Crazy Egg vs Hotjar
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentHotjar compared with Crazy Egg
The closest historical rival, and today the difference is emphasis. Crazy Egg leans on heatmap reporting formats (including confetti and list views) and includes lightweight A/B testing, which Hotjar does not offer at all. Hotjar leans on qualitative feedback and research, with surveys and user interviews as first-class products. Crazy Egg is priced on monthly tracked pageviews, Hotjar on daily sessions, so the cheaper option depends on your traffic shape.
Choose Crazy Egg if
Small marketing teams, agencies, and ecommerce operators who want cheap heatmaps with real segmentation, some session recordings, and built-in A/B testing on one bill, and who benefit from unlimited team seats and unlimited domains rather than a per-site or per-seat structure.
Choose Hotjar if
Small and mid-sized marketing, product, and ecommerce teams that need to see why a page underperforms without hiring a specialist: fast to install, free to start, and strong at turning observed behavior into an argument for a specific fix.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Crazy Egg | Hotjar |
|---|---|---|
| Category | CRO | CRO |
| Starting price | $29 per month ($348 per year) (free trial) | Free (35 daily sessions on Observe Basic); paid Observe plans from roughly $32 per month billed annually (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Subscription metered on tracked pageviews per month, with separate per-plan caps on session recordings and heatmap reports, and unlimited team members and domains on every tier. | Per-product subscription (Observe, Ask, and Engage are bought separately) with tiers priced by captured daily sessions and monthly survey responses. Each product has a free plan; paid tiers step up allowance and unlock filtering, longer data retention, and advanced features. Annual billing carries a discount. |
| Free plan | No | Basic tiers on Observe (about 35 daily sessions), Ask (about 20 survey responses per month), and Engage (limited interviews) |
| Free trial | Free trial available on every plan | Free plan on each product, plus a paid-plan trial |
| Best for | Small marketing teams, agencies, and ecommerce operators who want cheap heatmaps with real segmentation, some session recordings, and built-in A/B testing on one bill, and who benefit from unlimited team seats and unlimited domains rather than a per-site or per-seat structure. | Small and mid-sized marketing, product, and ecommerce teams that need to see why a page underperforms without hiring a specialist: fast to install, free to start, and strong at turning observed behavior into an argument for a specific fix. |
| Setup time | Under thirty minutes. One script covers every domain and every report, with documented paths through Google Tag Manager, Shopify, and WordPress. Heatmap reports need creating per page, which is the only ongoing setup task. | Under an hour for the tracking script, whether pasted into a template, deployed via Google Tag Manager, or enabled through a Shopify or WordPress integration. Useful heatmaps appear once enough traffic accumulates, typically within a day or two. |
| Learning curve | Very low for the reports themselves. The part that rewards a little study is the filter set: knowing to compare paid against organic on a confetti map, or converters against non-converters on a scroll map, is what separates a useful subscription from a pretty one. A/B testing adds a second concept set but stays approachable. | Low for the basics. The skill that takes longer is discipline: watching filtered recordings against a specific question rather than browsing them, and writing survey questions that do not lead the respondent. |
| Platforms | Any website via a single JavaScript snippet, Google Tag Manager, Shopify, WordPress, Unlimited domains per account | Web (JavaScript snippet), Google Tag Manager, Shopify, WordPress, Webflow, Wix, Squarespace, Magento, Mobile web |
| Compliance | GDPR and CCPA considerations addressed in the vendor's privacy documentation, Confirm current certification scope and data processing terms during procurement | GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 |
| Founded | 2005 | 2014 |
| Headquarters | United States | St Julian's, Malta |
| Ownership | Founder-owned, privately held, never externally funded | Acquired by Contentsquare (2021) |
Strengths and limitations
Crazy Egg
Strengths
- Five distinct heatmap report types over the same data, which gives more analytical range than the single heat visualisation most competitors ship.
- More than twenty audience filters including UTM parameters, conversion goals, and custom variables, applied to both heatmaps and recordings.
- Unlimited team members and unlimited domains on every plan, which makes it dramatically cheaper than per-site competitors for agencies and multi-brand companies.
- Unlimited A/B testing included from $99 a month, so seeing the problem and testing the fix happen in one tool on one bill.
Limitations
- Three separate meters, covering pageviews, recordings, and heatmap reports, make it easy to hit a wall on one while well inside the others.
- Starter at 5,000 tracked pageviews and 50 recordings is too small for a real business site, so the effective starting price is $99 rather than $29.
