What Hotjar does well, and what it misses in your forms
What Hotjar is built for
Hotjar is a behaviour analytics and feedback tool for your whole site. Its heatmaps show where visitors click, move and scroll on a page. Its recordings let you watch visits as they happened. Its surveys and feedback widget ask visitors what they think, and Engage runs user interviews. Hotjar describes itself as a tool to use next to a web analytics platform like Google Analytics, not instead of one.
For broad UX research it is a strong choice. A designer who wants to know whether a page is read, a product team that wants to hear objections in the visitor’s own words, a marketer checking a new landing page: Hotjar serves all of them well. That breadth is also its limit. Hotjar looks at pages and visits. It does not look inside the form, where the conversion is won or lost.
Hotjar is becoming Contentsquare
Contentsquare bought Hotjar in 2021, and on 1 July 2025 Hotjar merged into the Contentsquare Group. Since then the two products have become one platform:
- New Hotjar accounts are no longer possible. New sign-ups start on Contentsquare’s Free plan.
- From 26 August 2026, existing Hotjar accounts are moving to Contentsquare’s Growth plan in phases. Each account gets 30 days to try Contentsquare next to Hotjar, and the account owner can opt out in that window.
- After the move, the Hotjar account turns read-only for 90 days and is then deleted. Historical heatmaps, recordings and funnels do not transfer, so they need exporting first.
- The Contentsquare tag sets its own cookies, which you add to your consent banner yourself.
If you run Hotjar today, you will choose a plan and review your consent setup either way. That makes it a good moment to ask what you need for your forms and checkouts.
Where Hotjar stops at the form
Hotjar once had a tool for forms. It retired Forms, together with the original Funnels, on 14 December 2020. Today its help centre gives three ways to study a form: the heatmap of the page, the recordings of the visits, and custom Events that you set up for the field interactions you want to follow.
Each of those shows a symptom, not the cause. A click map shows that the date of birth field gets attention; it does not show how long prospects hesitate there, or how many abandon on it. A recording shows one prospect correcting a phone number three times; it takes dozens of recordings to know whether that is a pattern. There is no drop-off rate per field, no hesitation time, no correction rate and no failed submit rate. You watch, you guess, and the guess costs time.
Contentsquare does have field-level Form Analysis, with drop, blank and refill rates for up to 15 zones you mark by hand. It is part of the Pro and Enterprise plans, not of Free or Growth, the plan Hotjar accounts move to.
By using Exatom, we were able to gain more detailed insights into potential bottlenecks in our forms compared to other tools such as Google Analytics and Hotjar. Very helpful are insights such as error-rate, hesitation time, autofill, interaction time per step and by field.
Verified User in Internet
Mid-Market (51-1000 emp.), review on G2
Every field, every session
Exatom starts where Hotjar’s page view ends. One tag finds every form and field on your site, including multi-step flows and forms in iframes, and measures each of them without any Events to set up:
- drop-off per field, split into prospects who leave before the first character and those who leave halfway
- hesitation time, apart from the time spent typing
- corrections, blank rates, autofill and the error messages each field shows
- the failed submit rate, and how many prospects try again
Then there is the question of how many sessions you see. Hotjar records up to the daily session limit of your plan and samples your traffic above it, and it skips sessions shorter than 30 seconds by default. A rare problem, one error on one browser, can slip through that sample. Exatom records every session on every form and checkout. A drop-off spike on a field opens the replays for exactly that field, sorted by Friction Score, so the first replay you watch is the one that cost the most.
From insight to a fix
Hotjar shows you that prospects drop off. What happens next is up to you: write a ticket, wait for a sprint, hope the change works. Exatom keeps the insight and the fix in one place.
- Smart Nudges show a short, relevant message at the moment a prospect hesitates or hits an error.
- Autofixes correct technical faults, such as the wrong keyboard, missing autocomplete attributes or unclear validation messages, without a code change.
- Eureka, the AI CRO assistant, reads your form data and replays, finds the friction per field, device and segment, and drafts the fix.
Every fix goes live from the Exatom dashboard, tested against a control group, and no developer has to touch the form.
Privacy without cookies
Hotjar’s tracking code sets first-party cookies and does not record visitors who have disabled them. How it fits into your consent banner is a question Hotjar leaves to you and your legal team. If your banner holds Hotjar back until visitors consent, the ones who decline are the ones you do not see.
Exatom works without cookies and without personal data: no names, email addresses, IP addresses or user IDs. It runs outside the consent layer, so it counts close to every visitor. Personal data in replays is masked in the browser before anything is recorded, and Exatom is ISO 27001 certified.
Use both, or choose
The two tools answer different questions. Keep Hotjar, or Contentsquare, for heatmaps, surveys and feedback across your site. Use Exatom for the forms and checkouts where your prospects and buyers convert or abandon. Both install with a tag through Google Tag Manager, and they run side by side without getting in each other’s way.
If forms and checkouts are where your revenue comes from, start with the Free plan: it shows where your form loses prospects and the conversion value it is missing, forever, with no credit card.
