Hotjar Alternatives for Ecommerce (2026): After Contentsquare

What happened to Hotjar (and what it means for you)

Contentsquare announced it was acquiring Hotjar on September 1, 2021 (Contentsquare press release). For years the two ran as separate products. In 2026 that changed:

• hotjar.com now redirects to Contentsquare. The Hotjar page on contentsquare.com says "Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare" and that it is "no longer possible to create a new account on Hotjar" (Contentsquare).
• Pricing moved too. The old Hotjar plan names (Observe, Ask, Engage) are gone from the public price list. New customers buy Contentsquare Experience Analytics (heatmaps, replays, funnels) and Voice of Customer (surveys and feedback) (Contentsquare pricing).
• Existing users keep working. Contentsquare tells Hotjar users to log in "with the same credentials."

So "Hotjar alternatives" in 2026 really means one of two questions:

1. I'm a Hotjar user. Should I move to Contentsquare or to something else?
2. I'm new. Hotjar isn't an option. What should I use instead?

For many small shops the honest answer to both is "start with a free tool." The rest of this article helps you decide when free stops being enough.

What Contentsquare Free and Growth include

This is the closest thing to "the new Hotjar," so it's worth knowing the limits exactly. From the Contentsquare pricing page, checked November 5, 2026:

A few things stand out for shops:

• 200k sessions sounds like a lot, but replays are capped. On Free, replays come from 5% of sessions, up to 10k. You won't see every visit.
• Growth gets expensive as traffic grows. The price tiers on the page run from $139 a month at 25k sessions to $279 at 60k and $409 at 100k (billed monthly). Annual billing takes off 20% when you pay by card or PayPal, not by invoice (Contentsquare pricing FAQ).
• Surveys are a second subscription. If you used Hotjar's surveys, budget for Voice of Customer Growth too.

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Quick answer: the best option by situation

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Comparison table

Prices are as listed on each vendor's site on November 5, 2026, in the vendor's own currency. "Annual" means the per-month price when you pay a year up front.

Mouseflow's pricing page shows its amounts without a currency symbol, and only the annual price per plan. Check the currency for your region before you compare.

What you'd pay at your traffic level

Starting prices hide a lot. Here's the monthly cost for heatmaps and recordings at three traffic levels, from the same pricing pages (November 5, 2026):

* Crazy Egg counts pageviews; this assumes about 3 pageviews per session as an example. Contentsquare's annual prices are the monthly price minus the 20% annual discount (card or PayPal only). Lucky Orange's Expand plan "starts with 50,000" sessions; prices above that aren't shown. For surveys and A/B testing on top, see the full CRO tool pricing tracker.

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Contentsquare (the "new Hotjar")

Who it suits: Hotjar users who want the least change, and teams that want a free plan with a high session limit.

What you get: heatmaps (including zone-based heatmaps on Growth), session replay, funnels, journey analysis, error and performance monitoring, surveys and feedback widgets, and an MCP connection so you can ask questions about your data from AI assistants such as Claude or ChatGPT (Contentsquare pricing).

Limits to know:

• Free keeps one month of data.
• Free replays come from 5% of sessions, up to 10k a month.
• Growth replays are capped at 20k a month on the tiers from 25k to 120k sessions.
• Surveys beyond the basics are a separate plan.
• A/B testing is not part of Free or Growth.

Data location: Contentsquare's sub-processor list (version of June 2026) says visitor data for Free and Growth plans is hosted in Ireland, at AWS (eu-west-1) and Microsoft Azure (North Europe) (Contentsquare sub-processors). That is a real EU option, so don't assume "EU tool" automatically means "not Contentsquare."

Moving from Hotjar: you log in with your Hotjar details. If you're happy with how it works, there's no urgent reason to move.

Microsoft Clarity

Who it suits: almost every small shop as a first tool. It's free.

What you get: heatmaps, session recordings, rage-click and dead-click detection, funnels, smart events and AI features through Copilot, such as heatmap summaries and chat (Clarity FAQ). Microsoft says Clarity "is a free service forever" with no traffic limits and no sampling.

