10 Hotjar Alternatives in 2026: Heatmaps, Replay, Surveys

Hotjar alternatives are worth a fresh look in 2026 because Hotjar has merged into Contentsquare, and new users can no longer create a Hotjar account. Hotjar's core toolkit covers four jobs: heatmaps, session recordings, on-site surveys and feedback widgets. This guide sorts the best Hotjar alternatives by which of those jobs they cover, with prices and limits taken from each vendor's own pages.

The short version: Microsoft Clarity replaces heatmaps and recordings for free but has no surveys. Mouseflow and Lucky Orange cover all four jobs in one paid tool. PostHog adds product analytics and surveys with a monthly free tier. OpenReplay and Matomo are the self-hosted options with heatmaps. Rybbit, which we build, suits teams that mostly watched recordings and want them next to funnels and conversion data; it has no heatmaps or surveys.

Disclosure: we build Rybbit. Every claim about the other tools comes from that vendor's own pricing or documentation pages, linked inline and checked in September 2026. Prices are the US-dollar figures those pages show; some vendors show euros to European visitors.

Hotjar is now Contentsquare

Contentsquare's Hotjar page puts it plainly: "Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare. The two platforms have merged into a single, more powerful experience intelligence platform," and "it's no longer possible to create a new account on Hotjar." Existing users can still log in, and hotjar.com/pricing redirects to Contentsquare's pricing page, where Hotjar's toolkit is now split across products:

• Experience Analytics (heatmaps, replays, funnels, error monitoring). Free covers 200,000 sessions a month for the whole account, 10,000 replays and 1 project, with one month of data according to Contentsquare's free plan announcement. Growth starts at $49/month ($39 billed yearly) for 7,000 sessions and 7,000 replays, and costs $409/month at 100,000 sessions, where replays stay at 20,000. Replays are "a fixed amount per month — it can't be increased." Growth keeps session data for 13 months and replays for 2 months.
• Voice of Customer (surveys and feedback widgets). Free includes 100 responses a month, with 3 surveys or widgets live at a time. Growth starts at $99/month ($79 billed yearly) for 500 responses.
• Interviews and user tests (Hotjar Engage). These are "no longer available for purchase by new customers," per Hotjar's help center.

Contentsquare also sells Product Analytics as a third product, free up to 10,000 monthly sessions. Staying is reasonable if the free quotas fit and you want heatmaps, recordings and surveys behind one login. The reasons to look elsewhere are specific: replays stop scaling with sessions on paid plans (20,000 replays at 100,000 sessions), surveys are billed as a separate product, and the pricing page lists no self-hosted option.

Hotjar alternatives and competitors at a glance

"No" under self-host means the vendor's pricing page lists only hosted plans. PostHog's self-hosted build includes only its free-plan features and is officially unsupported. Matomo's heatmaps and recordings are a paid plugin when you self-host and are included in Matomo Cloud.

Alternatives to Hotjar by the feature you use

• Heatmaps. Clarity gives you click and scroll maps for free with no traffic limits. Mouseflow, Lucky Orange and Crazy Egg are heatmap-first tools, and PostHog, FullStory, LogRocket, OpenReplay and Matomo include heatmaps next to their other features. Rybbit has none.
• Recordings. Every tool here records sessions, which most vendors call session replay; Crazy Egg's free plan doesn't list them. Free allowances differ the most: Clarity is unlimited, Contentsquare Free has 10,000 replays a month, FullStory's free plan covers 30,000 sessions, PostHog 5,000 recordings and Mouseflow 500 sessions. If recordings are all you need from Hotjar, our session replay tools comparison goes deeper on masking, sampling and retention.
• Surveys and feedback widgets. Lucky Orange includes unlimited surveys on every plan, and Crazy Egg includes them even on its free plan. PostHog gives 1,500 responses a month free, LogRocket lists surveys on its Core plan, Mouseflow starts at its Advanced plan, and FullStory sells them as an add-on. Clarity, OpenReplay, Matomo and Rybbit have no surveys.
• Funnels and product analytics. Clarity, Mouseflow, Lucky Orange and Crazy Egg include conversion funnels. PostHog, FullStory, LogRocket, OpenReplay and Rybbit add event-based product analytics on top.
• Interviews and user tests. Engage is no longer sold to new customers. PostHog's surveys can book user interviews from in-app templates; for recruiting participants and running tests, you'll need a dedicated research tool.

The best free Hotjar alternative

Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity is the usual answer to "free Hotjar alternative". Its FAQ says: "Clarity is a free service forever. You never encounter traffic limits or are compelled to upgrade to a paid version." There's no sampling and no limit on the number of sites. The feature list covers session recordings, heatmaps (click and scroll maps), event and funnel tracking, and Copilot summaries, and there are SDKs for Android, iOS, Flutter and React Native apps.

