Lucky Orange and Hotjar are two of the most popular user experience (UX) research tools on the market today. Both products provide users with a wealth of information, including heat maps, click maps, scroll maps, and visitor recordings. 

While both products offer similar features, some notable differences between Lucky Orange vs. Hotjar could impact your decision when choosing web analytics tools for your site. 

In this article, we will compare these two user behavior analytics services in terms of their key features, pricing, interface, ease of use, and customer support to help you decide which is best for your needs.

Lucky Orange vs. Hotjar Overview 

Lucky Orange is a customer experience and web analytics software that helps you measure and optimize your website and mobile apps. It has multiple features that allow you to analyze your website’s traffic, including heat maps, click maps, scroll maps, and session recordings.

It also has more advanced features like conversion funnels, form analytics, on-site surveys, and more. 

You can see how many visitors visit your website, which page they visit, how much time they spend on a particular page, and user interactions with page elements.

Here’s a quick overview of its key features: 

  • Session Recordings – Lucky Orange’s session recordings allow you to see how visitors navigate your website and interact with the elements on the page. You can also determine if certain elements are not working correctly, allowing you to fix the issue before it becomes a barrier for users.
  • Dynamic heatmaps – These will help you see which elements – buttons, forms, menus, popups, and hyperlinks – are getting clicked. You can evaluate a particular element’s usefulness and position it better if necessary.
  • Live Chat Tool – The live chat tool lets you offer real-time customer support on your website in response to visitors’ actions on your web page.
  • Conversion Funnels – Conversion funnels clearly show which pages are getting you conversions and which pages cause your visitors to drop off.
  • Form Analytics – Form analytics provides insight into which form fields are the most popular and which can be removed.
  • Visitor Profiles – Lucky Orange’s visitor profiles feature allows you to track a specific visitor’s activities on your website in one convenient location.
  • Surveys – It allows you to create on-site surveys and polls on your website and ask visitors questions about your site’s features.
  • On-site Announcements – Use Lucky Orange’s announcement tool to make on-site announcements to everyone visiting your site.
  • Visual Dashboards – You can build multiple dashboards to get a visual overview of your campaign activities, analytics, and more.

Like Lucky Orange, Hotjar is a user behavior analytics service that helps you understand how people use your website. It provides insights into your visitors’ behavior and interactions, which you can use to optimize your website performance.

Hotjar tells you why your website visitors are not interacting with your page or not converting into customers. It gives you in-depth insights into where your visitors click, their scroll depth, which part or element of the page they ignore, and more. 

Like Lucky Orange, Hotjar also offers heatmaps and session recordings that can help track user behavior.

Some key features of Hotjar include 

  • heatmaps – With Hotjar heatmaps, you can view where your website visitors click and how far they scroll on your web page.
  • Visitor Recordings – Watch recordings of actual user sessions to see how people use your site and how they move across it and interact with your elements. 
  • Customer FeedbackAsk visitors questions about your brand or products directly on your site. You can get direct feedback from the visitors if they are experiencing smooth flow on your page or are frustrated because something is broken or not working as expected.
  • On-site Surveys – You can also evaluate your ideas by sending out surveys to visitors when they are moving across your website. Hotjar also offers multiple survey templates, eliminating the need to build surveys from scratch.

Lucky Orange vs. Hotjar Detailed Comparison. 

Lucky Orange and Hotjar are popular heatmap tools that allow you to see where people click on your site, what they’re interested in, and how they move around the page.

They both have free versions that are easy to use and provide great functionality. As a result, it can be challenging to decide which tool is better for your business.

We’ll review some key differences between Lucky Orange and Hotjar in detail to help you decide which one is right for you!

1. Heatmaps  

Heatmaps are a great way to visualize data and understand user behavior. Both Hotjar and Lucky Orange have heatmaps that let you track how your visitors interact with your website.

Let’s compare them to see how they stack against each other:

Lucky Orange Dynamic Heatmaps lets you see how users interact with your website when they encounter a popup, carousel, or any other element that overlays the page.

