FullStory vs Heap
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Editorial assessmentHeap compared with FullStory
FullStory comes at the same problem from the qualitative side: autocapture feeding session replay and heatmaps first, with quantitative analysis added later. Heap runs the reverse order, analytics first with replay as a paid add-on. Teams whose main need is watching what happened lean FullStory; teams whose main need is measuring it across cohorts lean Heap. Both are quote-priced above their entry tiers, so neither offers an easy self-serve comparison.
Choose FullStory if
Product, engineering, and support teams at software companies and larger ecommerce operations who need to reproduce and diagnose real user problems quickly, and who value retroactive analysis over the lower price of event-based tools.
Choose Heap if
Product and growth teams at small to mid-sized software companies who want analytics that answer questions retroactively without a tracking-plan project, and who value not having to negotiate engineering time for every new metric.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | FullStory | Heap |
|---|---|---|
| Category | CRO | Product Analytics |
| Starting price | Free tier for low session volumes; paid plans quoted by session volume (free plan available) | Free up to 10,000 monthly sessions; the Growth tier is commonly reported at around $3,600 per year (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Subscription priced by captured sessions and product modules, with a free entry tier and quoted contracts above it. Annual agreements are standard, and add-ons such as mobile app capture or data export are typically priced separately. | Session-based subscription, billed on monthly sessions rather than seats or events. Four tiers: Free, Growth, Pro, and Premier. Only the free plan has a published limit; Growth gives a self-serve estimate after you install the snippet, and Pro and Premier are quoted by sales against your session volume on an annual commitment. Session replay, additional projects, and extra years of data retention are separately priced add-ons. |
| Free plan | Limited monthly sessions with core replay and analytics | Up to 10,000 monthly sessions, 6 months of data history, core charts, unlimited enrichment sources, and SSO, with no technical support |
| Free trial | Free tier plus trial access to paid capabilities | Free plan rather than a time-limited trial; paid-tier trials arranged through sales |
| Best for | Product, engineering, and support teams at software companies and larger ecommerce operations who need to reproduce and diagnose real user problems quickly, and who value retroactive analysis over the lower price of event-based tools. | Product and growth teams at small to mid-sized software companies who want analytics that answer questions retroactively without a tracking-plan project, and who value not having to negotiate engineering time for every new metric. |
| Setup time | The snippet installs in under an hour, but a responsible deployment includes a privacy configuration pass, masking sensitive fields and gating on consent, which typically takes a few days of coordination. | Under an hour to install the snippet or mobile SDK and begin capturing. The real work starts afterwards: defining the virtual events that matter, wiring identify calls, and connecting enrichment sources typically takes a week or two of part-time effort before dashboards are trustworthy. |
| Learning curve | Moderate. Replay is intuitive; building useful segments and search queries takes practice, and the retroactive model rewards teams that learn to ask precise questions. | Low to start, moderate to do well. Building a chart is easy; writing virtual event definitions that stay correct through front-end changes is a skill, and so is resisting the urge to define an event for every interaction now that doing so is free. |
| Platforms | Web (JavaScript), iOS and Android SDKs, React Native, Google Tag Manager | Web (JavaScript snippet), iOS and Android SDKs, React Native, Google Tag Manager, Server-side libraries |
| Compliance | GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA support on qualifying plans | GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2 Type II, HIPAA (with BAA on qualifying plans), ISO 27001 |
| Founded | 2014 | 2013 |
| Headquarters | Atlanta, Georgia, United States | San Francisco, California, United States |
| Ownership | Private, venture-backed | Acquired by Contentsquare; deal announced September 2023 and completed December 2023 |
Strengths and limitations
FullStory
Strengths
- Autocapture means analysis is retroactive, so an untracked action is still analyzable later.
- Search over behavior is genuinely powerful, turning replay from browsing into querying.
- Automatic frustration signals surface problems nobody reported, functioning as passive quality monitoring.
- Console and network context alongside replay makes it a credible engineering debugging tool, not just a marketing one.
Limitations
- Priced well above behavior analytics tools aimed at marketers, with quoted contracts at any real volume.
- No A/B testing, so validating a fix requires another platform.
- Autocapture requires deliberate privacy configuration before it can be turned on in regulated contexts.
- Session-based metering makes cost a direct function of traffic, which penalizes growth.
