Companies Using Hotjar

I spend my days turning detection data into prospect lists, so the first question I ask of a technology this size is not how big it is but which direction its customers are walking. As of our August 2026 crawl we verify 433,037 active Hotjar domains and we matched 223,684 of them to company records. That makes Hotjar 2nd of 34 in Heatmaps & Session Recording. It also makes it the most contested account list in the category, and the reason is one competitor.

1. Growth trajectory

The chart above shows the current crawl only. Our records, not plotted there, open for Hotjar in September 2014 with 9 domains, the year the company was founded, and reach 433,037 now. I would not hand a sales team that curve without a warning. The domains we crawl turn over every month, dead sites leave and newly found ones arrive, and our detection signals broaden over time, so the step between our 2025 and our 2026 coverage is our measurement changing as much as the market moving. What survives that caveat is the shape inside a single crawl: 344,907 domains in June 2026, 425,254 in July, 433,037 in August. Hotjar is not shrinking. It is being outgrown.

Sales Signal: Do not sell against Hotjar as a declining product, because the account list is not shrinking and the pitch will not land. Sell against its price ladder instead.

2. The Clarity problem

This is the number that matters on this page. Since we began tracking domain movements in March 2026, 6,308 domains dropped Hotjar while running Microsoft Clarity and 3,295 moved the other way. Net, Hotjar is down 3,013 domains to Clarity, and no other corridor comes close. The next largest outflow after Clarity and Hotjar's own parent company is 168 domains.

The mechanism is not mysterious. Clarity is free, with unlimited heatmaps and recordings and no session cap, and it holds 53.63% of the category against Hotjar's 26.93%. Hotjar's free tier is metered. Our size distribution shows 78.59% of Hotjar deployments sit at 50 staff or fewer, which is precisely the segment that treats a monthly session allowance as a reason to leave. This is share pressure at the entry level, not enterprise churn.

"A free competitor does not take your enterprise accounts. It takes the bottom of your funnel, quietly, one small site at a time, and you notice two years later when the top stops getting fed." - Emma Davies, Data Analyst at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales Signal: The 3,295 domains that moved the other way, from Clarity onto Hotjar, are the more interesting list. They tried free, found it insufficient, and paid. Those are qualified buyers for anything priced above zero in this category.

3. Customer profile

Hotjar's base is small companies, and it is not close. 49.45% of the 213,958 deployments where we know headcount sit at 1 to 10 staff, another 29.14% at 11 to 50, and only 8.54% employ more than 200. The enterprise tail exists but it is thin, at 758 deployments above 10,000 staff, and it looks like Wipro, Ford, Lockheed Martin, Roche, Bayer, NVIDIA, Nissan, Renault Group, Takeda, and Veterans Affairs.

Worth being precise about what those enterprise rows are. Almost none of them are enterprise rollouts. They are a careers site, an investor relations subdomain, a regional shop, a single campaign property. Hotjar is bought by a team with a card, which is what makes the list long and the contracts small. On the age distribution, 40.14% of matched companies were founded in the 2010s and 17.16% in the 2020s, so this is a base that grew up with self-serve SaaS.

Sales Signal: Filter this list above 200 employees and you get roughly 18,266 enriched deployments with a real budget line. Everything below that is a volume motion where price and time to first insight decide the deal.

4. Industry and geographic concentration

The industry table is unusually flat. Retail leads at 5.12%, Software Development follows at 4.52%, Advertising Services at 4.19%, and the top ten together reach only 33.44%. A vertical tool routinely gives its leading industry 15% or more. Hotjar is bought wherever a page has a conversion rate attached to it, which is everywhere.

Geography is where Hotjar differs from its rivals. The United States leads with 64,268 domains, but the United Kingdom (22,321), Netherlands (12,400), France (6,278), Spain (5,124), Italy (4,536), Germany (4,467), Poland (4,466), and Belgium (3,464) together reach 63,056, effectively matching the US on their own. Hotjar was founded and is headquartered in Malta, and the European weighting shows it. The Netherlands at 4th, ahead of Brazil and Canada, is not a position a US-born analytics tool usually holds.

