Microsoft Clarity vs Hotjar: (Tried, Compared) - Here's the Winner
Finding the perfect website analytics tool can feel overwhelming with so many options available. In this guide, we're diving into a head-to-head comparison of Microsoft Clarity vs Hotjar — two of the most popular choices and introducing a third contender, heatmap. From features to pricing and real user feedback, we’ll explore what each tool offers and help you decide which one aligns best with your goals.
TL;DR- Microsoft Clarity or Hotjar? (Maybe Neither)
- Go with Microsoft Clarity if you're looking for a free, user-friendly tool that offers essential heatmap and session recording features without any cost. It's great for small businesses or beginners, but it lacks advanced analytics and customization options found in other tools.
- Go with Hotjar if you need a more robust platform with advanced features like conversion funnels, surveys, and feedback tools. It's perfect for businesses looking for in-depth insights into user behavior, but expect higher costs as your website traffic increases.
- Go with heatmap if you want the best of both worlds: actionable insights tied directly to your revenue. Offering AI-powered recommendations and transparent pricing based on your business size, heatmap is a strong choice for serious website optimization and growth.
Still undecided? Let’s take a closer look at the distinct features, advantages and drawbacks, pricing, and user reviews of Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar to help you make an informed decision for your business.
What's Microsoft Clarity?
G2 Rating: 4.5/5 (36 reviews)
Best for: Website owners, digital marketers, and UX/UI designers looking to analyze user behavior and optimize website performance. Ideal for businesses looking for a lightweight, no-cost solution to analyze user interactions.
Microsoft Clarity is a free user behavior analytics tool designed to help website owners and marketers understand how visitors interact with their sites. It offers features like session recordings, heatmaps, and click tracking to provide valuable insights into user behavior. With Clarity, users can track mouse movements, clicks, and scrolling patterns, identifying issues like rage clicks or dead clicks. Moreover, Clarity integrates with other Microsoft tools and offers an intuitive dashboard to visualize data.
Microsoft Clarity’s key features
- Session recordings: Clarity records real user sessions, allowing you to watch how users navigate through your site, click on elements and interact with various website components.
- Heatmaps: Microsoft Clarity provides both click and scroll heatmaps, visually displaying which parts of your web pages are getting the most attention and which sections are being ignored.
- Rage clicks and dead clicks detection: Clarity automatically identifies frustrated users by tracking repeated clicks in the same spot (rage clicks) and non-functional clicks (dead clicks), helping pinpoint user experience issues.
- Advanced filtering and segmentation: Clarity allows you to filter user data by various parameters like device type, location, and more, enabling targeted analysis and deeper insights into specific user groups.
- Integration with Microsoft and Google tools: Clarity seamlessly integrates with other Microsoft products like Power BI, as well as Google Analytics, allowing for a more comprehensive view of your website’s performance and user behavior.
What's Hotjar?
G2 Rating: 4.3/5 (307 reviews)
Best for: Website owners, marketers, and UX/UI designers looking to gain in-depth insights into user behavior and improve site performance. It's particularly valuable for optimizing user experience.
Hotjar is a powerful user behavior analytics tool designed to help businesses understand how visitors engage with their websites. It allows website owners to visualize user behavior through detailed data, helping them optimize site design, enhance user experience, and increase conversions. By tracking user interactions, Hotjar makes it easier to identify areas for improvement and gather actionable feedback directly from site visitors.
Hotjar's key features
- Heatmaps: Hotjar provides heatmaps that visually represent user behavior on your site, showing where visitors click, move, and scroll.
- Session recordings: Hotjar records real-time user sessions. This feature helps identify friction points and areas where users might drop off.
- Surveys and polls: Hotjar allows you to gather direct feedback from users through customizable surveys and polls, enabling you to understand user sentiment, preferences, and pain points in real-time.
- Conversion funnels: Hotjar’s conversion funnel analysis tracks how users move through specific paths on your site, helping you identify where visitors drop off and which steps need optimization to improve conversions.
- Feedback widgets: Hotjar offers on-page feedback widgets that allow users to provide quick feedback or rate their experience, giving you valuable insights into their thoughts while they’re still on your site.
After that, we examined 500+ user reviews of Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar from platforms like G2, TrustPilot, Gartner, and others to uncover common strengths and critiques shared by real users of these web apps.
Here’s what we discovered:
What Users Like About Microsoft Clarity
- Free forever: Teams appreciate Microsoft Clarity’s zero-cost pricing model, making it accessible for businesses of all sizes, especially startups and small teams with limited budgets.
- Integration with other tools: Users like that Clarity integrates well with other analytics platforms like Google Analytics, allowing them to cross-reference data and get a comprehensive view.
