Contentsquare vs Hotjar: which is right for you?

The information on this page is correct as at 18/10/2024 to the best of Contentsquare's understanding.

Plot twist: Contentsquare acquired Hotjar in 2021 and integrated all of Hotjar’s tools and features into the Contentsquare platform in 2024. So while you can’t sign up for Hotjar anymore, everything people loved about it (like heatmaps, recordings, surveys, and feedback widgets) now lives inside Contentsquare—the free forever plan included! 

In this article, we compare what you get with Contentsquare’s free forever plan with our full platform features (like AI-powered insights, revenue impact quantification, product and mobile app analytics). By the end, you'll know which Contentsquare plan is right for you and how to turn your customer data into real growth. 🚀

TL;DR

• Hotjar was a freemium behavior analytics platform with tools like heatmaps, session replay, and surveys. You can now get the same tools on Contentsquare’s free forever plan—use it to understand the why behind metrics and optimize UX while improving conversions

• Contentsquare is an all-in-one experience intelligence platform, combining behavior analytics, product analytics, experience monitoring, voice of customer, and mobile app analytics in one powerful platform—use it to drive business growth across the org

• Contentsquare’s free forever plan gives you the ‘classic Hotjar’ experience (beginner-friendly heatmaps, surveys and feedback, session replays) with additional features like autocapture so small teams can get quick UX wins without complex setup

• Upgrade to the full Contentsquare platform and let AI surface your most impactful insights, self-serve data with plain language prompts, and quantify revenue impact so you always know which optimizations to prioritize. That’s why 30% of the Fortune Global 100 rely on us to drive business growth. 

The main differences between Contentsquare and Hotjar

Since Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare, the real choice is how far you want to go with Contentsquare itself. You can stay with a Hotjar-style setup by using our free forever plan or upgrade to the full Contentsquare platform to get the full benefits of unified analytics and AI insights in one place so every team can understand journeys, improve conversion, and grow lifetime value.

Here’s a summary of the main differences:

What Contentsquare does that Hotjar didn’t

While Hotjar (aka Contentsquare’s free forever plan) is a great self-service product for UX optimization and user research, the full Contentsquare platform pairs the best of what Hotjar used to offer with all-in-one experience intelligence, combining behavior analytics, product analytics, and monitoring with AI and revenue impact.

Here are the 3 main things you’ll get in Contentsquare that you never found in Hotjar:

H3: All-in-one platform

While Hotjar excelled in standalone tools like heatmaps, session replay, and integrated user feedback, Contentsquare brings together 4 often-siloed analytics domains:

• Experience Analytics (DXA)

• Experience Monitoring (DEM)

• Product Analytics (PA) (formerly Heap)

• Voice of Customer (VoC)

When you combine that with Smart Capture and pre-built integrations, Contentsquare becomes a single source of truth, breaking down data silos (and technical barriers) to give every team visibility into complex, multi-channel customer experiences.

Contentsquare brings data, insights, and AI together so every team can self-serve decisions that drive revenue

You might be familiar with Hotjar as an entry-level behavior analytics platform used by UX and CRO experts to troubleshoot friction, drop-offs, and conversions. Contentsquare does all that and goes beyond, turning behavior and feedback into a shared source of truth for Product, Marketing, and Engineering teams.

Contentsquare gives every team clear answers from the same data

For example, you’ll get way more functionality and a deeper understanding of user behaviors and experiences in Contentsquare compared to Hotjar, including

• Journey Analysis: intuitive, top-down visualizations of customer journeys 

• Zone-based Heatmaps: attribution engagement, conversion, and revenue metrics to content elements that drive success 

• Error Analysis: find technical issues, ranked by impact

• Speed Analysis: balance rich interactive content vs. speedier experiences to maximize conversion

• Retention Analysis: drive customer lifetime value and lower churn

These deeper insights enable teams to answer virtually any question about customer behavior and experiences, revealing the root causes of issues so they can prioritize what to fix or improve based on business impact. 

Advanced intelligence

Hotjar had a couple of useful AI features that made it easier to analyze customer sentiment, survey results, or session frustration levels. But Contentsquare takes practical intelligence to the next level, allowing you to

• Quantify the business impact of every insight and prioritize what to fix or improve—see exactly how much revenue is lost to bugs, or gained by design changes (we call this Impact Quantification)

• Reduce time to insight with automated data analysis (Sense Agent)—no need to waste time sifting through data, your biggest wins are served straight to you

• Gain a competitive advantage—see how you compare against competitors with Benchmarks, and optimize ecommerce pricing with the Merchandising tool

• Chat with your data—get actionable insights from complex data without needing an advanced degree in analytics

“Sense has taken the guesswork—and manual effort—out of analysis. You can literally ask a question, and it can build funnels, dashboards, even segments and cohort analysis. What used to take days, we can now achieve in minutes." - Andy Dover, Software Development Manager at Lightspeed Commerce

Mobile app analytics

You need the same visibility into your mobile apps that you have into your website performance. Hotjar didn’t work with mobile apps, but Contentsquare does. 

