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into the Contentsquare group in July 2025, and the three-product split that everyone knew, Observe, Ask and Engage, has been replaced by Contentsquare product lines with their own tiers, their own meters and their own bills.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 ad produced the order, neither Hotjar nor Contentsquare was built for it, and Arktis is the clear winner. Arktis captures the click identifiers, matches the order back to the campaign, reports customer acquisition cost and return on ad spend, and plays the session recording of the buyer next to that number. 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 10,000 replays and one month of retention, then Growth bands that start at 49 a month for 7,000 sessions with 7,000 replays and run to 739 a month for 200,000 sessions. Voice of Customer is free for 100 responses a month and starts at 99 for 500. Product Analytics is quote-only at every tier, including its free one. 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.

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.

Experience Analytics prices, band by band

Growth is sold in session bands. The prices below are the monthly figures from the live pricing page, with the annual column at the stated 20 percent discount. 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 cap. Replays track sessions one for one up to 20,000, then flatten. At 100,000 sessions you are still getting 20,000 replays, so the marginal money buys analytics coverage rather than more recordings. No competitor guide currently mentions this.

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 10,000 replays 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 retention 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. Growth starts at 99 a month for 500 responses, or 79 on annual 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. Response retention on Growth is unlimited. Pro is quoted and starts from 6,000 yearly responses.

Product Analytics, the third line, is quote-only on every tier including the free one, which 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. The collection rate is 100 percent on every tier including free, so the only lever is the band you are on.

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, with ease of use at 4.6 and value for money at 4.4, 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, imports Shopify orders and matches Stripe customers, and reports customer acquisition cost and return on ad spend per campaign under five switchable attribution models. The recording of the attributed buyer sits next to that number, gated behind explicit consent, with capture buffered in the browser and discarded unless consent is given, and data in the EU by default. 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 ad paid for it. 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; session bands, 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

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

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