Two tools, two different questions
Hotjar is a behaviour analytics tool: heatmaps, session recordings, surveys and feedback widgets, fed by your real visitors. It is good at telling you where people click, scroll and leave.
Tower is not behaviour analytics. It sends AI agents through your store, behaving like your personas, and reports what is wrong on the way: a search that misses a product you sell, a missing delivery time on the product page, an account wall with no reason given. Each finding comes with its screenshot, an estimated conversion impact and a ticket ready for your sprint.
Hotjar vs. Tower at a glance
| Hotjar | Tower | |
|---|---|---|
| Source | Your real visitors' sessions | AI agents browsing as your personas |
| Answers | Where do people click, scroll, leave? | What on this journey is broken or costing conversions? |
| Output | Heatmaps, recordings, survey answers | Findings with screenshot, severity and impact; user stories exportable to Linear |
| Who does the analysis | Your team, watching and interpreting | The agents; your team judges each finding in one keystroke |
| Install | A tracking script on your site | Nothing — public pages only |
| Needs traffic | Yes, to have sessions to analyse | No — works on a new store or a new page |
| Visitor data | Collects your visitors' sessions | Touches no visitor data at all |
When Tower is the better fit
- Nobody has time to watch recordings. Tower does the browsing and the write-up; you only read and judge findings.
- You need tickets, not insights. Every finding becomes a user story with acceptance criteria.
- Traffic is low, or the page is new. Agents do not need visitors to find a broken journey.
- You want to avoid another tracking script. Tower reads public pages and collects nothing about your shoppers. Data lives in the EU (Frankfurt), screenshots are deleted after 90 days.
When to keep Hotjar
If you want to see how your real customers behave — where they hesitate, what they say in a survey — behaviour analytics remains the right tool, and Tower does not replace it. Many teams will use both: Hotjar to see where shoppers drop, Tower to find the defects behind the drop and put them in the backlog.
Proof, not promises
In the latest published pilot, the store owner judged 11 findings out of 11 true. One audit finds about 65% of the defects on a store, two reach about 90% — measured, and published with its misses on our FAQ. See what the audit covers on the e-commerce UX audit page, or run one on your store.