Galytics vs Hotjar

Let us start with the part most comparison pages skip. Hotjar is a good product run by people who take privacy seriously, and several things you might expect us to attack them for are simply not true.

Their own documentation says user data is stored "in Ireland, European Union (EU) on the Amazon Web Services infrastructure, eu-west-1 data centers". It says Hotjar "does not sell, has not sold, and will never sell personal data to anyone at any time". Recordings suppress keystrokes in the browser, before anything reaches their servers. If you are choosing between Hotjar and a free replay tool from an advertising company, choose Hotjar.

There are still two real differences, and both are about what ends up on your page.

Hotjar stops working when cookies do

This is the one that matters. From Hotjar's own cookie documentation:

Hotjar does not track or record users who have cookies disabled. The Hotjar Tracking Code doesn't properly load its different components if it detects that cookies are disabled.

Cookies are not an optional extra in Hotjar, they are load-bearing. Which means two things.

In a consent jurisdiction you have to hold the script back until a visitor accepts your banner. Hotjar's advice on that is to go and build it yourself:

Solutions exist for blocking the loading of cookies until a website visitor has given consent using a consent window. The cookie consent solution that works best for you will depend on how your website is set up.

And everyone who declines, or blocks cookies by default, is invisible. Not partially recorded. Absent. The visitors most likely to refuse tracking are also the ones most likely to be using the browsers and settings that correlate with a particular kind of user, so the gap in your recordings is not random.

Galytics sets no cookies. There is no banner to hold the script back, and nothing to decline, so the recordings cover everyone rather than the subset who clicked accept.

Hotjar is half of your stack

Hotjar does replays, heatmaps, surveys and feedback. It does not tell you how much traffic you got, which campaign delivered it, or whether your conversion rate moved. So Hotjar is never the only script on your page. It sits next to an analytics tool, which means two vendors, two bills, two data processing agreements, and two scripts for a browser to fetch.

Galytics is the analytics and the replay, in one script, from one vendor, on one bill.

The packaging is moving

Hotjar was acquired by Contentsquare, and as of August 2026 hotjar.com/pricing no longer resolves to a Hotjar page. It returns a permanent redirect to contentsquare.com/pricing. Hotjar still exists as a product, but which plan you are quoted, and what it is called, is in motion.

We are not going to publish competitor prices here, because they would be wrong within a month. Check theirs directly and compare it to ours, which is on one page with a slider and no sales call.

Side by side

When Hotjar is the better call

Hotjar has more product than we do. If you need surveys, feedback widgets or heatmaps, we do not have those and Hotjar does them well. If your team already runs a consent banner for other reasons, the cookie argument costs you much less than it costs someone trying to stay banner-free.

Galytics is the better call when you want the traffic numbers and the recordings from one script, when you would rather not run a banner, and when you want the visitors who decline tracking to still show up in your data.

Sources

Quotes are from Hotjar's own public documentation, checked in August 2026:

• Cookies Set by the Hotjar Tracking Code
• Data Safety, Privacy & Security
• Privacy FAQs

If any of this has changed since, tell us and we will correct the page.