Cometly vs Hotjar in 2026: Revenue attribution vs behavioral analytics
Cometly connects ad spend to closed-won ARR from your CRM. Hotjar shows you heatmaps and session replay for free up to 200,000 monthly sessions. They rarely compete for the same budget line.
Cometly
Hotjar- Cometly ties every ad dollar to closed-won ARR pulled from your CRM, correcting for the 60 to 90 day B2B sales cycles that make last-touch attribution misleading.
- Hotjar ships a free tier covering 200,000 monthly sessions with heatmaps, session replay, funnels, and error monitoring included, no sales call required.
- Both tools now offer an AI assistant connection: Cometly has an MCP integration for Claude to query attribution data, and Hotjar has an MCP connector for Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot to query Contentsquare behavioral data.
- Cometly automatically detects and attributes traffic from ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Google AI Overviews at the campaign level, a capability Hotjar does not have.
- Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare, which is pulling the roadmap and pricing page toward a larger enterprise platform rather than a standalone marketer tool.
- Cometly has no public pricing and requires a sales conversation before you see a number. Hotjar Growth starts at €39 per month with published pricing on the Contentsquare site.
Cometly and Hotjar both live in the Analytics & Reporting category, but they answer different questions. Cometly exists to tell a B2B SaaS marketing team whether a specific ad campaign produced pipeline and closed-won revenue, tracing the full journey from first touch through the CRM. Hotjar exists to show any team, B2B or not, what a visitor actually did on a page: where they clicked, where they got stuck, and what they said when asked. One is a revenue attribution tool gated behind a sales call, the other is a behavioral analytics tool with a genuinely usable free tier. The choice usually is not "which is better" so much as "which problem do you have this quarter."
The tools at a glance
Cometly
B2B SaaS ad attribution that connects every campaign dollar to pipeline created and closed-won ARR.
Cometly is built for one job: telling a B2B SaaS marketing team whether their Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads, or Meta Ads spend produced actual closed-won revenue, not just booked demos. It tracks sessions from first ad touch through the full CRM pipeline and calculates LTV ROAS against real deal values rather than platform-reported conversion estimates.
Server-side tracking through a Conversion API recovers sessions that ad blockers and iOS restrictions would otherwise erase, and the platform auto-detects AI-sourced traffic from ChatGPT, Gemini, Grok, and Google AI Overviews as named channels alongside paid and organic. The Enterprise plan adds Snowflake and BigQuery sync plus an MCP integration that lets Claude answer attribution questions directly.
The trade-off is access: pricing is usage-based on website sessions and not published, so every evaluation starts with a sales call. That is a real cost in time for a team that just wants a quick answer, but for companies spending serious money on paid acquisition with a long sales cycle, the attribution accuracy is difficult to replicate with a cheaper tool.
| Feature | Core Usage-based, contact for pricing | Enterprise Custom |
|---|---|---|
| Full-funnel ARR attribution | Yes | Yes |
| Server-side Conversion API | Yes | Yes |
| AI traffic source tracking | Yes | Yes |
| CRM and warehouse sync | No | Yes |
| MCP integration for Claude | No | Yes |
| Public pricing | No | No |
Hotjar
Heatmaps, session replay, and user feedback tools that show you what happens on your site and why.
Hotjar is behavioral analytics: heatmaps, session replay, funnels, and on-page surveys that show what a visitor actually did rather than what a spreadsheet says converted. Setup is a single script tag, and the free tier covers 200,000 monthly sessions with replays, heatmaps, funnels, and error monitoring included, which is generous enough for most small and mid-size sites to run on indefinitely.
Since being fully absorbed into Contentsquare in 2024, Hotjar has picked up AI-driven session summaries through Sense and an MCP connector that lets you query behavioral data from Claude, ChatGPT, or Copilot in natural language, available even on the free plan. Zone-based heatmaps, journey analysis, and impact quantification sit behind Growth and above.