- Intuitive dashboard: The platform’s intuitive and clean dashboard makes it easy for users to analyze data without a steep learning curve.
Considerations Before Using Microsoft Clarity:
- Accuracy issues: Some users report minor accuracy problems with the data, making it less reliable for in-depth analysis.
- Limited features: Lacks advanced analytics and A/B testing tools for UX and design improvement, which some users find limiting for more complex needs.
- Slow data processing: Users experience noticeable delays in data updates, with a desire for more real-time processing.
- Basic reporting: The analytics provided are considered basic, and users express a need for additional features, like drop-off segments and advanced data filtering.
What Users Like About Hotjar
- User-friendly interface: Users find the platform accessible, with straightforward features that don’t require a steep learning curve.
- Customizable features: The platform’s ability to customize feedback collection, including targeting specific pages and user segments, is another feature that users enjoy.
- Survey and feedback tools: The platform’s tools for collecting user feedback, such as on-page surveys and polls, are highly valued by users.
Considerations Before Using Hotjar:
- Support responsiveness problems: Some users have raised concerns about Hotjar’s customer support being slow to respond, resulting in delays in resolving issues and assisting users.
- Data accuracy: Users have concerns about the accuracy of the data captured, especially regarding fake vs. real users.
- Difficulty in extracting actionable insights: While session recordings and heatmaps offer useful insights, many users find it challenging to turn these observations into actionable changes without additional analysis.
- Pricing concerns: Many users feel that Hotjar's pricing is too high, with essential features often restricted to higher-tier plans or hidden behind paywalls.
What Actual Microsoft Clarity Users Have to Say
- Positive Review: "Invaluable insights to understand website visitor behavior. I love that it's fully-featured and free. I can quickly see recordings of user activity on the site and observe behavior in ways that help me improve the user experience of any website." David V. K - Director of Growth Marketing
- Critical Review: "The user interface is simple and cannot perform high-end analytics. A challenging task to process and visualize a large amount of data using this tool. There is no option to filter traffic based on the traffic source or campaign. This software lacks the A/B testing tools needed for UX based testing. Needs further improvements to the design and user interface." Shaunak P. - Design Engineer
What Actual Hotjar Users Have to Say
- Positive Review: "Best tool to analyze user journey and experirnce. Hotjar gives us data in 20-25 min frequency which is amazing. Also, Implementing hotjar on website via GTM is pretty easy. Data analysis of sessions and clicks helps to see performance of the pages." Mansi S. -Data Analyst
- Critical Review: "Useful software but you can't fully depend on it. I dislike the fact that you can't know for sure if they are capturing all the traffic on your website. Maybe it's a problem of our own website, but it seems to capture lots of "fake" users and doesn't capture real users that I know for a fact have visited the page." - Maria M., Marketing Executive.
What People Are Saying About heatmap 🔥
- "$71,286 per month in revenue with 97% significance." - Spencer Pawliw after he downloaded heatmap, waited for 5k sessions, and reorganized products based on the highest revenue per session from top left to bottom right.
- "We're up 23% YoY" - Ashvin Melwani. "With heatmap, I've been able to figure out what elements actually increase AOV and optimize our landing pages to drive more first purchase profitability..."
- "Heatmap is a non-negotiable for all Ecom stores!" - Oliver Kenyon.
Comparing Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar’s Pricing
When comparing pricing, Microsoft Clarity stands out with its entirely free plan, offering unlimited heatmaps, 30 days of session recording retention (extendable with tagging), and support for up to 100,000 sessions daily.
In contrast, Hotjar provides a free plan with 35 sessions/day and unlimited heatmaps but scales through paid plans starting at $39/month, offering advanced features like custom filters and behavioral insights. Clarity is ideal for small businesses, while Hotjar’s tiered plans cater to growing and enterprise-level needs.
Let's explore the breakdown of the costs and features for each platform:
Bottom line:
- Microsoft Clarity offers a free plan with essential features, but has limitations in data retention and functionality, making it best for smaller sites or those starting out.
- Hotjar has more advanced features but at a higher cost. Its session-based pricing can get expensive for high-traffic sites, with premium features locked behind higher plans.
- heatmap offers scalable pricing based on revenue, not sessions, making it ideal for e-commerce businesses and teams who want predictable costs and maximum insights.
Not sure which tool suits you best? All platforms offer free trials, so you can try them out and see which one suits your needs best.
Have you tried heatmap.com?
Looking for more than just basic heatmaps and session recordings?
heatmap.com is a revenue-focused analytics platform that shows exactly how every element on your website impacts sales. Unlike traditional tools, heatmap ties revenue to each click, giving you insight into buyer behavior that goes beyond visits and pageviews. With tools like revenue-based heatmaps, scrollmaps, and screen recordings, it reveals which parts of your site drive the most value.
