Functionality | 6 <p>Hotjar dominates in visual analytics with industry-leading heatmaps and session recordings. While purposely narrower than full-spectrum analytics platforms, its specialized tools for click/tap tracking, scroll depth, mouse movement, and rage clicks provide unmatched visual behavior insights. It's best used alongside a more quantitative, events centric tool.</p> | 10 <p>PostHog's functionality range is the best on the market. It excels in richness in nearly every category from automatic event capture to heatmaps to session replay recordings.</p> |
Ease of Use | 8 <p>Hotjar excels in user experience with an exceptionally intuitive interface that makes complex behavioral data accessible through visual representations. The tool requires virtually no training even for non-technical users, with self-explanatory visualizations and intelligent filtering options that simplify analysis.</p> | 5 <p>PostHog’s web app can feel overwhelming due to the sheer number of controls and limited in-product guidance (e.g. tooltips or hints). Less experienced users often end up a bit lost. For example, on the Web Analytics tab, there are ~50 controls - most of which are undefined, and some (e.g. 'Paths' and 'Correlation Analysis') which even confused even fairly experienced users.</p><p>That said, inside specific areas - like session replays - controls and charts are much easier to use.</p> |
Look and feel | 8 <p>Hotjar's interface is clean, visually appealing and purpose-built for clarity. The design prioritizes visual understanding with intuitive heat overlays and user recordings that require minimal interpretation. Navigation is straightforward and focused, with remarkably fast load times (<1s) for heatmaps and smooth playback for session recordings.</p> | 7 <p>PostHog's design aesthetic is warm and quirky. Given the sheer breadth of functionality, they do a good job of presenting information clearly, though we would have preferred a touch more simplicity. When tested, pages and charts were extremely fast to load (<1s).</p> |
Customisability | 3 <p>While less customizable than comprehensive analytics platforms, its focused approach means most needed adjustments are readily available without overwhelming complexity.</p> | 8 <p>PostHog is one of the most customizable tools on the market. Everything from reports, to custom metrics to self-hosting is possible with this tool.</p> |
Ease of Setup | 8 <p>Hotjar offers remarkably simple implementation requiring only a single JavaScript snippet installation. The platform begins delivering valuable insights immediately after installation with no additional configuration required. Given the lack of functionality depth, there's little additional configuration needed.</p> | 7 <p>PostHog offers a self-serve product with a very generous free tier. Additionally, it was one of the first products to pioneer automatic event capture, meaning it's pretty simple to get value from the product after installing a simple script. That being said, the onboarding process is very developer centric so is best suited to technical team members.</p> |
Customer Support | 5 <p>Hotjar's documentation is middle-of-the-road. We would have preferred a more developer centric layout instead of providing articles in a help centre format which can be harder to navigate. Beyond this, email support replies take 24-48 hours in our testing.</p> | 9 <p>As with the majority of tools in the space, the primary means for support will come from developer documentation. PostHog's docs are best in class. Additionally, thanks to a thriving open-source developer ecosystem, its forums are lively and a great way to get answers to technical questions in less than 24 hours.</p> |
Integratability | 6 <p>Hotjar offers a number of native integrations with popular ticketing tools such as Jira/Linear, automation platforms like Zapier and analytics tools like Google Analytics/Mixpanel. It's integration range is somewhat limited when compared to larger, all-in-one product analytics tools though.</p> | 10 <p>PostHog offers one of the widest arrays of integrations we've tested covering everything from data warehouses, to CRMs, to CDPs and even customer support tools. They also offer a great API through which you can interact with the product programatically.</p> |
Ease of Migration | 6 <p>Hotjar provides straightforward exports for heatmaps, recordings, and feedback data. Users can download recordings, export heatmap data as CSV files, and access feedback responses through the dashboard or API. While not as extensive as enterprise analytics platforms, the export capabilities align well with the qualitative nature of the data collected.</p> | 9 <p>PostHog offers self-serve export functionality within its web app. It also offers a very robust and well documented API through which you can interact with data from the product directly.</p> |