Hotjar for Shopify in 2026: what it can and cannot see on your store

Hotjar is the default answer when a Shopify merchant asks how to watch what shoppers actually do. It records sessions, draws heatmaps, builds funnels and runs on-site surveys, and for a decade it was the tool everyone reached for first. The question worth asking in 2026 is narrower: how much of a Shopify store can it see, what does it cost now that its pricing page redirects somewhere else, and what do you do with a recording once you have one?

Every price, quote and limitation below was read off a live vendor page on August 9, 2026, with the URL named. Nothing is quoted from memory, and where a number could not be confirmed it is left out rather than guessed.

What happened to Hotjar

TL;DR Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare. Its pricing page 308-redirects to contentsquare.com. The product still exists and still works, but the plan you buy is called Experience Analytics.

This is the question people are actually typing, and it has a clean, measurable answer. Request Hotjar's pricing page and you do not get a Hotjar page:

$ curl -sSIL https://www.hotjar.com/pricing/
HTTP/2 308
location: https://contentsquare.com/pricing/?utm_source=hotjar-pricing

A 308 is a permanent redirect. Hotjar's own Shopify integration page, at hotjar.com/integrations/shopify/, opens with a banner reading "Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare. The same easy-to-use tools you know, plus even more ways to understand and improve your website or app." Both checked August 9, 2026.

Read this as a fit signal rather than an obituary. Hotjar Ltd still exists, the help centre still says Hotjar on every page, the tracking snippet is unchanged, and the free plan is bigger than it used to be. What changed is who you buy from and where the roadmap points. The pricing page's own plan data marks Free and Growth as Hotjar plans and Pro and Enterprise as not, which is a fair summary of where the Hotjar-shaped product stops and the enterprise platform begins. Day to day on Free or Growth, little changes. Planning three years out, the ceiling above you is now an enterprise contract rather than a bigger Hotjar.

What Hotjar actually does (and the one thing it does not)

TL;DR Recordings, heatmaps, funnels, surveys and error monitoring. All of it answers "what happened." None of it answers "will changing this make me money."

Five things ship on the free plan, per the Contentsquare pricing page read August 9, 2026: session replays, heatmaps, funnels, error and performance monitoring, and basic surveys. Replays let you watch one shopper's path from collection page to product page and out again. Heatmaps aggregate clicks, taps and scroll depth, so you learn that most mobile shoppers never reach your size guide. Funnels show which step sheds the most people. Surveys ask the shopper directly, and are the only one of the five that returns a stated reason rather than an inferred one.

Now the honest boundary, and it is not a criticism. Every one of those outputs describes the past. A heatmap showing nobody clicks your size guide tells you the size guide is invisible. It does not tell you whether moving it above the add-to-cart button will sell more shirts, or fewer, or the same number with more returns. That is a question about a counterfactual, and the only instrument that answers it is a controlled comparison between shoppers who saw the change and shoppers who did not.

Confusing the two is the expensive mistake in this category: watch ten recordings, spot something ugly, ship a redesign, see revenue move, credit the redesign. Revenue moves for a dozen reasons in any fortnight. Hotjar is a superb instrument for generating hypotheses and a non-instrument for confirming them.

What Hotjar costs on Shopify today

TL;DR Free is $0 for up to 200k monthly sessions. Growth runs from $49/mo at 7k sessions to a published $739/mo at 200k. Above that it is quote-only.

Almost every article ranking for this term quotes a price ladder Hotjar retired. Here is the live one, read off contentsquare.com/pricing on August 9, 2026. Prices shown are the pay-monthly figures; the page's billing toggle discounts yearly payment by 20%, so Growth's $49 becomes $39 if you pay annually.

Monthly sessions	Per month	Replays included	Notes
Free, up to 200k	$0	10k	1 project, 1 month data access
7k	$49	7k	Growth entry; 13 month data access, 3 projects
10k	$69	10k
15k	$99	15k
20k	$119	20k	Last tier where replays match sessions
30k	$159	20k
45k	$219	20k
60k	$279	20k
100k	$409	20k
120k	$469	20k	Replay cap still 20k
150k	$569	22k
200k	$739	30k	Top published tier
240k and up	Quote	36k+	"Talk to our team"

Pay-monthly prices. Yearly billing is 20% lower per the page's own toggle, confirmed by its cost summary ($49 + $99 monthly shown against $114 billed annually). Pro starts "from 1m+ monthly sessions" and Enterprise is custom; both are quote-only, so no figure is printed here. Re-check before you buy.

