Hotjar

Hotjar is no longer a product you can sign up for. Contentsquare, an analytics company founded in Paris in 2012, bought Hotjar in 2021 and has now folded it in: hotjar.com leads to a page headed "Hotjar is now Contentsquare", which says new Hotjar accounts can no longer be created. This review covers what you can buy instead, Contentsquare's Experience Analytics, which carries Hotjar's heatmaps, recordings and surveys. We logged the change on our news page.

The free plan covers 200,000 sessions a month in one project, with one month of data. Heatmaps and funnels use every session, and replays are captured for 5% of sessions, up to 10,000 a month. It also includes JavaScript error tracking, Core Web Vitals, basic surveys and seven ready-made integrations, among them Google Analytics, Jira, HubSpot and Slack.

Growth adds 13 months of data, three projects, journey analysis, zone-based heatmaps, a frustration score and AI summaries. Contentsquare's pricing page says Growth captures replays of 15% of sessions, with a minimum of 20,000 a month. Pro and Enterprise add the API, alerts, revenue attribution and cross-device journeys, at prices you get from sales.

Surveys and feedback widgets, Hotjar's other half, now come from a separate product, Voice of Customer. Its free plan allows 3 surveys or widgets and 100 responses a month.

Contentsquare suits a site that already counts its traffic elsewhere and wants to know why pages underperform. A shop sees people add to the basket and leave at the delivery step; a heatmap and a few replays usually show why. A content team sees which parts of a long page nobody reaches.

The free plan is generous for this kind of tool: 200,000 sessions covers most small and medium sites, and 10,000 replays is more than most teams will watch. The catch is one month of history. Growth makes sense once you need history, journey analysis or several projects. Pro and Enterprise aim at large retailers and product teams who want revenue attribution, alerts and an API, and can sign a contract.

It is a poor fit if you want one tool for everything, no cookies, or a view of visitors as they arrive. It also takes patience: Contentsquare sells three product lines (Experience Analytics, Voice of Customer and Product Analytics), each with its own plans and add-ons.

You add the Contentsquare tag to every page: a snippet placed before the closing body tag, a Google Tag Manager template, a Shopify app, or tags for Tealium, Adobe Launch and Commanders Act. The script loads asynchronously, and a Chrome extension, the Tracking Setup Assistant, confirms that the first pageview arrives. New accounts start with a 15-day trial of Growth that needs no card. Existing Hotjar customers have nothing to install: Contentsquare says their Hotjar code keeps sending data into the new account. For apps, Contentsquare documents SDKs for Android and iOS with session replay.

Before you watch any replays, check two settings. Masking is set per project: full masking hides all text, numbers and images, partial masking hides text and numbers, and no masking shows the page as it is. If your site asks for consent, replays can wait for it, and an opt-out command covers visitors who decline.

A useful first report is a click and scroll heatmap of your busiest landing page, then the replays of visitors who left from it.

Day to day you work from three views. Heatmaps show where people click and how far they scroll, and you can compare two periods or two traffic sources side by side. On Growth, zone-based heatmaps put numbers on each element of the page, such as how often it was seen and clicked. The replay list shows each recording with its duration, pages, country, browser and screen size, filtered by feedback, audience segment, user ID or errors. Funnels show where people drop out of a series of steps, and one click opens the replays of those who left.

Growth adds journey analysis, which maps the paths people take between pages, and a frustration score, with filters for the sessions where visitors struggled. AI summaries sum up a replay or a heatmap in a few lines. CS Live, a browser overlay, shows these metrics on top of your own pages. Error tracking lists JavaScript errors and links to the replays where they happened.

What you will not find on Free or Growth is a live view, alerts or an API. Real-time dashboards exist only for errors, as a Pro add-on or on Enterprise.

Contentsquare says its tag uses only first-party cookies. The main one, _cs_id, recognises a returning visitor for 13 months, and _cs_s holds the session for 30 minutes. A cookieless mode exists, but it moves the same identifiers into local storage rather than dropping them.

