Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: which heatmap tool fits a service business site

A landing page can rank well and still lose most of the people who land on it, and analytics alone rarely explains why. Heatmap and session recording tools exist to close that gap: they show where a visitor's mouse and attention actually go, where they get stuck on a form, and where they give up and leave, evidence a plain traffic report cannot give you.

Hotjar built its name doing exactly that for over a decade as a standalone product. That changed with its merger into Contentsquare, a shift that shows up immediately the moment you try to check Hotjar's price: the pricing address itself now forwards to Contentsquare's own page.

Microsoft Clarity entered this same space from a completely different angle, as a free product with no self-serve payment tier at all. For a service business trying to fix a landing page that gets traffic but not enquiries, the practical question is not just which tool records sessions better, but which one you can actually try today without a sales conversation.

As fetched on 2026-09-26, hotjar.com/pricing issued a 308 permanent redirect to contentsquare.com/pricing, a clear, documented sign that Hotjar's pricing structure is no longer maintained on its own domain. The destination page names several product lines, including Experience Analytics, the closest match to what Hotjar historically sold: heatmaps and session recordings.

The static content of that page, as we were able to read it, showed navigation to different Contentsquare products and two calls to action, Start for free and Book a demo, rather than a table of dollar figures for named tiers. That is a meaningful change in itself: a product that used to publish clear self-serve monthly prices now routes a prospective buyer toward a demo request for at least part of its offering, and we could not confirm a specific current dollar amount for any tier from the page content available to us that day.

If you are evaluating Hotjar specifically, the honest first step is to visit Contentsquare's own pricing page directly and see what self-serve option, if any, is offered for your traffic level, rather than relying on a remembered Hotjar price from before the merger.

Microsoft Clarity's own site (clarity.microsoft.com, accessed 2026-09-26) states directly that the product is free forever with no limits on traffic, and the page names no paid tier, seat count, or session cap anywhere in its content.

Features named on the page include session recordings, described as watching real users on your site, heatmaps for visualizing where attention and clicks concentrate, AI-generated summaries meant to surface actionable takeaways from recorded sessions, and an AI chat feature for querying your own site data directly. The page also names mobile app analytics with SDK support for Android, iOS, Flutter, and React Native, extending the same recording and heatmap approach beyond a website alone.

On integrations, the page states Clarity connects directly with Google Analytics, and separately names an MCP server and a browser extension as additional ways to work with the data it collects. The page states more than 2 million sites and apps globally use the product and describes it as GDPR and CCPA ready.

Clarity's page names generous features for free, but a product that costs nothing rarely carries the same support commitments or product roadmap guarantees as a paid enterprise platform, and its page does not name a service level agreement or dedicated support tier of the kind a paid tool typically publishes.

Hotjar's situation cuts the other way. A company mid-merger can change its self-serve pricing, its feature set, and its support model without much notice, and the fact that its own pricing URL now forwards elsewhere is itself a sign that its go-to-market has shifted toward Contentsquare's demo-first approach for at least part of its lineup. Anything you read about Hotjar's old standalone pricing should be treated as historical rather than current.

Neither page, as fetched on 2026-09-26, detailed exact data retention windows for recorded sessions, so if session history length matters to your use case, confirm it directly with either company before relying on either tool for a long-running test.

Choose Microsoft Clarity when you want to start recording sessions and building heatmaps today with no monthly cost and no traffic ceiling named on the page, and a direct Google Analytics integration is enough to tie recordings back to your existing reporting.

Choose Hotjar, now sold under the Contentsquare name, when your business already needs, or expects to need, the broader experience analytics and product analytics tooling Contentsquare sells beyond basic heatmaps, and you are comfortable working through a demo to find out what a self-serve option, if any, actually costs at your traffic level today.

Either way, run a real test before committing budget. Clarity's free, unlimited access makes it a reasonable first move for most service businesses, and you lose nothing by trying it before deciding whether a paid platform's extra features are worth a demo call.