The best Hotjar alternatives, compared honestly
Hotjar built this category: drop in a script, watch recordings, read a heatmap, ask a visitor why. It still does that well, and since the plan launch of 16 March 2026 its free tier is unusually generous at 200k monthly sessions, though only 10k of those come with a session replay. What changed is the vendor. On 19 August 2026 hotjar.com returns an HTTP 301 to contentsquare.com/hotjar/ and hotjar.com/pricing returns an HTTP 308 to Contentsquare's pricing page, five years after the acquisition release said the two companies would "continue to operate independently for the foreseeable future". This page compares seven alternatives on the thing that decides your bill: what each one counts.
The best Hotjar alternative depends on what's actually hurting:
- Zero budget, no ceiling → Microsoft Clarity: free forever, no traffic limits, unlimited websites and team members.
- Replay next to product data → PostHog: 5k session recordings free every month, then $0.0050 each.
- Your own servers, EU data → Matomo: GPL-3.0 and free to self-host, but heatmaps and replay are a 219 EUR/year plugin.
- Closest like-for-like swap → Mouseflow: the same monthly-session shape, 500 sessions free, €25/month billed annually for 5,000.
Narrower cases are in the table below: OpenReplay if you would rather rent an instance than buy sessions, Lucky Orange if live chat belongs in the same script, Fullstory if 30,000 free sessions a month is enough and an unpublished paid price is acceptable.
Why teams look elsewhere
What pushes teams off Hotjar
Hotjar did not get worse at recording sessions. Every pattern below is about the meter, the cap or the vendor, and each one is quoted from Contentsquare's own pricing page or from a dated redirect, checked on 19 August 2026.
The vendor changed under you
Contentsquare announced the acquisition on 1 September 2021 and said the companies would "continue to operate independently for the foreseeable future". On 19 August 2026 the Hotjar homepage is an HTTP 301 to contentsquare.com/hotjar/ and the pricing page is an HTTP 308 to Contentsquare's. That period is over.
The cap is a hard stop
From the pricing FAQ: "If you reach the session limit on our Free and Growth plans: You won't get any new heatmap or funnel data until next month's reset date." No sampling, no overage charge. Surveys behave the same way; at the response limit "your surveys and widgets will no longer be sent".
The unit is no longer daily
Hotjar was known for allowances quoted in sessions per day. The live product meters monthly sessions, defined as a visitor's full journey across every page, ending after 30 minutes of inactivity. A comparison built on a Hotjar per-day figure is measuring a plan you can no longer buy.
Two products, two meters
Behaviour is sold as Experience Analytics in monthly sessions. Surveys are sold as Voice of Customer in monthly responses, free to 100 and from €99/month monthly-billed for 500. One job, two subscriptions, two independent ways to run out mid-month.
The volume ladder runs backwards
Free carries 200k monthly sessions. Growth, at €39/month billed yearly, starts at 7k. Growth sells 13-month data access, three projects and zone-based heatmaps, not headroom; anyone upgrading purely for volume is reading the ladder the wrong way round.
The published ladder stops early
Growth's session bands top out at 200k sessions for €739/month monthly-billed; past 240k the price field is empty. Pro and Enterprise both read "Let's talk", so anything above mid-market volume has no number you can budget against without a sales call.
The shortlist
7 Hotjar alternatives worth evaluating
Hotjar bundled three separable jobs: watching what happened (replay), summarising where attention went (heatmaps) and asking people why (surveys). Almost nothing replaces all three at once. This ranking optimises for the first two, says who also does the third, and leads with the metering shape, because that is what changes your invoice. Every pick carries one honest strength and one real weakness.
The only tool here with an empty price cell that is a fact rather than a sales gate. Clarity's own pricing page reads "It's free, forever" and "You'll never run into traffic limits or be forced to upgrade to a paid version", with unlimited heatmaps, websites and team members. You get always-on recordings, click, scroll, area and conversion heatmaps, rage and dead click detection, 40+ segmentation filters and Copilot session summaries. Weakness: no on-site surveys, no self-hosting, and Microsoft states plainly on that page that it gathers the anonymous behavioural data to improve the machine learning models behind its other products, which is the actual price.
