Software Alternatives & Reviews

Hotjar VS Plausible.io

Compare Hotjar VS Plausible.io and see what are their differences

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!

Plausible.io logo Plausible.io

Plausible Analytics is a simple, open-source, lightweight (< 1 KB) and privacy-friendly web analytics alternative to Google Analytics. Made and hosted in the EU, powered by European-owned cloud infrastructure 🇪🇺
  • 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

  • Plausible.io Landing page
    Landing page //
    2020-07-07

Plausible Analytics is not designed to be a clone of Google Analytics. It is meant as a simple-to-use replacement and a privacy-friendly alternative that can help many site owners.

  • It's quick, simple to use and understand with all the metrics displayed on one page. Doesn't track hundreds of metrics like Google Analytics does

  • Lightweight script of less than 1 KB so sites load fast. The script is 45 times smaller script than the Google Analytics one

  • Doesn't use cookies so there's no need to worry about cookie banners

  • Doesn't track personal data so it's compliant with GDPR out of the box and you don't need to worry about asking for data consent

  • It's open source with the code available on GitHub so you can even self host exactly the same product free as in beer

  • Unlike Google Analytics, the cloud product is not free as in beer because the business model is subscriptions rather than selling the data of your visitors. Plausible Analytics is bootstrapped without any external funding so the subscription fees help cover the costs and time spent on development.

Hotjar

Website
hotjar.com
$ Details
freemium €39.0 / Monthly (Starting at: 3,000 Recordings per month with unlimited Heatmaps)
Platforms
-
Release Date
2014 June

Plausible.io

$ Details
paid Free Trial $9.0 / Monthly (10,000 pageviews)
Platforms
Web Browser Google Chrome Firefox Safari Wordpress
Release Date
2019 April

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.

Plausible.io features and specs

No features have been listed yet.

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?

Plausible.io videos

Cardano Blackboard Series #5: What is plausible deniability?

More videos:

  • Review - How Plausible is the Balkanized America from Crimson Skies? (A Map Analysis)
  • Review - Movie Review - How Plausible is The Martian?

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Hotjar and Plausible.io)
Heatmaps
100 100%
0% 0
Analytics
47 47%
53% 53
Web Analytics
62 62%
38% 38
Privacy
0 0%
100% 100

User comments

Share your experience with using Hotjar and Plausible.io. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

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

Hotjar Reviews

  1. 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!

  2. Feeling disappointed

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

    🏁 Competitors: WatchThemLive
  3. Don't work the heatmap and I did not like others.

    Don't work the heatmap and I did not like others.

    🏁 Competitors: WatchThemLive

10 Best Hotjar Alternatives & Competitors in 2023
Hotjar provides its users with 4 packages, and its ‘Basic’ one is free. In the following picture, you can take a look at all Hotjar plans, including ‘Plus,’ ‘Business,’ and ‘Scale’ services. The pricing on Hotjar starts from $32 a month.
The Top 10 Website Session Recording Tools for 2022
Hotjar is a simple, virtual, and visually appealing solution to find, track, gather, and convey consumer needs. Using the HotJar programme, you can understand your users and identify their key issues. By examining your user behaviour, the application enables you to ask the appropriate inquiry at the appropriate time.
Hotjar vs FullStory
Hotjar combines analytics data with user feedback collection to give you a more holistic understanding of your website visitors and customers. Hotjar and FullStory both offer tools like heatmaps and recordings to visually understand user behavior, but Hotjar also gives you survey tools and feedback widgets so you can quite literally ask your users for the why behind their...
Source: www.hotjar.com
30 Best Customer Feedback Survey Tools: An Overview | Mopinion
Hotjar is a user testing and behaviour analytics software that combines multiple UX tools in one. This focus however means that it lacks a solid CX solution. Feedback analysis and reporting are not available (aside from exporting data to XLS or CSV. With this software however, users can create heatmaps, user recordings (e.g. tracking sessions) and customisable surveys and...
Source: mopinion.com
Free SEO Tools To Improve Your Rankings
HotJar (Basic Plan) - An analytics tool that offers heatmaps, and visitors session replays to analyze their behavior. Basic plan is limited to 2,000 pageviews a day.

Plausible.io Reviews

  1. Happy Paying User :)

    I've been using plausible since Sep 2019 and never had any doubts about it. It provides me with everything I need related to visitor stats while keeping privacy in first place.

    It doesn't slow down my website loading speed (it's amazing, it's less than 1KB in size!), is not blocked by adblockers since it's not really a tracker tracker, and owners are super cool and they actually respond to every inquiry you could possibly have.