Three things in that table matter more than the headline number.

The free tier is enormous for a Shopify store. 200k monthly sessions is more traffic than the overwhelming majority of independent stores see. If you skipped a recording tool because you assumed it cost money, that assumption is wrong. The same comparison table lists an "Analytics collection rate" of 100% across all four tiers, Free included, so nothing is being sampled down.

The real free-tier limit is time, not volume. The plan comparison gives Free 1 month of analytics data access against 13 months on Growth. You cannot compare this August to last August, and any before-and-after you attempt runs off the end of your own history. For a merchant whose purpose is measuring the effect of a change over time, that is the constraint that forces an upgrade, not the session count.

The replay allowance flattens hard. Follow the third column. Replays track sessions one-for-one up to the 20k tier, then stop: 20k replays at 20k sessions, and still 20k replays at 120k sessions, where you are paying $469/mo. Between those rungs the price rises by $350/mo and the number of sessions you can actually watch does not move. A store doing 100k sessions on Growth captures a fifth of its traffic on replay, which is plenty for spotting friction, but you are buying analytics coverage rather than replay coverage as you climb.

How Hotjar installs on Shopify, and the app that is not Hotjar

TL;DR The documented install is a manual paste into theme.liquid before the closing head tag. There is no official Hotjar app. The App Store listing is published by a third party called Dualsided.

Hotjar's marketing and Hotjar's documentation tell slightly different stories here, and it is worth seeing both. The Shopify integration page promises setup in "a few clicks" with "no custom coding required." The help centre article on Shopify documents this (read August 9, 2026):

1. Open your Hotjar Sites page and click Install tracking code for your site.
2. Click Add code manually, then Copy.
3. In Shopify admin, go to Online Store › Themes.
4. On your current theme, open the … menu and choose Edit code.
5. In the Layout folder, open theme.liquid.
6. Scroll to the closing </head> tag and paste the snippet just before it.
7. Click Save.

That is a code-editor edit. It is not difficult, and thousands of merchants do it without incident, but calling it "no custom coding required" is generous. Both pages are linked from Hotjar's own navigation; judge for yourself.

The bigger consequence is that the snippet is now theme code you own, living in a file rather than in your admin settings. Duplicate your theme for a Black Friday variant and the copy carries it, which is what you want. Accept a theme-vendor update that ships a fresh theme.liquid, or switch themes, and it does not follow. Nothing errors. Your data simply stops, and you find out weeks later when you go to look at a heatmap.

The App Store listing, read carefully

Search the Shopify App Store for Hotjar and you get a listing called Hotjar Install. Its developer is Dualsided, based in Vista, California, not Hotjar Ltd. The listing says so itself: "We are not affiliated with Hotjar itself and have no ability to manage your account with Hotjar Ltd."

The facts, read August 9, 2026: rated 4.3 from 86 reviews (62 five-star, 9 one-star), $0.99/mo Basic or $2.99/mo Pro, 7-day free trial, launched July 20, 2018. The Pro tier adds product and cart event tracking and customer identity tracking. It still requires you to have your own Hotjar account, free or paid.

Is a dollar a month worth it? Genuinely, it might be. What you buy is not the snippet, which is free, but the fact that the snippet stops being theme code: no code editor, no theme-update fragility, and a toggle in the admin. The argument against is equally real: it is a paid dependency on a small third party sitting between you and your analytics, and several of the one-star reviews concern billing rather than function. Google Tag Manager gives you the same durability for free if you already run it. What you should not do is install it believing it is Hotjar's own app.

The coverage map: what Hotjar cannot see on a Shopify store

TL;DR Checkout is out, by Hotjar's own documentation. So are iframes, canvas and WebGL, and the Shopify Admin. Heatmaps additionally struggle with hover menus, horizontal carousels and JS-rendered imagery.

