Hotjar pricing plans explained: what you actually get in 2026

Hotjar charges based on daily session volume. Its free Basic plan captures up to 35 sessions per day; paid plans scale from roughly $32 to custom enterprise pricing depending on traffic and feature needs.

Understanding what you are actually paying for matters because the sticker price is only part of the story. Session limits, feature gates, and the absence of participant recruitment can all affect whether a given plan delivers real research value for your team.

How Hotjar structures its pricing

Hotjar organizes its plans into four tiers:

Basic (free) for small sites testing the product
Plus for growing products with moderate traffic
Business for product and UX teams running ongoing research
Scale for enterprise teams needing advanced analytics and dedicated support

The core metric across all tiers is daily sessions, meaning the number of individual user visits Hotjar records each day. When you hit the cap, recording stops until the following day.

Plan-by-plan breakdown

Basic (free)

The free plan is a genuine permanent tier, not a trial. You get:

Up to 35 daily sessions captured for heatmaps and recordings
Unlimited surveys (with response limits depending on your plan)
Unlimited feedback widgets
365-day data storage

The 35-session cap means Hotjar will record only the first 35 visitors each day. For a site with a few hundred monthly visitors, this is workable. For anything with meaningful traffic, it fills up before mid-morning.

Plus

Plus is Hotjar’s entry-level paid tier, designed for teams that have outgrown the free cap. Key inclusions:

100 daily sessions
All Basic features
Events API for tracking custom actions
No Hotjar branding on surveys and widgets
1-year data retention

Pricing is in the $32/month range on an annual commitment. Month-to-month rates are higher. The session limit can still be a constraint for marketing-heavy campaigns or product launches.

Business

Business is Hotjar’s primary commercial tier and the plan most product and UX teams use day-to-day:

500 daily sessions at the base tier (upgradeable)
Funnels (on some Business sub-tiers)
Integrations with Segment, Mixpanel, HubSpot, Salesforce, and others
Priority support
Team management controls

Base Business pricing starts around $80/month annually. Additional session volume can be purchased, which raises the total cost meaningfully for high-traffic properties.

Scale

Scale is Hotjar’s enterprise offering with custom pricing. It adds:

Custom session limits negotiated per contract
Full funnel analysis and console tracking
API access for data export
Dedicated customer success manager
SLA-backed support

Scale is aimed at teams running Hotjar as a core part of a broader analytics stack. If you need volume, SLAs, or API integration, this is the only tier that delivers it.

What you do not get at any Hotjar tier

Hotjar is a behavioral analytics tool. It tells you what users do on your site through recordings, heatmaps, and click maps. What it does not provide:

A participant panel. You cannot recruit specific user profiles (by job title, industry, company size) to take part in your research directly through Hotjar.
Moderated interviews. There is no built-in live or AI-moderated conversation layer.
Qualitative follow-up. When a recording shows a confusing pattern, there is no mechanism within Hotjar to reach out to those same users for an interview.

For teams that need to combine behavioral observation with qualitative follow-up, a separate recruitment platform or a multi-method tool becomes necessary alongside Hotjar.

Comparing Hotjar tiers at a glance

Feature	Basic (free)	Plus	Business	Scale
Daily sessions	35	100	500+	Custom
Heatmaps	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Session recordings	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Surveys and feedback	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Funnels	No	No	Yes (some tiers)	Yes
API access	No	No	No	Yes
Integrations	Limited	Yes	Full	Full
Dedicated CSM	No	No	No	Yes
Branding removal	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Data retention	365 days	365 days	365 days	Custom

When does upgrading make financial sense?

The decision to move from free to Plus, or Plus to Business, usually comes down to one of three moments:

You keep hitting the daily cap. If your site regularly receives more visitors than your plan records, you are losing behavioral data on real sessions. A product launch, a paid campaign, or seasonal traffic spikes can all expose this gap.

You need integrations. Connecting Hotjar data to your product analytics stack (Mixpanel, Amplitude, Segment) requires a Business-tier plan or above. If cross-tool analysis is part of your workflow, the free or Plus tiers block you.

You need to share professionally. The Basic plan adds Hotjar branding to surveys and widgets. If you are running research on behalf of clients or in a professional product context, this matters.

Hotjar vs. alternatives: what to consider before committing

Hotjar is not the only behavioral analytics tool. Depending on your use case, other platforms may offer better value at a given price point. Our comparison of Hotjar vs. FullStory covers the key trade-offs in depth.

For teams that need behavioral analytics plus a participant recruitment layer, the calculus changes. Platforms like FullStory, Microsoft Clarity, and LogRocket cover similar behavioral data. None of them provide a built-in participant panel either.

If your team’s next step after watching a confusing recording is to recruit specific users for a moderated interview, that requires a different category of tool entirely. CleverX, for example, gives research teams access to a verified panel of 8 million professionals across 150 countries, with AI-moderated interviews and multi-method studies built in, so behavioral insights and qualitative follow-up live in the same workflow.

If you are evaluating Hotjar and want to compare panel-based qualitative tools, see our roundup of the best Hotjar alternatives in 2026.

Frequently asked questions

Is Hotjar free to use?

Yes. Hotjar offers a permanent free plan called Basic that includes up to 35 daily sessions for heatmaps and recordings and unlimited surveys and feedback widgets. The free tier is capped tightly enough that most growing products will outgrow it within a few months of launch.

How much does Hotjar cost per month?

Hotjar’s paid plans start at around $32 per month (Plus, billed annually) for 100 daily sessions. The Business plan begins at approximately $80 per month for 500 daily sessions, and Scale pricing is custom. All figures are based on publicly listed rates as of early 2026 and may change; check Hotjar’s official pricing page for current numbers.

What is a ‘daily session’ in Hotjar?

A daily session is a single visit to your site that Hotjar captures as a recording or heatmap data point. Once you hit your plan’s daily cap, Hotjar stops recording new sessions for the rest of that day. High-traffic sites can burn through low-tier caps very quickly.

Does Hotjar charge per seat or per site?

Hotjar charges per site (called a ‘site’ or organization in their dashboard), not per seat. All team members at your organization can access the same account at no extra cost. If you have multiple products or domains, you need a separate plan for each.

What does Hotjar’s Scale plan include that Business does not?

Scale adds features built for larger teams: funnels, console tracking, API access, a dedicated customer success manager, and higher session limits with custom pricing. It is designed for enterprise UX teams that need deeper analysis and SLA-backed support.

When should I consider a Hotjar alternative?

Consider an alternative when you need to recruit specific user profiles for qualitative follow-up (Hotjar cannot do this), when you need moderated interviews alongside behavioral data, or when your session cap is too restrictive for your traffic. Platforms that combine behavioral analytics with a verified research panel solve these gaps in one workflow.