Hotjar alternatives: the honest shortlist. Hotjar alternatives: the honest shortlist.

The verdict

Hotjar alternatives at a glance

How we picked. Every tool here is one a Hotjar user could switch to this week, priced from the vendor's own page on 26 July 2026. Ranked by who the reader is, not by who pays us, which is why the free option is first and Mtrix is last.

One thing to be straight about. Legacy Hotjar was cheap. On Hotjar's own pricing page, archived 3 December 2024, the Observe product (heatmaps and recordings, the part this page is about) ran $0, $39, $99 and $213 a month paying monthly, with 20% off for paying yearly. Two caveats their own page carries. $213 is where the top plan started, not where it stopped: the Scale card reads "Starts with 500 daily sessions," and the same page footnotes priority support for "plans with 4,000+ daily sessions." And surveys and interviews were separate products, priced on top.

Mtrix does not sit in that band and never did. It is priced at the platform tier, next to a Shopify Plus subscription, not next to a $99 heatmap tool. If the number you had in mind is under a few hundred dollars a month, stop at row three of that table. Clarity and Contentsquare Free will do more for you than this page will.

What changed at Hotjar, in their own words

$ curl -I https://www.hotjar.com/pricing/

HTTP/2 308

location: https://contentsquare.com/pricing



$ curl -o /dev/null -s -w "%{http_code}\n" https://www.hotjar.com/signup/

404

Four statements, all from Contentsquare's and Hotjar's own help centres, read 26 July 2026:

• "Access to Contentsquare on insights.hotjar.com is no longer available to new customers."
• "No, data migration isn't available. You need to manually activate a new Contentsquare Free account and set it up from scratch. We recommend exporting any important data from your Hotjar account before switching."
• "No, you need to install a new Contentsquare tracking tag on your website." Your CSP allowlist has to be updated too, because the domains are different.
• "By default, your Contentsquare account is set to mask all text and numbers across pages… This differs from Hotjar's suppression settings."

New tag, new CSP entries, new privacy config, and nothing you've recorded comes with you. That is a re-implementation, not a migration, which is the only reason this page is worth your time. One thing is urgent before you decide anything else: export what you care about out of Hotjar now. The recordings you'd want again, survey responses, funnel exports. Contentsquare recommends it in their own words above, and it is the only step that gets harder the longer you leave it. After that, you're paying the switching cost whichever way you go. Spend it on the tool you actually want.

Nothing forces your hand this week: existing Hotjar Free accounts still work by Hotjar's own statement. If your question is what the Contentsquare bill looks like at your traffic, that argument lives on our Contentsquare page. The short version is that above roughly 240,000 sessions a month, Contentsquare stops publishing a price at all.

If your budget is zero, use Microsoft Clarity

Not a hedge, not a consolation prize. Microsoft's own docs: "Clarity is a free service forever. You never encounter traffic limits or are compelled to upgrade to a paid version." No card, no seat limit, and "no sampling" on capture, which is the objection people used to raise against Hotjar's tiers. It ships recordings, heatmaps, funnels, Copilot summaries, and real mobile SDKs for iOS, Android, Flutter and React Native, which Mtrix does not have. Its Shopify app rates 4.6 from more than 1,700 reviews.

For a store under about $1M, Clarity plus your platform's own reporting is a complete answer. Take it.

Three things it costs you, so the decision is informed:

1. Playback is deleted at 30 days. Microsoft's retention doc: playback 30 days, click and heatmap data 9 months, and sessions you label or favourite 9 months. Your Black Friday recordings are gone by Christmas unless somebody favourited them at the time.
2. You are not the only one using the data. Microsoft's own suggested footer wording for sites running Clarity: "We improve our products and advertising by using Microsoft Clarity to see how you use our website. By using our site, you agree that we and Microsoft can collect and use this data." Their suggested privacy-policy text names Microsoft Advertising directly, and their FAQ answers the status question against itself: "Clarity is GDPR-compliant as a data controller." A controller, not your processor — every paid tool here, Mtrix included, signs a processor DPA instead. Microsoft also states plainly that "Clarity doesn't sell data." Read the clause and decide; some boards sign it and some won't.
3. Revenue isn't in it. Clarity's ecommerce Purchases metric is a percentage of sessions, not money, and exists only on Shopify projects (checkout abandonment: Shopify Plus only).

Hotjar can't run an A/B test. That's usually the real problem.

Does Hotjar have A/B testing is one of the most-asked questions about the product, and Hotjar's own help centre answers it: "You can use Hotjar's built-in integrations with the below A/B testing tools." It monitors somebody else's experiment. So does Contentsquare, whose partner directory names AB Tasty, Convert and Dynamic Yield as the tools that do the testing. So does Clarity: tag your variants with custom tags and you can filter recordings by them, but there is no test builder. Mouseflow and Lucky Orange, the same.

Fullstory is the one partial exception, and it's worth stating precisely: it does allocate traffic to variants, but only across its own Guides and Surveys content — in-app tours, checklists, banners and surveys — on a paid add-on. Not a product page, not a price, not a checkout.

So of everything in the table above, only Crazy Egg and Mtrix build a test on your own pages as well as watch it. Crazy Egg does it from $99/mo on the Plus plan, billed annually, with a visual editor or a URL redirect, and their own pricing page calls it "Unlimited A/B Testing."

