Hotjar vs. Lucky Orange: an in-depth comparison

Are you ready to graduate from Google Analytics platform? When you're ready for deeper insights than Google alone can provide, you'll want to use heatmaps. Without heatmaps, you're missing out on a huge opportunity to learn about how your customers are actually using your site, and how to better meet their expectations.

But there's more than one way to view heatmaps on your website and many heatmap softwares out there.

Which is the best for your business?

Well, that depends on a bunch of factors, including your feature requirements, budget, and the customer experience you'll want while using the software. It'll also depend on how valuable user engagement data is to you—because choosing the wrong heatmap can mean you miss out on critical information that could improve your business.

In this article, we're going to compare two well-known heatmap tools: Hotjar vs Lucky Orange. We'll compare them and tell you which is better for your website. (Spoiler alert: there's actually a third option we recommend for you.)

What is a heatmap?

A heatmap is a website analytics tool that shows you how visitors interact with your website. Basically, it's the closest thing to reading your customers' minds. It tracks user behavior like mouse movement and clicks, translating it into a colored overlay on your web pages ranging from blue (cold, not engaged) to red (hot, very engaged).

With a heatmap, you'll instantly see, for example, which buttons attract more user clicks, which written product descriptions influence more people to buy, and which opt-ins are getting the most buy-ins.

What is Hotjar?

Hotjar helps businesses understand user behavior and what they need. They offer a full suite of web analytics software (but you have to pay for each one), including:

• Heatmaps that record user sessions and show you where users click
• Feedback collection via surveys
• Support to find beta testing users and a platform to get feedback from them

Their heatmap product helps you:

• Determine if your website changes are capturing attention or getting ignored.
• See where users are clicking (or not clicking).
• Find bugs and issues your website team may have missed.

What is Lucky Orange?

Lucky Orange is another software people use to get heatmaps. They've got several digital marketing tools to help you better understand how users interact with your website. They have solutions including:

• Live heatmaps (and user recordings)
• Live chat software
• User interactions (forms and surveys)

Their heatmap product helps you:

• Study clicks and scrolls in forms, pop-ups, and menus.
• Understand the effectiveness of individual page elements.
• Track visitor behavior and view data based on segment data.

Let's compare: Hotjar vs. Lucky Orange

Now that you've read about their features and promises, how does each stack up in real life? Here's our complete comparison between Hotjar vs Lucky Orange:

Features

When choosing between Hotjar vs. Lucky Orange, you'll first compare their features to see which has what you need. Both create heatmaps, but the types of data they show is different. At a high level, Lucky Orange is prized for its real-time heatmaps (based on live user activity). Hotjar doesn't have live data views, but focuses on focuses on recorded sessions. Both Hotjar and Lucky Orange create Shopify Heatmaps, as well as Wordpress, WooCommerce, and custom Ecommerce websites.

Here's a summary of the features of Hotjar vs Lucky Orange:

The verdict: If viewing live data is important, Lucky Orange may be better. If you don't need live data and want longer-term storage of recorded sessions, Hotjar will perform better for you.

The one valuable feature neither includes is the ability to revenue data straight on your site. Heatmap.com's proprietary algorithm shows you golden CRO metrics like Average Order Value and Conversion rates to see the quality of clicks, not just how many clicks you got. You can also combine elements on your page with custom boxes to see which groupings lead to more sales.

Comparison Price

You'll quickly notice that Hotjar is much more expensive than Lucky Orange. Hotjar plans start at free or $32 (for 100 daily sessions) to $9448+ (for 270,000 daily sessions). Lucky Orange also has a feature-limited free version, then monthly paid plans starting at $14 (for 10,000-pageviews per month) to $128 (for 300,000 per month).

Here's the full breakdown of pricing between Hotjar vs. Lucky Orange:

HotJar (4 tiers)

Hotjar has 4 pricing tiers. Prices below are averaged per month based on annual payment:

Lucky Orange (6 tiers)

Lucky Orange offers free 7-day trials of all plans. Prices below are averaged per month based on annual payment:

The verdict: Lucky Orange is the much cheaper option between itself and Hot Jar. But heatmap.com is much better value, with their free plan including over 10,000,000 page views per month (yes, that's 10 million). The first tier of heatmap.com premium plans include up to 100 million monthly page views.