Every row below traces to a sentence in Hotjar's own help centre, read August 9, 2026. Start with the big one, quoted exactly from Hotjar's Shopify installation article:

"This will install the Hotjar tracking code on your Shopify storefront only. Shopify's built-in checkout process doesn't support the direct integration of third-party scripts, including the Hotjar tracking code."

Your recordings end at the checkout button. If your suspicion is that shoppers bail at shipping options, at a surprise tax line, or at a payment method failing on mobile Safari, Hotjar shows you every step up to the door and nothing past it. That is not a defect. Shopify deliberately does not run arbitrary third-party JavaScript in checkout, which is also why your checkout is fast and hard to break. It does mean the tool cannot answer the question many merchants install it to answer.

The sanctioned way to see checkout behaviour on Shopify is a Web Pixel: a sandboxed subscriber to standard customer events such as checkout started, payment info submitted and purchase, which respects the shopper's consent choices. It gives you events, not video, so it is a different kind of visibility. It is also where Shopify is pushing everything. The old "Additional Scripts" box on the Thank you and Order status pages is being retired, the Plus deadline having passed on August 28, 2025 and the non-Plus deadline landing August 26, 2026. Any advice telling you to install a recording script via Settings › Checkout › Additional Scripts has an expiry date on it.

That deadline also puts an asterisk on one Hotjar claim. Its incompatibility article says: "We support the installation of Hotjar on your Shopify storefront and order status page, as explained in our Shopify installation guide." The installation guide it points at documents only the theme.liquid paste. There are no order-status steps in it. Treat order-status coverage as unconfirmed until Hotjar publishes the method.

Surface	Recorded?	Why
Home, collection and product pages	Yes	The standard theme.liquid install covers the whole storefront.
Cart page	Yes	Part of the storefront, so the same snippet covers it.
Shopify checkout	No	Hotjar: Shopify's checkout "doesn't support the direct integration of third-party scripts, including the Hotjar tracking code."
Order status page	Claimed	The incompatibility article says Hotjar supports the storefront "and order status page," but the install guide it points to documents only the theme.liquid paste.
Shopify Admin and embedded apps	No	Explicitly unsupported: technical limits on third-party scripts in the Admin, plus compliance concerns.
Development or Plus sandbox stores	No	Hotjar: "no data will be collected and Ask tools won't display," and it "also prevent any tracking of the checkout pages."
Anything in an iframe	No	Recordings suppress all iframes from executing; heatmaps render them as a black box with no click data.
3D or AR product viewers	No	Canvas and WebGL content is not exposed to the page DOM, so it cannot be captured.
Hover mega menus	Partly	Heatmaps may not display a hover menu unless the page's HTML and CSS change when it opens.
Horizontal product carousels	Partly	Elements with horizontal scrolling may not fully display beyond the area initially visible.
JS-rendered imagery	Partly	Heatmap screenshots do not execute JavaScript, so images or animations created with it will not appear.

Sources: Hotjar's Shopify installation article, its "Platforms and Frameworks Not Compatible with Hotjar" article, its Heatmap Limitations article, and its Troubleshooting FAQs for Recordings. All read August 9, 2026.

The theme-shaped blind spots

Three of those rows map onto features almost every modern Shopify theme ships.

Iframes are invisible, twice over. Hotjar's recordings documentation is blunt: "Ads, chat widgets, and other third-party software installed on your site are loaded as iframes. In order to protect you from possible security threats when replaying Recordings, Hotjar suppresses all iframes from executing. This means we are unable to track iframe content on your site." On heatmaps the same content appears as a black box, and Hotjar notes that even with a workaround to view inside it, "click data will still not be present." On a typical Shopify product page that quietly removes your reviews widget, your embedded size chart, your Klarna or Afterpay messaging and your support chat. Those are exactly the elements a CRO review wants to study.

Heatmap screenshots do not execute JavaScript. Hotjar's Heatmap Limitations article says so directly, adding that "any images or animations created using it will not be visible in a heatmap." Themes that build galleries or badges client-side produce heatmaps with holes in them. From the same article: if the scrolling part of your page sits inside a <div> rather than <body>, "Hotjar can't detect the correct page height, and your screenshot will be cut off," with "no workaround for this at this time." Scroll-lock and parallax pages get cut off or distorted too, and screenshots cap at a 10MB HTML capture and 50,000 pixels of page height.

