9 Hotjar Alternatives Compared for 2026

Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare, and hotjar.com/pricing redirects permanently to the Contentsquare pricing page. For most people that is the reason they are here: the plan they signed up for has been renamed, repackaged, or absorbed into something larger. This guide compares nine alternatives on prices read from each vendor's own page in September 2026, including two that most round-ups still get wrong. One of the nine, Arktis, is ours, and the section says so.

The short answer: Arktis for stores, Clarity if you want free, Mouseflow if you want a like-for-like swap

If you run an online store, Arktis is the clear winner here and it is not a close call. Every other tool on this list shows you where visitors hesitate; only Arktis connects the order back to the ad that produced it. It captures the fbclid and gclid identifiers when a visitor lands, imports Shopify orders, matches Stripe customers, then reports customer acquisition cost and return on ad spend per campaign with five switchable attribution models, and plays the session recording of each attributed buyer next to that number. Priced on monthly tracked visitors at $49, $149 and $349 a month, every tier published, with a 7-day free trial on Growth.

If you just want heatmaps and replay for nothing, Microsoft Clarity is free with no session cap and no paid tier. If you want the closest like-for-like replacement for old Hotjar, Mouseflow is it, with a permanent free tier of 500 sessions a month.

Two things most Hotjar round-ups still get wrong

Smartlook is shutting down. It has joined Cisco, and its own transition notice sets out the timeline: end of sale on 31 May 2026, no further renewals or expansions after 31 August 2026, support ends 31 August 2027, and the platform is decommissioned on 30 September 2027 with all remaining customer data deleted. The migration path is Digital Experience Analytics inside Splunk Observability Cloud, and existing subscriptions are not transferred automatically. Any 2026 guide still listing Smartlook as a Hotjar alternative was not checked this year.

VWO no longer publishes a price. VWO has 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. VWO Insights is now Behaviour Analytics, with no public price at any tier. Third-party directories still list a monthly figure for it; the vendor's own page contradicts them.

The 9 best Hotjar alternatives

1. Arktis, the winner for online stores

Heatmaps tell you that people hesitated at the size selector. They cannot tell you that the campaign sending those people costs more per customer than the customer is worth. For a store, the second question is the one that decides the month.

Arktis is an attribution and user journey platform for e-commerce. It captures ad click identifiers at the landing page, holds them against the visitor across sessions, matches Stripe customers back through a four-pass waterfall and Shopify orders on email, campaign and checkout token, then reports customer acquisition cost and return on ad spend per campaign with first-touch, last-touch, linear, time-decay and position-based models so you can see how much the answer depends on the model. Session recordings of the attributed buyers sit next to the numbers, gated behind explicit consent, with capture buffered in the browser and discarded unless consent is given, and data hosted in the EU by default.

Starter is $49 a month for 50,000 monthly tracked visitors, Growth is $149 for 250,000 with recordings and custom models, Scale is $349 for unlimited with API access and raw export. Growth has a 7-day free trial.

Where it does not fit: Arktis is not a UX research suite. It has no on-site surveys and no dedicated heatmap editor, so a research team whose entire job is page-level usability will be happier in one of the tools below.

2. Microsoft Clarity, free with no catch on volume

Clarity gives away heatmaps, session recordings, rage-click and dead-click detection with no session cap and no paid tier at all. It holds 4.8 out of 5 on Capterra, and for a tool that costs nothing that is remarkable. The price of admission is Microsoft's terms and the fact that your behavioural data sits with an advertising company. There is no funnel builder to speak of and no attribution.

For most small sites the right move is Clarity plus one tool that answers a commercial question, rather than paying for a mid-tier replay product.

3. Contentsquare, which is where Hotjar went

If you liked Hotjar, the product is still there under a new name, and the free tier is now unusually generous: 200,000 sessions a month, with replays capped at 5 percent of sessions up to 10,000, with paid plans starting at $49 a month, or $39 on annual billing. Heatmaps, replay and on-site surveys all remain. The reason people leave is not the product, it is that the packaging now points upward toward an enterprise experience platform, and the roadmap follows the enterprise buyer rather than the small site.

4. Mouseflow, the closest like-for-like swap

Mouseflow does what Hotjar did: replays, click, scroll and geographic heatmaps, friction detection, funnels and surveys. The free tier is permanent at 500 sessions a month with one project and one month of retention. Paid starts at 25 euro a month on annual billing, or 39 euro month to month, for 5,000 sessions; Advanced is 109 euro annual for 25,000 sessions and Premium 319 euro for 100,000. Users are unlimited on every plan, and there is a 14-day trial.

