Heap is a digital analytics platform that automatically captures every user interaction on your website or app, including clicks, page views, taps, swipes, and form fills, without requiring you to manually tag each event. It’s designed for product teams, marketers, and analysts who want to understand how people actually use their digital products and where they drop off.
Unlike traditional analytics tools that require you to decide in advance which events to track, Heap’s approach flips that model. You install one code snippet, and it starts collecting everything immediately. You define and analyze events after the fact, which means you never lose data because someone forgot to set up tracking for a specific button or page.
How Autocapture Works
The core technology behind Heap is what the company calls “autocapture.” Traditional analytics platforms require developers to write specific tracking code (usually something like track('event')) for every interaction they want to measure. If you want to know how many people clicked your “Add to Cart” button, someone has to write code for that specific button before you can start collecting data. If you forget to track something, the data from before you added the code is gone forever.
Heap eliminates that requirement. A single JavaScript snippet added to your site captures every click, swipe, tap, page view, and form fill from the moment of installation forward. The data is stored retroactively, so when a product manager asks “how many people clicked that button last month?” you can answer the question even if nobody thought to ask it until today.
This matters most for growing teams where the questions change faster than engineering can implement tracking. With manual tagging, answering a new analytics question can take weeks of developer time. With Heap, you label the events you care about using a visual interface (pointing and clicking on elements of your site) rather than writing code.
Core Analysis Features
Once Heap is collecting data, the platform offers several tools for making sense of it:
- Funnels: Build conversion funnels to see where users drop off in multi-step flows like signups, checkouts, or onboarding sequences. You can create these retroactively since all the interaction data already exists.
- Journeys: Visual maps showing all the paths users take through your product, not just the paths you expected. This helps identify unexpected behaviors, like users visiting a help page right before abandoning a purchase.
- Session Replay: Watch recordings of individual user sessions to understand the context behind the numbers. Replays are automatically matched to specific events, so you can jump directly to the moment a user encountered an error or abandoned a flow. Privacy settings let you exclude sensitive information from recordings.
- Heatmaps: Visual overlays showing where users click, scroll, and engage on specific pages. Useful for understanding whether people are finding key elements on a page.
- Heap Illuminate: A data science layer that automatically identifies friction points you might not think to look for, surfacing patterns in user behavior that correlate with drop-offs or conversions.
- Sense AI: An AI-powered assistant (built on parent company Contentsquare’s technology) that lets you ask questions about your data in plain language rather than building charts manually.
How It Compares to Google Analytics
The most common point of comparison is Google Analytics 4 (GA4), which is free and widely used. The two tools serve different purposes, though they overlap in some areas.
GA4 is strongest for marketing analytics: tracking where your traffic comes from, measuring ad campaign performance, and understanding audience segments. Its tight integration with Google Ads and Google Tag Manager makes it the default choice for marketing teams focused on acquisition and ROI. However, GA4 still relies on manual event configuration for most custom interactions, and many users find its interface less intuitive since the transition from Universal Analytics.
Heap is built more for product analytics: understanding what users do after they arrive. Its autocapture approach means you spend less time on implementation and more time on analysis. The tradeoff is that Heap’s marketing attribution capabilities are less developed than GA4’s, and it costs money beyond the free tier. Many teams use both, with GA4 handling traffic and campaign analysis while Heap handles in-product behavior.
Pricing and Plans
Heap offers four tiers, with pricing based on the number of monthly sessions your site or app generates. A session is a period of activity from a single user, ending after 30 minutes of inactivity on web or 5 minutes on mobile.
- Free: Up to 10,000 monthly sessions. Includes core analytics charts, unlimited data enrichment sources, single sign-on, and 6 months of data history.
- Growth: Custom session pricing. Adds the AI assistant, unlimited users and reports, chart customization, CSV exports, 12 months of data history, and email support.
- Pro: Custom session pricing. Adds account-level analytics (useful for B2B products), engagement scoring, report alerts, and the option to add session replay.
- Premier: Custom session pricing. Adds data warehouse integration, behavioral targeting, unlimited projects, advanced user permissions, a dedicated customer success manager, and region-specific data storage.
Heap doesn’t publish exact dollar amounts for paid plans. You’ll need to contact their sales team for a quote based on your session volume. Session replay and some advanced features like Heap Connect (for syncing data to your warehouse) are available as paid add-ons on Pro, and included with Premier. Data history can be extended up to 3 years as an add-on.
If you exceed your plan’s monthly session limit, Heap won’t drop or throttle your data. You’ll receive an email asking you to upgrade, and you’ll need to do so before you can access your data again.
Setting Up Heap on Your Site
Installation is straightforward. You add a JavaScript snippet to your site’s HTML, replacing the placeholder with your unique app ID (found on your Projects page in Heap). The snippet loads asynchronously, meaning it won’t slow down your page rendering, and data collection begins immediately.
If your site uses a Content Security Policy (CSP), you’ll need to whitelist Heap’s domains. Heap provides specific CSP directives for both US and EU data residency, depending on where you want your data stored.
For privacy-sensitive pages, Heap offers configuration options at the code level. You can disable text capture entirely by passing disableTextCapture: true when loading the snippet, or selectively redact specific page elements like titles using a data attribute. This is useful for pages that display personal information you don’t want captured in analytics.
Once the snippet is live, there’s no additional setup required to start collecting interaction data. The next step is defining the events you care about, which you do through Heap’s visual labeling tool rather than writing more code. You point to an element on your live site, give it a name (like “Add to Cart Click”), and Heap retroactively applies that label to all matching interactions it has already captured.
Who Heap Is Built For
Heap fits best in product-led companies where understanding user behavior inside an application matters more than tracking ad spend. SaaS companies, e-commerce platforms, and mobile app teams are the most common users. It’s particularly valuable for teams that don’t have dedicated analytics engineers, since autocapture reduces the dependency on developers for instrumentation.
One practical limitation worth noting: as your data grows and the number of labeled events increases, maintenance can become more demanding. Teams with very large datasets sometimes find they need additional tooling to manage which events and charts are still in active use. Starting with a clear naming convention for your events helps avoid this as your Heap instance scales.