TWIPLA: The Best Hotjar Alternative for Complete Analytics and UX Insights

Hotjar is a popular behavior analytics tool. It helps businesses visualize how visitors interact with their website(s). However, it lacks integrated traffic analytics. It also relies on cookie-based tracking and splits key features across multiple paid products — making it expensive and limiting for businesses. As a result, many users are looking for a Hotjar alternative.

TWIPLA improves on Hotjar by offering all core features in one unified, privacy-first analytics platform. You get session recordings, heatmaps, event tracking, funnel tracking software, traffic stats, visitor feedback tools, and more. Everything's interconnected and available from the start. It all comes in one pricing plan. Taken together, TWIPLA's simpler to use, more affordable, and gives you deeper, more actionable insights.

Hotjar is a behavior analytics platform. It helps businesses understand how visitors interact with their website using session recordings, heatmaps, and feedback widgets.

It’s ideal for website owners, UX designers, and marketers looking to increase conversion rates. However, it may not suit smaller companies wanting a simple website analytics tool. There's also more cost-effective Hotjar alternatives available.

Launched in 2014, Hotjar is one of the most popular website analytics platforms on the market. Today, it’s installed on over 1.3 million websites. It also holds a strong user rating across all leading review sites.

Customer experience analytics provider Contentsquare has merged with Hotjar. This could fuse the two platforms into a single web analytics tool with features to rival TWIPLA. Watch this space; we wish Hotjar luck, but the process could cause problems for users in the short term.

If you’re looking for traffic analytics or website performance statistics for marketers, Hotjar isn’t for you and we've written elsewhere about the best Hotjar alternative web statistics platforms.

It’s a behavior analytics platform that visualizes how visitors interact with a website. However, developers have also added feedback tools to support customer dialogue.

Hotjar’s split into three products: Observe, Ask, and Engage.

• Observe: Session recordings, heatmaps, and event tracking
• Ask: On-site surveys and feedback tools
• Engage: User interview tools unrelated to behavior analytics or on-site feedback collection

Each product is offered with its own pricing structure — great for businesses that want flexibility. They can pick and choose exactly what they pay for. But prices add up quickly if you want to replicate the all-in-one insights available from a platform like TWIPLA.

Additional features like Highlights and Trends help users to identify patterns of behavior.

• Highlights: Capture and organize recording snippets and heatmaps into Collections
• Trends: Visualize and analyze custom metrics over time, and link them back to other tools to understand the “why” behind website conversion tracking or app performance

These are useful, but it feels like Highlights and Trends only paper over the cracks between tools that aren’t deeply integrated enough to do what businesses need.

For instance, Highlights allows users to manually pull different tools together to create data synergies. But it’s a time-consuming way to get insights that are automatically available using a fully integrated Hotjar alternative like TWIPLA.

The siloed nature of Hotjar reveals itself in other ways.

• Session recordings aren’t linked to funnel dropouts or traffic sources, making customer journey tracking difficult
• Heatmaps don’t clearly show campaign or country context unless you enable higher-tier filters and integrations
• Trends offers only high-level charts, making session context hard to access for real funnel tracking or analytics

TWIPLA includes all of Hotjar’s core tools but builds them into a single, fully integrated web analytics platform.

As a complete website intelligence solution, it offers more than 20 core visitor behavior, feedback, and analytics features that are all available from a single pricing plan.

And unlike Hotjar, these features are deeply integrated and designed to work together. This enables it to unearth deeper insights unavailable from limited behavioral analytics tools, or when using multiple platforms simultaneously.

This acts as a power up that makes it a great Hotjar alternative, with the following additional functionalities:

• Pre-filtered behavior reports can be added to custom dashboards alongside real-time visitor analytics, allowing users to collect everything they need to monitor a task or goal in one place
• Session recordings contain time-stamped instances of alarming behavior events
• Conversion funnels let teams build around auto-tracked events and alarming behavior signals without additional setup

TWIPLA’s on-site polls benefit from being fully integrated within the wider suite.

