Hotjar vs Humblytics in 2026: Free heatmaps and replay vs revenue-verified A/B testing
One shows you where people click and lets you ask them why, free for up to 200,000 sessions a month. The other scores every A/B test by the Stripe revenue it actually produced, and charges from the first day.
Hotjar
Humblytics- Hotjar's free tier covers 200,000 monthly sessions with heatmaps, session replay, funnels, and error monitoring included. Humblytics has no permanent free tier, only a 14-day trial before billing starts at $19/month.
- Humblytics is the only one of the two with built-in A/B testing, and it scores winners by actual Stripe MRR rather than click rate or conversion proxy metrics. Hotjar has no A/B testing feature at all.
- Humblytics tracking is cookieless with no consent banner required. Hotjar is GDPR and CCPA compliant through IP anonymization and data masking, but still operates within a standard cookie-based consent framework.
- Hotjar's MCP connector lets Claude, ChatGPT, and Copilot query session and heatmap data directly, available even on the free plan. Humblytics's Agent API goes further, letting Claude or Codex read results and ship new A/B test variants autonomously, but only on the Business plan.
- Humblytics ties ad spend from Meta and Google directly to Stripe revenue at the campaign and creative level. Hotjar has no ad platform attribution feature.
- Hotjar is now fully owned by Contentsquare, the same parent as Heap, putting it inside a larger enterprise experience platform. Humblytics remains an independent, narrower product built specifically for Stripe-connected paid traffic teams.
Hotjar and Humblytics both promise to explain user behavior beyond what a pageview count can tell you, but they get there from opposite directions. Hotjar is a qualitative behavior tool: heatmaps, session replay, and surveys, with a free tier generous enough (200,000 monthly sessions) that most small and mid-size sites never need to pay. Humblytics is a revenue-first CRO platform: it runs A/B tests and scores the winner by actual Stripe MRR rather than click-through rate, and it does not have a permanent free tier at all, just a 14-day trial before the $19-a-month clock starts. If your question is "what are people doing on this page," Hotjar answers it for free. If your question is "which version of this page actually made money," only one of these two tools was built to answer that directly.
The tools at a glance
Hotjar
Heatmaps, session replay, and feedback tools for seeing what users do on your site, free for most sites
Hotjar's pitch has not changed much since it launched: add a script tag, and within minutes you get heatmaps, session recordings, and the ability to ask visitors directly what they think through on-page surveys. It has been used on over 1.3 million websites, and the free tier, 200,000 monthly sessions with replays, heatmaps, funnels, error monitoring, and basic surveys included, is generous enough that a lot of small and mid-size sites never see a Hotjar invoice.
The 2024 completion of the Contentsquare acquisition (which also owns Heap) is changing what Hotjar can do without changing what it costs to get started. Zone-based heatmaps, journey analysis, impact quantification, and the Sense AI assistant are all Growth-tier additions layered on top of the free core. The MCP connector, which lets you query your Contentsquare data from Claude, ChatGPT, or Copilot in natural language, is available even on the free plan, which is unusual for an AI integration this capable.
What Hotjar does not do is tell you which version of anything made more money. There is no A/B testing feature anywhere in the product, and no revenue tie-in of any kind. It shows you behavior and lets you infer what it means; verifying that inference against an actual outcome is left to you or to a separate tool.
| 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 |
| Basic surveys | 100/mo | Unlimited | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| MCP connector (LLM access) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Zone-based heatmaps / journey analysis | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Sense AI assistant | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
Humblytics
Revenue-verified analytics and A/B testing that scores every experiment against actual Stripe MRR
Humblytics starts from a specific frustration: most A/B testing tools declare a winner based on click-through rate or a proxy conversion event, and that winner does not always turn out to be the variant that made more money. Humblytics closes that gap by joining every tracked session directly to Stripe, so when a test finishes, the variant that wins is the one with the higher actual MRR attached to it, not the one with the better click rate.
That Stripe connection runs through the whole product, not just the A/B testing module. Heatmaps rank pages by the revenue they generated rather than just click density, and Meta and Google Ads attribution is calculated against real Stripe revenue instead of platform-reported conversion values, which tend to over-credit whichever channel touched the sale last. Tracking itself is cookieless and needs no consent banner, which also means it keeps capturing traffic from visitors who reject cookie prompts or run ad blockers.
