Hotjar vs OpenReplay

Quote on request

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

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.

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.

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.

Self-hosted community edition is free and unlimited.

Category standard

Contentsquare · since 2014

Established

OpenReplay · since 2021

• 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.

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

• 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.

• 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.

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

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