The verdict
If you run a marketing site or signup flow and a funnel stalls with no obvious reason, pick Hotjar. Run it for a week, watch about twenty recordings and you will usually find the next fix. If you ship a software product and need to know who used a feature, where new users drop out and which cohorts stay, pick Mixpanel. A small B2B team with a website and no product yet should start with Hotjar. A team with a live product and someone owning product decisions should start with Mixpanel. Many teams end up with both, because Hotjar is page-level and deep event analysis still belongs in a tool like Mixpanel.
Side by side
| 8 points compared | ||
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | $49/mo | |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| MCP server | Yes | Yes |
| Custom dashboards | Yes | Yes |
| Heatmaps | Yes | Yes |
| Product analytics | Yes | Yes |
| Session replay | Yes | Yes |
| Links |
Plans and pricing
Hotjar
- FreeFree
- Growth - Experience Analytics$588/yr
- Growth - Voice of Customer$1,188/yr
Mixpanel
- FreeFree
- GrowthFree
Who each is for
Choose Hotjar if…
Hotjar suits marketing, product and UX teams with a website that gets enough visitors to watch. Set-up is one script, often added through Google Tag Manager. I adopted Hotjar in 2014 and it remains in my toolkit. Watching prospects rage-click a disabled button on a signup form exposed a bug no report had shown. The free plan caps recorded sessions, so on a busy site I sample traffic or record only during research sprints. You also need consent set up and sensitive fields masked. Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare, so check how you would buy it before you plan around it.
Choose Mixpanel if…
Mixpanel suits software companies where behaviour in the app matters more than traffic to the site. A product manager can build funnels and retention charts alone, and the free plan is large enough to learn on. The catch is data quality. The tool is only as good as your event tracking, so agree a naming plan, document it and keep it clean, or the charts mislead you. Spend time on that plan before you install anything. Paid plans are priced by event volume, so estimate your tracking before you pick. If all you need is website traffic reports, Mixpanel is the wrong tool, and Google Analytics covers that.
Other options worth a look
Combines product analytics, session replay, feature flags and experiments in one open-source stack for product teams.
Track user behaviour, retention and conversion across your web and mobile products in one platform.
Automatically captures every user interaction on web and mobile apps without pre-defining individual events.
Create and distribute surveys to collect customer, employee, and market feedback at scale.