Heap

Name: Heap
Brand: Heap
Price: 100003600 USD

Autocapture product analytics: install once, define the events later

Heap is a product analytics platform built around autocapture: instead of asking engineers to instrument each event before it can be measured, a single snippet records every click, tap, form submission, and pageview, and analysts define named events retroactively against data already collected. It covers funnels, retention, segmentation, user journeys, session replay, and heatmaps, and is priced by monthly sessions with a free tier up to 10,000 sessions a month. Heap was acquired by Contentsquare in December 2023 and now sits inside that company's product analytics line while continuing to operate at heap.io.

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Overview

Every product analytics tool asks the same tax up front: decide what matters, write the tracking code, deploy it, then wait a month for enough data to answer the question. Heap was built to remove that tax. Its snippet captures the full interaction surface of a web or mobile app automatically, so the question you think of on a Tuesday can be answered against last quarter's behavior rather than starting a new collection clock. That single design decision is the entire argument for the product, and it is genuinely a different working model from Mixpanel or Amplitude, where an untracked event is simply gone.

The mechanism is a two-layer data model. The raw layer is a firehose of every DOM interaction with its element hierarchy, text, and page context attached. On top of it, analysts create virtual events: named definitions like "clicked Start Trial on the pricing page" that are matched against the raw history the moment they are saved. Change your mind about a definition and the historical numbers change with it, which is powerful and also the thing new users misread most often, since a sloppy selector quietly matches more than intended.

The rest of the product is the standard analytics vocabulary applied to that foundation: funnels, retention curves, segments, dashboards, and a Journeys view that maps the paths users actually take rather than the one you designed. Heap Illuminate is the differentiated piece, a data science layer that surfaces friction points and behavioral differences you did not think to query. Session replay and heatmaps arrived after the Contentsquare acquisition, sold as add-ons on higher tiers rather than bundled, and Sense AI is the natural-language chart-building layer added in 2025.

The commercial reality is the hardest part of evaluating Heap for a small business. There is a real free plan at 10,000 monthly sessions with six months of history, and it is usable. Above that, only the Growth tier gives a self-serve estimate (roughly $3,600 a year as commonly reported), and Pro and Premier are quote-only session pricing negotiated with sales. Session replay, extra projects, and extra years of data retention are add-ons. So the pattern is a generous entry point followed by an opaque step up, and buyers should treat any published paid figure as a starting estimate rather than a list price.

Best for

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.

Not the right fit for

Teams that want a clean, deliberate event taxonomy; autocapture produces an enormous raw surface and governance becomes a real ongoing job rather than a one-off setup.
Buyers who need transparent published pricing above the free tier; Pro and Premier are quote-only and Growth requires installing the snippet before you see a number.
Very high-traffic consumer sites where session-metered pricing scales faster than the value of the incremental analysis.
Teams whose analytics needs are primarily marketing attribution and channel reporting rather than in-product behavior.
Organizations needing multi-year historical comparison on a standard plan, since retention caps at twelve months on Growth and Pro without buying additional years.
Anyone wanting session replay bundled at no extra cost; on Heap it is a paid add-on, not an included feature.

How it works

1
You install the Heap snippet on your site or the SDK in your iOS, Android, or React Native app. From that moment autocapture records every click, tap, form submission, page or screen view, and change event, along with the CSS hierarchy, element text, and page URL that identify it. Nothing needs to be named in advance for it to be recorded.
2
Analysts then create virtual events in the Heap UI by pointing at an interaction, either from a live visual labeling session on the site or by selecting from the captured event stream. The definition is a rule (this selector, on this page, with this text), and Heap applies it backwards across all retained history, so a new event has data on the day it is created.
3
User identity is stitched with an identify call and enrichment from your other systems. Heap ingests attributes from Salesforce, Stripe, Snowflake, Segment, and similar sources so behavioral events can be sliced by plan tier, ARR band, industry, or account owner without those fields living in your front-end code.
4
Analysis runs through charts (event segmentation, funnels, retention, journeys) and reusable segments, gathered into dashboards. Illuminate runs continuously in the background looking for statistically notable differences between converting and non-converting cohorts and posts them as suggested findings. Sense AI answers plain-language questions by building the corresponding chart.
5
Data leaves the system through Heap Connect (a direct sync to Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or Databricks), the REST and webhook APIs, and Activate, which pushes behavioral segments into downstream tools for targeting. Warehouse sync is a Premier-tier capability, or a Pro add-on.

