Hotjar pricing in 2026: $0 for 200,000 sessions, $49 for 7,000

By Jan Suski. I go deep on every review, checking every number against its source and digging up details other coverage misses, a habit from six years of SEO and link building for tech companies. Bylines at Surfer, Brand24, and Senuto. How the scoring works.

Published 17 October 2026

Hotjar pricing is Contentsquare pricing now. The old address, hotjar.com/pricing-csq, answers with a 302 redirect to contentsquare.com/pricing, and Contentsquare's Hotjar page says new Hotjar accounts can't be created. Checked on 17 October 2026, the Hotjar pricing 2026 rate card has one oddity worth knowing before you pay: the Free plan counts up to 200,000 monthly sessions, while the cheapest paid Growth plan counts 7,000.

That gap tells you what the money buys. Growth's $49 a month pays for 13 months of data access, more replay capture, journey analysis and AI summaries, and the session count is the dial that sets the bill. This report covers every Hotjar plan, what each tier gates, the add-ons, the hidden fees, what users say about the price, and what a realistic budget looks like.

It's written for marketers, product managers, UX designers and UX researchers who were quoted Hotjar's old prices in a 2024 guide and want the actual cost today. The product itself, from heatmaps to the form analytics it retired, is covered in our Hotjar review.

How much does Hotjar cost in 2026

Hotjar costs $0 on the Free plan and $49 a month for the first paid step of Experience Analytics Growth, or $39 a month billed annually. The Pro and Enterprise plans carry no public pricing at all; Contentsquare doesn't publish pricing for either, and both buttons say "Book a demo", a contact sales route by another name. Ask how much does Hotjar cost above 200,000 sessions and the only answer on the page is a calendar link.

The pricing structure splits into multiple products. Contentsquare sells three products on one page (Experience Analytics, Voice of Customer and Product Analytics), sold as separate subscriptions with their own tiers, so the Hotjar pricing model of one bill per feature set survives the merger. A G2 reviewer's complaint about that layout is quoted further down.

The currency depends on where the account sits. Contentsquare's billing FAQ says Growth plans for European customers are billed in euros, the UK included, and everyone else pays US dollars. The figures in the page's own plan data are bare numbers (49, 69, 99 and up), so a European buyer sees €49 where an American sees $49. This report quotes dollars throughout.

Prices apply per account per region, covering every site in it. Contentsquare's FAQ says any plan "will be applied to all your sites within the region", and sessions are shared across projects first come, first served. Three sites on one Growth plan draw from one session pool.

Hotjar plans after the Contentsquare merger

The checkout sells four paid tiers and a free one: Free, Growth, Pro and Enterprise. The Basic plan, Plus plan and Business plan that older guides price still appear inside Hotjar's data-retention article, and the Scale plan older comparisons list is gone from the rate card too. None of those legacy names can be bought today, Plus tier included.

Contentsquare US-dollar list prices from contentsquare.com/pricing, read 17 October 2026. No row uses a Vendr median.

Every row comes from the comparison table on Contentsquare's pricing page. Analytics collection runs at 100% on all four tiers; only the replay share changes as you climb from the lower tiers to the higher tiers.

Free plan

Contentsquare Free is the most generous free plan in this category on raw volume. It counts up to 200,000 monthly sessions, keeps 1 month of data, allows 1 project, and covers the basic features: replays, heatmaps, funnels, error monitoring, performance monitoring and basic surveys.

Its one AI feature is an MCP connection capped at 300 tool calls a month, and integrations with Google Analytics, Jira, HubSpot, Slack and Teams are included. It's free forever, with no credit card required.

The devil's in the details on the limits. Replay capture sits at 5% of sessions, up to 10,000 replays a month, and replays expire after 30 days. Filtering stops at basic filters (new vs returning users, pages viewed, country, device), so the free plan lacks advanced filtering by frustration behaviour, custom variables or user ID. Contentsquare's 11 December 2025 plan announcement raised the free allowance from 20,000 sessions and the replay cap from 5,000.

For small teams that just want heatmaps, session recordings and a feedback widget, this entry level tier is the right call. Hotjar lacks advanced analytics on this tier: no journey analysis, no zone-based heatmaps, no session replay summaries.

Growth plan

Growth is the mid tier most buyers land on, and its price moves with session volumes in 15 published steps. Its key features over Free are 13 months of data access, 3 projects, zone-based heatmaps, engagement zones, journey analysis, impact quantification, side-by-side comparison and live browsing heatmaps. Its AI-powered insights are Sense AI chat, single-session replay summaries, heatmap summaries and a beta Sense Analyst lite.

