Arktis vs Heap: Product Analytics or E-Commerce Attribution?

Heap built its reputation on autocapture, the promise that you never have to write another track() call because Heap just records every click, tap, and pageview automatically. That makes it a favorite among SaaS product teams trying to understand feature adoption. But e-commerce brands asking "which ad campaign actually drove this sale" or "what's my real customer acquisition cost" run into a different problem: Heap wasn't built to answer that question, and its pricing since the 2023 Contentsquare acquisition has gotten harder to predict. This Heap comparison breaks down where each tool actually fits.

The Quick Verdict

Heap is a genuinely strong product analytics platform if you're a SaaS company with a product team that needs to understand in-app behavior without engineering tickets for every new event. Its retroactive event definition, where you can create a new "event" from historical raw data instead of waiting for future data to accumulate, is a real technical advantage that few competitors match. But Heap is not built for e-commerce attribution, its pricing is quote-based and has drawn criticism for scaling unpredictably with session volume, and since folding into Contentsquare it now sits alongside separate logins for session replay and heatmaps rather than one unified product. Arktis is narrower by design: it exists to connect ad spend, on-site behavior, and revenue for e-commerce brands, with transparent published pricing and AI agents that act on the data rather than just visualize it.

Feature Comparison

Data Capture Philosophy

Heap's core pitch is autocapture: install one snippet and it retroactively captures every user interaction, letting teams define events after the fact rather than instrumenting tracking code in advance. This is powerful for exploratory product analytics, but reviewers have noted the tradeoff, Heap was designed around autocapture first and precise event tracking second, which means segmentation and funnel analysis can require more cleanup work than tools built for intentional tracking from the start.

Arktis takes a more targeted approach: it tracks pageviews, sessions, and custom events automatically through its tracker script, but its focus is the full customer journey, from the ad click that brought a visitor in, through the pages they browsed, to the purchase they completed. Rather than capturing everything and sorting it out later, Arktis structures data around attribution tracking from day one, so campaign-to-conversion reporting works without manual event mapping.

Privacy and Compliance

Heap treats behavioral interaction data tied to a session identifier as personal data under GDPR, and offers tools like Heap Redact to prevent sensitive form fields and page content from being captured, plus a Data Processing Addendum with Standard Contractual Clauses for EU data transfers. That said, because autocapture records everything by default, teams need to actively configure suppression rules and consent gating, otherwise the platform can capture form fields and personal data from visitors who haven't consented.

Arktis is privacy-first by default rather than by configuration: consent is checked before recording starts, and session data collection respects visitor consent status at the point of capture rather than relying on teams to retroactively redact fields. For e-commerce brands operating in the EU, that consent-first architecture reduces the operational burden of staying compliant as traffic scales.

E-Commerce Attribution

Attribution is not Heap's focus. It's a product analytics platform for understanding in-app and on-site behavior, not a system for connecting ad platform spend to revenue. Teams that want to know their true CAC or ROAS by campaign generally need to pipe Heap data into a separate business intelligence tool or data warehouse, since Heap itself doesn't calculate multi-touch attribution or match ad clicks to conversions natively.

Attribution is the reason Arktis exists. The product page covers how Arktis connects Facebook and Google ad clicks (via fbclid and gclid) directly to on-site sessions and Shopify orders, calculating first-touch and last-touch attribution, CAC, and ROAS without exporting data anywhere else. For a merchant running paid acquisition, that's the difference between a dashboard that shows behavior and one that shows which campaigns are actually profitable.

Session Recordings

Session replay exists in the Heap and Contentsquare ecosystem, but it's positioned as an add-on capability layered onto the Pro and Premier tiers rather than a core included feature, and some customers report needing to log into Heap, Contentsquare, and Hotjar separately to access the full suite of behavioral tools post-acquisition.

Arktis includes session recordings as a native part of the Growth plan, built on rrweb, with recordings stored alongside the same session and attribution data rather than in a separate product. There's no additional login or separate contract needed to watch how a visitor from a specific ad campaign actually navigated the checkout flow.

