John Lincoln

Crazy Egg vs. HotJar Review: Which Tool Is Better?

If you’re serious about conversion rate optimization (CRO), then you need to know where people are focusing their attention when they visit your website. That’s why you should use a heatmap tool. Fortunately, there are two great options on the market: Crazy Egg and HotJar. In this article, we’ll review both tools so you can decide which one is better for your business. Crazy Egg vs. HotJar: Which Tool Is Better for Your Business? But which should you choose? Unfortunately, there’s no “one size fits all” answer to that question.

What Is a Heatmap, Anyway?

In a nutshell: a heatmap shows you which parts of a web page get the most attention. How does it do that? With colors. It looks a bit like the storm map that your local meteorologist often shows on the evening news. The more intense parts of the storm system appear in brighter colors than the less intense parts. On a web page heatmap, bright colors indicate more attention. Soft colors indicate less attention. Why is that important? Because you should put elements that you want people to interact with on the parts of your page that receive the most attention. That way, those elements are more likely to get clicks. A particularly bright part of your page is usually a great place for a call-to-action (CTA) button.
Crazy Egg: Heatmaps
Crazy Egg: Heatmaps

How Does a Heatmap Tool Measure Attention?

A heatmap tool measures attention by grabbing the HTML of your page and analyzing the parts that people interact with. For example, your page probably has a number of menu links at the top, clickable elements within the content, a call to action (CTA) button, and links in the footer. Every time somebody clicks on one of those elements, the tool notices. The elements that receive the most engagements will get the brightest colors on the heatmap. You could write some code that aggregates that data and produces the heatmap report. As you can imagine, though, that’s not easy to do. That’s why you need a heatmap tool.

Crazy Egg vs. HotJar

Now that you understand a little bit more about heatmaps and their usefulness, let’s take a look at a couple of the best heatmap tools available. HotJar bills itself as an “all-in-one analytics and feedback tool.” If you’ve been in digital marketing for more than a week, then you know that there’s no such thing as an “all-in-one” tool. But it would be nice if such a tool existed. Still, HotJar does offer a number of benefits. It combines services provided by a number of other marketing tools, such as ClickTale, SurveyMonkey, and Qualaroo. We’ll just focus on the heatmap aspect of the tool here.
HotJar: Heatmap
HotJar: Heatmap
Crazy Egg claims it’s “like a pair of x-ray glasses that lets you see exactly what people are doing on your website.” It does that with more than just heatmaps, though. It also uses recordings. In other words, you can watch a video of how people interact with your website. That will tell you quite a bit about where visitors are focusing their attention. Crazy Egg also supports split-testing. That will help you understand how changes to the user interface impact visitor behavior.

Comparing Crazy Egg and Hotjar

Let’s compare the two tools before we dive into the review. Both Crazy Egg and HotJar offer heatmap reports. They show you where visitors click and tap on your page. In case it’s not clear from the use of the word “tap” above: Crazy Egg and HotJar both support mobile devices. They also support scrollmaps. Those are like heatmaps but focus more on people scrolling rather than clicking. HotJar stands out by offering a move heatmap report. That shows you where people move their mouse cursor on your site. Of course, that isn’t supported on a mobile platform. Crazy Egg offers a confetti report. You can use that to see how many clicks and taps an element receives based on referral sources, search terms, browser type, and other info. Additionally, Crazy Egg also has a list report that displays all the elements on your page that received a click. Who uses Crazy Egg? Prominent companies include Dell, Etsy, Optimizely, and Yahoo. Who uses HotJar? Prominent companies include IKEA, Nintendo, Panasonic, and Unbounce. It’s worth noting that one popular CRO service (Optimizely) uses Crazy Egg whereas another one (Unbounce) uses HotJar. That should tell you right off the bat that the two services are comparable. Both Crazy Egg and HotJar offer free trials. With Crazy Egg, it’s a 30-day free trial. With HotJar, it’s a 15-day free trial and a 30-day money-back guarantee. According to SimilarTech, Crazy Egg is used by about 290,000 websites. HotJar is used by about 425,000, so it’s clearly the market leader. Datanyze has different numbers. It’s got the number of Crazy Egg websites at about 101,000 and the number of HotJar websites at about 225,000. Also, Datanyze says that Crazy Egg has a .048% market share and HotJar has a 1.07% market share. HotJar is a leader in most countries, including the United States and the United Kingdom. Crazy Egg leads in Iceland, Ethiopia, and Côte d’Ivoire.
HotJar
HotJar
On TrustRadius, HotJar has a slight lead among users. It’s got an 8.5/10 rating and Crazy Egg has a 7.8/10 rating. Crazy Egg is much less expensive. Its pricing ranges from $29/month to $189/month billed annually. HotJar costs between $89/month and $589/month. That’s probably why one of the reviewers on TrustRadius wrote: “Crazy Egg is the best CRO and LPO tool for performance marketers who have a limited budget!”