The limits are retention and consent. Recordings are kept for 30 days (favorites and a random sample for up to 9 months), heatmaps stay available for 9 months, and each heatmap draws on up to 100,000 page views. For visitors in the EEA, UK and Switzerland, Clarity expects a consent signal; without one, the FAQ says, sessions are fragmented and "full session replays and user journey continuity are unavailable."

• Covers: heatmaps, recordings, funnels, AI summaries
• Missing or limited: no surveys or feedback widgets; 30-day recording retention; consent signal needed for European visitors
• Pricing (September 2026): free, with no paid plan. Source: Clarity FAQ

Closest like-for-like Hotjar replacements

Hotjar's help center groups its product into Observe tools (heatmaps and recordings) and Ask tools (surveys and feedback). These three cover both in a single product, at published prices.

Mouseflow

Mouseflow lines up most closely with Hotjar's feature set. Every plan, Free included, gets session replays, conversion funnels, friction detection, unlimited users, and click, scroll and geo heatmaps. Feedback surveys, with NPS scoring and branch logic, start at the Advanced plan, along with attention and movement heatmaps. Form analytics start at Premium and journey analytics at Enterprise, per the pricing page.

Plans are sized by monthly sessions. Free covers 500 sessions and 1 month of data. Essential is $39/month ($25 billed yearly) for 5,000 sessions and 3 months; Advanced is $149/month ($109 yearly) for 25,000 sessions and 6 months; Premium is $399/month ($319 yearly) for 100,000 sessions and 12 months. The 14-day trial needs no credit card.

• Covers: heatmaps, recordings, funnels, friction detection; surveys and feedback from Advanced
• Missing or limited: no surveys on Free or Essential; form analytics only from Premium
• Pricing (September 2026): free for 500 sessions a month; paid from $39/month, or $25/month billed yearly. Source: mouseflow.com/pricing

Lucky Orange

Lucky Orange keeps packaging simple: every plan has every feature. The pricing page lists dynamic heatmaps, session recordings, unlimited surveys and announcements, live chat, a live visitor view, conversion funnels, and page and form analytics on all plans, with unlimited team members. Its Discovery AI is an add-on.

You pay by sessions. Build is $39/month ($32 billed yearly) for 3,500 sessions and Grow is $72/month billed yearly for 10,000. Expand is $199/month billed yearly ($249 monthly) from 50,000, and Scale is $839/month billed yearly ($1,049 monthly) from 300,000. Data is kept for 60 days by default, with 90, 180 or 365-day upgrades, and each extra site costs $5. There's no free plan, only a 7-day trial.

• Covers: heatmaps, recordings, surveys, announcements, funnels, form analytics, plus live chat
• Missing or limited: no free plan; 60-day default retention
• Pricing (September 2026): from $39/month, or $32/month billed yearly, for 3,500 sessions. Source: luckyorange.com/pricing

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is heatmap-first and prices by tracked pageviews, with a separate, smaller recording allowance. According to its pricing page, the free plan needs no credit card and includes web analytics, instant heatmaps, conversion analytics and on-site surveys. Paid plans are billed annually. Starter is $29/month for 5,000 tracked pageviews, 5 heatmap reports and 50 recordings a month. Plus is $99/month for 150,000 pageviews, 75 heatmap reports and 1,000 recordings, and adds A/B testing and error tracking. Pro is $249/month for 500,000 pageviews and 5,000 recordings.

Every paid plan includes unlimited surveys and responses, unlimited domains and team members, and a 30-day free trial. Heatmaps track 100% of pageviews on the pages you target unless you set a lower sample rate.

• Covers: heatmaps, surveys, funnels, A/B testing (Plus and up); recordings in small volumes
• Missing or limited: 50 recordings a month on Starter and 1,000 on Plus; no monthly billing
• Pricing (September 2026): free plan with heatmaps and surveys; paid from $29/month billed annually. Source: crazyegg.com/pricing

Hotjar alternatives with product analytics

These tools are built around event data (funnels, retention, user paths) and attach recordings to it, which fits questions about conversion and retention across sessions better than questions about one page's layout.

PostHog

PostHog is the broadest single replacement on this list: heatmaps, session replay, surveys and product analytics in one product, each with a free monthly allowance. The pricing page lists 1 million analytics events, 5,000 recordings and 1,500 survey responses free every month, with the same allowance whether or not a card is on file. Beyond that, web recordings cost $0.005 each and fall to $0.0015 above 500,000 (replay pricing), and survey responses start at $0.10 each (survey pricing). Surveys can run as popovers, behind a feedback button, or as hosted links.

