Question 1

Why people leave Hotjar

Accepted Answer

It is Contentsquare now. As of September 2026 hotjar.com redirects to Contentsquare, the pricing page redirects to Contentsquare's pricing, and Contentsquare's landing page is headed "the next evolution of Hotjar". Existing Hotjar plans still run, and Contentsquare publishes a table contrasting Hotjar Free with Contentsquare Free, but a new customer is buying a different, larger product than the one they read about.
The unit is the captured session. Hotjar's free tier stops at 35 sessions a day. That is not sampling, it is a stop: past the cap the day is simply not recorded, and the recordings you have are the ones that happened to come first.
It needs a consent banner. Recording a session means keeping an identifier on the visitor's device, so in the EEA and the UK it needs consent, and everyone who declines is missing from your replays as well as from your funnels.
It answers half the question. Nothing in Hotjar or Contentsquare reports where your traffic came from. It has always been a tool you run alongside analytics, which is a second integration, a second bill, and two sets of numbers that never quite agree.

Question 2

What to weigh before you pick one

Accepted Answer

Does it need a consent banner? Session recording usually means storing an id on the device. It does not have to, because identity can be derived on the server instead, but most tools take the easy route, and the banner is the visible cost.
What is the pricing unit, and what happens at the cap? Per captured session is the norm. Ask what happens when you reach the number: some products stop recording for the period, some sample, and the two give you very different pictures of a busy week.
What does the replay actually capture? Form fields should never be recorded, and whether the words on the page are captured should be your decision rather than a default. If your pages show account details, orders or anything medical, this is the question that matters most.
Does it report traffic as well? If it does not, you are buying a second product alongside your analytics and joining the two by hand.
Where is the data, and how long is it kept? Thirty days is common for replays, and it is short if you are investigating something seasonal.
Are surveys part of it? A survey builder and a feedback widget are different things wearing similar names. Decide which you actually need before comparing prices.

Question 3

Which to choose

Accepted Answer

If surveys and user interviews are the job, stay with Contentsquare or look at PostHog. Nothing else on this page has a survey builder, ours included.
If the budget is zero, Microsoft Clarity, and plan for the consent banner. It gives you more free behaviour tooling than anything else here.
If you want the banner gone, it is ours or a carefully configured Matomo.
If you want one tool for traffic and behaviour, it is Matomo or ours; everything else on this page still needs analytics beside it.
If the subject is an application rather than a site, Mixpanel or PostHog.

	Skomi	Google Analytics	Plausible	Umami	Matomo	Cloudflare Web Analytics	Hotjar	Microsoft Clarity	Fathom Analytics	Simple Analytics	PostHog	Mixpanel	Firebase Analytics
Works without a cookie bannerOut of the box, with no configuration.	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Configurable	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	With cookieless mode on	No	No
Stores something on the visitor's deviceA cookie or an id in local storage. The law treats them the same.	No	Yes	No	No	Configurable	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	Cookies by default	Yes	Yes
Counts every visit, without samplingBoth Google and Cloudflare sample adaptively, so a small site is not sampled at all. Hotjar does not sample; it stops, at a number of sessions set by the plan.	Yes	Explorations over 10M events	Yes	Yes	Yes	Adaptive sampling	Capped per plan	Yes	Yes	Not checked	Not checked	Not checked	High-cardinality dimensions
Keeps your full history for as long as you are a customerSkomi does not: it deletes analytics once the plan's window has passed, and the window each plan sells is on the pricing page. A cell reads "Not checked" where the product publishes no figure we could verify. Plausible documents "5+ years" for Enterprise but states nothing for its standard plans, and Cloudflare documents no retention period at all.	No	Reports yes, event data 2 to 14 months	Not checked	Your own database, self-hosted	Reports forever, raw data 24 months on cloud; your own database self-hosted	Not checked	Not checked	No	Yes	No	Not checked	Not checked	No
Sites	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Web, through GA4
Mobile and desktop apps	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	Not checked	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Heatmaps	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	Not checked	Yes	No
Session recordings	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No
Feedback boards	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	Not checked	Not checked	No
Reports where your traffic comes from	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Data stored in the EU	Yes	No	Yes	Your choice	Your choice	No	Not checked	No	Yes	Yes	Not checked	Yes	No
Open source	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	Capture script only	No	Not checked	Yes	Not checked	SDKs only
Can be self-hosted	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No	Not checked	Yes, officially unsupported	Not checked	No
Surveys and user interviews	No	No	No	No	Not checked	No	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	Not checked	No
More than one site on the free planSkomi's free plan carries one site, which is a real reason to pick something else if you look after several small ones. Google and Cloudflare read "Not checked" because how many sites their free tiers cover was not verified. That they HAVE a free tier is the row above.	No	Not checked	No	Unlimited, self-hosted	Unlimited, self-hosted	Not checked	Not checked	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Free tierSkomi's is the Hobby plan: one site, no card.	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Self-hosted only	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Hotjar alternatives

Why people leave Hotjar

What to weigh before you pick one

The alternatives to Hotjar

Skomi Ours

Umami

Matomo

Microsoft Clarity

PostHog

Mixpanel

All of them, side by side

Which to choose

One script, or one SDK. The same reports either way.