hotjar vs crazy-egg
Hotjar vs Crazy Egg — features, pricing, and which to choose for your SEO workflow in 2026.
Quick Verdict
Both Hotjar and Crazy Egg help you understand how users behave on your website through heatmaps and click tracking, but they take different approaches to user behavior analytics. This matters for SEO because user engagement signals like time on page, bounce rate, and click-through patterns directly impact your search rankings.
The fundamental difference is scope: Hotjar is a comprehensive behavior analytics platform with session recordings, surveys, and feedback widgets alongside heatmaps, while Crazy Egg focuses specifically on visual analytics and A/B testing for conversion optimization.
Feature Comparison
Hotjar delivers the full user behavior picture with session recordings that show exactly how individual users navigate your pages, scroll depth heatmaps revealing how far down users read, and click heatmaps showing interaction patterns. You also get user feedback through surveys and feedback widgets, plus funnel analysis to identify where users drop off in your conversion process. Crazy Egg specializes in visual optimization with five types of heatmaps (click, scroll, move, attention, and list reports), plus built-in A/B testing capabilities. Their snapshot feature captures page layouts at different times, and their confetti report breaks down clicks by traffic source, which is particularly useful for understanding how different visitor segments interact with your content. The key difference for SEO practitioners is that Hotjar's session recordings let you watch actual user journeys to identify content gaps and navigation issues, while Crazy Egg's A/B testing helps you optimize specific page elements for better engagement metrics.
Pricing Comparison
Hotjar wins on budget accessibility with a generous free plan covering up to 35 daily sessions and basic heatmaps. Their paid plans start around $32/month for small sites, scaling up based on session volume rather than page views. Crazy Egg starts at $49/month with no free tier, charging based on tracked page views with a 30-day free trial. While more expensive upfront, their pricing includes unlimited heatmaps and A/B tests, making it potentially better value for high-traffic sites running constant optimization experiments.
Best For
Hotjar is the better choice if you need comprehensive user research capabilities for content optimization and want to understand the complete user journey. The free tier makes it perfect for small sites and agencies testing user behavior analytics, while the session recordings provide insights you can't get from heatmaps alone. Crazy Egg works better for established sites focused on conversion rate optimization and A/B testing specific page elements. If you're primarily interested in optimizing landing pages and have the budget for dedicated testing tools, Crazy Egg's specialized features deliver faster optimization results.
The Verdict
Hotjar is the clear winner for most SEO use cases. The free tier eliminates risk, session recordings provide deeper insights than heatmaps alone, and the comprehensive feature set covers everything from content optimization to user experience research. Unless you specifically need Crazy Egg's A/B testing capabilities and have budget constraints around Hotjar's session limits, Hotjar delivers more value for understanding and improving user engagement signals that impact SEO performance.