OakData vs Heap
Heap invented autocapture. OakData finished the thought.
Heap pioneered capture-everything analytics and now lives inside Contentsquare, with replay, heatmaps, and error analysis sold as add-ons. OakData ships all of it in one plan.
Heap's founding idea changed the industry: capture every interaction automatically, define events retroactively, never wait on an instrumentation sprint. The core analytics are still strong, funnels, retention, and journeys from a single snippet, and the free tier covers 10,000 sessions a month. Since the 2023 acquisition, Heap belongs to Contentsquare, which now markets the technology as Contentsquare Product Analytics, formerly Heap.
The friction is in what sits on top. Session replay, heatmaps, and error analysis are a paid extension available only on Pro and Premier, tiers that are themselves sales-priced; the only public price is free. There are no Web Vitals, bot filtering is a user-agent blocklist, and the MCP and AI investments live on the Contentsquare platform rather than in Heap itself. OakData takes Heap's founding idea and ships the whole modern stack around it, replay to revenue, at one public price.
Side by side
 OakData | Heap | |
|---|---|---|
| Autocapture | Yes | Pioneered it |
| Session replay | Included | Add-on, Pro and Premier only |
| Heatmaps | Included | Add-on, Pro and Premier only |
| Error monitoring | Included | Add-on, Pro and Premier only |
| Funnels & retention | Yes | Yes |
| Person-level profiles | Yes | Yes |
| Core Web Vitals | Yes | No |
| Stripe revenue & MRR | Yes | Attribution reports, no billing integration |
| Bot filtering | Layered: UA, IP ranges, ASN, headless | UA blocklist plus manual IPs |
| Identity durability | Hardware fingerprint survives cleared storage | Cookie-based |
| AI agent access (MCP) | Yes | Via Contentsquare platform |
| Standalone product | Yes | Absorbed into Contentsquare |
| Pricing | Public, one plan, usage-based | Free 10K sessions; paid tiers sales-only |
Based on publicly available information as of July 2026. Features and pricing change, so verify anything decision-critical against Heap's current site.
Choose OakData if…
- You want replay, heatmaps, and error monitoring included, not sold as an extension on top of a sales-priced tier.
- You want a public price: above Heap's free tier, every number is a conversation.
- You'd rather bet on a focused product than a brand in mid-absorption whose roadmap belongs to its parent platform.
- Revenue matters: OakData ties Stripe MRR and lifetime value to people, where Heap stops at campaign attribution.
Choose Heap if…
- You're already a Contentsquare customer and want product analytics inside that platform.
- The free tier fits: 10,000 sessions a month of genuinely good core analytics.
- You need mobile app autocapture, which Heap's SDKs handle and OakData doesn't.
Questions
Not discontinued: existing accounts, plans, and workflows keep working, and Contentsquare says so explicitly. But the brand is transitional. Contentsquare markets the technology as Contentsquare Product Analytics, formerly Heap, new AI and MCP investment lands on the parent platform, and parts of heap.io are quietly decaying. You'd be adopting a product in absorption, not one being built under its own name.
Session replay, heatmaps, and error analysis come as the Experience Analytics extension, a paid add-on available only on the Pro and Premier tiers, which are themselves custom-priced through sales. In OakData all three are included for every customer.
The philosophy is the same, and Heap deserves the credit for inventing it. The difference is what surrounds the captured data: OakData attaches it to durable person identities (a fingerprint that survives cleared cookies), filters bots at the network level, measures Web Vitals, and ties Stripe revenue to the same people, all in the base product.
Run both snippets side by side: they don't conflict. OakData starts autocapturing immediately, so you can compare numbers, then define any custom events you relied on in Heap. Most teams find the retroactive-analysis habit transfers directly.
More comparisons