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testcritic

Amplitude vs Hotjar

Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.

Entry price

Free tier available

Free tier

Quote on request

Quote only

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Paid plans are quote-based on monthly tracked users and events; enterprise contracts are substantial.

Hotjar's own plans are no longer sold. New buyers are quoted on Contentsquare's three product lines, which are billed separately, so budget for the line you need rather than one Hotjar-style bill. Existing customers are being migrated through 2026.

Free tier

Free plan with a monthly event allowance suitable for early-stage products.

Not available to new users. Contentsquare's free tier is the successor and is more generous than Hotjar's old 35-sessions-a-day limit.

Open source

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonJavaSwiftKotlinGo
JavaScriptCodeless

Platforms

WebAPIiOSAndroid
WebiOSAndroid

Fits teams

StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Category standard

Amplitude · since 2012

Category standard

Contentsquare · since 2014

Strengths

  • The deepest retention and cohort analysis in mainstream product analytics.
  • Good free tier for early-stage products.
  • Strong data-governance tooling for event taxonomy.
  • Non-technical teams adopt it without training, which is why it spread inside organisations.
  • Surveys and recordings together let you ask a user about the behaviour you just watched.
  • Simple installation and good default privacy masking.

Limitations

  • Requires deliberate event instrumentation — nothing works without it.
  • Enterprise pricing rises steeply with tracked users.
  • Replay and experimentation are newer and less mature than the analytics core.
  • You cannot buy it: new accounts are closed and you are really evaluating Contentsquare.
  • Existing customers face a migration onto separately billed product lines, which can change the total.
  • Weak for engineering debugging compared to LogRocket or FullStory.

Best for

Product teams that need rigorous behavioural analysis over time.

Nobody new — start with Contentsquare or Microsoft Clarity instead. Existing Hotjar customers should plan the Contentsquare migration.

All of these integrate with: Slack.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.