While Hotjar shows basic response details like device and country, TWIPLA goes further by displaying full traffic attribution software and website behavior analytics context (including traffic source, location, and behavior), right in the interface. This added context helps teams understand who responded and what they did before and after.

Hotjar remains a solid choice for behavior analytics.

But it doesn’t offer web analytics platform capabilities like web statistics, campaign reporting, or website conversion tracking. Real-time visitor analytics and many other essential privacy-focused analytics tools are also missing. This leaves major blind spots around traffic attribution, goal tracking, and broader performance analysis.

To bridge these gaps, Hotjar offers a wide range of integrations across analytics tools, marketing platforms, and collaboration solutions.

Integration options include:

• Popular platforms like Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, HubSpot, and Zapier
• Project management tools like Jira, Trello, and Asana
• Communication platforms like Slack and Microsoft Teams
• Additional services like AB Tasty, Contentsquare, Optimizely, and Kissmetrics

Together, these integrations help streamline workflows and patch missing context. But turning Hotjar into a full website intelligence solution to match TWIPLA still means managing multiple subscriptions and tools. As a result, this system feels like a poor workaround that also brings with it compatibility issues — unnecessary given the number of more complete Hotjar alternatives on the market.

TWIPLA comes fully assembled, with no need to piece tools together.

There’s no extra setup, no tool stitching, and no learning curve across different interfaces. The platform unifies everything in one place. Teams can track journeys, spot issues, and collect feedback without switching tools or managing disconnected data.

Hotjar calls itself a privacy-by-design platform that delivers analytics in a “privacy-compliant manner".

Users get supporting tools like a Data Processing Agreement, EU-only data storage, and features that anonymize sensitive data. It also offers guidance on integrating with consent management platforms to ensure proper consent before tracking.

But this compliance isn’t automatic, and Hotjar uses tracking cookies to collect visitor data.

This means users must configure tracking to run only after visitors give explicit consent. The platform does not block itself by default and if used without a cookie banner or delay script, it can easily lead to unintentional violations of GDPR, CCPA, and other data privacy regulations.

This setup puts the legal burden on businesses and ties traffic capture to consent, causing major data loss. In practice, it creates knowledge gaps that limit insight, especially for companies needing GDPR-compliant analytics or working in privacy-focused environments.

TWIPLA is fully privacy-compliant by design, with no cookie banners or visitor consent required.

In its default Maximum Privacy Mode, there’s no fingerprinting, IP tracking, or page history tracking. This allows businesses to use analytics legally under all global data privacy regulations without needing to configure anything for compliance.

TWIPLA also uses advanced cookieless tracking. This means you can collect meaningful website analytics data without intrusive identifiers or reliance on cookies. It also removes the need for consent banners, eliminates friction in the visitor journey, and boosts your traffic visibility by up to 500% compared to cookie-based analytics tools.

For businesses that want more detailed visitor data, TWIPLA has three additional privacy modes, each requiring consent. Through the built-in Privacy Center, you can automatically assign different modes by visitor country, ensuring regional compliance. And thanks to dual tracking codes, you’ll still capture basic session data from visitors who decline consent, without violating privacy laws.

TWIPLA processes and stores all data in ISO 27001-certified data centers in Germany, with no third-party processors. And unlike Hotjar, TWIPLA gives you full data ownership and control, including the ability to export, manage, or delete it at any time.

The result is a privacy-compliant Hotjar alternative offering complete visitor visibility, with no compliance risks.

TWIPLA offers a far more straightforward and cost-effective pricing model than Hotjar.

While Hotjar splits its core features across three separate products (each with its own pricing), TWIPLA includes session recordings, heatmaps, surveys, funnels, and more in every plan. Even TWIPLA’s free website analytics tier includes access to all behavior analytics and communication tools, whereas Hotjar's free plans are split and highly limited. To match TWIPLA's feature set, a Hotjar user would need to pay for at least two, if not all three, modules — pushing the monthly analytics software cost well into the hundreds.

In contrast, TWIPLA scales simply by traffic volume, not by completely locking analytics features behind multiple paywalls. This unified, usage-based pricing makes TWIPLA not only a more affordable Hotjar alternative, but also easier to plan and manage as your site grows. 

