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.
Still shortlisting? Browse the best in CRO & Experimentation and the best in Product Analytics & Session Replay for every option we track, with award winners called out.
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 up to 10,000 monthly sessions; the Growth tier is commonly reported at around $3,600 per year |
| 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
Ease of UseHeap 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.
The best in CRO & Experimentation
20 trackedConversion rate optimization and experimentation tools show how visitors actually behave on a site through heatmaps and session recordings, then let teams test changes with A/B and multivariate experiments before committing to them.
A ten minute install, automatically surfaced insights, and Copilot answers in chat give a shop owner real findings on day one at zero cost.
The best in Product Analytics & Session Replay
15 trackedProduct analytics tools track what users do inside an application, funnels, retention, feature adoption, and session replay, so teams can see where activation breaks rather than guessing.
Product analytics that kept buying the rest of the stack: experiments, session replay, and a CDP under one roof, with 2 million free events a month.
A free plan covering one million events a month with unlimited seats means a 10,000 user product pays Mixpanel nothing for genuinely deep analytics.
Relaunched in 2025 around autocapture, autoconfiguration, and Ask AI, with a 2026 LLM Acquisition report, Kissmetrics is the roster's genuine comeback story.
Agent Analytics, generally available in December 2025, measures how AI agents behave inside products, a capability nothing else in this roster ships.
Autocapture records every interaction from one snippet in under an hour, so teams define events after the fact instead of instrumenting anything first.
Frequently asked questions
6 questionsWhat is the difference between FullStory and Heap?
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.
Is FullStory or Heap cheaper?
FullStory starts at Free tier for low session volumes; paid plans quoted by session volume. Heap starts at Free up to 10,000 monthly sessions; the Growth tier is commonly reported at around $3,600 per year. The billing models differ, so the entry price is rarely the whole cost. FullStory 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. Heap pricing model: Session-based subscription, billed on monthly sessions rather than seats or events. Four tiers: Free, Growth, Pro, and Premier.
Does FullStory or Heap have a free plan?
FullStory has a free plan. Limited monthly sessions with core replay and analytics. Trial terms: Free tier plus trial access to paid capabilities. Heap has a free plan. Up to 10,000 monthly sessions, 6 months of data history, core charts, unlimited enrichment sources, and SSO, with no technical support. Trial terms: Free plan rather than a time-limited trial; paid-tier trials arranged through sales.
Who should choose FullStory?
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.
Who should choose Heap?
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.
What are the best alternatives to FullStory and Heap?
SaaSTracker profiles 20 products in CRO & Experimentation. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Microsoft Clarity (Ease of Use). SaaSTracker profiles 15 products in Product Analytics & Session Replay. The Summer 2026 awards in the category went to Amplitude (Category Leader), Mixpanel (Best Value), Kissmetrics (Momentum). Every profile is compiled from primary sources, so a shortlist can be built from pricing, limitations, and fit rather than from star ratings.
