Hotjar heatmaps and session recordings now cost $49 a month for 7,000 sessions, rising through a 16-rung ladder to $739 for 200,000 sessions, and there is a free plan that tracks 200,000 monthly sessions and captures 10,000 of them as replays. Surveys are billed separately, starting at $99. Prices read off Contentsquare's own pricing page in August 2026, because hotjar.com/pricing now redirects there. Last updated August 2026.
Nearly every Hotjar pricing article still in the search results quotes the old Observe plans at $39, $99, and $213 a month. Those plans are not sold to new buyers anymore. Hotjar was merged into Contentsquare, the bill was split into separate product lines, and the ladder underneath behaves in a way that catches people out: past a certain rung you stop buying recordings entirely and keep paying more.
Hotjar pricing 2026: every plan and what it includes
Heatmaps and session recordings are sold as Contentsquare Experience Analytics. The pricing page carries a monthly and yearly toggle, with yearly labelled as saving 20 percent. These are the monthly rates. If you land on the vendor page and see $39 rather than $49 at the entry rung, that is the yearly-billed rate with the toggle already flipped to yearly, which is how the page loads by default.
| Monthly price | Monthly sessions | Replays included | Cost per 1,000 sessions |
|---|---|---|---|
| $0 Free | 200,000 | 10,000 (5% captured) | $0 |
| $49 | 7,000 | 7,000 | $7.00 |
| $69 | 10,000 | 10,000 | $6.90 |
| $99 | 15,000 | 15,000 | $6.60 |
| $119 | 20,000 | 20,000 | $5.95 |
| $139 | 25,000 | 20,000 | $5.56 |
| $159 | 30,000 | 20,000 | $5.30 |
| $179 | 35,000 | 20,000 | $5.11 |
| $219 | 45,000 | 20,000 | $4.87 |
| $279 | 60,000 | 20,000 | $4.65 |
| $339 | 75,000 | 20,000 | $4.52 |
| $369 | 85,000 | 20,000 | $4.34 |
| $409 | 100,000 | 20,000 | $4.09 |
| $469 | 120,000 | 20,000 | $3.91 |
| $569 | 150,000 | 22,000 | $3.79 |
| $739 | 200,000 | 30,000 | $3.70 |
Above 240,000 monthly sessions the self-serve ladder ends and becomes Pro and Enterprise, which are quote-only. Read the right-hand column and this looks like sensible volume pricing: cost per thousand sessions falls from $7.00 to $3.70 as you scale. Read the replay column instead and the picture changes completely.
The replay cap: your recordings stop growing at $119
A session is a visitor's journey through your site. A replay is the recording you can actually sit down and watch. Contentsquare meters them separately, and only one of the two keeps growing when you upgrade.
From $139 through $469, the replay allowance is frozen at 20,000. The session allowance climbs from 25,000 to 120,000 over that same stretch and the price rises by 294 percent. Here is what that does to the number that matters.
| Plan | Monthly sessions | Replays | Cost per 1,000 replays |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 200,000 | 10,000 | $0 |
| $49 | 7,000 | 7,000 | $7.00 |
| $119 | 20,000 | 20,000 | $5.95 |
| $219 | 45,000 | 20,000 | $10.95 |
| $409 | 100,000 | 20,000 | $20.45 |
| $469 | 120,000 | 20,000 | $23.45 |
| $739 | 200,000 | 30,000 | $24.63 |
Cost per replay is cheapest at $119 and gets roughly four times worse by $469. Contentsquare is open about the mechanism rather than hiding it: above 20,000 monthly sessions the capture rate drops to a 15 percent sample instead of 100 percent, and the free plan captures 5 percent up to a maximum of 10,000 recordings.
The practical consequence is worth being blunt about. If your reason for paying is that you want to watch more sessions, upgrading past $119 does not buy you that. It buys heatmap and metric coverage across a bigger traffic base, which is a real thing to want, just not the thing most buyers think they are paying for. Decide which of the two you actually need before you climb, because for a lot of sites the honest answer is $119 or the free plan, with nothing sensible in between.
The free plan tracks more than the entry paid plan
Compare the two rungs at the bottom of the ladder and the usual logic inverts. The free plan tracks up to 200,000 monthly sessions and captures 10,000 replays. The first paid rung at $49 tracks 7,000 sessions and captures 7,000 replays. Free tracks roughly 28 times more traffic and hands you more recordings than the plan directly above it.
So what does the $49 actually buy? Three things, none of them volume. Analytics data access goes from one month on Free to 13 months on Growth, which is the real gate and the reason most teams end up paying. Projects go from one to three, so a second site or a staging environment needs the paid tier. And the AI layer, zone-based heatmaps, journey analysis, and impact quantification only appear on Growth.
