Hotjar alternatives and competitors, compared after the Contentsquare merger

The free tiers are where this category is actually decided now, because several of them are large enough that a mid-sized site never has to pay anyone. The numbers below were read off first-party pages in August 2026.

Contentsquare Free captures 200,000 sessions a month with session replay, funnels, error monitoring, performance monitoring and 10 or more integrations, plus 100 survey responses a month. Hotjar Free, the tier it replaces, captured 35 sessions a day, which is about 1,050 a month, with 20 survey responses and 2 integrations. Contentsquare describes the gap as 190 times more, and the arithmetic confirms it: 200,000 divided by 1,050 is 190.5.

Microsoft Clarity remains free with no published session cap, which is why it is the most common direct swap for teams who only ever wanted heatmaps and recordings. PostHog gives 1 million events and 5,000 web recordings a month free before per-unit pricing begins. FullStory's free tier is 30,000 sessions a month.

The honest conclusion is that if your requirement is heatmaps and recordings on a site under a few hundred thousand sessions a month, this is now a solved problem with a zero dollar answer, and the buying question has moved on. What you still cannot get free anywhere is the analysis: reading a few hundred open-ended survey answers a month and turning them into themes is manual work in every tool listed here.

It depends what you used Hotjar for. If it was heatmaps and recordings on a marketing site, Microsoft Clarity covers that ground at no cost and is the most common direct swap. If you need enterprise-grade experience analytics with support and governance, FullStory and Contentsquare itself are the serious contenders. If replay was only ever half the reason and you also wanted product analytics, PostHog bundles both.

If what you actually wanted was to understand why people struggle, rather than to watch them struggling, the recordings were a proxy for that. Themed feedback across every source answers the same question at a scale nobody can reach by watching sessions one at a time.

They help, and they are genuinely good at one thing: showing you a specific broken interaction you would never have guessed at, like a form field that silently rejects a paste. For that kind of discovery there is no substitute for watching a few sessions.

What recordings scale badly at is measurement. Watching thirty sessions tells you nothing reliable about how often something happens or who it happens to, and the time cost means most recorded sessions are never watched. That is why teams usually pair a small amount of qualitative watching with a quantitative source that can count how widespread a problem actually is.

It can be, and it is worth taking seriously rather than dismissing. Replay tools capture what a real person did on a screen that may contain their name, email, account balance or health information. Every serious vendor offers masking and suppression controls, but those controls are opt-in configuration, and the default failure mode is a field that nobody remembered to mask ending up in a recording.

Under US state privacy laws and the consent expectations most SaaS buyers now carry, this is a review question your security team will ask. UserInsight sidesteps it by design: aggregate, consented data, no PII and no individual replay, so the insight arrives without a recording of somebody's screen sitting in a vendor's storage.