The only shortlist entry that bills replay per recording: the first 5,000 recordings each month are free, then $0.0050 each to 15k, $0.0035 to 50k, $0.0020 to 150k, $0.0017 to 500k and $0.0015 above that. Every month also includes 1M analytics events, 1,500 survey responses and 100k error-tracking exceptions free, with unlimited team members and no per-seat charge. Licence is MIT Expat outside the ee/ directory; 37,761 stars and a push on 19 August 2026. Weakness: this is a whole product-analytics platform, so swapping Hotjar for it means adopting far more surface than heatmaps and recordings, and the replay line grows with every recording you keep.
The pick when the data must live on hardware you control. The core is GPL-3.0 (release 5.13.0 on 16 August 2026), and the self-hosted Community edition is "Free / forever" with "Unlimited users and hits". The catch is specific: in Matomo's own feature table, Heatmaps & Session Recording is a premium plugin and a dash for Community. Standalone it costs 219 EUR per year for up to 4 users; the cheapest On-Premise bundle carrying it is Team at €275/month monthly-billed, or from €230/month annually. Cloud starts at €22/month for 50,000 hits with heatmap pageviews and session recordings as their own separate allowances. Weakness: the free tier and the feature you came for do not overlap.
If you want the Hotjar experience without rethinking anything, this is it: monthly sessions, session replays, click, scroll and geo heatmaps, friction detection and unlimited users on every plan including Free. Free is 500 sessions/month and one project; Essential is €25/month billed annually (€39 monthly) for 5,000; Advanced €109 annually (€149 monthly) for 25,000; Premium €319 annually (€399 monthly) for 100,000. Mouseflow's own offer schema quotes EUR. Weakness: the same hard stop, in blunter words ("When you run out, all tracking will stop until your next refill date, unless you manually request a refill or upgrade in the dashboard"), feedback surveys only start at Advanced, and project counts are capped per plan at 1, 1, 2 and 5.
The unit here is an instance-hour, which makes it the one pick whose bill does not move when your traffic does: cloud starts at $199/month, quoted as $0.276/hr, for up to 4TB storage, 32GB RAM and 8 vCPUs with custom retention across 50 regions. Self-hosting is free and the core defaults to AGPL-3.0, with the ee/ directory under a separate "OpenReplay Enterprise license" you can only obtain by contacting sales. Release v1.27.0 on 5 May 2026, last push 18 August 2026, 12,525 stars. Weakness: it is built for developers (network, console, state, backend traces) with no survey product, and self-hosting session data at volume is genuine operations work.
The broadest feature bundle for the money: dynamic heatmaps, session recordings, unlimited surveys and announcements, live chat, funnels and unlimited team members across plans, with storage starting at 60 days and upgradeable to 90, 180 or 365. Billed by monthly sessions, annual pricing (the page states a 20% discount) runs $32/month for 3,500 sessions, $72 for 10,000, $199 for 50,000 and $839 for 300,000; monthly billing is $39, $249 and $1,049 at the equivalent steps. Weakness: no free plan at all, only a 7-day trial, and additional sites cost $5/site, so this is the one tool where a second domain really is a second line item.
The enterprise end of the category, and the free plan is genuinely competitive: 30,000 sessions per month, 12 months of data retention, up to 10 users, no credit card. Ranked last for one reason only, and it is a factual one rather than a judgement: Fullstory publishes no price for any paid plan. Business, Advanced, Enterprise, Workforce and Anywhere all route to "Request pricing & demo". Weakness: you can evaluate it thoroughly for free and still have no idea what step two costs, which makes it impossible to budget against and impossible to put a number in the table below.
Two names that appear on most Hotjar listicles are deliberately excluded. Smartlook has joined Cisco and is folding into Splunk Observability Cloud on a published timeline: End of Sale 31 May 2026 (already in effect), no renewals or expansions after 31 August 2026, last day of support 31 August 2027, and the platform decommissioned with remaining customer data deleted on 30 September 2027. It is not a destination for a migration. Glassbox is excluded because glassbox.com/pricing/ returned HTTP 404 on 19 August 2026, so there is nothing to compare fairly.
