Heap
Auto-capture product analytics. Tracks every click and event without manual instrumentation.
VISIT HEAPKey takeaway: Where engineering capacity is the bottleneck on instrumentation, Heap changes the shape of the problem: install one snippet and analyse events you never defined, including retroactively. Choose it over Mixpanel or Amplitude when the tracking plan is the thing that keeps not getting written. Choose against it when your engineers want deliberate, explicit events.
Quick facts
- CategoryProduct analytics
- PricingFreemium
- Starts atFree / contact
- LicenseProprietary
- Created2013
- GitHub starsclosed
- Script size~80KB
- CookielessNo
- Self-hostNo
What it is
Heap's differentiator is auto-capture, install one snippet and it records every click, form submit, and pageview retroactively. No manual event-tracking plan needed. Acquired by Contentsquare in 2024. Strong for teams that want analytics without engineering bottleneck on instrumentation.
Best for
- Marketing-led teams who want event analytics without engineering tracking-plan work
- Companies in early product-discovery where you do not yet know what events to track
- Teams who value retroactive analysis of past behaviour
When not to pick it
Skip Heap if your engineering team prefers explicit instrumentation. Skip if you need feature flags or session replay in the same tool, PostHog wins there.
My take
Heap is the right pick when product instrumentation is the bottleneck. The Contentsquare acquisition has shifted Heap's roadmap toward enterprise analytics; smaller teams may find PostHog more appropriate.
Autocapture and the retroactive question
Every other product-analytics tool asks you to decide in advance what matters, ship that instrumentation, then wait for data to accumulate. Heap records interactions by default and lets you define what counts as an event afterwards, against history it has already collected. The practical consequence is that a question like how many people clicked the new pricing toggle last month has an answer even though nobody thought to track it last month. In early discovery, when you genuinely do not know which behaviours predict retention, that is a different working speed. The trade-offs are equally real. Autocaptured events are pinned to DOM selectors, so a front-end refactor can quietly break definitions your dashboards depend on. Data volume is large by construction. And engineers who believe analytics events belong in the domain model tend to find the whole approach unruly.
What the Contentsquare acquisition means for you
Heap was acquired by Contentsquare in 2024, and acquisitions like that reliably pull a roadmap toward the acquirer's customer base, which here means enterprise digital-experience analytics. If you are an enterprise, that is fine or even welcome: more investment, a broader platform story, more adjacent tooling under one contract. If you are a twelve-person startup, the honest read is that you are no longer the customer the roadmap is written for, and pricing and sales motion tend to follow the roadmap rather than lag it. Weigh that against how long you expect to stay on the tool. PostHog is the alternative that keeps a small-team focus and adds flags and session replay in the same product, though it expects you to instrument events deliberately rather than capturing everything and deciding later.
Frequently asked questions
What is autocapture in Heap?
It means the snippet records clicks, form submissions, pageviews, and other interactions automatically, without you defining events in advance. You then label the interactions that matter as named events, and those definitions apply to data already collected. That is what makes retroactive analysis possible and removes the engineering dependency from most day-to-day tracking work.
Heap or Mixpanel?
Heap when defining and shipping a tracking plan is the thing that keeps not happening, or when you need to ask questions about behaviour you did not anticipate. Mixpanel when the team is happy instrumenting deliberately and wants the stronger analysis experience over a clean, intentional event model. The choice is really about where your bottleneck sits.
Is Heap free?
There has been a free entry tier for small usage, but anything past it is a sales conversation rather than a published price, and that has become more pronounced since the Contentsquare acquisition. If you want transparent usage-based pricing and a free tier you can grow into without booking a call, PostHog is the more predictable option at small scale.
Links
Similar tools you should also consider
Mixpanel
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Open-source product analytics. Mixpanel + LaunchDarkly + Hotjar in one self-hostable bundle.
Read the take →If Heap is your pick, the next conversation is short
The 30-min call is where your analytics choice becomes a real implementation, an event-tracking plan that fits your product, and a privacy story that does not need a 4-screen cookie banner.