Read that as a buying rule: upgrade from Free when you need history, a second project, or the journey and AI analysis. Do not upgrade to watch more sessions, because at the entry rung you will watch fewer.
Surveys are a separate bill now
The old Hotjar pitch was heatmaps, recordings, and surveys arriving on one subscription. Under Contentsquare, basic surveys do still appear on every plan including Free, and the vendor lists surveys among the things included everywhere. The distinction that costs money is volume: real survey capacity is a distinct product line called Voice of Customer, metered by monthly responses rather than sessions.
| Monthly price | Monthly survey responses |
|---|---|
| Free | A small allowance, listed as 100 responses and 3 surveys |
| $99 | 500 |
| $129 | 1,000 |
| $249 | 2,500 |
| $349 | 5,000 |
| $459 | 7,500 |
| $529 | 10,000 |
| $689 | 25,000 |
| $949 | 50,000 |
| $1,479 | 100,000 |
So the cheapest paid setup covering what one Hotjar subscription used to cover is $49 plus $99, which is $148 a month. Committing to annual billing brings that to $114, because the 20 percent yearly discount stacks with a further 10 percent off the cheaper of the two products when you buy more than one line. If you last budgeted Hotjar as a single line item, re-price it before your next renewal. One honest caveat: the free response allowance is the one figure here we would not bet on, because the vendor's feature list shows 100 responses a month while the underlying plan data carries a 20-response variant. Confirm it at signup rather than trusting either number.
Is Hotjar free?
Yes, and the free plan is considerably better than the one people remember. It tracks up to 200,000 monthly sessions and captures up to 10,000 of them as replays, against the old Hotjar free tier's limit of 35 sessions a day. For a site under a few hundred thousand monthly sessions that mostly wants heatmaps and a sample of recordings, the free plan is a genuinely serious answer rather than a demo.
Microsoft Clarity remains the more generous option in pure replay terms, since it is free with no session cap and no paid tier at all. The comparison most teams end up making is covered in Microsoft Clarity vs Hotjar.
How much does Hotjar cost per month?
For most small and mid-sized sites, between $0 and $119. The free plan covers a lot, $49 is the entry paid rung at 7,000 sessions, and $119 buys the best replay value on the whole ladder at 20,000 sessions and 20,000 recordings. Adding surveys puts a floor of $148 on a full setup. Only sites past 100,000 monthly sessions have a good reason to be higher, and past 240,000 sessions you are into sales-quoted territory.
Why does hotjar.com redirect to Contentsquare?
Contentsquare acquired Hotjar in 2021 and has since merged the two platforms into one product. Both hotjar.com and hotjar.com/pricing now redirect to contentsquare.com, and the vendor page states that the platforms have merged, with heatmaps, recordings, and surveys all still present. Hotjar was not discontinued and legacy plans are still honored. What changed is that new buyers price through Contentsquare product lines, and the single bundled subscription became separate lines for Experience Analytics, Voice of Customer, and Product Analytics.
What older Hotjar pricing posts get wrong
| Common claim | What the vendor actually publishes |
|---|---|
| "Hotjar starts at $39/mo on Observe Plus" | Observe plans are not sold to new buyers. Experience Analytics starts at $49. |
| "Contentsquare does not publish list pricing" | It publishes 16 self-serve rungs from $49 to $739. Only Pro and Enterprise are quote-only. |
| "Hotjar free gives you 35 sessions a day" | Free now tracks 200,000 monthly sessions and captures 10,000 replays. |
| "Surveys are included" | Basic surveys are, on every plan including Free. Survey volume is a separate product line, Voice of Customer, starting at $99 a month for 500 responses. |
| "Paying more gets you more recordings" | Replays are frozen at 20,000 from $119 through $469. |
Is Hotjar worth it in 2026?
It is worth paying for when surveys sitting alongside recordings is genuinely the point, because running feedback widgets and session replay from one vendor with shared segments is real value that stitching two tools together does not replicate. It is poor value when you are paying purely to watch more sessions, since the replay allowance stops moving at $119 and Microsoft Clarity does uncapped replay for nothing.
There is a wider trap worth naming. Session tools of every kind, Hotjar included, are very good at showing you that people hesitated and very bad at telling you what to write instead. Teams routinely spend months and a few thousand dollars accumulating recordings that confirm what they already suspected. Exporting the underlying event data and analyzing it properly helps, and if your data already sits in a warehouse you can ask questions of it in plain English rather than waiting on an analyst. But the interpretation and the rewrite still land on you.
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If you are shopping rather than renewing, the full priced comparison is in the best Hotjar alternatives roundup, the wider category is covered in the best session replay tools, and the question of what these tools are each good for is worked through in session replay vs heatmaps. To skip straight to the fix, start with a landing page audit.
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