Hotjar Session Replay Reviewed: Why Userpilot Offers More for Product Teams

Hotjar is one of the most popular behavior analytics tools on the market and the go-to platform for heatmaps among many companies. But is Hotjar session replay the best tool for your SaaS business too?

You see, just because a tool is great for one use case, doesn’t automatically mean it will be for others as well. And in my humble opinion, this is the case with Hotjar. While its heatmap features are one of the best out there, the session replay feature doesn’t have the same quality. I’ll admit that it has decent capabilities for small teams, but it lacks critical features for adding more context and nuance to user session data.

To help you make an informed choice, in this article, I’ll explore the core capabilities and limitations of Hotjar’s session replay and also explain why I believe an all-in-one product growth platform like Userpilot is a better choice for mature businesses.

How is Hotjar’s session replay used?

Hotjar’s session replay lets you reconstruct users’ actions and observe how exactly they interact with your app: what elements they click on, which pages they visit, and how far they scroll.

Having such a detailed view of the user journey at your fingertips allows you to easily make a number of product improvements. Here are just a few examples of what you can do with session replays:

  • Spot UX pain points: Hotjar’s session replays can help identify frustration signals, such as dead clicks, rage clicks, or repetitive behaviors, which suggest usability problems.
  • Identify drop-off points: Once you find drop-off points in user funnels, you can combine them with session replays to understand the exact reasons behind them and optimize conversion rates accordingly.
  • Find bugs: By watching replays, your developers can quickly spot bugs—such as broken links, unresponsive buttons, or form validation issues—and resolve them to enhance functionality.
Session replay dashboard of Hotjar
Session recordings dashboard on Hotjar.

Overview of Hotjar’s session replay feature

Now, let’s understand Hotjar’s core session recording functionalities in detail.

  • Multi-page navigation: Hotjar enables you to track and analyze user behavior across multiple pages of your app during a single session. This is particularly useful for understanding how users navigate through a series of related pages, such as a product tour that spans multiple product pages and features.
  • Playback speed controls: You can watch at normal speed, speed things up to skim through boring parts, or slow down recordings to 0.5x when you need to catch crucial micro-interactions.
  • Frustration and engagement filters: Hotjar automatically organizes user sessions based on factors like relevance, frustration levels, and engagement. This allows you to quickly see which sessions are most important and watch them first.
  • Path and action filters: You can narrow down session recordings using specific use case scenarios, such as landing page user actions, browser, and mobile device type.
  • Collaboration tools: You can tag relevant teammates, leave comments, add timestamps, and even create clips of critical moments. Hotjar lets you share session insights directly with your UX or support team.
  • Privacy settings: With its customizable privacy settings, you can set data collection parameters to ensure compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and PCI. For example, you can exclude recordings of sensitive information on payment pages.

How much does the Hotjar session replay feature cost?

Hotjar’s session replay tool is part of its Observe suite. It offers 4 plans:

  1. Basic: This free plan includes up to 35 daily session recordings, heatmaps, and Hubspot integration.
  2. Plus: At $39 per month, you get up to 100 daily user sessions, page view filters, custom event tracking, and filtering for recordings.
  3. Business: Hotjar’s popular plan costs $99 monthly (or $80 per month when billed annually). It includes 500 user sessions, frustration and engagement signals, and custom integrations.
  4. Scale: This plan, designed for larger businesses, costs $213 per month and offers 500 daily sessions, funnels, and error tracking.
Hotjar session replay pricing plans
Subscription packages via Hotjar.

Why you might need a Hotjar alternative?

After combing through dozens of user reviews on G2, here are the most common issues I noticed Hotjar users bring up.

  • Not all user sessions are recorded: Customers often complain that Hotjar heavily relies on data sampling and doesn’t record all sessions, leaving them with gaps in data and half-baked insights.
  • Lack of auto-capture: Without auto-capture, you have to manually configure each interaction you want to track, which requires time and technical expertise.
  • Limited analytics: While Hotjar offers heatmaps, it doesn’t provide traditional web analytics reports like paths, retention tables, and trend reports for adding context to session recordings.
  • Lack of engagement tools: Data is only actionable if you act on it. For example, if you see with session recordings that your user is struggling to meaningfully use a feature, the right action would be to create an interactive tour to guide them. Unfortunately, This not only increases costs but also fragments your user data across different platforms.

To sum this up, Hotjar is a decent tool for small teams looking for basic insights, but you’ll outgrow it as you scale because it doesn’t have enterprise features like comprehensive analytics and integrated engagement tools.

