Top Hotjar Competitors for User Feedback & Survey

Customer feedback is the lifeblood that fuels the growth and success of startups and businesses alike.

It provides the insights needed to make informed decisions, improve products, and ultimately build stronger relationships with users.

While Hotjar is widely known as a great tool for gathering user feedback, its high price point can be a significant barrier, especially for small businesses just getting off the ground.

Many entrepreneurs find themselves paying hefty fees simply to access basic survey tools, which can limit their ability to focus on other growth areas.

According to Bill Gates, "Your most unhappy customers are your greatest source of learning."

In this article, we'll introduce you to some of the best alternatives to Hotjar—affordable yet powerful tools that will help you effortlessly collect and analyse feedback without breaking the bank.

If you're a startup or a small business, these solutions can provide the insights you need to drive success.

7 Best Hotjar Competitors for User Feedback Feedback Survey

1. Saylo

Saylo is widely regarded as the best alternative to Hotjar. It provides a powerful platform for efficiently collecting and analyzing user feedback.

With Saylo, teams can easily gather insights that inform product development and enhance user experiences.

Features

• Real-time Feedback: Capture user sentiments instantly as they interact with your application, allowing for immediate insights into their experiences.
• Customizable Widgets: Seamlessly integrate feedback tools into your apps, ensuring that user engagement remains smooth and unobtrusive.
• Advanced Analytics: Transform raw data into actionable insights, helping teams understand trends and user behavior to make informed decisions.

Pros

1. Affordable Pricing Plans: Saylo offers competitive pricing that accommodates various budgets, making it accessible for teams of all sizes.

2. Easy Integration with Existing Systems: Saylo integrates effortlessly with your current workflows, minimizing disruption and maximizing productivity.

3. Effectively Prioritizes User Needs: With Saylo's intuitive features, teams can quickly identify and address user needs, enhancing satisfaction and loyalty.

Pricing

Freelancer: Free plan for one widget, allowing up to 50 responses—perfect for individual users or small projects.

Pro: $15.80/month (billed annually), featuring 10 widgets and the capacity for up to 1,000 responses, ideal for growing teams.

Startup: $24/month (billed annually), offering unlimited widgets and accommodating up to 5,000 responses, tailored for startups focused on scalability and user engagement.

2. UserGuiding vs Hotjar

UserGuiding is well-known as a tool for product adoption, but it also works wonders for gathering user feedback.

If you’re looking for a Hotjar alternative that lets you create multiple survey types in minutes and deploy them instantly—with no coding required—UserGuiding is a top competitor.

Like Hotjar, UserGuiding supports various survey types, such as:

• Emoji-based surveys
• Multilingual surveys
• Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys
• Open-ended questions
• Multiple-choice surveys

These surveys can capture in-app feedback about:

• Product satisfaction

• Feedback on newly launched features

• Segmenting users based on feedback

A key advantage of UserGuiding over Hotjar is its onboarding features, which help optimize user interaction from the very beginning.

If you believe these features align with your needs, UserGuiding is the right choice for you.

Benefits

• Smooth integration with onboarding
• Customizable feedback and survey modules
• Real-time survey analytics
• Targeted deployment options

Drawbacks

• Limited native integrations

Best Uses

• Onboarding feedback

• Feature adoption surveys

• NPS surveys

Pricing

UserGuiding offers a 14-day free trial. Annual pricing includes:

• Basic Plan: $89/month for up to 2,500 active users.

• Professional Plan: $389/month for up to 20,000 active users.

• Corporate Plan: $689+/month for customized usage.

3. Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg, like Hotjar, provides heatmaps, scrollmaps, and click reports to analyze user interactions. It also offers feedback through several types of surveys, such as NPS, open-ended questions, and multiple-choice options.

These surveys provide a direct communication channel between website owners and visitors, helping identify areas for improvement.

Compared to Hotjar, Crazy Egg stands out with its built-in A/B testing tool.

You can easily target a specific user group and collect feedback through surveys, whereas Hotjar requires third-party integration for similar functionality.

If you frequently use A/B testing and want a tool that uses survey feedback, Crazy Egg might be a better option than Hotjar.

Benefits

1. Integrated A/B testing and surveys: Easily test different versions of your site and gather feedback in one place.

2. User-friendly interface: The platform is simple to navigate, even for those without technical expertise.

3. Heatmaps and session recordings: See how users interact with different elements of your website and collect feedback simultaneously.

Drawbacks

1. Limited session recordings: Depending on the plan, the number of session recordings can be restricted, which may limit the depth of insights you can gather.

2. Basic analytics: While Crazy Egg offers powerful visualization tools, its analytics capabilities may be basic compared to more specialized analytics platforms.

