Do you really get benefit from HotJar?

Hotjar is useful but overpriced for what you get. And it's a silo — the data doesn't connect to your traffic analytics. I built Zenovay to solve this: heatmaps and session replay built into your analytics dashboard. When you see a traffic spike, you can immediately watch how those visitors behaved. That connection between "where they came from" and "what they did" is what actually drives decisions.

Yes yes yes 1000%. Especially during the phase of getting your first customers. From watching screen recordings, I've picked up points at which users get stuck...or small features that I forgot to finish that end up frustrating the user (like a dead link in the footer), a user repeatedly tapped one of mine about 10 times before leaving the page - something I thought was small was obviously a big deal to them.

It's also useful for debugging, if a user describes a problem they had, you can use it as reference. I don't see the benefit of removing it except every so slightly reducing page load time.

I've had a similar experience — signed up, thought it was cool, then never checked again. I don't think that means the tool is useless, any more than the gym is useless. I actually think it's valuable to watch how people use what you've built.

I think it's great if you want to observe user behaviour. It's nice to see people using your website, clicking on places, scrolling.

I found it useful to understand where people were clicking. People were clicking on some places that were not supposed to be clickable, so I did updates on my website based on that.

Also it was useful to see how the page was rendered on different browsers, etc... And I fixed some bugs based on that.

I found it useful to see where people got stuck on our site, after a few months though I switched it off though as I wasn't getting much more benefit from it.
One thing it did highlight to me was while we were running Google Ads we got quite a few click throughs to our public site where the mouse just moved around the screen in a very un-human way. e.g. scrolled a few hundred pixels in a straight line, paused for a few secs, moved diagonally down, scrolled the page down. My guess was seo companies burning my ad budget to promote their customers keywords in an automated way. Scary how many of these there were though, was a significant cost to our ad budget.

Just like @gramos mentioned, the users of https://www.condense.press were clicking on places I did not expect like on images and on load button after it is loaded. But you should remove hotjar atleast temporarily, as it increases the load time of the page.

I use Inspectlet (hotjar competitor, its the same) and its by far the most valuable tool I've used. I think its super useful if you created an UI and you don't know if users are understanding how to use your app, or you have a long onboarding process.

For example my app have two buttons in the inner app menu, and I noticed 70% of the users haven't seen the second button, and they had a very frustrated experience because of that.

I like hotjar. I use them to share surveys with my YouTube channel and have used the screen recordings in the past for highly interactive apps.

I haven't used the screen recordings much. I think if you know you're having a problem on a page, those might be useful.

I do use the heatmaps mostly. It's a little science and a little art in reading them and interpreting what you think is going on. Things I look at...

Scroll depth tracking can be useful to see how far users are getting down the page. Mouse movements (desktop only of course) contrasted with click tracking. Most users follow the mouse with their eyes as they go down they page. This lets you see what they are looking at. Click tracking lets you know what they are clicking.

Examples:
Is a small link getting more attention than you expected? Should it be elevated in the design? Larger, higher on the page?

Are users clicking on something that isn't clickable - or, you don't want them clicking on often? Either make it clickable, or make it look less like it's clickable.

Also, the form tracking can be useful to see where users are falling off.

Always wondered what exactly you get to make from this heat maps. I think it is one of this products that solves only its own made up problem rather than any real one. You can get all the data you need from Google Analytics to optimize your site.