Matomo vs Hotjar

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

Quote on request

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

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

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.

Widely used

InnoCraft · since 2007

Category standard

Contentsquare · since 2014

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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