Smartlook vs. Hotjar

Smartlook, Hotjar, and Plerdy are all good to improve website conversion and user experience. Yet, they offer different approaches to data analysis and website optimization. Plerdy has the richest functionality and unites standard heatmaps with advanced data segmentation.

4.9/5
4.7/5
4.95/5

Heatmaps

Hotjar

Smartlook

Plerdy

Real-time website tracking
Dynamic elements
Custom user groups
Testing first clicks
Accurate mobile analytics
Deeper segmentation
Segmentation by traffic channels
Adaptive layout and show data
Correct data after website design changes
Hide empty clicks
Sequence of clicks
Users did not go to another page
Detect what website elements are the least effective
Find out which part of the page is making users leave

PopUps forms

Hotjar

Smartlook

Plerdy

Ready to use templates
Reports about leads
Statistics about how do people interact with a form
Display a popup to specific trigger
API integrations with (Mailchimp, Zapier, Cliclup, Intercom, Hubspot and etc.)
Video popup
Integrations virtual pageviews Google Analytics UA & events GA 4
Decrease eCommerce cart abandonment
Over 20 display rules

Feedbacks & NPS

Hotjar

Smartlook

Plerdy

Surveys
Visual feedback (Emoji)
Net Promoter Score

Session recording

Hotjar

Smartlook

Plerdy

Replay video about user behavior
Custom events and more setting
Timeline recording with pages and time
Filter by traffic channels
Analyze individual user groups
Analyze mobile and desktop website versions separately
Easily share video links
Automatically delete old videos
Rage clicks

Conversion Funnels

Hotjar

Smartlook

Plerdy

Analyze funnels by devices and traffic channels
Track unique pageviews and drop-offs on every stage

SEO-checker

Hotjar

Smartlook

Plerdy

Automatics SEO audits
SEO mistakes in semantics
Comparison of duplicates of the main meta tags
Data about mobile-first index
SEO heath score
HTML page source
Historical data for 30 days
Semrush backlink analysis
Export your data to Google Spreadsheets

Google Search Console integration

Hotjar

Smartlook

Plerdy

Tips on missed keywords
Segmentation of URL data, automatically added to the search
Analysis of keywords in the title
Search for insights (impressions, clicks, positions and CTR)
Adding tags

Event / Goals Tracking

Hotjar

Smartlook

Plerdy

Configure events using a class or item ID
Automatically add up different events from a specific website page
Transfer to Google Analytics

Sales perfomance

Hotjar

Smartlook

Plerdy

Elements do customers interact with before making a purchase
Find out what don't affect sales at all
E-commerce conversion analysis
Each element is assigned a price
Analyze the impact of website elements on sales by traffic channel and device

Macro conversion

Hotjar

Smartlook

Plerdy

Items that customers interact with before ordering

Other settings

Hotjar

Smartlook

Plerdy

Cross-domain tracking
Sub-domain tracking
Email and Slack reports
Launch A/B Tests with Google Optimize Integration capabilities
Supports SPA sites
GDPR & CCPA compliance

Pricing

Hotjar

Smartlook

Plerdy

Entry Level Price
Free 35 Daily sessions Free Free
Free Trial
Start, month
Observe Plus €32 Start $98
Business, month
Observe Business Starting at €80 Pro plan Starting at €55 Business $198
Enterprise, month
Comparison

Smartlook Benefits

Leandro Chaves, Analista de sistemas at Autônomo:

I like Smartlook because it offers heat maps of website consumption and recordings of users' navigation. Smartlook solves all the problems at a fair price. But using Smartlook, I missed the option of creating folders or tagging the recordings.

Sarah Bellaiche, Product Design/Development Engineer at Garantme:

I love the funnel functionality at Smartlook. With it, Smartlook helped us to see the step our users dropped the most. The dashboard at Smartlook is well done. Events are also very well done at Smartlook to check actions precise page.

Francesco Tonti, Development Director at Udacity:

I like that Smartlook shows what users click on and how interact with the website.

Moreover, Smartlook doesn't slow down the website. I recommend everybody to try Smartlook.

Hotjar Benefits

Tony Spencer, Independent Entrepreneur:

Hotjar was easy to integrate. But I think Hotjar isn't solving any problems. Hotjar crippled the original product. I don`t recommend you use Hotjar.

Emily Schreiber, Retention Marketing at Simon & Schuster:

Hotjar is excellent for small businesses and agencies. I can admit that Hotjar integrates with lots of other tools. But I dislike that Hotjar is not always user-friendly when generating heatmaps.

