Hotjar vs Propel Replays
for Shopify, in 2026.

The short answer.

Hotjar is the original. It defined the category, has a decade of brand equity, and is now part of Contentsquare. Propel is the Shopify-shaped one. It started inside a Shopify store with a merchant trying to figure out why his paid traffic wasn't converting. Different shapes, different jobs.

Pick Hotjar (now Contentsquare) if you're multi-platform, you need surveys + user interviews + feedback widgets in one bundled stack, and you're comfortable paying for breadth and the enterprise procurement story.

Pick Propel Replays if you're a Shopify merchant, you want filters that speak Shopify customer fields, you care about Core Web Vitals, you want a dashboard that doesn't feel like a generic SaaS port, and you'd rather a small studio answer your support tickets than a Tier 2 contact form.

"In the past we used Hotjar (I think it's called something else now), but this is much better because it's in Shopify. Having qualitative data like session replays is essential, and Propel is designed in a way that's tailored to how shop owners use this kind of data." — Strudel3D, Shopify App Store review

If you only read one section, read this one.

The seven decisions that actually matter. The right answer depends on your store, not on whose name is on the building.

When Hotjar (now Contentsquare) is genuinely the right answer.

We're not going to pretend Hotjar is bad. It's one of the most refined products in the category, with a decade of feature investment behind it and a content team that owns most of the CRO knowledge graph. There are real cases where it's the right tool, even for a Shopify merchant.

You're not just on Shopify.

The most common reason to stay with Hotjar is the simplest one: your business runs on more than Shopify. You've got a marketing site on Webflow, a Help Center on Zendesk, a B2B portal on a custom React stack, and your DTC store on Shopify. You want one heatmap tool across all four properties so the dashboards are unified and the team only has to learn one product. Propel is Shopify-only by construction; we don't try to be the multi-platform tool. If your job spans surfaces, Hotjar is the right shape.

You need surveys, interviews, and feedback bundled in one stack.

Hotjar has Hotjar Engage (user interviews — recruit testers, schedule and run sessions), Hotjar Surveys (multi-step branched surveys with logic), and the Feedback widget. Contentsquare has more on top — Voice of Customer, Heap-style product analytics through the Heap acquisition, etc. If your CRO program needs all of that in one bundled login, Hotjar/Contentsquare is the obvious answer. Propel Replays does session replay + heatmaps + surveys; we don't ship user-interview recruiting or a feedback widget. We chose to be tighter and Shopify-shaped instead of broader.

Procurement requires enterprise-grade controls.

If your security team's checklist includes SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, EU data residency by region, custom DPAs, SSO via Okta, role-based permissions, and a contractual SLA — Contentsquare can sign all of that. Propel can sign some of it (we honour the Shopify customer privacy API, our data is processed on infrastructure we control, we'll sign a DPA), but we're a small studio without an enterprise sales motion or a Trust Center page yet. Plus-tier features are in development; if procurement is the binding constraint today, the larger vendor is the safer call.

You're already migrating onto Contentsquare.

If your org has decided Contentsquare is the standard analytics layer and Hotjar is the entry point into it, switching tools mid-migration is more friction than the upside justifies. Stay where you are; revisit once the dust settles.

When Propel Replays is genuinely the right answer.

Propel exists because the founder, Chris Norton, was running a Shopify store called SOLID Tool Chests and couldn't get his existing tools — including Hotjar — to answer a basic question: why isn't this paid traffic converting? The dashboards were generic. The filters didn't speak Shopify. The script was slowing his store. So he built the tool he wanted. Seven thousand Shopify stores later, that's still the brief. Here are the cases where it's the better fit.

Your business runs on Shopify and you want a Shopify-shaped tool.

Replay filters that speak Shopify customer fields — order count, total spent, customer tag, cart value, product, collection. Replays that link back to actual Shopify orders in the admin. A theme app embed install (no theme.liquid edits, no GTM). Filtering replays for "first-time buyers vs repeat customers" or "carts over $100" is one click in Propel and either custom JS or impossible in Hotjar. That's the entire point.

You want the work surfaced for you, not buried in a queue.

