Best heatmap tools in 2026 (free and paid)

Every tool here draws click and scroll maps; the brochure features have converged. The differences that decide how the tool feels after three months:

• Retention - how long the data lives. Some tools keep heatmap data for over a year but delete recordings within a month; a free tier that erases last quarter is a real limit.
• The pricing meter - per recorded session or per tracked pageview. It decides whether a traffic spike raises your bill.
• What the free tier honestly includes - session caps, retention caps and report caps hide there.
• Map types beyond click and scroll - attention, movement and friction maps exist in some tools and not others.
• Whether the heatmap connects to your other numbers - or lives in a separate tool from your traffic and revenue data.

Clarity is free with no traffic cap - not a trial, not a tier, just free, which makes it the default first heatmap tool for most sites. Click and scroll maps, rage- and dead-click detection, and session recordings included. Retention is the asymmetry to know about: heatmap data is kept around 13 months, recordings only about 30 days.

The costs are indirect: your visitor data goes to Microsoft, filtering is basic, and the maps don't connect to signups or revenue. As a way to find out whether heatmaps change any decision you make, the price argues for itself.

Hotjar made heatmaps mainstream, and a decade of blog posts still recommends it by name. The company behind it, Contentsquare, folded Hotjar into its own platform - the merger completed in mid-2025, and hotjar.com's pricing page now redirects to Contentsquare's. There's still a free tier with one-month retention, and paid plans start at $49 a month billed annually, with 13-month retention.

For existing Hotjar users the practical question is whether the platform they're being moved to still fits - the same question that's sent many of them shopping for alternatives.

Crazy Egg has drawn click maps since before "heatmap tool" was a category, and prices by tracked pageviews: plans start at $29 a month for 5,000 pageviews, with no free tier and caps on how many heatmap reports each plan can run. The pageview meter suits low-traffic, high-value pages and punishes big audiences.

Lucky Orange prices by sessions instead - from $32 a month billed annually, with a 7-day trial rather than a free plan. Its distinctive choice: every feature is in every plan, so tiers differ only in session volume. Base data retention is 60 days, extendable on higher plans.

Mouseflow's free plan is genuinely free but small - 500 sessions a month, one site, one month of retention. What stands out is the range of map types: alongside click and scroll it draws movement, attention, geography and friction maps, the broadest list in this group. Paid plans start at $25 a month.

The 500-session cap makes the free plan a demo for most real sites; on a few thousand visits a month you'd be sampling a sixth of your traffic. Fine for evaluating the tool, thin for trusting the maps.

Smartlook still appears on best-of lists, so this belongs on the record: it's being discontinued. After its acquisition, the product is being folded into Splunk's observability platform, with Smartlook itself scheduled to shut down on September 30, 2027. Existing users have time to migrate; adopting it new in 2026 means choosing a tool with a published end date.

Bigdelta's heatmaps are a feature of a web analytics tool rather than a separate product - the same script that counts your visitors draws click, scroll, attention and move maps, built per device and updating continuously as visits arrive. Maps filter by page, traffic source or segment, so "how do paid visitors use this landing page" is one filter, not an export. Click maps flag dead and rage clicks, and a hotspot can be drilled into the session replays behind it. The Forever Free plan covers up to 100K pageviews a month.

The fit is best when you want the counting and the seeing in one place; teams that only want a standalone heatmap widget next to an existing analytics stack have cheaper single-purpose options above.

Free and this afternoon: Clarity. Heatmaps connected to your visitor and revenue numbers: Bigdelta. The widest menu of map types on a budget: Mouseflow. Low-traffic pages you study intensely: Crazy Egg. Everything-included pricing you can predict: Lucky Orange. And whatever the list, don't start something new on Smartlook. If two tools survive your shortlist, run both on the same pages for two weeks - the maps will disagree a little, and the tool you actually open twice is the answer.