Hotjar defined this category and three things now send people looking elsewhere. Microsoft Clarity does most of the same work for nothing at any volume, which makes any paid heatmap tool a harder sell than it was in 2019. Hotjar is no longer really its own product: Contentsquare acquired it in 2021, and hotjar.com now redirects to Contentsquare's pricing.
The third reason gets less attention and matters more. Every well-known tool in this category sets cookies, so a heatmap costs you a consent banner, and the visitors who decline are not a random sample: they skew towards more technical, more privacy-aware audiences. Your heatmap is therefore a picture of what the accepting subset does, not what your visitors do, and the bias is invisible from inside the tool. There is now a way round that, and it is the first pick below.
When to stay put. Keep Hotjar if on-page surveys and feedback widgets are central to how you work. Asking visitors a direct question is a genuinely different kind of evidence from watching them, Hotjar does it better than the free alternatives, and the free tier at 200,000 monthly sessions is large enough for most sites. If you are keeping it for the heatmaps alone, the first pick below does that without the banner.
The 6 alternatives, in order
18.9/10Privacy-first and cookieless The pick if you want heatmaps and stopped wanting a cookie banner. Click, scroll and attention maps are included from $14 on the same cookieless script already counting your traffic, so there is no second vendor, no second tag and no consent prompt, which means every visitor appears in the maps rather than only the subset who accepted one. Dead-click detection surfaces the headings and images people mistake for buttons. Session replay is an add-on from $19 and masks every input, textarea and contenteditable element in the browser before the recording is transmitted, so a misconfiguration on a checkout or login page fails safe rather than open.
From $9 per month. None, so no consent banner. Full review →
25.9/10Heatmaps and session replay The answer if the budget is the constraint. Session recordings, click and scroll maps, rage-click detection and AI summaries at any volume, free, with no session cap. You pay in data rather than money, and Microsoft's own documentation describes using it for its own purposes, so it sets cookies and needs the banner Hotjar needed.
From Free at any volume. Yes. Full review →
35.7/10Heatmaps and session replay The answer if you have outgrown watching recordings and want to query them. It indexes every interaction so you can ask for every session containing a rage click on checkout, then measure what those sessions did. Pricing is quoted.
From Free then quoted. Yes. Full review →
45.8/10Heatmaps and session replay The answer if the people watching are engineers. It captures the console, network requests and application state alongside the session, so a bug report becomes reproducible rather than a guess.
From Free then from about $69. Yes. Full review →
55.5/10Heatmaps and session replay The answer if the thing you need to watch is a native mobile app. Its iOS and Android replay is the most developed here, properly rendered rather than approximated.
From Free then from about $55. Yes. Full review →
Worth naming because it is now the same company. Zone-based heatmaps that attach revenue to page areas, journey analysis and impact quantification, aimed at enterprise ecommerce. The Hotjar free tier appears here as the Free plan.
From Free then from $39. Yes. Full review →
Common questions
Is Microsoft Clarity a good Hotjar replacement?
For recordings and heatmaps, yes, and it is free at any volume with no session cap. Hotjar remains better at on-page surveys and feedback widgets. Both set cookies and both require a consent banner in the UK and EU, so neither solves the consent problem.
Is there a heatmap tool that does not need a cookie banner?
Yes. Absolutely Analytics includes click, scroll and attention maps on a cookieless script from its $14 tier, so no cookie is set and no consent prompt is needed, which also means every visitor appears in the maps rather than only those who accepted one. Matomo's heatmaps can run in a cookieless configuration with IP anonymisation, though that is configuration you have to get right and its Cloud allowance is 1,500 heatmap pageviews a month. Hotjar, Clarity, FullStory, LogRocket and Smartlook all set cookies.
What happened to Hotjar?
Contentsquare acquired it in 2021. The product still exists and its free tier is still generous at 200,000 monthly sessions, but hotjar.com now redirects to Contentsquare's pricing page and the roadmap is Contentsquare's to set.
Which alternative is safest for pages with forms?
The one that never transmits the field contents. Absolutely Analytics masks every input, textarea and contenteditable element in the browser before the recording is sent, and you opt individual fields back in. Hotjar, Clarity, FullStory and LogRocket all apply masking to content they have received, which is a different risk profile on a checkout or a login page.