Contentsquare’s Sense surfaces issues and opportunities in your mobile app in seconds

Contentsquare's mobile app analytics provide a holistic view of the customer experience across platforms. By integrating app, web, and even offline interactions, you can optimize the entire customer journey, not just isolated touchpoints.

Hotjar vs. Contentsquare tools and feature comparison

Both Contentsquare and Hotjar were built to help teams understand user behavior. Since Hotjar’s tools and features still live inside Contentsquare, use the below summary to decide whether our Hotjar-style free forever plan or the wider Contentsquare platform is going to drive more value for your business.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps show where users are clicking, scrolling, and hovering on any website (or app) page. They’re a great starting point for finding areas of frustration (like dead clicks) or optimization opportunities (like an underperforming CTA). 

Hotjar heatmaps showed clicks, mouse movement (on desktop only), scrolling, rage clicks, and engagement zones—a combined view of all interaction data. 

Contentsquare’s heatmaps also show engagement zones but go beyond what Hotjar offered, with

• Live heatmaps: use the Contentsquare CS Live Chrome extension to view UX metrics on any site page

• Side-by-side heatmaps: ideal for comparing how different A/B test variants or traffic sources perform

• Business metrics: overlay revenue and conversion rate onto heatmaps and view how page-level engagement impacts KPIs

A Contentsquare heatmap showing revenue driven by different zones

Both Hotjar and Contentsquare heatmaps make it easy for you to click through to view related session recordings. But Contentsquare goes a step further and also gives you one-click access to related product analytics insights for deeper analysis, like multi-session conversions or user retention data points. 

In a nutshell, Hotjar’s Heatmaps tool shows you how people engage with your website. Contentsquare’s Zone-Based Heatmaps tool shows how engagement affects conversion and revenue, so you can prioritize investments in content elements, what to A/B test, and what to redesign based on business impact. 

Session replays

Session replays, or session recordings as they used to be called in Hotjar, recreate individual user journeys as they browse your site across multiple pages. They’re great for troubleshooting why users are getting stuck and sharing issues with other teams directly. 

Hotjar’s and Contentsquare’s session replay tools had plenty of overlap. Both let you

• Surface critical replays quickly through automated frustration scoring 

• Click straight to relevant session replays from other tools (like heatmaps or conversion funnels)

• Integrate with Jira to create tickets

• Add comments and share replays with your team to improve collaboration

However, Contentsquare’s replays have several advanced features that Hotjar lacked. In Contentsquare, you can

• Display any error type, including console-logged errors, and custom errors such as form validation messages, and quantify those errors

• Retrieve the granular network waterfall of client-server communications that technical teams need to understand and resolve bugs

• Retrieve request headers and bodies to troubleshoot issues  

• Calculate the revenue impact of any error found in a session replay—use this to accurately prioritize fixes

• View session replays of mobile app users

• Get individual and group replay summaries to quickly understand why users struggle and what to fix first  

Quantify the impact of any error from a Contentsquare session replay

In summary, Hotjar Recordings made it easy to find, clip, and share important web-based user sessions with your team. Contentsquare session replays also work on mobile apps, automatically summarize key sessions, and quantify how session errors impact business metrics. 

Funnels

Funnels help you measure conversions and see where users drop off, which is ideal for troubleshooting checkout issues or optimizing signup flows. Hotjar had a dedicated tool—Hotjar Funnels—that let you

• Create custom funnels with up to 10 steps using advanced session filters

• Add up to 5 funnel comparisons—for example, to compare how different marketing channels convert

• Click through to relevant session recordings of users who completed or dropped off each step—use this to understand why people drop off or convert

• Add funnels to Dashboards to stay on top of performance

Hotjar’s popular funnel analysis tool is now available on all Contentsquare plans

In Contentsquare, you can also create funnels in the product analytics tool (formerly Heap)

As you’ve probably guessed by now, funnel analysis in Contentsquare is more advanced than in Hotjar. You can do everything that Hotjar Funnels did, plus

• Click through to analyze any funnel step in the Journey Analysis tool

• Create segments of users who completed or dropped off any funnel step over one or multiple sessions—try using this to send personalized offers to improve conversions

• Use Sense Chat to ask questions to investigate funnel behavior, like “What are the most common events triggered when users drop off in step 2?”

Contentsquare funnels are powered by Heap

To sum it up, Hotjar Funnels let you create and monitor custom funnels to measure conversions and identify drop-off points. In Contentsquare, you can do the same while also using AI to troubleshoot funnel performance and explore journeys, segments, and revenue impact in a single view.

