Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
Quote on request
Quote onlyFrom $4.5 per 1k sessions (indicative, cloud)
Free tierWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Enterprise annual contracts priced by traffic, typically six figures at scale.
Self-hosting costs only infrastructure. Cloud pricing is usage-based and cheaper than the closed-source leaders.
Free tier
No free tier; Hotjar is the company's self-serve entry product.
Self-hosted community edition is free and unlimited.
Open source
ELv2
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
Contentsquare · since 2012
Established
OpenReplay · since 2021
Strengths
Limitations
Best for
Large e-commerce, travel and financial organisations with dedicated optimisation teams.
Privacy-constrained or high-volume teams that cannot use a hosted replay vendor.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.