Hotjar vs Maze
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 assessmentMaze compared with Hotjar
Complementary. Hotjar watches real traffic on a live site and asks it questions; Maze recruits participants and gives them tasks, including on things that do not exist yet. A product team usually wants both eventually, with Hotjar answering what is happening now and Maze answering whether the proposed replacement is any better.
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.
Choose Maze if
Product designers and product managers at software companies who want to validate prototypes and concepts continuously, with quantitative reports polished enough to circulate to stakeholders without editing.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Hotjar | Maze |
|---|---|---|
| Category | CRO | CRO |
| Starting price | Free (35 daily sessions on Observe Basic); paid Observe plans from roughly $32 per month billed annually (free plan available) | Free tier for limited studies; paid plans commonly from around $99 per month (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | 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. | Seat and volume-based subscription with a free tier for occasional use. Paid plans scale by studies, responses, and seats; panel participants are charged separately per person. Annual billing is discounted and enterprise agreements are quoted. |
| Free plan | Basic tiers on Observe (about 35 daily sessions), Ask (about 20 survey responses per month), and Engage (limited interviews) | A small number of studies and responses per month with core methods |
| Free trial | Free plan on each product, plus a paid-plan trial | Free plan plus trial access to paid features |
| Best for | 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. | Product designers and product managers at software companies who want to validate prototypes and concepts continuously, with quantitative reports polished enough to circulate to stakeholders without editing. |
| Setup time | 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. | A first prototype study can be built and launched within an hour, particularly from a template. Live website testing and in-product recruitment require a script and slightly more setup. |
| Learning curve | 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. | Low for launching studies, moderate for designing them well. The common failure is writing leading tasks, which produces confident but useless data, and templates only partly protect against it. |
| Platforms | Web (JavaScript snippet), Google Tag Manager, Shopify, WordPress, Webflow, Wix, Squarespace, Magento, Mobile web | Web application, Figma and prototyping tool integrations, In-product recruitment widget, Mobile web testing |
| Compliance | GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001 | GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 Type II |
| Founded | 2014 | 2018 |
| Headquarters | St Julian's, Malta | Remote (incorporated in the United States, European roots) |
| Ownership | Acquired by Contentsquare (2021) | Private, venture-backed |
Strengths and limitations
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.
Maze
Strengths
- Direct Figma integration makes testing a design as easy as sharing it.
- Automatic quantitative metrics give unmoderated studies stakeholder credibility.
- Reports are genuinely presentable, which matters more than researchers like to admit.
- Broad method coverage including IA testing, surveys, and moderated interviews.
Limitations
- Unmoderated testing cannot ask the follow-up question when a participant does something unexpected.
- Pricing is aimed at funded product teams, with panel costs on top of the subscription.
- No A/B testing or conversion experimentation on live traffic.
- Behavior analytics on an existing site is shallow compared with dedicated replay tools.
Pricing compared
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.
Maze
Seat and volume-based subscription with a free tier for occasional use. Paid plans scale by studies, responses, and seats; panel participants are charged separately per person. Annual billing is discounted and enterprise agreements are quoted.
- Free$0
- ProfessionalFrom about $99
- OrganizationQuoted
Maze converts research from a scheduled project into something a designer does on a Tuesday, and the time saved before a bad build is the return that matters. For a funded product team, one avoided sprint pays for a year of the subscription. For a small team or solo operator, the entry price plus panel costs is steep next to cheaper suites that cover the same methods with less polish, and the honest comparison is against those rather than against not doing research at all.
Editorial verdict on each
Hotjar
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 profileMaze
Maze's contribution is speed: it made research fast enough to influence decisions that were already in motion, which is the difference between a research function that shapes a product and one that documents it afterwards. The Figma integration, automatic metrics, and shareable reports together mean a designer can settle an argument with data in two days rather than deferring it. The limits are structural rather than fixable: unmoderated studies cannot probe, prototypes are not products, and panel costs stack on top of a subscription already priced for funded teams. For product organizations that will actually run studies weekly it is excellent value, and for everyone else a cheaper suite covers the same methods with less polish.
Read the full Maze profileHotjar profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Maze last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.