Hotjar Pricing 2026: What Changed After Contentsquare

Hotjar does not have a pricing page any more. Ask for one and you land somewhere else: hotjar.com/pricing returns a permanent redirect to contentsquare.com/pricing, checked on 16 September 2026. Hotjar merged into the Contentsquare group in July 2025, and the three-product split that everyone knew, Observe, Ask and Engage, has been replaced by Contentsquare product lines with their own tiers, their own meters and their own bills. Most of the pricing guides you will find still describe the old plans. This one describes what is actually on the page today, and what it means if you are paying for Hotjar or about to.

The short answer: Contentsquare for UX research, Arktis for stores

If your question is where visitors hesitate on a page, the product formerly known as Hotjar is still good at answering it, and the free tier is now unusually generous. If your question is which source, campaign and ad platform your orders came from, neither Hotjar nor Contentsquare was built for it, and Arktis is the clear winner. Arktis captures the click identifiers, matches orders back to a visit and, where that visit carried an ad click identifier, to the ad platform, counts conversions per UTM campaign and per ad platform next to the Meta spend it syncs per campaign, and lets you watch the session recordings of visitors who converted, filtered by source. It is priced on tracked visitors at $49, $149 and $349 a month, published, with a 7-day free trial on Growth.

Key takeaways

Hotjar is now sold as Contentsquare. Observe became Experience Analytics, Ask became Voice of Customer, and a third line called Product Analytics was added. Experience Analytics has a free tier covering up to 200,000 monthly sessions, with replays captured for 5 percent of sessions up to 10,000, and one month of retention, then 15 Growth bands, as shown on 16 October 2026, that start at 49 a month for 7,000 sessions and run to 739 a month for 200,000 sessions, with replays stated as 15 percent of sessions with a minimum of 20,000. Voice of Customer is free for 100 responses a month, and on 26 October 2026 its Growth plan was listed from 79 a month. Product Analytics has a free tier and is quote-only on its paid tiers. Annual billing takes 20 percent off, there is a further 10 percent discount if you buy two Growth plans, and pricing is per account per geographic region rather than per site, which is a real change from Hotjar's site-level billing. Going over your allowance no longer means sampled data; collection stops until the cycle resets. If you already pay for Hotjar, Contentsquare's help centre says it has been moving Hotjar accounts onto its Growth plan in phases since 26 August 2026 unless the account owner opts out, with Hotjar left read-only for 12 months and the price liable to change.

What replaced Observe, Ask and Engage

Contentsquare's own support documentation puts the merger date at 1 July 2025 and maps the products directly. Observe, the heatmaps and session replay product, is now Experience Analytics. Ask, the surveys and feedback product, is now Voice of Customer. Product Analytics is new and has no Hotjar predecessor.

Engage, the user-interview recruiting product, has no tier of its own on the current page. The vendor's own pricing configuration is labelled as an Engage end-of-life update, which is strong evidence that it has been folded away rather than repriced, though no public sunset notice appears to exist. If you still rely on Engage, ask your account manager in writing what happens at renewal.

The billing change that catches teams out is not the renaming. Hotjar billed per site. Contentsquare bills per account per geographic region, stated plainly in its FAQ: the prices cover your entire account within one region no matter how many sites you have. For an agency or a brand with several storefronts, that is a straightforward improvement. For a single-site business, it is neutral.

Existing Hotjar customers do not have to do anything to be moved, which is the point to watch. Contentsquare's help centre, as shown on 26 October 2026, says it began contacting Hotjar customers in phases from 26 August 2026. Each account gets 30 days with both products running on the existing Hotjar tracking code; unless the Account Owner opts out before the deadline in the notification email, the account then switches to a Contentsquare Growth plan, Hotjar stops collecting and becomes read-only for 12 months, and the Hotjar account and its data are deleted after that. Historical heatmap and recording data stays in Hotjar rather than moving across, while surveys and feedback data do move. Contentsquare says your price may change, based on your observed traffic and the Growth plan you are moved to, with any new price applying from your next renewal date, and that its tag does not inherit your existing cookie banner settings, so its cookies have to be added to your consent tool by hand.

Experience Analytics prices, band by band

Growth is sold in session bands. On 16 October 2026 the selector listed 15 priced steps from 7,000 to 200,000 monthly sessions, more than the seven our September table showed, plus a 240,000-and-up option that asks you to talk to sales. The prices below are read from that page, monthly and annual, viewed from Sweden and shown in euros. European customers are billed in euros and everyone else in dollars, with the same numerals either way.

Two things in that table deserve attention. The first is the replay rule. The page no longer lists a replay count per band; its comparison table states Growth replay capture as "15% sessions captured (min. 20k)", against 5 percent with a maximum of 10,000 on Free. Contentsquare's help centre, in an article last edited on 21 October 2026, now states the rule outright: on Growth, 100 percent of sessions are captured for replay up to 20,000 monthly sessions, and 15 percent above that, with a minimum of 20,000. So every session up to 20,000 a month can be replayed, and the 15 percent only adds more above about 133,000 sessions. At 100,000 sessions you are still getting 20,000 replays, so the marginal money buys analytics coverage rather than more recordings.

