Hotjar vs Semrush

Hotjar (Product Experience Insights Tools) and Semrush (We do love open source and have an opportunity to make it better from now.) both appear on the Smoower Developer Ecosystem Index.

Hotjar and Semrush sit at essentially the same overall ecosystem score (44), which is unusual and worth reading through the pillars below.

On code quality (the state of repositories, tests, releases and polish), Hotjar is ahead of Semrush. On education (docs, guides and learning material for developers), Hotjar is clearly ahead of Semrush. On community (issue response, PR reviews and discussion health), Semrush is ahead of Hotjar. On reach (how visible the ecosystem is beyond its own repos), Hotjar is clearly ahead of Semrush. On momentum (release cadence and how fast the ecosystem moves), Semrush is ahead of Hotjar.

Hotjar carries 52 GitHub stars across 2 public repos, with 1 repositories active in the last 90 days and 2 external contributors on record. Semrush shows 454 stars across 11 public repos, 2 active in the last 90 days and 7 external contributors. The star gap on its own does not decide the comparison, but Semrush's footprint is roughly 8.7x larger, which usually shows up in downstream signals like inbound issues and third party integrations.

Hotjar is the stronger read for anyone weighting reach. Semrush looks better where community is the deciding factor. The table below breaks the scores down pillar by pillar; the linked profiles cover the underlying repos, docs and community signals in full.