Honest comparison · Updated October 2026

The best Contentsquare alternative for Shopify,
ranked honestly.

Q: What's the best Contentsquare alternative for Shopify?

Propel Replays. It records every session on every plan, including the free one, with no sampling. Replays can be filtered by any Shopify customer field (customer tag, order count, total spent, cart value, UTM, device, country), each replay is AI-summarized when you open it, and the tracking script ships as a Shopify theme app embed with a measured 0ms impact on Core Web Vitals. Free up to 750 pageviews a month, paid plans from $9.90/mo. Contentsquare is a broad, multi-platform analytics suite; Propel is Shopify-shaped. If the problem you are trying to solve lives on a Shopify storefront, the Shopify-shaped tool surfaces it faster.

Contentsquare is where Hotjar's pricing page now sends you. It has a genuinely big free plan, a sane self-serve price ladder, and one catch that matters more for a Shopify store than any feature list: the plans you can buy without a sales call sample session replays. Here are the six best Contentsquare alternatives for Shopify merchants in 2026, with real numbers, real trade-offs, and the cases where Contentsquare is still the right answer.

Jump to the ranked list See the side-by-side table

6 ALTERNATIVES · COMPARED ON SHOPIFY-FIT, PRICING, AND REPLAY CAPTURE

TL;DR

The short answer.

Contentsquare's 2026 self-serve pricing is a real improvement on the sales-only page that greeted Hotjar refugees a year ago: a Free plan at $0 for up to 200,000 monthly sessions, and a Growth plan from $49/mo on monthly billing for 7,000 sessions up to $739/mo for 200,000. The catch is in the plan table's own words. Free captures 5% of sessions (max. 10k) and Growth captures 15% of sessions (min. 20k); only the custom-quoted Pro and Enterprise plans record up to 100%. Add a filter model built on User ID and custom variables rather than Shopify customers and orders, and a price gap of roughly 5x against a Shopify-native tool at the entry tier, and the shape of the problem is clear.

If you run a Shopify store and you are looking for a Contentsquare alternative, the answer is almost always Propel Replays. It records every session on every plan, including the free one. Filters speak every Shopify customer field, replays link back to real orders, every replay is AI-summarized when you open it, and the tracking script adds 0ms to your Core Web Vitals. Free up to 750 pageviews/mo, paid plans from $9.90/mo.

If you are not on Shopify, Microsoft Clarity is the strongest free option and does not sample. Lucky Orange bundles live chat and announcements. MIDA is the closest direct peer to Propel in the Shopify App Store. Mouseflow has the deepest friction and form analytics. FullStory is the enterprise-shaped option with a big free tier and a data clause worth reading.

Picking a Contentsquare alternative is mostly a sample-versus-every-session question. If aggregate heatmaps and funnels are what you use, Contentsquare's free plan is hard to beat. If the specific session is what you need, it is the wrong tool below the Pro tier.

Why people search for this

Why merchants are looking for a Contentsquare alternative in 2026.

Give Contentsquare its due first. The analytics side is broad and deep: zone-based heatmaps, journey analysis, a frustration score, error and performance monitoring, 13 months of analytics history on Growth, and a free tier whose session allowance dwarfs every Shopify-native free plan, ours included. It has a Shopify App Store listing (launched December 2025) that covers storefront and checkout pages. None of that is the issue. Four things shift the math when you are running a Shopify store:

The self-serve plans sample replays. The plan comparison table on contentsquare.com/pricing reads "5% sessions captured (max. 10k)" for Free and "15% sessions captured (min. 20k)" for Growth. Only Pro and Enterprise, both custom-quoted, capture up to 100%. When an unusually large cart is abandoned on a Growth plan, the odds that its replay exists are about one in seven.
The price gap at Shopify volumes. Growth is $49/mo on monthly billing for 7,000 sessions, $99 for 15,000, $179 for 35,000 and $409 for 100,000 (annual billing is advertised at 20% less). At Littledata's Shopify median of 2.7 pages per session, 7,000 sessions is roughly 19,000 pageviews, which a Shopify-native tool covers for about a fifth of the price. The gap narrows at the top of the slider, to roughly 1.7x at 100,000 sessions, which is where fit should decide (full Contentsquare pricing breakdown).
The filter model does not speak Shopify. Growth filters by User ID and custom variables. There is no native concept of a customer tag, an order count or a cart value; you push that data in yourself. For a generic web property that is fine. For a storefront, it is the core feature missing.
A lot of people did not choose it. hotjar.com/pricing now 308-redirects to contentsquare.com/pricing. Hotjar's last published plans capped daily sessions (35, 100, 500, 1,500) and recorded the sessions within the cap; Contentsquare's plans meter monthly sessions and sample. If you came for Hotjar and you used it for replays, the row to check is the capture row, not the price.

