Hotjar vs Mouseflow vs Smartlook pricing: Hotjar vs Mouseflow cost per session, Smartlook pricing after End of Sale, and the Smartlook alternative that fits

Divide the price by the sessions and the ladder gets cheaper per unit as you climb, which is what you would expect, but not by as much as the headline suggests. Billed annually, Essential works out to $0.0050 a session, Advanced $0.0044 and Premium $0.0032. Month to month, the same three plans cost $0.0078, $0.0060 and $0.0040.

So moving from Essential to Premium on annual billing cuts the unit cost by about 36%, while multiplying the bill by nearly 13. If your real traffic sits between two rungs, the cheaper decision is almost always the lower rung plus sampling, because Mouseflow lets you record a share of sessions rather than every one.

Only on the cheapest plan. The pricing page advertises "Save up to 35%" on annual billing. Worked out from the prices on the same page, the saving is 35.9% on Essential ($39 down to $25), 26.8% on Advanced ($149 down to $109) and 20.1% on Premium ($399 down to $319). The more you spend, the smaller the annual discount, so a Premium buyer comparing quotes should use 20%, not 35%.

One more detail a US buyer should check before paying. The page prints plan prices with no currency symbol, and the structured data Mouseflow publishes on the same page declares the prices in euros, even when the page is requested from the US. Confirm the currency on the checkout screen before you put a figure into a budget request.

Hotjar costs whatever the Contentsquare plan costs, because a new customer cannot buy a Hotjar plan. Requesting hotjar.com/pricing returns a 308 permanent redirect to contentsquare.com/pricing. On 18 September 2026 that page showed a free plan with 200,000 sessions a month and one project, and a Growth plan from $49 a month starting at 7,000 sessions, with three projects, 13 months of data access and 2 months of session replay retention. Pro starts at 1 million monthly sessions and is quote only, as is Enterprise.

Surveys, which Hotjar used to sell as Ask, are now a separate Voice of Customer subscription from $99 a month billed annually for 500 responses. A team that wants replays and surveys is buying two products, just as it was on the old modular Hotjar list. Our Hotjar pricing guide covers the plan history and what the old Observe, Ask and Engage figures meant.

For a small site, Contentsquare, because its free plan covers 200,000 sessions a month against Mouseflow's 500. If your traffic fits under that line and you only need replays, heatmaps and funnels, you may not need to buy anything.

Once you are paying, the two are close. At the bottom, Contentsquare Growth is $49 a month for 7,000 sessions, about $0.0070 a session, against Mouseflow Essential at $0.0050 annual or $0.0078 monthly. At 100,000 sessions Mouseflow Premium costs $319 a month on annual billing. The differences that decide it are elsewhere: Mouseflow gives unlimited users and 12 months of retention on Premium, while Contentsquare Growth keeps replays for only 2 months even though it keeps other data for 13. If your team goes back to old recordings, retention is worth more than the unit price.

No. Smartlook's own homepage states the End of Sale is in effect. The dates it publishes are 31 May 2026 for End of Sale, when new subscriptions stopped; 31 August 2026 for End of Contract Renewals, after which no renewals or expansions are sold; 31 August 2027 as the Last Day of Support, by which every paid subscription ends; and 30 September 2027, when the platform is decommissioned and remaining customer data is deleted.

When a paid plan ends, the account drops to the Smartlook free plan, with its limits, until 30 September 2027. Smartlook's pricing page and sign-up page both return a 301 redirect to the homepage, so any Smartlook price you find in a comparison article is a price you cannot pay.

No. Smartlook's FAQ says Splunk will not migrate historical data from Smartlook to Digital Experience Analytics in Splunk Observability Cloud, the product that takes over Smartlook's session replay, heatmaps and funnel analysis. Your subscription is not transitioned automatically either.

The practical consequence is that the replacement decision and the data decision are separate. Whatever you move to, export the recordings, events and funnel data you want to keep through the Smartlook API before your paid plan ends, because after that you are working inside free plan limits, and after 30 September 2027 there is nothing left to export.

It depends on what you used Smartlook for. If you replayed a website, Mouseflow is the closest like-for-like purchase with a published price, a self-serve trial and unlimited users, and Contentsquare is the obvious choice if your traffic fits its free plan or you want a larger platform. If you already run Splunk for observability, Splunk's Digital Experience Analytics is the official successor, priced by quote.

Smartlook's strength was native mobile apps as well as websites. Mouseflow plans are built around website projects, so if you replay native iOS or Android apps, confirm mobile SDK coverage with each vendor before you sign. And look at what you actually did with the recordings. If the honest answer is that someone watched them to guess why users drop off, a replay tool alone will leave the same gap it left before.

Session replay shows you what one person did, and a heatmap shows you where a thousand people clicked. Neither tells you why. Teams usually find the reason somewhere else: in a support ticket, an app review or an answer to a survey that nobody has had time to read.

UserInsight reads those sources together with product usage, groups them into named themes with counts, and ranks each theme by how many users and accounts it touches, so the drop-off you spotted in a recording arrives with the complaint that explains it. Keep whichever replay tool fits your budget for watching sessions. Use UserInsight for the question the recordings raise, at a published price from $199 a month.