Hover menus and horizontal carousels are partial. A hover mega menu "may be unable to display" unless the theme changes both HTML and CSS when it opens, which Hotjar notes needs a developer. Horizontally scrolling elements "may not fully display beyond the area that is initially visible," so a swipeable collection carousel will under-report everything past the first card. Session replay handles this far better than heatmaps do. When a heatmap looks wrong, watch the replay before concluding nobody interacted.

Consent, recordings and Shopify's privacy surface

TL;DR Hotjar suppresses keystrokes and long numbers by default, on the device. What it does not do by itself is wait for your consent banner, because a raw theme paste fires independently of Shopify's consent layer.

Credit where it is due: Hotjar's defaults are better than most. Its recordings documentation states that keyboard input and numbers embedded in page content are suppressed by default, that "numbers 9 characters or longer will always be suppressed," which covers phone and card numbers, and that suppression "occurs on the user's device, meaning it is never stored on our servers." Suppressed text renders as asterisks of randomised length. Extend that suppression by hand to anything showing a name, address or order number.

The gap is sequencing, not storage. A script pasted into theme.liquid runs when the page runs. It does not know what your cookie banner decided unless you wire that up. If you sell into the EU or UK, or a US state with an opt-out regime, that ordering is the part your policy turns on, and it is your responsibility rather than Hotjar's. Before you call the install finished: confirm the snippet is gated behind your consent mechanism, and check that your privacy policy names session recording. Shopify's Customer Privacy API exists to let scripts ask what the shopper agreed to, but whether your install consults it depends entirely on how it was pasted in.

One thing Hotjar itself flags is a good sign rather than a bad one. Explaining why it will not run inside the Shopify Admin, its documentation cites "compliance concerns that are difficult to manage when tracking apps running in the backend of your users." A vendor declining data it could technically collect is a vendor thinking about this properly.

You have a recording. Now what?

TL;DR Watch ten sessions on one template, write the friction as one testable sentence, change one thing, and compare against a holdback. Recordings generate hypotheses. Only a comparison settles them.

Every competing article on this keyword stops at "verify your installation is working." That is where the merchant's real problem starts. Here is the loop that turns a recording into a decision.

1. Pick one template, not your whole store. Filter to your highest-traffic product template or your main collection page. Studying the whole catalogue produces impressions. Studying one template produces a finding you can act on.

2. Watch ten sessions, not one hundred. Ten is enough to spot a repeated behaviour and few enough that you will actually do it. Watch mobile first, because that is where most Shopify traffic and most friction lives. Look for repetition: three shoppers hunting for the same missing information, or the same rage-click on something that is not a button.

3. Write it as one sentence with a number in it. Not "the product page is confusing." Something like: "shoppers scroll past the add-to-cart button looking for shipping cost, so a delivery estimate above the button should lift add-to-cart rate." A hypothesis you cannot measure is an opinion with better posture.

4. Change one thing. Change five and you learn only that five things together did something. You cannot keep the winner and drop the losers, because you cannot tell them apart.

5. Compare against a holdback, and wait. Some shoppers see the change, some do not, and you compare the two groups on the same days under the same ad spend. Judge on revenue per visitor rather than conversion rate alone, so a change that lifts orders while shrinking basket size cannot masquerade as a win. And set the sample size before you start; the strongest temptation in testing is to stop the moment the line is briefly ahead. Our Shopify A/B testing guide covers the arithmetic, and the theme testing guide covers doing it without breaking your storefront.

If your store is small, that last step is where honesty is required. Detecting a modest lift takes tens of thousands of visitors per variant, and a store doing a few thousand sessions a month will not get there this quarter. That does not mean do nothing. It means preferring changes with large expected effects, running them longer, and being candid that you are making a judgement call rather than reading a result. Our low-traffic testing playbook lays out what is measurable at that scale.

