Hotjar Surveys Alternative: Your Contentsquare Migration Guide

Hotjar Surveys is not being switched off. It is being moved into Contentsquare, and the old Hotjar account is deleted after the move. New Hotjar accounts can no longer be created, hotjar.com redirects to Contentsquare, and since August 26, 2026 existing accounts have been getting 30-day notices before they switch to the Contentsquare Growth plan. Your surveys and responses make the trip. Your Zapier flows and webhooks do not.

This guide is for teams that used Hotjar for on-site surveys and feedback widgets. It covers the exact timeline, what transfers and what breaks, the export checklist for the 90 days before your Hotjar data is deleted, and how to pick a Hotjar Surveys alternative if the new terms don’t work for you.

What is happening to Hotjar?

Contentsquare, which bought Hotjar in 2021, is merging the two products into one platform. Each Hotjar account gets a notification, then 30 days of Contentsquare running alongside Hotjar. On day 30 the subscription switches to the Contentsquare Growth plan unless the Account Owner opts out. Hotjar then goes read-only for 90 days and is deleted.

All of this is set out in Contentsquare’s own Moving from Hotjar to Contentsquare FAQ, which is the document to keep open while you plan. The key dates:

Two details change how you should plan. First, the 30 days count from your own notification email, not from August 26. The rollout is phased, and some accounts with complex setups are contacted by their account team instead. Second, Contentsquare’s FAQ describes opting out as a way “to postpone your move”. Staying on Hotjar buys time. It is not a long-term plan.

Only the Account Owner can opt out. If you are not sure who that is, Hotjar shows it on the Team page. Find out now, not on day 29.

What moves to Contentsquare, and what doesn’t

For survey users, the headline is good news: your surveys and responses transfer. Almost everything around them needs work.

The step most teams will miss: your cookie banner

Once the Contentsquare tag is live, your site runs two cookie families in parallel, Contentsquare’s cs* and Hotjar’s _hj*. The Contentsquare tag does not read your existing cookie banner or consent platform configuration, so the FAQ says you need to add the new cookies yourself, and to do it as soon as you can.

The timing matters for any site under GDPR. Your existing Hotjar code starts sending data to Contentsquare as soon as the account is created, so plan for the new cookies from the start of the 30 days, not from the switch. If your banner does not list them, the gap opens on day one. If your Content Security Policy names hosts explicitly, you will also need to allow https://*.hotjar.io, because during the move the tag loads from t.cs.hotjar.io.

Why Zapier and webhooks matter more for survey users

In Hotjar, survey responses could be forwarded to email, Slack or Microsoft Teams, sent to a webhook, or added to a Zapier workflow. That is documented in Hotjar’s own export guide. For many teams those forwards were the whole point of the survey: an NPS score written to the CRM, a low CSAT rating opening a support ticket, every response landing in a spreadsheet.

After the switch, the migration FAQ lists Webhooks and Zapier as unsupported. The Growth plan does support Slack, Jira, Microsoft Teams, HubSpot, Google Analytics and Mixpanel, but none of them carry over on their own.

One caveat, in fairness to Contentsquare: its pricing page lists Zapier among the Voice of Customer integrations on both the Free and Growth plans. The migration FAQ, written specifically for moved Hotjar accounts, says the opposite. Until the two agree, assume the FAQ applies to you, and test every Zap you depend on during your 30-day window, while Hotjar is still running alongside.

What the move to Contentsquare costs

Contentsquare’s FAQ says plainly: “Your price may change.” Your notification email shows the Growth plan and price that apply to you, based on your observed traffic. You pay nothing extra for the rest of your current Hotjar term. The new price applies from your next renewal date, which stays the same.

For reference, these are the public list prices on Contentsquare’s pricing page as of October 2026:

Three things are worth knowing before you read your own email:

• Surveys and heatmaps are now separate products with separate prices. Several 2026 write-ups quote a Contentsquare Growth price of €39 or $39 a month. That is the yearly-billed price of the heatmap product. For a team that mostly ran surveys, the relevant floor is the Voice of Customer price.
• Free response access is one month. On the Voice of Customer Free plan, responses stay accessible for one month. If you planned to sit on the free tier to keep your survey history, keep your own export.
• Auto-renewal follows you. If you cancelled auto-renewal in Hotjar, the Contentsquare subscription doesn’t auto-renew either, and the cancellation takes effect at the end of your current billing cycle. If you are leaving, turning auto-renewal off in Hotjar before your switch date is the simplest way to avoid starting a new paid term by accident.

