Hotjar vs Contentsquare: which one does your business need?

In this piece, we help you decide which tool is best for you based on your business’s needs and what you’re trying to achieve. We cover:

• The history and mission of Hotjar and Contentsquare
• Getting the insights you need to optimize your website (and your business)
  • Experience your website from your users’ point of view
  • Gain actionable insight through customer feedback (Hotjar only)
• 4 reasons our customers choose Hotjar

TL;DR: what are the main differences between Hotjar and Contentsquare?

How do Hotjar and Contentsquare compare based on features?

Headquartered in Paris, Contentsquare was formed in 2012 with a goal of “providing brands with an innovative tool to measure digital performance.” Since then, Contentsquare has grown to a team of over 550 employees in five cities around the world.

Contentsquare’s software helps brands improve the online experience for their users. Their digital experience analytics platform (DXP) was designed to track large volumes of user behavior and to deliver visual data that can be used to increase conversion rates and revenue.

Hotjar is a fully remote company with over 100 team members distributed across the globe (in over 25 countries!). When Hotjar entered the scene in 2014, our co-founders wanted to better understand user behavior with the intent of improving the experience for teams of all sizes.

Hotjar’s toolkit was designed by optimization experts and made with marketers, analysts, and UX and CRO professionals in mind. Hotjar helps you gain a clearer understanding of your website visitors—then, based on what you learn from their behavior and feedback, you can make informed decisions about how to optimize your site to create an experience your users will love.

If you’re a business selling online, Hotjar’s insights will enable you to make improvements to your website, which will naturally affect your business. To help you see the full picture of user behavior, Hotjar delivers a combination of tools that show you more than just what your users are doing—Hotjar helps you understand why your visitors behave the way they do on your site, and can help you identify how to improve their experience and increase conversion rates.

Contentsquare similarly helps you fix problems and find revenue opportunities, but it does so in a different way: rather than focusing on holistic insight and user feedback, it offers hyper-focused behavior tools that visualize user data and can help you understand the overall effectiveness of a piece of content as it relates to conversions.

Both Hotjar and Contentsquare let you walk a proverbial mile in your customers’ shoes: with heatmaps and recordings, they allow you to experience your website from the users’ point of view so you can better understand their behavior and identify trends or pain points you may have missed, otherwise.

Click maps, scroll maps, and move heatmaps show you what visitors are doing on individual pages: you can see which features and elements they click on, how far they scroll down the page, and where they move their mouse on the screen.

• Session recordings, often called visitor recordings or session replays, let you watch recordings of how real people have navigated through your site: you can see where they moved, clicked, and scrolled across multiple pages, and watch how they interact with features and elements.

Contentsquare captures 100% of users’ data by default, giving you large data sets to filter through and learn from. The volume and range of data provided compelled Contentsquare to create a dedicated training and certification program for their enterprise customer base to help them deeply understand the software, get clear insight from it, and learn how to draw conclusions.

In comparison, Hotjar is easy to set up, get started, and understand right away, while still giving the detail and quality of information that advanced users need. Our sampling model lets you collect fewer data points at a lower cost, yet still captures enough traffic to be confident in your discoveries. This approach also allows Hotjar to offer a ‘free forever’ plan, which has been available since the very beginning.

Tools like heatmaps and recordings will give you a better understanding of how users are browsing your site, but you won’t necessarily be able to learn why your visitors do what they do if you rely solely on them. It’s only when you pair that insight with feedback tools that you can take your knowledge a step further by learning directly from your users.

Contentsquare’s software offers a lot of valuable data and insight into user behavior and content performance, but doesn’t include customer feedback tools for gaining insight directly from users. Hotjar, on the other hand, includes:

• An Incoming Feedback widget that allows your visitors to leave instant visual feedback on your website. You can see which specific features people love (and hate), identify issues and pain points, and find opportunities for growth—all in the customers’ own words.

• An on-site survey tool that you can place on individual website pages to get a better understanding of what your visitors need from your site. When you ask questions with on-site surveys, you can learn how you can improve the user experience, and find out what might be preventing people from taking action or converting.

• A Net Promoter Score (NPS) feature that helps you keep track of your customer loyalty by computing replies to question like “How likely are you to recommend [this product] to someone like you?” on a scale from 0 to 10.

• A Survey tool that allows you to create and email customer surveys to collect information from your customers about their level of satisfaction with your products, your brand, and your team.
  

With these powerful voice of customer tools, Hotjar helps you take the guesswork out of UX and conversion rate optimization—each of these feedback tools gives you a simple way to hear from your customers so you can gain actionable insight and reach conclusions about what drove them to your site, what keeps them there, and what makes them want to leave.

Hotjar helps you build on traditional data like traffic, pageviews, and bounce or exit rates by showing you how and why users interact with your website. Using Hotjar in combination with traditional analytics tools like Google Analytics will give you everything you need to learn which changes to make to your site.

In a Capterra review, Roy W says that “if you are into deep website analytics and user behaviour and want to get great insights, Hotjar is a great tool.” Roy uses “several analytics tools” and combines the data from each source to gain the insights they need.

The user experience is crucial to the customer journey: customers make decisions about your business based on what they experience on your website. Hotjar can show you how to improve the overall user experience, creating a smoother journey for your potential customers.

Jack C said in their review on G2 that Hotjar’s tools are “incredibly valuable to understand if users get the right experience from their web pages.” Jack says Hotjar “provides valuable information beyond the clicks as to what users are doing,” and that Hotjar helps to “understand where the user’s attention is and where to improve your marketing / web pages.”

Hotjar is designed to be easy for anyone to set up, get started, and understand right away, while still delivering the depth and value that advanced users need. Just add a snippet of code to your site, and you’re ready to start learning from your users.

In their review, Steven D says that Hotjar is “so easy to use. And easy to use with multiple different websites and client accounts. [Hotjar] has given me insight that I wasn’t able to get (or had to pay a lot to get it) before.”

Steven goes on to say that Hotjar has “multiple powerful tools + functions for getting great insight into how your people use your site and what is stopping them from taking the core action(s) you want more people to take.”

Hotjar gives you a combination of behavior analytics and customer feedback tools so you can learn not only what needs to change, but also understand how to change it. Our tools can help you improve the user experience, boost customer satisfaction, and increase conversions.

Chris C said in a review that Hotjar “is a great tool to help make the analytical data come to life with visuals,” and that Hotjar’s tools can help you learn how to “make adjustments for future visitors.”

In another review, Dheeraj M says that Hotjar has a “user friendly interface,” and that “Session Recordings are extremely accurate and will help in conversions. It’s a kind of instant feedback and extremely helpful.”

Hotjar is for you if:

✔️ You’re a business selling online

✔️ You want to create a better overall user experience and improve conversions as a result

✔️ You want insight into the how and why of user behavior

✔️ You want a tool to help you learn directly from your customers

✔️ You need to get set up quickly and easily, and start learning right away

✔️ You want to be able to try our tools for free for 30 days, and only pay for what you need as your business grows (or even stick with our ‘free forever’ plan)

Hotjar is NOT for you if:

✖️ You want to capture 100% of your users’ digital behavior by default

✖️ You want detailed content analysis to drive maximum engagement

✖️ You want a tool to replace Google Analytics

✖️ You want a tool to run A/B tests

We hope this piece has answered some of your questions and that you’re one step closer to finding the tool that’s right for your business. If you’re still unsure, why don’t you give Hotjar a try using our ‘free forever’ plan? Set-up is easy, and you can start learning from your users right away.