Comparison: Customer Support

We all need help sometimes. If you need help when using Hotjar or Lucky Orange, you have several ways to access customer support, including:

• Hotjar users get support through the help centre (knowledge base), interactive courses, user guides, and a promise to answer all customer support queries within 2 days.
• Lucky Orange users can access support through the Help Centre (knowledge base) or developer docs on their website.

Integrations

You already know that a more organized business makes a more successful one. Anything you can do to link your software and systems will mean less work for you and your team. Integrating your heatmap data to your other software (CRM, website platform, website analytics), will save you both time and money as everything already “speaks” to each other and you can see combined data more easily for analysis or actioning.

Here's a comparison of the integration capabilities of Hotjar vs. Lucky Orange:

• Hotjar integrations are only available on Business and Scale plans. Available integrations include Google Analytics, Google Optimize, MS Teams, HubSpot, Omniconvert, Optimizely, Segment, Slack, and Zapier.
• Lucky Orange includes all integrations for every plan. Available integrations include BigCommerce, Google Analytics, Google Optimize, HubSpot, Square, Shopify, WordPress, Zapier, and Adobe DTM.

The verdict: We can't really make this decision for you. You need to decide which is better based on the other digital tools you're using and which you want to integrate with your heatmaps.

Do heatmaps slow my website loading time?

Most heatmaps don't protect your website's load time, which means they slow down your site significantly. Not only is this frustrating to visitors, but displeasing to Google (which you don't want to do because it could drop your website from getting higher Google rankings).

Does Hotjar slow down my site?

Many users say their website pages load slower after they install Hotjar. However, the company claims any delay in page loading is “minimal.” Some users say 1 second or more is added to their page load time with Hotjar installed. While 1 second doesn't seem like a big deal, this delay is enough to cause issues for search engines like Google (who prioritize pages that load faster).

Does Lucky Orange slow down my site?

Lucky Orange claims that your webpages will fully load before the Lucky Orange code loads. In theory, this means their code won't slow down your site. In practice, however, some users on review sites report it still slows down their websites (or that the dashboard is slow to respond), which will affect their Google ranking and user experience.

How do these heatmaps compare to Google Analytics?

Google Analytics also provides some cool and useful data on website usage. How does it compare with Hotjar and Lucky Orange?

Is Hotjar better than Google Analytics?

It depends on what you need. Google Analytics provides excellent data-based stats you could spend hours analyzing to look for trends and analyze what they mean. But Hotjar heatmaps provide more at-a-glance details about what's working and what's not in the website user experience.

Read more about Hotjar vs Google Analytics.

Is Lucky Orange better than Google Analytics?

It also depends on what you need. While both provide a powerful analytics dashboard, Lucky Orange displays your analytics in a more visual heatmap view. Neither is necessarily better than the other, but the key difference is that Lucky Orange is better when you want to quickly view page data and exactly where users click on your pages.

In actuality, neither Hotjar, Lucky Orange, or Google Analytics is the “better” option. Instead, heatmap.com provides more helpful, detailed info. Heatmap.com's tracking script is so small it's actually guaranteed not to affect page load times. And you'll get way more helpful information on how clicks convert or don't, into sales and conversions — something you can't get with as much detail when using just Google Analytics, Hotjar, or Lucky Orange)

What is the alternative for Hotjar on mobile?

A better option is heatmap.com. It includes site speed protection, which protects content load time. This means it doesn't affect your website's performance and loading speed enough to notice, even in mobile, unlike other heatmaps out there. Heatmap.com also collects info on sales and conversions so you can instantly see if that new button CTA text is turning more casual website visitors into paying customers.

What's the best heatmap for your business?

When looking at all the variables (features, price, support, and integrations) between Hotjar vs Lucky Orange, one winner clearly rises above the rest: heatmap.com.

Heatmap.com delivers a much better overall experience and level of detail that you need to grow your business. With heatmap.com, you can:

• Apply industry's only Custom Box view, allowing you to group page elements for combined analysis
• View revenue data in your heatmap (you can't do this with Hotjar or Lucky Orange)
• View more detailed filtering (Hotjar and Lucky Orange have basic filtering capabilities)
• Get more monthly page views than either Hotjar or Lucky Orange's most expensive packages

So, if your business is dedicated to using heatmap data to better the overall user experience, then heatmap.com is your heatmap software of choice.

Now you can stop comparing the features and inclusions of heatmap software. Start a free 7-day trial of heatmap.com and see how valuable their heatmap data can be for your business.