Heap was founded in 2013 by Matin Movassate and Ravi Parikh with a radically different approach to product analytics. Instead of requiring developers to manually instrument every event worth tracking, Heap automatically captures everything — every click, swipe, pageview, and form submission.
Contentsquare acquired Heap in September 2023, combining Heap’s auto-capture analytics with Contentsquare’s experience analytics platform. The deal brought together two complementary approaches to understanding digital user behavior.
The auto-capture philosophy solves a real problem. With traditional analytics tools, you can only analyze events you thought to track in advance. If a product manager wants to understand a user flow that wasn’t instrumented, they have to ask engineering to add tracking, wait for a release, and then wait for data to accumulate. With Heap, the data is already there.
Heap captures interactions retroactively. You can define an event today and immediately see historical data for it, going back to when the JavaScript snippet was first installed. This eliminates the painful gap between asking a question and having the data to answer it.
The platform provides standard product analytics features — funnels, retention, user paths, and segmentation — all built on top of the auto-captured event stream. Heap Illuminate uses machine learning to surface friction points and conversion opportunities that might take analysts weeks to find manually.
Session replay capabilities let teams watch actual user sessions to understand the context behind behavioral data. Seeing a user struggle with a confusing interface provides qualitative insight that quantitative metrics alone miss.
The tradeoff with auto-capture is data volume — capturing everything generates significantly more data than targeted instrumentation. Heap handles this with smart compression and a proprietary data engine designed for high-cardinality event data.
