Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity

This comparison used to be straightforward and Microsoft changed it. Hotjar defined the heatmap-and-recording category and was the default purchase for a decade. Clarity then offered session recordings, click maps, scroll maps, rage-click detection and AI summaries at any traffic volume, for nothing, with no paid tier behind it, and now runs on more than two million sites.

Hotjar's free tier is genuinely large at two hundred thousand monthly sessions, and its paid Growth plan starts around thirty-nine dollars a month billed yearly, now through Contentsquare, which acquired it in 2021.

The verdict

Microsoft Clarity, for most teams, and mostly on price. It does the core job, the recordings are solid, the heatmaps are readable, and the AI summaries save you watching forty sessions to find a pattern. At zero, at any volume, with no session cap, the burden of proof sits firmly on the paid option.

Hotjar holds two real advantages. On-page surveys and feedback widgets are a genuinely different kind of evidence and Hotjar does them better. And the product is bought rather than given, which means Contentsquare's incentive is to keep you subscribed rather than to derive value from your visitors' data.

That second point is the one to think about rather than skip. Clarity is free because Microsoft's own documentation describes using the collected data for its own purposes, inside a company that sells advertising. Both tools set cookies and both need a consent banner, so neither is the privacy-preserving option. But they are free in different ways, and if that distinction matters to you, the cookieless tools that bundle heatmaps are the category you actually want.

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