For completeness, this is the gap StorePilot is being built for, stated plainly: it is pre-launch, there is no App Store listing yet, and you cannot install it today. The premise is that finding the friction and testing the fix should be one loop rather than two tools and a spreadsheet. None of the advice above depends on it. Hotjar, Clarity and Lucky Orange are all shipping now, and the loop works with any of them plus a disciplined test. For the broader programme this sits inside, start with the Shopify CRO playbook.

Hotjar vs Clarity vs Lucky Orange vs Optimizely

TL;DR Clarity is free and covers checkout. Lucky Orange is Shopify-native and session-metered. Optimizely is not in this category at all. Hotjar wins on surveys and polish.

Tool	Category	Price	On Shopify
Hotjar (Contentsquare Experience Analytics)	Session recording, heatmaps, funnels, surveys	$0 up to 200k sessions; Growth from $49/mo	Manual theme.liquid paste. No official Hotjar app. Checkout not covered.
Microsoft Clarity	Session recording, heatmaps, funnels	Free (no paid tier listed)	Official Microsoft-published app, 4.6 from 1,824 reviews, carries Shopify's "Works with: Checkout" badge.
Lucky Orange	Session recording, heatmaps, surveys, chat	Free (100 sessions/mo); Launch $19, Build $39, Grow $89	Shopify-native app, 4.7 from 811 reviews. Session-metered, so cost tracks traffic closely.
Optimizely	Experimentation platform, a different category	No published prices; /pricing redirects to a quote form	Enterprise experimentation, not a heatmap tool. Compare it to VWO, not to Hotjar.

Sources: contentsquare.com/pricing; apps.shopify.com/microsoft-clarity (4.6, 1,824 reviews, launched July 17, 2025); apps.shopify.com/lucky-orange (4.7, 811 reviews); optimizely.com/pricing, which redirects to a quote form reading "Every Optimizely plan is individually packaged."

Clarity is the uncomfortable comparison on Shopify specifically. It is free with no paid tier listed, published by Microsoft rather than a reseller, and its App Store listing carries Shopify's "Works with: Checkout" badge, precisely the surface Hotjar's own docs exclude. If your budget is zero and your question is about checkout, that is close to decisive.

Lucky Orange trades scale for fit. Its free tier is 100 sessions a month against Hotjar's 200k, and paid plans run $19, $39 and $89/mo for 500, 3,500 and 10,000 sessions with 30 to 60 days of storage. It is a proper Shopify app rather than a theme paste, rated 4.7 from 811 reviews, and built around ecommerce events. Under ten thousand sessions a month that is a fair trade. Above it, session metering gets expensive next to Hotjar's free tier.

Optimizely is here only because people put it on the same shortlist, and it does not belong there. It is an enterprise experimentation and content platform, closer to VWO than to a heatmap tool, and its pricing page redirects to a quote form. Choosing between Optimizely and Hotjar means comparing two different jobs.

The verdict: install it, and know its edges

Hotjar remains a good recommendation for most Shopify stores, and the free tier makes it an easy one. The caveats are about coverage, not quality.

Install Hotjar if you have never watched your own shoppers, you want surveys and feedback widgets in the same tool as your replays, and your friction is on the storefront. Two hundred thousand free sessions covers essentially any independent store, the collection rate is not throttled on Free, and the survey layer beats the free alternatives. Treat the 1-month data window as the thing that will eventually push you to $49.

Choose Clarity instead if your problem sits at checkout, or you want a Microsoft-published app rather than a code-editor paste and a third-party installer.

Do not expect either to tell you whether your fix worked. That is the boundary this page is drawn around. Session recording is an excellent instrument for finding what is going wrong and a poor one for deciding what to do about it. Pair it with a test, hold your nerve on the sample size, and judge on revenue per visitor.

Install it this week, watch ten mobile sessions on your best-selling product page, and write down the one thing you see three shoppers do. That single sentence is worth more than another month of dashboards.

Questions merchants keep asking

Does Hotjar work with Shopify?