None of this means Contentsquare is a bad tool. For a multi-site enterprise that wants aggregate analytics, long history, SAML and a customer success manager, it is what the product has always been built for. But for a Shopify merchant trying to find out why a specific kind of visitor did not buy, it is the wrong shape below the Pro tier, and the Shopify-shaped alternatives have caught up.

Ranked alternatives

The 6 best Contentsquare alternatives for Shopify, ranked.

Each entry covers what it is, who it fits, pricing, where it shines, and where it falls short. Listed in order of fit-for-Shopify. We built one of these, and we will be honest about the trade-offs anyway.

Propel Replays

Best for Shopify

The Shopify-native answer to Contentsquare: every session recorded, filters that understand Shopify customers, built by a small studio that runs Shopify stores.

Propel Replays is a Shopify-native session replay, heatmap and survey app from Propel Commerce, a small independent studio that has been shipping Shopify apps since 2019. It started as the tool our founder wanted while running a Shopify store and trying to work out why paid traffic was not converting. The multi-platform tools of the day all felt like generic web analytics with a Shopify integration bolted on. Replays was built to be Shopify-shaped from the start.

What it does: records every visitor session, generates click and area heatmaps for any page, AI-summarizes each replay into two sentences when you open it (so you can skim 200 sessions in the time it used to take to watch ten), runs surveys on all pages, specific products, products by collection or time on page, and lets you filter every replay by any Shopify customer field: order count, total spent, customer tag, cart value, UTM, device, country. Insight alerts surface the day's biggest orders, biggest abandoned carts and biggest abandoned checkouts relative to your store's baseline, so you know which sessions to watch first; product-page alerts flag drops in add-to-cart rate on product pages before they bleed conversion.

Where it wins vs Contentsquare: no sampling, on any plan. When an insight alert flags a $400 abandoned cart, the replay exists. The Shopify-nativeness is real, not marketing: replay filters speak every Shopify customer field, replays link back to actual orders in Shopify admin, and the tracking script ships as a Shopify theme app embed that Shopify injects at the bottom of the page after the rest of the theme has loaded, async, with a measured 0ms impact on Core Web Vitals. Less than 30 seconds from install to first replay. Surveys are included on every plan rather than sold as a second product line.

Where it falls short: Shopify-only. If you run on WooCommerce, BigCommerce or any other stack, this is not your tool. Replay retention is 30 days on every plan, against Contentsquare's 13 months of analytics history on Growth, so if comparing this Black Friday to last Black Friday inside the tool matters to you, that is a real gap. Heatmaps today are click and area (scroll and movement heatmaps are on the roadmap), and there is no journey-analysis product. We do not try to be the whole analytics stack; we try to be the right shape for one job.

"We transitioned from a different heatmap application and so far we're very impressed with the features with Propel."

Good Organics · Shopify App Store review

"More features and metrics available than other replay apps I have used so far."

Cask & Cotton · Shopify App Store review

Pricing

Free up to 750 pageviews/mo. Paid from $9.90/mo (or $7.43/mo annual). 7-day free trial. Every plan records every session.

Best for

Independent and DTC Shopify stores and Shopify Plus brands that want the specific session, not a sample, with Shopify context in the filters.

Install free on Shopify See the full Replays product page

Microsoft Clarity

Best free, multi-platform

Free, no traffic limits, no sampling. The strongest Contentsquare alternative if you are not on Shopify.

What it is: Microsoft's free behavioural analytics tool. Session recordings, heatmaps, dead-click and rage-click detection, per-replay AI summaries, integrations with Google Analytics. No paid tier; Microsoft's own FAQ says it is free forever with no traffic, site or member limits. Genuinely good engineering; the dashboards do not feel like a free product.

Where it wins vs Contentsquare: it records sessions rather than sampling them, and it costs nothing at any volume. Recordings are retained for 30 days, with favourites and a random sample kept for up to 9 months, and heatmaps for up to 9 months, which is a longer analytics window than Contentsquare's Free plan offers. If you are leaving Contentsquare because the replay you wanted was never captured, Clarity fixes that for free (the real tradeoffs of "free forever").

Where it falls short of Contentsquare: no journey analysis, no zone-based heatmaps, no 13-month history, no surveys product, none of the enterprise controls. It is the core replay and heatmap job, done well, and not much beyond it.

Where it falls short for Shopify: the same place Contentsquare does. Filters do not map to Shopify customer fields, replays do not link back to orders, and the data lives on Microsoft's servers, which some merchants (and most Shopify Plus brands) will not accept on principle.

