Analytics
Heap - the practical guide.
Heap is a digital insights platform built around autocapture - the idea that you should record every click, swipe, form submission and pageview by default and decide later what counts as a meaningful event. Founded in 2013 and now part of Contentsquare, it sits in roughly the same competitive space as Mixpanel and Amplitude but solves a different problem: avoiding the situation where the analysis you want to run today is blocked by an event you forgot to instrument six months ago.
What Heap does
The core captures every user interaction on your site or app automatically. You then define virtual events retroactively ("checkout button click on pricing page") and Heap reconstructs the history as if you'd been tracking that event from day one. Funnels, retention curves, segmentation and journey maps are built on top, alongside session replay, heatmaps and conversion analysis under the broader Contentsquare umbrella.
Recent releases have leaned into automated insights - the platform surfaces unexpected drop-offs, segment differences and friction points without you having to ask. Native integrations cover Segment, Snowflake, BigQuery, Salesforce, HubSpot and the major CDPs and warehouses, with a clean API for custom event sending where autocapture isn't enough.
Who it's for
Product, growth and marketing teams at SaaS, ecommerce and consumer apps that have been bitten by missing event tracking before. Particularly strong for fast-moving product teams that ship weekly and don't want to coordinate analytics changes through engineering on every release.
Pricing, in rough terms
Pricing is by monthly active user volume and tier (Free, Growth, Pro, Premier), available on request. Free supports up to 10,000 sessions per month with core analytics; paid tiers are quote-based and tend to start in the low thousands per month for serious volume. Bundle pricing is common since the Contentsquare acquisition.
When Heap is the right fit
The right call when you can't predict what you'll want to analyse, the team ships fast, and retroactive insight is worth the data volume cost. Also a sensible default when product analytics and session replay would otherwise be two separate tools and bills. A weaker fit for very small teams that genuinely only need a handful of well-defined events (Mixpanel or PostHog free) or for organisations where a strict event taxonomy is already enforced.
Watch-outs
Autocapture creates noise - without virtual events and naming conventions you'll drown in raw selectors. Budget time to define a clear event hierarchy in the first month. Pricing is opaque and scales fast with traffic, so model your sessions before signing. Some single-page-app frameworks need careful setup to capture meaningful element identifiers; test thoroughly before relying on retroactive analysis.