Hotjar Pricing: What Each Plan Costs and Where It Bites

A freelancer at a tidy wooden desk with a closed laptop and a mug, looking out of a window.

Hotjar pricing starts at free and then climbs in steps tied to how many sessions you capture each day, not how many people visit your site. The free Basic plan is usable for a small site, but paid tiers get expensive as traffic grows. Plans have changed several times since Contentsquare acquired Hotjar, so confirm current numbers on the live pricing page before you budget.

TL;DR:

  • Hotjar is free to start, but the free Basic plan caps how many sessions are recorded per day, so it suits small sites only.
  • Paid plans are priced by daily session volume, which means your bill follows your traffic, not your needs.
  • Hotjar is owned by Contentsquare, which bought it in 2021, and plan names and limits have shifted since.
  • Hotjar sets cookies, so in the EU and UK you generally need consent before it loads, an indirect cost the price page never shows.
  • If you only need heatmaps and replays alongside basic traffic stats across several sites, a cookieless analytics tool with replays built in is usually the cheaper, simpler pick.
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Table of Contents

Hotjar Pricing by Plan: Free, Plus, Business and Scale

Three stacks of wooden blocks in rising heights with a brass coin on the tallest one.

Hotjar sells its behavior-analytics product in tiers that scale with the number of daily sessions you want captured. The figures below are the ranges we saw at the last check. They change often, so treat them as a guide and confirm on Hotjar's pricing page before you commit.

Plan Who it suits How it's metered Rough monthly cost (monthly billing)
Basic One small site, testing the tool Small daily session cap $0
Plus A site with modest traffic and one analyst Low hundreds of daily sessions Roughly $30 to $40
Business A team that needs filters and more history Daily session tiers that scale up Roughly $80 to $100 and up
Scale High-traffic sites and larger teams Highest daily session tiers Roughly $170 to $215 and up

Annual billing normally lowers the monthly figure. Hotjar also sells separate products for surveys and interviews, priced on their own, so the number on the first card is rarely the whole bill.

Is Hotjar Free to Use? What the Basic Plan Gives You

Two coworkers in conversation at a table with closed laptops, one gesturing as they talk.

Yes, Hotjar has a free plan, and it is not a trial. The Basic plan includes heatmaps, session recordings and a limited set of feedback tools, with a hard cap on daily sessions. At the time of writing that cap was 35 sessions per day.

35 daily sessions is roughly 1,050 recorded sessions a month, which is a few hours of normal traffic on a busy page.

That is enough to spot a broken form or a button nobody clicks on a small brochure site. It is not enough to draw conclusions about a page that gets a few hundred visits a day. The cap works as a sample, so the recordings you see are whichever sessions arrived first on a given day, not a fair cross-section of your visitors.

My position: use the free plan to find out whether replays and heatmaps change your decisions at all. If you open them twice and never act, you just saved a few hundred dollars a year.

What Is Hotjar and How Does It Work?

Hotjar is a behavior-analytics tool. You paste a tracking script into your site, and it records how visitors interact with pages. You then see that behavior in three main forms:

  • Heatmaps. Aggregated click, move and scroll data shown as color overlays on a page screenshot. They show where attention goes and where it stops.
  • Session recordings. Replays of individual visits, including mouse movement, clicks, scrolls and page changes, so you can watch where someone got stuck.
  • Feedback tools. On-page surveys and feedback widgets that ask visitors directly what is confusing.

It is not a full traffic-analytics product. It tells you what people did on a page, not a clean breakdown of where visitors came from across all your sites. For that distinction, our guide to what website analytics measures and what tools only guess covers where each type of tool stops being reliable.

What Happened to Hotjar? Is It Part of Contentsquare?

Yes, Hotjar is part of Contentsquare. Contentsquare, the enterprise digital-experience analytics company, announced its acquisition of Hotjar in 2021. Hotjar kept its own product and brand, but it now sits inside a much larger company, and its sign-up and marketing pages are increasingly hosted under the Contentsquare domain.

What that means for you as a buyer:

  • Plan changes are likely. Plan names, limits and bundles have shifted since the deal. Any pricing article more than a year old, including a Reddit thread, may describe plans that no longer exist.
  • Positioning has moved upmarket. Hotjar's pitch has leaned toward teams and larger organizations, which is not where a freelancer with five client sites lives.
  • The product still works. Nothing here means Hotjar stopped being a competent tool. It means you should re-check the price every renewal, not assume it stayed put.

Hotjar login and careers questions follow the same logic. Use the login link on Hotjar's own site, and check its careers page directly, because both have been moving under the parent company's umbrella.