At the 50,000 visits per month level, Hotjar costs $178 per month to access both behavior analytics and feedback tools, while TWIPLA provides all of this in a single plan for $39.99, making Hotjar over four times more expensive for the same core functionality. 

Hotjar divides its tools into three separate product pillars (Observe, Ask, and Engage), with each product offering its own Basic, Plus, Business, and Scale pricing tiers.

Observe (behavior analytics, session recordings, heatmaps)

• Basic (Free): Up to 35 daily sessions, unlimited heatmaps, dashboards, Highlights
• Plus: ~ $32 per month if billed annually, or $39 per month
• Business: ~ $80 per month when billed annually, or $99 per month
• Scale: ~ $171 per month with annual billing, or $213 per month

Ask (on-site surveys and feedback widgets)

• Basic (Free): Includes a limited number of surveys or feedback widgets (e.g. three)
• Plus: ~ $48 per month with annual billing, or $59 per month
• Business: ~ $64 per month with annual billing, or $79 per month
• Scale: ~ $128 per month with annual billing, or $159 per month

Engage (user interviews and tests)

• Basic (Free): Includes a few interviews per month (e.g. up to 3–6 depending on source)
• Plus: ~ €280 per month (~$300–$350)
• Business: ~ €440 per month (~$440–$550)
• Scale: Custom enterprise pricing

To unlock full functionality across behavior analysis, surveys, and interviews, businesses must subscribe to multiple separate plans. This results in significant costs and complexity compared to Hotjar alternative platforms at current pricing levels.

Data retention and access to historical insights depend on your Hotjar plan.

Hotjar stores session data like heatmaps and recordings for 30 days on Basic, 6 months on Plus, and 12 months on both Business and Scale. But it keeps survey responses indefinitely unless users delete them manually.

TWIPLA offers an integrated analytics suite priced by usage, with all features included in each plan.

All TWIPLA plans include the full feature set (session recordings, heatmaps, polls, surveys, funnels, alarming behavior tracking, traffic analytics, and more) without the need to purchase add-ons or separate modules. 

Even the free plan includes access to every feature, with usage limits clearly defined. This makes TWIPLA one of the most generous free-forever analytics solutions available and a superior Hotjar alternative. 

Data retention is 40 days on the free plan. For all paid plans, TWIPLA stores data indefinitely and provides historical analytics from the moment your tracking code is installed.

Hotjar helped popularize behavior analytics, but as business needs evolve on a fast-changing digital landscape, its limitations become more apparent.

Hotjar’s tracking script is heavy, weighing in at around 76.8 KB gzipped. For businesses focused on website performance, this added page weight can slow down load times, especially on dynamic frameworks like React or Next.js. Unlike lightweight analytics tools, Hotjar’s footprint can noticeably affect visitor experience, which makes it a growing concern for teams optimizing for speed.

Hotjar also struggles with data accuracy on modern websites. Dynamic IDs, delayed-loading elements, scroll-locked content, and staging environments can all distort results or block analytics data collection entirely.

And because it uses tracking cookies, the platform automatically excludes any session if a visitor denies consent. This massively reduces traffic data capture and insight accuracy at a time when most website analytics tools have already moved away from cookie-based tracking. The setup also creates compliance responsibilities for users, who must ensure proper consent mechanisms are in place to avoid violations.

Meanwhile, important features like funnel tracking are limited by sampling and manual configuration. Conversion paths can be hard to define on complex websites, and Hotjar’s tools often operate in isolation. This makes it difficult to understand where visitors came from, why they dropped off, or what influenced their behavior.

For teams working across multiple markets or languages, Hotjar restricts surveys to one language per deployment. This limits the platform’s flexibility for multilingual websites or global campaigns.

While tool integrations can help patch some of these gaps, combining multiple platforms introduces setup complexity, interface inconsistency, and added cost. For businesses that need full visitor visibility without the technical overhead, the platform starts to feel more like a bottleneck than a solution — and particularly when there are other stronger Hotjar alternatives available.

