Microsoft Clarity is the best free Hotjar alternative. Mouseflow is the closest paid swap. FullStory wins for product teams with budget. The bigger question: do you actually need to switch? And what would you gain (or lose)?
Hotjar changed a lot since Contentsquare bought it in 2021. The full merger happened July 1, 2025. Pricing went up. Products got unbundled. New signups now go through Contentsquare’s platform. If your Hotjar bill looks different lately, that’s why.
Seven alternatives, real pricing, and the privacy trade-offs most guides quietly skip. If you’re building a CRO tools stack, this is where to start. And if you need an A/B testing tool on top, that’s a separate decision.
Quick comparison: Hotjar vs the alternatives
| Tool | Best for | Starting price | Free plan? | Heatmaps? | Surveys? | Key difference vs Hotjar |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Clarity | Zero-budget teams | Free | Yes (unlimited) | Yes | No | Free forever, but Microsoft uses data for ads |
| Mouseflow | CRO teams | $24/month | Yes (limited) | Yes | No | Form analytics + friction scoring |
| FullStory | Product teams | Custom pricing | Yes (limited) | Yes | No | AI frustration detection |
| Lucky Orange | Small business owners | $14/month | No | Yes | No | Built-in live chat |
| Crazy Egg | Simple heatmaps + testing | $49/month | No | Yes | No | Includes basic A/B testing |
| PostHog | Developer teams | Free (5K replays/month) | Yes | Yes | Yes | Open source, self-hosted option |
| Matomo | Privacy-first teams | $26/month (cloud) | Self-hosted is free | Add-on | No | You own 100% of the data |
| Hotjar (for reference) | Beginners who want surveys | $49/month | Yes (limited) | Yes | Yes | Surveys + feedback in one tool |
For a broader look at session recording software, including tools like Smartlook and LogRocket, check our session recording software compared guide.
Why people switch from Hotjar (and when to stay)
Hotjar used to be the go-to heatmap tool for small teams. Simple pricing, generous free plan, everything in one place. Then Contentsquare acquired it, and things shifted.
The pricing change that upset everyone.
Hotjar’s billing switched from per-organization to per-site. According to Hotjar’s own documentation, the minimum documented increase was 400%. Old Plus plan: 9 EUR for your entire organization, all sites included. New pricing: 39 EUR per site. If you had three sites, your bill tripled overnight.
On Trustpilot, Hotjar sits at 1.7 out of 5 stars. One reviewer described “over 800% increases since new ownership.” That’s not a typo. On Capterra, a Senior Product Manager wrote: “After the product was acquired the price was instantly increased while the pricing tiers became extremely hard to follow.”
The unbundling.
In 2023, Hotjar split into three separate products. Observe (heatmaps and recordings), Ask (surveys), and Engage (user interviews). Each one billed separately.
Features that used to come together now cost extra. Want heatmaps AND surveys? That’s two subscriptions now. The survey product alone starts at $99/month.
The free plan today.
After the Contentsquare merger, the free plan offers 200k monthly sessions but only 10k session replays, 1 project, 1 month of data access, and 100 survey responses. Not awful, but not the “just try it” experience it used to be. Growth plans start at $49/month for 7,000 sessions and scale up to $739/month.
It’s also slow.
Every script you add to your website slows it down a little. Some more than others. Lighthouse data compiled by Howuku shows Hotjar adds around 829ms to page load time. For comparison: Mouseflow adds 68ms and Crazy Egg adds 124ms. Rollbar’s script-size benchmark found Contentsquare’s script weighs in at 553KB gzipped, the heaviest of any tool they tested.
Think of it like loading a delivery truck. Every analytics tool you add is another box. Hotjar’s box is one of the biggest.
When to stay with Hotjar.
If you rely on the survey and feedback widget combo, Hotjar is still the best option. Nobody else bundles behavior tracking and customer surveys as well. The product itself isn’t broken. Capterra’s overall rating is 4.7/5. The frustration is about pricing and corporate direction, not about whether heatmaps work.