• 7,000 sessions: $49 monthly or $39 annual
• 15,000 sessions: $99 monthly or $79 annual
• 30,000 sessions: $159 monthly or $127 annual
• 60,000 sessions: $279 monthly or $223 annual
• 100,000 sessions: $409 monthly or $327 annual
• 150,000 sessions: $569 monthly or $455 annual
• 200,000 sessions: $739 monthly or $591 annual
• 240,000 sessions and up: "Let's talk"

These analysis features are what lets a team analyze user behavior across visits. Journey analysis shows where visitors drop off between entry and exit, and filters by rage clicks, frustration score and custom variables arrive here. To analyze conversion funnels with replays attached, Growth is the first tier that links funnels to session replay.

Replay capture is the line to read twice. The comparison table lists Growth as "15% sessions captured (min. 20k)", up from Free's 5%, with replays kept 2 months against 13 months for analytics. A team that wants every session replayed has to move to Pro. That's where Hotjar's pricing can escalate quickly, because Pro has no list price, and budgeting goes back to square one at the demo call.

Pro plan

Pro starts at 1 million monthly sessions and is priced through the sales team on a sales call, as custom pricing. Its more advanced features include event-based, cross-session & cross-device user journey analysis, form analysis, APIs, alerts, retroactive precision filtering, multi-session replay summaries, revenue attribution by channel and AI source, and SAML single sign-on. Priority support and a dedicated customer success manager come with the contract.

Projects need a careful read. The plan card says "Up to 6 projects", and the FAQ says Pro includes 3 with the option to buy 3 more, so the second three are an extra line on the quote. Free users can't access multi-session replay summaries, and Growth users can't either.

Enterprise plan

Enterprise adds unlimited projects, real-time error troubleshooting, synthetic monitoring, dedicated support & SLAs, and replay access from 3 months up to 24. The plan card's tooltip says the dedicated Customer Success Manager is there to help teams reach their "service-level agreements". A/B testing & outcomes analysis and the full Sense Analyst with scheduled insights come included here, where Pro sells them as add-ons.

Pro and enterprise pricing is a custom plan in both cases, with custom session volumes and custom terms, and nothing on the site hints at a floor. Contentsquare says 3,000 enterprise and mid-market brands use the platform; none of their contract values is public.

What the Hotjar free plan still gives legacy accounts

Hotjar's free plan still runs for accounts that already had it. Hotjar's help centre says "Hotjar Free captures 35 sessions per day (sampling) which is around 1,050 sessions per month", with dynamic sampling that lowers capture as traffic rises. On high traffic sites that daily session cap records 35 visits a day, whatever the real total. Contentsquare's Hotjar page adds that the old plan allowed 20 survey responses a month, against 100 on Contentsquare Free.

Retention runs the other way. The same help article says Contentsquare Free keeps replays for 30 days, "compared to 365 days with Hotjar Free". The legacy plan's 365-day retention is close but no cigar at 35 sessions a day. A legacy free user who switches gains 190 times the analytics volume and loses 335 days of replay history. A stitch in time saves nine: export the recordings you need before moving.

The retention article itself is split by an A/B test. Its HTML wraps two opening paragraphs in an experiment container: one says Recordings and Heatmaps "retain data for 365 days from the date of capture" and "This applies to all accounts and plans"; the other says retention periods "differ based on your plan".

The table under both reads Basic 1 month, Plus 6 months, Business 12 months. Which version a visitor reads depends on the bucket they land in, so data retention length is a clause to check in your own contract.

Voice of Customer pricing for surveys and feedback

Surveys sit in their own product with its own bill. Voice of Customer Free gives 100 responses a month, three feedback widgets and surveys, unlimited questions per survey, and 1 month of response access. The response limit is the wall most small sites hit first.

Growth starts at $99 a month, or $79 billed annually, for 500 responses, and scales to 100,000. It adds unlimited surveys and feedback widgets, unlimited response access, embedded surveys, advanced feedback targeting, custom colours and branding, concept testing with images, and AI-automated survey analysis. That's the feedback management layer teams use to collect feedback next to session data. Pro, priced by quote, raises responses to unlimited and adds custom CSS.

When the response limit is reached, Contentsquare says surveys and widgets "will no longer be sent" until the monthly reset. No overage is billed; feedback collection stops. Our survey software pricing report sets these rates against 13 dedicated survey tools.

