Hotjar Alternative for SaaS Teams: Monolytics vs Contentsquare

Feb 6, 2026

Mykola Riabchenko

Analytics Tool Alternatives

Hotjar Alternative for SaaS Teams: Monolytics vs Contentsquare

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Hotjar merged into the Contentsquare Group on July 1, 2025. Compare the current Contentsquare offering with Monolytics’s site analyst, session replay, and targeted Website Surveys.

If you already use Hotjar, check your account’s migration, billing, and data-retention path before planning a switch. Then test the workflow you need with the same journey in each product.

Checked 2026-10-13. Existing Hotjar customers should check their own account, billing notice, and platform URL because migration and plan handling can differ. Always verify current commercial terms on the official pricing pages.

Quick answer: Contentsquare or Monolytics?

Your main requirement	Start with	Why
Preserve the current vendor path from Hotjar	Contentsquare	Contentsquare is the official home for the former Hotjar capabilities and documents account-specific guidance for existing customers.
Heatmaps, journey analysis, replay, feedback, surveys, and a broader suite	Contentsquare	Its current offering spans Experience Analytics, Voice of Customer, and Product Analytics.
AI summaries and analysis inside the Contentsquare suite	Contentsquare on the applicable plan	Contentsquare documents Session Replay Summaries and Sense workflows. It should not be described as lacking AI.
Questions about site activity and business flows	Monolytics	Assistant uses collected activity and business context, states sources and limits, and links supporting recordings where available.
A simple price comparison	Neither article alone	Session allowances, replay captures, retention, feedback limits, and included features use different units. Compare the live plan pages with your own traffic.

Use the same task to test the current Contentsquare and Monolytics workflows.

What happened to Hotjar?

Contentsquare’s official Hotjar plans and pricing notice says Hotjar merged into the Contentsquare Group effective July 1, 2025. It maps the familiar product areas into the current suite:

Experience Analytics includes Session Replay, Heatmaps, Journey Analysis, and related behavior analysis;
Voice of Customer includes feedback, surveys, and usability testing;
Product Analytics supports cross-session journey, retention, and loyalty analysis.

Contentsquare’s current pricing separates Experience Analytics Free/Growth from Experience Platform Pro/Enterprise; its detailed comparison also distinguishes product and legacy plan scopes. Confirm the exact offering and entitlements for your account. The migration notice links to separate billing and legal guidance.

The current Hotjar-branded site also states that Heatmaps, Recordings—called Session Replay in Contentsquare—surveys, and feedback remain available. It presents funnels, Sense, survey generation, summaries, and other current capabilities. A fair comparison therefore cannot claim that the Contentsquare path is replay-only or has no AI.

Monthly sessions and replay captures are different units

This distinction is essential when comparing plans.

Contentsquare’s current Experience Analytics Free plan lists up to 200,000 monthly sessions and replay capture at 5% of sessions, capped at 10,000 captures. The pricing page separates analytics collection from replay capture and access. A session counted in analytics does not automatically have a playable replay.

The official Contentsquare Free-plan overview presents the two limits separately. The Session Replay sampling documentation also explains that replay collection rates vary by plan and can use different sampling mechanisms.

Do not compare “200,000 monthly sessions” with another vendor’s “sessions per month” and assume the same number of replays, the same session definition, or the same retained evidence. Before choosing a plan, ask each vendor:

What starts and ends a session?
How many sessions are analyzed?
How many sessions become playable replays?
Does sampling change by route, event, or plan?
How long are analytics data and replays retained?
What happens after the allowance is reached?

Contentsquare’s Free and Growth plan documentation says new data collection stops for the rest of the billing cycle after the Experience Analytics session allowance is reached. Confirm the behavior of the exact product and plan you are evaluating.

Contentsquare’s current replay and AI path

Contentsquare’s Introduction to Session Replay documents replay across Free, Growth, Pro, and Enterprise. The surrounding platform includes heatmaps, journeys, funnels, Voice of Customer, and other capabilities depending on product and plan.

AI is part of that path. Official Session Replay Summaries documentation says individual summaries are available on Growth, Pro, and Enterprise. The summaries can identify key behavior, potential friction, and time-coded examples. Group summaries require Pro or Enterprise, and access also requires acceptance of the applicable AI Service Schedule.

Contentsquare also documents Sense Chat workflows that can work from other analysis contexts and surface related replays. Buyers should confirm which AI features, models, data inputs, legal terms, and plan entitlements apply to their account.

What the Monolytics path is designed to do

Monolytics Assistant is your site’s analyst:

Ask about a visitor journey, error, business flow, or missing data.
Check the collected activity, business context, sources, and limits used in the answer.
Open supporting sessions and compare relevant failed and successful paths.
Choose a fix, instrumentation check, survey, or further review according to the evidence.

This fits questions such as checkout abandonment, stalled onboarding, repeated dead clicks, validation loops, or behavior before a pricing or signup exit. It does not prove user intent or causality. When replay shows friction but not the reason, a targeted survey is a separate supporting signal rather than a conclusion generated from the recording.

Monolytics should therefore be evaluated as a focused product investigation path. It should not be presented as automatic parity with every Contentsquare heatmap, journey, product analytics, mobile, research, or enterprise workflow.