Oliver Pearson, Digital Marketing Manager at Risilience:

It's challenging to find things to dislike about Hotjar. Hotjar is a tool that fulfills everything it promises. I recommend you to try Hotjar.

About Hotjar

Hotjar and Smartlook are popular website analytics tools offering a range of features to help businesses better understand and optimize their online presence. Hotjar, in particular, is known for its emphasis on user experience and behavior, offering tools such as heatmaps, session recordings, feedback, surveys, and user personas to help businesses gather reliable insights about their users.

With Hotjar, businesses can quickly identify opportunities to improve their products and services, validate their ideas with real user data, increase team alignment, and spot UX issues fast. The tool offers 10 inspiring product podcasts and 12 best product monitoring tools for cross-functional product teams.

Hotjar's emphasis on continuous discovery, organizational awareness, and product team culture makes it a valuable tool for website specialists, experts, and product teams. Its clients range from startups to well-established companies such as Audiense, Materials Market, and Jenni Kayne, who have used Hotjar to increase conversions, empathize with users, and spot issues before it's too late.

Overall, Hotjar is a powerful tool for businesses that want to grow and improve their online presence. It has a lot of features and focuses on the user experience.

About Smartlook

Smartlook offers many features that provide powerful insights, including session recordings, events, funnels, heatmaps, behavior flows, and crash reports. By combining session recordings with event-based analytics, you can better understand user behavior and determine where and why users drop off. The advanced filtering capabilities of Smartlook allow you to quickly find the crucial moment and determine if the path you created for your users works as expected.

Smartlook's platform is GDPR compliant, with no need to call developers and a simple setup for mobile apps. The platform is a game-changer for mobile app analytics and provides advanced features such as funnels, enabling you to adjust your UX and discover problems you wouldn't have noticed otherwise. The comprehensive nature of Smartlook's website analytics and visual user insights helps businesses and their clients improve conversion rates, making it a great investment.

The heatmap tool from Smartlook is an important part of web and mobile analytics. It is perfect for businesses that want to improve conversion rates and optimize the customer journey. Heatmaps offer a visual representation of click, scrolling, or movement data superimposed over the interface, allowing you to determine what attracts the most user attention and which areas receive minimal interaction. Heatmaps come in three types, scroll, move, and click heatmaps, which offer valuable insights into how users interact with your interface.

Heatmaps serve as a first step in the analysis process, providing a general overview of user activity and allowing businesses to test hypotheses and run experiments to confirm or invalidate assumptions. The data can provide quick and actionable insights when aggregated with a particular expectation or objective. With filters, you can create heatmaps that only display the actions of a particular group of users. Smartlook is an excellent choice for businesses looking for comprehensive product analytics and visual user insights.

Hotjar vs. Smartlook: A Side-by-Side Comparison

Several options are available if you're looking for a tool to help you optimize your website. Two popular options are Hotjar and Smartlook. To help you decide which tool is right for your business needs, we've compared them side-by-side based on preference data from user reviews.

At a glance, both tools are equally easy to use and administer. However, reviewers found Smartlook easier to set up and do business with overall. When it comes to ongoing product support, reviewers preferred Smartlook. They also preferred the direction of Smartlook's feature updates and roadmaps over Hotjar's.

Regarding pricing, both tools offer free versions with limited features and paid plans with more advanced features. Hotjar offers four pricing plans, while Smartlook offers six. Smartlook's plans are generally more affordable, with the entry-level plan starting at $0.00 and the highest-priced plan starting at $112.00.

Hotjar and Smartlook are categorized as Product Analytics, Session Replay, Heatmap Tools, and Digital Analytics. However, Hotjar is categorized as Feedback Analytics, Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM), User Research, Software Testing, Survey, and E-Commerce Analytics. In contrast, Smartlook is categorized as Mobile App Analytics and Optimization.

Reviewers of both tools were most often representing companies in the Small-Business segment. The top industries represented were Marketing and Advertising, Computer Software, and the Internet.

In summary, Hotjar and Smartlook have strengths and weaknesses, but Smartlook is the preferred option for most reviewers. With its ease of setup and use, superior ongoing support, and more affordable pricing plans, Smartlook might be the best choice for your business needs.

Here’s what customers say about it:

“I don’t use Hotjar because of poor website performance. Although I lose some performance with Plerdy, the data I’m getting is worth it”

nick500

“Plerdy’s session recording feature is what I use most. Thanks to the layout, you can see how people interact with the website. Customer movement, click, page scroll, and keyboard indicators allow easily scanning long videos”

John B Founder)