Heap Alternatives: Best Heap Competitors, Alternatives to Heap Analytics and 2026 Pricing Compared

Short answer: the best Heap alternatives in August 2026 are PostHog if you want a published per-unit rate and no sales call, Mixpanel if you want to buy online from a public slider, Amplitude if you want session replay and experimentation bundled into every plan including the free one, Contentsquare if you want the enterprise journey suite that owns Heap anyway, and Microsoft Clarity if all you actually needed was heatmaps and recordings for nothing. Heap's free tier covers 10,000 monthly sessions with 6 months of history. No paid Heap tier publishes a price, session replay is a paid add-on restricted to Pro and Premier, and passing your session limit locks you out of your own dashboard until you upgrade. Last updated August 2026.

Heap pricing in August 2026: the ladder with no numbers on it

Heap sells four tiers. One of them has a price. The table below is read directly off heap.io/pricing and its plan comparison grid in August 2026, and where a cell says "not published" that is what the vendor prints, not a gap in our research.

Two details in that table deserve to be pulled out, because they are the ones that change a purchase decision rather than describe it.

The estimate sits behind your own tracking code

Heap's Growth card does not say "contact sales" and it does not show a figure. The call to action is "Sign up and install the free snippet to get an estimate!" That is a pricing model where discovery runs through deployment. You create an account, you put Heap's JavaScript on your production site, you let it collect for long enough to measure your session volume, and the number arrives after that.

There is a defensible reason for it. Heap bills by session, sessions are hard to predict from the outside, and a snippet measures them accurately in a way a slider cannot. But look at what the alternatives ask for. PostHog prints a per-event and per-recording rate card you can read in ten seconds with no account. Mixpanel gives you a slider, a monthly or yearly toggle, and a Buy Online button. Amplitude publishes an estimator. All three let you cost the tool before you touch your codebase. Heap is the only one in this set where the sequence runs the other way.

The practical consequence is that a Heap evaluation cannot be a spreadsheet exercise. It has to be a project, with whoever owns your production deploy in the room. That is a small thing at a startup and a large thing at a company with a change-control process, and it is worth knowing before you put Heap on a shortlist rather than after.

What happens when you go over: Heap locks the dashboard, it does not bill you

This is the finding that changes how the free and Growth tiers should be read, and it comes verbatim from Heap's own pricing FAQ. Asked what happens if you exceed your plan limit, Heap answers: "Don't worry, we won't drop or throttle your data! Once you exceed your plan's monthly limit, you'll receive an email asking you to upgrade to the appropriate tier. You'll need to do this before you can view your data again."

Read that carefully. Heap keeps collecting. Heap does not charge an overage rate, because it does not publish one. What it does instead is stop you seeing your own dashboard until you move up a tier. So the 10,000 monthly sessions on the free plan are not a soft budget you can drift past for a month. They are the point at which the tool stops working until money changes hands.

Compare how the rest of the category handles the same moment:

PostHog is the instructive contrast because it solves the same problem in the opposite direction. It bills you for overage but hands you a per-product spending cap, so the failure mode is "collection pauses" rather than "surprise invoice" or "locked dashboard." Heap's answer protects your data and gates your access. Whether that is better depends entirely on whether the person who can approve the upgrade is available the week it happens.

Heap is product analytics that does not include session replay

A lot of shortlists put Heap next to Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity, which quietly assumes Heap records sessions. On the free and Growth tiers it does not. Session Replay, Heatmaps and Error Analysis are packaged as an add-on called Experience Analytics, and the pricing grid marks that add-on as available for Pro and Premier only. So the two Heap tiers a small team would realistically start on have no recordings, no heatmaps and no error replay.

That is unusual now, because the three tools Heap is most often compared against all include replay for nothing:

Heap wins one column of that table outright and it is worth saying so plainly: Heap is the only tool here that puts SSO on its free plan. Amplitude gates SSO to Growth, which is sales-quoted, and Mixpanel gates it to Enterprise. If you are a security-conscious team that needs single sign-on from day one without a contract, Heap Free is genuinely the cheapest way to get it, and that is not a small thing.

But if you assumed a product analytics purchase came with recordings, budget for the add-on and two tiers of upgrade, or pair a free replay tool with whichever analytics tool you pick. Our product analytics versus session replay comparison covers why the two answer genuinely different questions, and best session replay tools prices the replay half on its own.