Pricing

Free, unlimited. No sampling. 30-day recording retention.

Best for

Non-Shopify sites, multi-property setups, teams already in the Microsoft ad stack.

Lucky Orange

Mature on Shopify App Store

The wide-feature-set veteran on the Shopify App Store. Mature, well-known, multi-platform, and metered by sessions like Contentsquare.

What it is: Lucky Orange has been around since 2010. It is a multi-platform analytics suite with session recordings, heatmaps, conversion funnels, surveys, announcements, form analytics and live chat. The Shopify App Store presence is strong; it is one of the most-installed analytics tools on Shopify, with a real install flow.

Where it wins vs Contentsquare: it records the sessions within your plan's cap rather than sampling a percentage of them, and it bundles live chat and on-site announcements that Contentsquare does not have at all. Build is $32/mo on annual billing ($39 monthly) for 3,500 sessions, which is a little under Contentsquare's Growth entry price (full Lucky Orange pricing breakdown).

Where it falls short: the free plan is 100 sessions a month on the Shopify App Store, where Contentsquare's free tier is enormous. Pricing scales aggressively: Grow is $72/mo, Expand is $199/mo ($249 monthly), Scale is $839/mo ($1,049 monthly), and the session allowances are smaller than Contentsquare's at every rung. The UI feels its age. And like Contentsquare, it is not Shopify-native: filters do not speak Shopify fields, and the workflow assumes a generic web property.

Pricing

Free App Store plan up to 100 sessions/mo. Paid from $19/mo (Launch, 500 sessions) on the App Store, or $32/mo on annual billing (Build, 3,500 sessions) on luckyorange.com.

Best for

Stores wanting live chat and announcements bundled with replays in one tool.

MIDA

Closest peer to Propel

The other Shopify-native session replay app. Strong product, similar shape to Propel.

What it is: MIDA is a Shopify-shaped session replay and heatmap app, the closest direct peer to Propel in the Shopify App Store, and the second tool on this list that is actually built on Shopify primitives. It ships scroll and movement heatmaps today, which Propel does not yet.

Where it wins vs Contentsquare: Shopify-nativeness, full stop. Filters generally map to Shopify fields, replays integrate with Shopify admin, and the script is lighter than a multi-platform payload. Pricing is competitive: MIDA's Basic plan is $9.90/mo for 5,000 sessions, a fifth of Contentsquare's Growth entry price. If you want a Shopify-only replay app, MIDA is a real option.

Where it falls short vs Propel: we would be lying if we said the differentiator was on a feature spec sheet; both apps cover the core job. Where Propel wins, in our (admittedly biased) view: insight alerts and product-page alerts that tell you which sessions to watch first, tighter craft on the dashboard and empty states, and a measurably 0ms-on-Lighthouse tracking script that not every competitor matches. Honest test: install both on the free plan for a week and compare the workflow. We wrote the full head-to-head here.

Pricing

Free up to 250 sessions/mo. Paid from $9.90/mo (Basic, 5,000 sessions).

Best for

Shopify merchants who want a Shopify-native replay app and have already tried (or want to compare against) Propel.

Mouseflow

Deepest friction analytics

The friction-events and form-analytics specialist. Multi-platform, session-metered, no Shopify lane.

What it is: a Danish multi-platform behaviour-analytics tool whose loudest and best feature is friction detection: rage clicks, dead clicks, error clicks and form drop-off, each categorized as a discrete event, plus per-field form analytics that nobody else on this list matches. There is a free plan at 500 sessions a month.

Where it wins vs Contentsquare: depth on friction and forms, and it records the sessions within your plan's cap rather than sampling. Essential is $25/mo on annual billing ($39 monthly) for 5,000 sessions, Advanced $109 for 25,000, Premium $319 for 100,000 (full Mouseflow pricing breakdown). If complex multi-step forms are your conversion surface, Mouseflow is the deeper tool.

Where it falls short: no Shopify App Store listing, no Shopify-specific filter set, and the differentiated features sit on the higher tiers. Most Shopify storefronts have two forms that matter (checkout and the newsletter capture), so the per-field depth is usually paying for something you will not use.

Pricing

Free up to 500 sessions/mo. Paid from $25/mo on annual billing ($39 monthly) for 5,000 sessions.

Best for

Form-heavy sites and teams whose CRO work is mostly friction-event triage.

FullStory

Enterprise-shaped

The other enterprise digital-experience suite. A big free tier, quote-only paid plans, and a data clause to read before you sign up.