    If you're looking for de-googling your stuff, you can start with Plausible :)

    🏁 Competitors: Google Analytics, Matomo, Woopra
    👍 Pros:    Loading speed|Clean ui|Privacy concisous|Custom domain|Affordable prices|Easy integration|Super simple
  2. Plausibly simple analytics!

    I tried several analytics tools prior to Plausible, namely Google Analytics and later on Matomo. I found both to be fairly complicated for my usage which is a personal blog. Complicated in the way I had to install and use them. Plausible's simple to set up approach combined with a very clean and inviting user interface was a breath of fresh air. It's simple and clean enough that it actually makes me want to check and analyse my traffic which is a feeling I never thought I'd have having tried alternatives.

  3. Excellent alternative to google analytics

    It offers clear information about what I really need, without distractions, without advertising and does not slow my site.

    🏁 Competitors: Google Analytics

Top 5 open source alternatives to Google Analytics
Plausible is a newer kid on the open source analytics tools block. It’s lean, it’s fast, and only collects a small amount of information — that includes numbers of unique visitors and the top pages they visited, the number of page views, the bounce rate, and referrers. Plausible is simple and very focused.
Source: opensource.com
Privacy-oriented alternatives to Google Analytics
I learned about Plausible just recently, but they deserve to be on top of this list for me. Their platform is completely Open Source on GitHub under the MIT license. I personally also like that it’s written in Elixir.
Lightweight alternatives to Google Analytics
Plausible is another relatively new analytics tool that was launched in early 2019. Soon after launching, it switched to open source, with the code licensed under the permissive MIT license. The company's business model is to charge for the hosting, with pricing aimed at small businesses. In addition to making its source code available, Plausible is one of an increasing...
Source: lwn.net

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Plausible.io seems to be a lot more popular than Hotjar. While we know about 187 links to Plausible.io, we've tracked only 12 mentions of Hotjar. 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 (12)

  • A list of SaaS, PaaS and IaaS offerings that have free tiers of interest to devops and infradev
    Hotjar — 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 / 3 months 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: 6 months 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: about 1 year 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: about 1 year ago
  • How to get a targeted user feedback in a less intrusive way?
    Sign up for hotjar.com They record your user's screen as they use the website. It's really useful and gives you qualitative feedback. Source: over 1 year ago
View more

Plausible.io mentions (187)

  • We need to Speak about Google Code Quality
    I could do the same exercise with Google Analytics and Google Tag Manager, but luckily I don't need to, since Plausible already did. A piece of advice, rip out Google Analytics and use Plausible instead. It first of all doesn't destroy your website, and secondly it doesn't violate the GDPR - So you can embed it on your site without having to warn your visitors about that they're being spied on by Google. - Source: dev.to / 8 days ago
  • Show HN: Open-Source Ad-Free File Upload Service
    Also, currently we are using https://plausible.io/ for analytics. No other bugs. - Source: Hacker News / 10 days ago
  • Plausible as an alternative to Google Analytics
    I just swapped out Google Analytics with Plausible for AINIRO.IO. It’s only been a week, but so far I am super jazzed about it. First of all, Plausible doesn’t use cookies, so I can completely drop all cookie disclaimers and popups I had because of GDPR. Second of all, the site scores significantly better on load time. This results in a 10x better user experience for my website visitors, while making sure the... - Source: dev.to / 14 days ago
  • Simple no bs persistent notepad
    No clue what you mean, browser cache might even clear itself without you doing anything manually. This thing makes no sense. Nowhere ever did it say Tech Demo anywhere, not in the HN headline, not on the page itself. No, thanks. And even as a tech demo, there is nothing impressive going in. It is stores shit to local storage, I guess. Lol, I just looked this up, and it was in Firefox on 2009 already? WHAT?... - Source: Hacker News / about 2 months ago
  • Using Analytics on My Website
    > Just use GoAcces for fuck's sake. GoAccess seems pretty cool and is probably a good task for the job, when you need something simple, thanks for recommending it: https://goaccess.io/ Even if you have analytics of some sort already in place, I think it'd probably still be a nice idea to run GoAccess on your server, behind some additional auth, so you can check up on how the web servers are performing. That said,... - Source: Hacker News / 5 months ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Hotjar and Plausible.io, 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.

Matomo - Matomo is an open-source web analytics platform

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.

Fathom Analytics - Simple, trustworthy website analytics (finally)

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

Crazy Egg - Through Crazy Egg's heat map and scroll map reports you can get an understanding of how your visitors engage with your website so you can boost your conversion rates.