Limits to know:

• Retention: playback data is kept for 30 days. Click data, and sessions you label or favorite, are kept for 9 months (Clarity data retention).
• Heatmap size: a heatmap covers up to 100,000 page views (Clarity FAQ).
• No surveys and no A/B testing.
• Consent in Europe: since October 31, 2025, Clarity needs a valid consent signal for visitors from the EEA, UK and Switzerland. Without consent, Clarity collects only cookieless data. Microsoft's FAQ says sessions then get fragmented, and full session replays and journey continuity are unavailable (Microsoft Learn).
• Data: stored in Microsoft Azure. EU customers contract with Microsoft Ireland, which uses standard contractual clauses for transfers to Microsoft in the US. The FAQ also states that "Microsoft/Clarity has access to the data" (Clarity FAQ).

We compare the two free options in detail in Microsoft Clarity vs Hotjar, and explain the EU consent setup in Clarity and cookie consent in the EU.

Mouseflow

Who it suits: shops that want more depth than the free tools: form analytics, interactive heatmaps and longer history.

Plans (annual billing, from mouseflow.com/pricing):

Good to know: surveys and interactive heatmaps start on Advanced. Form analytics, data export, the REST API and an MCP server start on Premium. Monthly billing costs more; the page says annual billing saves "up to 35%."

Lucky Orange

Who it suits: small teams that want recordings, heatmaps, surveys and live chat in one tool, without feature gates.

Plans (from luckyorange.com/pricing): Build $32/month billed annually ($39 monthly) for up to 3,500 sessions; Grow $72/month annually for up to 10,000; Expand $199/month annually ($249 monthly) from 50,000 sessions; Scale $839/month annually ($1,049 monthly) from 300,000.

Good to know: Lucky Orange says all features are on every plan: dynamic heatmaps, recordings, surveys, live chat, funnels, form analytics and unlimited team members. Base storage starts at 60 days, with paid upgrades to 90, 180 or 365 days. Its AI feature (Discovery AI) is listed as an add-on. There is no free plan, only a 7-day trial.

Crazy Egg

Who it suits: marketers who want straightforward heatmaps and simple A/B tests in one place.

Plans (billed annually, from crazyegg.com/pricing):

Good to know: Crazy Egg counts pageviews, not sessions. A shop with 30,000 sessions and 4 pages per session uses about 120,000 pageviews. Recordings are capped per plan, so you won't see most visits on the lower plans. The page says "No overages, ever."

heatmap.com

Who it suits: Shopify brands with real revenue that want to see which page elements make money.

Plans (heatmap.com/pricing): priced by your annual revenue. Launch $199/month for shops up to $10M a year, Growth $349 for $10M–25M, Scale $699 for $25M–50M. Annual prepay saves "up to 32%." 14-day trial.

Good to know: every plan includes revenue-tracked recordings, scroll maps, funnels and surveys, with data kept "forever." A/B testing is listed as integrations with other tools. MCP and API access are on Scale only. Small shops pay the same $199 whether they make $50k or $9M a year.

FullStory

Who it suits: larger teams that want product analytics and session replay together.

Plans (fullstory.com/pricing): FullstoryFree includes 30,000 sessions a month and 12 months of analytics retention. Business, Advanced and Enterprise plans are not public (quote only).

Good to know: the free plan is generous for a small shop, but FullStory is built for product and digital teams. Expect a sales process for paid plans.

Varly

Full disclosure: we build Varly. It is in private beta right now, so you can't buy it today; you can join the waitlist.

What it is: one tool for heatmaps (click, scroll and move, with segments and side-by-side compare, including clicks inside closed menus and carousel slides), session recordings (with rage- and dead-click filters, AI summaries and a highlights feed), funnels with time to convert, saved segments, key clicks such as Add to cart detected without code, site speed and JavaScript errors, form analytics (where visitors give up in each form, without recording what they type), on-site surveys (8 templates, logic, 5 languages, thank-you page surveys, orders and revenue per answer), "click to revenue" (orders, revenue or leads of visitors who clicked an element vs. those who didn't), an ideas backlog with PXL, PIE, ICE or custom scoring, and A/B tests, including split URL, server-side and multivariate tests and a visual editor.

How it handles privacy: text is masked on the visitor's device, checkout pages are never tracked by default, and nothing is measured before the visitor accepts your cookie banner. App and data are hosted by Hetzner in Germany. Cloudflare, a US company, sits in front as the CDN.

Script: one script of about 21 kB gzipped. The recording code (about 29 kB gzipped), the survey widget (about 12 kB) and form analytics (about 6 kB) only load when needed.