One limit, from Crazy Egg's own A/B testing page. The tests draw on the same allowance as your heatmaps — "tracked pageviews capacity, which includes traffic you're running A/B Testing on," 150,000/mo at that tier — and "if you meet your traffic capacity for the month, then Heatmaps and A/B Testing will pause data collection." Blow the cap mid-test and the test stops, not just the reporting. Even so: if heatmaps plus A/B testing is the whole job, Crazy Egg is the cheapest honest answer on this page, and you should go and read their pricing.

This matters more than a feature checkbox. A behaviour tool on one side and a testing tool on the other means two scripts, two definitions of a session, and a manual step every time you want to watch what the losing variant actually did. That step is where programmes die. Nobody does it at 6pm on a Thursday.

What you can actually watch

The number that decides whether a replay tool is useful is not the price. It's how much of your traffic gets recorded, how long you can go back, and what happens when you run over.

Read that table against your own worst day. A customer emails about a broken checkout on Saturday. A tool that replays 5% of sessions probably doesn't have theirs. Contentsquare Free analyses all 200,000 of your sessions and that is a real strength; it just records 10,000 of them, and on Saturday it is the recording you need. A tool that hard-stops tracking mid-month doesn't have it either. And read the middle column against Mtrix too: one month is the shortest replay window on this list, level with Clarity and Contentsquare Free. If reviewing peak season in January matters to you, Crazy Egg's two years and Fullstory's twelve months are genuinely better, and no amount of full capture fixes that.

Where Mtrix fits — and what you give up

Mtrix runs two ways, and the difference matters. As an npm package or CDN script on the store you already have, it gives you session replay, analytics, experiments, error tracking and real-user performance monitoring. That's the Hotjar-shaped part. Or you build and host the store on Mtrix, which is a different conversation entirely.

What you get that nothing else in the table does:

• The test and the sessions are one product. Filter the session list by experiment and by variant arm, and watch what the losing variant did. No integration to wire, no ID to reconcile.
• Every session, on purpose. 100% capture; sampling is a control you switch on, not a plan tier. Events can also be routed through your own domain, so nothing is stripped in transit, if you wire that route.
• Revenue is the unit. Revenue per visitor, conversion rate and add-to-cart rate, with orders, line items and refunds in the same product. Not a purchase percentage.
• Four test types and no cap. A/B, multivariate, split URL, mask URL, plus bandit allocation that shifts traffic toward the winner mid-flight. No limit on how many run at once, on any plan, and about five minutes from configuring a test to taking it live.
• Flat pricing, not metered on sessions, orders or profiles. One month free, no credit card, full platform. Monthly or annual.
• SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001 certified, with GDPR, CCPA/CPRA and HIPAA/HITECH compliance programmes. No third-party cookies, and payloads are AES-256-GCM encrypted in the browser before they leave the page. Passwords, card numbers, CVV, SSN and auth tokens are detected by type and name and masked before they leave the browser. Email, name, phone and address fields are not masked by default, and you should mask them explicitly.

Three things Mtrix does not have, and one of them will matter to you:

1. No surveys, no feedback widgets, no NPS, no user interviews. Hotjar's voice-of-customer product has no Mtrix equivalent at all. If on-site surveys are why you bought Hotjar, nothing on this page replaces them. Contentsquare's VoC does, priced separately from $99/mo billed monthly. (Hotjar's own Engage interviews are closed to new customers by their documentation; the capability now sits inside Contentsquare's VoC.)
2. Web only. No native iOS or Android SDK. Clarity, Contentsquare and Fullstory all ship one. If you have an app, this is decided already.
3. No published customer stories. There are no logos and no case-study numbers on this page because there are none to publish. Ask for a reference call instead.

Choose Mtrix if…

• You're already paying a replay tool and a testing tool, and the wiring between them is your job.
• You want to watch the losing variant's sessions without exporting anything.
• Revenue per visitor, not a purchase percentage, is how you judge a change.
• A point of conversion rate is worth more to you than the subscription line.

Who should not switch at all

• You're on Hotjar Free and you just want heatmaps. Take the Contentsquare Free account. It's 200,000 sessions a month against your current 1,050, at no cost. That's the best-value move on this entire page and it isn't ours.
• Surveys, NPS or user interviews are a real part of how you work. Stay where the surveys are.
• You have a native app. Fullstory, Contentsquare and Clarity all record one; Mtrix doesn't. That single fact decides it, whatever else is on this page.
• You need to look back further than a month of recordings. Crazy Egg keeps two years.
• Your store is under about $1M in revenue. Clarity is free and good. Spend the money on traffic.
• Nobody on your team owns conversion rate. A testing platform with no one to run it is a subscription, not a programme.

If you switch, you're re-implementing anyway

The tag work and the lost history are fixed costs whichever destination you pick. So the only real question left is which tool you want to be running in a year, and the order you do it in.

1. Decide whether you're buying one tool or three. Replay, testing and analytics as separate subscriptions is a legitimate answer. It's just a more expensive one than most people price it at.
2. Install and get one thing live. Mtrix goes on as an npm package or a CDN script, and a first experiment is about five minutes after that. Run it alongside Hotjar for a fortnight rather than cutting over cold.
3. Redo your privacy config from scratch. Contentsquare masks everything by default; Mtrix masks credentials and payment fields by type and name. Neither matches what you had. Walk the privacy checklist before recording goes on.
4. If you're moving the whole store, not just the tracking, Mtrix imports from your GitHub repo, your live site URL, or Figma, then helps finish the setup — the most complex stores are fully live within a week. Order and customer history both transfer, and the jobs your apps do — subscriptions included — are supported natively; each store's specific stack is mapped on the migration call first.

FAQ

Watch the session, ship the fix, see the revenue move

One script. One definition of a session. The experiment and the recordings of it in the same place.