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Rating
4/5
5/5
Summary
Hotjar provides Product Experience Insights about your website that show how users behave and what they feel strongly about, so product teams can deliver real value to them.
Open Web Analytics is the free and open source web analytics framework that lets you stay in control of how you instrument and analyze the use of your websites and application
An open-source product analytics for developers. It helps engineers understand their product usage, automate events, and user data collection.
Pirsch is a simple, cookie-free, open-source web analytics solution that integrates easily into your website or backend.
Pros
  • Comes with great heatmaps
  • Includes session recordings
  • Good polling function
  • Hotjar features exit surveys
  • The software is open source
  • It is very customizable
  • Ecommerce reporting
  • Privacy friendly
  • The script is lightweight
  • Easy to set up
  • Great interface design
  • Reasonable pricing
  • Good session recordings
  • Lightweight, cookie-free and open-source
  • Pirsch's backend integration requires no client-side scripts and delivers the same accurate results without the interference of adblockers
  • Extensive API
  • Fully-fledged access management
  • Comprehensive filtering by any metric including event metadata
Cons
  • Hotjar is not available for mobile
  • Steep pricing for large organisations
  • Hard to exclude URLs from reports
  • Limited reporting features
  • Technical skill required
  • Comply with data privacy regulations
  • You need a secure server
  • Feature flags are limited
  • Limited amount of graph types
  • Filtering could be improved
  • Visitors are only recognized for up to 24 hours to comply with the privacy policy
  • Heatmaps and session recordings are not available

Pricing information

Starting Price
BasicFree
Plus$49+ p/m
BusinessOn req.
ScaleOn req.
Cloud LiteFree
Cloud€0.005 per event / recording
Enterprise Cloud€450 p/m minimum
Free trial period
Free plan
Free plan
Free plan
30 days

Account Management

Trackable Items
Unlimited
Unlimited
Unlimited
Unlimited
User Seats
1
Unlimited
Unlimited
Unlimited
Account Security
  • Single Sign-on
  • Two-factor Authentication
  • Single Sign-on
  • Two-factor Authentication
  • Single Sign-on
  • Two-factor Authentication
  • Single Sign-on
  • Two-factor Authentication

Data Processing

Data Center Locations
  • European Economic Area (EEA)
  • United States
  • Not applicable
  • United States
  • European Economic Area (EEA)
Software Hosting
  • Public Cloud
  • Private Cloud
  • On-Premise
  • Public Cloud
  • Private Cloud
  • On-Premise
  • Public Cloud
  • Private Cloud
  • On-Premise
  • Public Cloud
  • Private Cloud
  • On-Premise
Data Ownership
Hotjar
You
You
You
Data Freshness
30 minutes
Realtime
Realtime
Realtime
Data Retention
12 months
Unlimited
Unlimited
Unlimited
Data Sampling
Data Import
Send user data to Hotjar to enhance analysis
by means of the REST API
Historical data ingestion
Import from Plausible, Fathom or Google Analytics
Data Export
Export recording meta data
by means of the REST API
via API or CSV
Compliance
  • GDPR
  • CCPA
  • GDPR
  • CCPA
  • GDPR
  • CCPA
  • HIPAA
  • PECR
  • GDPR
  • CCPA
  • ePrivacy
  • PECR
Cookieless
Hotjar relies on first-party cookies.
Sets first-party cookies (owa_v, owa_c, session). Lifetimes can be shortened or made session-only.
Posthog has the option to be used without cookies
Pirsch Analytics does not use cookies

Alerts & Automation

Custom Alerts
in the interface, via e-mail or Slack
Receive alerts via Slack or email
Email Reports
e.g. daily survey responses reports
Subscribe to an Insight or dashboard
Daily, Weekly, Bi-weekly, Monthly

Reporting

Trend Reporting
Device Reporting
See on which device the user was
Device type, OS, Browser, Browser version, Screen size
Funnel Reporting
Discover why users drop off
Analyze Funnels
User Flow Reporting
Entry and exit pages
Segmentation
Create custom filters for recordings
Extensive filtering by any metric
Cohort Reports
Retention Reporting
Attribution Reporting
Ecommerce Reporting
Possible with custom events and goals

User Experience Features

Heatmaps
Unlimited
Session Recordings
Record all interaction with your site
Domstream
A/B Testing
No A/B testing tool only integrations
Feature flags and A/B testing
Tag-based A/B testing and segmentation
User Feedback
Place NPS ratings or a survey pop-up on every page
Surveys

Customizability

Custom Properties
As part of custom events
Custom Metrics
Custom Reports
Custom Events
Track and filter sessions & heatmaps
With additional metadata fields (key-value pairs).
Annotations
Hotjar does not have annotations

Support

Support description
Hotjar offers extensive documentation and a ticketing support system. Most requests are answered within 1-2 business days, but often faster.
Because Open Web Analytics is open source, all documentation is found on GitHub. Apart from the community, there are no support options available.
Posthogs' support consists of an extensive knowledge base and community on their website. For enterprise users, support is also available trough a dedicated Slack channel and via e-mail.
Email support, public Discord server
Support Options
  • Phone
  • Email
  • Live Chat
  • Ticketing system
  • Knowledge base
  • Community
  • Phone
  • Email
  • Live Chat
  • Ticketing system
  • Knowledge base
  • Community
  • Phone
  • Email
  • Live Chat
  • Ticketing system
  • Knowledge base
  • Community
  • Phone
  • Email
  • Live Chat
  • Ticketing system
  • Knowledge base
  • Community

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Check out our knowledge base for more articles on analytics, tracking and privacy.

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