Side by side
Hotjar alternatives compared
Prices as of August 2026, from each vendor's own pricing page. The column that decides most migrations is Bills by: five tools here use five genuinely different units, so the headline allowances in any listicle are not comparable to each other. What happens when you hit the limit matters just as much, and it is rarely printed. Hotjar's own row is included as the baseline.
| Tool | Type | Bills by, and what happens at the cap | Free tier | Self-host / licence | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hotjar (now Contentsquare) | Hosted replay, heatmaps, surveys | Monthly sessions, account-wide per geographic region. At the cap: no new heatmap or funnel data until the reset date. Surveys metered separately in monthly responses. | €0: 200k monthly sessions, 1 project | ✗ proprietary SaaS | Staying put under the free ceiling |
| Microsoft Clarity | Hosted replay + heatmaps | Nothing. No sessions, seats or sites metered; the page states you will never hit a traffic limit. There is no cap to reach. | Entire product, forever | ✗ proprietary, closed | Any team that just wants recordings and heatmaps |
| PostHog | Product analytics + replay | Per recording, from $0.0050 down to $0.0015 by volume. Usage-based, so it overflows into a bill rather than stopping. | 5k recordings + 1M events + 1.5k survey responses per month | ✓ MIT Expat, ee/ separate |
Engineers who want replay beside product data |
| Matomo | Web analytics + paid replay plugin | Hits for Cloud (from €22/mo at 50k), plus a per-user licence for the replay plugin: 219 EUR/year up to 4 users. Two unrelated meters for one job. | Self-hosted core: unlimited hits and users, no heatmaps or replay | ✓ GPL-3.0 core, plugin commercial | Data that must stay on your own servers |
| Mouseflow | Hosted replay, heatmaps, surveys | Monthly sessions with a per-plan project cap. At the cap: "all tracking will stop until your next refill date". | 500 sessions/month, 1 project, 1 month retention | ✗ proprietary SaaS | A like-for-like swap with published prices |
| OpenReplay | Developer-first replay | Instance-hours: $0.276/hr, from $199/month for a dedicated instance. Traffic does not move the price; capacity does. | Self-hosted community edition, you supply the hardware | ✓ AGPL-3.0, ee/ enterprise licence |
Debugging with network, console and state |
| Lucky Orange | Replay, heatmaps, surveys, live chat | Monthly sessions plus $5 per extra site, so a second domain is a second charge. Retention starts at 60 days. | None: 7-day trial only | ✗ proprietary SaaS | One script covering feedback and chat too |
| Fullstory | Enterprise experience analytics | Sessions on the free plan; no published unit or price above it. Every paid plan routes to "Request pricing & demo". | 30k sessions/month, 12 months retention, 10 users | ✗ proprietary SaaS | A large free allowance, if a sales call is fine |
Numbers that do not fit the cells: Contentsquare's Growth ladder runs €39/mo billed yearly at 7k sessions up to €739/mo monthly-billed at 200k, with no published price above 240k, and annual payment takes 20% off only when set up in-app by card or PayPal, "not applicable when paying by invoice". European customers, including the UK, are billed in Euros and everyone else in US dollars, so a EUR and a USD quote for the same plan are the same number, not a conversion. Pricing and free tiers change often; check each vendor for current terms. Compiled August 2026.
Official pages: Contentsquare (Hotjar) · Microsoft Clarity · PostHog · Matomo · Matomo replay plugin · Mouseflow · OpenReplay · Lucky Orange · Fullstory · Contentsquare acquisition release
A fair call
When Hotjar is still the right choice
Leaving is not free. Recordings, heatmaps and survey responses do not export in a form another tool can replay, so every migration starts your history at zero and the honest plan is to run both scripts for a month, then drop one. And the free plan is genuinely generous: 200,000 monthly sessions on one project, which is more traffic than most sites will ever send. Read the second allowance too: only 10,000 of those sessions come with a replay, so the ceiling that binds first is replays, not sessions. For a single-site team under that ceiling, the answer to "what should we switch to" may well be "nothing yet".
Hotjar is still right if…
- You run one site and stay under 200,000 monthly sessions. The free plan covers replay, heatmaps and a survey allowance, and the volume headroom is larger than the entry paid plan's 7,000 sessions.
- You want replay, heatmaps and surveys from one script and one vendor. Most tools on this page do two of the three well; assembling the third yourself is a real cost.
