Hotjar Alternative for SaaS Teams: Monolytics vs Contentsquare

A current Hotjar alternative review should compare Monolytics with Contentsquare, not with an old standalone Hotjar plan table. Hotjar Ltd. merged into the Contentsquare Group on July 1, 2025, and Contentsquare says the familiar Heatmaps, Recordings, and Surveys capabilities are now available within its product suite.

Contentsquare is the natural path to evaluate when you want continuity from Hotjar into a broader experience analytics, voice-of-customer, and product analytics platform. Monolytics is a separate option to evaluate when the main job is focused web SaaS diagnosis: ask a product question, surface relevant sessions, verify the replay evidence, and use events or targeted feedback when more context is needed.

Checked 2026-07-11. 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?

The choice is not “old Hotjar versus a new replay tool.” It is whether the current Contentsquare platform or the focused Monolytics investigation path better matches the job your team performs each week.

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 publishes Free, Growth, Pro, and Enterprise plan levels for its products. Existing customers should not infer a billing change from a generic comparison page: the official notice links to separate migration, 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 Free-plan materials publish up to 200,000 monthly sessions and 10,000 session replay captures. Those numbers describe different scopes. A session may contribute to analytics without having a playable replay, and replay collection can depend on the plan and sampling configuration.

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:

1. What starts and ends a session?
2. How many sessions are analyzed?
3. How many sessions become playable replays?
4. Does sampling change by route, event, or plan?
5. How long are analytics data and replays retained?
6. 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

The Monolytics Assistant is positioned around a narrower evidence workflow:

1. Define a product question tied to a page, event, journey, segment, or outcome.
2. Use natural-language session search to narrow the replay set.
3. Open representative recordings and compare failed and successful paths.
4. Fix, instrument, survey, or keep monitoring based on what the evidence supports.

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

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:

• a product manager needs the relevant sessions for one signup, pricing, checkout, onboarding, or activation question;
• 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.

Contentsquare’s current data masking documentation describes controls for collection, masking, and IP blocking. It says keystrokes, email addresses, and credit-card numbers are automatically masked, while administrators can configure broader page content masking.

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.

Then run one controlled comparison:

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

Final decision

Choose the Contentsquare path when continuity from Hotjar, heatmaps, journeys, Voice of Customer, broader analytics, or its current AI suite matters. Evaluate Monolytics when the core job is a focused web SaaS investigation that begins with a product question and ends with replay evidence your team can verify.

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.

Official sources checked 2026-07-11

• Contentsquare: Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare—Plans and Pricing
• Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare
• Contentsquare pricing
• Contentsquare Free-plan overview
• Contentsquare Free and Growth plans
• Contentsquare Session Replay sampling mechanisms
• Contentsquare Session Replay Summaries
• Contentsquare tag installation
• Contentsquare data masking and collection controls
• Monolytics Assistant
• Monolytics pricing