Looking for a Hotjar Session Replay Alternative? Try Userpilot

Introducing Userpilot: The all-in-one product growth platform for SaaS teams

Userpilot is a complete suite of tools that not only offers advanced session replay features but also a broad range of features for quantitative and qualitative data collection such as analytics reports and user surveys.

In other words, you get all the session recording features from Hotjar and much more when you use Userpilot: Which includes:

  • Autocapture: Userpilot automatically records important user interactions such as clicks, text inputs, and form submissions. This not only saves you manual work and time but also allows you to analyze historical data without having to anticipate and set anything up in advance.
  • Advanced filters: You can quickly find relevant sessions and analyze specific user segments based on parameters like company and key events. For example, you can choose to watch sessions from users who have interacted with a specific feature if you suspect it’s hard to use and want to confirm your hypothesis.
Apply filters to analyze specific customer interactions on your site with Userpilot
You can filter and segment sessions in Userpilot to quickly find relevant sessions.
  • An activity log panel: View all user actions during the session and jump directly to specific events for faster debugging.
  • Skip inactivity: This feature highlights key moments in recordings while auto-skipping inactive periods, allowing you to focus only on critical user actions.
Jump directly to key user events and data with Userpilot's skip inactivity feature
Userpilot’s skip inactivity panel breaks down user actions so you can find relevant ones for you easily.
  • Direct access from analytics reports: You can access session replays directly from trend charts, conversion funnels, or user profiles to quickly drill down into specific user behavior. For example, if a specific user submits a support ticket, you can search for their name and watch their last sessions to see what went wrong.
  • Session playlists: Organize sessions with your favorite filters into playlists so you can refer back to them when needed without much hassle.
Use filters to create your own session playlist
Userpilot allows you to save similar sessions in a playlist so you can refer back easily.
  • Comments and notes: Collaboration is also a breeze with Userpilot. You can leave comments and tag team members to ensure you are on the same page and foster cross-team collaboration.
  • Data masking: We have GDPR, HIPAA, and SOC 2 Type II privacy compliances to ensure that valuable user data is secure during recordings.

How much does Userpilot cost?

Userpilot’s pricing is based on the total number of Monthly Active Users (MAUs), not sessions or events like our competitors. We’ve figured out that event-based pricing can be unpredictable and lead to unexpected expenses, and that’s not the experience we want for our customers. Hence, we chose a more scalable pricing structure where we grow as you do.

We offer three plans, but session replays aren’t available on the Starter one, so here’s a breakdown of our plans that include the playbacks:

  • Growth plan: Priced at $799/month, this mid-tier package includes session replay, user surveys, advanced analytics reports, and a resource center. This plan is our customers’s top pick so far.
  • Enterprise plan: Available at a quote, this package offers a comprehensive set of features, including session recordings, security audit, custom roles, SAML SSO 2.0 and activity logs, priority support, and third-party integrations.
Get unlimited sessions and seats with Userpilot
Userpilot’s pricing packages.

Userpilot vs. Hotjar: feature breakdown

Here’s a quick roundabout of all the features available on Userpilot and Hotjar platforms.

Feature Userpilot Hotjar
Web App Recording
Mobile App Recording
Records all user sessions
Identity Detection
Playlists
Privacy Masking
Skip Inactivity
Integrated Analytics
Bug Flagging
Activity Log
Colleague Tagging
In-Session Notes
Session Replay Sharing

So is Hotjar the right session replay tool for you after all?

Hotjar session replay is a decent tool for SaaS companies with small product teams, but it lacks advanced features like auto capture and analytics reports that enterprises need to fully understand and improve the user experience.

On the other hand, Userpilot comes with a number of native analytics reports such as paths, funnels, and cohort tables that contextualize session replay data. Moreover, Userpilot also combines these analytics features with in-app engagement tools, making it simpler to act on data right away and fix friction points.

If you need a robust all-in-one platform that replaces tools, then book a free demo with Userpilot now and get started!

Looking for a Hotjar Session Replay Alternative? Try Userpilot for an All-In-One Platform

FAQ

Does Hotjar record every session?

Hotjar captures most customer interactions but sometimes misses data, such as less than 30-second sessions or during inconsistent website traffic.

How do I enable session replay?

To enable Hotjar’s session replay feature, follow these steps:

  • Log in to your Hotjar account.
  • Go to account settings.
  • Navigate to the “Recording” section.
  • Toggle the option to enable session recording.
  • Save changes.

About the author
Armine Matevosyan

Armine Matevosyan

Content Marketing Specialist at Userpilot

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