- Your traffic is low but your questions are qualitative. Here the per-session meter is an advantage: a tool that bills per recording or per instance-hour charges you for capacity you are not using.
- You are already a Contentsquare customer, or expect to become one. The consolidation that unsettles everyone else is convenient if the wider platform is where you were heading.
Look elsewhere if…
- You need to never think about a cap: Microsoft Clarity meters nothing at all, and its own pricing page says you will not hit a traffic limit.
- Replay must sit next to product data: PostHog bills per recording, so cost tracks what you actually watch rather than what your site serves.
- The data cannot leave your infrastructure: Matomo is GPL-3.0 and self-hostable, with replay and heatmaps as a paid plugin.
- You need network requests, console errors and state alongside the video: OpenReplay is AGPL-3.0 and built for debugging, not marketing.
- You want a published price above a small free tier: Mouseflow and Lucky Orange both print their ladders in full, which Contentsquare and Fullstory stop doing at the top.
Common questions
Common questions about Hotjar alternatives
What is the best Hotjar alternative in 2026?
Microsoft Clarity, for most teams. It does session replay and heatmaps, it is free for the whole product, and it meters nothing: no session cap, no seat count and no per-site charge, so there is no limit to plan around. Its pricing page states you will not hit a traffic limit. The trade-offs are real: it is closed-source, data lives in Microsoft's cloud, and it has no on-site surveys, so Hotjar's third job needs a separate tool. If you want replay beside product analytics, PostHog is the better pick; if the data must stay on your own servers, Matomo is.
Why do teams leave Hotjar?
Mostly because the vendor changed under them. Contentsquare acquired Hotjar in 2021, and as of August 2026 hotjar.com redirects to contentsquare.com and hotjar.com/pricing redirects into the Contentsquare pricing page, so the product you signed up for is now a plan inside a larger platform. The second reason is the meter. Experience Analytics bills monthly sessions and stops collecting new heatmap and funnel data at the cap rather than sampling or charging overage, and surveys are a separate Voice of Customer subscription billed in monthly responses. The third is the gap above the published ladder, which ends at 240,000 sessions.
How much does Hotjar cost in 2026?
Hotjar is now sold as Contentsquare Experience Analytics. The free plan covers 200,000 monthly sessions on one project. Paid Growth starts at 39 EUR per month billed yearly for 7,000 monthly sessions and runs to 739 EUR per month at 200,000 sessions when billed monthly, with no published price above 240,000. The 20% annual discount applies only when the subscription is set up in-app by card or PayPal, not when paying by invoice. Surveys are a separate Voice of Customer subscription metered in monthly responses. European customers, including the UK, are billed in Euros; everyone else in US dollars.
Is Microsoft Clarity really free with no limits?
Yes, in the sense that matters here. Clarity's own pricing page offers the full product at no cost with unlimited sessions, unlimited sites and unlimited users, and states explicitly that you will never hit a traffic limit. There is no paid tier to upgrade to. What you pay instead is not money: it is closed-source, your visitor data is processed by Microsoft, and the feature set is deliberately narrow. You get replay, heatmaps and a Copilot summary layer, but no on-site surveys, no funnel product and no self-hosting option, so a Hotjar replacement built on Clarity usually needs a second tool for the asking.
Is there a truly open-source Hotjar alternative?
Three, with the licences named precisely. Matomo's core is GPL-3.0, but the Heatmap and Session Recording feature is a commercial plugin licensed per user, currently 219 EUR per year for up to four users, so the open-source core alone does not replace Hotjar. OpenReplay is AGPL-3.0 with the enterprise directory under a separate proprietary licence. PostHog is MIT Expat with its paid features kept in a separate directory under their own terms. All three are genuine OSI-approved licences rather than source-available ones, which is not something you can assume in this category.
Can I migrate off Hotjar without losing my recordings?
No, and no tool in this category solves that. Session recordings, heatmaps and survey responses are not portable: there is no export format another vendor can replay, so a migration starts a new history rather than moving the old one. What does move is your thinking, since the questions and the funnels are yours. The practical approach is to install the new script alongside Hotjar, run both for two to four weeks so you can compare what each one captures on the same traffic, export any survey answers you need as raw text or CSV for the record, then remove the old script.