The Business plan adds an Agent API with pre-built skills that let Claude or Codex read test results, propose the next experiments to run, and ship new variants without a human approving each step. That is a meaningfully different use case from just querying data: it is closer to letting an AI agent run the testing loop. The trade-off for all of this is that Humblytics has no permanent free tier, the Plus plan caps you at one A/B test, one funnel, and one heatmap at a time, and Stripe is a hard requirement, so teams on other payment processors get none of the revenue-verification benefit.
| Feature | Plus From $19/mo | Business Contact for pricing | Scale Contact for pricing | Enterprise Custom |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Events per month | 10K | 500K | 1M | Custom |
| A/B tests | 1 | 5 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Heatmaps | 1 | 5 | Unlimited | Unlimited |
| Ad attribution (Meta, Google) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Agent API | No | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| 14-day free trial | Yes | Yes | Yes | No |
Head-to-head feature comparison
| Feature | Hotjar | Humblytics |
|---|---|---|
| Core focus | Qualitative UX behavior: heatmaps, replay, feedback | Revenue-verified A/B testing and CRO for paid traffic |
| Free tier / trial | 200,000 monthly sessions, free, no trial limit | 14-day free trial, no permanent free tier |
| Starting paid price | From €39/month (Growth) | From $19/month (Plus) |
| Heatmaps | Yes (zone-based on Growth and above) | Yes (revenue-ranked) |
| Session replay | Yes | No |
| Built-in A/B testing | No | Yes (Stripe-verified) |
| Revenue-verified test scoring | No | Yes |
| Cookieless, consent-banner-free tracking | No (GDPR/CCPA compliant via IP anonymization and masking) | Yes |
| On-page surveys and feedback widgets | Yes (100/month free, unlimited on Growth+) | No |
| Ad platform attribution (Meta, Google) | No | Yes (tied to actual Stripe MRR) |
| AI agent integration | Yes (MCP connector for querying data via Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot) | Yes (Agent API for Claude/Codex to run the testing loop, Business plan) |
Which should you choose?
HotjarHumblyticsHotjarHumblyticsHotjarHumblyticsHotjarThese two are not really competing for the same first dollar. Hotjar is the tool most teams reach for because it costs nothing to try and answers "what is happening on this page" within minutes of installing the snippet. Humblytics assumes you already have Stripe revenue flowing and a specific test you want scored honestly, and it charges from day one because that is a narrower, higher-stakes job. A team with no revenue yet, or one running on a payment processor other than Stripe, gets little practical benefit from Humblytics regardless of how good the Stripe integration is for everyone else.
Bottom line
Start with Hotjar if you have not already; the free tier is real, not a crippled trial, and it answers the basic "what are people doing here" question that almost every site needs answered eventually. Bring in Humblytics specifically once you are running paid traffic through Stripe and have gotten tired of picking A/B test winners by click rate that do not hold up in revenue. Running both is not redundant: Hotjar for the qualitative "why," Humblytics for the "which variant actually made money" once you have something worth testing.
Frequently asked questions
Is Humblytics a replacement for Hotjar?
No, they solve different problems even though both touch heatmaps. Hotjar is a general qualitative behavior tool with a generous free tier and no revenue tie-in, while Humblytics is a narrower, revenue-first A/B testing platform that requires Stripe and has no permanent free tier. A team could reasonably run both: Hotjar to see what is happening, Humblytics to verify which variant is actually worth shipping.
Does Hotjar have built-in A/B testing like Humblytics?
No, Hotjar has no A/B testing feature on any plan. It is built for observing behavior through heatmaps, session replay, and surveys, not for running or scoring experiments. If A/B testing scored against real revenue is the priority, Humblytics is the tool that does it; Hotjar would need to be paired with a separate testing tool to cover that gap.
Can I use Humblytics without Stripe?
You can install the script and use the analytics, heatmaps, and A/B testing features without Stripe, but you lose the entire premise of the product: revenue-verified test winners. Without a Stripe connection, Humblytics degrades to a proxy-metric testing tool, which is exactly the problem it was built to avoid, so teams on other payment processors get comparatively little value from it.
Which is cheaper, Hotjar or Humblytics?
Hotjar is cheaper for most sites because its free tier covers up to 200,000 monthly sessions at no cost, while Humblytics has no permanent free tier and starts billing at $19/month after a 14-day trial. Humblytics only becomes worth the cost if the revenue-verified testing is actually solving a problem Hotjar's free tier cannot touch.
Is Humblytics only useful for paid traffic teams?
It is built primarily for paid traffic teams, but the Stripe-verified scoring is equally relevant to any SaaS team running landing page or onboarding tests who wants to know if a variant actually increases MRR rather than just registered accounts. The Meta and Google Ads attribution features specifically are the part that is wasted if you are not running paid campaigns.
How is Humblytics's Agent API different from Hotjar's MCP connector?
Hotjar's MCP connector lets an AI assistant like Claude or ChatGPT query and summarize existing session and heatmap data in natural language, which is a read-only research task. Humblytics's Agent API is closer to giving an AI agent the wheel: on the Business plan, Claude or Codex can read test results, rank the next experiments to run, and ship new variants without a person approving each step, which is a much more active role in the testing loop.