Stay on Contentsquare or switch? It depends on how you used Hotjar

Most Hotjar customers fall into one of three groups, and the right answer differs for each.

You lived in heatmaps and recordings; surveys were a side feature. Staying is reasonable. Contentsquare adds journey analysis and error and performance monitoring that Hotjar didn’t have. Check the Growth price in your email against Microsoft Clarity, which is free and covers heatmaps and session recordings.

You used Hotjar mainly for surveys and feedback widgets. You are now being moved onto a behavior analytics platform to do a survey job. Voice of Customer Growth starts at $99 a month for 500 responses. A dedicated survey platform is built for that job, and it can reach people beyond your website: inside your app, by email, by text message, or after a support ticket closes.

Your survey responses fed other systems through Zapier or webhooks. The move breaks that pipeline whatever you decide, so you are rebuilding either way. This is the case where moving to a Hotjar Surveys alternative costs the least extra effort.

Export checklist before your Hotjar data is deleted

Survey responses transfer to Contentsquare, so exporting them gives you a backup in a format you control. Heatmaps and recordings don’t transfer at all, so for those the export is the only copy you will have. You can still sign in and export during the 90 read-only days, but don’t leave it for the last week.

Hotjar Surveys alternatives, by job

There is no single best replacement, because Hotjar did two jobs at once. Pick by the job you actually used it for.

Best Hotjar Surveys alternative for website and in-app surveys: Responsly

If surveys were the main reason you paid for Hotjar, Responsly replaces that job and takes it further. The website survey widget covers the popover, button and embedded formats Hotjar users know. In-app surveys reach people inside your iOS or Android app, which Hotjar never did: its own documentation says it is “not compatible with mobile apps”. Responses keep flowing out through webhooks, the API, Zapier and CRM integrations, and Athena, our AI agent, reads every open-text answer. More on the rebuild in the next section.

Best if heatmaps matter most: Contentsquare itself

If behavior analytics was the main event, staying is a legitimate choice. The Voice of Customer Free plan covers 100 responses a month, which is enough for one light feedback widget. Watch the integrations: if a survey flow depends on Zapier or a webhook, plan its replacement now.

Best free heatmaps and recordings to pair with a survey tool: Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity is free with no traffic limits and covers session recordings and heatmaps. It doesn’t run surveys, so it replaces only half of what Hotjar did. Pair it with a survey tool to cover the other half.

Best Hotjar Surveys alternative for product teams with engineers: PostHog

PostHog combines product analytics, session replay and surveys in one developer-oriented platform. The free tier includes 1,500 survey responses, 5,000 recordings and 1 million events a month, with usage-based billing above that. It suits teams that already have engineers instrumenting the product.

Best open-source Hotjar Surveys alternative: Formbricks

Formbricks is open-source and can be self-hosted. Its cloud version is hosted in Frankfurt, and the free Hobby plan covers 250 responses a month. It suits teams that want full control of the infrastructure and have someone to run it.

Best Hotjar Surveys alternative for in-product SaaS surveys: Survicate

Survicate focuses on in-product and website surveys for SaaS teams. Its Growth plan starts at $114 a month billed annually, for 250 responses a month.

Hotjar Surveys alternatives compared

For a broader look at on-page survey tools beyond the Hotjar migration, see our comparison of popup survey tools.

Rebuilding Hotjar Surveys in Responsly

Responsly is an AI-powered customer feedback and survey platform. In Hotjar, a survey lived on your website or behind a link. In Responsly, you build a survey once and choose where it appears: on your website, inside your app, by email, SMS or WhatsApp, as a link or as a QR code. Every answer lands in the same dashboard, next to your NPS, CSAT and CES from every other channel. Website and in-app surveys are part of the Professional plan.

