Free alternatives to Hotjar
Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare, and hotjar.com/pricing redirects there, which means the Basic and Plus plans you remember are gone. The current free tier caps you at 10,000 session replays a month on a single project, and the paid Growth ladder climbs in steps: $49 at 7,000 monthly sessions, $179 at 35,000, $739 at 200,000. If your traffic grows a little, your bill can move two bands, and that is what sends people looking.
Facts checked as of July 2026Read our Hotjar review
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Microsoft Clarity
Best Free Alternative ToHotjarDoes Hotjar's two headline jobs, session replay and heatmaps, with no traffic limit and no paid tier to upgrade to
Clarity is the obvious first move off Hotjar because it is the same product shape with the meter removed. Session recordings, click and scroll heatmaps, and automated insights that flag rage clicks, dead clicks, and quick backs, on unlimited traffic with no sampling. Microsoft's own FAQ states there are no traffic limits and no paid version, which is why most Hotjar free-tier users would struggle to name what they lost by switching.
- Completely free (as of July 2026)
- United States
United States- Best for:
- Almost anyone currently on Hotjar's free tier or its lowest Growth band
- The catch:
- Recordings are kept 30 days against Hotjar's 13-month data access, and Microsoft receives your visitors' behavioral data.
Compared to Hotjar
- Advantage: No session or replay cap versus Hotjar's 10,000 free replays per month
- Advantage: Free forever with no paid tier, against a ladder from $49 to $739 per month
- Advantage: Unlimited projects and team members versus 1 project on Hotjar free
- Worth knowing: Automated rage-click and dead-click insights comparable to Hotjar's
- Tradeoff: Thirty-day recording retention versus 13-month data access on Growth
- Tradeoff: Survey and feedback tooling is far thinner than Hotjar's
- Tradeoff: Behavioral data goes to Microsoft, with no self-hosted option
5,000 free session replays a month sitting on top of 1 million free product analytics events
PostHog is the better answer when you want to know not just what a user did on a page but where they are in your product. Watching a recording is one click from a funnel drop-off, heatmap data does not count against your bill at all, and you get feature flags and surveys in the same tool. The free tier covers 5,000 web recordings and 2,500 mobile recordings a month, alongside a million events and a million flag requests.
- Free plan (as of July 2026)
- United States
- Open source (MIT (with a proprietary ee/ directory))
- Best for:
- Product teams who want replay attached to real funnel and retention data
- The catch:
- The replay player and heatmap tooling are less refined than Hotjar's, and PostHog is a much heavier tool to learn.
Compared to Hotjar
- Advantage: Replay, heatmaps, product analytics, and feature flags in one free tier
- Advantage: 1M events per month free, which Hotjar does not offer at all
- Advantage: Heatmap data explicitly excluded from billing
- Advantage: Mobile session replay included on the free tier
- Tradeoff: 5,000 free replays against Hotjar's 10,000
- Tradeoff: Steeper learning curve than Hotjar's point-and-click setup
Session recordings and heatmaps on your own server, free and unlimited under GPL-3.0
Matomo is the option for teams that cannot send recordings to a third party at all. The self-hosted On-Premise edition includes session recording and heatmaps alongside full web analytics, with unlimited hits and unlimited users, and it runs on ordinary PHP and MySQL hosting. For public sector, healthcare, and EU organizations, being able to say the recordings never left the building is worth more than a nicer player.
- From €29/month (as of July 2026)
- New Zealand
- Open source (GPL-3.0)
New Zealand- Best for:
- Regulated teams and anyone with hard data residency requirements
- The catch:
- Free means you administer the server, and some behaviour plugins are sold separately on the self-hosted edition.