The retention ladder stops improving at Pro

Heap publishes data history per tier, and the ladder does something odd at the top. Free keeps 6 months. Growth keeps 12 months. Pro keeps 1 year. Premier keeps 1 year. Twelve months and one year are the same number, so the step from Growth to Pro, which is also the step that unlocks the session replay add-on and account analytics, buys exactly zero additional history. Going past a year is a separate paid add-on, described on Heap's own page as extending analysis out to 3 years.

Two things fall out of that. PostHog's free tier keeps twice as much history as Heap's free tier. And PostHog's paid retention, seven years, is more than double the three years Heap will sell you at any price. If your reason for wanting analytics is year-over-year seasonality or a compliance requirement to keep behavioral data, that gap is the whole decision.

The nine best Heap alternatives, priced

PostHog

PostHog is the closest thing to an anti-Heap in this list, and the reason is transparency rather than features. Its free tier resets monthly and includes 1 million analytics events, 5,000 session recordings, 1 million feature flag requests, 100,000 error tracking exceptions, 1,500 survey responses, 1 million data warehouse rows, one project, one year of retention and unlimited team members, with no credit card. Adding a card moves you to six projects, seven years of retention and email support, and every product then bills at a published rate that falls with scale: product analytics from $0.00005 per event down to $0.000009, session replay from $0.005 per recording down to $0.0015. You choose US or EU hosting.

Where it beats us and beats Heap: you can cost it exactly, in advance, without an account. Where Heap beats it: PostHog expects an engineer. Autocapture exists but the tool is built around the assumption that someone technical owns it, and the breadth of ten products on one bill is either the appeal or the overwhelm depending on your team. Our head-to-head is on the PostHog alternative page.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is the self-serve answer. The free plan gives unlimited seats, up to 1 million events a month, 10,000 session replays, up to 1,000 monthly experiment users and 10 active feature flags, plus the funnel and retention analysis Mixpanel is genuinely best in class at. Growth starts at $0 with the first million events free, scales to 20 million events, and, uniquely in this set, is sold through a public slider with a monthly or yearly toggle and a Buy Online button. Early-stage companies under five years old with up to $8 million in total funding can get the first year free through Mixpanel's startup program.

One caution, and it is exactly the kind of thing our claim-audit table exists for: Mixpanel's own pricing page states two different Growth session replay allowances. The plan card says up to 500,000 replays a month and the comparison grid below it says 20,000. We are not going to guess which is authoritative. If replay volume is why you are buying, get it in writing before you commit. The Mixpanel alternative page covers the head-to-head.

Amplitude

Amplitude repriced during 2026 and the widely-repeated figures for it are now stale. It has moved off monthly-tracked-user tiers to event-based pricing, and the old published dollar amount for its entry paid plan is gone from the page. What it says now: every plan includes the full platform and unlimited seats, and every plan includes session replay, experimentation, and guides and surveys. Free gives 2 million events a month forever with 10,000 monthly session replays and no card. Plus starts at $0 with the first 2 million events free, requires a card, scales to 70 million events, and states two-year data retention. Growth and Enterprise are custom event-based pricing through sales, and Growth is where SSO and project permissions start.

Where it beats us and beats Heap: bundling. Getting replay, experimentation and surveys on the same plan as the analytics, including on the free tier, removes an entire class of integration work. Where Heap beats it: SSO on the free plan, which Amplitude puts behind a sales call. If you followed the Statsig story, our post on the Statsig to Amplitude handover covers how Amplitude ended up with that brand and customer base, and the Amplitude alternative page is the head-to-head.

Contentsquare, which already owns Heap

This one is genuinely strange and worth stating clearly. Contentsquare acquired Heap in December 2023, having bought Hotjar in 2021. Heap is still sold as its own product, and its AI assistant is now branded inside the Heap interface as Sense, Contentsquare's AI. So evaluating Heap against Contentsquare is comparing two products from one company.

The part worth noticing is which of the two publishes more. Contentsquare Experience Analytics lists sixteen priced rungs from $49 to $739 a month, covering 7,000 to 200,000 monthly sessions, before it goes quote-only, plus a free plan at 200,000 monthly sessions with 10,000 replays and one month of history. Voice of Customer surveys are priced separately from $99 a month for 500 responses. The parent company publishes sixteen prices. The subsidiary publishes none. If you want the same corporate relationship with a number attached, start at the parent. Details are on the Contentsquare alternative page and in best Hotjar alternatives, since Hotjar now bills through the same ladder.

