Hotjar Pricing: Is It Worth Your Investment? [+ A Better Alternative] (original) (raw)

Thinking of investing in behavioral analytics software and considering Hotjar? You are not alone. Hotjar has become a household name and the first name that comes to mind for many companies. That said, the Hotjar pricing model is quite confusing and complex.

In this guide, we’ll walk you through each subscription tier to help you make sense if it and also introduce you to an alternative that we believe offers more value for money.

Overview of Hotjar pricing model

When attempting to grasp Hotjar’s pricing, it’s helpful to group its subscriptions into two camps.

The first consists of its Ask and Observe products with plans that start at 39/monthand39/month and 39/monthand59/month, respectively. These products are priced like most other SaaS products with different features, integrations, and capacities as you go up their subscription tiers.

Hotjar Engage — its user interview solution — is priced significantly higher, with the entry-level plan starting at €350/month (which is equivalent to $380/month at the time of writing). Hotjar Engage lets you recruit respondents, schedule research sessions, and conduct interviews using native conferencing.

Note: We do not know why Hotjar uses euros for its Engage plans while using dollars for the Ask and Observe products.

The sections below will give you a closer look at the Ask, Observe, and Engage options from Hotjar.

Hotjar Ask and Observe pricing

Hotjar’s Ask and Observe solutions let you visualize user behavior.

You’ll be able to track custom user interactions and events such as:

• What users click on
• How far down your users scroll
• Key features they interact with*****

*Hotjar can only show you which buttons or elements users repeatedly click on. It doesn’t have native product usage or feature adoption capabilities, so we’d recommend using another analytics tool for product analytics.

Source: Hotjar.

Hotjar Ask plans

Here’s an overview of the features and pricing of each Hotjar Ask plan:

• Basic. The free version of Hotjar Ask lets you collect up to 20 survey responses per month. You’ll be able to create up to three surveys, embed three feedback widgets, and automatically generate survey summaries using OpenAI.
• Plus. The Plus plan (starting at $59/month) increases capacity to 250 survey responses per month and unlocks Hotjar’s Events API. It also lifts the restriction on surveys and feedback widgets, which means you’ll be able to create unlimited surveys/feedback widgets.
• Business. The Business plan (starting at 79/month)increasescapacityto500surveyresponsespermonthandupto100kmonthlyresponsesifyou’rewillingtopay79/month) increases capacity to 500 survey responses per month and up to 100k monthly responses if you’re willing to pay 79/month)increasescapacityto500surveyresponsespermonthandupto100kmonthlyresponsesifyou’rewillingtopay1,379/month. You also get AI-powered sentiment analysis, custom branding, survey analytics, integrations, and the Identify API.
• Scale. The Scale plan (starting at $159/month) also starts at 500 responses per month but can go as high as one million monthly responses with custom pricing. It also lets you automatically export responses, send responses to third-party tools using webhooks, and use single sign-on (SSO).

All Hotjar Ask plans let you request feedback in over 40 different languages, choose from 40 unique survey templates, store unlimited responses indefinitely, and ask unlimited questions per survey. You’ll also be able to filter through responses using date ranges, keywords, URLs, or survey completion rates.

Hotjar Observe plans

Here’s an overview of the features and pricing of each Hotjar Observe plan:

• Basic. The free version of Hotjar Observe lets you track up to 35 sessions per day. You’ll be able to automatically capture data on user actions, create unlimited heatmaps, and use the HubSpot integrations to watch session recordings from your CRM timeline.
• Plus. The Plus plan (starting at $39/month) increases capacity to 100 sessions per day and unlocks Hotjar’s Events API. You’ll also unlock the ability to filter your heatmap data, session recordings, and user responses to hone in on the user insights you need most.
• Business. The Business plan (starting at $99/month) increases capacity to 500 sessions per day and up to 270k daily sessions (users report paying four or five figures per month for this volume). You’ll also be able to track frustration signals, use integrations, and access the Identify API.
• Scale. The Scale plan (starting at $213/month) also starts at 500 sessions per day with a maximum capacity of 270k daily sessions (but costs twice as you’ll also get funnel/trend reports, automated user lookup/deletion requests, single sign-on (SSO), and priority support*****.

*Priority support is only available for subscriptions with 4,000+ daily sessions.

Hotjar Engage pricing

Whereas the Ask and Observe solutions help you conduct user surveys or analyze user behavior, Hotjar Engage focuses on letting you collect direct feedback during user sessions (which are hosted through the built-in video conferencing feature).

• Basic. The free version of Hotjar Engage lets you conduct up to five interviews per month. One of these interviews will come from the Hotjar participant pool while five need to come from your own network. Interviews can last up to 30 minutes with one moderator and spectator present.
• Plus. The Plus plan (starting at €350/month) increases capacity to 15 interviews per month and increases recording retention from two weeks to two years. Five of these interviews will come from the Hotjar participant pool while 10 need to come from your own network.
• Business. The Business plan (starting at €550/month) increases capacity to 30 interviews per month. 10 of these will come from the Hotjar participant pool while 20 need to come from your own network. Interviews can last up to 60 minutes with two moderators and spectators present.
• Scale. The Scale plan (using custom pricing) increases capacity to 60 interviews per month. 20 of these will come from the Hotjar participant pool while 40 need to come from your own network. Interviews can last up to 120 minutes with four moderators and 10 spectators present.

Source: Hotjar.

What are the downsides of Hotjar?

