Microsoft Clarity vs Hotjar: is the free tool enough?

Microsoft Clarity vs Hotjar used to be an easy call on price: Clarity cost nothing, and Hotjar’s free plan was tiny. In October 2026 the picture has shifted. Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare, new accounts open on Contentsquare, and its free plan has become far more generous. The question behind the search has not changed, though: is the free tool enough for a small business website?

For most small business sites, my answer is yes. I use Microsoft Clarity to see where people engage on a page, whether they came for something specific and which areas make them leave, so I can tell whether the copy, a picture or the layout is the problem. That is the job a small site needs done, and Clarity does it for free, on as many sites as you like.

Hotjar, which now lives inside Contentsquare, goes further when you also want to ask visitors questions, keep more history on a paid plan or run research as a team. This comparison covers features, limits, prices at the time of writing (October 2026) and consent, the part that is easiest to forget. It belongs with the other small business marketing tools I review.

Microsoft Clarity vs Hotjar at a glance

Both tools answer one question: what do visitors actually do on your pages? A heatmap colours a page according to where people click and how far they scroll. A session recording replays a single visit, with every scroll, click and pause, so you can watch the page the way your visitor saw it.

These figures come from Microsoft’s documentation and Contentsquare’s pricing and plan pages at the time of writing. On Contentsquare’s free plan, once a monthly allowance is used up, collection stops until the 1st of the next month. Contentsquare has changed these limits before, so check them again before you decide.

What happened to Hotjar: it now lives inside Contentsquare

For years, Hotjar was the name many people gave to heatmaps. It now belongs to Contentsquare, a larger analytics platform aimed at marketing, product and e-commerce teams, and Hotjar’s own site says new Hotjar accounts can no longer be created. If you sign up today, you open a Contentsquare account.

The free offer changed with it. Hotjar’s old free plan captured 35 sessions a day; Contentsquare’s free plan covers 200,000 sessions a month, with funnels on top of the heatmaps, recordings and surveys listed in the table. For a small business site, those limits are generous.

What you sign up for, though, is a bigger platform, with user tests and interviews on top of heatmaps, recordings and surveys. For an owner who checks the website once a month, it is more tool than the job needs.

What Microsoft Clarity gives you for free

Microsoft Clarity is a free behaviour analytics tool: you add one tracking code to your site, and it records how visitors use your pages. Once it is installed, you get:

• click and scroll heatmaps for every page;
• session recordings you can filter, for example by page or by device;
• a dashboard that flags signs of frustration, such as rage clicks (several fast clicks in the same spot), dead clicks (clicks on something that does nothing) and quick backs (visitors who open a page and soon return to the previous one);
• a Google Analytics integration and installation through Google Tag Manager, both offered on its setup page.

Microsoft lists Clarity as free, with unlimited sites and heatmaps. Its FAQ sets the limits: up to 100,000 sessions per project per day, with recordings kept for 30 days (Microsoft Clarity FAQ). A local business site is unlikely to get anywhere near 100,000 visits a day, so the only limit you will feel is the 30 days. Watch your recordings within the month and mark the ones worth keeping as favourites: Microsoft’s data retention page gives 9 months for favourites and for heatmap data at the time of writing.

Since 29 August 2025, Clarity has also sorted visits from AI assistants (ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini and Perplexity) into channels of their own, AIPlatform and PaidAIPlatform. If you want to know whether ChatGPT sends you visitors, my guide on how to track AI traffic in GA4, Search Console and Clarity shows where to look.

What Clarity does not do is ask questions. It shows behaviour, not reasons: you see that people leave halfway down your services page, not what they were thinking when they left. For the why, you need a survey, a feedback button or a conversation.

Where Hotjar goes further: surveys, history and teams

Contentsquare’s advantage lies in everything around the recordings.

Surveys and feedback

You can ask visitors a question on the page itself: what they were looking for, what stopped them, why they did not get in touch. A recording shows where someone hesitated; a one-question survey can tell you why. The free plan caps responses at 100 a month, with three surveys or feedback widgets live at once according to its plan table, which is plenty for a small site.

More history, but only on a paid plan

On free plans, Clarity actually keeps more: one month of data on Contentsquare’s free plan, against 30 days of recordings and 9 months of favourites and heatmap data on Clarity. The longer history comes with Contentsquare’s paid plans, which keep up to 13 months of data according to its pricing page, with a shorter period for session replays. That matters if you compare seasons, or measure a redesign against the same months of the previous year. On a small site, saving the telling recordings as favourites in Clarity covers most of that need.

Tools for a research team

Contentsquare is built for teams that study their website every week: surveys, user tests, interviews and paid tiers sized for large sites. If several people in your company work on conversion full time, it gives them more to work with than Clarity does. If that person is you, between two client jobs, Clarity covers what you need.

Prices in October 2026

Here is what each tool costs at the time of writing (October 2026).

