Hotjar is now Contentsquare, but the question hasn't changed. Do you want to watch visitors, or find out what's costing you sales? Here's how to pick, and why plenty of teams run both.
UX Audit Tool is a free Hotjar alternative for teams who want a ranked list of fixes and a revenue estimate in about a minute. You paste in a URL, and that's the setup done. Hotjar works differently. Its tracking code has to go live first, and then the picture slowly fills in as real visitors click around.
One thing worth knowing up front: Hotjar is now Contentsquare. Existing users log in with the same credentials, and the heatmaps, recordings, and surveys carry over into Contentsquare's free plan.
Short version? The audit tells you where to look first. Contentsquare is what you open when you want to see the problem happen.
Run the free audit first. It'll show you which pages deserve a closer look, and that's exactly where session recordings earn their keep.
Run the free audit| Areas | UX Audit Tool | Hotjar (now Contentsquare) |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | AI-powered UX and conversion audit | Behavior analytics: session replays, heatmaps, funnels, surveys |
| What you give it | Your URL, industry, business stage, and a few GA4 numbers | A tracking code on your site |
| Setup | Nothing to install. Enter your name and email to unlock the full report | Install the script, then wait for visitors to arrive |
| Pages covered | All pages on your site | Pages where the tracking code runs |
| First results | About a minute | Builds up with traffic |
| What you get back | Score out of 100, issues ranked by priority, Lighthouse scores, PDF report | Replays, heatmaps, funnels and survey responses |
| Revenue impact | Revenue gap estimate is free | Impact quantification from Growth; revenue attribution on Pro |
| Watches real visitors | No | Yes |
| Data history | Past audits saved in your dashboard | 1 month on Free, 13 months on Growth |
| Price | Free | Free plan available. Paid plans from $39 a month |
| Best for | Fast diagnosis and getting buy-in for fixes | Ongoing behavior research on busy pages |
Credit where it's due. Hotjar is very good at showing you things you'd never guess, and the free plan is generous now, with up to 200k sessions a month.
A session recording catches a shopper tapping the same spot on mobile four times, then giving up. No report would have spelled that out so clearly.
Heatmaps show where attention drops off. If half your visitors never reach the pricing table, you'll see it in one glance.
On-page surveys let you ask "What stopped you today?" right at the moment someone hesitates.
It needs traffic before it has much to say. A landing page with a few hundred visits a month can take a long while to produce a useful heatmap. The free plan also keeps just one month of data.
Then there's the watching. On the free plan, someone on your team still has to sit through recordings and work out what they mean. AI summaries of replays and heatmaps help with that, but they start on the paid Growth plan.
Fair warning: digging up your GA4 login might take longer than the form itself.
01
URL, industry, and what stage the business is at, which is how the tool picks a fair benchmark for you.
02
Monthly users, conversion rate, bounce rate, and average session duration. Stuck? Each field links to where it lives in GA4 or Clarity.
03
Last, your average order or deal value and the goal you care about most. Leads? Sales? Pick one.
The AI then crawls the pages on your site and builds the report. To open the full version, you add your name and email and type in a one-time code.
Your site gets a score out of 100, with separate UX, performance, accessibility, SEO, and best practices scores alongside it.
Each problem is tagged high, medium, or low priority. And the wording is refreshingly plain. You'll see things like "Primary CTA not prominent above the fold" or a load time flagged against the 2.5-second mark.
If you only look at one screen, make it this one. The report estimates the orders you're missing each month and the revenue gap between your conversion rate and your industry benchmark. On Contentsquare, impact reporting is on paid plans. Here it's part of the free report.
Strengths get their own panel, so you know what to leave alone during a redesign.
There's an opportunity plan inside the dashboard, and the whole report downloads as a PDF for your next team meeting.
Curious what your own score looks like? Run a free UX audit on your site.
Feature lists only get you so far. Here's how the choice usually plays out.
Start with the audit. Within minutes, you'll know if it's the product page or the cart dragging things down. Want to actually watch shoppers bail? Point Contentsquare at that one page.
Audit, then ContentsquareAudit the current version now and keep the PDF. That's your baseline, plus a to-do list the new design has to beat. Run it again a week after launch. If the score dips, you'll hear it from the report before you hear it from sales.
Start with the auditRecordings can trickle in slowly at that volume. An audit gets you something to act on today.
Start with the auditThis one goes to Contentsquare. Watching someone stall on the phone number field for twenty seconds tells you more than any score will.
ContentsquareA heatmap is easy to shrug at. A revenue gap in dollars, set against an industry benchmark, is a lot harder to ignore.
Start with the auditYou don't have to pick a side. Plenty of teams end up with both, and the order you use them in matters more than you'd think.
Run the audit and see which issues sit at the top of the list.
Set up Hotjar heatmaps on those pages only, so you aren't drowning in recordings from pages that are fine.
Watch a handful of sessions to see how the problem actually shows up for people.
Ship the fix. A few weeks later, run a new audit with your updated GA4 numbers and see if the gap has closed.
For some teams, yes. If you mainly used Hotjar to figure out what's wrong with a page, an audit gets you there faster. If you rely on recordings and surveys, it works better as a companion than a replacement.
If you already have Hotjar running under its new Contentsquare name, keep it. Just let the audit tell you where to point it. And if you're starting from zero and want a Hotjar alternative that hands you a fix list on day one, the audit is the quicker way in.
Got questions about your results, or want someone to walk through the report with you? Talk to our team.
