Smartlook vs Hotjar

Free tier available

Quote on request

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.

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.

Free plan with a monthly session limit.

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

Cisco · since 2016

Category standard

Contentsquare · since 2014

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

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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

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