Hotjar vs. FullStory: A Head to Toe Comparison

What are the differences between Hotjar and Fullstory? If you’re wondering which tool you should use, this article is for you. It gives you a side-by-side comparison of both Fullstory and Hotjar. Happy reading!

Hotjar vs. Fullstory

Hotjar Overview

Hotjar is an online tool that allows users to monitor, track, and analyze user behavior on their websites. It also allows users to get feedback and post surveys to visitors on their websites. It is not an alternative to Web analytics tools like Google Analytics but provides supplementary information about user behavior and psychology. Hotjar was founded in 2014 by David Darmanin and is headquartered in Saint Julian’s, Malta. Hotjar claims it is being used in over 900 thousand websites across 180 plus countries worldwide.

Hotjar Features

1. Heatmaps

Heatmaps let you visualize user behavior. It represents where users click, move, and scroll on your website. It enables you to discover what attracts user attention. It lets you see which parts of your website the user is drawn toward and which features they miss. It helps you understand which parts of your website are ignored by visitors and where they stop scrolling. Heatmaps let you analyze where users move, click and scroll before and after releasing a change on your website. It examines how visitors behave depending on their device to surf your website, namely desktop, tablet, or mobile. Heatmaps help you determine if visitors to your website are receptive or not to the changes you make to your website. It enables you to see which parts of your website users click on. With Heatmaps, you better understand any content on your website that won’t load or any buttons that won’t function.

2. Recordings

This feature allows you to see what visitors to your website visitors. It includes playback of visitors scrolling, moving, turning around, and clicking on your website. It lets you map the visitor’s journey from when they land on your website until they leave your website. It helps you monitor if your new releases are working as expected. Recordings help you identify problems, pain points, and bugs on your website. You can watch and correct reasons resulting in rage clicks and turnaround by visitors. Recordings help you gather reliable evidence of real user experiences, which you can use to decide what more to add to your website. You can use recordings to compare user cohorts.

3. Feedback

Feedback allows you to understand what visitors to your website think about it. It will enable you to collect user opinions while they are still browsing your website. You can target sections of your website to collect data about whether visitors like it or don’t like it. Feedback allows you to compare feedback scores on every webpage to spot pages that perform well and those that aren’t. Negative feedback will enable you to understand what’s going wrong on your site and how you can change that. Feedback can be used to spot problems on your site before they develop.

4. Surveys

Surveys allow you to gather customer opinions about how you can improve your website and offerings. It includes pre-built templates and a question bank to help you create a survey. Surveys can be built using a simple drag and drop builder. It enables you to understand what customers love and hate about your offerings. Onsite and external surveys can gauge customer opinions about your plans before implementing them. You can also use surveys to understand why customers did not buy your offering or left after using your services. You can use surveys to improve your product offerings.

Hotjar Pricing

All plans are billed monthly. Hotjar offers a 20 percent discount for annual billing for all plans.

1. Basic

This is a free plan. It allows for up to 35 daily sessions. A session captures the visitors’ entire journey from landing on the website to exit. Automatic data capture facilitates the collection of data automatically month on month without the need for manual intervention. You can track unlimited heatmaps and up to 1,050 sessions per month. You can also create and store three surveys & feedback widgets.

2. Plus

This plan is available for 39 USD per month. It includes everything in the Basic plan plus more. You can track up to 100 daily sessions. It allows you to filter and segment data to analyze Heatmaps, Recordings, and Feedback to identify trends and get insights. Events API lets you track user actions like conversion and facilitates A/B testing. You can track up to 3,000 sessions per month. It allows for unlimited surveys & feedback widgets.

3. Business

This plan is available for 99 USD per month. It includes everything in the Plus plan and more. It allows tracking of up to 500 sessions daily. It will enable integration with Slack, Segment, Google Optimise, Zapier, Optimizely, Omniconvert, and Hubspot. It will allow you to track users based on attributes like User ID, Email, last purchase date, etc., and compare insights. It helps you identify areas where visitors are getting frustrated or confused by highlighting rage clicks, U-turns, etc. It allows for the removal of Hotjar branding. The pricing also depends on the daily number of sessions you want to be captured.

