Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Hotjar VS Active Admin

Compare Hotjar VS Active Admin and see what are their differences

Note: These products don't have any matching categories. If you think this is a mistake, please edit the details of one of the products and suggest appropriate categories.

Hotjar logo Hotjar

The #1 Leader in Heatmaps, Recordings, Surveys & More. Sign up for a 15-day free trial and start learning from real user behavior today!

Active Admin logo Active Admin

The administration framework for business critical Ruby on Rails applications.
  • Hotjar Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-23

Hotjar's product experience insights make it easy to understand what users are really doing on your site.

  • Visualize behavior on your site with Heatmaps

  • Eliminate guesswork with user Recordings

  • Understand the reasons behind behavior with Surveys and Incoming Feedback

  • Active Admin Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-07-30

Hotjar

Website
hotjar.com
$ Details
freemium โ‚ฌ39.0 / Monthly (Starting at: 3,000 Recordings per month with unlimited Heatmaps)
Release Date
2014 June
Startup details
Country
Malta

Hotjar features and specs

  • Heatmaps
    Visually represent where users click, move, and scroll on your site. With this context, you'll learn how users really behave.
  • Recordings
    Live playbacks of users on your site.
  • Surveys
    Bring the voice-of-customer to your decision making.
  • Incoming Feedback
    A real-time suggestion box on your site, that lets users express frustration or delight about individual parts of your site.

Active Admin features and specs

  • Rapid Development
    Active Admin allows for rapid development of back-end administration dashboards without having to code everything from scratch. It provides a default set of controllers, routes, and views that can be easily customized.
  • Rails Integration
    Built specifically for Ruby on Rails applications, Active Admin leverages Rails conventions and integrates seamlessly with its ecosystem, enabling a familiar and efficient development experience for Rails developers.
  • Rich Features
    Active Admin comes with a wide range of features like authentication, authorization, filtering, searching, and custom actions which can be customized to fit business requirements.
  • Community and Documentation
    Active Admin has a strong community and well-maintained documentation which provides support and resources for developers. The community contributes by sharing plugins and solutions to common problems.

Possible disadvantages of Active Admin

  • Customization Complexity
    Once you move beyond basic customizations, making extensive changes to the default behavior or appearance can be complex and require a deeper understanding of both Active Admin and Rails.
  • Performance
    Due to the abstraction and additional layers provided by Active Admin, it might not be the best choice for high-performance applications, especially when dealing with large datasets.
  • Dependency on Rails
    Active Admin is tightly coupled with Rails, which means it cannot be used for non-Rails applications, limiting its use for projects not based on this framework.
  • Version Compatibility
    As both Rails and Active Admin evolve, there might be compatibility issues between different versions, which could require upgrades or modifications in your existing codebase.

Analysis of Hotjar

Overall verdict

  • Overall, Hotjar is considered a good tool for businesses looking to gain deeper insights into user behavior and enhance their websites based on real user data. It offers a combination of qualitative and quantitative analytics which adds a significant advantage for understanding key user interaction points.

Why this product is good

  • Hotjar is a popular analytics tool that provides heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys to help businesses understand user behavior on their websites. It is praised for its ease of use, intuitive interface, and comprehensive features that offer valuable insights into how users interact with a site. Additionally, it enables businesses to collect direct feedback from users, helping to identify areas for improvement and optimize user experience.

Recommended for

    Hotjar is recommended for small to medium-sized businesses, eCommerce sites, and startups looking to improve their website's user experience. It is also suitable for UX/UI designers and product managers who want detailed analytics without the complexity of larger enterprise-level tools. However, larger organizations may want to consider more robust analytics platforms that can handle and analyze larger volumes of data.

Hotjar videos

What is Hotjar?

More videos:

  • Review - Invision prize Hotjar's straightforward, shareable insights
  • Tutorial - Why you should be using Hotjar Analytics
  • Tutorial - Google Analytics vs. Hotjar - Which one should you use?

Active Admin videos

Harry Potter and the Active Admin

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Hotjar and Active Admin)
Web Analytics
100 100%
0% 0
Developer Tools
0 0%
100% 100
Heatmaps
100 100%
0% 0
Data Dashboard
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Hotjar and Active Admin

Hotjar Reviews

  1. Kris Leviss
    ยท Founder at KrisLess ยท
    Love it

    I've been using Hotjar for a few months, and it's been a perfect tool for understanding how users interact with my website. The heatmaps and session recordings are especially helpful for identifying problem areas, and the feedback polls give me direct insights from visitors. The platform is easy to navigate, but Iโ€™ve noticed the session recordings can be a bit glitchy at times, and the free version is quite limited. Despite these small issues, Hotjar has definitely helped me improve user experience and optimize my siteโ€™s performance.

    ๐Ÿ‘ Pros:    Intuitive user interface|Good session recordings|Useful feedback tools
    ๐Ÿ‘Ž Cons:    Free plan is limited|Occasional recording glitches|Data processing can be slow
  2. Prema Toppo
    ยท SEO Specialist at TechUp Labs ยท
    Must have tool

    Hotjar has been our go-to for optimizing UI, reducing bounce rates, and refining CTAs. Its powerful insights have been instrumental in enhancing user experience. A staple tool for data-driven decisions!

  3. Feeling disappointed

    I don't like the service. It is very slow and very expensive. Not recommended it to others.

