Heap

What it does

Heap is a product analytics tool, now part of Contentsquare. You add one code snippet, and it captures every click, tap, page view and form interaction automatically. You then define the events you care about afterwards, in the interface, and they apply to data that was already collected.

It adds session replay and heatmaps, and Sense AI, a chat assistant for exploring the data. Heap Illuminate looks for friction and opportunities in the behaviour it has captured.

Why you would need it

In classic product analytics, someone has to decide what to track before a feature ships. If you forgot an event, or want to ask a question about something you did not plan for, you have no data, and you wait for the next release to start collecting.

The pain is that sense of "I wish we had tracked that". With automatic capture you can ask the question today, and answer it from history.

Where it fits

Heap sits inside your product or website as the behaviour layer. It feeds your warehouse through Heap Connect and shares data with more than 100 integrations. It sits beside tools such as Mixpanel, Amplitude and PostHog, and next to a customer data platform such as Segment.

It replaces manual event instrumentation, and in part a separate session replay tool.

What stands out

• Automatic capture of every interaction from a single snippet.
• Retroactive analysis, so new questions can use old data.
• Session replay, heatmaps and maps of user flows in the same product.
• Segments, charts, dashboards and playbooks for non-technical people.

What you get beyond the basics

Heap also ships segments for user cohorts, charts, shareable dashboards and ready-made playbooks, so a marketer or product manager can answer common questions without help from a data team. Mobile apps are covered too, with analysis across devices. That breadth is what lets one tool serve product, marketing and data people at once.

My take

The retroactive idea is the real selling point. It suits teams who do not have an engineer ready to instrument events, or who change the product often.

Be careful with data quality. Capturing everything gives you a lot of noise, so you still need to name events clearly and agree on definitions. Heap also has a free plan to test it on real traffic, which is how I would try it. Plans above that are priced by session volume, so check your numbers.

Verdict

Pick Heap when you want behaviour data fast and cannot plan every event in advance. Skip it when you need a fixed, published price before you install anything, or when your team prefers to design a strict tracking plan.