Ease of Signing Up

It’s easy to sign up for either one of the services. As we’ve just seen, they both offer free trials. Yes, you’ll have to go through the usual process of filling out a form, but both tools do a great job of guiding you through the process. Of course, you’ll also need to install code on your site. If you’re one of those skittish marketers who would rather swallow a live rattlesnake head-first than touch any code, you’ll have to contact a developer to add the code. Once you’re signed up and the code is installed, you can view your reports.

Compatibility

Both tools should work on your website right out of the box. There are some caveats, though. The HotJar JavaScript files might conflict with some of the JavaScript libraries that your site is using. If that happens, you might have to switch over to Crazy Egg. It doesn’t appear that Crazy Egg users are experiencing compatibility issues. Neither Crazy Egg nor HotJar integrate with Google Analytics at this time. That’s probably because they consider their services as alternatives to Google Analytics. It’s probably advisable to use Google Analytics in addition to either one of the services, though. You also can’t just drop your heatmap reports into Google Drive or Dropbox with either tool. That would certainly be a nice-to-have and hopefully will be provided in the future. Neither of the tools integrate with Facebook, Twitter, Salesforce Cloud, or Slack. However, Crazy Egg does integrate with Optimizely, Boast, and Bitium. HotJar integrates with HubSpot and Shopify. Also, HotJar offers API access. Crazy Egg doesn’t.

Usability

Both Crazy Egg and HotJar have pros and cons in terms of usability. You might experience a learning curve when it comes to understanding the Crazy Egg scrollmap. Once you figure it out, though, you should be fine going forward.
Crazy Egg: Scrollmap
Crazy Egg: Scrollmap
Also, Crazy Egg gives you separate snapshots for desktop and mobile. That could be a problem because the tool essentially charges you per snapshot. With HotJar, you can see desktop, tablet, and smartphone views all in one snapshot. Also, keep in mind that HotJar has additional features beyond heatmaps. That’s a two-edged sword. Sometimes, additional features are great because you use them. Other times, they complicate the user interface when you’re just looking for one feature.

The Heatmap

The heatmap reports produced by both tools look very similar. There are some key differences, though. First, as we’ve seen, HotJar shows you where the mouse moved on the page in addition to mouse clicks. Also, HotJar shows you how many clicks on element received when you just hover over it. With Crazy Egg, you have to view a separate report to see that level of detail. Where Crazy Egg shines is with the confetti view. That breaks down your heatmap into new vs. returning visitors, country, browser, day of the week, and other details.

The Scrollmap

Although both services offer scrollmaps, they display them in different ways. With HotJar, the scrollmap just shows how far people scroll down on the page. It’s on a red-to-yellow scale. With Crazy Egg, the report shows you how long visitors spend on a specific part of the page. That uses a white-to-yellow-to-red scale. That’s why it’s a bit confusing. Some users would like both of those types of scrollmaps in one tool.

Support

It looks like Crazy Egg delivers the quality of support in line with the price of the plan you choose. In other words, if you go with the cheapest plan, you can expect the lowest level of support. That’s arguably a sensible business decision by Crazy Egg, but you have a business to run as well. If you rely on quality support, you might want to go with HotJar. That’s because HotJar offers both phone and live-chat support. Reviews about the quality of that support are generally positive.

Wrapping It Up

Clearly, both Crazy Egg and HotJar have their pros and cons as heatmap tools. It’s up to you to determine what’s best for your business. It’s likely that you won’t go wrong with either option, though.

4 Responses

  2. Best review ever. Thanks so much for your comprehensive analysis. You did an awesome job breaking them down by things you don’t normally find in reviews, like who among the people who know what they are doing actually use this thing. Nicely done.

    Reply
  3. Pingback: Crazy Egg vs. HotJar Review: Which Tool Is Better? - Content Creation | SEO Analysis | Analytics Reporting

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

About the Author

John Lincoln is CEO of Ignite Visibility, one of the top digital marketing agencies in the nation. Named #1 Search Engine Marketing company by Clutch.co, Ignite Visibility is a 3 time Inc. 5,000 company. Ignite Visibility offers a unique digital marketing program tied directly to ROI with a focus on using SEO, social media, paid media, CRO, email, Amazon and PR to achieve results. Outside of Ignite Visibility, Lincoln is a frequent speaker and author of the books “Digital Influencer” and “The Forecaster Method.” Lincoln is consistently named one of the top digital marketing strategiest in the industry and was the recipient of the coveted Search Engine Land “Search Marketer of The Year” award. Lincoln has taught digital marketing and Web Analytics at the University of California San Diego since 2010, has been named as one of San Diego’s most admired CEO’s and a top business leader under 40. Lincoln has also made “SEO: The Movie” and “Social Media Marketing: The Movie.” His business mission is to help others through digital marketing.

John Lincoln’s Book

Get my new book. It will change the way you operate online. All proceeds go to charity: Digital Influencer, A Guide to Achieving Influencer Status Online

Get Social

Recent Tweets

Contribute

Want to contribute to JohnLincoln.marketing? Good news, you can! But it needs to be a great post. Contact John Lincoln to submit any time.

Related Posts