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testcritic

Hotjar vs Mixpanel

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

Quote on request

Quote only

Free tier available

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

Hotjar's own plans are no longer sold. New buyers are quoted on Contentsquare's three product lines, which are billed separately, so budget for the line you need rather than one Hotjar-style bill. Existing customers are being migrated through 2026.

Growth now starts at $0 and scales with event volume up to 20M events a month, with the first million free; annual billing saves around $480 a year. Enterprise is quote-based. Event-volume pricing stays generous for early products but climbs with a chatty event schema.

Free tier

Not available to new users. Contentsquare's free tier is the successor and is more generous than Hotjar's old 35-sessions-a-day limit.

Free forever, up to 1M events a month.

Open source

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptCodeless
JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonJavaSwiftKotlinPHP

Platforms

WebiOSAndroid
WebAPIiOSAndroid

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Category standard

Contentsquare · since 2014

Category standard

Mixpanel · since 2009

Strengths

  • Non-technical teams adopt it without training, which is why it spread inside organisations.
  • Surveys and recordings together let you ask a user about the behaviour you just watched.
  • Simple installation and good default privacy masking.
  • Genuinely self-serve — product managers build their own reports without help.
  • Large free tier that carries an early-stage product a long way.
  • Fast query performance on large event volumes.

Limitations

  • You cannot buy it: new accounts are closed and you are really evaluating Contentsquare.
  • Existing customers face a migration onto separately billed product lines, which can change the total.
  • Weak for engineering debugging compared to LogRocket or FullStory.
  • Requires disciplined event instrumentation and naming.
  • Weaker on user-level qualitative investigation than replay tools.
  • Costs scale with event volume, which grows faster than user count.

Best for

Nobody new — start with Contentsquare or Microsoft Clarity instead. Existing Hotjar customers should plan the Contentsquare migration.

Product teams that want fast, self-serve behavioural reporting.

All of these integrate with: Slack.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.