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 |
Hotjar pricing and plans in 2026: what you actually pay now
Verified on contentsquare.com/pricing on 21 September 2026. This is what a new account sees at checkout, and it is simpler than the Observe / Ask / Engage split it replaced: one Free plan, one self-serve paid plan called Growth, and two sales-led tiers above it.
| Plan | Price | Monthly sessions | Data access | Projects | What it adds |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0, forever | Up to 200,000 | 1 month | 1 | Heatmaps, session replays, funnels, error and performance monitoring, basic surveys (100 responses a month) |
| Growth | From $49/mo monthly, $39/mo billed yearly | From 7,000, scales to 10 million | 13 months | 3 | Zone heatmaps, journey analysis, impact quantification, AI summaries |
| Pro | Custom quote | From 1 million | 13 months | Up to 6 | Retroactive filtering, revenue goals, multi-session replay summaries |
| Enterprise | Custom quote | Custom | 13 months | Unlimited | Real-time monitoring and alerts, data feeds, dedicated support and SLAs |
The details that change what you pay:
- Free trial. Every new account starts with a 15-day free trial of Growth. No card, no auto-charge; when it ends you pick a plan or stay on Free.
- Money back. New Growth subscriptions carry a 30-day money-back guarantee. Cancel inside 30 days and you get a full refund.
- Monthly or yearly. Growth has no annual contract. Pay monthly and cancel any time by downgrading to Free. Pay yearly in-app by card or PayPal and the price drops 20% before VAT; that discount does not apply to invoice billing.
- Per account, not per site. One plan covers every site under the same account in the same region. You buy sessions for the account, not for each domain.
- Bundle discount. Pair a paid Experience Analytics plan with a paid Voice of Customer plan and the cheaper of the two gets 10% off, on top of the yearly discount.
- Hitting the limit. On Free and Growth, once you reach the monthly sessions, heatmaps and funnels stop receiving new data until the next reset date. The fix is to add sessions or move up a plan.
So the Hotjar cost for a small business site in 2026 is usually zero. Two hundred thousand sessions a month on the Free plan is more traffic than most local sites see in a year. You pay when you need 13 months of history, more than one project, or the journey and revenue tools, and at that point the entry price is $39 to $49 a month.
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.
That describes the Hotjar plans sold until 2025. On the Contentsquare plans every new account gets today, the behavior flipped: the collection rate is 100% until you reach your monthly allowance, and then heatmaps and funnels simply stop taking new data until the reset date. No sample, no partial picture, a hard stop. It is more honest, and with 200,000 sessions a month on Free it is a limit most small sites never touch, but if you are on Growth with 7,000 sessions and a traffic spike, check the date the data ends before you read the funnel.
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. On the current Contentsquare plans the rule is different: at the monthly limit heatmaps and funnels stop receiving new data until the reset date, with no sampling.
Does Hotjar have a free trial?
Yes. Every new account starts with a 15-day free trial of the Growth plan, with no payment details required and no automatic charge. When it ends you either choose a paid plan or continue on the Free plan, which has no expiry. Paid Growth plans also carry a 30-day money-back guarantee.
How much does Hotjar cost per month?
Free for up to 200,000 sessions a month on the Free plan. The Growth plan starts at $49 a month, or $39 a month billed yearly, for 7,000 sessions and 13 months of data, and scales with session volume. Pro and Enterprise are quoted by sales. Surveys beyond the free allowance are a separate product from $99 a month.
What does the Hotjar free plan include in 2026?
Heatmaps, session replays, funnels, error and performance monitoring, and basic surveys with 100 responses a month, for one project and up to 200,000 sessions a month. The limits are one month of data access and a single project, not the feature set.
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 Marketing, a digital marketing agency in Hialeah, Florida. Pricing and the hotjar.com/pricing redirect verified 2 August 2026; Contentsquare plans, trial and limit behavior re-verified on contentsquare.com/pricing on 21 September 2026. Qualitative assessment draws on the public review corpus at G2, Gartner Peer Insights and Trustpilot. tamer Marketing has no affiliate relationship with Hotjar or Contentsquare.