Heap
Strengths
- Autocapture removes the single biggest failure mode in product analytics, which is discovering that the event you need was never instrumented.
- Retroactive event definition means a new metric has months of history on the day it is created, rather than starting a clock.
- Non-technical users can define events visually on the live site, so analytics work does not queue behind engineering.
- Illuminate genuinely surfaces findings nobody queried for, which is rare in a category where most tools only answer what you already thought to ask.
Limitations
- Autocapture produces a very large and noisy raw surface; without ongoing governance the event list becomes unusable and teams end up doing the taxonomy work they hoped to avoid.
- Virtual events defined against CSS selectors break silently when the front end is refactored, and a definition that is too loose quietly overcounts across all historical data at once.
- Paid pricing is opaque: Growth requires installing the snippet before you see a number, and Pro and Premier are sales-quoted with no published anchor.
- Data retention caps at twelve months on standard tiers, so year-over-year comparison requires paying for extra retention or exporting to a warehouse.
Pricing compared
FullStory
Subscription priced by captured sessions and product modules, with a free entry tier and quoted contracts above it. Annual agreements are standard, and add-ons such as mobile app capture or data export are typically priced separately.
- Free$0
- BusinessQuoted
- Advanced and EnterpriseQuoted
FullStory is expensive relative to heatmap tools and cheap relative to the engineering hours spent reproducing bugs from bad descriptions. The value case rests almost entirely on retroactive autocapture: teams that regularly need to answer questions they did not anticipate get something no event-based tool can offer at any price. Teams whose questions are all known in advance are paying a premium for optionality they will not use, and should look at cheaper replay products or free options instead.
Heap
Session-based subscription, billed on monthly sessions rather than seats or events. Four tiers: Free, Growth, Pro, and Premier. Only the free plan has a published limit; Growth gives a self-serve estimate after you install the snippet, and Pro and Premier are quoted by sales against your session volume on an annual commitment. Session replay, additional projects, and extra years of data retention are separately priced add-ons.
- Free$0
- GrowthQuoted after snippet install (commonly around $3,600 per year)
- ProCustom session pricing
- PremierCustom session pricing
The free plan is one of the better deals in product analytics: 10,000 monthly sessions with full autocapture, SSO, and six months of history is enough to run a real early-stage product. The step above it is where the value question gets harder. Growth at roughly $3,600 a year is competitive with Mixpanel and Amplitude for a small team, but Heap's opacity means you cannot compare on a spreadsheet without contacting sales, and the features a growing B2B team most wants (account analytics, the engagement matrix, warehouse sync) sit on quote-only tiers with add-ons stacked on top. Judged purely on capability per dollar the product is strong; judged on procurement friction for a five-person company, it is the least small-business-friendly part of an otherwise small-business-friendly tool.
Editorial verdict on each
FullStory
FullStory is the strongest argument in the category for capturing everything and deciding later, and retroactive analysis is a genuine capability rather than a marketing distinction: the questions you did not know to ask are exactly the ones that turn up when something breaks. Its search and frustration signals make replay operational rather than anecdotal, and its privacy controls are mature enough to survive a regulated review. What it asks in return is money and rigor: quoted annual contracts scaled by session volume, and a privacy configuration pass before launch. Product and engineering organizations that use it as a shared source of truth get their money back in reproduction time alone. Marketers who wanted heatmaps should shop elsewhere.
Read the full FullStory profileHeap
Heap made a genuinely good bet: that the expensive part of product analytics is not the charts but the instrumentation decisions you have to make before you know what you need. Autocapture plus retroactive event definition solves that better than anything else in the category, and Illuminate turns the resulting data mass into findings rather than just storage. For a small product team without analytics engineering, the free plan at 10,000 monthly sessions is one of the strongest starting offers available. The reservations are commercial and structural. Paid pricing is quote-only above a Growth tier that will not even show you a number until the snippet is installed, session replay and retention are add-ons that inflate the real cost, and the twelve-month history ceiling undercuts the very promise of retroactive analysis. Add the Contentsquare acquisition folding Heap into a larger platform and the long-term shape of the standalone product is uncertain. Start free and stay there as long as the volume allows; before upgrading, get a written quote that includes replay and retention, and compare it honestly against PostHog and Mixpanel, both of which will tell you their price without a phone call.
Read the full Heap profileFullStory profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Heap last reviewed 2026-08-23. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.