Both share surface similarities, but under the hood, they’re very different platforms. Hotjar positions itself as a behavior analytics tool focused on visitor interaction. It offers helpful visual tools like recordings and heatmaps plus various feedback tools.

TWIPLA, by contrast, is a complete website intelligence solution. It includes all of Hotjar's core tools, but adds traffic structure statistics, campaign attribution, funnel analytics, alarming behavior detection, and more. TWIPLA builds everything into a single platform from the start.
There is no need for third-party integrations or separate product modules.

The table below breaks down how each platform handles core analytics features and shows where TWIPLA fills the gaps.

While TWIPLA is one of the most complete Hotjar alternatives, it’s not the only option. Depending on your needs, here are some Hotjar alternatives that address the gaps overlooked by the behavior analytics suite:

TWIPLA includes all the analytics tools found in Hotjar but integrates them into a single, privacy-compliant platform. You also get traffic segmentation, conversion funnels with dropout session replays, alarming behavior detection, and UTM source tracking. Unlike Hotjar, TWIPLA doesn’t require cookie banners or visitor consent, meaning you get 100 percent traffic visibility from the start. One scalable plan includes everything, with no need to purchase separate modules.

Microsoft Clarity is a free behavior analytics tool that includes session recordings, heatmaps, and automated insights like rage click detection. It’s easy to install and typically runs without consent banners, making it appealing for quick, lightweight analysis. But without features like funnels, surveys, or traffic attribution, it can’t provide the insight context needed to understand why visitors behave the way they do.

FullStory is a premium platform that focuses on digital experience intelligence, offering advanced session replays, heatmaps, and conversion analytics. Unlike Hotjar, FullStory captures structured event data across sessions, making it easier to spot recurring UX problems at scale. It’s a powerful tool for product teams, but it comes with a steep learning curve and enterprise-level pricing.

Crazy Egg focuses on visual behavior insights like scrollmaps, clickmaps, and built-in A/B testing. It’s a strong option for teams that want to experiment with layout and UX changes directly. However, it lacks built-in visitor feedback tools and form analytics, so it’s often used alongside other platforms to complete the picture.

TWIPLA is the best Hotjar alternative because it solves the limitations found in each of these platforms.

• Beyond Clarity’s free offering, TWIPLA adds surveys, polls, conversion funnels, and full traffic analysis
• TWIPLA matches FullStory’s behavioral depth while staying easier to use and far more affordable
• Crazy Egg’s dependency on third-party tools disappears, since TWIPLA includes feedback tools and complete session context

If you're looking for a scalable, privacy-compliant Hotjar alternative that replaces your entire analytics stack, TWIPLA is perfect for you.

Hotjar gives you snapshots. TWIPLA provides you the full picture.

With integrated behavior analytics, traffic stats, conversion tracking, and visitor feedback modules, you can stop switching between tools and start answering real questions faster.

Whether you’re looking to replace Hotjar or build your analytics stack from scratch, TWIPLA makes it easier to grow, optimize, and stay compliant from day one.

Sign up for free to see how it works, or book a demo and let us walk you through what smarter website intelligence looks like.

Many businesses are moving away from Hotjar due to rising costs, limited integrations, and its reliance on cookies. These issues reduce traffic visibility and complicate compliance. They also make it difficult to gain complete insights into behavior, conversions, and campaign performance.

No. Hotjar can be used in a GDPR-compliant way, but it requires manual setup. Since it uses cookies by default, website owners must ensure visitors give proper consent before tracking begins.

Yes, Hotjar does offer funnel tracking, But it's limited by sampling, manual setup, and a lack of context around traffic sources or visitor actions. This makes it hard to pinpoint where visitors drop off or what influences conversions across the full journey.

No. Hotjar does not include built-in website traffic statistics or campaign reporting. This creates missing areas of insight for businesses. Many need to connect behavior analytics with performance metrics, UTM campaigns, or visitor acquisition channels.

Hotjar uses cookies and requires consent from visitors. As a result, it can miss up to 75% of traffic and excludes visitors who opt out. This leads to major visibility gaps in behavior tracking, campaign performance, and overall visitor insights.