    ๐Ÿ Competitors: WatchThemLive

7 Best Product Discovery Tools for High-Growth B2B SaaS Teams (2026)
Hotjar is a behavioral analytics tool that provides heatmaps and session recordings. In the discovery process, it acts as the "eyes," showing where users get stuck, click out of frustration, or ignore a new feature entirely, providing the "why" behind the data.
Source: www.laneapp.co
10 Best Mixpanel Alternatives for Product Analytics in 2024
Hotjar is an all-in-one feedback and analytics software suite to optimize your website and make data-driven decisions. Hotjar Observe is the suiteโ€™s most popular Mixpanel alternativeโ€”pair it with Hotjar Ask, Hotjar Engage, and Hotjar Funnels for all the tools you need to succeed. ๐Ÿ˜Ž
Source: clickup.com
7 best Mixpanel alternatives to understand your users
๐Ÿ’ก Pro tip: you don't need to choose between Hotjar and Mixpanel. With the Hotjar-Mixpanel integration, you not only identify what's happening on your website (e.g. users frequently add certain items to their cart), but you'll also understand why it's happening (e.g. Hotjar's heatmaps and recordings show users are attracted to a particular promotional banner).
Source: www.hotjar.com
The best Hotjar alternatives & competitors, compared
Sprig is a decent replacement for Hotjar, especially if you find Hotjar's survey tools lacking. It's support for mobile apps is another key differentiator.
Source: posthog.com
11 Hotjar alternatives and competitors in 2024
Hotjar features primarily focus on how users interact with your website rather than gaining in-depth insights that can explain why they interact that way. As a strictly-quantitative data tool, Hotjar only gives you half the answers. While you can run user surveys with Hotjar, the tool lacks many other research methodsโ€”such as card sorting, tree testing, user interviews, and...
Source: maze.co

Active Admin Reviews

We have no reviews of Active Admin yet.
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Social recommendations and mentions

Hotjar might be a bit more popular than Active Admin. We know about 13 links to it since March 2021 and only 12 links to Active Admin. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Hotjar mentions (13)

  • The Best 100 Free UI/UX Resources for Every Designer & Developer
    Hotjar Hotjar.com Heatmaps, session recordings, and feedback polls (free basic plan). - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
    Hotjar โ€” Website Analytics and Reports . Free Plan allows 2000 pageviews/day. One hundred snapshots/day (max capacity: 300). Three snapshot heatmaps can be stored for 365 days. Unlimited Team Members. - Source: dev.to / over 2 years ago
  • What do I do after ProductHunt?
    So you can use heatmapping software such as Crazy Egg and Hotjar to see how your end users use your website. Source: almost 3 years ago
  • Lots of Traffic but no sales
    If you have installed a heat map like hotjar.com then I will tell you that I used that for a month and found 5 or so dead ends where users were not getting to the cart or clicking on things that where not informative enough to lead to the next action. Source: over 3 years ago
  • Anyone willing to provide feedback on my newly created website?
    Install hotjar.com - it's free. It's a heatmap that tracks how people navigate around your site. Why this matters? You can see where people drop off on your site (specifically, what content they see/don't see). Then, you can make informed decisions on what content is landing and what needs to change. Source: over 3 years ago
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Active Admin mentions (12)

  • Goravel: A Go framework inspired by Laravel
    Same reason IDEs โ€” when you really know them โ€” allow for quicker development compared to using primitive text editors with a bunch of third-party plugins duck-taped together. When you understand the framework, everything is written to the same standard, behaves in similar ways, and is where you expect it to be. Adding things like background job processing requires changing one line of config. Also, one... - Source: Hacker News / over 1 year ago
  • Use Rails
    Rails is absolutely fantastic for projects below 10,000 lines with 1 or 2 contributors, especially if you want a classic forms-based UI. And you can get a huge amount done under those constraints in Rails. But as of couple of years ago, Rails came with a number of drawbacks: 1. There was no really viable system of static typing that a significant number of people were enthusiastic about. See... - Source: Hacker News / over 2 years ago
  • Ask HN: Why aren't Django Admin style dashboards popular in other frameworks?
    Can you clarify what's the "tremendous value" you're getting out of the Django admin? At Heii On-Call https://heiioncall.com/ we are using Active Admin https://activeadmin.info/ for Ruby on Rails, which seems quite similar to the Django admin. In my experience, it's mostly useful as a fairly basic read-only view of what's in the database. In Rails, it's so easy to whip together a custom view that we tend to do... - Source: Hacker News / almost 3 years ago
  • View code coverage (active_admin and orther .arb file)
    For those who know [https://activeadmin.info/](https://activeadmin.info/) it uses a file format [https://github.com/activeadmin/arbre](https://github.com/activeadmin/arbre). Source: almost 4 years ago
  • Show HN: Build Ruby on Rails apps 10x faster โ€“ Avo
    Very neat! My first thought was that this was a competitor to https://bullettrain.co/. Looking into it a bit more, it seems more aimed at building admin panels than whole apps. I guess it competes against tools like https://activeadmin.info/? - Source: Hacker News / about 4 years ago
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What are some alternatives?

When comparing Hotjar and Active Admin, you can also consider the following products

Smartlook - Qualitative analytics for websites and mobile apps Start understanding the 'whys' of your users' behaviors with clear, visual insights. With session recordings and event tracking, you get the complete picture.

RailsAdmin - A Rails engine that provides an easy-to-use interface for managing your data

Google Analytics - Improve your website to increase conversions, improve the user experience, and make more money using Google Analytics. Measure, understand and quantify engagement on your site with customized and in-depth reports.

Slick - A jquery plugin for creating slideshows and carousels into your webpage.

FullStory - Meet FullStory, the app that captures all your customer experience data in one powerful platform.

Sequel Pro - MySQL database management for Mac OS X