Feature breakdown

26 features in 4 modules

Autocapture and data foundation

The collection layer that makes retroactive analysis possible.

Full autocapture: One snippet records every click, tap, form submission, page view, and input change with its element hierarchy and text, so no interaction is lost because nobody thought to instrument it.
Virtual events: Named event definitions built from captured interactions, applied retroactively across all retained history, so a metric defined today has a trend line going back months.
Visual event labeling: Point at an element on your live site in an overlay session and Heap turns it into a tracked event, no code deploy and no engineer in the loop.
Mobile SDKs: Autocapture for iOS, Android, and React Native applies the same model to native screens and gestures, with events defined against the view hierarchy.
Enrichment sources: Pull user and account attributes from Salesforce, Stripe, Snowflake, Segment, and similar systems so behavior can be sliced by plan, revenue, or account without front-end changes.
Data governance: Event verification, naming conventions, categorization, and deprecation controls, which matter more here than in a manual-instrumentation tool because the raw surface is so large.
Server-side and API ingestion: A track API and server-side libraries let backend events (payments, provisioning, emails) join the same timeline as front-end interactions.

Analysis

The chart vocabulary applied to autocaptured behavior.

Funnels: Multi-step conversion analysis with drop-off by step, built from virtual events that can be redefined and rerun without waiting for new data to accumulate.
Retention analysis: Cohort retention curves against any defined return action, not just app opens, so you can measure retention of the behavior that actually indicates value.
Journeys: A visual map of the paths users genuinely take through the product, including the ones nobody designed, with volume weighting on each branch.
Segments: Reusable behavioral and attribute-based cohorts that apply across every chart and dashboard rather than being redefined per report.
Heap Illuminate: A background data science layer that flags statistically notable differences between cohorts and surfaces friction points you did not query for.
Engagement matrix: Plots features by adoption frequency against breadth of use, which is the quickest read on what is core, what is niche, and what is dead weight. Pro tier and above.
Account analytics: Rolls user-level behavior up to the company level for B2B teams, so usage health is measured per account rather than per anonymous user. Pro tier and above.
Dashboards and alerts: Shared dashboards with scheduled delivery, plus threshold alerts on report metrics so a drop reaches someone without anyone opening the tool.

Qualitative and AI layers

The context around the numbers, much of it added after the Contentsquare acquisition.

Session replay: Replay of individual sessions reachable from any chart, so a funnel drop-off becomes a watchable recording. Sold as a paid add-on on Pro and Premier, not included.
Heatmaps: Click and scroll visualization per page, drawn from the same autocaptured stream rather than requiring a separate tag.
Sense AI and Sense Chat: Natural-language question answering that builds the corresponding chart, aimed at people who will never learn the query builder. Available from the Growth tier.
Playbooks: Prebuilt analysis templates for common questions like onboarding completion, feature adoption, and checkout friction, which shorten the empty-dashboard problem.
Web analytics views: Traffic, source, and page metrics presented alongside product behavior so marketing and product numbers sit in one place.

Distribution and administration

Getting data out, and controlling who sees it.