What it is: FullStory is the closest thing to Contentsquare in shape: session replay, heatmaps, funnels and journey analysis aimed at product and digital-experience teams. It publishes no paid prices; Business, Advanced and Enterprise are all "Request pricing & demo". The one number that is public is FullstoryFree: 30,000 sessions a month, 12 months of retention, up to 10 users, no card.

Where it wins vs Contentsquare: the free tier records sessions up to its cap rather than sampling a percentage, and 12 months of free retention beats Contentsquare's one month on Free. If you are an enterprise buyer comparing the two suites, FullStory is a legitimate alternative at that altitude.

Where it falls short: FullStory's own FAQ says FullstoryFree users grant it ownership rights to the anonymized non-PII data collected, usable for model training and sharing with business partners; read that clause before you install it on a storefront. Its Shopify app requires an existing account and Shopify Plus, and is a checkout add-on rather than a storefront install path. And every paid price is a sales conversation (everything that is public about FullStory pricing).

Pricing

Free up to 30,000 sessions/mo. Paid plans quote-only.

Best for

Enterprise product teams comparing suites, and Plus stores with a FullStory contract already in place.

At a glance

Contentsquare alternatives, side-by-side.

The same six tools plus Contentsquare itself, scored on the things that actually matter for Shopify merchants, including the row that sends most people here: whether the replay you want was recorded.

Tool	Shopify-native?	Free tier?	Starts at	Replay capture	0ms CWV?	App Store rating
Propel Replays	Yes	750 pageviews/mo	$9.90/mo	Every session, every plan	Yes (measured)	4.9★ (500+ reviews)
Contentsquare	No (App Store listing, Dec 2025)	200,000 sessions/mo, 1-month data access	$49/mo monthly (Growth, 7,000 sessions)	5% on Free, 15% on Growth; up to 100% on quoted plans	No	No reviews yet
Microsoft Clarity	No	Unlimited (free only)	Free	Every session, 30-day retention	No	N/A
Lucky Orange	No	100 sessions/mo (App Store plan)	$32/mo annual (Build)	Up to the plan's session cap	No	4.6★
MIDA	Yes	250 sessions/mo	$9.90/mo (Basic)	Up to the plan's session cap	Not published	4.9★
Mouseflow	No	500 sessions/mo	$25/mo annual (Essential)	Up to the plan's session cap	No	No App Store listing
FullStory	No (Plus-only checkout app)	30,000 sessions/mo	Quote-only	Up to the free cap; paid plans quoted	No	No reviews

Pricing reflects the lowest non-free paid plan as listed by each vendor, checked against vendor pricing pages in October 2026. Contentsquare's replay capture figures are quoted from the plan comparison table on contentsquare.com/pricing. App Store ratings are Shopify App Store; Clarity and Mouseflow have no native Shopify App Store listing. "0ms CWV" reflects Propel's measured Lighthouse delta; competitors do not publish a CWV claim.

Migration guide

Switching from Contentsquare to a Shopify-shaped tool.

Start by being honest about which parts of Contentsquare you used in the last 90 days. Most Shopify stores find it was the heatmaps and the replays, occasionally the funnels, rarely the journey analysis, and that the replays were frustrating precisely because the one they wanted was so often not there. If that is you, the migration is simpler than it looks, because you are replacing a sampled replay library with an unsampled one, not recreating a whole analytics stack.

The standard "what about my data?" worry: you cannot migrate it, and this is industry-wide rather than a Contentsquare problem. Session replays are stored as compressed DOM events in a vendor-specific format; heatmaps are derived from those events; neither translates between tools. Two things make it hurt less here than elsewhere. On Free you only ever had one month of data access, and on Free and Growth the replay archive was a 5% or 15% sample, so what you are leaving behind is thinner than it feels. If you are on Growth with 13 months of analytics history and you want to keep it, export the reports you actually refer to before the subscription ends.

Concrete remapping for Shopify merchants moving from Contentsquare to Propel: session replays → covered, every session, plus an AI summary on each and insight alerts that surface the day's biggest orders, biggest abandoned carts and biggest abandoned checkouts. Click heatmaps → covered, plus area heatmaps; zone-based, scroll and movement heatmaps are not like-for-like today. Funnels → Propel ships conversion funnels, and Shopify Analytics covers the storefront funnel natively. Frustration score and journey analysis → not like-for-like; Propel surfaces rage clicks and dead clicks per replay rather than as an aggregate score. Surveys → covered on every plan (triggers on all pages, specific products, products by collection, or time on page), with no second product line. Segmentation → replaced by Shopify customer fields, which is the upgrade.