4. Scale

This is a custom plan with custom pricing. It allows unlimited daily sessions to be captured. Hotjar provides a dedicated customer success manager to you. You can track any number of websites under the same plan. It offers SAML, which facilitates single sign-on (SSO) access across all your websites. It allows for enough data for the most significant sites to facilitate the capture of every session. It guarantees access to all future feature releases.

Fullstory Overview

Like Hotjar, Fullstory is also a Website analytics tool that helps capture visitors’ journeys on your website. It is a Customer Experience platform that enables you to understand how visitors interact with your website. It was founded in 2014 in Atlanta, Georgia, by a team of former Google employees who wanted to make products more user-friendly. The CEO is Co-Founder Scott Voight. The company is headquartered in Atlanta, Georgia.

Fullstory Plans and Features

1. Free Plan

Fullstory offers a free plan with limited features for people who wish to try out Fullstory. FullStory Free Edition provides access to 1,000 sessions per month, three user seats, one month of Session replay retention, and one month of Analytics data retention. You’ll also get access to these features:

• Session playback.
• Cards for instant analytics.
• OmniSearch for search filtering.
• Rage clicks, a tool that helps you find frustrated users on your site.
• A dead click is a tool that allows you to find unresponsive clicks on your site.
• Identify an API that will enable you to tag and filter your users by name.
• Custom User Attributes, which allow you to add searchable user variables
• Integrations like Segment, Google Tag Manager, and Slack.
• FullStory Console gives a view of JS console errors during session playback.
• Page Insights with Click Maps, a page-level visual data aggregation tool.
• An Inspect Mode to find and build CSS selector searches.
• Error clicks, a tool that helps you find sessions with JS errors.
• Abandoned forms are a tool that helps you find when users don’t complete a form.
• A frustrated Session is a tool that helps with identifying sessions with the highest number of frustration events.
• Go Live is a tool that helps you offer real-time support.
• Reflection API to pass FullStory links to tools of your choice.
• Export CSV to export user lists.
• Development Tools for analyzing bugs as they occur in the real world.

2. Business Plan

The Fullstory Business Plan is available with a 14-day free trial. It includes the following features:

• 100% tagless auto-capture.
• Private and sensitive data are excluded by default.
• Retroactive data history.
• Frustration signals.
• User trends.
• User segmentation.
• Event funnels.
• Customizable dashboards.
• Page flow analysis.
• Pixel-perfect session recreation.
• Heatmaps.
• Scroll maps.
• Click maps.
• Developer tools.
• Omnisearch.
• Co-browsing.
• Session notes.
• Shareable session links.
• Replay retention (Starting at one month)
• Analytics data retention (Starting at one year)
• Integrations.
• Webhooks.
• Security compliance.
• Persistent data encryption using AES-128 standards.
• Restriction by IPA.
• Restriction by User-Agent.
• Restriction by location.
• Consent API.
• FS. Identify API.

3. Enterprise Plan

The Enterprise plan offers the following features over and above those provided in the Business plan.

• Watched elements.
• Journey mapping.
• Conversions analysis.
• Real-time alerts.
• Data export.
• Multi-organization management.
• Role-based access control.
• Single Sign-On.

Fullstory has not publicly disclosed its pricing for the Business Edition and the Enterprise Edition. You may have to connect with them to get the pricing information.

Final Words

Both Hotjar and Fullstory are available as plugins for WordPress. Fullstory seems to offer a more comprehensive range of features than Hotjar. It is also likely that Fullstory is priced more dearly than Hotjar. Hotjar appears to satisfy the requirements of most website owners with its simplistic features and attractive price. Unless you are a large organization with a complex website, you could do well with Hotjar. Don’t forget to try the free versions of both the software before you make up your mind.

Do check the difference between Hotjar and Google Analytics.