Insight alerts proactively flag the highest-value sessions — the day's biggest orders, biggest abandoned carts, biggest abandoned checkouts — so you watch what matters first instead of triaging hundreds of recordings. Product-page alerts catch significant drops in add-to-cart rate so you hear about a broken theme update or new friction the day it starts. Hotjar's a brilliant viewer; Propel does some of the watching for you.

You want AI session summaries that actually save time.

Every replay in Propel is summarized into a two-sentence narrative the moment you open it. Not a buzzword AI feature — a workflow. A small team can review hundreds of sessions a week by skimming summaries and only watching the ones that look interesting. Hotjar has AI features (Highlights, AI Surveys), but the daily-skim summary workflow specifically is Propel's. Multiple merchants have told us this is the feature they didn't know they needed until they had it.

You care about Core Web Vitals.

Propel measures 0ms impact on Core Web Vitals. The tracking script ships as a Shopify theme app embed (Shopify injects it at the bottom of the page after the rest of the theme has loaded) and the script itself is async — nothing blocks render. We've measured Lighthouse with Replays installed and disabled and the scores are identical. Hotjar's script bundles session recording, heatmaps, surveys, and a feedback widget into one payload, which is structurally heavier than a Shopify-native embed. If mobile Lighthouse is part of your job (it should be), the Shopify-native shape matters.

You want a dashboard that doesn't feel like a generic SaaS port.

We sweat empty states, default filters, copy, and the install flow. The app feels like it was made by someone who runs a Shopify store, because the founder did. Hotjar's UI is mature and polished, but it's a generic UI by design — it has to work for SaaS, B2B, ecommerce, and content sites. Propel's UI assumes you're a Shopify merchant and shapes itself accordingly. Merchants notice.

You want sustainable, predictable pricing.

Propel's pricing is published, simple, and Shopify-shaped: free up to 750 pageviews/mo, paid plans from $9.90/mo (or $6.44/mo billed annually with 35% off), top tier $49.90/mo. We've held these prices roughly steady since 2019. Hotjar's pricing now redirects to Contentsquare, the self-serve plans still exist but the surface around them has moved enterprise-shaped, and we don't speculate about repricing. If pricing predictability is part of your decision, the smaller bootstrapped vendor is usually the safer bet — we have no investors pushing us toward an enterprise pricing motion.

You want named human support, not a Tier 2 form.

Tom, our Support Team Lead, is named by merchants in dozens of 5-star reviews. Tickets get answered by the same small team that built the feature you're asking about. That's a structural feature of being a small independent studio, not a perk we'll cut at the next QBR. Hotjar/Contentsquare's support is professional and competent at scale, but it's scale-shaped — tiered, ticketed, async. Different model, different tradeoff.

Session replay.

The core of both products. Where they diverge: Shopify-shape, AI workflow, and what happens to your Lighthouse score.

Heatmaps.

Hotjar invented modern heatmap UI. Propel renders directly on the live storefront DOM and segments by Shopify fields.

Surveys, feedback, and research tooling.

This is where Hotjar genuinely wins on breadth. We don't ship user-interview recruiting; they do.

Shopify integration depth.

The asymmetric category. Hotjar is a multi-platform tool that runs on Shopify; Propel is built on Shopify primitives.

Brand, support, and the rebrand question.

The category most comparison pages skip. The Contentsquare migration is a real factor in 2026 — we'd be dishonest not to name it.

Pricing comparison.

We'll be honest about Hotjar's pricing being in transition. The numbers below reflect the last self-serve Hotjar plan structure as it appeared on hotjar.com before the pricing page started 301-redirecting to contentsquare.com.

The honest disclaimer: as of April 2026, the Hotjar pricing page on hotjar.com redirects to contentsquare.com. Existing customers continue on their existing plans. New self-serve signup still works through the Hotjar product, but the marketing surface has moved. Contentsquare's pricing motion is enterprise-shaped — custom-quote rather than transparent SaaS tiers. Numbers below are for the legacy Hotjar plans, current at last public listing — for the deeper breakdown of what each Hotjar tier actually buys a Shopify store, see our Hotjar pricing guide for 2026.

If you decide to switch from Hotjar to Propel.

Switching from Hotjar isn't trivial — but it's not as scary as it sounds either. Most of what feels like friction is the worry about losing data; once you accept that historical replays don't migrate from any tool to any tool (industry-wide; not a Propel limitation), the rest is mechanical.