Heap Connect: Direct sync of the full event dataset to Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or Databricks for modeling in SQL. Included on Premier, an add-on on Pro.
Heap Activate: Pushes behavioral segments into downstream marketing, CRM, and messaging tools so an analysis can trigger an action.
Integrations library: More than 100 bi-directional connections covering CDPs, warehouses, CRMs, support tools, and experimentation platforms.
Projects and environments: Separate projects for production, staging, and distinct properties; three are included on Pro, unlimited on Premier, and more are purchasable.
SSO and permissions: Single sign-on is available even on the free plan, with granular role and data-access permissions arriving at the Premier tier.
Privacy controls: Data blocking by CSS selector, PII redaction rules, IP anonymization, and consent-gated capture so autocapture does not sweep up sensitive fields by default.

Use cases

4 documented

Product manager at a 25-person B2B SaaS company

Leadership asks which onboarding step loses the most new accounts. No onboarding events were ever instrumented, and the engineering backlog is three sprints deep.

The PM defines five virtual events from the already-captured stream in an afternoon and gets a funnel with six months of history, identifying a data-import step where 40 percent of accounts stall, without opening a ticket.

Growth lead investigating a trial-to-paid drop

Trial conversion fell two points last quarter and the usual suspects (pricing page, checkout) look unchanged in the marketing analytics.

Illuminate surfaces that converting trials use one specific integration in week one at three times the rate of non-converters; the team reorders onboarding to put that integration first and measures the change against the retroactive baseline.

Founder of an early-stage app on the free plan

Under 10,000 monthly sessions, no analytics budget, and no confidence that any bespoke event tracking they write today will match the questions they ask in three months.

The snippet goes in on day one and collects everything; questions get answered against real history as they arise, and the decision about paid analytics is deferred until session volume proves the product has traction.

Data team at a mid-market ecommerce company

The analytics team already models revenue in Snowflake but has no reliable behavioral event data to join against orders.

Heap Connect syncs the full event dataset into the warehouse, letting the team build attribution and lifetime value models on real interaction data instead of the sampled, sessionized approximations they were using.

Pricing

from Free up to 10,000 monthly sessions; the Growth tier is commonly reported at around $3,600 per year

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.

Plan	Price	Includes
Free	$0 per month	Up to 10,000 monthly sessions 6 months of data history Core charts, unlimited enrichment sources, SSO included Genuinely usable rather than a demo, but support is community and documentation only.
Growth	Quoted after snippet install (commonly around $3,600 per year) billed annually	12 months of data history Sense AI, unlimited users and reports, chart customization, CSV export Email support The only paid tier with any self-serve price signal, and the estimate depends on your measured session volume.
Pro	Custom session pricing billed annually	Account analytics, engagement matrix, and report alerts 3 projects included, more available as an add-on Session replay available as a paid add-on; standard support
Premier	Custom session pricing billed annually	Data warehouse integration via Heap Connect and behavioral targeting via Activate Unlimited projects and advanced user permissions Dedicated customer success manager and premium support

Add-ons

Session replay (Quoted): An add-on on Pro and Premier rather than an included feature, which surprises buyers comparing against tools that bundle it.
Extended data retention (Quoted per additional year): Standard plans cap at twelve months; year-over-year comparison requires buying more retention or exporting.
Additional projects (Quoted): Beyond the three included on Pro; unlimited on Premier.

Billing notes

The meter is monthly sessions, not events or seats, so autocapture volume does not directly inflate the bill; traffic does. Users and reports are unlimited on paid tiers.
Paid pricing is not published. Growth returns an estimate only after you install the snippet and Heap measures your actual sessions, and Pro and Premier require a sales conversation.
Annual commitment is the norm on every paid tier; there is no published monthly self-serve checkout above the free plan.
Session replay, additional projects, and additional retention years are line items on top of the tier price, so the quoted number is rarely the final number.
The free plan carries no technical support, which is a real consideration if autocapture starts double counting on a single-page app and nobody can tell you why.

Value assessment: 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.

Strengths & limitations

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.
Session-based pricing means high event volume does not itself inflate the bill, unlike event-metered competitors where autocapture would be ruinous.
A free plan with 10,000 monthly sessions, SSO, and unlimited enrichment sources that an early-stage product can actually run on.
Enrichment from CRM, billing, and warehouse sources makes behavior sliceable by plan, revenue, and account without front-end changes.
Heap Connect delivers the full event dataset into the warehouse for teams that want to model in SQL rather than in a vendor UI.

