Looking for a Hotjar alternative?
Hotjar records what your visitors did. You watch someone scroll past your add-to-cart button, and you still have to guess why. It also needs weeks of traffic before the recordings say anything, which is no help at all if the problem is that nobody is buying yet. It is now part of Contentsquare, an enterprise analytics platform, and hotjar.com/pricing redirects there. We read your site the way a visitor does and tell you what to fix first, in minutes, with no traffic to wait for.
Hotjar and you x you i, side by side
| Feature | you x you i ResearchPublished research and standards, your real page, and your real search data | Hotjar Real dataRecordings and click maps of your own real visitors |
|---|---|---|
| Conversions More of your visitors buy | ||
| Tells you why people are not buying | Measured | ChecksFunnels only |
| Checks your headline says what you sell | Measured | Not checked |
| Checks your buttons and calls to action | Measured | Not checked |
| Checks your pricing is laid out clearly | Measured | Not checked |
| Records real visitor sessions | Not checked | Measured |
| Heatmaps of real clicks | Not checked | Measured |
| Findability More visitors arrive and more of them buy | ||
| Checks the Google basics | Checks | Not checked |
| Checks AI can read and quote your pages | Checks | Not checked |
| Technical health More visitors arrive, more of them buy and more people can use your site | ||
| Checks how fast your pages load | Measured | Not checked |
| Checks it works on phones | Checks | Not checked |
| Checks people with disabilities can use it | Measured | Not checked |
| Trust and brand More visitors trust what they see | ||
| Checks your site looks trustworthy | Checks | Not checked |
| Predicts where visitors look first | Measured | Not checked |
| Clarity More of your visitors buy | ||
| Checks how hard the page is to take in | Checks | Not checked |
| How it works How each tool is run and priced, and what its scores rest on | ||
| Results in minutes, no traffic needed | Needs traffic first | |
| Tells you what to fix, in order | ||
| One audit, no subscription | ||
| Pricing | $5 per audit, no subscription required | Free tier, then from $49/mo |
The scoring behind your audit is state of the art: more than a dozen machine-learning models, several built on research published in the last two years, benchmarked on held-out data and calibrated to how thousands of real people rated thousands of real web pages. No other audit at this price grades a site this way.
Grounded in research and web standards
- WCAG 2.2 accessibility standard
- Google Core Web Vitals performance standard
- Usability research usability principles
- Web-credibility research trust
- Eye-tracking research visual attention
- Readability research clarity
- Colour science brand consistency
When to choose Hotjar
Choose Hotjar when you already have steady traffic and a specific question about behaviour: people are reaching checkout and abandoning it, and you want to watch it happen. Recordings and click maps are the right tool for that, and we do not do them. If you are running a test and need to see how real visitors move through a page, Hotjar will show you and we will not.
When to choose you x you i
Choose us when the question is why, not where. You get a read of your whole site: what is stopping people buying, whether your headline says what you sell, what is slow, what breaks on a phone, and what Google cannot see. It costs $5 for the audit, once, with no subscription required, so nothing bills in the background whether you open it or not.
What we check that Hotjar does not
Every one of these is a row in the table above, ticked in our column and blank in theirs.
- Checks your headline says what you sell
- Checks your buttons and calls to action
- Checks your pricing is laid out clearly
- Checks the Google basics
- Checks AI can read and quote your pages
- Connects to Google Search Console
- Shows which searches moved after your audit
- Links your fixes to your Google traffic
- Shows what AI answers cost you in clicks
- Compares your clicks with last year
- Tracks your score against your Google traffic
- Checks how fast your pages load
- Checks it works on phones
- Checks people with disabilities can use it
- Checks your site looks trustworthy
- Checks your brand is consistent
- Predicts where visitors look first
- Checks your writing reads clearly
- Flags copy that sounds AI-written
- Checks how hard the page is to take in
- Tells you what to fix, in order
- Emails you what your fixes did, 30 days on
- Scores measured against what real people said, not an opinion
- One audit, no subscription
What a year costs
Same year, both tools, list prices only.
- Hotjar Growth, billed annually, $49 a month
- $588a year
- you x you i $5 an audit, 12 audits, one a month
- $60a year
- Difference over a year
- $528
And you only pay for the audits you run. One audit is $5, paid once, so a year of monthly checks is a ceiling and not a bill. A subscription is the other way round: you pay it whether you look at it that month or not.
The two tools do different jobs, and the table above says which. This is only what each one asks for.
Hotjar list price read from contentsquare.com on 14 July 2026. Prices change; this one is checked by hand.
Hotjar vs you x you i: common questions
Is this a replacement for Hotjar?
No, and we would not pretend otherwise. Hotjar watches real visitors; we read the site itself. If you want session recordings and click maps, keep Hotjar. If you want to know what to change and why, that is our job. Plenty of sites end up doing both.
Do I need traffic before this is useful?
No. That is the main practical difference. Hotjar has nothing to show you until enough people have been through your site. We audit the pages themselves, so a site that launched yesterday gets the same report as one with ten thousand visitors a month, and it takes minutes rather than weeks: you paste your URL and get a ranked list of what to fix first, while a traffic tool would still be waiting for visitors.
How much does it cost?
A single page audit is $5, paid once, and buying it does not put you on a subscription. Hotjar starts free and moves to a monthly plan as your traffic grows, which is a bill that runs every month whether you log in or not.
Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare. Does that change anything?
For what you get, not much yet: the free and growth plans still cover sessions, recordings, heatmaps and friction detection, which is what most small businesses used Hotjar for. What changes is the direction of travel. Contentsquare sells to enterprise, the speed and monitoring features sit on its Pro and Enterprise plans, and hotjar.com/pricing now redirects to contentsquare.com. If you liked Hotjar because it was the small tool that did one thing well, it is worth knowing whose roadmap it is on now.
What do you check that Hotjar does not?
Speed, mobile, accessibility, whether your pricing is laid out clearly, whether your site looks trustworthy, whether your brand holds together, how hard the page is to take in, and what Google and AI search can read. None of these are in the free or growth plans a small business lands on. Contentsquare does sell speed monitoring higher up its range, on the plans priced for enterprise.
What is the audit based on?
Our own machine-learning models, each tuned on hundreds of real business pages and checked against the web standards professionals use for speed, accessibility, readability, and brand. Where a single-purpose tool checks one slice of your site, every score here comes from published research and is ranked by what actually moves visitors.