OpenReplay vs Hotjar

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

Quote on request

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.

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 and unlimited.

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.

Established

OpenReplay · since 2021

Category standard

Contentsquare · since 2014

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

• 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 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.

• 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.

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

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