Long-time customers report Hotjar became 'shockingly greedy' under new ownership. One user reported a price increase of over 800%. The pricing structure shifted from affordable to 'penny-pinching every little feature' requiring hundreds of dollars a month for arbitrary limits.

Hotjar splits everything into three separate plans (Observe, Ask, Engage) which is annoying - you probably need features from multiple products. Each product has its own pricing tier, making the total cost hard to calculate and expensive to get full functionality.

The free Basic plan caps at 35 daily session recordings, which is insufficient for any site with meaningful traffic. Most features are locked behind paid plans. Even the $99/month plan caps at 500 sessions/day which users say doesn't actually capture that many.

If you cancel the day your subscription renews, Hotjar refuses to refund you. Billing practices reported as predatory with difficulty canceling subscriptions or getting charged for unwanted plans.

Hotjar's script adds 0.47MB to page weight and 829ms to load time. Users report sites loading 1.5-2.5 seconds normally but up to 4 seconds with Hotjar installed. It's one of the slowest among popular heatmap tools.

Hotjar adds overhead to websites and ad blockers started making sites respond weirdly. Some users report their sites behave differently when visitors have ad blockers enabled because of Hotjar integration conflicts.

Plans have strict daily session caps (35 on free, 100-500 on paid). When exceeded, Hotjar stops recording for the remainder of the day. High-traffic sites frequently hit limits, missing important user sessions and creating gaps in data.

Heat maps are occasionally buggy especially when switching between desktop and mobile views. Some accounts constantly go on and off with alerts about tracking not being properly implemented. Doesn't work well with single page applications.

Users report the conversion funnel tracking tool doesn't accurately report metrics. If a page has popup, modal, or overlay, that can be problematic for tracking. Users question the accuracy of the reports overall.

After-care service is poor with no way to speak to a human, just a chatbot. Users describe serious gatekeeping, requiring multiple field entries in chat windows. AI chatbot required re-entering the same URL three times - very frustrating experience. 2.5-star Trustpilot rating largely stems from support issues.

Session recordings can be incomplete, hard to filter, and miss key interactions. JavaScript obscures viewing of dynamic content, making it unclear what users are doing. Users get overwhelmed by not-relevant recordings where users just idle.

There's a limit on page height that can be captured at 1500px. Long scrolling pages don't get fully captured in heatmaps, limiting insights for modern long-form content pages and infinite scroll designs.

On smaller Hotjar plans, the cap at creating only 3 heatmaps at a time feels restrictive. Users need to delete old heatmaps to create new ones, losing historical data in the process.

Hotjar recently removed cross-domain tracking, which was a great benefit for users tracking customers across multiple domains. This feature removal frustrated many multi-site businesses who relied on it.