Hotjar Pricing: Plans, Cost and What Changed

As of August 2026 there is no published Hotjar price anywhere on a first-party page. Hotjar's pricing page returns a 308 permanent redirect to Contentsquare, and the Contentsquare pricing page carries no prices at all, only a "Start for free" button and a "Book a demo" button. Hotjar has been folded into Contentsquare, and Contentsquare's own site now tells anyone looking to try Hotjar to sign up for Contentsquare instead. The one number both companies still publish is the free tier: Hotjar Free captured 35 sessions a day, and Contentsquare Free captures 200,000 sessions a month. Everything below was read off hotjar.com, contentsquare.com/pricing and contentsquare.com/hotjar in August 2026, across several separate reads.

How much does Hotjar cost?

The honest answer is that nobody outside a Contentsquare sales conversation can tell you, and any page that gives you a confident number is quoting a price list that has been retired.

This is worth stating plainly because it is not what you will find elsewhere. Search for Hotjar pricing and you will get a dozen articles with tidy tables: Observe at 32 dollars a month, Business at 80, Scale at 171, Ask at 48, Engage at 280. Those figures were real. They belonged to a product structure of three separately sold modules, Observe, Ask and Engage, each with Basic, Plus, Business and Scale tiers. That structure no longer exists on Hotjar's website, because Hotjar's website no longer sells anything.

What actually happens today is this. Request hotjar.com/pricing and the server responds with a 308 Permanent Redirect to contentsquare.com/pricing. A 308 is not a temporary detour or an A/B test. It is the strongest signal a server can send that a page has moved for good and that search engines should transfer it permanently. Follow that redirect and you land on a page titled "Contentsquare Pricing: Pick the Plan That Suits Your Needs" that contains no plans, no prices, no session limits and no feature comparison. It offers two buttons: start for free, or book a demo.

So the pricing question has quietly changed shape. It used to be "which Hotjar tier should I buy." It is now "what will Contentsquare quote me," which is a different question with a different answer for every company that asks it.

What happened to Hotjar pricing?

Hotjar and Contentsquare have merged. Contentsquare's own page on the subject puts it directly: "Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare. The two platforms have merged into a single, more powerful experience intelligence platform."

The commercially significant sentence is the one further down the same page, aimed at people arriving from a Hotjar search: "If you were looking to try Hotjar, Contentsquare is where you sign up, and you'll get a lot more for free." That is the vendor telling you, in its own words, that new Hotjar signups are being routed into Contentsquare. Existing Hotjar customers still have a login link, but there is no published migration timetable and no published path to buy a Hotjar plan as a new customer.

If you are researching this because a colleague asked you to "just get us Hotjar," that is the thing to relay back. The purchase you were asked to make is not available in the form it was described. You are evaluating Contentsquare, and you should evaluate it on its own terms rather than assuming it is Hotjar with a new logo.

Is Hotjar still free, and what does the free plan include?

Both free tiers exist and Contentsquare publishes a direct comparison of them, which is the most useful first-party data available on this topic. Here it is as shown on contentsquare.com/hotjar in August 2026.

Contentsquare describes its session allowance as "190x more" than Hotjar's, and that figure is worth checking because it confirms both numbers at once. Thirty-five sessions a day across a 30 day month is 1,050 sessions. Divide 200,000 by 1,050 and you get 190.5. The vendor's own multiplier reconciles exactly with the two limits it publishes, which is a good sign that all three figures are current rather than copied forward from an older page.

The practical reading of 35 sessions a day is that Hotjar Free was never sized for a real website. A site with 200 visitors a day would exhaust the allowance before lunch, and you would be sampling roughly one visitor in six with no control over which six. It was a sampling tier for a small site or a demonstration for a large one. Contentsquare's 200,000 a month is a genuinely different proposition, and for most small and mid-sized US sites it is more capacity than they will use.

What did the old Hotjar plans cost?

This table is included because you will encounter these numbers everywhere and you should know exactly what they are worth. These are the legacy Observe, Ask and Engage prices as widely reported by third-party articles. None of them could be verified on any first-party Hotjar or Contentsquare page in August 2026, and the plan names they refer to are no longer offered. Treat them as history, not as a quote.

Two things about that structure are worth carrying forward even though the prices are gone. First, it was modular, and the modules stacked. A team that wanted heatmaps, surveys and interviews was buying three subscriptions, so the real Hotjar bill was routinely two or three times the number people quoted from the Observe column. Second, the reported prices were annual-billing rates with a discount already applied, so month-to-month cost more than the figures above. Any comparison that put "Hotjar from 32 dollars" against a competitor's monthly rate was not comparing like with like.