Best Uses

1. Website usability feedback: Understand how visitors are interacting with your website and what issues they are encountering.

2. Page-specific surveys: Target feedback to specific pages, allowing for more focused and relevant insights.

3. A/B testing feedback: Collect direct feedback from users about different versions of your site during A/B testing.

Pricing

Crazy Egg offers a 30-day free trial to let users explore its full range of features. Its annual pricing options are as follows:

Standard Plan: $49/month, includes 500 session recordings and unlimited surveys.

Plus Plan: $99/month, includes 1,000 session recordings and unlimited surveys.

Enterprise Plan: $249/month, includes 5,000 session recordings and unlimited surveys, with additional support for larger websites.

4. Mouseflow vs Hotjar

Mouseflow specializes in gathering feedback from website visitors and analyzing their behavior via session replays.

It provides a combination of heatmaps and session recordings, which lets you view a user's journey through your site.

This makes Mouseflow an excellent choice if you're looking to integrate feedback collection directly with user interaction recordings.

For example, pairing heatmaps with feedback surveys allows you to visualize how users navigate your site and what feedback they provide.

If you're searching for a tool that helps track the entire feedback process through session replays, Mouseflow is a fantastic alternative to Hotjar.

Benefits

• Seamless integration with session recordings

• Customizable survey options

• Easy to implement

Drawbacks

• Limited question types

• Basic analytics

Best Uses

• Visitor satisfaction surveys
• Feature evaluation feedback
• Session replay surveys

Pricing

Mouseflow offers a 14-day free trial. Annual pricing includes:

• Free Plan: Up to 500 recordings per month for one website
• Starter Plan: $31/month for 5,000 recordings
• Growth Plan: $109/month for 15,000 recordings across three websites
• Business Plan: $219/month for 50,000 recordings across five websites
• Pro Plan: $399/month for 150,000 recordings across ten websites

5. VWO vs Hotjar

VWO (Visual Website Optimizer) is another great Hotjar competitor, offering customer feedback tools through forms, heatmaps, and session recordings.

One of its standout features is using AI to enhance survey creation and reporting.

Both Hotjar and VWO use AI to create surveys, but VWO’s AI assistant provides more in-depth reports on survey responses, offering insights, summaries, and actionable items.

If you see yourself relying on AI for feedback customization, VWO could be a superior choice.

Benefits

• AI-driven reports and analytics
• Visual editor
• Various survey types

Drawbacks

• Complex for beginners
• Limited mobile optimization

Best Uses

• On-site visitor feedback
• Product feedback
• Digital experience improvement

Pricing

VWO offers a 30-day free trial. Annual pricing includes:

• Starter Plan: Free for unlimited team members
• Growth Plan: $392/month
• Pro Plan: $903/month
• Enterprise Plan: $1,581/month

6. Survicate vs Hotjar

Survicate is a dedicated survey tool, making it an excellent choice for those seeking a Hotjar alternative specifically for survey creation. Survicate supports email, website, and mobile in-app surveys.

Survicate really stands out in its mobile survey capabilities.

Unlike Hotjar, Survicate allows feedback collection through mobile apps, making it an ideal choice for businesses with mobile platforms.

If you're focused on mobile user feedback, Survicate is an excellent alternative to Hotjar.

Benefits

• Native mobile app support
• Multiple survey templates
• Real-time analytics

Drawbacks

• High costs for advanced features
• Limited survey types on the free plan

Best Uses

• NPS surveys
• Mobile surveys
• Customer satisfaction surveys

Pricing

Survicate offers a 10-day free trial for its Business Plan. Annual pricing includes:

• Free Plan: 25 responses per month for up to 3 team members
• Business Plan: $99/month for 250 responses
• Scale Plan: $299/month with custom response pools

7. Canny vs Hotjar

Canny is a customer feedback management tool designed to help businesses collect user feedback, prioritise features, and track product roadmap progress.

It serves as a centralized platform for users to submit their ideas, vote on features they want, and stay updated on development.

Canny’s intuitive feedback boards allow users to participate in product development, making them feel valued.

It's particularly beneficial for SaaS companies, startups, and organizations that want to stay connected with their customers while building products that meet user demands.

It's a big competitor of Hotjar.

Key Features of Canny

1. Feedback Boards: Canny enables users to submit ideas and vote on existing feedback, helping businesses identify which features are most requested.

2. Roadmap: It offers a public roadmap where companies can showcase upcoming features and keep users updated on progress.

3. Prioritization Tools: Canny helps teams organize feedback by importance, making it easier to prioritize features based on user interest and business goals.

4. Changelog: It allows companies to publish updates and notify users when a requested feature has been completed.

5. Integrations: Canny integrates with several platforms, including Slack, Intercom, and Jira, streamlining feedback collection and implementation across teams.