Heatmaps show clicks, dead clicks, rage clicks, mouse movement and scroll depth, and PostHog says heatmap data "doesn't contribute to your bill". Recordings are kept for 1 month on the free plan and 3 months on pay-as-you-go.

Self-hosting is limited. The MIT-licensed Docker deployment is "officially unsupported", wants roughly a 4 vCPU, 16 GB RAM machine, and "All paid-plan features are Cloud-only", per the self-hosting docs. We compare the two products in Rybbit vs PostHog.

• Covers: heatmaps, recordings, surveys and a feedback button, funnels and product analytics
• Missing or limited: per-recording and per-response billing past the free tier; self-hosting unsupported
• Pricing (September 2026): free tier renewed monthly, then usage-based. Source: posthog.com/pricing

FullStory

FullStory is the enterprise option. FullstoryFree, a permanent free plan with no credit card, includes "30,000 sessions per month with 12 months of data retention" for up to 10 users, covering session replay, basic analytics and debugging tools, per the plans page. The paid Business, Advanced and Enterprise plans are sold through "Request pricing & demo", and the plan table lists click and scroll maps, funnels, dashboards, journeys and retention analysis. Surveys come with the Guides and Surveys add-on, and mobile analytics is an add-on too.

• Covers: recordings, heatmaps, funnels and product analytics; surveys as an add-on
• Missing or limited: no published prices above the free plan
• Pricing (September 2026): free for 30,000 sessions a month; paid plans by quote. Source: fullstory.com/plans

LogRocket

LogRocket records sessions along with "console and network logs, errors, warnings, crashes and performance data", per its docs, and adds product analytics on top. Its pricing page charges only for sessions captured; analytics events, errors, logs and network data are unlimited. The Core plan lists click maps, heatmaps and rage-click maps, path analysis, conversion funnels, alerting, SSO and surveys. Pro adds the Galileo AI layer and is "included free above 100K sessions / mo".

The pricing calculator shows $176/month at 25,000 sessions. There's no free plan, only a 14-day trial that needs no credit card, and self-hosting is an Enterprise option.

• Covers: recordings with console and network data, heatmaps, surveys, funnels, error tracking
• Missing or limited: no free plan; self-hosting only on Enterprise
• Pricing (September 2026): $176/month at 25,000 sessions. Source: logrocket.com/pricing

Rybbit

Rybbit is the only tool on this list without heatmaps: no click or scroll maps, and no surveys or feedback widgets either. What it does have is session replay inside a full web and product analytics tool: funnels, user journeys, goals, error tracking, Web Vitals, retention and user profiles. The replay timeline marks clicks, page navigations, typing and rage clicks, so you can jump straight to the moment a visitor got stuck. Input values are masked by default, the analytics are cookieless, and Rybbit Cloud is hosted in the EU.

It fits teams that mostly watched recordings in Hotjar and read them against conversion numbers. If heatmaps are why you open Hotjar, Clarity or Mouseflow will serve you better. If it's surveys, stay on Contentsquare's Voice of Customer or use Mouseflow's feedback surveys.

On Rybbit Cloud, replay is a Pro feature: from $39/month for 100k events, or $26/month billed yearly. Pro's replay quota is 10% of its event allowance, so 10,000 replays a month on the 100k tier. Standard, from $19/month, includes the analytics but not replay. Both start with a 7-day trial, and the card is collected at signup. Cloud replays are kept for 30 days. Rybbit is open source under AGPL-3.0, and self-hosting is free with replay included. There's no Hotjar importer; data import covers Plausible, Umami and Simple Analytics.

• Covers: recordings with rage-click markers, funnels, journeys, goals, error tracking, Web Vitals
• Missing or limited: no click or scroll heatmaps, surveys or feedback widgets; replay needs the Pro plan on cloud, with a monthly replay quota
• Pricing (September 2026): Pro, with replay, from $39/month; self-hosting free. Source: rybbit.com/pricing

Open-source and self-hosted Hotjar alternatives

If recordings can't leave your servers, these two self-host with heatmaps included. PostHog's self-hosted build (above) covers its free-plan features, and Rybbit self-hosts replay and analytics but has no heatmaps.

OpenReplay

OpenReplay is an open-source session replay and product analytics suite; most of the code is AGPL-3.0, with a separately licensed ee/ directory, per the license file. Its pricing page marks session replay, developer tools, product analytics, co-browsing and bug reports as included in the free self-hosted edition, and the heatmaps show clicks and rage clicks per page. The managed option is a Dedicated instance from $199/month, billed hourly at $0.276, "with no limits on users, recordings, or retention", with a 7-day trial and no credit card.

