Contentsquare vs Hotjar: which is right for you?

Plot twist: Contentsquare acquired Hotjar in 2021, so you’re technically about to compare two products from the same company—but you can still use them as separate platforms to optimize digital customer experience. Our new combined platform is scheduled to launch in Q4 of 2024 though.

In this article, we get specific about the key capabilities of Contentsquare and Hotjar, and their respective strengths and weaknesses. By the end, you’ll have a clear idea of which platform aligns best with your goals, requirements, and resources so you can confidently elevate your digital experience strategy with the right solution. 🚀

TL;DR

• Hotjar is a freemium behavior analytics platform with tools like heatmaps, session replay, and surveys—use it to understand the why behind metrics and optimize UX while improving conversions
• Contentsquare is a premium all-in-one experience intelligence platform, combining behavior analytics, product analytics, digital experience monitoring, and voice of customer tools in one powerful platform—use it to drive business growth across the org
• Hotjar is popular with self-service users, small businesses and startups, while Contentsquare is used by leading global brands, including over 30% of the Fortune Global 100
• Hotjar can only capture user behavior on websites, while Contentsquare can also integrate data from mobile apps and offline touchpoints

The main differences between Contentsquare and Hotjar

	Contentsquare	Hotjar
Price	Custom	From free
Tracking	Cross-session autocapture across web & apps	JavaScript snippet on websites and single page applications
Use cases	Whole funnel optimization for Product, Marketing, Design, and Engineering teams	Small business optimization, user research, CRO
Heatmaps	✅	✅
Session replays	✅	✅
VoC tools	✅	✅
Funnel analysis	✅	✅
Customer journey analysis	✅	❌
Error monitoring	✅	❌
Product analytics	✅Full	✅Limited
App analytics	✅	❌
Real-time alerts	✅AI and manual	✅Limited
Lookback analysis	✅	❌-
Additional tools	Merchandising Performance, Benchmarks, Form Analysis, Impact Quantification, Retention Analytics, User Segmentation, Page Comparator, Speed Analysis, Web Analytics	Dashboards, Highlights, Trends
AI features	✅Automated insights, feedback and sentiment analysis, smart alerts and recommendations, generate analytics charts with plain text prompts, impact quantification	✅Survey generation and analysis, feedback sentiment analysis
Enterprise privacy & security	✅incl. ISO 27001, ISO 27701 Certified, SOC 2 Type II Compliant, GDPR and CCPA compliant	GDPR and CCPA compliant

What Contentsquare does that Hotjar doesn’t

While Hotjar is a great self-service product for UX optimization and user research, Contentsquare is an all-in-one experience intelligence platform that pairs the best of Hotjar with additional behavior analytics, product analytics, and digital experience monitoring tools. 

Here are the 3 main things you’ll get in Contentsquare that you won’t find in Hotjar:

All-in-one platform

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

• Digital Experience Analytics (DXA)
• Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)
• Product Analytics (PA)
• Voice of Customer (VoC)

When you also add in its extensive pre-built integrations and flexible APIs, 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.

In practical terms, this means Hotjar enables individuals, explorers, and any sized business to get  started in a self-services manner, within minutes, and obtain insights without virtually any need for a learning curve.

Meanwhile, 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 behaviors and experiences, reveal underlying root causes of issues, and prioritize what to fix or improve based on business impact. 

Advanced intelligence

Hotjar incorporates AI to make 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
• Reduce time to insight with automated data analysis—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

 

 

“What’s great about Contentsquare is that the insights are visual and extremely easy to digest. It’s particularly helpful to be able to give the creative or leadership team a clear picture of pain points and successes—it helps secure immediate buy-in and significantly reduces time to action, meaning we don’t miss out on potential sales.”- Lisa Skowrup, Senior Manager, Site Experience at The North Face

 

Mobile app analytics

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

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 have overlapping behavior analytics tools to help you optimize digital experiences. Here’s a summary of the tools and features you’ll find in each platform, so you can decide which one is best 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). 

Both Contentsquare and Hotjar have heatmap tools with some overlap.

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

A Hotjar heatmap showing engagement on a demo pricing page

Contentsquare’s Zone-Based Heatmaps also show engagement zones but go beyond what Hotjar can offer, 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 comparing the revenue generated by 

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 Heatmaps show you how people engage with your website. Contentsquare Zone-Based Heatmaps show 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’re 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 and Contentsquare’s session replay tools have 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

Hotjar Recordings has one key unique feature that Contentsquare doesn’t: you can create clips from any replay, known as Highlights, and add them to a collection of related insights—like a bug board for the dev team.

