Heap vs FullStory
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 tierQuote on request
Quote onlyWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Paid tiers are quote-based by session volume.
Quote-based annual contracts priced by session volume. Among the more expensive tools in the category.
Free tier
Free plan with a monthly session limit.
Free plan with limited monthly sessions.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Contentsquare · since 2013
Widely used
FullStory · since 2014
Strengths
- Retroactive event definition eliminates 'we didn't track that' entirely.
- Very fast time to first insight — no instrumentation project required.
- Warehouse sync for teams that want the raw data.
- Retroactive analysis is a genuine capability difference, not a marketing angle.
- Excellent search: find the eleven sessions where a specific error occurred in checkout.
- Strong privacy controls with element-level exclusion rules.
Limitations
- Autocaptured data needs governance or the event list becomes unusable noise.
- Session-based pricing on high-traffic products.
- Acquisition means overlap with Contentsquare's own products.
- Expensive, with opaque quote-based pricing.
- Capturing everything raises data-governance questions that need answering up front.
- Meaningful learning curve to use the search language well.
Best for
Product teams that want analytics without an instrumentation backlog.
Product and support organisations that need to investigate specific user problems in depth.
All of these integrate with: Segment, Snowflake, Salesforce, Slack.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.