Our take: Hotjar is going through what happens to every small-team tool that gets acquired by an enterprise company. The product gets folded into something bigger. Prices go up. The simple tool you loved starts optimizing for a different customer. If that customer isn’t you anymore, it’s time to look around.
Microsoft Clarity vs Hotjar
This is the comparison everyone makes first. Clarity costs $0. Hotjar starts at $49/month. For basic heatmaps and session recordings, Clarity matches Hotjar feature for feature.
What you get for free: unlimited session recordings, unlimited heatmaps, scroll maps, rage click detection (Clarity calls it “frustration detection”), and built-in Google Analytics integration. Microsoft’s FAQ says it straight: “Clarity is a free service forever. You never encounter traffic limits.”
What you don’t get: surveys, feedback widgets, form analytics, or data older than 30 days. Hotjar keeps data up to a year on paid plans. Clarity wipes it after a month. If you need to look back at last quarter’s recordings, they won’t be there.
The privacy trade-off nobody talks about.
Clarity is free because it feeds Microsoft’s advertising machine. Microsoft’s own terms explicitly say they can “create user profiles for purposes that include advertising.” Installing Clarity puts Bing cookies on your visitors’ browsers.
Since October 31, 2025, Microsoft requires explicit consent for visitors from the EU, UK, and Switzerland. Two types of consent needed: analytics AND advertising. Most websites put Clarity in the “analytics” cookie category. It probably belongs under “marketing.”
Clarity also doesn’t respond to your browser’s Do Not Track signal. And if you need to delete one specific visitor’s data? You can’t. You’d have to delete the entire project.
In plain English: you pay nothing in dollars. Your visitors pay in data.
Bottom line. For watching recordings and getting heatmaps on a budget, Clarity is excellent. For surveys, long-term data, or strict privacy needs, Hotjar earns its price.
This walkthrough from Analytics Mania shows how to get started with Microsoft Clarity from scratch:
Hotjar vs FullStory (and FullStory alternatives)
FullStory and Hotjar look similar on paper. Both record sessions. Both make heatmaps. The difference is depth.
FullStory uses AI to spot visitor frustration automatically. Rage clicks (hammering a button that won’t respond), dead clicks (tapping something that looks clickable but isn’t), error clicks, and erratic mouse movement. It finds your worst sessions for you instead of making you watch hundreds.
FullStory also ties recordings to the bigger picture. You can see how one person’s session connects to their account, support tickets, and which features they use. For a product team with a dedicated researcher, that’s powerful.
For a small business owner who just wants to know where people click? It’s like hiring a private investigator when you needed a doorbell camera.
FullStory launched a free tier in August 2025 with limited sessions. The real product requires custom pricing (read: you’ll talk to sales). If you need to ask “how much does it cost?” it’s probably more than you want to spend.
Looking for a FullStory alternative? PostHog gives you open-source session replay with product analytics. Heap focuses on auto-captured product analytics. LogRocket is better for developer debugging. And Mouseflow covers the CRO use case at a fraction of the price.
Our take: FullStory is the best tool in this list if you have a dedicated product team AND budget. For everyone else, it’s overkill. Start with something simpler, learn what you need, then upgrade if your team outgrows it.
Hotjar vs Mouseflow
If you’re looking for “Hotjar but cheaper and more focused on conversion rate optimization,” that’s Mouseflow.
The standout feature is form analytics. It shows you exactly which field in your signup form makes people give up. Not “people abandon this page.” More like “47% of visitors drop off at the phone number field.” That’s specific enough to act on.
Mouseflow also generates a friction score for every session. Instead of watching recordings at random, you see the most frustrated sessions first. Six types of heatmaps (click, scroll, attention, movement, geo, and live) give you more visual data than Hotjar’s three.
Pricing: Mouseflow starts at $24/month. Hotjar’s equivalent tier is $49/month. For basic CRO work, Mouseflow gives you more for less.
