Hotjar vs Mimiq: real visitors or simulated ones

Both promise to show why visitors leave. Hotjar does it from recordings of real visitors, which is the stronger evidence, but only once a page has traffic, and recordings show what people did, not what they were thinking. Teams with a new page, a redesign that is not live yet, or too little traffic to learn from look for a way to hear the reasons sooner.

• Hotjar: real visitors' behavior, recorded on your live site.
• Mimiq: simulated visitors before you have traffic, with reasons in words.
• Hotjar is now Contentsquare: new accounts start on Contentsquare, which has a free plan.
• Mimiq: first test free, then a $9 Starter (120 credits that never expire) or monthly plans from $49.

Hotjar built its name on heatmaps, session recordings and on-site surveys. It is now part of Contentsquare: Contentsquare's Hotjar page says the two platforms have merged, that it is no longer possible to create a new Hotjar account, and that new users sign up for free on Contentsquare.

The same page lists heatmaps, session replay and surveys as carried over, alongside error monitoring and funnels. It says Contentsquare's free plan captures up to 200,000 sessions a month, compared with 35 sessions a day on the old Hotjar free plan, with no credit card. We could not read paid prices on its pricing page, so they are left out here.

All of it works from real visitors on your live site, which is its strength: it shows what actually happened.

Mimiq shows your work to simulated people who match your audience. In a page test, 25 simulated visitors land on your live page and decide whether they would sign up, stay, skim or leave, and say why, in about 90 seconds. In a flow, each one opens your site in their own real browser and tries a task, such as signing up, and the report shows where each one got stuck.

It needs no tracking code and no traffic: it opens the page the way a visitor would. And because the people are simulated, it can run on a page nobody has seen yet, as long as its address is public.

Everyone in it is simulated. It shows where people like your visitors are likely to get stuck, not what your visitors did.

Behavior analytics answers "what are real visitors doing?" It finds the page and the step where people drop, the button nobody clicks, the form field where they hesitate. With traffic, nothing simulated beats it.

Simulated visitors answer "what is likely to go wrong, and why?" before traffic arrives, and they say it in words. It says which version to take forward, not how big the real lift will be. So a Mimiq report is a list of likely problems to fix and to watch for, not a measurement.

The two fit together. Test with simulated visitors before launch. Once real visitors arrive, use heatmaps and replays to see where they actually drop. Then put the page where they drop in front of simulated visitors and ask what stopped them, and check the fix on the same simulated people before it goes live.

Choose behavior analytics as soon as your site has steady traffic. It shows real visitors, at scale, on every page, and the free plan covers a lot of sessions.

It is also the better tool for finding problems you did not think to test, since it watches every visit rather than the pages you picked, and for errors and broken interactions that real browsers and devices run into.

Choose Mimiq before launch, on pages with little traffic, on a redesign that is not live for everyone yet, or when you have recordings of people leaving and want to hear why. It also tests things analytics cannot see, such as an ad, a video or an email before they go out.

The first test is free with a free account (Google sign-in, no card), then a $9 Starter (120 credits that never expire) or monthly plans from $49. One credit is one simulated person, and a flow uses 5 a person.