The acquisition cuts both ways. Feature depth is increasing, but the roadmap and pricing page now live under the Contentsquare brand, and the product is visibly shifting upmarket toward mid-market and enterprise buyers rather than the solo marketer who adopted Hotjar for a quick heatmap five years ago.
| Feature | Free €0/mo | Growth From €39/mo | Scale Contact sales | Enterprise Contact sales |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Monthly sessions | 200,000 | From 7,000 (custom) | Custom | Custom |
| Heatmaps and session replay | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| MCP connector (LLM access) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Zone-based heatmaps | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Journey analysis | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Sense AI assistant | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Head-to-head feature comparison
| Feature | Cometly | Hotjar |
|---|---|---|
| Primary use case | Ad-to-ARR revenue attribution | On-site behavioral and qualitative analytics |
| Revenue/ARR attribution | Yes | No |
| Heatmaps and session replay | No | Yes |
| AI-sourced traffic detection (ChatGPT, Gemini, AI Overviews) | Yes | No |
| MCP / LLM assistant integration | Yes (Enterprise, for Claude) | Yes (all plans, Claude/ChatGPT/Copilot) |
| Free tier | No | Yes (200K sessions) |
| Public pricing | No | Yes |
| CRM and data warehouse sync | Yes (Enterprise) | No |
| Best fit | B2B SaaS paid acquisition teams | Marketers and CRO teams needing UX insight |
Which should you choose?
CometlyHotjarCometlyHotjarHotjarCometlyThese tools rarely get shortlisted against each other in practice because they solve different problems. Cometly is a revenue attribution platform for teams who already know their ads are driving something and need to prove what, in dollars, tied back to the CRM. Hotjar is a behavioral analytics platform for teams who need to see what a visitor does on a page and why they left. A B2B SaaS company with a long sales cycle and serious ad spend often ends up running both: Hotjar to fix the landing page, Cometly to prove the campaign paid for itself.
Bottom line
Choose Cometly if your sales cycle stretches weeks or months and you need attribution tied to actual closed-won ARR rather than demo bookings, and you are prepared to sit through a sales call to get a quote. Choose Hotjar if you want to see what visitors are doing on your site today, starting free, with no procurement process. Most serious B2B marketing teams will eventually want both, since one explains behavior and the other explains revenue.
Frequently asked questions
Can Cometly replace Hotjar or do they solve different problems?
Cometly cannot replace Hotjar because it does not offer heatmaps, session replay, or on-page surveys at all. Cometly is purely a revenue attribution tool that connects ad spend to CRM outcomes, while Hotjar shows you what happened on the page itself. Teams that need both behavioral insight and revenue attribution typically run them side by side rather than choosing one.
Is Hotjar still worth using now that it is part of Contentsquare?
Yes, the core heatmap and session replay product is unchanged and the free tier still covers 200,000 monthly sessions with no feature degradation. What has changed is the pricing page, which now lives under Contentsquare, and the roadmap direction, which is adding enterprise features like journey analysis and Sense AI faster than it is adding features for solo marketers.
Does Cometly work if my business is not B2B SaaS with a CRM?
Cometly is built specifically for B2B SaaS companies with CRM deal pipelines and multi-week sales cycles, so it is a poor fit for eCommerce, direct-to-consumer, or content businesses where a purchase happens immediately. Hotjar has no such restriction and works for any website type.
Which tool is cheaper to get started with?
Hotjar is cheaper to start with because the free tier is immediately usable and Growth pricing is public starting at €39 per month. Cometly has no public pricing at all: it bills based on website sessions and every prospective customer needs a sales call to get a quote, which makes early-stage budget planning harder.
Do both tools let me query data using Claude or ChatGPT?
Both do, through separate MCP integrations. Cometly gates its Claude MCP integration to the Enterprise plan, so you need the top tier to ask attribution questions in natural language. Hotjar includes its MCP connector, which works with Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot, on every plan including the free tier.