8 Best Hotjar Alternatives in 2026 (Free & Paid)

If you’re looking for Hotjar alternatives in 2026, start with the part most roundups skip: Hotjar is no longer the simple standalone tool it used to be and I used to love and recommend. Visit hotjar.com now and you land on Contentsquare. The old public plans are gone, the product positioning has changed, and teams that only needed heatmaps and recordings now have to re-check the market.

Hotjar is not the only reason to revisit your stack. Smartlook has stopped selling new subscriptions and is headed for shutdown, while tools like Microsoft Clarity, PostHog, Mouseflow, Crazy Egg, Lucky Orange, Matomo, and Umami now cover different pieces of the old Hotjar workflow at very different prices.

I’ve used heatmap and session replay tools on my own sites and client CRO projects, so I care less about feature-count theater and more about limits: how many sessions you get, where data lives, how recordings affect consent, and whether the free plan is actually usable. These are the eight Hotjar alternatives worth shortlisting.

My Quick Picks

The fast version:

• Microsoft Clarity: the default answer. Free forever, no traffic limits, no sampling, used on 2M+ sites.
• Contentsquare: what Hotjar actually became, with a surprisingly big free plan (200k monthly sessions).
• PostHog: best for developers, 5,000 free session recordings every month.
• Matomo Heatmap & Session Recording: the self-hosted option, €219/year, data never leaves your server.
• Mouseflow: the closest like-for-like Hotjar replacement among the classic SaaS tools.

What Actually Happened to Hotjar?

Contentsquare bought Hotjar back in 2021, ran it as a separate product for four years, then completed the legal merger on July 1, 2025. Since then, hotjar.com redirects to Contentsquare’s site, the pricing page 308-redirects to Contentsquare’s pricing, and the old Observe, Ask, and Engage plans (including the 35-sessions-a-day free tier) are history. Existing accounts were migrated toward Contentsquare’s “Experience Analytics.”

Is that bad news? Mixed. The replacement free plan is genuinely bigger than Hotjar’s ever was (more on that below). But surveys moved into a separately priced product line, replay retention on the entry paid tier is short, and the whole thing now smells like enterprise software because it is enterprise software. If you loved Hotjar for being simple and cheap, the successor is neither, and that’s exactly why this list exists.

One Legal Thing Before the List

Session recordings need consent in the EU, full stop. France’s CNIL put it in writing in its February 2026 draft recommendation on session replay tools: “The purposes pursued by the deployment of session replay tools are subject to the prior consent of users,” because watching someone’s full visit is not “strictly necessary” to deliver your site. The audience-measurement exemption that lets cookieless pageview analytics run banner-free does not extend to replays.

Practical translation: pair any tool on this list with a consent banner for EU visitors, fire recordings only after opt-in, and mask form fields. Every serious tool below supports that. If a vendor tells you their replays are “GDPR compliant, no banner needed,” they’re selling, not advising.

Hotjar Alternatives Compared: Pricing and Free Tiers

All prices verified on official pricing pages this week. “Free tier” means a permanent free plan, not a trial.

The Best Hotjar Alternatives in 2026

Ranked by where I’d send a friend first, not by feature-count.

1. Microsoft Clarity

Best for: almost everyone. The free tier isn’t a tier, it’s the whole product.

Microsoft Clarity is the reason this category struggles to charge money. Session recordings, click/scroll/area heatmaps, funnels, rage-click and dead-click detection, AI session summaries, mobile SDKs, and a Google Ads integration, all free, on 2 million+ sites. Microsoft’s FAQ is unambiguous: “Clarity is a free service forever. You never encounter traffic limits or are compelled to upgrade.” No sampling either, which paid tools still charge to remove.

The WordPress plugin has 200,000+ active installs and was updated last month, so setup on a WordPress site takes about three minutes. Recordings keep for 30 days, heatmap data for 13 months.

The honest downside: you pay with data residency. Clarity data lives in Microsoft Azure, EU traffic gets transferred to the US under Standard Contractual Clauses, and Microsoft acts as a data controller of your visitors’ data, not just your processor. There’s no per-user deletion either; you delete the whole project or nothing. For most sites that’s acceptable. For strict-compliance clients, it isn’t, and that’s what Matomo below is for.

2. Contentsquare (What Hotjar Became)

Best for: ex-Hotjar users who want continuity, and anyone who can use a 200k-session free plan.