Planned pricing at launch: €99 per website per month ($125 outside Europe), billed monthly, with all features. Unlimited team members: 4 included, then €10 per extra member per month. Agencies get a lower per-site price (see /agencies). Pricing may change before launch.

Gaps you should know about:

• No mobile-app SDK. Web only.
• No fully interactive heatmaps. Varly can open a hidden menu, tab or carousel slide on the heatmap to show its clicks, one element at a time.
• No US data residency.
• Built-in AI needs your own API key from Anthropic (Claude), OpenAI, Google Gemini, DeepSeek or Mistral. You pay that provider directly.
• Young product, with few public reviews yet.

Matomo and self-hosted options

If you want the data on your own server, Matomo sells a Heatmap & Session Recording plugin with click, move and scroll heatmaps and session recordings, including masking of form keystrokes (Matomo plugin page). It's paid, with a 30-day trial and pricing tiered by user count; the plugin page we checked did not show the amounts. You'll need someone to run and update the server.

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When Varly is not the right choice

• You need a tool today. Varly is in private beta with a waitlist. If you need heatmaps this week, start with Clarity or Contentsquare Free.
• You only need heatmaps and recordings. Clarity is free, and Contentsquare Free covers 200k sessions. Paying for Varly makes sense only if you also want surveys, revenue per click or A/B tests in the same tool.
• You have a mobile app. Clarity has free Android and iOS SDKs (Clarity FAQ). Varly is web-only.
• You need fully interactive heatmaps. Mouseflow and Lucky Orange have them.
• You need US data residency. Varly stores data in Germany only.
• You need live chat. Lucky Orange includes it.

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How we researched this

• Prices and limits: checked on each vendor's own pricing page on November 5, 2026. Where a price isn't public, we say "quote only."
• Ownership and status: Contentsquare's own Hotjar page and the 301 redirect from hotjar.com.
• Consent and retention: vendor documentation, linked inline.
• Script size: our own measurement of the standard tags on November 4, 2026 (compressed transfer size). See the script weight study for the method.
• What we did not do: we did not buy paid plans for this article, and we didn't run a hands-on test of every tool on the same shop. Where we describe a feature, it comes from the vendor's own documentation.

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How to switch without losing data

1. Export what you want to keep. Most tools only let you look back a limited time. Save key heatmaps as images, write down your findings, and export survey answers.
2. Run both tools for 2–4 weeks. Install the new tool next to the old one. Compare numbers before you remove anything.
3. Set up consent first. Connect the new tool to your cookie banner before it goes live. In the EU, a tool that doesn't receive consent signals collects little or nothing. See our GDPR guide for CRO.
4. Rebuild your segments and filters. Device, new vs. returning, traffic source, and buyers vs. non-buyers. These are what make heatmaps useful.
5. Remove the old script. Two recording tools on one page add JavaScript and slow things down. Check your theme, tag manager and apps.
6. Write down the change date. Numbers will differ between tools. Note the date so you don't mistake a tool change for a change in your visitors.

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FAQ

Can I still sign up for Hotjar? No. Contentsquare's Hotjar page says it's no longer possible to create a new Hotjar account, and points new users to Contentsquare (Contentsquare).

Is Contentsquare Free the same as Hotjar's old free plan? No. Contentsquare Free has a much higher session limit (200k a month) than Hotjar's old free plan, but replays are captured from 5% of sessions (max. 10k) and data access is one month.

What's the best free Hotjar alternative? Microsoft Clarity for no-limit heatmaps and recordings; Contentsquare Free if you also want basic surveys and funnels in the same place. Both need proper consent setup for EU visitors.

What's the best Hotjar alternative for Shopify? For research only, Clarity or Contentsquare Free. For revenue per element on a large store, heatmap.com. If you want research and testing in one tool, see our Shopify CRO guide, which also covers Shopify's native A/B testing.

Which Hotjar alternative is hosted in the EU? Several. Contentsquare stores Free and Growth plan data in AWS Ireland. Varly is hosted in Germany (with Cloudflare, a US company, as CDN). For a closer look at defaults and data location, see EU-hosted heatmap tools.

How much does a full CRO stack cost? It depends on your traffic. We keep a dated, sourced overview in What a CRO tool stack really costs.

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Varly puts heatmaps, recordings, surveys and A/B tests in one EU-hosted tool. It's in private beta. Join the waitlist to get access when we open up.