Add-ons priced outside the platform fee

The plan fee is the floor on Pro. These items are listed as optional add-ons on Pro, each a separate line on the quote:

• A/B testing & outcomes analysis
• Sense Analyst, the full AI analyst
• Conversation Intelligence (an add-on on Enterprise too)
• Data Connect, for sending data to other tools
• User view and user-level session replay summaries
• Merchandising, acquisition analysis, lifetime metrics and segments
• Error analysis, error summaries, real user monitoring and synthetic monitoring

Product Analytics, the third product, carries no published price on any of its paid tiers or its Free tier. Its Free tier counts up to 10,000 sessions and keeps 7 months of data. Implementation is self-service on Free and Growth, usually by pasting the tracking script or loading it through Google Tag Manager; Pro and Enterprise get CS onboarding, with professional services and technical account management sold as packages.

Hidden costs: session limits, sampling and retention

Hotjar charges based on individual sessions, and Contentsquare defines one as a visitor's full visit, ending after 30 minutes of inactivity. A visitor who comes back after lunch counts twice, and a team that cuts corners on the session tier loses the rest of the month's heatmaps. The Growth session limit is hard: once you reach it, you "won't get any new heatmap or funnel data until next month's reset date". Contentsquare's fix is to upgrade by adding more sessions.

Four more costs sit in the small print:

• The 20% annual pricing discount applies only when annual payment is set up in-app with a credit card or PayPal; Contentsquare says it "is not applicable when paying by invoice".
• Cancel Growth after 30 days and you're charged to the end of the current billing cycle, a full year on an annual contract.
• Growth replays are kept 2 months even though analytics are kept 13, so a year-old replay is gone on every self-serve plan.
• Deleting recordings destroys the heatmaps built from them, and recordings aren't backed up, per the help documentation our review traced.

Seats are the one thing not rationed. Contentsquare's own blog bills the free plan as having "unlimited users", and no plan card lists a seat price, so all plans include unlimited team seats in practice, unlimited team members on Free and Enterprise alike. Projects are what gets rationed: 1, 3, up to 6, then unlimited.

What users say about Hotjar pricing

Reviewers call a spade a spade about two moments: the 2020 pricing change and the post-acquisition tiers. A Geschäftsführer in marketing and advertising wrote on Capterra on 30 November 2020, after legacy accounts were moved to new prices: "What does this mean, a minimum price increase of 400%." The same reviewer added "No more customer support similarly to how Facebook does it."

A senior product manager in financial services, reviewing on Capterra, put the acquisition in one line:

"After the product was acquired the price was instantly increased while the pricing tiers became extremely hard to follow"

Capterra review, Senior Product Manager, Financial Services, 25 October 2024

A marketing technologist in education management described the renewal side on 15 May 2026: "We were grandfathered in to a lower price point that eventually expired". The same review continued:

"We were disappointed when their pricing model changed to require more investment to cover the same number of domains."

Capterra review, Marketing Technologist, Education Management, 15 May 2026

The entry price draws its own complaint. A cofounder and CTO in the automotive sector wrote on 2 May 2025 that the "free version is very limited, and first paid tier is already very expensive." That review predates the free plan's jump to 200,000 sessions by seven months.

On G2, listings read on 17 October 2026 carried two more. Samir M., at a business of 50 or fewer employees, objected to modular pricing: "that there is no holistic pricing there, you have to pay for each feature". Gabor F., at a mid-market firm of 51 to 1,000 employees, wrote about caps:

"The session recording limits can be restrictive, and once you hit your quota, visibility drops unless you upgrade."

G2 review, Gabor F., Mid-Market, read 17 October 2026

A head of marketing in IT services took the other side on Capterra in March 2025, writing that "pricing is very reasonable."

How to cut the Hotjar bill

The bundle discounts stack, by the book. The annual discount takes 20% off before VAT, and buying both a paid Experience Analytics Growth plan and a paid Voice of Customer Growth plan takes a further 10% off the cheaper of the two, applied on top. A team on the 30,000-session annual plan ($127) plus annual Voice of Customer ($79) pays $127 + $71.10, or $198.10 a month, $2,377.20 a year, against $258 a month at full price on monthly billing.

Four other levers cost nothing:

1. Run the 15-day free trial of Growth first; Contentsquare says it needs no payment details and doesn't auto-charge.
2. Use the 30-day money-back guarantee on new Growth accounts to cut your losses if the first month disappoints.
3. Pay monthly until session volume settles; Growth needs no annual contract and cancels down to Free.
4. Size the session tier from your own analytics; the FAQ tells buyers to compare against their existing analytics before choosing.

A buyer under 1 million monthly sessions has no reason to book the Pro demo, since Pro's session floor sits above every published Growth step: cross that bridge when you come to it. The 2026 reviewer above shows what grandfathered pricing is worth at renewal, so plan for the list price.