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.
Session replay and heatmaps are add-ons on higher tiers rather than bundled, which changes the comparison against tools that include replay in the base price.
Query performance degrades on very large datasets, and complex multi-step funnels over long windows can take noticeably longer than in tools built on precomputed event schemas.
Single-page applications and heavily dynamic or component-generated markup need careful configuration; auto-generated class names in particular make durable selectors hard.
Post-acquisition roadmap ambiguity: Heap's capabilities are being folded into Contentsquare's product analytics line, and while existing accounts are told nothing changes, the long-term identity of the standalone product is not guaranteed.

Head-to-head comparisons

6 alternatives

Heap vs June

from No longer sold (product wound down 8 August 2025); the last published self-serve price was $149 per month on the Growth plan before it was retired in October 2024

Different answers to the same complaint, that analytics tools demand too much setup. June solved it with opinionated prebuilt reports on top of a Segment stream; Heap solved it with autocapture and retroactive definition. June's product wound down into Amplitude in 2025, so it is a historical comparison rather than a live buying choice, and teams who liked June's zero-configuration promise generally find Heap's free tier the closest surviving equivalent.

Full Heap vs June comparison

Heap vs Pendo

from Free up to 500 monthly active users; paid tiers are quote-only, with reported contracts commonly starting around $15,000 per year

The nearest competitor on autocapture, since Pendo also captures interactions without upfront instrumentation and also lets you tag features retroactively. The split is what sits on top: Pendo bundles in-app guides, onboarding walkthroughs, and NPS surveys, so it is bought as much by customer success and product marketing as by analysts. Heap goes deeper on the analysis itself (Illuminate, journeys, warehouse sync) and does not try to change the product in the browser. Buy Pendo if you want to act inside the app; buy Heap if you want to understand it.

Full Heap vs Pendo comparison

Heap vs Amplitude

from $0 (Free, 2M events per month forever); Plus starts at $0 with the first 2M events free

Amplitude is the deeper analytics engine with a broader self-serve platform (experiments, feature flags, guides, CDP) and published pricing you can evaluate without a sales call. Heap's edge is the collection model: Amplitude still expects a tracking plan, and an event you never defined is an event you cannot analyze. Small teams without dedicated data engineering usually get to a first answer faster on Heap; teams with an analytics function that will maintain a taxonomy typically prefer Amplitude's depth and transparency.

Full Heap vs Amplitude comparison

Heap vs Mixpanel

from $0 (Free plan, 1M events per month), Growth starts at $0 and scales with volume

Mixpanel is the classic deliberate-instrumentation tool: you define events, you get a clean schema, and queries are fast because the data model is tight. It also publishes its pricing openly and meters on events, which makes budgeting straightforward. Heap trades that cleanliness for coverage. Choose Mixpanel if you have the discipline and engineering capacity to maintain a tracking plan; choose Heap if the honest assessment is that you do not, and would rather clean up noisy data than be missing it entirely.

Full Heap vs Mixpanel comparison

Heap vs PostHog

from $0 (generous monthly free tiers; pay only past the allowance)

PostHog offers autocapture too, plus session replay, feature flags, experiments, and surveys in one bill with fully published usage pricing and a generous free tier, and it can be self-hosted. That combination undercuts Heap badly on transparency and breadth for a small team. Heap answers with a more refined analysis layer, Illuminate, account-level B2B analytics, and enterprise governance that PostHog is still building out. Price-sensitive startups increasingly start on PostHog; Heap wins where analysis sophistication and B2B account rollups matter more than the invoice.

Full Heap vs PostHog comparison

Heap vs FullStory

from Free tier for low session volumes; paid plans quoted by session volume

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.

