OpenReplay vs Hotjar

From $4.5 per 1k sessions (indicative, cloud)

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

Self-hosting costs only infrastructure. Cloud pricing is usage-based and cheaper than the closed-source leaders.

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 and unlimited.

Free plan with a daily session limit and basic heatmaps.

Established

OpenReplay · since 2021

Category standard

Contentsquare · since 2014

• Full data sovereignty — recordings stay inside your infrastructure.
• Developer-focused feature set comparable to LogRocket.
• No volume-based pricing when self-hosted.

• 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 session replay is a non-trivial operational commitment, including storage.
• Smaller community and fewer integrations than the commercial tools.
• Analytics and funnel features are thinner.

• 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.

Privacy-constrained or high-volume teams that cannot use a hosted replay vendor.

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