Mouseflow shows the same numerals in euro to European visitors and in dollars everywhere else, so read 25 as 25 euro or 25 dollars depending on where you are. It holds 4.7 out of 5 on Capterra across 122 reviews.

5. Lucky Orange, replay plus live chat

Lucky Orange bundles dynamic heatmaps, replay, funnels, unlimited surveys and live chat, which makes it the best fit if you want one tool for both watching and talking to visitors. The current pricing page lists no free plan, only a 7-day trial. Build is $32 a month on annual billing or $39 month to month for 3,500 sessions, Grow is $72 annual for 10,000, Expand is $199 annual for 50,000 and up. Data retention starts at 60 days, with 90, 180 and 365-day upgrades sold separately. Capterra rates it 4.7 out of 5 across 267 reviews.

6. Crazy Egg, the heatmap specialist

Crazy Egg is the oldest name here and still the most focused on heatmaps and scrollmaps, with A/B testing on higher tiers. Every plan is billed annually, with no month-to-month option: Starter is $29 a month, billed annually, which works out at $348 a year, for 5,000 pageviews, 5 heatmap reports and 50 recordings; Plus is $99 for 150,000 pageviews and 1,000 recordings; Pro is $249 for 500,000 pageviews. Domains and team members are unlimited on every plan and there is a 30-day trial. Note that it meters pageviews, not sessions, which makes it cheap for a low-traffic site with deep sessions and expensive for the opposite.

7. LogRocket, replay for engineering teams

LogRocket is the tool to choose when the people watching the recordings are the people who will fix the bug. It combines replay with error monitoring, console and network logs, path analysis and heatmaps, and it prices on sessions captured through a calculator rather than a plan table, starting at $176 a month for 25,000 sessions. There is no free tier, only a 14-day trial, and data retention is a priced variable that is not published. Capterra rates it 4.9 out of 5, the highest in this list, across 28 reviews.

8. Matomo, if the requirement is ownership

Matomo is the answer when a policy says the data stays yours. The self-hosted Community edition is free forever with unlimited hits and users; heatmaps and session recording are a paid plugin bundle, included from the Team tier at 2,750 euro a year for up to four users and five million hits a month. Matomo Cloud starts at about 22 euro a month for 50,000 hits with data stored in Europe, and prices by country with no currency selector, so check the figure for your own. Cloud caps the behavioural tools tightly: 1,500 heatmap pageviews and 150 session recordings a month on Business.

Matomo is the only tool on this list with anything attribution-shaped, through its Multi-Channel Conversion Attribution and Advertising Conversion Export plugins. Read the direction carefully: it exports conversions to ad platforms, it does not import ad spend, so it cannot compute customer acquisition cost or return on ad spend.

9. FullStory, when replay is the whole job

FullStory has the deepest replay and autocapture in the category, a free tier of 30,000 sessions a month, and quote-only pricing on everything above it; Vendr puts the median contract at $28,240 a year. If a dedicated research team will use it every day, it earns that. If replay is a thing you check twice a month, it does not.

What none of them do

None of the eight tools other than Arktis ingests advertising spend, which means none of them can report customer acquisition cost or return on ad spend. Matomo exports conversions to ad platforms and Plausible reports e-commerce revenue by channel on its Business plan, and both stop short of the same wall: without spend in the tool, there is no cost per customer. For a store spending money on Meta and Google, that is the number the whole exercise exists to produce.

Arktis is ours, so weigh this accordingly, but the gap is structural rather than a matter of opinion. To see attribution and recordings on your own traffic, start the 7-day Growth trial. Tiers are on the pricing page, Hotjar pricing covers what changed under Contentsquare, and ecommerce attribution software compares ten tools built for the commercial question.

How to choose

If the budget is zero, take Clarity and stop reading. If you need Hotjar's feature set with a permanent free tier, take Mouseflow. If engineers will own it, take LogRocket. If a data residency rule decides it, take Matomo. If you sell things online and you are deciding which campaigns to cut this week, none of the heatmap tools have the data you need, and that is the case for Arktis.

Sources

hotjar.com/pricing, confirmed on 16 September 2026 to redirect permanently to Contentsquare

Contentsquare pricing page, accessed 16 September 2026

Microsoft Clarity, free with no paid tier

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

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

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

Smartlook: the future of Smartlook, end-of-life timeline and Cisco transition

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

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