Contentsquare’s Experience Analytics free plan is the quiet shock of this roundup: 200,000 monthly sessions, one project, replays, heatmaps, funnels, JS error monitoring, and 100 survey responses a month, at $0. Old Hotjar’s free plan capped at 35 daily sessions. The successor’s free plan is bigger than most competitors’ paid plans.

Pricing: the Growth plan runs $49/month (or $39/month billed annually) starting at 7,000 monthly sessions and scaling with usage, with zone-based heatmaps, journey analysis, and their “Sense” AI layered on top.

The honest downside: Growth keeps session replays for only 2 months (13 months for other data), surveys beyond the free quota are a separately priced product, and the upgrade path points at enterprise sales calls. The free plan is generous; the paid ladder is built for budgets with commas.

3. PostHog

Best for: developers and product teams who want replays inside a full product-analytics stack.

PostHog gives every account 5,000 web session recordings and 1 million events free, every month, no card required. After that it’s usage-based: $0.005 per recording, sliding cheaper at volume. Rage-click detection, funnels, feature flags, A/B testing, and toolbar heatmaps come along in the same platform, and you can choose EU cloud hosting at signup, which quietly solves the data-residency complaint I just made about Clarity.

The honest downside: PostHog is built for people comfortable with the word “SDK.” A blogger wanting to see where readers stop scrolling will drown in it. Recordings also keep for just 3 months on paid plans.

4. Mouseflow

Best for: marketers who want the closest thing to classic Hotjar in one focused tool.

Mouseflow does the full classic kit: session replay, five heatmap types (click, scroll, movement, attention, geo), friction detection, form analytics, funnels, and surveys, with unlimited seats on every plan. The permanent free plan gives you 500 sessions a month on one site, enough to evaluate honestly, and the 14-day trial turns everything on with 2,000 sessions.

Pricing: Essential at $25/month (annual billing) covers 5,000 sessions; Advanced at $109/month covers 25,000 and adds more funnels; Premium at $319/month covers 100,000 with 12-month retention. Monthly billing costs up to 35% more.

The honest downside: retention on the cheap plans is short (1-3 months), and there’s no official WordPress.org plugin, so installation is paste-the-script. At higher traffic, Clarity does most of this for free.

5. Crazy Egg

Best for: CRO-curious site owners who want heatmaps plus built-in A/B testing.

Crazy Egg has been doing heatmaps since before “CRO” was an acronym, and 449,000+ websites still use it. The current product bundles heatmaps, recordings, surveys, error tracking, and A/B testing, with AI analysis of recordings included. Starter at $29/month (annual) covers 5,000 tracked pageviews and 50 recordings a month; Plus at $99/month is the realistic working tier with 150k pageviews and 1,000 recordings. A limited free plan and a 30-day trial soften the entry.

The honest downside: 50 recordings a month on Starter is a rounding error for any real site, and the pageview-based billing punishes content sites that need few recordings but have lots of traffic. The “no overages, tracking just pauses” policy is honest, but a paused tracker is also no data.

6. Lucky Orange

Best for: small ecommerce stores that want replays plus live chat and live visitor view in one bill.

Lucky Orange stacks more tools per dollar than anyone here: recordings, dynamic heatmaps, funnels, form analytics, surveys, announcements, plus live chat and a live visitor view, on every plan with unlimited team members. Build at $32/month (annual) covers 3,500 sessions; Grow at $72/month covers 10,000. Extra sites are $5 each, and the WordPress plugin was updated last month.

The honest downside: the permanent free plan that older roundups praise is gone; today you get a 7-day trial. Base data retention is 60 days, and per-session pricing climbs steeply, $199/month for 50k sessions, where Clarity charges nothing.

7. Matomo Heatmap & Session Recording

Best for: strict-compliance projects where recordings must never leave your infrastructure.

This is the answer when legal says no to everything above. Matomo’s Heatmap & Session Recording plugin runs inside your self-hosted Matomo: click, hover, and scroll heatmaps per device type, full replays with form-field masking, and GDPR export/delete tooling, all on your own server where no third party ever touches a recording. Combined with consent-gated triggering, it’s the cleanest possible CNIL story.

Pricing: €219/year ($269) for up to 4 users on unlimited websites, on top of free Matomo On-Premise. Matomo Cloud (from €29/month) includes heatmaps and recordings with monthly allowances. Older articles still quote €199/year; the current price is €219.

The honest downside: you’re running the infrastructure, recordings eat disk fast, and the UI is functional rather than delightful. This is the compliance pick, not the convenience pick.

