Hotjar Review 2026: The Free Plan, the Sampling Problem, and the Contentsquare Question
Summarize with AI
What happened to the pricing page
Start here, because it is the first thing you will hit and no other review on this search result explains it.
As of August 2026, hotjar.com/pricing returns a 308 permanent redirect to contentsquare.com/pricing. Contentsquare completed its acquisition of Hotjar in July 2025 and is migrating the product onto a unified platform with its own tiers. Existing Hotjar customers are being moved across gradually through 2026.
Practically, this means three things:
- Published Hotjar prices from review sites are drifting out of sync with what you will actually be quoted.
- The old Observe / Ask / Engage product split is being folded into Contentsquare packaging.
- If you are evaluating for a new install, price it at checkout rather than from any article, including this one.
The figures below are the best current picture from the plans still being sold under Hotjar branding. Treat them as a range, verify before you buy.
| Plan | Approx. price | Daily sessions | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | Free | 35 | Heatmaps and recordings, no time limit |
| Plus | ~€32/mo | 100 | Adds filters and more retention |
| Business | from ~$80/mo | 500 | Adds funnels, integrations, more segmentation |
| Scale | ~€171/mo and up | 500+ | Custom above this tier |
The number that actually constrains you
Daily sessions, not features.
Thirty-five sessions a day on the free plan is roughly 1,050 a month. If your site does 2,000 visits a month, Hotjar sees about half of them, and the half it sees is whichever ones happened to arrive before the daily cap was hit.
This is the part that catches people. When you exceed your allowance, Hotjar does not stop and it does not queue. It samples. You keep getting data, it just stops being all of your data, and nothing in the interface shouts about it.
For heatmaps this is mostly fine, because a heatmap is an aggregate and a good sample still shows you the pattern. For session recordings it is worse, because the one visit you needed to watch, the person who abandoned the form, is probably not in the sample. And for funnel analysis it is genuinely misleading.
Check your daily session count in GA4 before you pick a tier. Our guide on how to track website traffic shows where that number lives.
Mobile versus desktop, which is the whole point
Hotjar splits heatmaps by device type automatically: desktop, tablet, mobile. Click through each and the preview redraws to what that device actually saw.
This sounds like a minor convenience feature. It is the most valuable thing in the product, and here is why.
Mobile is now the majority of web traffic, running around 55% to 64% depending on whose measurement you use and what sector you are in. For a local service business it is usually higher. So a blended heatmap, one that mixes desktop and mobile clicks into a single image, is describing a page that no single visitor ever saw.
The failures it hides are specific and common:
- A call-to-action that sits comfortably above the fold on a 1440px monitor and lands below three stacked blocks on a phone.
- A navigation menu that gets 30% of desktop clicks and is collapsed into a hamburger nobody opens on mobile.
- A phone number in the header that is the single most-tapped element on mobile and gets almost no desktop clicks at all, which is the signal that your mobile visitors want to call and your desktop visitors want to read.
That last one changes what you build. It is the difference between designing one page and designing the page each half of your audience is actually looking at, and it is why we pull device-split behavior before any web design decision. The strategy side of that same split is in mobile marketing for local businesses.
If you look at one thing in Hotjar, look at your top landing page on mobile only.
What else it does well
The free tier is genuinely useful. Not a crippled trial. You get heatmaps and recordings with no expiry, which is more than most competitors give away.
Surveys and feedback widgets. Hotjar will ask your visitors questions on the page. A one-question exit poll on a page that is not converting will often tell you in a week what a month of heatmap analysis would not, because people will just say what confused them.
Setup is a script tag. If you have installed Google Analytics you can install this.
What it does badly
The Trustpilot problem. Hotjar sits around 2.5 on Trustpilot, which is low, and the complaints cluster on billing and support rather than the product. Read a page of those reviews before you put a card in.
No native mobile app support. Websites and progressive web apps only.
Sampling is under-communicated. Covered above, and it is the single most common reason people mistrust the data later.
Pricing complexity since the acquisition. Also covered above. This will settle, but it has not settled yet.
Hotjar or Crazy Egg
| Hotjar Basic | Crazy Egg Starter | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free | $29/mo |
| Volume | 35 sessions/day | 5,000 tracked pageviews/mo |
| Surveys | Yes | Yes |
| A/B testing | No | Not on this tier ($99 tier up) |
| Pricing clarity | In transition | Stable, four flat tiers |
Start with Hotjar because it costs nothing to find out whether behavior data changes your decisions. Move to Crazy Egg if you want predictable pricing, simple A/B testing in the same tool, or if the sampling is undermining your confidence in what you are seeing. We broke the numbers down in our Crazy Egg review.
Common questions
Is Hotjar free?
Yes. The Basic plan is permanently free and gives you 35 sessions per day with heatmaps and recordings. It is not a trial.
What happens when you exceed your Hotjar session limit?
Hotjar samples. You keep receiving data, but only a percentage of real sessions is captured, and the interface does not make this obvious. Aggregate heatmaps survive sampling reasonably well. Individual recordings and funnels do not.
Did Contentsquare buy Hotjar?
Yes, the acquisition completed in July 2025. The Hotjar pricing page now redirects to Contentsquare's, and customers are being migrated onto unified tiers through 2026. The product still works as before.
Hotjar or Google Analytics?
Both. They answer different questions. GA4 tells you how many people came and what they did in aggregate. Hotjar shows you an individual person struggling with your form. Neither substitutes for the other, and Hotjar on top of a broken GA4 setup will just give you confident pictures of the wrong traffic.
What we would do
Install the free plan, point it at your worst-performing page, filter to mobile only, and watch ten recordings.
Ten is enough. If you watch ten real people use a page you wrote and you do not find at least one thing to change, the page is in better shape than most. If you find five things, the free tier just paid for a redesign.
Where we would slow down is on buying a paid tier before you have used the free one for a month. The session limit will tell you what you need, and buying ahead of that is how people end up on a plan that samples anyway.
Send us the page that is not converting
We will read the recordings for you and tell you what your visitors are actually doing on it.
Written by J Raydel Sanchez, Founder and CEO of tamer, a digital marketing agency in Hialeah, Florida. Pricing and the hotjar.com/pricing redirect verified 2 August 2026. Qualitative assessment draws on the public review corpus at G2, Gartner Peer Insights and Trustpilot. tamer has no affiliate relationship with Hotjar or Contentsquare.
