Best Hotjar alternatives (2026)

Hotjar is the tool most people install to see what visitors actually do on a website: recordings of real visits, and heatmaps showing where people click and how far they scroll. It earned its place as the default — friendly, and recommended in a decade of blog posts. The shopping around has two causes. The big one: Contentsquare, the enterprise analytics company that bought Hotjar in 2021, is folding it into its own platform, and being moved somewhere you didn't choose is the moment most people look around. The everyday one is price. It's based on how many visits get recorded, so a good traffic month raises the bill, and the free plan records only a small daily sample. Heatmaps, recordings and surveys are also priced as separate pieces that other tools now bundle.

Every tool on this page has heatmaps and recordings, so feature lists won't help you choose. The differences that matter after a few months:

• How the price grows. Some tools charge by recorded visits, so the bill jumps whenever traffic does. Flat plans and generous limits are easier to live with — check what a month with three times the visits would cost.
• What the free plan really gives you. Two things hide in the fine print: how many visits get recorded, and how long recordings are kept. If they're deleted after 30 days, insights expire before your quarterly review does.
• Privacy out of the box. A recording tool must hide what visitors type — passwords, card numbers, emails. Good tools do this automatically; with others you have to set it up yourself and hope you didn't miss a field.
• Whether recordings connect to your other numbers. If recordings live in their own tool, you can watch them but can't ask 'show me the visitors who almost paid'. Connected to your visitor stats and revenue, recordings get picked by what they're costing you instead of watched at random.
• Surveys. Hotjar also does popup surveys and feedback forms. Several alternatives skip that side entirely — fine if you never used it, a gap if you did.

Microsoft Clarity is the first stop and, for many sites, the last. It's completely free with no limit on visits: heatmaps, recordings, and automatic flagging of 'rage clicks' — the rapid, repeated clicking of a frustrated visitor. The trade-offs are real but livable. Recordings are only kept for about a month, the filters are basic, your visitor data goes to Microsoft, and there's no way to connect a recording to signups or revenue. As a free way to find out whether watching recordings changes any of your decisions, it's hard to beat.

Hotjar sees the page and nothing else. Where a visitor came from, or what they ended up spending, sits in other tools — and tying a recording to those is manual work. Bigdelta keeps recordings and heatmaps in the same place as your visitor stats and revenue. The practical difference is which recordings you end up watching. Instead of sampling at random, you start from a number that bothers you — shoppers who reached checkout and didn't buy, say — and watch those exact people. It works the same whether the site sells products, takes bookings or grows a newsletter. One gap: there's no survey or poll tooling. Anyone who relies on Hotjar's feedback side would need a separate tool for that.

Smartlook records both websites and mobile apps, a fit when your product spans both. PostHog packs recordings into a much bigger toolbox — visitor stats, funnels, A/B testing; it's built by developers for developers, and non-technical users tend to find it a lot to learn. LogRocket is really a debugging tool for engineers: every recording comes with the technical error logs behind it, exactly what a developer wants when fixing a bug and more than most people need for understanding visitors.

FullStory keeps a searchable record of every visit, so you can ask questions after the fact — 'show everyone who clicked this button and then left' — without setting anything up in advance. Pricing and onboarding are built for companies with a research team on staff. Staying put is also an option: Contentsquare itself, where Hotjar users are being steered, is a serious platform aimed at large retailers and product organizations. The question for both is whether someone at your company will spend real hours a week in the tool; without that person, most of what they charge for goes unused.

Pick by job, not by feature count. Just curious what recordings would show you: Clarity, free, this afternoon. Want recordings connected to your signups and revenue: Bigdelta. A developer chasing bugs: LogRocket. A technical team that wants one big toolbox: PostHog. A big company with a research team: FullStory or Contentsquare. Then let two weeks of your own traffic decide — run the favorite alongside Hotjar, the same parallel-running trick that settles analytics choices, and keep whichever tool you find yourself actually opening.