These are the US-dollar prices on Contentsquare’s pricing page at the time of writing. Contentsquare says its European customers are billed in euros, so a UK business may be invoiced in euros rather than pounds: check the currency and the amount on the Contentsquare pricing page before you subscribe. The annual price is a 20 per cent discount on the monthly one, and the monthly plan needs no annual contract: you can drop back to the free plan at any time.

Whichever you choose, the real cost is the time you spend watching recordings and acting on them.

Consent: both tools need your cookie banner

A recording tool uses cookies or similar trackers and captures what visitors do on your pages, so the cookie and consent rules apply to it: PECR in the UK, the ePrivacy rules in the EU.

Microsoft has made this explicit for Clarity. Since 31 October 2025, Clarity needs a consent signal for visitors in the European Economic Area, the UK and Switzerland: your cookie banner must pass each visitor’s choice to Clarity, through what Microsoft calls Consent API v2 (Microsoft’s consent documentation). Without that signal, Clarity sets no cookies for those visitors, and features such as session recordings may be limited. Clarity is a Microsoft product, so it is also worth checking how the GDPR treats US tools.

If your site has visitors in France, keep an eye on the CNIL, France’s data protection authority: it put a draft recommendation on session replay tools out to public consultation from 25 February to 22 April 2026. The draft treats session replay as reading and writing data on the visitor’s device, so prior consent is the rule. The post-consultation version was on the agenda of the CNIL’s plenary session of 8 October 2026, but no final text had been published at the time of writing (CNIL consultation page). In the UK, new cookie exemptions have applied since February 2026 under the Data (Use and Access) Act 2025, but Microsoft still asks for a consent signal from UK visitors, so the banner stays.

Whatever the final French text says, this is how I would set up either tool today:

1. Load it only after the visitor accepts, and make sure your banner passes that choice to the tool.
2. Mask form fields and any part of a page that shows personal details. Both tools have masking settings: check them before you go live.
3. Name the tool and mention session recordings in your cookie banner and your privacy policy.
4. Keep it off pages that display personal information, such as a client area.

How I use Clarity to find out why visitors leave

My use of Clarity comes down to one question per page: is it the copy, a picture or the layout that makes people leave? Here is a simple way to answer it on your own site:

1. Pick the page that should bring enquiries: the home page, a service page or a landing page.
2. Open its scroll heatmap and find the point where most visitors stop. If your phone number or your main button sits below that line, most people never see it.
3. Open the click heatmap. Clicks on things that are not links, such as a photo or a heading, show what people expected to open.
4. Filter the recordings by that page and by a frustration signal such as rage clicks or quick backs, then watch a handful of visits that ended without an enquiry and ask what each visitor was looking for.
5. Decide what to change: the words, an image or the layout. Change one thing, then give it a few weeks before you compare.

Clarity shows you where the problem is; fixing it is a separate job. My guide for when your website is not getting enquiries covers the usual causes and their fixes, and my tutorial on how to use Microsoft Clarity walks you through the installation and each report.

My verdict: is the free tool enough for a small site?

Yes, for most small business websites. A local service business, a consultant or a small B2B company needs to know where visitors stop and what puts them off. Clarity shows that for free, on every site you own, and a small site is unlikely to reach its limits.

Choose Microsoft Clarity if:

• you want heatmaps and recordings without adding a subscription;
• you run several websites, as some of my clients do, and want them all in one free account;
• you want visits from AI assistants to show up next to the rest of your traffic.

Choose Hotjar, now part of Contentsquare, if:

• you want to ask visitors questions on the page, with surveys and feedback;
• you want up to 13 months of data, which means a paid plan;
• a team studies the website every week and will use the user tests and interviews.

Search Console completes the picture for free: it shows which searches bring people to a page, and Clarity shows what they do once they arrive. My guide on how to use Google Search Console covers that half.

The shiny-object trap applies here as well. A research platform you open twice a year is worth less than a free tool you check every month. Start with Clarity, act on what it shows, and pay for more only when you have a question it cannot answer.

Before you install anything: a short checklist

1. List the pages that should bring calls, bookings or form requests: those are the pages to watch.
2. Install Clarity: one tracking code in the head of every page. On Squarespace, it goes into code injection, which my guide to Squarespace code injection explains.
3. Connect it to your cookie banner the same day, and mention it in your privacy policy.
4. Check the masking settings, so that form fields and personal details stay hidden.
5. Put an hour a month in your diary to watch recordings, and leave each session with one change to make.
6. Add a survey, with Contentsquare’s free plan or a one-question form, only if the recordings leave you guessing why people leave.

You do not need me to set up Clarity: an afternoon is enough, banner included. Where I come in is the step after, when the recordings show that the page itself is the problem, through its structure, its copy or its design, and it needs rebuilding rather than tweaking. That is the work behind my website design service.