OakData vs Hotjar
Hotjar shows you sessions. OakData shows you the whole story.
Hotjar built its name on replay, heatmaps, and surveys, and is now being folded into Contentsquare. OakData pairs that behavior layer with real analytics, identity, and revenue.
Hotjar made session replay and heatmaps mainstream, and 1.3 million websites used it for good reason. It's now becoming something else: Hotjar is part of Contentsquare, new sign-ups create Contentsquare accounts, the pricing page redirects there, and the classic Observe/Ask/Engage plans are gone. The upside is a much more generous free tier (10K replays a month) and new platform features like error monitoring and web performance.
What Hotjar never had is the analytics half: traffic, channels, campaigns, and the people behind them. That's now arriving via Contentsquare's absorption of Heap, as part of an enterprise platform mid-migration. OakData is the one-product version of that combination, behavior tools and analytics designed together from the start: every session belongs to a durable person profile, and revenue is attached to the same people you watch in replay.
Side by side
 OakData | Hotjar | |
|---|---|---|
| Session replay | Included, tied to person profiles | 10K/month free (sampled) |
| Heatmaps | Included | Basic free; zone-based on Growth |
| Traffic & acquisition analytics | Yes | Arriving via Contentsquare platform |
| Funnels | Multi-step, drill to person | Basic on free plan |
| Person-level profiles | Durable fingerprint + identify() | Journeys gated to Growth and up |
| Error monitoring | Yes | Yes |
| Core Web Vitals | Yes | Yes |
| Stripe revenue & MRR | Yes | Revenue-impact estimates on Growth |
| Bot filtering | Layered: UA, IP ranges, ASN, headless | Manual segment, not retroactive |
| Surveys & feedback | No | Yes |
| AI agent access (MCP) | Yes | Yes |
| Standalone product | Yes | Brand retiring into Contentsquare |
| Pricing | One plan, all features, usage-based | Free tier, then Growth from $40/month |
Based on publicly available information as of July 2026. Features and pricing change, so verify anything decision-critical against Hotjar's current site.
Choose OakData if…
- You want behavior tools and analytics as one product, not a replay tool waiting on an enterprise platform migration for its analytics.
- Revenue questions matter: OakData ties Stripe MRR and lifetime value to the same people you watch in replay.
- Identity accuracy matters: OakData's fingerprint persists where cookie-based tracking resets, and its replays aren't sampled.
- You'd rather adopt a focused, independent product than a brand mid-absorption.
Choose Hotjar if…
- Surveys, feedback widgets, and user interviews are core to your workflow. OakData doesn't do voice-of-customer.
- You want a genuinely generous free tier for behavior tools: 10K replays and 100 survey responses a month.
- You're an enterprise already on Contentsquare and want everything under that platform.
Questions
The product lives on, but the brand is being retired into Contentsquare: the merger completed in mid-2025, new sign-ups create Contentsquare accounts, and hotjar.com's pricing now redirects to Contentsquare's. Existing customers are being migrated through 2026. The tools survive; the standalone product you evaluated years ago effectively doesn't.
The analytics half: traffic and acquisition channels, person-level profiles with durable identity, multi-step funnels you can drill into, layered bot filtering, and Stripe revenue down to the person. Classic Hotjar was behavior tools on top of someone else's analytics; OakData is both in one snippet.
No. Surveys, feedback widgets, and interviews are Hotjar's home turf and OakData deliberately doesn't compete there. If voice-of-customer tooling in the same product is a requirement, that's a genuine reason to pick Hotjar or Contentsquare.
Yes. The snippets don't conflict, and running both during an evaluation is the easiest way to compare replay quality, identity accuracy, and the numbers side by side before you choose.
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