Contentsquare vs Monolytics by decision area

Decision area	Contentsquare path	Monolytics path	What to verify
Session replay	Replay within a broader Experience Analytics product, with plan-dependent collection and sampling.	Replay connected to focused product questions and Assistant-surfaced sessions.	Analyzed sessions, playable captures, sampling, retention, and filters.
AI assistance	Replay summaries and Sense capabilities on applicable plans and terms.	A site analyst for questions about journeys, errors, business flows, and data readiness, with visible sources and limits.	Plan access, data inputs, evidence links, false leads, and human review controls.
Heatmaps and journeys	Current Contentsquare materials document heatmaps, funnels, and journey analysis.	Do not assume equivalent breadth from the current Monolytics Assistant positioning.	Which analysis views the team uses weekly.
Feedback and research	Voice of Customer includes feedback, surveys, and usability testing, with plan-specific allowances.	Current Monolytics plans include Website Surveys alongside Assistant and Session Replay; review supported targeting and available context.	Targeting, response limits, connection to sessions, and export needs.
Plan model	Free, Growth, Pro, and Enterprise exist across Contentsquare products; exact capabilities and units vary.	Free, Growth, and Pro are published on the Monolytics pricing page.	Current price, volume units, over-limit behavior, retention, support, and contract.
Existing Hotjar account	Official migration and billing guidance applies.	A new vendor implementation and data transition would be required.	Historical data, account URL, remaining contract, exports, and migration timing.

Who should stay on the Contentsquare path?

Start with Contentsquare when one or more of these are important:

continuity for an existing Hotjar account, contract, or dataset;
heatmaps and journey analysis alongside session replay;
Voice of Customer or usability-testing workflows within the same vendor suite;
product analytics or broader experience analytics beyond a single replay investigation;
Contentsquare’s Sense or replay-summary workflows;
managed implementation, enterprise controls, or a wider organizational rollout.

For teams that only used Hotjar lightly, the current Contentsquare Free or Growth path may already cover the required job. Confirm the actual account migration and plan before introducing the cost and operational work of a vendor switch.

Who should evaluate Monolytics?

Monolytics belongs on the shortlist when the team’s recurring problem looks like this:

the team needs to ask about visitor journeys, errors, business flows, or missing data;
random replay browsing creates noise, so the team wants to begin with a specific behavior or outcome;
AI-assisted output must stay connected to recordings the team can inspect;
product events or a targeted survey should support the replay evidence;
the current public Monolytics plans match the required traffic, retention, and collaboration needs.

This is not evidence that Monolytics is always faster, simpler, cheaper, or stronger. Validate those outcomes with your own traffic and workflow. A narrow tool can be a better fit for one job and a worse fit when the organization needs broader platform capabilities.

Setup and privacy are part of the comparison

Contentsquare’s tag installation guide documents a JavaScript tag installed in the page head, with manual, Google Tag Manager, and developer-assisted paths for Free and Growth. Its implementation overview distinguishes self-service Free and Growth onboarding from managed Pro and Enterprise implementation.

Privacy setup depends on the platform. The data suppression guide applies to insights.hotjar.com. For app.contentsquare.com, use the Data masking guide, which describes project-level masking, page exceptions, and element rules. Test the collected view before production use; settings changes do not apply retroactively.

For Monolytics, use the event-tracking setup guide to review direct-code and Google Tag Manager event paths. Define the routes and audiences that need recording, then review the Monolytics Privacy Policy and GDPR information before production capture.

For either vendor, your organization must decide what may be recorded, what must be masked or excluded, how consent works, who can access evidence, and how long it should be retained. Do not copy a competitor’s default settings into production without reviewing your own product, audience, and legal obligations.

Migration checklist for an existing Hotjar team

Before switching vendors, write down what must survive the transition.

Question	Why it matters
Is the account on `insights.hotjar.com` or `app.contentsquare.com`?	The applicable plan, help content, and migration path can differ.
Which Hotjar capabilities are used every week?	Prevents paying for unused parity or losing a critical survey, heatmap, or replay workflow.
How many monthly sessions are analyzed and how many replays are actually watched?	Separates analytics volume from replay-capture needs.
Which recordings, survey results, and settings need export or retention?	Historical continuity can determine the migration date.
Which privacy and consent rules are production-critical?	Collection should not begin until those rules are reproduced and tested.
What is the first decision the new workflow must improve?	A real product question is a better success criterion than a completed installation.

Then run one controlled comparison:

Choose a failed high-intent journey and its successful comparison group.
Verify the tracking and privacy configuration in a non-sensitive scope.
Find representative failed sessions in each product.
Use each product’s available AI workflow and check every important output against replay evidence.
Record missing context, false leads, review effort, and the next action the team can support.
Compare plan terms using both total analytics sessions and required replay captures.

Final decision

Evaluate Contentsquare when continuity from Hotjar, its analytics views, Voice of Customer, or Sense capabilities match your needs. Evaluate Monolytics when you want questions answered from collected activity and business context, plus focused replay collection and targeted feedback. Check sources, limits, and account-specific terms before choosing.

To test the focused workflow, see how Monolytics turns product questions into replay-backed findings and compare the current Monolytics plans. Use the AI session replay analysis workflow when you need a review method, or the Fullstory comparison when the shortlist includes another broad experience analytics platform.