Voice of customer

Voice of customer (VoC) data gives you insight into what customers think about their experiences, what’s increasing their loyalty, or what’s making them leave. 

Contentsquare now has the same VoC tools Hotjar did. On all plans, you’ll get

• Feedback buttons: use these to collect low-friction ad hoc feedback from any visitor

• Surveys: add targeted surveys to any page, like an exit survey when people bounce after adding items to cart

• User research: run moderated user interviews, test prototypes, and validate ideas before launch

• Free templates and AI-generated survey questions

• Connected responses: see what users did before and after they answered

As you likely expect by now, you get a lot more value from paid Contentsquare plans. You can:

• Target and filter surveys more precisely (for example, by behavior, page, or segment)

• Use AI to automate analysis, find themes, and track sentiment

• Brand and integrate VoC into your existing tools and workflows

• Recruit panels for interviews and tests

Use Contentsquare AI to track sentiment and connect responses to the rest of your experience data

With Contentsquare, feedback is automatically tagged and linked to journeys, funnels, product analytics, and error data. You can ask Sense AI questions like “What’s causing checkout bounces?” or “What’s bringing our NPS® score down this month?” and quickly see which issues to action first to make measurable improvements. 

In summary, Hotjar gave you a powerful way to capture and combine customer sentiment with quantitative insights. The full Contentsquare platform lets you connect that voice to behavior and business impact so all teams can use it as part of a single source of truth to grow. 

Product analytics

Product analytics is about collecting and analyzing how users interact with your website or app, across sessions and devices. 

Hotjar did not have product analytics features.

Contentsquare, however, has complete product analytics capabilities—thanks in part to the acquisition of Heap in 2023—and can even replace other tools like GA4.  With Contentsquare, you can

• Create multiple, customizable product analytics dashboards for different teams and use cases, like an acquisition dashboard for marketers or a feature adoption dashboard for the product team

• Combine website, app, and offline data in one place to understand journeys across devices and touch points

• Use intuitive tools—like Web Analytics, Retention Analysis, User Segmentation, and Page Comparator—to get quick insights and monitor changes

• Perform lookback analysis to get retroactive data anytime—no need to plan what to track in advance

• Use AI to generate any analytics chart or insight by chatting with AI Copilot

• Click to investigate analytics data from other Contentsquare tools, like heatmaps or funnels—and vice versa

• Add the User Lifecycle Extension to optimize your acquisition channels and increase repeat purchases

Chat with your analytics data using Sense AI

In short, Hotjar had limited product analytics capabilities. Contentsquare has comprehensive, AI-powered product analytics that can replace legacy platforms like Google Analytics.

Performance monitoring and error tracking

Spotting (and fixing) bugs and speed issues before they lead to unhappy (or lost) customers is the simplest way to build better customer experiences. 

Hotjar had limited bug-spotting capabilities. You could use it to

• Track and investigate rage clicks

• Sort session recordings by frustration to find issues quickly

• Integrate with Jira to create tickets for issues found in session replays

In comparison, Contentsquare provides complete digital experience monitoring capabilities, also letting you

• Find and prioritize errors in the Error Analysis tool—use this to proactively find the errors most impacting conversions and revenue 💰

• Deep underlying network waterfalls and request/response data that enable technical teams to identify the root cause of issues and fix them

• Monitor real and simulated user behavior to identify speed issues before they become problems

• Create customizable real-time alerts for critical issues

• Monitor Core Web Vitals in the Speed Analysis tool—use this to prioritize site speed improvements

• Find friction points in real time with Sense AI

Quickly find your most costly errors in Contentsquare

Ultimately, Hotjar had limited error-tracking features and was best for identifying UX issues. Contentsquare has comprehensive error-tracking and performance monitoring tools to find and prioritize issues based on conversion and revenue impact.

Is Contentsquare or Hotjar better for your team? 

Short answer: you don’t need to choose between Contentsquare and Hotjar anymore. Hotjar now lives inside Contentsquare, so the real decision is whether you’re going to start with our free plan or upgrade to get the full benefits of the wider platform. 

Choose the full Contentsquare platform if you need

• A complete experience intelligence platform to replace legacy tools like Google Analytics and behavior analytics tools like Hotjar 

• AI-powered insights and recommendations to optimize experiences faster, without needing a data analyst

• Advanced product analytics to deeply understand user behavior

• Comprehensive error tracking and performance monitoring enabling technical teams to find and fix issues

• Enterprise-level security, privacy, and support

However, the free forever plan (Hotjar style) might be a better choice if

• You're a smaller team that needs a low-cost, self-serve tool to complement your existing analytics stack

• You want quick and simple user behavior insights

• You only need a tool to collect voice of customer feedback

Ready to see which solution fits your team best? Take the 7-minute Contentsquare product tour to discover how we turn your data into growth-driving insights.

Contentsquare vs Hotjar FAQs