Hotjar against its alternatives

Hotjar's free tier is hard to beat on analytics volume, and Microsoft Clarity is the one rival that beats it on price. Microsoft's Clarity FAQ says "Clarity is a free service forever" with no traffic limits, records up to 100,000 sessions per project per day, and keeps recordings 30 days. It's a free tool for basic user behavior analytics and sells no paid tier at all, so for a pure heatmap tool it's the best Hotjar alternative on cost.

Every price is the vendor's own published list price, read 17 October 2026. No row uses a Vendr median.

LiveSession's pricing page describes its cap as monthly, "The number of sessions which can be recorded every month", with no daily session caps of the kind legacy Hotjar Free imposed.

Formbricks publishes every price except Enterprise, a transparent pricing contrast with Hotjar's custom quotes above 200,000 sessions. UXtweak sells usability studies and user testing with a 1-month results window on its free Starter plan.

Userpilot calls itself "a product growth and analytics platform", pairing analytics with in-app engagement at a price 6 times Growth's entry step.

Google Analytics is the other free comparison, and it answers a different question: how many people came and from where. Our Google Analytics vs Hotjar comparison covers that split, the Hotjar vs Amplitude and Hotjar vs Mixpanel pages cover product analytics, and the web analytics pricing report prices 17 tools side by side.

That's the full comparison for anyone evaluating Hotjar against other tools, and our customer analytics tools rankings place Hotjar in the wider field.

What to budget for Hotjar

Budget planning starts from your monthly sessions, read from your current analytics. Three annual-billing scenarios from the published ladder:

• A small site at 7,000 sessions: $39 a month, $468 a year.
• A mid-size site at 100,000 sessions: $327 a month, $3,924 a year.
• A large site at 200,000 sessions: $591 a month, $7,092 a year, still below Pro's 1-million-session floor.

The large-site line is where Hotjar starts to cost an arm and a leg for a two-person team, at 15 times the small-site bill.

Add Voice of Customer if you need more than 100 survey responses a month, at $79 a month annual before the 10% bundle cut. A site that only needs heatmaps and session recordings and can live with 5% replay capture and 30-day retention should bite the bullet on those limits and stay on Free; it already counts 200,000 sessions at $0.

Above 240,000 sessions the rate card stops and the quote starts. Large organizations should treat any figure for those volumes as a negotiation, and ask for the retention clause, the replay capture rate and the project count in writing.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Hotjar cost per month?

Hotjar costs $0 on Free and $49 a month on Growth at 7,000 sessions, or $39 a month billed annually. Growth tops out at $739 a month for 200,000 sessions. Pro and Enterprise are quoted only.

Is Hotjar free to use?

Yes. New users sign up for Contentsquare Free, which counts 200,000 monthly sessions, captures 5% as replays up to 10,000, and keeps data 1 month. Legacy Hotjar Free accounts keep 35 sessions a day.

What happened to Hotjar?

Contentsquare acquired Hotjar, and Contentsquare's Hotjar page says the two platforms "have merged into a single, more powerful experience intelligence platform." Our review dates the merger of Hotjar Ltd into the Contentsquare Group to 1 July 2025. Existing users log in with the same credentials; new Hotjar accounts can't be created.

What is Hotjar and how does it work?

Hotjar is a website analytics and user research platform. A tracking script records clicks, scrolls and mouse movement, which become heatmaps and session recordings showing how users interact with a page and where users click, while surveys and feedback widgets collect user feedback. Hotjar helps teams spot user frustrations such as rage clicks and drop offs.

What is Hotjar used for?

Teams use Hotjar for qualitative research on live pages: watching session recordings, reading heatmaps, and asking visitors questions through on-page surveys. It shows the behavior behind numbers a traffic tool reports.

Is Hotjar better than Google Analytics?

They measure different things. Google Analytics counts visitors and sources; Hotjar shows user behavior on the page. Both have free tiers, so running both costs $0 below 200,000 monthly sessions.

Is Hotjar.com legit?

Yes. Hotjar.com is the original domain of the Hotjar product, now owned by Contentsquare, and its pricing URL redirects to contentsquare.com.

Is Hotjar any good?

For behavior analytics on a budget, the free tier's 200,000 sessions make it a strong pick for startups and growing teams. The weak points are 2-month replay retention on Growth and no list price above 200,000 sessions.

Bottom line

Hotjar's price list is Contentsquare's, and the headline is a free plan counting 200,000 sessions against a $49 Growth plan counting 7,000. At the low end, paying buys 13 months of history, a 15% replay share, journeys, zone-based heatmaps and AI summaries for deeper insights.

A small site can stay on Free at $0, or on the 7,000-session Growth step for $468 a year. The bill gets hard to predict past 200,000 sessions or the moment you want full replay capture, because that's Pro, and Pro has no number on it.