Heap alternatives: when autocapture isn't the answer
Last reviewed: 28 July 2026. Every Heap fact below was read from heap.io, contentsquare.com or Heap's own help centre on 26 July 2026. Every quote is verbatim. Nothing comes from a rival's comparison page.
The verdict
What changed at Heap
Contentsquare completed its acquisition of Heap on 7 December 2023. As of 26 July 2026, the state of play — all from the two companies' own pages:
- Contentsquare's Heap page says it plainly: "Heap has officially become part of Contentsquare. Its advanced capabilities are now integrated in Product Analytics."
- The same page reassures customers: "Your Heap tools, plan, and account still work as usual" — "No changes to your existing workflows."
- Heap still sells under its own brand: heap.io is live with a self-serve free tier and a footer reading "© 2026 Heap Inc." No sunset, end-of-sale or forced-migration date has been published by either company.
- The parent is already inside the product: Heap's own pricing page brands its AI assistant "Sense Contentsquare's AI."
The honest reading: Heap isn't shutting down, and writing that it is would be false. It's being absorbed — the same pattern Hotjar followed inside the same parent company, and Hotjar's redirect into Contentsquare has already happened while Heap's hasn't. What nobody has published is how long the two product lines stay separate. If you're evaluating Heap fresh today, you're also evaluating Contentsquare, because that's whose roadmap you'd be on.
Heap alternatives at a glance
| Tool | Best for | Published price | Where replay & heatmaps live the pivot | Runs experiments |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Heap (a Contentsquare company) | Product teams that need events defined retroactively | Free up to 10k monthly sessions. Every paid tier is quote-only — Growth asks you to install the snippet for an estimate; Pro and Premier say “Custom Session Pricing — Contact Us” | Paid add-on, Pro and Premier only — bundled with error analysis as “Experience Analytics” | No — Heap’s platform has no testing module; it ingests experiment data from tools that do |
| Mtrix | DTC brands that want measurement and the fix in one product | Not published — custom. Flat across three tiers, not metered on sessions, orders or profiles | Core, on every plan — replay at 100% capture, heatmaps by device, errors grouped, no add-on | Yes — A/B, multivariate, split URL, mask URL, plus bandit allocation; no cap on any plan |
| Contentsquare | Enterprise experience-analytics programmes | Not published — quote-only | Core product — its Growth tier is published at 15% replay capture with 2 months of replay retention | — |
| PostHog | Technical product teams on one usage-based bill | Yes — usage-based, published per product | Included — free allowance covers 5,000 replays a month | Yes — experiments bill with feature flags |
One comparison deliberately not in this table: Heap vs Google Analytics, the most-searched Heap question of all. That's a different decision — a free reporting layer against a paid product-analytics platform — and we've argued the GA4 side properly in our Google Analytics comparison.
The add-on problem, in Heap's own table
Heap's pricing page (read 26 July 2026) marks Session Replay, Heatmaps and Error Analysis as unavailable on Free and Growth, and as an add-on on Pro and Premier — packaged together as "Experience Analytics." Which means the stack most DTC teams actually want from an analytics tool — the numbers and the sessions behind them — is, at Heap: a quote-only tier, plus an add-on, via a sales conversation. Not a price you can read.
Three more mechanics from the same page worth knowing before that conversation:
- Data history is tiered: 6 months on Free, 12 months on Growth, 1 year on Pro and Premier — with longer history sold as an add-on "out to 3 years."
- Exceeding your session limit locks the dashboard. Heap's FAQ, verbatim: "Don't worry — we won't drop or throttle your data! Once you exceed your plan's monthly limit, you'll receive an email asking you to upgrade to the appropriate tier. You'll need to do this before you can view your data again." Your data is kept. Your access to it is the lever.
- Governance is top-tier: region-specific storage, audit logs, SCIM and custom permissions are Premier-only.
Credit where due: compliance ships on every tier including Free — GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 and a User Privacy API at $0 is unusual, and Heap deserves the mention.
Autocapture answers "what happened." Then what?
Say Heap does its job perfectly: you define a funnel retroactively, and it shows you that mobile visitors who open size guides drop off at twice the rate. Now what?
- The fix happens somewhere else. Heap has no builder and no storefront — the page change goes into someone else's tool.
- The test happens somewhere else. Heap runs no experiments. Its own help centre documents integrations that pull experiment data in — from testing tools like Optimizely and VWO — as event properties you can group by. Running the test is still someone else's job, and someone else's subscription.
- The revenue check happens somewhere else. Heap sees money through enrichment sources or a warehouse sync, not as native orders.
That's the loop Mtrix closes. Watch the sessions behind the drop-off — every session, 100% capture, filterable by experiment and variant. Change the page in the builder. Test it — four test types, no caps on any plan — and read the result as revenue per visitor against the orders themselves, which live in the same platform. One subscription, no integration seams, and the person who found the problem is the person who ships the fix.
The honest limit of that pitch, stated plainly: Mtrix's event model is not retroactive. Heap's "define it today, get history back" trick is an architectural advantage Mtrix does not replicate — Mtrix tracks a rich default event set from install, but a custom event you invent next quarter starts counting next quarter. If retroactive definition on data you didn't plan to collect is your daily workflow, Heap is genuinely better at it and you should weigh that heavily.
Where Mtrix fits — and what you give up
Choose Mtrix if you run a DTC store and the point of analytics is to change the store: the builder, the experiments, the replay, the heatmaps, the errors, the performance monitoring and the orders are one product, on every plan, with events and purchase data kept for 3 years and replay and errors for 1 month. One month free, no credit card, full platform.
What you give up against Heap, plainly:
- Retroactive event definition. Conceded above; it's real.
- A free tier. Heap's Free plan is genuinely useful at 10k sessions with SSO included. Mtrix has no free tier — a free month, then paid.
- Native mobile-app analytics. Heap ships iOS, SwiftUI, Android, Jetpack Compose, Flutter and React Native support, with replay subject to the add-on gating. Mtrix records mobile web, not native apps.
- A warehouse-native path. Heap Connect syncs retroactively to your data warehouse — for a team with a data function, a real strength Mtrix doesn't match.
Who should stay on Heap
- Product teams whose daily question is retroactive — "did people do X last quarter?" asked about events nobody thought to define. That's the product's soul, and it's still the best at it.
- Data teams built around the warehouse. Heap Connect's retroactive sync is the architecture they want.
- Products with native mobile apps alongside web.
- Teams betting on the Contentsquare ecosystem — if the parent's enterprise suite is where you're heading anyway, Heap is now the analytics wing of it.
If you stay, go in with two questions: what the Experience Analytics add-on costs at your tier, and how the Contentsquare integration affects your plan at renewal. Neither answer is published; both are decidable on a call.