8. Umami Session Replay

Best for: self-hosters who want replays bolted onto privacy-friendly analytics for free.

The newest entry in the category: Umami v3.1 (April 2026) added session replay, built on rrweb with configurable masking, plus heatmaps in its newest releases. Self-host Umami (MIT-licensed, Node.js + PostgreSQL, one Docker Compose file) and replays cost you nothing. On Umami Cloud, replays live in the Business plan at $200/month with 5,000 included recordings, so self-hosting is clearly where the value sits.

The honest downside: replays are brand new, retention is a 30-day window, and there’s no rage-click detection or funnels-from-recordings polish like Clarity has. It’s an analytics tool growing replay features, not a dedicated behavior platform.

What About Smartlook? Don’t.

Smartlook deserves its own warning because thousands of “best Hotjar alternatives” articles still recommend it. Cisco acquired Smartlook in 2023 and is winding it down into Splunk: new sales ended May 31, 2026 (you literally cannot buy it today), final renewals run through August 2026, support ends August 2027, and on September 30, 2027 the platform shuts down with all data deleted. No migration of historical data to Splunk is offered.

Between Hotjar’s absorption and Smartlook’s execution date, the lesson of this category is blunt: behavior data is strategically valuable, vendors keep getting bought, and your recordings live or die by acquisition press releases. It’s a big part of why the self-hosted options above earn their place on this list.

Setting Up Microsoft Clarity on WordPress in 10 Minutes

Since Clarity is the answer for most readers, here’s the actual setup, because it’s short enough to include:

1. Create a free project at clarity.microsoft.com (sign in with any Microsoft, Google, or Facebook account).
2. Install the official Microsoft Clarity plugin from the WordPress directory and paste your project ID. No code touching required.
3. In Clarity’s settings, turn on IP masking, enable the cookie-consent integration so recordings wait for opt-in from EU visitors, and mask sensitive form fields (it masks inputs by default, verify it).
4. Let it collect for a week before judging anything. Day-one heatmaps are noise.

The first thing to check after a week isn’t the heatmap. It’s the Insights tab: rage clicks, dead clicks, and quick-backs. Those three signals point at broken expectations (buttons that look clickable, links that go nowhere useful), and they hand you a fix-it list faster than an hour of watching recordings.

How Many Recordings Do You Actually Need?

Fewer than the pricing pages imply. For a typical content site or small store, 300-500 recordings of a specific page template tell you everything its layout is doing wrong; after that, you’re watching reruns. The vendors charging per session are betting you’ll never set a sampling strategy and just record everything forever.

A smarter pattern: record continuously on your money pages (checkout, pricing, key landing pages), sample everything else, and review on a schedule instead of doomscrolling sessions. That discipline is also what makes the small free tiers genuinely workable: PostHog’s 5,000 monthly recordings or Mouseflow’s 500 sessions stretch a long way when they’re pointed at the right pages. The constraint was never the quota. It’s that watching recordings without a hypothesis is the analytics equivalent of daytime TV.

Which Hotjar Alternative Should You Pick?

My honest routing table:

• Blog, portfolio, or small business site: Microsoft Clarity. Free, unlimited, three-minute WordPress install. Done.
• You were a paying Hotjar customer: try Contentsquare’s free 200k-session plan first since your account already points there; jump to Mouseflow if the enterprise vibe puts you off.
• SaaS or app team: PostHog, EU cloud if residency matters.
• Ecommerce store under 10k sessions: Lucky Orange for the chat-plus-replay combo, or Crazy Egg if A/B testing matters more than chat.
• Regulated industry, paranoid legal team: Matomo Heatmap & Session Recording on your own server, or self-hosted Umami if you want it free.

Whichever you choose, wire recordings into an actual improvement loop. Watching replays without changing anything is entertainment, not optimization. Pair the tool with proper experiments (my guide to the best A/B testing tools covers that side), keep your pageview analytics separate and banner-free (see my Google Analytics alternatives for WordPress), and if you’d rather have the whole stack configured for you, that’s what my analytics and tracking services are for.

My Recommendation

Start with Microsoft Clarity today, accept the US-cloud trade-off consciously, and graduate to Matomo or self-hosted Umami if compliance or ownership starts to matter. The Hotjar era ended with a redirect; the tools that replaced it are mostly better and mostly cheaper. The only real mistake is building your workflow on a product whose future depends on someone else’s acquisition strategy… twice.

FAQs on Hotjar Alternatives

Quick answers for the questions people search most.