Matomo vs Hotjar

From €26 per month (indicative, cloud by hits)

From $32 per month (indicative, Growth tier by daily sessions)

Self-hosting is free but plugins such as heatmaps and A/B testing are paid add-ons.

Priced by daily sessions per module; Observe, Ask and Engage are billed separately, so a full setup is several subscriptions.

Self-hosted community edition is free; premium plugins are paid.

Free plan with a daily session limit and basic heatmaps.

Widely used

InnoCraft · since 2007

Category standard

Contentsquare · since 2014

• Complete data ownership with no third-party processing — the strongest GDPR position available.
• No sampling, unlike free tiers of hosted analytics.
• Can be configured to run without cookies or consent banners.

• Non-technical teams adopt it without training, which is why it spreads inside organisations.
• Surveys and recordings together let you ask a user about the behaviour you just watched.
• Simple installation and good default privacy masking.

• Self-hosting requires PHP and MySQL operations, including performance tuning at scale.
• The interface is less refined than modern product analytics tools.
• Advanced features are paid plugins even on the free self-hosted edition.

• Session-based pricing across three separate modules adds up quickly.
• Sampling on lower tiers means the session you need may not have been recorded.
• Weak for engineering debugging compared to LogRocket or FullStory.

Public sector, healthcare and European organisations with strict data-residency requirements.

Marketing and product teams that want behavioural insight without an analytics specialist.