Hotjar alternative: what to use now it is Contentsquare

Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare. That is the single most important fact for anyone evaluating it in 2026, and it is the reason a lot of people are reading a page like this.

What actually changed

Contentsquare acquired Hotjar in 2021 and, for years, very little visibly changed. That stopped. The legal merger of Hotjar Ltd into Contentsquare Group completed on 1 July 2025, the platforms have converged into one experience, and new sign-ups now create Contentsquare accounts rather than Hotjar ones. Existing customers are being moved from legacy Hotjar pricing onto Contentsquare’s unified tiers through 2026.

Hotjar’s own messaging is reassuring — the core capabilities “aren’t going anywhere”, and heatmaps, recordings, surveys and feedback all continue. That is probably true. What nobody has committed to publicly is whether the legacy Hotjar plans get repriced, repackaged, or retired, and on what timeline.

If you are on a legacy plan you like, the honest advice is not “switch now”. It is: find out which pricing framework your account is on, and what happens when it migrates. Ask Contentsquare directly. Then decide.

But if you were going to re-evaluate anyway, this is the moment, and that is why alternative searches for Hotjar are up.

The daily cap, which is the real cost

This is the part that catches developers out, and it is worth understanding before you compare prices.

Hotjar limits sessions per day, not per month. Plus is 100 sessions a day. Business is 500 a day.

A monthly cap is a budget. A daily cap is a ceiling on your worst — or best — day. The moment you get written up somewhere, launch on Product Hunt, or send a campaign, you blow through the daily limit before lunch and record nothing for the rest of the day.

Those are precisely the sessions you most want. Traffic spikes are when new users hit your product cold, and when your onboarding breaks in ways your regulars never see. A daily cap is structurally guaranteed to miss them.

UserTapes caps monthly: 15,000/mo on the $29 Indie Deck. A spike day draws from the same monthly pool as a quiet one, which is what you want.

Compare like for like. Roughly 15,000 sessions a month costs about $80/mo on Hotjar Business against $29/mo on Indie Deck — and the Hotjar version still refuses to record after 500 in any one day.

Where Hotjar is genuinely better

This is not a close call in Hotjar’s favour on several dimensions, and pretending otherwise would be silly:

Heatmaps, surveys and feedback widgets. UserTapes has none of these. If your job involves asking visitors questions on the page or showing a client a scroll map, Hotjar does that and we do not. This alone settles it for a lot of teams.

Non-technical usability. Hotjar is the easiest tool in this category to hand to a marketer. That is a real engineering achievement and it is why it has 1.3 million-plus installs.

Ubiquity. Every agency knows it. Every contractor has used it. There is no onboarding cost for a team that has seen it before.

If you are a CRO or marketing team, Hotjar — or Contentsquare now — is probably still your tool. This page is not really for you.

Where UserTapes is a better fit

For developers, the pitch is narrow and specific:

Monthly limits, not daily. Covered above. It is the biggest practical difference.

Built for debugging, not conversion. Every session comes with a text transcript: clicks, navigations, JS errors, failed requests with status codes, rage clicks, dead clicks. You read what happened instead of scrubbing a video looking for it.

Your agent can read it. UserTapes exposes sessions over MCP, so Claude Code or Cursor can query them next to your codebase. Ask “did anyone hit an error on checkout this week”, get an answer citing specific sessions, and let the agent go fix the cause. Hotjar has no equivalent.

Cookieless, masked at source. No cookies, no fingerprinting, and every input masked in the browser before transmission. Worth reading the GDPR piece for what that does and does not get you.

Migrating

Recordings do not transfer — not to us, not to anyone. Run both in parallel for a couple of weeks, then let your Hotjar retention age out before you cancel.

If you use heatmaps or surveys, check what you would lose before switching. Plenty of teams end up keeping Hotjar for the marketing side and adding UserTapes for engineering, which is a perfectly sensible outcome and not one we will argue you out of.

UserTapes records 100 sessions free, no card, no expiry.