Contentsquare vs Matomo

Free tier available

From $29 per month (Cloud, 50k hits; annual billing gives 2 months free)

Since absorbing Hotjar, Contentsquare sells three separately billed product lines — Experience Analytics, Voice of Customer and Product Analytics — with a free entry tier and quote-based paid plans. Enterprise annual contracts are priced by traffic and are typically six figures at scale.

Self-hosting is free but plugins such as heatmaps and A/B testing are paid add-ons. Cloud scales with hits.

There is now a free Contentsquare plan — it replaced Hotjar's as the self-serve entry point and is considerably more generous than Hotjar's old 35-sessions-a-day limit.

Self-hosted Community edition is free forever with unlimited users and hits; premium plugins are paid.

Widely used

Contentsquare · since 2012

Widely used

InnoCraft · since 2007

• Revenue attribution turns UX findings into business cases executives act on.
• Zone-based analysis is more actionable than raw heatmaps on complex pages.
• Handles very high traffic volumes without sampling.

• Complete data ownership with no third-party processing — the strongest GDPR position available.
• No sampling, unlike free tiers of hosted analytics.
• Can be configured to run without cookies or consent banners.

• The full platform is expensive, and paid tiers are quote-based rather than published.
• Substantial implementation and training effort before value appears.
• Splitting the old Hotjar bundle into three separately billed lines means you may need more than one to replace what Hotjar did.

• Self-hosting requires PHP and MySQL operations, including performance tuning at scale.
• The interface is less refined than modern product analytics tools.
• Advanced features are paid plugins even on the free self-hosted edition.

Large e-commerce, travel and financial organisations with dedicated optimisation teams — and now, via the free tier, the small teams Hotjar used to serve.

Public sector, healthcare and European organisations with strict data-residency requirements.