What Mouseflow lacks: No surveys. No feedback widgets. If you need to ASK visitors why they’re confused (not just watch them be confused), Hotjar’s survey tools are still the best in this category. Mouseflow is also a smaller company with less brand recognition, which means fewer community resources and tutorials.
Our pick for CRO teams. If you do CRO testing, Mouseflow is the better tool. The form analytics alone are worth the switch. Just know you’d need a separate survey tool if surveys matter to you.
Lucky Orange vs Hotjar
Lucky Orange costs $14/month. That makes it the cheapest paid Hotjar alternative on this list. It bundles session recordings, heatmaps, and something no other tool here offers: live chat. You can watch a visitor browse your site and start a conversation with them in real time.
For e-commerce store owners, that’s a real workflow. See a visitor stuck on your product page. Chat with them. Help them buy. It turns passive observation into active selling.
Lucky Orange also handles dynamic pages well. If your site changes content without reloading (think interactive catalogs or app-like interfaces), Lucky Orange tracks those interactions where some tools lose them.
What Lucky Orange lacks: The data isn’t as deep as Mouseflow’s friction scoring or FullStory’s AI analysis. Data retention on standard plans is only 30 days (same as Clarity). And the tool feels more “scrappy small business” than “polished marketing suite.” For some teams, that’s a plus. It’s simple because it’s focused.
Who it’s for. Shopify store owners and small business websites that want heatmaps plus the ability to chat with stuck visitors. Hard to beat at $14/month.
Other Hotjar alternatives worth considering
PostHog is open source and free for 5,000 session recordings per month. It also includes A/B testing and toggles that let you turn features on and off for different visitors. Powerful stuff, but it’s built for developer teams. If “event taxonomy” sounds like a foreign language, keep scrolling.
Already exploring Google Optimize alternatives? PostHog is worth a look.
Crazy Egg keeps things simple. Heatmaps, scroll maps, and basic A/B testing for $49/month. No bells and whistles. You want to see where people click, maybe test a headline change? Crazy Egg does that. Same price as Hotjar, though, so the value is simplicity, not savings.
Matomo is the privacy-first option. It’s an open-source analytics platform with heatmaps as a paid add-on. Self-host it and you own 100% of your data. No third-party cookies, no data sharing.
The European Commission uses Matomo. If data ownership is non-negotiable, it’s the answer. For more on cookieless tracking, we’ve covered that separately.
Contentsquare is where Hotjar’s parent company wants you to end up. The enterprise version of everything Hotjar does, plus website personalization and AI-powered insights.
Outgrown Hotjar and have serious budget? This is the upgrade path. Just know “enterprise” pricing means sales calls and annual contracts.
How to pick the right Hotjar alternative
Question 1: What’s your budget?
- $0: Microsoft Clarity (unlimited, free, data trade-off with Microsoft)
- $0 + technical team: PostHog (5K recordings free, open source)
- Under $25/month: Lucky Orange ($14) or Mouseflow ($24)
- $49+/month: Hotjar, Crazy Egg, or Contentsquare
Question 2: Do you need surveys?
If yes, your options shrink fast. Hotjar and PostHog include surveys. Everyone else doesn’t. If surveys are important, stick with Hotjar or add a separate survey tool.
Question 3: What will you DO with the data?
This is the question nobody asks. And it’s the most important one. Heatmaps show you what’s happening on your pages. They’re the diagnosis. But a diagnosis without treatment doesn’t fix anything.
A peer-reviewed study by researcher Alia Bojko found that heatmaps are “often used incorrectly and for the wrong reasons.” The biggest mistake: looking at a heatmap without a specific question in mind. You see a hot spot and confirm whatever you already believed. That’s not research. That’s a mirror.
The real workflow is: observe a problem, form a theory, test the fix. Heatmaps handle step one. A/B testing handles step three. Skip the test, and you’re just guessing with extra steps.
A quick note about privacy.