Full Heap vs FullStory comparison

Implementation & onboarding

Setup time: 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: 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.
Onboarding: Self-serve on the free and Growth tiers with documentation, playbook templates, and Heap University style guides. Pro adds standard support and Premier adds a dedicated customer success manager. Free-plan users get no technical support, which is worth planning around.
Migration notes: Coming from Mixpanel or Amplitude, existing event definitions map to Heap virtual events but the mental model inverts: you stop deciding in advance and start defining after the fact. Historical data does not transfer between vendors, though Heap begins accumulating its own history the moment the snippet is live, so running both in parallel for a quarter is the usual approach. If you rely on multi-year trends, plan warehouse export via Heap Connect before the twelve-month retention window closes on anything you care about.

Platform, API & security

Platforms: Web (JavaScript snippet)iOS and Android SDKsReact NativeGoogle Tag ManagerServer-side libraries
API: REST APIs for track, identify, add user and account properties, and user deletion, plus webhook delivery. Heap Connect provides a managed sync of the full event dataset into Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, or Databricks on the Premier tier or as a Pro add-on.
Compliance: GDPRCCPASOC 2 Type IIHIPAA (with BAA on qualifying plans)ISO 27001
Data residency: US and EU data processing regions available, with EU hosting offered for customers with residency requirements.
SSO: Single sign-on via SAML, available on all tiers including the free plan; granular permissions arrive on Premier.
Security notes: Because autocapture is on by default, privacy configuration is a first-week task rather than an optional one: data blocking by CSS selector, PII redaction, IP anonymization, and consent-gated capture keep sensitive inputs out of the stream. Teams handling payment or health data should block whole regions rather than individual fields.

Support & resources

Channels: Documentation and knowledge base (all tiers)Email support (Growth and above)Standard support (Pro)Premium support and dedicated CSM (Premier)
Documentation: Thorough technical documentation covering the capture model, virtual event definition, identity resolution, and warehouse sync, plus a well-regarded library of analytics guides that predates the acquisition.
Community: An active user community and a long-running blog that helped popularize the autocapture argument in the first place. Contentsquare's support center now hosts release notes alongside Heap's own materials.

Company

Founded: 2013
Headquarters: San Francisco, California, United States
Ownership: Acquired by Contentsquare; deal announced September 2023 and completed December 2023
Founders: Matin Movassate, Ravi Parikh
Employees: Part of Contentsquare (roughly 1,800 across the group)
Funding: Raised roughly $205 million across five rounds before acquisition, including a $110 million Series D in December 2021 led by Sixth Street and Goldman Sachs Asset Management at a reported valuation near $960 million.

Funding history

Round	Amount	Year	Notes
Y Combinator	Undisclosed	2013	Winter 2013 batch.
Series A	$11M	2016	Disclosed publicly months after closing.
Series C	$55M	2020
Series D	$110M	2021	Led by Sixth Street and Goldman Sachs Asset Management.

Timeline

2013Founded by Matin Movassate and Ravi Parikh out of Y Combinator's Winter 2013 batch, with autocapture as the founding argument.
2016Series A of $11 million disclosed, by which point autocapture had become a recognized alternative to manual instrumentation.
2020Series C of $55 million; product expands into enterprise governance, account analytics, and warehouse sync via Heap Connect.
2021Series D of $110 million at a reported valuation near $960 million, led by Sixth Street and Goldman Sachs Asset Management.
2023Contentsquare announces its acquisition of Heap in September and completes it in December, placing Heap alongside Hotjar in the same group.
2024Session replay and heatmaps added to the Heap product line following the acquisition, sold as add-ons on higher tiers.
2025Sense AI natural-language analysis introduced across the Contentsquare platform, including Heap.
2026Heap continues to operate at heap.io with existing plans intact while its capabilities are folded into Contentsquare's product analytics line.

Integrations

Segment
Snowflake
BigQuery
Redshift
Databricks
Salesforce
HubSpot
Stripe
Marketo
Zendesk
Slack
Optimizely
LaunchDarkly
Intercom
Google Tag Manager
Contentsquare

Frequently asked questions

12 questions

What is Heap used for?