Yes, on your storefront. Hotjar's own help centre documents a manual install: copy the tracking code, open Online Store › Themes › Edit code, open theme.liquid in the Layout folder, and paste the snippet just before the closing </head> tag (help.hotjar.com, Shopify article, read 2026-08-09). There is no official Hotjar-published Shopify app. The listing at apps.shopify.com/hotjar is published by a third party called Dualsided.

Can Hotjar record the Shopify checkout?

No. Hotjar's own documentation says so directly: "This will install the Hotjar tracking code on your Shopify storefront only. Shopify's built-in checkout process doesn't support the direct integration of third-party scripts, including the Hotjar tracking code" (help.hotjar.com, Shopify article, read 2026-08-09). Your recordings and heatmaps end at the moment a shopper clicks Checkout. Everything after that is invisible to Hotjar.

Is Hotjar still free in 2026?

Yes, and the free tier is unusually generous. The Contentsquare pricing page lists a $0 Experience Analytics plan with up to 200k monthly sessions, 10k session replays, 1 project, heatmaps, funnels, error and performance monitoring, and up to 100 monthly survey and feedback responses (contentsquare.com/pricing, read 2026-08-09). The real limit is data access: the plan comparison table gives the Free tier 1 month of analytics data access, against 13 months on Growth.

What happened to Hotjar?

Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare, and the merge has reached the commercial layer. As of 2026-08-09, requesting https://www.hotjar.com/pricing/ returns an HTTP 308 permanent redirect to contentsquare.com/pricing/, and hotjar.com/integrations/shopify/ carries a banner reading "Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare." The Hotjar-branded product still exists and still works. You now buy it as Contentsquare Experience Analytics.

How much does Hotjar cost per month in 2026?

On the Contentsquare pricing page as of 2026-08-09: Free is $0 for up to 200k monthly sessions. Growth starts at $49/mo billed monthly ($39/mo billed yearly) for 7k monthly sessions and rises in steps to $739/mo at 200k sessions. Above roughly 240k sessions, and on the Pro and Enterprise plans, pricing is quote-only. Re-check before you buy; this ladder is the vendor's live page, not a cached table.

Is the Hotjar app on the Shopify App Store made by Hotjar?

No. The listing at apps.shopify.com/hotjar is called "Hotjar Install" and its developer is Dualsided, based in Vista, California. Its own description says: "We are not affiliated with Hotjar itself and have no ability to manage your account with Hotjar Ltd." It costs $0.99/mo (Basic) or $2.99/mo (Pro) with a 7-day free trial, is rated 4.3 from 86 reviews, and launched July 20, 2018 (read 2026-08-09). It still requires a paid or free Hotjar account of your own.

Will Hotjar show me my mega menu, cart drawer or product carousel?

Partly. Heatmaps are the weak spot: Hotjar's Heatmap Limitations article says hover-state menus may not display unless the page's HTML and CSS change when the menu opens, and that elements with horizontal scrolling may not fully display beyond the initially visible area (help.hotjar.com, read 2026-08-09). Session replay handles dynamic UI better than heatmaps do.

Does Hotjar sample my sessions?

Not on the analytics side, per the vendor's own comparison table, which lists an "Analytics collection rate" of 100% on all four tiers, Free included (contentsquare.com/pricing, read 2026-08-09). What is capped is session replay: Free gives 10k replays against 200k sessions, and on Growth the replay allowance flattens at 20k from the 20k-session tier to the 120k-session tier.

Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity for a Shopify store?

Clarity is free, is published by Microsoft itself, and its Shopify App Store listing carries Shopify's "Works with: Checkout" badge, rated 4.6 from 1,824 reviews and launched July 17, 2025 (apps.shopify.com/microsoft-clarity, read 2026-08-09). Hotjar's own docs rule checkout out. If checkout visibility matters and budget is zero, Clarity is the stronger Shopify fit. Hotjar's advantages are its survey and feedback layer and a more polished heatmap and funnel workflow.

Does a Hotjar install survive a Shopify theme update?

Not on its own, because the documented install is theme code. The snippet lives in theme.liquid, so duplicating your theme for a seasonal refresh or accepting a theme-vendor update leaves the copy without it unless you paste it across by hand. This is the practical argument for the third-party Dualsided app, or for Google Tag Manager: both move the snippet out of a file that gets replaced.