Lucky Orange comes with three major types of heatmaps: clicks/taps, moves, and scrolls. The first two are self-explanatory – they show where users click on the screen and how often they do it. The third one – scrolls – is similar to clicks/taps but instead shows you where users scroll down on your page.

Image: Lucky Orange Heatmaps

Hotjar heatmaps also help you analyze user behavior on your website. These visualizations give you a clear overview of what’s happening on your website and how visitors interact with it.

Just like Lucky Orange, Hotjar has three main types of heatmaps:

Image: Hotjar Heatmap

Move maps show how far users scroll down the page, where they move their cursor, and how far they click on links. Move heatmaps are helpful in determining whether your site’s content is positioned in the right place and whether visitors are getting distracted by irrelevant elements.

Click maps show where users click on links or buttons on your website – even if they are invisible to you! This type of data can help you optimize the design of your site so that it’s easier for users to navigate around it.

Scroll maps show which parts of your page have been viewed by most visitors and which have not yet been viewed. Scroll maps are particularly useful for ensuring important information is visible above the fold (i.e., before people need to scroll down).

Other key features include: 

  • Unlimited heatmaps and users. 
  • You can set the date range to compare user behavior over time.
  • You can combine multiple pages in one heatmap.

You can also filter out specific actions and investigate their frequency across different screens or devices. This helps you compare different behaviors across different screens and devices.

Quick Breakdown: 

Lucky Orange Hotjar
Lucky Orange offers dynamic heatmaps which show real-time data, data for dropdowns and popups, etc. Hotjar doesn’t capture heatmaps for dynamic content such as popups, drawdown menus, or lazy-loading content.
Lucky Orange captures clicks/taps, moves, and scrolls. Hotjar also captures three types of heatmaps, including clicks/taps, moves, and scrolls.
Lucky Orange offers segment filters, including date, source, medium, browser, operating system, events, custom user data, and more. Hotjar has 2 types of filters: Heatmap session filters and Heatmap URL filters.
Lucky Orange offers a maximum of 60 days of storage for heatmaps. (Depends on the plan) Hotjar stores heatmaps for 365 days.

2. Session Recordings

Session recordings give you insight into what users do while on your site. They can help you understand what needs improvement and what needs to be changed for people to continue using your product or service.

Image: Hotjar Recording

This allows you to see where users click on elements like buttons, links, menus, etc., and how far down they scroll in certain areas.

While Lucky Orange and Hotjar have similar session recording features, Lucky Orange has one advantage over Hotjar. 

Lucky Orange lets you go to a visitor’s profile to check their other recordings to get in-depth insights into what happened during their visit. For example, if someone visited your homepage but didn’t convert, you could click on their profile and go through all of his other recordings – maybe they read an article or two before leaving. 

Image: Lucky Orange Session Recording

Quick Breakdown: 

Lucky Orange Hotjar
You can fully replay the visitor’s journey on your website. You can analyze their clicks, form interactions, and key movements. You can get visitor behavior insights from their clicks, scrolls, rage clicks, and u-turns.
Using the timeline view feature, you can directly go to key events, such as conversion or chat. Hotjar offers similar functionality, where you can jump to a specific event and watch actions.
You can watch live customer journeys. Hotjar also offers a live view of customer journeys.
You can go directly to a certain visitor’s profile to check their other recordings and get in-depth insights. Hotjar displays a user id in recording data. However, unlike Lucky Orange, you can not check visitors’ profiles from session recordings.
You can segment visitor data by filters such as visited page, exit page, landing page, visit number, source, browser, device, online status, and more. Hotjar also allows you to segment data by filter attributes such as date, landing page, visited page, referral URL, country, duration, page count, browser, and more.

However, Hotjar’s Observe Basic plan includes only a date filter, while additional filters are available in paid plans.

3. On-site Surveys

If you’re looking to get feedback from users as they use your website, Lucky Orange and Hotjar both offer on-site survey options. Both offer easy, no-code solutions that don’t require any programming knowledge.

Lucky Orange lets you preview your surveys before launching to verify placements, triggers, and design. 

And both Lucky Orange and Hotjar allow you to choose who to survey based on different segments and filters. A few examples of segments could be new vs. returning users, paying customers, users with a particular lifetime value, specific industries, etc.