Sales Signal: The European base is the defensible half. EU data residency and GDPR handling are an easier argument there than against a free product operated by a US hyperscaler, and the Netherlands, Belgium, and Poland are the densest markets to work per capita.

5. The Contentsquare question

Read the second largest outflow on this page carefully, because it is easy to misreport. Contentsquare acquired Hotjar in 2021 and Heap in 2023. The Hotjar to Contentsquare corridor, a few hundred domains each way, is one vendor moving accounts up its own price list. It is not a competitive loss and it should never be counted as one.

These are genuinely two products rather than one tag catching another. They co-occur on 10,663 domains, which is about 2.5% of Hotjar's base but 34% of Contentsquare's. That asymmetry tracks the size difference between them, which is what co-selection looks like. The useful reframe for anyone selling against the portfolio is the combined footprint: 464,163 domains across both brands, free self-serve heatmaps at one end and enterprise journey analytics at the other.

"When the vendor above you in the table owns you, that row is a price list, not a competitor. The only genuinely contested corridor Hotjar has is Clarity." - Emma Davies, Data Analyst at TechnologyChecker.io

Sales Signal: Accounts running both tags at once are mid-migration and are the moment implementation, analytics, and experimentation services get bought.

6. Technology ecosystem

Google Analytics sits on 93.43% of Hotjar domains. That is not a competitive signal, it is the definition of the product: Hotjar explains behaviour and leaves traffic counting to something else. Cloudflare at 41.47% and WordPress at 32.77% are ordinary for a base this size.

The entry I did not expect is Alpine.js at 17.39%, ahead of React at 9.43% and Vue.js at 5.93%. Alpine is what page builders and lightweight marketing sites ship, and it is the clearest technical fingerprint of the small self-serve buyer that dominates the size table. On the commerce side, Shopify reaches 10.11% and WooCommerce 6.72%, together about 17% of the base where a heatmap has a direct revenue argument attached.

Sales Signal: The Shopify and WooCommerce slice is roughly 74,000 domains where conversion rate maps to money on the same day. That is the subset worth a revenue-led pitch rather than a research-led one.

7. G2 review signals

The G2 sentiment lines up with the migration data more neatly than usual. Reviewers praise Hotjar for being intuitive and easy to navigate (12 mentions), for insightful tools (11), and for comprehensive heatmaps (10). Of the five leading complaints, three are about filtering recordings, one is about recording limits and slow loading, and one is that the tool gets expensive as usage grows. Ease of use is not the problem here. Volume pricing is.

Sales Signal: The recording limit and price complaints are the same objection wearing two hats, and they name the exact reason 6,308 domains walked to a free product. Transparent, volume-based pricing is the strongest counter-positioning available against Hotjar today.

8. Key takeaways

1. Position: 2nd of 34 at 26.93% with 433,037 domains, more than three times Crazy Egg in 3rd.
2. Direction: growing inside our current crawl, from 344,907 in June 2026 to 433,037 in August, while losing share at the entry level.
3. Vulnerability: Microsoft Clarity, net 3,013 domains taken since March 2026 and no other corridor close.
4. Customer archetype: small and self-serve, with 78.59% of enriched deployments at 50 staff or fewer and an enterprise tail of 758.
5. Differentiator: Europe. Eight European markets match the United States for domain count, which is unusual in this category.

9. Sales applications

Outreach angle: "You run Hotjar alongside Google Analytics on a Shopify store. Your heatmaps stop at the session allowance, which is the point most teams start sampling instead of measuring." That is the 44,565 Shopify domains in the base, where the money argument is same-day.

Targeting strategy: Split the list in two. Above 200 employees there are about 18,266 enriched deployments for a contract motion. Below it, target the Advertising Services segment (4.19%), because agencies buy per client and switch tools faster than the brands they work for.

Competitive angle: The 3,295 domains that dropped Clarity and adopted Hotjar are the proof set. They already decided a free tool was not enough, which makes them the reference accounts for any paid alternative in this category.

All of it comes from TechnologyChecker.io's own crawl: 433,037 active Hotjar domains, 223,684 matched to company records, set against the full technology set we track across 29.9 million active domains.