Whichever tool you pick, know this: session recording tools are the subject of active lawsuits in the United States. In June 2025, the Ninth Circuit Court ruled that session replay captures “contents” of communications, which could make it wiretapping under California law. K&L Gates reports one plaintiffs’ firm filed over 60 session replay lawsuits in a single year. The websites get sued, not the tool vendors.
Don’t panic. Just make sure your tool has proper consent settings turned on, and your privacy policy actually mentions session recording. Five minutes of setup beats a legal headache later. Our session replay tools guide covers the privacy question in more detail.
The heatmap-to-test workflow (what most guides miss)
Every other “Hotjar alternatives” article compares observation tools. Watch recordings. Look at heatmaps. Great. Then what?
This is the workflow that actually improves your website:
Say your scroll map shows 70% of visitors never get past the hero section on your landing page. You look at the headline. It says “Welcome to our platform.” That’s not a headline. That’s a placeholder.
You write something better. Something specific. But don’t just swap it in and hope. Run a test. Send half your traffic to the old headline and half to the new one. If the new one wins, you know it. If it doesn’t, you saved yourself from a mistake.
That’s CRO strategy in a nutshell. Watch, guess, test, measure. Session replay handles step one. A/B testing software handles the rest.
In our experience building Kirro, the best test ideas almost always come from watching session recordings first. Random testing is a coin flip. Testing with context is how you get real wins.
The lightweight stack we’d recommend:
- GA4 (free) for traffic data
- Microsoft Clarity (free) for recordings and heatmaps
- Kirro for A/B testing
Three tools. Two free. The whole thing costs less than a single Hotjar Business plan. And you get the complete workflow: watch, spot, test, measure.
A CRO audit is a good place to start if you’re not sure what to test first. It gives you a prioritized list of problems to fix, so you’re not just picking at random.
FAQ
What is the best free Hotjar alternative?
Microsoft Clarity. It’s free with unlimited session recordings and heatmaps. No session caps, no traffic limits, no premium tier hiding the features you need. The trade-off: Microsoft uses aggregated visitor data for its advertising products. If privacy is your main concern, PostHog’s free tier (5,000 recordings per month) lets you self-host, so your data stays on your servers.
Is Microsoft Clarity better than Hotjar?
For heatmaps and session recordings alone, Clarity matches Hotjar and it’s free. Hotjar is better if you need surveys, feedback widgets, form analytics, or data retention longer than 30 days. Want to ask visitors questions? Hotjar wins. Just want to watch what they do? Clarity wins.
What is the difference between Hotjar and VWO?
Different jobs. Hotjar watches what visitors do (heatmaps, recordings, surveys). VWO changes what visitors see (A/B testing, personalization). They overlap slightly now that VWO added basic heatmaps, but Hotjar doesn’t do A/B testing at all. Most CRO software stacks include one tool for observation and one for testing. They’re complements, not competitors.
What is the difference between Hotjar and Matomo?
Hotjar is a behavior tool (heatmaps, recordings, surveys). Matomo is a web analytics platform (like Google Analytics, but privacy-first and open source). Matomo offers heatmaps as a paid add-on, but its main job is tracking traffic, not recording sessions. If you want to replace Google Analytics AND get heatmaps, Matomo does both. If you just want better heatmaps, that’s Hotjar’s (or its alternatives’) territory. Both are useful conversion rate optimization tools, just in different ways.
What’s the cheapest heatmap tool?
Microsoft Clarity is free. Lucky Orange is the cheapest paid option at $14/month. Mouseflow starts at $24/month. Hotjar’s paid plans now start at $49/month (after the Contentsquare merger). PostHog is free for up to 5,000 recordings per month if you have someone technical to set it up. Pick based on what you need, not just what costs least. A free tool you never act on is worth exactly $0. And once you’ve found problems worth fixing, set up a quick A/B test to make sure your fix actually works.
Randy Wattilete
CRO expert and founder with nearly a decade running conversion experiments for companies from early-stage startups to global brands. Built programs for Nestlé, felyx, and Storytel. Founder of Kirro (A/B testing).
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