• Covers: recordings with developer tools, heatmaps, funnels and journeys, co-browsing
• Missing or limited: no surveys or feedback widgets; you run the servers
• Pricing (September 2026): self-hosted free; Dedicated cloud from $199/month. Source: openreplay.com/pricing

Matomo

Matomo is a Google Analytics alternative first, with Hotjar-style features on top. Its Hotjar comparison page says self-hosted users can buy heatmaps, session recordings, funnels and form analytics from the Matomo Marketplace, and that "all these features are included in the Matomo Cloud Business plan." It is just as clear that Matomo "doesn't currently offer feedback or surveys tools."

On Matomo's pricing page, Cloud is priced by traffic: the 50,000-hit tier is USD 26/month (excluding tax) and includes 1,500 heatmap pageviews and 150 session recordings a month, with data stored in Frankfurt. The self-hosted core is free, and the heatmap and recording plugin has a 30-day trial. See how it compares with Rybbit in Rybbit vs Matomo.

• Covers: heatmaps, recordings, funnels, form analytics, full web analytics
• Missing or limited: no surveys or feedback; small recording quotas on entry Cloud tiers; heatmaps are a paid plugin when self-hosted
• Pricing (September 2026): self-hosted core free; Cloud from USD 26/month for 50,000 hits. Source: matomo.org/pricing

Before you switch: what you can export from Hotjar

Heatmaps and recordings are built from each tool's own tracking script, so your history stays behind and the new tool starts from zero. According to Hotjar's export guide, you can take out:

• Survey responses as CSV or XLSX. Exports over 10,000 responses arrive as an emailed link.
• A list of recordings with metadata (pages, duration, device, country, rage-click flag and more) as CSV or XLSX, up to 100,000 recordings per export. The recordings themselves stay in Hotjar, though Highlights download as video files.
• Heatmaps as a JPG image, or as a CSV of clicks per element and scroll depth.

Then run both scripts side by side until the new tool has enough sessions to answer the questions you used Hotjar for, rebuild your surveys, and remove the Hotjar snippet last.

Which Hotjar alternative should you pick?

• Heatmaps and recordings for free: Microsoft Clarity, if 30-day recordings and sending consent signals for European visitors are acceptable.
• All of Hotjar in one paid tool with public prices: Mouseflow (surveys from Advanced) or Lucky Orange (every feature on every plan).
• Heatmaps and surveys matter more than recordings: Crazy Egg.
• Product analytics, heatmaps, replay and surveys with a free tier: PostHog.
• Engineers who debug from recordings: LogRocket, or OpenReplay if it has to be self-hosted.
• Recordings next to funnels and conversion data, cookieless and open source: Rybbit, with the caveat that it has no heatmaps or surveys.
• Heatmaps, recordings and surveys behind one login, and the free quotas fit: stay on Contentsquare.

One to skip: Smartlook. Its homepage says end of sale took effect on 31 May 2026, renewals stopped on 31 August 2026, and the platform will be decommissioned on 30 September 2027.

FAQ

What is the best free alternative to Hotjar? Microsoft Clarity. It's free with no traffic limits and includes heatmaps, recordings and funnels, but it has no surveys, and recordings are kept for 30 days. If you also need free surveys, PostHog's free tier includes 1,500 responses a month and Crazy Egg's free plan includes on-site surveys.

Who are Hotjar's main competitors? Contentsquare now owns Hotjar. The direct competitors in heatmaps and recordings are Microsoft Clarity, Mouseflow, Lucky Orange, Crazy Egg and FullStory. PostHog, LogRocket, OpenReplay, Matomo and Rybbit compete from the product analytics, debugging or self-hosting side.

Can you still sign up for Hotjar? No. Contentsquare says "it's no longer possible to create a new account on Hotjar." New users sign up for Contentsquare instead, whose Free plan includes 200,000 monthly sessions, 10,000 replays, heatmaps and basic surveys. Existing Hotjar users can still log in.

Is there a Hotjar alternative with product analytics? Yes. PostHog, FullStory, LogRocket, OpenReplay and Rybbit pair recordings with event-based product analytics. PostHog and LogRocket also include heatmaps and surveys; Rybbit has neither. Contentsquare sells Product Analytics as a separate product with its own free tier.

Is there an open-source Hotjar alternative? OpenReplay (AGPL-3.0 core) self-hosts recordings and heatmaps for free. PostHog's MIT-licensed build self-hosts its free-plan features without official support. Matomo is open source too, but heatmaps and recordings are a paid plugin when self-hosted. Rybbit (AGPL-3.0) self-hosts replay and analytics, without heatmaps.

Does Rybbit have heatmaps or surveys? No. Rybbit has session replay on the Pro plan, with rage clicks marked on the timeline, plus web and product analytics. It has no click or scroll heatmaps, surveys or feedback widgets. For heatmaps, use Clarity or Mouseflow; for surveys, use Contentsquare, Lucky Orange or Mouseflow.