9 Best Heatmap Tools for 2026, Compared

A heatmap is the cheapest diagnostic in conversion work and the easiest to over-read. It shows where attention landed, not why the visitor left, and it cannot tell you what that visitor cost to acquire. This guide compares nine tools on prices read from each vendor's own page in September 2026, including one that meters pageviews rather than sessions and one that no longer publishes a price at all. One of the nine, Arktis, is ours, and the section says so.

The short answer: Arktis if you sell things, Clarity if you want free, Crazy Egg if heatmaps are the job

If you run an online store, Arktis is the clear winner over every tool on this list, because a heatmap answers the smaller half of the question. Knowing that people hesitate at the size selector is useful; knowing that the campaign sending those people costs more per customer than the customer is worth is what decides the month. Arktis captures the ad click identifiers on landing, matches Shopify orders and Stripe customers back to the visitor, reports customer acquisition cost and return on ad spend per campaign with five switchable attribution models, and plays the buyer's session recording next to the number. $49, $149 and $349 a month, published, with a 7-day trial on Growth.

Microsoft Clarity is free with no volume cap and no paid tier, which makes it the default answer for most sites. Crazy Egg remains the most heatmap-focused product in the category, with scrollmaps and A/B testing attached.

What a heatmap can and cannot tell you

Three types are standard. Click maps show where people pressed, including clicks on things that are not links, which is how you find a product image everyone expects to zoom. Scroll maps show how far down the page attention survived, which is the fastest way to discover that your strongest argument sits below the fold nobody reaches. Move maps track cursor position and are the weakest of the three, because cursor position correlates loosely with gaze and not at all on touch devices.

The limits matter more than the features. A heatmap aggregates, so it tells you what the average visitor did and hides the segment you care about unless the tool lets you filter by device, source or campaign before drawing. It also says nothing about intent: a cold click map and a hot one can produce the same revenue. And on a dynamic page, personalised blocks, cookie banners, variable stock messages, the aggregate is drawn over layouts that were never identical, so read those with suspicion.

Use a heatmap to generate a hypothesis, a session recording to test it, and a funnel or attribution report to decide whether it was worth fixing.

The 9 best heatmap tools

1. Arktis, the winner for online stores

Arktis is not a heatmap tool and does not pretend to be one. It is on this list because the decision a heatmap is usually feeding, what to change and where to spend, needs a number heatmaps cannot produce. Arktis captures the fbclid and gclid identifiers on landing, matches Shopify orders and Stripe customers to the visitor, and reports customer acquisition cost and return on ad spend per campaign with first-touch, last-touch, linear, time-decay and position-based models, with the attributed buyer's session recording next to it. Recordings are gated behind explicit consent, with capture buffered in the browser and discarded unless consent is given, and data hosted in the EU by default. $49, $149 and $349 a month with a 7-day trial on Growth.

The common pattern that works well is Clarity or Mouseflow for page-level diagnosis alongside Arktis for the commercial answer.

2. Microsoft Clarity, free with no volume cap

Clarity gives away click, scroll and area maps alongside session recordings, rage-click and dead-click detection, with no session limit and no paid tier to graduate to. Recordings are kept 30 days. Capterra rates it 4.8 out of 5 across 57 reviews. The analysis layer is thinner than paid tools and your data sits with Microsoft under Microsoft's terms, but for a site that checks heatmaps monthly rather than daily, paying for an alternative is hard to justify.

3. Crazy Egg, the heatmap specialist

Crazy Egg has been doing this longer than anyone and still leads with the report rather than the recording: click maps, scrollmaps, confetti views that segment clicks by source, plus A/B testing from the Plus tier. Every plan is billed annually with no monthly option: Starter $29 a month, billed annually, which works out at $348 a year, for 5,000 pageviews, 5 heatmap reports and 50 recordings; Plus $99 for 150,000 pageviews and 75 reports; Pro $249 for 500,000 pageviews; Enterprise $599 for a million. Domains and team members are unlimited, and there is a 30-day trial.

The meter is the thing to watch. Crazy Egg counts pageviews, not sessions, so a content site with long visits burns the allowance far faster than a store with short ones.

4. Contentsquare, where Hotjar went

Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare, and hotjar.com/pricing redirects there permanently. The free tier is the most generous among the paid tools here at 200,000 sessions a month, with replays capped at 5 percent of sessions up to 10,000, and paid from $49, and you get heatmaps, replay and on-site surveys in one place. Hotjar holds 4.6 out of 5 on Capterra across 545 reviews. The product now points toward an enterprise experience platform, which is why some small teams keep shopping.

