The verdict
For a lean B2B founder, start with Hotjar and graduate to Amplitude. Hotjar gives you fast, watch-with-your-own-eyes insight into where a specific page or flow breaks, for 39 USD/mo (or free while volumes are tiny), with almost no setup tax , you paste a script and you are recording within the hour. That is exactly what you need when you have a handful of pages and a conversion problem you can see but not explain.
Amplitude is the heavier, more powerful instrument: event-based product analytics that answers retention, activation and cohort questions Hotjar simply cannot. But it asks for a real event taxonomy and someone who enjoys building funnels, and its pricing scales on monthly tracked users, so it earns its keep once you have enough traffic and enough of a product to analyse.
The honest verdict is that these are not really competitors , they are two layers of the same stack. The decisive question is sequencing, not winner: solve the visible on-page problem with Hotjar now, layer Amplitude in when "why don't users come back" becomes the question that's actually costing you money.
Side by side
| 9 points compared | ||
|---|---|---|
| Starts at | $49/mo | |
| Free plan | Yes | Yes |
| API | Yes | Yes |
| MCP server | Yes | Yes |
| Custom dashboards | Yes | Yes |
| Heatmaps | Yes | Yes |
| Product analytics | Yes | Yes |
| Self-hosting | No | No |
| Session replay | Yes | Yes |
| Links |
Plans and pricing
Amplitude
- FreeFree
- PlusFree
Hotjar
- FreeFree
- Growth - Experience Analytics$588/yr
- Growth - Voice of Customer$1,188/yr
Who each is for
Choose Amplitude if…
Choose Hotjar if you want to see behaviour rather than query it, and you want it now. It is the better fit when you have a marketing site or a few key flows, a conversion leak you can sense but not diagnose, and no appetite for building an event taxonomy. Heatmaps, session recordings, on-page surveys and feedback widgets give product, marketing and UX people qualitative insight without a data team. It starts free, with Observe Plus from 39 USD/mo (32 USD/mo billed annually). One caveat to factor in: Hotjar was acquired by Contentsquare in 2025 and is being folded into that platform, so pricing and packaging are in transition , worth a glance before you commit annually.
Choose Hotjar if…
Choose Amplitude if your central question is retention, activation or conversion across a product, not friction on a single page. It is the right call when you have a real product with multiple paths through it, enough traffic that cohort and funnel analysis is statistically meaningful, and someone , you or a teammate , who is comfortable defining events and building reports. The free Starter tier (10K monthly tracked users, 2M events) is generous enough to prove the value before you pay, and the Plus plan starts at 49 USD/mo. If "why do users churn after week two" is the question keeping you up, this is your tool.
Other options worth a look
Automatically captures every user interaction on web and mobile apps without pre-defining individual events.
Analyse user events to understand funnels, retention, flows and cohort behaviour without writing SQL.
Combines product analytics, session replay, feature flags and experiments in one open-source stack for product teams.
Create and distribute surveys to collect customer, employee, and market feedback at scale.