Hotjar vs FullStory: two free plans with different limits, then a price you can read against a quote

What each vendor lists

Hotjar's column comes from hotjar.com/pricing, which is titled Contentsquare Pricing and sends sign-ups to app.contentsquare.com. FullStory's comes from its plans page. Both were read on 7 October 2026.

Hotjar's cost summary also shows what stacking costs: Experience Analytics Growth ($39) plus Voice of Customer Growth ($79) is $118 before discounts, and the page shows $114 with a 10% discount on the lowest-priced plan, billed annually. Hotjar's page lists Slack, HubSpot, Microsoft Teams and Zapier integrations. It also says Product Analytics will be a separate application for the next few months while the products move under one platform.

Which free plan runs out first

Hotjar defines a session as "a visitor's full journey across every page (or screen)". A SaaS with 60,000 monthly active users who open the app three times a month produces about 180,000 sessions. That fits inside Hotjar's 200,000 free sessions, with 20,000 to spare for the marketing site, and is six times FullstoryFree's 30,000. Flip the example: a seed-stage product with 8,000 users opening the app four times a month is 32,000 sessions, just over FullStory's free cap, and well under Hotjar's.

The other limits cut the opposite way. Hotjar's free plan keeps one month of analytics data, so a quarterly retention question cannot be answered on it, and Growth lifts that to 13 months, with two months for session replays. FullstoryFree's 12 months of analytics retention and 10 seats suit a small product team that wants to compare this quarter with last.

Two tools, two centres of gravity

Hotjar's page leads with Experience Analytics: replays, heatmaps, funnels and surveys. The page says to start there, add Voice of Customer for feedback, or add Product Analytics to optimise journeys. FullStory's comparison table reads more like product analytics with replay inside it: funnels, page flow analysis, user segmentation, retention analysis, conversion analysis, metric alerts and rows for webhooks, data export, a consent API and an identity API. It does not show which plan includes each row, so the demo is where you pin that down.

Billing screens and privacy

SaaS teams want replays on the screens where money moves: plan picker, checkout, update-card page, cancellation survey. These are also the screens where recording can capture data you must not hold. FullStory's FAQ names sensitive data exclusion and consent-based recording, and its table lists private and sensitive data excluded by default and configurable form privacy. For Hotjar, ask in writing which input fields are masked by default, whether masking can be forced for given pages, and how a visitor's consent choice stops recording.

A practical rule: record plan-picker and cancellation flows, mask everything on the card form, and keep invoice pages out of recording entirely. Test with a dummy account before launch and watch your own replays to confirm nothing sensitive appears.

Tying a replay to a billing event

A replay of a failed upgrade is worth far more when you know the payment was declined. FullStory's table lists server-side events capture, data layer capture and an identity API, which is where a billing webhook could be attached to a user, subject to the plan you buy. For Hotjar, read how it identifies users and records events in the Contentsquare documentation before you assume the free plan supports it.

A two-week test on one flow

1. Pick one flow: trial signup to first project, or pricing page to checkout.
2. Install both free plans on it, staying under each session cap, or sample a share of traffic.
3. Give three people the same question, for example where trial users stall before the invite step, and note how long each tool takes to answer it.
4. Check what each tool masks and how each handles a visitor who declines cookies.
5. Ask FullStory for a quote at your real session count and compare it with Hotjar's Growth price at the same volume.

Which to choose

• Hotjar Free fits a SaaS with traffic up to 200,000 sessions that wants replays and heatmaps on the marketing site and signup flow, and can live with one month of history.
• FullstoryFree fits a small team under 30,000 sessions that wants 12 months of analytics and up to 10 users.
• Hotjar Growth fits a team that needs 13 months of data and a public price of $39 a month on yearly billing.
• FullStory paid plans fit a product team that wants funnels, retention, export and privacy tooling in one place and will go through a quote.

Related reading: Mixpanel vs Amplitude, Pendo vs Appcues, Heap vs Mixpanel, the analytics stack for SaaS, the customer analytics category and the comparison index.