Heap vs OpenReplay
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 tierFrom $199 per month (Cloud dedicated instance, billed hourly at $0.276)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Paid tiers are quote-based by session volume.
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.
Free tier
Free plan with a monthly session limit.
Self-hosted community edition is free and unlimited.
Open source
ELv2
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Contentsquare · since 2013
Established
OpenReplay · since 2021
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.
- Full data sovereignty — recordings stay inside your infrastructure.
- Developer-focused feature set comparable to LogRocket.
- No volume-based pricing when self-hosted.
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.
- 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.
Best for
Product teams that want analytics without an instrumentation backlog.
Privacy-constrained or high-volume teams that cannot use a hosted replay vendor.
All of these integrate with: Slack.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.