Contentsquare vs OpenReplay

Free tier available

From $199 per month (Cloud dedicated instance, billed hourly at $0.276)

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 costs only infrastructure and is the main reason to pick OpenReplay. Managed cloud is an instance you rent rather than a per-session rate, though a usage-based serverless option also exists.

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 and unlimited.

Widely used

Contentsquare · since 2012

Established

OpenReplay · since 2021

• 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.

• Full data sovereignty — recordings stay inside your infrastructure.
• Developer-focused feature set comparable to LogRocket.
• No volume-based pricing when self-hosted.

• 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 session replay is a non-trivial operational commitment, including storage.
• Smaller community and fewer integrations than the commercial tools.
• Analytics and funnel features are thinner.

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

Privacy-constrained or high-volume teams that cannot use a hosted replay vendor.