Organize related session replay clips in Hotjar Highlights

However, you’ll still find that Contentsquare’s replays have several advanced features that Hotjar lacks. In Contentsquare, you can

• Display any time of error that the user encountered during their session – Not just JS errors but also API errors, console logged errors, and custom errors such as form validation messages etc.
• 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

Quantify the impact of any error from a Contentsquare session replay

In summary, Hotjar Recordings make it easy to find, clip, and share important web-based user sessions with your team. Contentsquare Session Replays also work on mobile apps 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 has a dedicated tool—Hotjar Funnels—that lets 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

Create custom funnels in Hotjar and monitor them in Dashboards

In Contentsquare, you can also create funnels, e.g. in the Product Analytics tool, powered by 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 does, 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 AI CoPilot to ask questions to investigate funnel behavior, like “what are the most common events triggered when users drop off in step 2? ”
• Visualize customer journeys in the Journey Analysis tool 

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.

Voice of Customer

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

There’s not much to compare here—Hotjar and Contentsquare have the same VoC tools. You will 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
• AI features—generate relevant survey questions, survey reports, and sentiment analysis automatically 

Tracking survey sentiment with AI in Hotjar and Contentsquare 

If you go with Hotjar, you can also track customer sentiment (like NPS®) by adding a Dashboard widget. 

💡Pro tip: in Contentsquare, you access VoC by clicking the ‘Voice of customer’ link in the left hand menu of your Contentsquare account. 

To sum it up, both Hotjar and Contentsquare offer the same VoC tools.

Product analytics

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

On its own, Hotjar can only display limited analytics data and therefore works best as a complement to legacy analytics suites. Hotjar integrates with popular analytics platforms like Google Analytics, Kissmetrics, and Mixpanel to filter insights by key events or segments and investigate the why behind the numbers. 

You can also use Hotjar to create custom Trends to monitor on Dashboards and view some top-level analytics insights, like top traffic channels, top countries, new vs returning users, and average drop-off rate. 

Track limited analytics metrics in Hotjar Dashboards

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 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

Chat with your analytics data using Contentsquare’s AI CoPilot

In short, Hotjar has limited product analytics capabilities and is best used to complement other analytics tools. 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 has limited bug-spotting capabilities. You can 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

Quickly find your most costly errors in Contentsquare

Ultimately, Hotjar has limited error tracking features and is best used 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? 

Hotjar and Contentsquare have some overlapping tools to help you optimize digital experiences, so the best fit for your team will come down to your company’s budget, size, and complexity.

Choose Contentsquare over Hotjar 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, Hotjar might be a better choice than Contentsquare 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? Explore Hotjar’s interactive demo and take the 6-minute Contentsquare product tour to discover how Contentsquare turns your data into growth-driving insights.

 

 

Contentsquare vs Hotjar FAQs

What is Hotjar?

Hotjar is the leading behavior analytics platform for individuals, small, and medium businesses founded in Malta in 2014 by David Darmanin, Erik Näslund, Johan Malmberg, Marc von Brockdorff, and Jonathan Vella. Hotjar was bootstrapped until Contentsquare acquired it in 2021. Thanks to its unparalleled ease of use, Hotjar is used on over 1 million websites spread across 180+ countries. 

What is Contentsquare?

Contentsquare is the leading all-in-one experience intelligence platform founded in Paris in 2012 by Jonathan Cherki. The company has raised over $1.4 billion in funding and acquired tools like Pricing Assistant and Clicktale (2019), Hotjar (2021), and Heap Analytics (2023). Today, Contentsquare has a team of 1,800+ across 16 global offices.

What’s the difference between Contentsquare and Hotjar?

Contentsquare and Hotjar both offer behavior analytics tools, but Contentsquare is a more comprehensive platform with advanced AI capabilities, product analytics, error tracking, and performance monitoring. Contentsquare is better suited to larger teams and companies that want to leverage customer behavior data to drive growth across the org. Hotjar is a simpler, lower-cost option for smaller teams that want to complement their existing analytics stack with quick user behavior insights and voice of customer feedback.

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