Step 1 — Install Propel without removing Hotjar.

Install Propel Replays from the Shopify App Store. Click the toggle to enable the theme app embed. Don't touch the Hotjar tag yet — running both in parallel for a week or two is fine, and it's the only way to get an apples-to-apples comparison on the same set of sessions. Recordings start streaming into the Propel dashboard within minutes.

Step 2 — Compare on real sessions for 1–2 weeks.

Pick five or six sessions you'd ordinarily review (a checkout drop-off, a mobile session that bounced, a high-value cart that didn't complete) and watch the same session in both products. The differences you'll notice are the things that will or won't matter to your daily work — Propel's AI summary at the top of each replay, the Shopify customer field filters in the sidebar, the way replays link back to the actual Shopify order. If those matter, the switch makes itself.

Step 3 — Accept that historical replays don't migrate.

Honest answer to the most common worry: no, you can't import your Hotjar replay archive into Propel. Session replays are stored as compressed DOM events in a vendor-specific format, and they don't translate between tools. Heatmaps are derived from those events, so they don't migrate either. This is true industry-wide. Anyone telling you they can import historical Hotjar data is either confused or selling you something.

The good news: fresh data accumulates fast. A typical Shopify store doing a few hundred sessions a day has a readable click heatmap within 24–48 hours of installing Propel, and a meaningful library of replays inside a week. So the "lost data" cost of switching is less than it feels like — you trade a few weeks of historical context for a tool shaped the way you actually work.

Step 4 — Remove the Hotjar tag.

Once you're confident, remove the Hotjar tracking code from your theme. If you installed via theme.liquid, edit the file and remove the script. If you installed via GTM, disable the Hotjar tag and publish a new GTM container. If you installed via the Hotjar Shopify legacy connector, uninstall it. We recommend deferring this step a week after you've stopped checking the Hotjar dashboard — the unsubscribe is permanent in spirit, even if Hotjar keeps your account in read-only mode.

Step 5 — Cancel the Hotjar subscription before next billing.

Log in to Hotjar (or Contentsquare, depending on where your billing has migrated), open Account → Subscription, and cancel before the next renewal date. Most Hotjar accounts stay accessible in read-only mode for 30 days after cancellation, which is useful if you want to refer to a specific historical replay during the transition period. Keep an export of any survey data you care about; surveys export cleanly as CSV.

Step 6 — Verify Lighthouse improved.

Run Lighthouse on your homepage, a product page, and a checkout page before switching, and again after removing Hotjar. The numbers should move — particularly on mobile, particularly on Largest Contentful Paint and Total Blocking Time. With Propel installed in Hotjar's place, the delta should be approximately zero from the no-tracker baseline. If it isn't, something else in your stack is the culprit; we'll help you diagnose.

Total elapsed time for the active work: about 30 minutes. Everything else is the parallel-run watching period and the cancellation paperwork.

What merchants who actually switched said.

Quotes are unedited from public Shopify App Store reviews. We didn't ask anyone to write the Strudel3D quote — they wrote it on their own.

So, Hotjar or Propel?

We try to write these comparison pages so a Hotjar customer who doesn't switch still feels we treated their tool fairly. Hotjar is one of the most refined products in this category. It defined the modern session-replay-plus-heatmaps shape. It has a feature footprint we don't match — user interview recruiting, the feedback widget, the multi-platform reach. If those are part of your job, stay where you are. If you're also weighing Lucky Orange in the mix, our three-way Lucky Orange vs Hotjar vs Propel breakdown covers the trade-offs side by side.

But if you're a Shopify merchant trying to figure out why visitors don't buy — and especially if you've been quietly bothered by the Contentsquare migration, the heavier mobile script, the filters that don't speak Shopify, the pricing that quietly redirects off-domain — Propel is the tool we'd build for you, and we did. It's free up to 750 pageviews/mo. It installs in 30 seconds. It doesn't move your Lighthouse score. It speaks Shopify out of the box. And the support tickets get answered by the people who built the feature.

The Strudel3D phrase keeps coming back because it's the whole comparison in one sentence: "In the past we used Hotjar, but this is much better because it's in Shopify." Run them side by side for a week. You'll know.

Hotjar is the original. Propel is the Shopify-shaped one. Pick the shape that matches your store.