There are a few drawbacks that you should be aware of before committing to a Hotjar subscription:

• Expensive pricing. Hotjar can get quite pricey as the number of sessions, responses, or interviews increases. For instance, you’d need to pay more than $7,000/year to conduct 30 monthly interviews with Hotjar Engage.
• Narrow feature set. Unlike other behavior analytics tools, Hotjar’s feature set narrowly focuses on heatmaps. This can make it less than ideal for teams that want to go beyond website analytics and actually see product or revenue metrics.
• Retention periods. Hotjar’s limited data retention periods (which will vary depending on which plan you subscribe to) can make it difficult to retain insights long-term. Being forced to upgrade in order to extend the retention period will further inflate the Hotjar cost you pay each month.
• Lacking support. The Hotjar support team is all but inaccessible to freemium users, and even paying customers need to upgrade to the Scale plan to receive priority support or get a dedicated customer success manager.

One last thing to consider is how restricted Hotjar’s freemium plans are — limiting data to 35 daily sessions and deleting user interviews after two weeks. This stands in stark contrast to something like Google Analytics which is free forever regardless of how much traffic your website gets.

What do users say about Hotjar’s pricing?

Multiple Hotjar customers have complained about its pricing model being too complex, expensive, or both:

“I dislike the new pricing model and the separation of the various analytics across observe, ask, etc. They are all important for product analytics. It would have been much better to keep an option for bundled deals. I am currently reviewing options at my new company and considering not implementing Hotjar due to the change in their pricing model.”

Source: G2.

“Some limitations due to the pricing, it’s not like it’s expensive but a bit annoying to have so many limitations on the free version”

Source: G2.

“Pricing can start to get costly as you scale up.”

Source: G2.

“The costing pattern is scattered, and I think they should have more categories for the pricing model.”

Source: G2.

“The pricing structure is a bit steep for what they offer and how much is overlapped by Google Analytics.”

Source: G2.

At first sight, it may seem like Hotjar is only a couple of dollars, so even if it lacks some features, it won’t hurt your pockets that much to have it alongside another tool.

But if you have a deeper look, then it’s clear that because Hotjar lacks critical features, you’ll have to invest in several complementary tools for feedback analysis, engagement, and product analytics, which will significantly add to your overall costs. So if you are a mature company, we don’t think Hotjar is worth your investment.

Introducing Userpilot – the best Hotjar alternative for mature SaaS teams

Userpilot is an all-in-one platform that not only offers analytics and feedback options but also an engagement layer so you can create engaging experiences based on the data you collect. Let’s quickly go over some of the features that Userpilot has to offer:

Here’s what it has to offer:

• Auto-capture: Gone are the days when you have to manually tag every feature before obtaining feature usage data. Today, Userpilot automatically collects this data for you from Day 1. You can simply access this data by labeling the event.

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Quickly label auto-tracked events with Userpilot’s visual labeler.

• Dashboards & Reports: Userpilot supports a host of dashboards and reporting features, including funnel, trends, and path analysis. You can customize your funnels, select which trends to track (and how!), etc.

Easily track key metrics and trends with Userpilot dashboards.

• Advanced segmentation: Userpilot’s segmentation feature now boasts improved logic and multi-value fields. You can combine multiple conditions to create segments and use these segments as analytics filters.

Define complex segmentation conditions in Userpilot.

• Session Recording: Beginning in Q1 2025, Userpilot’s session replay feature will go live. You can even pair funnel analysis with session replay to see what makes a specific user drop off.

Replay user sessions for deeper insights.

• Webhooks & Integrations: Userpilot offers one-click native integrations with tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, Zendesk, etc. For custom integrations, Userpilot offers webhooks to enable real-time data transmission between Userpilot and other tools.
• Analytics for In-app Experiences: Userpilot offers detailed analytics and reporting features for in-app experiences created with Userpilot. This includes onboarding flow analytics, survey analytics, and a robust NPS dashboard, providing insights at every turn.

Userpilot Pricing

Userpilot pricing plans breakdown.

There are 3 Userpilot pricing categories:

• Starter: This plan, billed annually, costs roughly $299/month for up to 2,000 monthly active users. It supports user segmentation, event tracking, trend analysis, NPS surveys, and user engagement flows. It also supports up to 5,000 monthly session recordings.
• Growth: Designed and customized and intended for growing teams needing more advanced product analytics and feedback mechanisms, this plan supports more in-depth analytics features, including funnels, retention, and path analysis. It also offers auto-capture and custom event tracking for retroactive events.
• Enterprise: Designed for enterprise users, this plan can be custom-made to suit your needs. It supports premium integrations, custom roles and permissions, security audit and compliance, etc.

Is Hotjar pricing worth it after all?

As you can see, Hotjar is more than capable of keeping tabs on your website visitors and seeing how they interact with different web pages. That said, its overcomplicated (and expensive) pricing model, coupled with the lack of product analytics, severely limits its usefulness.

If you’d rather have a more actionable tool that not only allows you to track user actions but also act on data from one platform, get your free Userpilot demo today!

FAQs about Hotjar pricing

Is Hotjar free or paid?

Hotjar offers both free and paid options for customers who’d like to use its product(s). Each product — Observe, Ask, and Engage — has a Basic plan that is free forever but limits the number of website sessions, feedback responses, or customer interviews in a certain period.

How long is Hotjar free trial?

Hotjar offers 15-day free trials on its Plus and Business plans. You can also request a 15-day free trial for the Scale plan if you choose the “contact sales team” option. You do not need a credit card to get started with your free trial.