Hotjar, FullStory and Sprig are all insights platforms that offer product teams a deeper understanding of their users. If you want to better understand what your users think of your product or app (and we think you do), then you should consider one of these platforms.
The question remains - which one suits your needs as a product team?
Use this guide to understand the different features and benefits to Hotjar, FullStory and Sprig.
At a High Level:
Hotjar was created with the primary focus of understanding people’s interaction with a website using heatmaps, which are maps for the most clicked elements on a page.
FullStory works to offer a holistic view of the user journey with heatmaps, session replays and customer journey analytics.
Sprig works to go beyond customer analytics and heatmaps to provide insight into why your customers take certain actions by combining the power of in-product surveys with AI Analysis and Sprig Replays.
Let’s dive into the key differentiating factors with each platform: product features, pricing, and target audience.
Product Features:
To start, let’s compare the key features of each platform including session replay tools, surveys and AI analysis.
Session Replay Tools:
Session replay tools capture and record the real-time actions and behaviors of website visitors or app users as they navigate through the website or platform.
Hotjar provides session replay functionality, allowing you to watch how users interact with your website or app. It offers adjustable replay speeds and various filtering options.
FullStory is known for its advanced session replay capabilities, offering comprehensive playback of user sessions and it indexes every user interaction within your site with tagless autocapture.
Sprig offers a unique version of the tool with our advanced targeting and short clips that enable product teams to view quick clips of specific user experiences instead of having to watch entire user sessions.
Here is a full summary of Sprig Replays features:
- Advanced Targeting: Replays can be triggered based on specific user actions and characteristics your product already tracks.
- User Engagement Tracking: Watch your users’ product interactions, including their cursor activity, clicks, page scrolls, and mouseovers.
- Customizable Privacy Settings: Blur out form content, images, password fields, and/or specific CSS selectors in your users’ screen recordings.
- Filtering Options: Filter Replay clips by time period and user attributes to see how product interactions change over time and across cohorts.
- Playback Functionality: Review Replay clips efficiently with the ability to adjust your video speed and skip past periods of user inactivity.
Surveys:
FullStory primarily focuses on session replay tools and user behavior analytics, so we will focus on Sprig and Hotjar when it comes to surveys.
Hotjar’s surveys are designed for websites and are not compatible with mobile apps. The platform provides product teams with various question types like multiple choice, open-ended and Net Promoter Score (NPS) questions. It also provides the following supporting features: feedback widgets, user feedback integration and survey targeting.
Sprig surveys are made for web and mobile apps and platforms, and are also uniquely designed to capture results directly in the app or platform. With in-product surveys, product teams are able to directly ask users what they think about specific parts of the product and solve issues like churn or low feature adoption using these results.
AI Analysis:
FullStory’s OmniSearch is an AI-powered search function with a broad spectrum of filters that lets users sort through their data and home in on highly targeted learnings. Because FullStory indexes so much information from all sessions on a website, OmniSearch is essential for efficiently filtering and searching this data to get to the crux of a visitor’s behavior.
Hotjar has recently begun developing AI to analyze open-text feedback and has the capability to categorize feedback as positive, negative and neutral.
Sprig already offers GPT-Powered AI Analysis which enables product teams to instantly summarize all of their survey responses, including multiple-choice and open-text feedback, into actionable product recommendations and opportunities.
Sprig AI analyzes thousands of responses in real time and thus significantly decreases the amount of time product teams would spend manually reviewing these responses to find insights.
Pricing:
Hotjar offers a free plan with limited features and pricing based on website traffic and the number of page views. It is generally considered affordable for small to medium-sized businesses, but less-so for companies with a larger user base.
FullStory offers a free 14-day trial, but no free plan. Its paid subscription model is priced based on the specific number of sessions you can capture, recording storage time, etc., which can end up being more expensive compared to Hotjar and Sprig, especially for larger websites
Sprig offers pricing models for any type of product and the pricing is transparent with no hidden fees.
- Free: For individuals just getting started with capturing quick and easy user insights.
- Starter: For professionals who only need to collect user insights from a small user base.
- Enterprise: For organizations scaling their product development with advanced user insights.
Get more information at sprig.com/pricing.
Target Audience:
Hotjar is suitable for a wide range of small to medium-sized businesses and professionals looking to improve user experience and conversion rates. It's often used by marketers, UX designers, and product managers.
FullStory is ideal for organizations that prioritize session replay capabilities and product analytics, making it a valuable tool for developers, customer support teams, and product managers.
Sprig is the only platform that is purpose-built for product managers, UX researchers and designers.
Conclusion:
All three platforms provide insights into user behaviors, but you should select the right platform for you based on your product team’s needs.
If you want to understand the why behind your users’ actions, then Sprig is the right choice.
The combination of in-product Surveys, Replays, Prototype Tests and AI Analysis enables product, design, and research teams to continuously discover insights across all stages of development to build the best possible product experiences.
Get started for free today!