Benefits of Canny

1. User Engagement: Canny fosters a collaborative environment where customers feel heard and engaged in the product development process.

2. Prioritized Product Development: Businesses can easily identify the most requested features and allocate resources accordingly.

3. Transparency: The public roadmap and changelog keep users informed, enhancing trust and engagement.

Drawbacks of Canny

1. Limited Analytics: While it offers prioritization tools, its analytics are not as robust as other feedback platforms.

2. Cost: For smaller businesses or startups, the pricing might be steep compared to other alternatives.

8. Savio vs Hotjar

Savio is a customer feedback tool built to help SaaS companies organize feedback, prioritize feature requests, and improve customer retention.

Unlike Hotjar, Savio emphasizes closing the feedback loop by informing customers when their feedback has been addressed or implemented.

Savio’s system is focused on making product teams and customer-facing teams more aligned.

It allows businesses to collect feedback from multiple sources, such as emails, customer support tickets, and surveys, and consolidate it all in one place.

Savio is a good alternative to Hotjar in every capacity.

Key Features of Savio

1. Centralized Feedback: Savio enables businesses to collect feedback from different channels, including emails, support conversations, and direct submissions, making it easier to gather and track input.

2. Prioritization by Customer Segment: Savio offers the ability to segment feedback by customer type, helping teams prioritize requests from high-value customers or power users.

3. Closing the Feedback Loop: A standout feature, Savio ensures that when feedback is acted upon, the customer who submitted it gets a personalized response, keeping them informed and engaged.

4. Feedback Analytics: Savio provides data on feedback trends, helping teams make data-driven decisions.

5. Integrations: Like Canny, Savio integrates with tools such as Slack, Jira, and Intercom, making feedback collection seamless across platforms.

Benefits of Savio

1. Closing the Feedback Loop: Savio excels in keeping users informed when their feedback leads to action, enhancing customer satisfaction and retention.

2. Prioritization by Customer Segments: Businesses can focus on feedback from their most important customers, improving product alignment with business goals.

3. Streamlined Feedback Collection: Collecting feedback from multiple channels ensures no valuable insights slip through the cracks.

Drawbacks of Savio

1. Smaller User Base: Compared to Canny, Jira may have fewer users and a smaller community, which may affect community engagement.

2. Less Emphasis on Public Roadmap: While Savio focuses on feedback prioritization and communication, it doesn’t offer as robust a public roadmap feature as Canny.

Saylo: the Best Hotjar Feedback Competitor/Alternative

Reading this article to this point shows, you are interested in getting quality feedback from your customers/users.

Hotjar is too expensive if you're just starting out as an indiehacker or a startup. Saylo is the best alternative to Hotjar for customer feedback.

Saylo is more efficient, accurate and budget-friendly than Hotjar.

Why not try Saylo for free today?

FAQs

1. What are the best alternatives to Hotjar for user feedback?

Several strong alternatives to Hotjar include Saylo, Canny, FullStory, and UserTesting. These tools offer various features, such as heatmaps, session recordings, and user testing capabilities.

2. How does Crazy Egg compare to Hotjar?

Crazy Egg provides similar features, such as heatmaps and A/B testing but is often noted for its user-friendly interface and straightforward pricing. It may be more suitable for smaller businesses.

3. Is UserTesting a good competitor to Hotjar?

Yes, UserTesting focuses on gathering qualitative feedback through video recordings of real users interacting with your site. This can provide deeper insights than quantitative data from Hotjar.

4. Can I use Google Forms as an alternative to Hotjar?

While Google Forms is primarily a survey tool, it can effectively collect user feedback. However, it lacks advanced features like heatmaps or session recordings that Hotjar offers.

5. What features should I look for in a Hotjar competitor?

Key features to consider include heatmaps, session recordings, user surveys, A/B testing capabilities, and integration with other analytics tools.

6. Are there any free alternatives to Hotjar?

Yes, tools like Saylo, Mouseflow and Smartlook offer free plans with limited features that can be suitable for small businesses or startups looking to gather user feedback.

7. Which competitor offers the best pricing for startups?

Saylo is often highlighted for its competitive pricing and comprehensive feature set, making it an appealing choice for startups looking for affordable user feedback solutions.

8. Can I integrate these alternatives with my existing tools?

Most Hotjar competitors offer integrations with popular platforms like WordPress, Shopify, and Google Analytics, allowing seamless data flow between tools.

9. What are Hotjar’s limitations?

Hotjar can be restrictive due to its session recording limits.

10. What is a good replacement for Hotjar?

Top alternatives include Saylo, Mouseflow, Crazy Egg, and VWO.