Pendo vs Heap pricing and Heap vs Pendo cost on monthly active users and sessions

Both vendors publish their free plans in full, and they look very different until you convert them to the same unit. Pendo Free covers 500 monthly active users with product analytics, in-app guides, Pendo-branded roadmaps, Pendo-branded NPS surveys and unlimited web and mobile app keys. It has no session replay, no product discovery, no orchestration and no support.

Heap Free covers up to 10,000 sessions a month with core analytics charts, 6 months of data history, single sign-on and one project. It has no session replay, no heatmaps and no error analysis.

Divide 10,000 sessions by 500 users and you get 20. If your average active user logs 20 sessions a month, the two free plans cover the same audience. If your users come back more often than that, which is typical for a work tool used daily, Pendo Free covers more of them. If they visit a handful of times a month, Heap Free does. Pendo Free also includes NPS and guides, which Heap does not sell at all. Heap Free includes SSO, which Pendo keeps for paid plans.

Above the free tier neither vendor publishes a figure. Pendo sells Base, Core and Ultimate, each marked Request pricing on custom MAU volume, plus Novus, which it labels a free beta with no MAU limit during the beta. Heap sells Growth, which shows an estimate only after you sign up and install the snippet, and Pro and Premier on custom session pricing.

The best public anchors are third-party. Vendr reports a median Pendo contract of $48,500 a year with a range of $18,500 to $151,135 and an average negotiated saving of 12 percent. For Heap it reports a median of $41,220, a range of $13,000 to $154,798 and an average saving of 21 percent. Both Vendr pages print two different deal counts, 276 and 585 for Pendo, 136 and 191 for Heap. The larger number is the purchase count behind the median.

Heap is the only one of the two with a marketplace price. Its AWS Marketplace listing has a single 12-month contract dimension at $100,000 and notes that usage is measured around sessions and pricing is custom. Treat it as a channel list price for a large deployment, not as what a small team pays.

On reported medians, no. The median Pendo contract is about $7,300 a year higher than the median Heap contract, roughly 18 percent more, and Pendo's buyers also negotiate less off the first quote, 12 percent against 21 percent on average.

Two things keep that from being the whole answer. A median mixes company sizes, so it does not tell you what your own volume will cost. And the meters reward different products. A daily-use B2B app with a few thousand users usually looks better on Pendo's MAU meter than on Heap's session meter, because every extra visit is free on Pendo. A broad consumer audience with low repeat use usually looks better on Heap. Get both quotes on your real numbers: monthly active users for Pendo, monthly sessions for Heap, measured over the same month.

Pendo's add-ons depend on the tier. On Base, session replay, product discovery, sentiment (NPS, PMF and CSAT surveys) and orchestration are all add-ons. Core includes session replay and leaves the other three as add-ons. Ultimate includes everything, including Listen and Data Sync. Pendo's AI assistant, Leo, is included on every plan, while Predict and Agent Analytics are sold as AI add-ons, the latter with a free prompt allowance.

One detail matters for small teams. Pendo Free includes Pendo-branded NPS, but Base and Core sell sentiment as an add-on. Moving from Free to Base can mean paying again for a survey capability you already had.

Heap's add-ons sit on the replay side. Session replay, heatmaps and error analysis are add-ons on Pro and Premier and unavailable on Free and Growth. Heap Connect, its warehouse sync, and Activate are add-ons on Pro and included on Premier. Data history past the first year is an add-on on Pro, up to three years. Heap's own page also disagrees with itself on Pro environments: the plan table says 3, the add-on tile says 2 are included.

The two vendors handle overage in opposite ways. Pendo says paid plans keep working when you exceed your MAU allowance, and a representative contacts you about adjusting the contract. On Free, you cannot create new guides, NPS surveys or segments until you upgrade, but existing ones keep running.

Heap says it will not drop or throttle data when you go over your session allowance, but you must upgrade before you can view your data again. Collection continues and analysis stops. For a team that relies on daily dashboards, that is the more disruptive rule, and it is worth asking how much notice you get before the lock applies.

Pendo wins when the job is changing behavior inside the product, not only measuring it. Product and customer success teams that want in-app guides, onboarding flows, NPS and a feedback portal on one MAU-priced contract get more from Pendo, and the MAU meter is kind to apps people use every day.

Heap wins when the job is analysis. A product or growth team that wants to define events after the fact, build funnels and retention charts without engineering help, and sync behavioral data into a warehouse gets more from Heap, and the session meter is kind to large audiences with light repeat use.

If you also need session replay, price it explicitly on both sides. It is an add-on on Pendo Base and on every Heap plan that offers it.

Both tools tell you what users did inside the product. Neither tells you which complaint is costing you customers, because that answer sits in the support tickets, survey comments, feature requests and app reviews that arrive alongside the behavior.

That is the gap UserInsight fills. It pulls usage, feedback, tickets and reviews into one place, groups what customers say into themes, counts the accounts behind each theme and ties it to churn, starting at $119.50 a month billed annually. Many teams run it next to Pendo or Heap rather than instead of them.