The second is the free tier's session allowance, which is larger than several paid bands. The free plan lists up to 200,000 monthly sessions, with replays captured for 5 percent of sessions up to 10,000, and one month of retention, while the entry Growth band is 7,000 sessions. What Growth buys at the bottom is not volume but 13 months of analytics data, two months of replays and the paid feature set. If your use is light and you can live with a month of history, the free plan is worth testing before any upgrade, and worth confirming against your own session counts.

Voice of Customer prices

Surveys are billed separately on monthly responses. Free covers 100 responses a month with one month of retention. On 26 October 2026 the pricing page no longer showed prices by response band: it listed Growth only as from 79 a month, the figure shown beside yearly pricing, for 500 to 100,000 monthly responses. Our earlier readings, most recently on 16 October 2026, listed 99 a month for 500 responses on monthly billing, then 129 for 1,000, 249 for 2,500, 349 for 5,000, 529 for 10,000, 949 for 50,000 and 1,479 for 100,000; treat those as a guide and confirm the price for your volume at checkout. Response retention on Growth is unlimited. Pro is quoted; up to 16 October 2026 the page said it started from 6,000 yearly responses.

Product Analytics, the third line, is quote-only on its paid tiers, and its free tier covers up to 10,000 monthly sessions with seven months of data access. That is unusual: you have to talk to sales to activate a free plan.

What happens when you go over

This is where the old advice about Hotjar is now wrong, and getting it right matters. Legacy Hotjar sampled: past your allowance it kept collecting a fraction of sessions, which is the source of years of complaints about unreliable data during traffic spikes. The current Contentsquare plans do not sample. The support documentation states that when the session allowance is reached, new data is not collected for the remainder of the billing cycle, and for Voice of Customer the surveys and widgets stop being served.

That is a cleaner deal, but it fails in a different direction. Data you did not collect cannot be recovered, so a campaign that triples your traffic mid-month can leave you blind for the rest of it. Sessions are collected at 100 percent on every tier; on the free plan, replays are captured for only 5 percent of them, up to 10,000.

Terms worth knowing before you buy

Growth has a 15-day free trial with no card required and no annual contract, and there is a 30-day money-back guarantee. The 20 percent annual discount is only available when paying by card or PayPal in the product, not on invoice, which is easy to miss if procurement handles the payment. Buying two Growth plans, for example Experience Analytics and Voice of Customer, takes a further 10 percent off the cheaper one. AI and MCP usage is quota'd separately, at 300 tool calls a month on free and 36,000 a year on Growth.

What reviewers say

Capterra rates Hotjar 4.6 out of 5 across 545 reviews, which is the most reliable review data available since G2 blocks automated access and lists the product under two different entries. G2 shows 4.3 out of 5.

The complaints fall into three groups. Sampling and caps dominate the older reviews, and as explained above that behaviour has changed, so treat those reviews as historical. Post-merger pricing fragmentation is the current theme: one product on one bill became three lines with three meters, and a team that used heatmaps and surveys together now buys two plans. The third is analytical depth, which has always been Hotjar's limit rather than a new problem: form analytics was retired in 2020 and never returned, funnels are capped at ten steps and scoped to a session, segmentation is thin, and there is no native mobile app support.

Where Arktis fits, and where it does not

Arktis is the product we build, so weigh this accordingly. It does not do surveys, it does not do heatmaps, and it is not a user-research tool. If your job is to watch where people hesitate on a redesigned product page, Experience Analytics does that better.

What Arktis does is join the recording to the revenue. It captures fbclid and gclid when a visitor lands, follows them across sessions, receives Shopify orders by webhook from the day the store connects and matches Stripe customers, matching each order back to a visit and, where that visit carried an ad click identifier, to the ad platform, and counts conversions per UTM campaign and per ad platform from matched orders, next to the Meta spend it syncs per campaign, comparing five switchable attribution models per ad platform. You can watch the recordings of visitors who converted, filtered by source, gated behind explicit consent, with capture buffered in the browser and discarded unless consent is given, and data hosted in the EU, according to its privacy policy. Pricing is flat and published: $49 up to 50,000 monthly tracked visitors, $149 up to 250,000 with recordings, $349 unlimited.

For a store weighing the two, the honest split is that Contentsquare tells you what happened on the page and Arktis tells you what the visit was worth and which source and campaign it came from. Our Arktis vs Hotjar comparison goes feature by feature, and Hotjar alternatives covers the wider field. To try it on your own traffic, start the 7-day Growth trial, or see the pricing page.

Sources

hotjar.com/pricing, confirmed on 16 September 2026 to redirect permanently to the Contentsquare pricing page

Contentsquare pricing page, accessed 16 September 2026, 16 October 2026 and 26 October 2026 from Sweden, shown in euros; session bands, replay capture, response bands and free-tier limits read from the live page

Contentsquare support: Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare, plans and pricing

Contentsquare support: Free and Growth plans, allowance and over-limit behaviour

Contentsquare help centre: Sessions, replays and plan limits, Growth replay capture of 100 percent up to 20,000 monthly sessions and 15 percent above, last edited 21 October 2026, accessed 26 October 2026

Contentsquare help centre: Moving from Hotjar to Contentsquare? FAQs, phased account moves from 26 August 2026, the opt-out, 12 months read-only, data and price changes, accessed 26 October 2026

Capterra: Hotjar reviews, 4.6 out of 5 from 545 reviews

Quackback: Hotjar pricing, independent 2026 guide corroborating the current bands