Hotjar Problems & Issues

Long-time customers report Hotjar became 'shockingly greedy' under new ownership. One user reported a price increase of over 800%. The pricing structure shifted from affordable to 'penny-pinching every little feature' requiring hundreds of dollars a month for arbitrary limits.

hotjar.com/pricing now redirects to Contentsquare, where heatmaps/recordings (Experience Analytics) and surveys (Voice of Customer) are separate subscriptions starting at $49 and about $99/month when billed monthly. Teams that used one Hotjar plan for both now pay two bills, and reviewers on Capterra and G2 call the post-acquisition tiers unclear.

The free Experience Analytics plan advertises up to 200k monthly sessions, but session replays capture only 5% of them (max 10k), data is kept for one month, and only one project is allowed. Teams that relied on the free plan for recordings get far fewer replays than the headline number suggests.

Older complaints describe being refused refunds when cancelling on the renewal day. Contentsquare's pricing page now offers a full refund within 30 days for new Growth accounts; after that, billing runs to the end of the cycle, so annual renewals are still a trap if missed.

Hotjar's script adds 0.47MB to page weight and 829ms to load time. Users report sites loading 1.5-2.5 seconds normally but up to 4 seconds with Hotjar installed. It's one of the slowest among popular heatmap tools.

Hotjar adds overhead to websites and ad blockers started making sites respond weirdly. Some users report their sites behave differently when visitors have ad blockers enabled because of Hotjar integration conflicts.

Hotjar samples traffic above the plan's capture rate and, once the allowance is used up, collects no new recordings or heatmap data until the next reset. Legacy plans capped daily sessions (100 on Plus, 500 on Business); Contentsquare plans use monthly session tiers, so busy launches can exhaust a tier early and leave gaps.

Heat maps are occasionally buggy especially when switching between desktop and mobile views. Some accounts constantly go on and off with alerts about tracking not being properly implemented. Doesn't work well with single page applications.

Users report the conversion funnel tracking tool doesn't accurately report metrics. If a page has popup, modal, or overlay, that can be problematic for tracking. Users question the accuracy of the reports overall.

After-care service is poor with no way to speak to a human, just a chatbot. Users describe serious gatekeeping, requiring multiple field entries in chat windows. AI chatbot required re-entering the same URL three times - very frustrating experience. 2.5-star Trustpilot rating largely stems from support issues.

Accounts are being moved from legacy Hotjar plans to Contentsquare tiers on a rolling, per-account basis through 2026. Reviewers describe changing billing entities, plan names (Basic/Plus/Business vs Free/Growth/Pro) and renewals that took weeks to sort out.

Session recordings can be incomplete, hard to filter, and miss key interactions. JavaScript obscures viewing of dynamic content, making it unclear what users are doing. Users get overwhelmed by not-relevant recordings where users just idle.

There's a limit on page height that can be captured at 1500px. Long scrolling pages don't get fully captured in heatmaps, limiting insights for modern long-form content pages and infinite scroll designs.

On smaller Hotjar plans, the cap at creating only 3 heatmaps at a time feels restrictive. Users need to delete old heatmaps to create new ones, losing historical data in the process.

Hotjar recently removed cross-domain tracking, which was a great benefit for users tracking customers across multiple domains. This feature removal frustrated many multi-site businesses who relied on it.