If you are rebuilding a budget that was based on those numbers, the safest assumption is that the modular stacking is gone and replaced by a single platform quote. Whether that quote lands above or below your old stacked total depends entirely on your traffic.

What should you budget for Contentsquare?

Start by finding out whether you need to pay at all. This is the unusual part of this particular buying decision: the free tier is large enough that a lot of companies researching Hotjar pricing do not have a purchase to make.

Work out your monthly session count from your existing analytics. If it is comfortably under 200,000 and you need session replay, heatmaps and a modest number of survey responses, the free plan covers you and the budgeting exercise is finished. That will be true for a large share of US small and mid-market sites, and it is the single most useful thing to check before booking a demo you do not need.

If you are over that line, three questions determine what you will be quoted, and having answers ready shortens the sales cycle considerably. How many sessions a month do you actually capture, including mobile. How long do you need to keep them, because retention is where behavior analytics contracts quietly get expensive. And how many people need a login, since seat policy varies far more between vendors in this category than the marketing pages suggest.

One more piece of budgeting advice specific to this category. Session-based tools bill on a number that grows when your marketing succeeds, so a good quarter raises your bill. Ask what happens when you exceed the tier: some vendors charge overage, some stop collecting, and the difference matters. We wrote up how the major behavior analytics vendors differ on exactly this in our Fullstory pricing breakdown, which compares the billing units used across Fullstory, Heap, Amplitude, Mixpanel, PostHog and Contentsquare.

Is the free plan a good reason to switch?

It is a good reason to try, and a poor reason to commit without reading the rest of the offer.

The free tier is generous by any standard in this category, and Contentsquare is clearly using it to convert Hotjar's long tail of small accounts. Two hundred thousand sessions a month, session replay, funnels, error monitoring and performance monitoring at no cost is more than most tools give you for money. If you are currently paying for a small session replay subscription, it is worth an hour of your time to check whether you still need to.

The caution is that free tiers in this category are the top of a sales funnel, and the things that are not free are the things you discover in month four: data retention beyond the included window, the number of seats, and whatever it costs to keep the data once your traffic grows. None of those are published, so you cannot plan for them. Adopt the free plan by all means, but do it knowing you are starting a relationship whose price you will learn later.

It is also worth being clear about what error monitoring and performance monitoring mean in a behavior analytics tool. They tell you that sessions containing errors or slow pages exist, and let you watch them back. They are not a substitute for infrastructure monitoring: if what you need is to know within seconds that a checkout endpoint has started returning 500s at three in the morning, that is a job for dedicated uptime and performance monitoring rather than a tool that samples user sessions. The two answer different questions and most teams eventually run both.

What none of these tools will do for you

Session replay shows you what one person did. Heatmaps show you where a thousand people clicked. Neither tells you why, and the gap between those two facts is where most of the frustration with this category comes from. You watch fourteen recordings, you form a theory, and you have no way to know whether the theory holds across the other nine thousand sessions you did not watch.

The surveys inside these tools are meant to close that gap, and they half do. Twenty free responses a month on Hotjar, or a hundred on Contentsquare, gets you a signal. What it does not get you is the analysis: once you are collecting a few hundred open-ended answers a month, reading them becomes a job nobody owns, and it quietly stops happening. That is the same failure mode we found in the survey tools when we looked at Typeform pricing, and it is not really a pricing problem. Collection is cheap now. Understanding is the part that is still manual.

That is the layer UserInsight adds. It reads open-ended answers at volume and groups them into themes, then sets those themes next to product usage, support tickets and reviews from the same customers, so a spike in one place arrives with candidate causes attached. Every theme traces back to the individual responses behind it, so you can quote a real customer rather than a summary. If you want to see how that compares to running the behavior tools alone, our Hotjar alternative and Contentsquare alternative pages lay out where each approach fits, and the customer sentiment analysis page covers how the open-text grouping works in practice.

The short version

Hotjar pricing, as a thing you can look up, no longer exists. The pricing page permanently redirects to Contentsquare, and Contentsquare publishes no prices. The legacy Observe, Ask and Engage figures still circulating are historical and refer to plans that are not sold. What is verifiable is the free tier comparison: 35 sessions a day and 20 survey responses a month on Hotjar Free, against 200,000 sessions and 100 responses a month on Contentsquare Free, with the vendor's own "190x" figure confirming the arithmetic.

For most teams the practical next step is not a demo. It is checking your monthly session count against 200,000 and finding out whether you have a purchase to make at all. If you do, go into the quote knowing your session volume, your retention requirement and your seat count, and ask what happens when you exceed the tier. Those three answers will shape the number far more than anything on a feature list.