On recordings, Contentsquare says the tag never collects text typed into input fields, and replaces it with bullets before the page is sent. Email addresses, card numbers and any run of 9 or more digits are masked even with masking switched off.

Contentsquare says it uses IP addresses only to find a visitor's city, to block unwanted traffic, and for troubleshooting logs kept up to three days. Visitor data on Free and Growth is stored in Ireland, on Amazon Web Services or Microsoft Azure; Pro and Enterprise can pick Ireland or the United States. Data is kept one month on Free and 13 months on Growth, with replays kept two months. The code is closed and cannot be self-hosted. Whether you need a cookie banner depends on everything your site loads and on the law where you operate.

Contentsquare publishes Growth prices by sessions a month, in US dollars, and bills customers in Europe in euros. One plan covers every site in your account within one region. Paying yearly by card or PayPal takes 20% off; paying by invoice does not.

A blog with 15,000 sessions a month fits in Free, with about 750 replays a month and one month of history. A shop with 60,000 sessions that wants a year of history needs Growth at $279 a month, or about $223 a month paid yearly. At 100,000 sessions Growth costs $409 a month, and at 200,000 it costs $739. From 240,000 sessions, and for Pro and Enterprise, Contentsquare quotes a price.

Surveys are billed separately, from $79 a month for Voice of Customer Growth. Taking both Growth plans takes another 10% off the cheaper one.

At the limit nothing extra is billed, but heatmap and funnel data stops until the monthly reset. New Growth accounts get a 30-day money-back guarantee and need no yearly contract. Our pricing comparison sets these numbers next to other tools.

If your Hotjar account is moving, staying on Contentsquare is the path of least effort: the tracking code keeps working, and Free covers most sites.

WireBoard (made by us) covers what Contentsquare leaves out, a live view. Its widgets stream visitors, pages, sources and events within seconds, across several sites, with a free plan for 50,000 pageviews a month on 2 sites and data hosted in the EU. It covers the traffic side, so it runs alongside a heatmap tool.

If you want out of Contentsquare, four tools in our reviews cover heatmaps and recordings.

Crazy Egg is the simplest swap for a small site. Its free plan adds traffic analytics, a live visitor feed and Instant Heatmaps for up to 1,000 sessions a day, but no recordings. Recordings start at $29 a month, billed yearly, with only 50 a month on Starter, and data is processed in the US.

Mixpanel gives the most free recordings of the hosted options here: 10,000 session replays a month and heatmaps on its free plan, next to funnels and retention. Contentsquare's free plan reaches 10,000 replays only at 200,000 sessions. Mixpanel pays off once someone plans which events to send. It sets a 365-day cookie, and data can stay in the EU if you choose that when you create the project.

Matomo puts heatmaps, recordings and A/B tests inside full web analytics, hosted in Frankfurt on its cloud. The entry plan, $26 a month for 50,000 hits, includes 1,500 heatmap pageviews and 150 recordings a month, far fewer replays than Contentsquare's free plan. Self-hosting is free, but heatmaps are a paid plugin there.

Umami is the cookieless choice. It added replays and heatmaps in 2026: free if you host it yourself, and part of the $200 Business plan on its cloud.

Compare their limits side by side on our heatmaps shortlist.

Hotjar as a product is gone for new users, and existing customers have to move. Once an account switches, Hotjar stops collecting data, and Contentsquare's migration page gives two different read-only periods before the old data is deleted: 90 days in one answer, 12 months in another. Check the date in your notification email.

There is no live view on Free or Growth, and the free plan keeps one month of data. On Growth, $49 a month buys just 7,000 sessions and 100,000 sessions cost $409, and at the limit heatmaps and funnels stop collecting until the next month. Surveys are billed separately, and the API, alerts and revenue attribution sit behind a sales call.

Because it sets cookies and records sessions by default, it is not a tool you can run without thinking about consent.