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testcritic

Hotjar 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

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.

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

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 plan with a monthly session limit.

Open source

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptCodeless
JavaScriptSwiftKotlinDart

Platforms

WebiOSAndroid
WebiOSAndroid

Fits teams

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

Adoption

Category standard

Contentsquare · since 2014

Established

Cisco · since 2016

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 good native mobile replay, including Flutter and React Native.
  • Always-on event tracking without pre-instrumentation.
  • Reasonable pricing for mid-sized traffic.

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.
  • 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

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

Nobody starting today. Existing users should be planning a migration.

All of these integrate with: Google Analytics, Slack, Jira.

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