Hotjar vs Fullstory pricing and Full Story vs Hotjar cost per session and per replay

The session price is only half the bill, because Hotjar does not record every session it counts. Its Growth plan pairs each session tier with a replay allowance: 7,000 replays at 7,000 sessions, rising one for one to 20,000 at 20,000 sessions, then flat at 20,000 replays from 25,000 sessions all the way to 120,000. It reaches 22,000 at 150,000 sessions and 30,000 at 200,000.

So at 100,000 sessions a month you are paying for 100,000 sessions of heatmaps, funnels and analytics, and 20,000 sessions of video. Divide the monthly price by the replays and the unit cost of a recording rises as you grow: $0.0060 at 20,000 sessions, $0.0140 at 60,000, $0.0205 at 100,000 and $0.0246 at 200,000. That is four times the per-replay price for the same product, purely because the replay allowance stopped growing.

Fullstory's meter is sessions, and the sessions it bills are the sessions it captures. Spread a reported $10,000 to $25,000 Business contract over 50,000 to 100,000 sessions a month and it lands between roughly $0.008 and $0.042 per recorded session. Hotjar at 100,000 sessions is $0.0205 per replay. Measured per recording rather than per visit, the two land in the same range. If replay is the reason you are buying, compare on this number, not on the headline.

Fullstory does not publish a monthly price for any paid plan, and it sells paid plans on annual contracts. The free plan costs nothing and covers 30,000 sessions a month, 12 months of data retention and up to 10 users. Reported contracts put Business at roughly $833 to $2,083 a month when a $10,000 to $25,000 annual deal is spread over twelve months.

Add-ons change the figure. Fullstory lists mobile analytics, guides and surveys, multi-org management and an Advantage support subscription as add-ons on Business, Advanced and Enterprise alike. Mobile in particular is an add-on on every paid plan, so a team with a web app and a native app should ask for both on the first quote rather than discovering the second line at renewal.

Hotjar Free is $0 for 200,000 sessions and 10,000 replays a month, one project, replays, heatmaps, funnels, error monitoring and basic surveys with up to 100 responses a month. Growth runs from $49 to $739 a month and adds 13 months of data access, 3 projects, zone-based heatmaps, journey analysis, impact quantification and the Sense AI assistant. Pro starts at 1 million sessions and is quoted, as is Enterprise.

Two details matter for budgeting. First, the 13 months of data access on Growth covers session tracking data, but the plan's own tooltip says replays are kept for 2 months. If you need to go back to a recording from last quarter, Growth will not have it. Second, surveys and feedback widgets beyond the basic free allowance are a separate Voice of Customer subscription, from $99 a month for 500 responses to $1,479 a month for 100,000. A team that wants replay plus a proper survey program is paying for two products.

Read the Hotjar ladder against its own free plan and something odd falls out. Free includes 200,000 sessions a month. Every Growth rung below the top one includes fewer: $49 buys 7,000, $409 buys 100,000. You do not upgrade to Growth to count more sessions until you pass 200,000. You upgrade for replays beyond 10,000, data beyond the free retention, more than one project, journeys, zone heatmaps and the AI features.

That makes the free plan a genuine evaluation tool for a high-traffic marketing site, and a poor fit for anyone who needs to watch a large share of sessions. Fullstory Free is the opposite shape: far fewer sessions, but every one of them recorded, 12 months of retention and seats for 10 people. A logged-in SaaS product with modest traffic will usually learn more from Fullstory Free. A content or ecommerce site with heavy traffic will get more from Hotjar Free.

Hotjar is better for marketing and CRO teams that need heatmaps, surveys and replay across a busy website at a price they can put on a card. It prints its prices, sells self-serve up to 200,000 sessions and lets you start the same day. Fullstory is better for product and engineering teams that need every session recorded, deep search across behavioral events, developer tools and retroactive analysis inside a web or mobile app.

The honest split we see is by buyer, not by feature list. If the person signing is a marketing lead with a few thousand dollars, Hotjar is the realistic choice and Fullstory is out of budget. If the person signing is a product or digital leader with a five-figure analytics budget and a lot of logged-in users, Fullstory is the realistic choice and Hotjar's replay cap starts to hurt.

For Hotjar: confirm whether the price you are shown is monthly or annual billing, how many replays come with your session tier, how long replays are kept on your plan, and what happens when you cross the session tier mid-month. If you need surveys, price the Voice of Customer subscription on the same order.

For Fullstory: ask for the written definition of a billable session, because it is not on the pricing page. Ask for the session allowance, the overage rate and whether unused sessions roll over. Get mobile and any guides or surveys add-on into the first quote. And bring the procurement numbers: a 19% average negotiated saving across 455 reported purchases means the first quote is rarely the last one.

Both tools are very good at showing you what happened on a page. Neither tells you why a customer cancelled, because the answer is usually not on the page at all. It is in the support ticket they filed two weeks earlier, the survey comment they left, the app store review and the feature request nobody answered.

That is the gap UserInsight fills. It pulls usage, feedback, tickets and reviews into one place and explains which issues are actually driving churn, so the replays you pay for get watched for the right reasons. Many teams run it next to Hotjar or Fullstory rather than instead of them: the replay tool shows the moment, UserInsight shows which moments cost revenue.