FullStory

FullStory's free plan is one of the most generous in the category: 30,000 sessions a month, twelve months of retention and up to ten users. Twelve months of free history is double what Heap gives you on its free tier and twenty-four times what Microsoft Clarity keeps. Its paid tiers are quote-only, so it shares Heap's opacity above the free line. Where it beats us: searching across thousands of sessions to hand an engineer a reproducible bug is a job FullStory does better than anything else here. See the FullStory alternative page.

Microsoft Clarity

If what you actually wanted from Heap was heatmaps and recordings rather than event analytics, Clarity is free forever with no traffic cap, no sampling, no site limit and no paid tier to graduate to. The catch is not money, it is time: Microsoft's own retention documentation keeps session recordings for 30 days, and heatmap and click data for 9 months. Sessions you label or favorite survive 9 months. Everything else expires monthly. We wrote the full breakdown in best Microsoft Clarity alternatives, and the honest recommendation there is usually to keep Clarity and add to it rather than replace it.

Mouseflow, Lucky Orange and Crazy Egg

Mouseflow has a free forever tier at 500 sessions a month and paid plans from $25 for 5,000 sessions, rising to $109 for 25,000 and $319 for 100,000. Its edge is form field analytics and a friction score, which is the one thing in this list that tells you which specific input is losing people. Lucky Orange is Build at $32 a month billed annually for 3,500 sessions, Grow $72 for 10,000, Expand $199 for 50,000 and Scale $839 for 300,000, with monthly billing at $39, $249 and $1,049 on three of those rungs and a 7-day trial. Crazy Egg is $29 a month for 5,000 pageviews, $99 for 150,000, $249 for 500,000 and $599 for 1 million, billed annually. Watch the meter on that last one: Crazy Egg counts pageviews, not sessions, so at equal traffic it is usually more expensive per visitor than it looks next to a session-metered tool. See the full set of Crazy Egg alternatives if that is the tool you are replacing.

Who will actually show you a price

We keep this table on every comparison we publish because price transparency tracks almost perfectly with who the product is sold to. A tool aimed at a marketer with a company card prints a number. A tool aimed at procurement books a call.

Do you have enough traffic for any of this?

This is the question that should come before the shortlist, and almost no comparison article asks it. Behavioral tools pay for themselves through the decisions they let you make, and decisions need enough volume to be trustworthy.

What the roundups get wrong about Heap alternatives

How to choose in about five minutes

1. Do you need a number before you deploy code? If yes, Heap is out on process grounds alone. PostHog and Mixpanel both cost out fully before you touch your site.
2. Do you need session recordings? If yes and your budget is small, that rules out Heap Free and Growth entirely. Amplitude, Mixpanel and PostHog all include replay on their free tiers, and Microsoft Clarity gives you unlimited recordings for nothing if you accept the 30-day window.
3. How long do you need to keep the data? Six months free at Heap, one year free at PostHog, seven years purchasable at PostHog against three years maximum at Heap.
4. Is anyone technical going to own this? If nobody is, PostHog will feel heavy and Mixpanel or Amplitude is the friendlier landing.
5. Do you have the traffic? Under 10,000 monthly visits, stop shopping. Nothing in this list will change a decision at that volume.

Where Converto fits, and where it does not

Converto is not a Heap replacement and we are not going to pretend otherwise. Heap autocaptures every click, form interaction and pageview once its snippet is live, which means you can define an event three months after the fact and still have the data. That retroactive property is genuinely valuable and it removes a real failure mode, namely discovering too late that nobody instrumented the thing you now need to measure. Nothing on this page does that except Heap and, partially, PostHog.

What Converto replaces is the step after the dashboard. Every tool above tells you that 68 percent of visitors leave your pricing page without clicking anything. None of them tells you what to write instead. Paste a live URL and Converto scores the copy, layout, CTA placement, page speed and AI-readability, then generates ready-to-ship headline and CTA variants you can push straight into whichever tester or builder you use. No snippet, no waiting for data to accumulate, and it works on pages you do not own, so you can audit a competitor's landing page the same way. Self-serve from $19 a month. Suggestions are data-informed rather than guaranteed.

If you are under 10,000 monthly visits, that is the whole program rather than a supplement to one, because you will not reach statistical significance on a split test this year anyway.

Still narrowing the field? The Heap analytics alternative page is the head-to-head against Converto specifically, our Heap pricing guide goes tier by tier on what Heap does and does not publish, best session replay tools prices the recording half of this category, best Hotjar alternatives covers the other Contentsquare-owned product, and best CRO tools is the wider category map.