Quick Breakdown: 

Lucky Orange Hotjar
Lucky Orange offers four types of surveys: multiple-choice, rating, like/dislike, and open-ended. Hotjat offers long text, short text, yes/no, radio buttons, checkboxes, rating scales, and survey statement options.
All Lucky Orange plans store surveys for 365 days. You can store unlimited surveys for as long as possible, with no limits.
Lucky Orange does not offer survey templates. Hotjar offers customizable survey templates.

Image: Hotjar Survey Templates 

4. Dashboards 

Lucky Orange is a powerful analytics tool that tracks your website visitors and analyzes their behavior. It lets you create unlimited dashboards and see a filtered view of your visitors and heatmaps. You can even create different charts based on your comprehensive ability and data. 

Image: Lucky Orange Dashboard

Although Hotjar is excellent at providing you with a detailed view of your user data, there’s not a lot of flexibility regarding the Dashboard. One drawback is that it doesn’t let you customize your dashboards or build more than one at a time.

Image: Hotjar Dashboard

Quick Breakdown: 

Lucky Orange Hotjar
Lucky Orange allows you to create separate dashboards for particular teams or campaigns. Hotjar does not allow multiple dashboards.
You can pick the data card you want to see on your Dashboard. Hotjar’s Dashboard has a fixed structure.
Lucky Orange’s dashboards give you insights into funnel behavior, event completions, chat ratings, traffic sources, survey results, top pages, live visitor snapshots, and more. Hotjar’s Dashboard gives you insights into top pages, u-turns, rage clicks, behavioral data from heatmaps, recordings, feedback, and more.

5. Visitor Profiles 

Lucky Orange offers a visitor profile feature that lets you search for specific visitors by name, saved segment, date range, and more. You can narrow your research by filtering further based on conversion, pages visited, or geographic location. 

Image: Lucky Orange Visitor Profiles

You can also delete, share, and block profiles of visitors that may be causing issues. 

Quick Breakdown: 

Lucky Orange Hotjar
Lucky Orange offers a visitor profile feature to enable you to track a specific visitor’s interaction with your website. You can also search visitors by their names, date ranges, and other segments and check their chat logs and conversion history. Hotjar does not offer this feature.

Lucky Orange vs. Hotjar Pricing Plans

Lucky Orange and Hotjar offer a free software version, including all the basic features. The paid versions are more expensive, but they’re also more comprehensive and feature-rich, so it depends on your needs as to whether or not they’re worth the money.

Here’s a quick breakdown of their pricing plans: 

Lucky Orange Hotjar
Free: 500 pageviews/month, unlimited team members, 30-day storage for recordings and heatmaps, 365 days storage for chat logs, surveys, and events. Free: Max 1050 sessions/month, unlimited heatmaps, and automatic data capture.
Build ($18/month): 10,000 pageviews/month, unlimited team members, 30-day storage for recordings and heatmaps, 365 days storage for chat logs, surveys, and events. Plus ($39/month): 100 daily sessions, Max 3,000 sessions/month, data segmentation and filters, and events API.
Grow ($35/month): 40,000 pageviews/month, unlimited team members, 60-day storage for recordings and heatmaps, 365 days storage for chat logs, surveys, and events. Business ($99/month): Starts from 500 sessions/day. Custom integrations. Identify API, frustration and confusion signals, and Hotjar branding removal.
Expand ($70/month): 100,000 pageviews/month + everything else in the previous plans   
Scale ($150/month): 300,000 pageviews/month + everything else in the previous plans   
Enterprise (Custom plan) Scale (Custom plan) with unlimited daily sessions 

Lucky Orange is one of the best tools for beginners regarding screen recording, heatmap creation, and conversion funnels. Hotjar, on the other hand, is a bit pricier than Lucky Orange. This might be an issue for some businesses that are just starting out.

Lucky Orange and Hotjar provide free trials so you can test their services before deciding which tool suits your needs best. 

User Interface

Lucky Orange Hotjar
Simple, easy-to-understand user interface.  Hotjar’s user interface is also easy to use and straightforward.

