Matomo vs Contentsquare

From $29 per month (Cloud, 50k hits; annual billing gives 2 months free)

Free tier available

Self-hosting is free but plugins such as heatmaps and A/B testing are paid add-ons. Cloud scales with hits.

Since absorbing Hotjar, Contentsquare sells three separately billed product lines — Experience Analytics, Voice of Customer and Product Analytics — with a free entry tier and quote-based paid plans. Enterprise annual contracts are priced by traffic and are typically six figures at scale.

Self-hosted Community edition is free forever with unlimited users and hits; premium plugins are paid.

There is now a free Contentsquare plan — it replaced Hotjar's as the self-serve entry point and is considerably more generous than Hotjar's old 35-sessions-a-day limit.

Widely used

InnoCraft · since 2007

Widely used

Contentsquare · since 2012

• Complete data ownership with no third-party processing — the strongest GDPR position available.
• No sampling, unlike free tiers of hosted analytics.
• Can be configured to run without cookies or consent banners.

• Revenue attribution turns UX findings into business cases executives act on.
• Zone-based analysis is more actionable than raw heatmaps on complex pages.
• Handles very high traffic volumes without sampling.

• Self-hosting requires PHP and MySQL operations, including performance tuning at scale.
• The interface is less refined than modern product analytics tools.
• Advanced features are paid plugins even on the free self-hosted edition.

• The full platform is expensive, and paid tiers are quote-based rather than published.
• Substantial implementation and training effort before value appears.
• Splitting the old Hotjar bundle into three separately billed lines means you may need more than one to replace what Hotjar did.

Public sector, healthcare and European organisations with strict data-residency requirements.

Large e-commerce, travel and financial organisations with dedicated optimisation teams — and now, via the free tier, the small teams Hotjar used to serve.