5. Mouseflow, heatmaps plus friction scoring

Mouseflow draws click, scroll, attention, geographic and movement heatmaps, and its friction score ranks sessions by how badly they went, which turns a heatmap finding into a specific recording to watch. Free tier is permanent at 500 sessions a month with one project. Paid starts at 25 euro a month on annual billing or 39 euro month to month for 5,000 sessions, then 109 euro for 25,000 and 319 euro for 100,000, with unlimited users throughout and a 14-day trial. Capterra rates it 4.7 out of 5 across 122 reviews.

6. Lucky Orange, dynamic heatmaps and live chat

Lucky Orange handles dynamic content better than most, redrawing heatmaps against the layout each visitor actually saw, and bundles unlimited surveys and live chat. No free plan on the current pricing page, a 7-day trial, then $32 a month on annual billing for 3,500 sessions, $72 for 10,000, $199 for 50,000 and up. Base data storage starts at 60 days, with longer windows sold separately. Capterra rates it 4.7 out of 5 across 267 reviews.

7. LogRocket, heatmaps for engineering teams

LogRocket includes click maps, heatmaps and rage-click maps, but the reason to choose it is the rest of the stack: console output, network requests and errors attached to every session. It starts at $176 a month for 25,000 sessions through a calculator rather than a plan table, with no free tier, a 14-day trial, and retention as an unpublished priced variable. Capterra rates it 4.9 out of 5 across 28 reviews.

8. Matomo, heatmaps inside your own analytics

Matomo is the choice when the requirement is that behavioural data stays under your control. Self-hosted Community is free forever with unlimited hits, and heatmaps and session recording arrive in the Team plugin bundle at 2,750 euro a year for up to four users and five million hits a month. Matomo Cloud stores data in Europe and starts at about 22 euro a month for 50,000 hits, though Matomo prices by country with no currency selector, but caps the behavioural tools hard at 1,500 heatmap pageviews and 150 recordings a month on Business, so if heatmaps are the point then self-hosting is the honest route.

9. FullStory, when the heatmap is a by-product

FullStory autocaptures everything and derives heatmaps from that, which means you can ask retroactive questions no other tool here can answer. The free tier is 30,000 sessions a month, and paid tiers are quote only, with Vendr putting the median contract at $28,240 a year. Overkill if heatmaps are the main event, excellent if they are one output among many.

Two tools to leave out of a 2026 shortlist

Smartlook is being decommissioned after joining Cisco: end of sale on 31 May 2026, no renewals after 31 August 2026, support ending 31 August 2027, and the platform will be decommissioned on 30 September 2027 with all remaining customer data deleted.

VWO Insights no longer publishes a price. VWO merged with AB Tasty into the Wingify Platform, vwo.com redirects to wingify.com, and no tier publishes a price; every tier routes to a demo or a trial signup. Directory listings quoting a monthly price for it are pre-merger data.

How to choose

Start with the meter, because it decides the bill more than the tier does. Pageview metering suits stores with short visits and punishes content sites; session metering does the opposite. Then check whether the tool redraws heatmaps for dynamic content and whether you can segment before it draws, since an unsegmented heatmap on a personalised page is close to decorative. Then check retention, which ranges from 30 days for Clarity's recordings, though its heatmap data is kept nine months, to two years on Crazy Egg's higher tiers.

If the budget is zero, take Clarity. If heatmaps are the daily work, take Crazy Egg or Mouseflow. If you sell things and the real question is where the next thousand of ad budget should go, start the 7-day Arktis Growth trial and look at your own numbers. The tiers are on the pricing page, and session replay tools covers the recording side in the same depth.

Sources

Microsoft Clarity, free with no paid tier

Crazy Egg pricing page, accessed 16 September 2026, annual billing only

Contentsquare pricing page, accessed 16 September 2026

Mouseflow pricing page, accessed 16 September 2026; the same numerals render in euro from a European IP and in dollars elsewhere

Lucky Orange pricing page, accessed 16 September 2026

LogRocket pricing calculator, accessed 16 September 2026

Matomo pricing page, Cloud and On-Premise, accessed 16 September 2026

FullStory pricing page, accessed 16 September 2026

Capterra: Hotjar reviews, 4.6 out of 5 from 545 reviews

Smartlook: the future of Smartlook, end-of-life timeline

Wingify Platform pricing, the page vwo.com/pricing now redirects to