Microsoft Clarity vs Hotjar: which one to pick

Contentsquare says it plainly on the page that hotjar.com now redirects to: Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare, and the two platforms have merged into one. The Hotjar tools survived the move. Heatmaps, session recordings, surveys and feedback widgets all live inside Contentsquare now, alongside things Hotjar never had, like error monitoring and funnel analysis.

For anyone comparing tools, two practical things changed. You can no longer sign up for Hotjar itself. And the free tier changed shape: Contentsquare's migration page advertises a free plan of 200,000 sessions a month at the time of writing, and contrasts it with the old Hotjar free plan, which it says capped recordings at 35 sessions a day. If you dismissed Hotjar years ago because of that cap, the successor deserves a fresh look.

Strip away the branding and the two products answer the same questions. Both record visits and play them back. Both build click and scroll heatmaps from every visitor. Both flag frustration signals like rage clicks so you can jump to the visits where something went wrong. Both install as one script and start collecting within minutes.

Both have also grown an AI layer that summarises recordings and answers questions about the data in plain language. Clarity calls its version AI summaries and chat. Contentsquare calls its version Sense AI. Neither layer changes what is collected, only how fast you can read it.

Clarity's pitch has not moved in years, and Microsoft's own pages state it flatly: free forever, no limits on traffic. There are no paid tiers to grow into and no sampling either. Microsoft's documentation is explicit that Clarity records all traffic rather than a portion of it. For a site with real volume that wants recordings without a bill, this combination is still unique among the big names.

It is also the simpler product to live with. Clarity is recordings, heatmaps and the AI layer, and that is roughly the whole surface. It integrates with Google Analytics, so teams in Google's world can jump from a GA number to the sessions behind it. The best session replay tools roundup covers how it stacks up against the wider field.

Hotjar's historic advantage was everything around the recordings, and that carried over. Surveys, feedback widgets and user interviews live in the merged product, so you can ask visitors why they did what the recording shows them doing. Clarity has nothing comparable. If your workflow runs on voice-of-customer as much as behaviour, this is the deciding difference.

The merged platform also reaches further up. Funnel analysis, error monitoring and performance monitoring sit in the same product, and above the free tier there is a paid enterprise platform with the sort of depth Clarity does not try to offer. A team that expects to grow into journey analysis across a large site is buying runway. A solo founder is buying features they may never open.

Clarity's sharpest limit is retention. Microsoft's retention policy keeps playback data for 30 days, with heatmap data and favorited sessions kept for 9 months, and deleted data is unrecoverable. A recording from six weeks ago is gone unless someone favorited it. Treat Clarity as a rolling window on the last month of behaviour rather than an archive.

The Hotjar side's limit is newness of the offer. The 200,000-session free plan is Contentsquare's current claim, the merged product is still settling, and the fine print on retention and caps is the thing to read at signup rather than something this post can promise will hold. Migration churn is also real: dashboards, URLs and plan names have all moved at least once since 2025.

Neither tool exempts you from consent rules, and both mask sensitive input by default. Clarity's documentation is unusually direct about the consequences: in the EEA, UK and Switzerland it now enforces a consent signal, and without consent, sessions fragment and full replays are unavailable. Recording tools in the EU need a consent banner regardless of vendor, and the session replay GDPR checklist covers what compliant setup looks like.

Pick Clarity if you want recordings and heatmaps at zero cost, at any traffic level, and you can live inside a 30-day replay window. It is the fastest an owner can go from curious to watching real sessions, and for many sites it is all the behaviour tooling they will ever need.

Pick the Hotjar side, which now means Contentsquare, if surveys and feedback matter as much as recordings, or if you expect to want funnels, error monitoring and an enterprise-grade platform in the same place. The free tier makes trying it cheap. The judgment you are really making is whether you want a suite or a utility.

Both tools watch behaviour on the page and stop there. Neither knows which marketing channel brought the visitor, whether the visit turned into revenue, or what the same person did across their previous visits, because neither is an analytics tool underneath. In practice that means running them alongside your analytics and hopping between tabs to connect a recording to a number.

Tools that combine analytics with replays close that gap. Bigdelta, for example, runs analytics, heatmaps and replays from one script, and can show the sessions that dropped out at any funnel step. The Hotjar alternatives roundup maps out that middle ground, including the options for teams leaving during the Contentsquare transition.

Clarity is free at any scale, records everything, keeps replays for 30 days, and stays deliberately simple. Hotjar is now Contentsquare: a bigger product with surveys, feedback and funnels, a generous free tier by its current claims, and an enterprise platform above it. Choose by what you will actually open on a Tuesday. If the answer is "a few recordings and a heatmap", Clarity. If it includes "and the survey answers", Contentsquare. If it includes "and revenue", neither alone will get you there.