Where Hotjar Pricing Bites: Daily Sessions, Spikes and Multiple Sites

The headline price is rarely the price you pay. Three things push the number up.

Daily sessions are a ceiling, not an average

Because plans are metered per day, a traffic spike can use your whole allowance in the morning. Sessions after that go unrecorded. The day you launched a campaign or got mentioned somewhere is exactly the day you wanted full coverage.

Tier jumps are steep

The step from one tier to the next is not a small bump. Moving from an entry paid plan to a business-level one can multiply your monthly cost several times over, even if your traffic only doubled.

More sites means more of everything

If you run several sites, you are either stretching one quota across all of them or paying for several. A freelancer maintaining ten small client sites finds this adds up faster than any single site would suggest.

Pro Tip: Before upgrading, look at your last 90 days and count how many of your sessions came from a single page type, like a checkout or a landing page. If 80 percent of the useful questions concern one or two pages, a page-targeted heatmap on those pages beats paying for blanket recording across the whole site.

The Cost Hotjar's Price Page Doesn't Show: Cookies and Consent

A hand turning a key in a small brass padlock on a wooden cabinet door.

Hotjar's tracking code sets cookies. Under the EU's ePrivacy Directive, storing or reading information on a visitor's device generally requires prior consent, with narrow exceptions for what is strictly necessary. Session recording is not strictly necessary for the site to function, so in practice you need a consent banner and a way to hold the script until a visitor agrees.

That has two effects on what you really pay:

  • Fewer recorded sessions. Visitors who decline or ignore the banner are never recorded, so your daily quota stretches further but your sample skews toward people who click "accept."
  • Extra setup. You need a consent tool, and you need to keep it correctly configured, which is either money or ongoing time.

There is a performance angle too. Every additional script competes with your page for load time, and Google's Web Vitals guidance treats loading, responsiveness and visual stability as measurable user-experience signals. A heavy third-party tag is not free even when the subscription is.

Hotjar Alternatives: How to Choose by the Job You Need Done

I would not pick on feature count. Pick on what question you are trying to answer.

  • "Why do people leave this page?" You need replays and heatmaps. Our breakdown of how to pick a session replay tool by the job it has to do walks through the trade-offs.
  • "Where is my traffic coming from?" You need plain analytics, not replays. Paying behavior-tool prices for this is the most common mismatch.
  • "I run WordPress and want to see clicks." Read what heatmaps for WordPress actually show you first, because a heatmap on a page with dynamic content can mislead.
  • "I manage many sites and I'm the only person." You want one dashboard, one consent-free setup and a flat price, not a per-site quota.

Reddit threads about Hotjar pricing are useful for spotting complaints, but check the date. A complaint from before the Contentsquare era may describe a plan that no longer exists.

If your real problem is the one above, several sites, modest traffic, and a need for both traffic numbers and a look at behavior, Replastats is built for exactly that. It is cookieless, so it needs no consent banner, and it installs with a single 4.7 KB deferred script tag or a WordPress plugin that puts reports inside wp-admin. Session replays and heatmaps arrive on the Starter plan, and the Pro and Agency plans add a multi-site board that shows every site on one screen. There is also a free single-site tier for plain traffic stats.

The honest limit: Replastats is analytics with replays and heatmaps, not a survey or customer-interview platform. If your team depends on on-page feedback forms and structured research workflows, you will miss that. Check each plan's current limits on our pricing page before you sign up, the same way I told you to check anyone else's.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Hotjar free to use?

Yes. Hotjar has a free Basic plan with heatmaps, recordings and limited feedback tools, capped at a small number of sessions per day. It works for a low-traffic site or a trial, but the cap means you only see a sample of visits.

What is Hotjar and how does it work?

Hotjar is a behavior-analytics tool that records how visitors interact with your pages. You add a tracking script to your site, and it produces heatmaps, session recordings and feedback surveys you review in a dashboard. It focuses on on-page behavior rather than full traffic reporting.

What happened to Hotjar?

Contentsquare acquired Hotjar in 2021. Hotjar remains a product with its own name, but plans, limits and marketing have changed under the parent company, so older pricing articles may be out of date.

Is Hotjar part of Contentsquare?

Yes. Hotjar is owned by Contentsquare, an enterprise digital-experience analytics company. Its sign-up pages now appear under the Contentsquare domain, though the product still operates as Hotjar.

Generally yes for visitors in the EU and UK, because its tracking code sets cookies and session recording is not strictly necessary for a site to work. Consult your legal advisor for your exact situation.

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