Hotjar's free tier survived the move to Contentsquare, at 10,000 replays a month

50 puts Hotjar at the bottom of this category, inside our Limited band, and the two pillars responsible are freedom at 38 and generosity at 44. Feature depth at 66 is the honest counterweight: on paper the free tier is broader than Microsoft Clarity's, adding funnels, error and performance monitoring and basic surveys to the replay-and-heatmap job.

The problem is that the tool it is compared against does the two headline jobs with no cap at all. Microsoft Clarity's free plan scores 77 here for that exact reason, and it is the comparison anyone shopping for free session replay ends up making. The restructure is the other weight on the score: a product whose pricing page now belongs to a different company, whose old tier names are retired, and whose free tier carries two contradictory figures, is harder to plan around than one that has stayed put.

Free means one project and a replay meter (as of July 2026):

• 10,000 session replays a month.
• 1 project. Two sites means two accounts or a paid plan.
• 13-month data access is a Growth feature, so the free tier's memory is short and that is the thing CRO teams actually buy.
• Zone-based heatmaps and additional projects also start at Growth.

Now the figure we are deliberately not repeating. Contentsquare's pricing page data also shows 200,000 monthly sessions against the free tier, which cannot be squared with Growth starting at 7,000 sessions for $49 a month. Our reading is that the 10,000 replay cap and the single project are what actually bind, with the session figure covering aggregate and heatmap traffic, and we could not confirm that from the page. We would rather flag the ambiguity than publish the bigger number and let you plan around it.

Two structural limits sit underneath all of that: no self-hosting and no data ownership story, which rules Hotjar out for some regulated teams entirely. And the Engage user-interview product is being end-of-lifed, which is worth knowing if it was part of why you chose Hotjar in the first place.

Growth is priced by monthly sessions and the ladder is long: $49 at 7,000, $99 at 15,000, $179 at 35,000, $409 at 100,000 and $739 at 200,000, with a dozen intermediate rungs between them. Above roughly 240,000 sessions you are into a sales conversation, and Pro (from 1 million monthly sessions, up to 6 projects, retroactive filtering and revenue goals) and Enterprise carry no public price at all.

What the first paid step buys is three projects, 13-month data access and zone-based heatmaps. The data access is the real product. Everything free in this category forgets quickly, and if your analysis runs on quarters rather than weeks, that is a defensible reason to pay somebody.

What makes the ladder uncomfortable is the size of the steps. A modest traffic increase can move you up two bands, so the bill is sensitive to a good month in a way that per-unit pricing is not. Model your seasonal peak rather than your average before you commit.

The migration has left the pricing readable but not simple: legacy plan keys are still visible in the page data, the old Observe, Ask and Engage structure is retired, and survey features now sit under Contentsquare's Voice of Customer line.

Yes, within limits, and we are landing a band above where a score of 50 would normally sit. The reason for the departure is that 10,000 replays a month is a lot of watching for a small site, and the score is dragged down by the restructure and the ownership story rather than by the cap itself. On the narrow question of whether zero dollars does the job, a modest site can run on this tier for a long time.

Who lives here: a small business or a solo founder investigating why one page converts badly, on a single site, where 10,000 replays is more sessions than they get. Who does not: anyone with two sites, because free is one project; anyone doing CRO analysis across quarters, because 13-month access starts at Growth; and any high-traffic site, because a traffic bump moves you up the ladder in steep steps.

There is also a straightforward reason to look elsewhere first. Microsoft Clarity's free plan does replay and heatmaps with no traffic limit, no project limit and no paid tier at all, which makes it the default free answer to this job. Hotjar earns money when you need surveys, funnels and long data access in one supported product.

Free Hotjar alternatives ranks the options, and the best free analytics tools covers the category.