Best Hotjar Alternatives That Are Free (or Much Cheaper)

Hotjar got expensive. The free plan now caps daily sessions hard, and the paid tiers jumped after the Contentsquare acquisition. If you're running a landing page that gets a few thousand visitors a month, you probably don't need Hotjar's enterprise features. You need heatmaps, session recordings, and maybe a funnel view, without paying $80+ a month.

Here are seven Hotjar alternatives that are either free or notablely cheaper, ranked by what they're actually good at.

Microsoft Clarity (free, no limits)

Clarity is the answer most people land on, and for good reason. It's completely free with no session caps, no user caps, and no feature gates. Microsoft owns it, monetizes it through anonymized data for advertising, and gives away the product.

What you get:

• Unlimited heatmaps (click, scroll, area)
• Unlimited session recordings
• Dead click and rage click detection
• JavaScript error tracking
• Funnel analysis
• GA4 integration

What's missing compared to Hotjar: on-page surveys and feedback widgets. If you want to ask visitors why they bounced, Clarity won't do it. You'll need a separate tool like Formbricks or Tally.

The dashboard is fast. The recordings load quickly. The "smart events" feature auto-detects clicks on buttons and forms without you tagging anything. For most landing page work, Clarity does 90% of what Hotjar does for $0.

The catch: you're sending behavioral data to Microsoft. If that's a problem for your privacy posture or your customers', skip it.

Plausible + Open Source Heatmaps (cheap and private)

If you care about privacy or you're hosting in the EU, you can stitch together a cheaper stack. Plausible for analytics ($9/month for 10k pageviews) plus an open source heatmap tool like Heatmap.com's free tier or self-hosted PostHog gives you most of what Hotjar offers.

This works best if you already use Plausible. It's not a one-click setup. But the total cost stays under $20/month even at scale, and you keep your data.

For a deeper look at heatmap tools specifically, check our breakdown of the best heatmap tools for landing page UX analysis.

PostHog (free up to 1M events)

PostHog is a product analytics platform that includes heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, feature flags, and A/B testing. The free tier covers 1 million events, 5,000 recordings, and 1,000 survey responses per month.

For a landing page, 5,000 recordings is plenty. You're not watching every single one anyway. You filter by behavior: rage clicks, form abandonment, scroll depth under 25%.

What makes PostHog interesting:

• One tool for analytics, recordings, heatmaps, and A/B tests
• Self-hostable if you want to keep data on your servers
• Open source, so the project isn't going anywhere

What's annoying: the interface is dense. It's built for product teams running complex apps, not solo founders checking one landing page. The learning curve is real. Budget a couple of hours to set it up properly.

If you're already thinking about A/B testing your landing page, PostHog can replace three or four tools at once.

Lucky Orange ($32/month)

Lucky Orange isn't free, but it's cheaper than Hotjar's paid tiers and has features Hotjar charges extra for. The starting plan includes heatmaps, recordings, live chat, surveys, and conversion funnels.

The interesting feature is live view: you can watch visitors interact with your page in real time. Useful when you're running a launch and want to see what people do in the first hour.

It's the closest feature-for-feature Hotjar replacement at half the price. If you liked Hotjar's product but hated the bill, this is the swap.

Mouseflow (free plan: 500 recordings/month)

Mouseflow has a free plan with 500 monthly recordings and one heatmap. That's tight, but for a single landing page that gets 5,000 visitors a month, you only need a sample anyway. Set the recording rate to 10% and you'll have plenty.

Paid plans start at $31/month and scale by traffic. Mouseflow's friction scoring is its standout feature: it ranks recordings by likely user frustration so you don't have to watch random sessions hoping to find something useful.

Smartlook (free plan: 1,500 sessions/month)

Smartlook gives you 1,500 sessions per month free, plus three heatmaps and basic funnels. Paid plans start around $55/month, which puts it between Lucky Orange and Hotjar.

It's solid but doesn't stand out against Clarity on the free end or Lucky Orange on the paid end. Worth testing if you find the others don't fit your workflow.

Formbricks (free, open source surveys)

Formbricks isn't a Hotjar replacement on its own. It's a survey and feedback tool. But if you pair it with Clarity, you cover the one feature Clarity lacks: asking visitors questions.

The cloud version has a free tier. You can also self-host it. Use it for exit-intent surveys, post-purchase feedback, or "what stopped you from signing up" prompts on your landing page.

Clarity + Formbricks = full Hotjar feature parity at $0.

What to actually pick

Here's the short version, by use case:

Solo founder, one landing page, want it free: Microsoft Clarity. Done. Move on.

Privacy-conscious or EU-based: PostHog (self-hosted) or Plausible plus a heatmap tool.

You want one tool that does analytics, recordings, heatmaps, and A/B tests: PostHog. It's a bigger commitment but replaces a stack.

You loved Hotjar but hated the price: Lucky Orange. Same product feel, lower bill.

You need surveys plus recordings on a budget: Clarity + Formbricks.

For most readers on this site, the answer is Clarity. It's free, it works, the setup takes ten minutes, and you can spend the saved budget on traffic or copywriting instead of tools.

What you actually do with these tools

Picking the tool is the easy part. The harder question: what do you look for once it's installed?

A few things worth checking in your first session:

1. Scroll depth on your hero. If 60% of visitors don't scroll past the fold, your headline or hero design is the problem. We wrote about hero sections that convert if that's where you land.
2. Rage clicks on non-clickable elements. People clicking your hero image or a bold word means they expect it to do something. Either make it clickable or restyle it.
3. Form field drop-off. Watch five recordings of people who started but didn't finish your form. You'll spot the field that kills it.
4. Mobile vs desktop scroll patterns. Mobile users behave differently. Filter your heatmaps by device.

Three or four sessions of focused watching beats a week of staring at dashboards.

Why we're picky about heatmap tools

At PagePulse, we analyze landing pages and tell you what's broken before you waste ad spend. Heatmap tools are part of how we do it, and we've used most of the options on this list. Clarity gets recommended most often because it removes the cost objection entirely. There's no reason not to install it today.

If you want a faster path: drop your landing page URL into PagePulse and we'll tell you what's killing conversions, no heatmap setup required. You'll get specific fixes in minutes, not after weeks of session recordings. Use the heatmap tool to validate the fixes after you ship them.