Hotjar

Hotjar is qualitative instrumentation for marketers — a single snippet yields click and scroll heatmaps, sampled session recordings, on-page surveys, and a feedback widget. Its data model is page- and session-oriented, not an event taxonomy you query: each site gets its own JavaScript tracking code, and everything Hotjar knows hangs off captured sessions rather than a schema you define.

Hotjar no longer operates standalone. hotjar.com/pricing now permanently redirects to Contentsquare’s pricing page, and the two products have merged into one platform: new sign-ups create a Contentsquare account, existing Hotjar accounts log in through Contentsquare, and the classic Hotjar toolset sits alongside additions like funnels, error and performance monitoring, and Heap-derived product analytics that Contentsquare is rolling out over time. The free tier is dramatically larger than old Hotjar Free (which capped capture at 35 sessions a day) — but data retention on the free plan is one month, so treat it as a diagnostic window, not an archive.

Implementation is genuinely low-lift: paste the per-site snippet or install it via the Google Tag Manager template. Two client-side APIs add depth when engineering does get involved. The Identify API (window.hj('identify', userId, {...})) attaches user attributes for filtering recordings and heatmaps and needs a small queue-stub fallback if it can fire before the snippet loads. The Events API sends named events that filter collected data, trigger session capture to start, or trigger surveys — the closest Hotjar gets to event-driven analytics, and still a filtering mechanism rather than a queryable model.

Two gotchas matter in practice. First, sampling: each site has a daily session capture limit shared by heatmaps and recordings, and once traffic exceeds it Hotjar samples at an even rate across the day — so recording counts will never reconcile with your analytics tool’s session numbers, by design. Second, privacy handling is client-side and irreversible: keystrokes in input fields are suppressed in the browser by default (never reaching Hotjar’s servers), and any text, image, or input you suppress is stripped from the DOM before the session is sent — there is no retrieving or suppressing data after the fact, so get your suppression rules right before launch.

Use it when a marketing or CRO team wants fast visual insight and lightweight voice-of-customer collection without engineering involvement — the merged free tier is now generous enough for real sites. Look past it when you need unsampled capture, long retention, identity resolution, or replay data feeding a warehouse — or when Clarity’s free tier already covers the basics. And go in knowing you’re adopting Contentsquare, not a standalone product: pricing, packaging, and roadmap are theirs now.