Contentsquare vs Smartlook
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 tierFree tier available
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
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.
End of Sale is in effect, so there is no current list price for new buyers: Cisco stopped new subscriptions on 31 May 2026, existing customers could renew only until 31 August 2026, paid subscriptions end 31 August 2027 and the platform is decommissioned with data deleted on 30 September 2027. Export anything you need before then.
Free tier
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.
Free plan with a monthly session limit.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Contentsquare · since 2012
Established
Cisco · since 2016
Strengths
- 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.
- Genuinely good native mobile replay, including Flutter and React Native.
- Always-on event tracking without pre-instrumentation.
- Reasonable pricing for mid-sized traffic.
Limitations
- 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.
- End of life announced by Cisco: sales closed 31 May 2026, dashboards and historical data go on 31 August 2027.
- Web analytics features are behind Contentsquare and FullStory.
- Interface is less refined than the market leaders.
Best for
Large e-commerce, travel and financial organisations with dedicated optimisation teams — and now, via the free tier, the small teams Hotjar used to serve.
Nobody starting today. Existing users should be planning a migration.
All of these integrate with: Google Analytics.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.