Backed by AI and CRO insights, heatmap helps ecommerce brands optimize their sites based on what truly matters—revenue per session. Easy to install on any CMS, heatmap transforms website optimization into a clear path to increased revenue.
Why teams choose heatmap.com over other analytics tools 🏆
Key features
- Revenue-based heatmaps: View revenue tied to every click on each element, providing clear insights into the financial impact of user interactions. Custom filters allow analysis by behavior, average order value (AOV), traffic source, and more.
- AI insights: One of the BIGGEST issues with tools like Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar? Users often struggle to make sense of the data. heatmap's AI engine takes behavioral data from visitor recordings and delivers actionable recommendations to optimize your pages for better results—whether it’s adjusting copy, rearranging sections, improving visuals, or more—making website optimization smarter and more revenue-focused.
- Dashboard & metrics: Access key metrics such as revenue per session, scroll depth, and high-traffic pages in an intuitive dashboard, enabling quick analysis of website performance.
- Session recordings that don't fall short: Session recordings that actually deliver: Unlike Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar, which may occasionally miss or record sessions inconsistently, Heatmap ensures reliable and smooth user recordings, providing teams with precise, actionable insights to effectively optimize their websites.
Other useful features of heatmap
- Interactive Scrollmaps: Unlike Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar, heatmap allows you to pinpoint where revenue drop-off occurs on your pages, offering insights beyond traditional engagement metrics to show where user interest fades and potential revenue is lost.
- Comparison mode: heatmap stands out with its ability to compare different user cohorts, such as purchasers vs. rage clickers, high vs. low AOV customers, and new vs. returning visitors—empowering data-driven A/B testing and audience segmentation for more targeted optimization.
- Filter options: With over 12 filters (including custom options), heatmap lets you slice data by AOV, traffic source, session type, and more, providing more granular insights compared to the more basic filtering in Clarity and Hotjar.
- JavaScript error tracking: heatmap's AI-powered tracking identifies JavaScript errors that impact site performance, offering actionable advice to quickly resolve issues—something not available in Microsoft Clarity.
- Rage click & top page analysis: heatmap gives you deep insights into high-engagement or problematic pages, with “rage click” data that allows you to fix user frustration points and enhance the overall experience, surpassing the basic user insights available in Clarity.
- Revenue Per Session (RPS): Unique to heatmap, this feature calculates how much revenue each page element generates based on site visits, providing a clear ROI metric that both Hotjar and Clarity lack.
- Privacy-focused analytics: Fully GDPR and CCPA compliant, heatmap ensures user privacy with anonymized session tracking.
- Site speed tracking: Built-in site performance tracking and optimization recommendations help improve load times, which is not a native feature in Microsoft Clarity and is only available in higher-tier Hotjar plans.
Summing Up - Microsoft Clarity vs Hotjar
To sum up, heatmaps are an invaluable tool for understanding user behavior on your website. Whether you're just starting to analyze your site or you're looking for advanced insights, choosing the right heatmap tool can help you make data-driven decisions that lead to better user engagement and higher conversion rates.
- Clarity – Best for beginners: A great free tool for basic heatmap functionality and insights.
- Hotjar – Best for advanced analytics: Ideal for deeper insights, offering a wide range of features.
- heatmap – Best Overall: A top choice for eCommerce businesses aiming to drive significant revenue growth and enhance user engagement.
Ultimately, heatmap is the key to unlocking actionable insights about your website's user experience. Ready to elevate your site’s performance?
Psst. Heatmap is the best Hotjar / Microsoft Clarity alternative - try it free for 14 days and hold us to it.
Heatmap.com is the only on-site analytics platform that ties revenue to every pixel on every page of your website. Finally, you can optimize for buyer behavior instead of site traffic.
Spencer Pawliw
@spencepawliw+ $71,286 per month in revenue with 97% significance.
How You Can Do It:
1: Download heatmap.com
2: Wait for 5k sessions
3: Reorganize products based on the highest revenue per session from top left to bottom right.
How You Can Do It:
1: Download heatmap
2: Wait for 5k sessions
3: Reorganize products based on the highest revenue per session from top left to bottom right.
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You made it all the way down here?
Might as well give us a shot, right? It'll change the way you approach CRO. We promise. In fact, our friend Nate over at Original Grain used element-level revenue data from heatmap to identify high-impact areas of his website to test, resulting in a 17% lift in Revenue per Session while scaling site traffic by 43%. Be like Nate. Try heatmap today.