Compared to Hotjar
- Advantage: Recordings and heatmaps stay on infrastructure you control
- Advantage: Unlimited retention instead of Hotjar's 13-month ceiling
- Advantage: Full web analytics included, which Hotjar does not provide
- Advantage: No session or replay caps when self-hosted
- Tradeoff: The replay and heatmap experience is less polished than Hotjar's
- Tradeoff: Matomo Cloud has no free tier and starts at €29/month
- Tradeoff: Requires ongoing server administration
Replay and heatmaps bundled into a cookieless analytics tool with a free hosted plan
Umami added session replay in version 3.1 and made click and scroll heatmaps a first-class report in 3.2, which turns it into a plausible one-tool answer for small sites: the traffic numbers and the behaviour picture together, cookieless, with a free hosted plan and an MIT license. It is not the deepest replay tool here, but it may be the only one you need if your site is small and you also wanted to drop your consent banner.
- Free plan (as of July 2026)
- United States
- Open source (MIT)
- Best for:
- Small sites that want analytics and light behaviour data without two subscriptions
- The catch:
- The replay and heatmap features are recent and noticeably thinner than Clarity's or Hotjar's, and Umami does not publish its Cloud limits.
Compared to Hotjar
- Advantage: Cookieless analytics and behaviour data in one tool
- Advantage: Free hosted plan plus a free MIT-licensed self-hosted option
- Advantage: Full traffic analytics, which Hotjar does not do
- Tradeoff: Replay and heatmaps are much less developed than Hotjar's
- Tradeoff: No on-site surveys or feedback widgets
- Tradeoff: Cloud replay allowances are not published anywhere verifiable
Replaces the analytics half of your Hotjar setup with funnels and goals, and nothing else
We are including Plausible with a clear warning: it has no session replay and no heatmaps, deliberately, because aggregate-only data is how it stays cookieless. If you have been using Hotjar's funnels and traffic views rather than its recordings, Plausible does that job better and lighter. Pair it with Clarity and you have covered everything Hotjar did, for less than Hotjar's cheapest paid band.
- From $9/month (as of July 2026)
- Estonia
- Open source (AGPL-3.0)
Estonia- Best for:
- Teams who used Hotjar for funnels and want a cleaner tool for that specific job
- The catch:
- No replay, no heatmaps, and no free hosted plan, just a 30-day trial and then $9 per month.
Compared to Hotjar
- Advantage: Funnels and goals with no cookies and no consent banner
- Advantage: Sub-1 KB script versus Hotjar's much heavier recording tag
- Advantage: Free and unlimited if you self-host the AGPL edition
- Tradeoff: No session replay at all
- Tradeoff: No heatmaps at all
- Tradeoff: Plausible Cloud has no free tier, unlike Hotjar
Free funnel and drop-off reporting at any traffic volume, if you only need the numbers
GA4 will tell you that 60 percent of people abandon your checkout, at any traffic level, for free. It will never show you why, because it has no recordings and no heatmaps. Most teams that leave Hotjar over price end up running GA4 for the numbers and Clarity for the behaviour, which costs nothing and covers both halves. It is a worse single tool than Hotjar and a better free pair.
- Free plan (as of July 2026)
- United States
- Best for:
- Teams already on GA4 who only used Hotjar's funnel reports
- The catch:
- No replay, no heatmaps, no surveys, plus GA4's own sampling and 14-month retention limits.
Compared to Hotjar
- Advantage: Free at any traffic volume, with no session ladder
- Advantage: Funnel and drop-off analysis included
- Advantage: Google Ads and Search Console integration Hotjar has never had
- Tradeoff: No session recordings or heatmaps at all
- Tradeoff: No on-site surveys or feedback widgets
- Tradeoff: Explorations sample above 10M events per query and retention caps at 14 months
How to choose
For most people this is a short decision. Microsoft Clarity does replay and heatmaps with no traffic limit and no paid tier, so try it first and see whether you miss anything. If you need replay tied to real product analytics, PostHog's free tier gives you 5,000 recordings alongside a million events. If data residency or ownership is the issue, Matomo self-hosted gives you recordings and heatmaps on your own server. The one thing none of the free options match is Hotjar's 13-month data access, so if looking back a year matters, paying is the honest answer.