- Heatmap reports are capped per plan, at 5 on Starter and 75 on Plus, which limits how many pages you can study at once.
- The A/B testing is a page variant tool with targeting, not a statistics platform; there is no sequential testing, no variance reduction, and no published methodology.
Hotjar
Strengths
- The fastest path from installing a script to a concrete, evidenced conclusion about why a page underperforms.
- A free plan good enough to answer a real question, which is why Hotjar is often the first analytics tool a small site installs after Google Analytics.
- Combines observation and direct feedback in one product, so the what and the why do not live in separate vendors.
- Filtering on recordings turns replay from a time sink into a targeted triage workflow.
Limitations
- No A/B testing, so proving a fix worked requires a second tool.
- Session-based pricing punishes traffic growth and samples rather than capturing everything on lower tiers.
- Three separately priced products create a bill that is larger than the headline number suggests.
- Another client-side script is a measurable page-weight and Core Web Vitals cost on performance-sensitive sites.
Pricing compared
Crazy Egg
Subscription metered on tracked pageviews per month, with separate per-plan caps on session recordings and heatmap reports, and unlimited team members and domains on every tier.
- Starter$29
- Plus$99
- Pro$249
- Enterprise$599
Crazy Egg looks like the cheapest option in the category and is really a $99 product once you account for how quickly 5,000 tracked pageviews disappear. At that price the value is strong: 150,000 pageviews, 1,000 recordings, 75 heatmap reports, two years of recording storage, unlimited A/B testing, unlimited seats, and unlimited domains. Working out your bill from user numbers means multiplying by pages per visit. A site with 10,000 monthly visitors viewing three pages each generates around 30,000 tracked pageviews, comfortably inside Plus at $99. The same site at 100,000 monthly visitors generates roughly 300,000 pageviews, which needs Pro at $249. Against Lucky Orange, where a comparable session volume costs $199, Crazy Egg is competitive and adds A/B testing that Lucky Orange does not have, while lacking live chat that Lucky Orange does. Against Microsoft Clarity, which is free and unlimited, Crazy Egg's argument is segmentation depth, five report types, long storage, testing, and a vendor relationship. Against Convert or VWO for testing specifically, it is a tenth of the price and a fraction of the statistical rigour.
Hotjar
Per-product subscription (Observe, Ask, and Engage are bought separately) with tiers priced by captured daily sessions and monthly survey responses. Each product has a free plan; paid tiers step up allowance and unlock filtering, longer data retention, and advanced features. Annual billing carries a discount.
- Basic$0
- PlusFrom about $32
- BusinessFrom about $80
Hotjar's free plan is one of the genuinely useful ones in go-to-market software, and for a site under a few thousand visits a day the Plus tier costs less than an hour of the consultant you would otherwise ask. The economics get less comfortable as traffic grows, since the daily session meter is the pricing axis and buying two or three of the three products multiplies the line items. Judged against what it replaces, guessing, or a specialist retainer, it remains one of the highest-return small purchases on this list, provided you accept that experimentation is a separate tool and a separate budget.
Editorial verdict on each
Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is the sensible heatmap purchase for a small marketing team, provided you price it honestly at $99 rather than $29. Five heatmap report types with twenty-plus audience filters give it more analytical range than tools that charge more, unlimited seats and unlimited domains make it unusually cheap for agencies and multi-brand businesses, two year recording storage beats the category norm, and unlimited A/B testing means you can act on what you find without a second subscription. It is twenty years old, founder-owned, and unfunded, which in this particular category counts for something real. The reservations are honest ones: three separate meters make it easy to hit a wall, the recording caps are modest next to Microsoft Clarity's free unlimited offer, the testing lacks any statistical depth, and there is no live chat if that is what you were hoping for. Buy it to understand and improve a marketing site. Do not buy it to debug software or to analyse behaviour inside a signed-in product.
Read the full Crazy Egg profileHotjar
Hotjar made behavioral analytics ordinary, and that remains its strongest recommendation: a script tag, a free plan, and within a day a specific, evidenced answer to why a page is failing. The combination of passive observation and direct questioning in one product is still rare, and the sharing workflow is built for the real job, convincing other people to change something. The pressure on it is obvious, since Microsoft Clarity gives away the observation half without a session cap, and the three-product split means a full deployment costs more than the advertised entry price. Buy it for the qualitative research, keep expectations modest on quantitative depth, and pair it with a testing tool before claiming any fix worked.
Read the full Hotjar profileCrazy Egg profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Hotjar last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.