Website surveys: how a Hotjar setup maps across

Rebuild your highest-traffic survey first, and keep the question wording exactly as it was, so your trend lines stay comparable with the Hotjar exports. Then run it next to the old survey for a week or two before you switch Hotjar off.

In-app surveys: the part Hotjar never covered

If your product is also a mobile app, the same survey can run inside it. Responsly’s in-app surveys render through a native SDK, so they use your app’s fonts, colours and rounded corners instead of showing a web page in a frame.

• Native SDKs for iOS and Android, plus React Native and Flutter through a single integration.
• Event triggers. Ask right after a purchase, a completed task, a failed payment or the tenth use of a feature, while the experience is seconds old.
• Targeting by plan, cohort and behavior, for example premium accounts past their first month, so you ask the people whose answer you actually need.
• Answers with the user attached. Send the account identifier and attributes such as plan, tenure or lifetime value, and every response arrives with them, so you can go back to that customer with an answer.
• Frequency capping across all in-app surveys, so nobody gets asked three things in one session.

Web apps work the same way through the website widget, and with Segment the user identifier travels into each response, so in-product feedback ties straight back to the customer profile.

What else comes with the Professional plan

• Open-text answers get read for you. Athena, Responsly’s AI agent, reads every open-text response rather than a sample, groups comments into themes, scores sentiment, explains why NPS or CSAT moved and recommends what to fix first. It also reads your reviews on Google, the App Store, Google Play and Trustpilot, so in-app answers and app store reviews are analysed together.
• More channels from the same survey. SendJet, our sending engine, handles email, SMS and WhatsApp with audience lists, throttling and automatic reminders, so a post-purchase survey reaches people who never come back to the site.
• Integrations that keep working. Webhooks, the API and CRM integrations such as Salesforce and HubSpot, on top of Zapier, Google Sheets and Slack.
• A team, not a seat. Three or more team members with roles and permissions, your logo and a custom subdomain.
• EU hosting by default. Respondent data is hosted in the EU unless agreed otherwise. US hosting is available on Enterprise.

What we don’t do: heatmaps and session recordings. If you need them, Microsoft Clarity alongside Responsly covers both jobs.

Independent for 15 years

Hotjar’s story is an acquisition story: bought in 2021, merged in 2025, moved in 2026. Responsly has been on the market for 15 years without venture capital money. No fund owns us, so there is no investor timeline that forces a sale or a migration onto someone else’s platform. That is not a promise that nothing will ever change. It is a different set of incentives: we change the product when our customers need it. Teams at Red Bull, DB Schenker, Bayer and Booksy collect feedback with Responsly, and DB Schenker lowered its survey drop rate by 40% after moving to it.

Price, compared honestly

Responsly is not the cheapest way to put one widget on one website. Professional starts at $250 a month billed yearly, and the final price depends on your volume and setup. Contentsquare’s Voice of Customer Growth lists from $99 a month for 500 responses. The difference is what you get for it: website and in-app surveys, email, SMS and WhatsApp sending, Athena’s AI analysis, webhooks and CRM integrations, and a team of three or more, instead of a survey module that, for moved Hotjar accounts, no longer connects to Zapier or webhooks.

If you only need link or email surveys with Zapier, the Essential plan starts at $50 a month for 500 responses. Teams with larger programmes can have the move done with them: migration assistance from other tools is part of the Enterprise plan. All plans are on the pricing page.

Conclusion: a deadline, not a shutdown

Hotjar Surveys isn’t disappearing, but Hotjar is. The move gives you two deadlines: 30 days to decide whether Contentsquare is where you want to be, and 90 days after that to export everything that won’t follow you. The survey responses are the easy part. The flows around them, meaning Zaps, webhooks, CRM fields and your cookie banner, are what need a plan.

Hotjar isn’t the only tool on this path. Delighted shut down in June 2026, and GetFeedback Direct closes on December 31, 2026. We wrote up the wider pattern in our guide to customer experience management software.

Moving your Hotjar surveys? Book a demo to see website and in-app surveys running on your own product and plan the move with our team, or start free and rebuild your survey questions first.

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