Pricing Transparency

Heap does not publish list prices for its paid tiers. Pricing is quote-based and scales with monthly tracked users, data volume, and contract length, which means getting an actual number requires a sales conversation, and third-party pricing trackers report entry paid pricing starting around $3,600 per year with costs climbing steeply as session volume grows, sometimes faster than teams can extract additional value from the extra data.

Arktis publishes every tier on its pricing page with no sales call required. That transparency matters most for smaller e-commerce brands who need to budget precisely rather than negotiate.

AI and Automation

Heap's AI layer, Sense, is shared across the Contentsquare and Heap product suite and functions primarily as an AI assistant for surfacing insights and generating summaries from behavioral data, available starting on the Growth tier.

Arktis goes a step further with AI agents that don't just summarize data, they act on it: monitoring transactions, flagging anomalies, and surfacing specific customer journeys worth investigating rather than requiring a human to dig through dashboards to find them.

Pricing Comparison

Heap

Heap offers a free plan supporting up to 10,000 monthly sessions with core analytics charts, unlimited enrichment sources, and six months of data history. Beyond that, pricing moves to three paid tiers, Growth, Pro, and Premier, none of which are published publicly. Growth adds unlimited users and reports, CSV exports, chart customization, and twelve months of data history, with third-party pricing aggregators citing entry costs starting around $3,600 per year (roughly $300/month) and scaling from there based on monthly tracked users and negotiated contract terms. Session replay is a paid add-on rather than included, and Pro and Premier pricing requires contacting sales.

Arktis

Arktis publishes four tiers with no sales calls required. The free tier covers up to 1,000 sessions per month, forever, with core analytics included. Iceberg Starter is $49/month for up to 50,000 monthly tracked users. Growth is $149/month for up to 250,000 monthly tracked users and adds session recordings and custom attribution. Scale is $349/month for unlimited users, raw data export, and full API access. A brand doing $2M in annual e-commerce revenue can typically see their exact cost before ever talking to sales, something Heap's quote-based model doesn't offer.

When to Choose Heap

Heap makes sense for SaaS and B2B product teams who need to understand in-app feature adoption without waiting on engineering to instrument every event, who value the ability to retroactively define new events from historical data rather than only going forward, who are already inside the Contentsquare ecosystem for digital experience analytics, who have budget and procurement processes built for enterprise contract negotiation rather than published pricing, and who don't need native ad platform attribution baked into their analytics stack.

When to Choose Arktis

Arktis is the better fit for e-commerce brands running paid acquisition on Facebook or Google who need to know true CAC and ROAS by campaign, teams that want session recordings and attribution data in one product rather than stitched together across separate logins, founders who need to see exact pricing upfront rather than negotiate a contract, brands that want privacy-first consent handling built into the tracker by default, and merchants who want AI agents that flag issues and opportunities automatically rather than a dashboard that only shows numbers when someone goes looking.

The Bottom Line

Heap and Arktis solve different problems for different teams. Heap is a mature product analytics platform built for understanding how people use a SaaS product, with genuine strengths in autocapture flexibility and retroactive analysis, but it asks e-commerce brands to bolt on separate tools for attribution and to negotiate pricing rather than see it upfront.

Arktis was built specifically for the e-commerce use case: connecting the ad click to the session to the sale, with published pricing and session recordings included rather than upsold. If the question keeping you up at night is "which campaign is actually making me money," that's the tool built to answer it.

Sources

1. Heap, "Pricing" (2026)

2. Vendr, "Heap Software Pricing & Plans 2026" (2026)

3. Mixpanel, "The 6 best Heap alternatives for product teams outgrowing autocapture" (2026)

4. Contentsquare, "Contentsquare Completes Acquisition of Heap" (2023)

5. Lokker, "Heap Analytics Privacy Risk, Consent, and GDPR CCPA/CPRA Compliance" (2026)

6. Heap, "Autocapture" (2026)