Heap is a product analytics tool used to understand how people behave inside a website or app: which features get used, where users drop out of a signup or checkout funnel, which cohorts retain, and what paths they actually take. Its distinguishing feature is autocapture, which records every interaction automatically so analysts can define and measure events after the fact rather than instrumenting them in advance.

How does Heap autocapture actually work?

The snippet records every click, tap, form submission, page view, and input change along with the element hierarchy, text, and URL that identify it. That raw stream is stored as-is. You then create virtual events, which are rules describing an interaction (for example a click on a specific button on a specific page), and Heap matches those rules against the history it already holds. The result is a metric with backfilled data the moment it is defined.

Is Heap free?

Yes, there is a permanent free plan covering up to 10,000 monthly sessions with six months of data history, core charts, unlimited enrichment sources, and SSO. It does not include technical support. Above that, the Growth tier gives a self-serve estimate once the snippet is installed, and Pro and Premier are quoted by sales against your session volume.

How much does Heap cost?

Heap does not publish paid pricing. The free plan is 10,000 monthly sessions. The Growth tier is commonly reported at around $3,600 per year, but the figure you are quoted depends on the sessions Heap measures after you install the snippet. Pro and Premier are custom session pricing on annual contracts, with session replay, extra projects, and extra retention years priced separately on top.

Who owns Heap?

Contentsquare, the French experience analytics company, which announced the acquisition in September 2023 and completed it in December 2023. Contentsquare also owns Hotjar, acquired in 2021. Heap continues to operate at heap.io and existing accounts and plans are unchanged, but its capabilities are being integrated into Contentsquare's product analytics platform.

Heap vs Mixpanel: which should we choose?

It comes down to whether you will maintain a tracking plan. Mixpanel expects deliberate instrumentation, which produces a clean schema, fast queries, and published event-based pricing you can budget against. Heap captures everything and lets you define events later, which suits teams without dedicated analytics engineering but produces noisy data that needs governance. Mixpanel is also far more transparent commercially; Heap requires a conversation for anything above free.

Does Heap include session replay?

Not in the base plans. Session replay is a paid add-on available on the Pro and Premier tiers, and heatmaps are part of the same qualitative layer added after the Contentsquare acquisition. If replay is central to your workflow, compare the total quote against tools that bundle it, because the tier price alone understates the cost.

How long does Heap keep my data?

Six months on the free plan and twelve months on standard paid tiers, with additional years available as a purchased add-on. That ceiling is the most commonly cited practical frustration, because year-over-year comparison requires either buying more retention or syncing to your own warehouse through Heap Connect before the window closes.

Does autocapture slow down my site?

The snippet loads asynchronously and the per-interaction overhead is small, but it is another client-side script listening to every event on the page, so it is not free. On performance-sensitive sites, measure Core Web Vitals with and without the tag before committing, and be aware that very interaction-heavy single-page applications generate the most traffic back to Heap.

Is Heap GDPR compliant?

Heap supports GDPR and CCPA obligations with data blocking by CSS selector, PII redaction, IP anonymization, consent-gated capture, and user deletion APIs, and offers EU data processing. Because autocapture is on by default, the configuration burden is higher than with manual instrumentation: you must decide what not to collect rather than what to collect, and controller obligations remain yours.

Does Heap work for mobile apps?

Yes, with autocapture SDKs for iOS, Android, and React Native that apply the same model to native screens and gestures. Event definitions are built against the view hierarchy rather than CSS selectors, and mobile sessions count against the same session meter as web.

What is Heap Illuminate?

Illuminate is a data science layer that runs continuously in the background comparing cohorts and surfacing statistically notable differences and friction points without anyone querying for them. It is the clearest payoff of collecting everything: because the data already exists, the system can find patterns you would never have thought to instrument for.

Editorial verdict

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.

Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.