Customer Support

Lucky Orange Hotjar
In terms of learning resources, Lucky Orange only provides blogs and a help center (knowledge base). Hotjar offers tons of material to support its customers, including guides, blogs, courses, product insights, and more.
Lucky Orange has an online support desk available M-F: 9:00 am – 5:00 pm (Central Time). You can also get help on call at 1.913.735.9032. You can always raise a ticket for the issue, which takes 1 to 2 business days to resolve.

Lucky Orange Unique Features 

Live Chat

Based on how website visitors engage with your page, you may provide real-time support to them with Lucky Orange’s live chat service.

You can save responses that are most likely to be used repetitively and use them from the dropdown list while using the chat box.

Other key live chat features include: 

  • The ability to send a chat satisfaction survey to determine whether or not the user got his answer via chat.
  • Once the chat is over and archived, you can send the entire conversation directly to an email address.
  • You can also set an ‘away’ notification when you are not available to chat.
  • You can customize the chat window to match your website’s branding.

Conversion Funnels

Lucky Orange’s conversion funnels help you determine which pages and elements lead to conversions and which drive people away.

You can also deep dive into key metrics, such as: 

  • How many users land on your website and leave before converting
  • Which page holds the most exit rate
  • When the most conversions happened, and more.

Hotjar Unique Features 

Feedback

Hotjar allows you to take visual and quick feedback from users while they are actually interacting with your website. This removes the guesswork, helping you ascertain what users liked and disliked on your page and get clear feedback for improvement. 

Hotjar Feedback, Source: Hotjar

You can customize feedback in terms of appearance, targeting, question steps, and forwarding feedback responses.

When it comes to appearance, you can customize widget label texts with Hotjar’s paid plans. You can also choose where your feedback popup will appear – in the middle left, middle right, bottom left, and bottom right.

For question steps, you can set it to click a screenshot of each response automatically. You can also add/edit custom text at the footer. One step ahead of the game, you can also ask for an email address from those users who submit feedback.

The best part? It lets you choose which device to display your feedback widget on or which URLs should display this widget.

Lucky Orange vs. Hotjar: Pros & Cons

Lucky Orange Pros:

  • It offers live chat with visitors as they move through your website.
  • Easy to set up.
  • It offers dynamic heatmaps, which means you can also capture heatmaps for dropdown menus and popups.
  • It offers visitor profiles, enabling you to get all insights related to a specific user in one place.
  • You can create individual dashboards for specific goals, campaigns, or websites.
  • All plans include a free 7-day trial.

Lucky Orange Cons: 

  • Although there are multiple types of surveys that Lucky Orange lets you build, it does not offer survey templates.
  • You can store heatmaps and recordings for up to 60 days based on your chosen plan.
  • Apart from the Enterprise plan, all other plans only allow one website integration.

Hotjar Pros: 

  • All Hotjar plans let you store unlimited heatmap data.
  • Easy to install.
  • It offers customizable survey templates, helping you save time.
  • All Hotjar plan allows heatmap storage for 365 days.
  • It offers unlimited surveys with unlimited storage.

Hotjar Cons:

  • Filter options are limited with its basic plan.
  • Hotjar cannot capture behavioral data from the pages that use scroll-lock.
  • It does not offer dynamic heatmaps.
  • Hotjar does not support Flash content in heatmaps.

Over to You!

Lucky Orange and Hotjar both offer useful behavioral data and handy features to help track your leads. In addition, they also have web analytics features that can give you a comprehensive insight into your website performance.

However, Lucky Orange leads in several areas, such as visitor profiles, multiple dashboards, and live chat, to name a few.

You can really boil this down to “Lucky Orange is better because it has more features at lower prices.” That’s fine, but you have to consider that Hotjar has been around longer and many online reviews suggest that it has a slightly better user interface.  

In the end, the decision is based on your budget and requirements! 

It’s also worth noting that neither Hotjar nor Lucky Orange offers an end-to-end AB testing tool. So, if you need an all-in-one with heatmaps, session recordings data, and A/B testing to see how things work with different versions of the same element or page, then neither of them would suffice. 

In that case, it’s best to turn to other user testing and conversion optimization tools on the market. 

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