How to get the best deals on Hotjar — pricing breakdown, savings tips, and alternatives
Hotjar offers a free tier — you might not need to pay at all!
Perfect for trying out Hotjar without spending anything
💡 Pro tip: Start with the free tier to test if Hotjar fits your workflow before upgrading to a paid plan.
per month
per month
Don't overpay for features you won't use. Here's our recommendation based on your use case:
Most AI tools, including many in the data & analytics category, offer special pricing for students, teachers, and educational institutions. These discounts typically range from 20-50% off regular pricing.
• Students: Verify your student status with a .edu email or Student ID
• Teachers: Faculty and staff often qualify for education pricing
• Institutions: Schools can request volume discounts for classroom use
Most SaaS and AI tools tend to offer their best deals around these windows. While we can't guarantee Hotjar runs promotions during all of these, they're worth watching:
The biggest discount window across the SaaS industry — many tools offer their best annual deals here
Holiday promotions and year-end deals are common as companies push to close out Q4
Tools targeting students and educators often run promotions during this window
Signing up for Hotjar's email list is the best way to catch promotions as they happen
💡 Pro tip: If you're not in a rush, Black Friday and end-of-year tend to be the safest bets for SaaS discounts across the board.
Test features before committing to paid plans
Save 10-30% compared to monthly payments
Many companies reimburse productivity tools
Some providers offer multi-tool packages
Wait for Black Friday or year-end sales
Some tools offer "win-back" discounts to returning users
If Hotjar's pricing doesn't fit your budget, consider these data & analytics alternatives:
Open-source, all-in-one product analytics platform combining event tracking, session replay, feature flags, A/B testing, surveys, error tracking, and a data warehouse — with self-hosting option for complete data control.
Free tier available
✓ Free plan available
Mixpanel: Advanced product analytics platform to analyze user behavior, optimize conversion funnels, and improve retention with event-based tracking.
Free tier available
✓ Free plan available
Product analytics platform that combines natural language AI queries with behavioral cohort analysis, enabling teams to ask complex questions in plain English while building precise user segments based on actual behavior patterns.
Free tier available
✓ Free plan available
Hotjar's tracking script is loaded asynchronously and is approximately 40KB. Most sites see no noticeable performance difference. Session recording does use some client-side resources, so performance-sensitive sites should test thoroughly in staging before deploying to production.
Google Analytics focuses on quantitative metrics — traffic sources, pageviews, bounce rates, conversions as numbers. Hotjar focuses on qualitative and visual insights — seeing how users interact with pages through heatmaps and recordings, and hearing why through feedback and surveys. Most teams use both together: GA for what happened, Hotjar for why.
Hotjar automatically suppresses keystroke recording in form fields by default and provides CSS-based suppression rules to exclude specific page elements from recordings. You can configure additional exclusion zones for sensitive content areas. Hotjar is GDPR-compliant and offers consent management tools.
Hotjar's free Basic plan captures up to 35 sessions per day for recordings and heatmap data. This is sufficient for low-traffic sites and initial testing but will miss the majority of sessions on busier sites. Paid Observe plans start at $39/month for 100 daily sessions, scaling up to 500+ daily sessions on Business plans.
Contentsquare acquired Hotjar and integrated it into their broader digital experience analytics suite. Hotjar continues to operate as its own product with its own pricing, but now includes AI-powered features from Contentsquare such as automated behavior analysis, rage click detection, and more sophisticated session analysis tools.
Start with the free tier and upgrade when you need more features
Get Started with Hotjar →Pricing and discounts last verified March 2026