The mechanics: install Propel from the Shopify App Store, enable the theme app embed, and recordings start streaming in within 30 seconds. You do not need to remove the Contentsquare tag first; running both for a week or two on the same traffic lets you compare the dashboards directly. When you are ready, remove the Contentsquare script from your theme (or uninstall the Contentsquare Shopify app if that is how you installed it) and cancel before the next billing cycle. Keep the Contentsquare account for 30 days after switching in case you need to refer back to a campaign-period report.

— FAQ

Contentsquare alternative FAQ

Why are Shopify merchants looking for a Contentsquare alternative?

Mostly because of one row in Contentsquare's own plan table. The self-serve Free and Growth plans sample session replays: the table reads "5% sessions captured (max. 10k)" on Free and "15% sessions captured (min. 20k)" on Growth, and only the custom-quoted Pro and Enterprise plans capture up to 100%. For aggregate heatmaps and funnels that is fine. For a merchant whose question is "show me the session where the $400 cart walked", the replay usually was not recorded. The second reason is price: Growth starts at $49/mo on monthly billing for 7,000 sessions, roughly 5x a Shopify-native tool at the same volume. The full breakdown is in Contentsquare pricing 2026.

What's the best Contentsquare alternative for Shopify?

Propel Replays. It records every session on every plan, including the free one, with no sampling. Replays can be filtered by any Shopify customer field (customer tag, order count, total spent, cart value, UTM, device, country), each replay is AI-summarized when you open it, and the tracking script ships as a Shopify theme app embed with a measured 0ms impact on Core Web Vitals. Free up to 750 pageviews a month, paid plans from $9.90/mo. Contentsquare is a broad, multi-platform analytics suite; Propel is Shopify-shaped. If the problem you are trying to solve lives on a Shopify storefront, the Shopify-shaped tool surfaces it faster.

Is Contentsquare the same thing as Hotjar now?

For a new signup, yes. hotjar.com/pricing answers with a 308 redirect to contentsquare.com/pricing, so there is no separate Hotjar price list any more. Hotjar's last published plans were capped by daily sessions (35, 100, 500 and 1,500). Contentsquare's Growth plan is metered by monthly sessions on a slider from 7,000 to 200,000, which is a different shape and usually a bigger allowance for the money, with the replay sampling as the new catch. We cover the history in Hotjar pricing 2026 and the current ladder in Contentsquare pricing 2026.

Does Contentsquare have a free plan?

Yes, and on analytics volume it is the most generous in the category: $0 for up to 200,000 monthly sessions, one project, replays, heatmaps, funnels and basic surveys. The limits are one month of data access and the replay sampling (5% of sessions, up to 10,000). If you want aggregate click and funnel data on a big store for nothing, that is hard to argue with. If you want to watch specific sessions, the free plan will usually not have recorded the one you need.

Is Microsoft Clarity a good Contentsquare replacement?

For non-Shopify sites, it is the obvious one. Clarity is free with no traffic limits, records sessions without sampling (30-day retention, with favourites and a random sample kept up to 9 months), and covers the core replay and heatmap job well. What it lacks against Contentsquare is the journey analysis, zone-based heatmaps and long analytics history. What it lacks for Shopify is the same thing Contentsquare lacks: filters that understand Shopify customers and orders. For a Shopify store, Propel Replays is the better answer; Clarity is the better answer for everything else.

Can Contentsquare filter replays by Shopify customer fields?

Not out of the box. Contentsquare does have a Shopify App Store listing (Contentsquare Analytics, launched December 2025, no reviews at the time of writing), and the Growth plan's filters work on User ID and custom variables, which means you wire Shopify data in yourself. There is no native concept of a customer tag, an order count or a cart value in the filter model. If you want to ask "show me replays of returning customers with $200+ in order history who left checkout", Propel answers that out of the box and Contentsquare answers it after custom instrumentation.

Will I lose my Contentsquare data if I switch?

Honest answer: yes, the history stays in Contentsquare, and this is true of every tool in the category. Session replays are stored as compressed DOM events in a vendor-specific format and do not translate between vendors; heatmaps are derived from those events, so they do not migrate either. Two things soften it. On the Free plan you only had one month of data access anyway, and on Free and Growth the replay library was a 5% or 15% sample, so the archive you are leaving behind is thinner than it feels. Fresh data accumulates fast: a store doing a few hundred sessions a day has readable heatmaps within 24 to 48 hours of installing a new tool.

How long does migration take?

An afternoon, not a project. Installing Propel on Shopify is a theme app embed: enable it and recordings start streaming in within 30 seconds, with no theme.liquid edits and no tag manager. You do not need to remove the Contentsquare tag first. Most merchants run both for a week or two on the same traffic, compare the dashboards, then remove the Contentsquare script and cancel before the next billing cycle.