Hotjar by Contentsquare: What Changed After the Acquisition
Contentsquare acquired Hotjar in 2021 and completed the full legal merger in July 2025. The product is now officially branded 'Hotjar by Contentsquare'. For SMB users, the day-to-day experience remains largely the same: heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys at session-based pricing. The acquisition introduced new AI features and a roadmap aligned with Contentsquare's enterprise vision, but the SMB product has not fundamentally changed.
What Hotjar by Contentsquare does well
Hotjar has set the standard for SMB behavioral analytics for years. Its heatmaps are easy to read, session recordings are reliable, and the survey and feedback tools are genuinely useful for user research. For teams that want to understand how users interact with a specific page, Hotjar is fast to set up and covers the basics well.
The AI features added post-acquisition (Trends, automated survey summaries) are a meaningful step forward. They reduce the manual effort of going through recordings one by one and surface patterns that would otherwise require analyst time.
The missing piece: web analytics
Hotjar by Contentsquare does not include web analytics. You can see where users click on a page and watch session recordings, but you cannot see which channel drove that traffic, what campaigns are converting, or how organic search performance compares to paid. Every Hotjar customer needs a separate web analytics tool running in parallel.
This is not a minor gap. Web analytics and behavioral analytics answer different questions, but they are strongest when the answers can be connected. A heatmap that shows users dropping off at a CTA is more actionable when you also know that the traffic came from a low-intent keyword with a high bounce rate across all pages. Without that connection, behavioral insights float without context.
