Best Free Website Heatmap Tools in 2026
Microsoft Clarity is free with no traffic limits and is the best pick for most small businesses. Here's how it compares to Hotjar and Crazy Egg in 2026.
4 min read · Updated 2026-09-02
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Short answer
Microsoft Clarity is the best heatmap tool for almost every small business — free forever, no traffic limits, and it does click maps, scroll maps and session recordings. Hotjar (now part of Contentsquare) has a free plan capped at 35 sessions a day. Crazy Egg has no free plan at all. Installation is about 10 minutes for any of them.
What heatmaps show you
A heatmap overlays your website with data about what visitors do:
- Click map — where visitors click (and what they click on that has no link — reveals confusion)
- Scroll map — how far down visitors scroll (reveals whether your key content is above the fold)
- Session recordings — video playback of individual visitor sessions (see exactly what they did)
- Rage clicks — where people frantically click something that isn't clickable (reveals broken expectations)
This data often reveals problems that Google Analytics can't: the page has good traffic but visitors scroll right past your call to action without seeing it.
- Title tag under 60 characters
- Sitemap submitted to Search Console
- Google Analytics set up correctly
- + 24 more
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Open the checklistThe three tools compared
Microsoft Clarity — free forever with no traffic limits, so there is no paid plan to weigh up. Best for almost every small business.
Hotjar (Contentsquare) — free plan capped at 35 sessions/day (~1,050 a month); paid heatmaps start around $49/month as Experience Analytics. Best for teams that want surveys alongside heatmaps.
Crazy Egg — no free plan at all; Starter is $29/month for 5,000 tracked pageviews. Best if you want A/B testing as well as heatmaps.
Microsoft Clarity — best for free unlimited use
- Free forever with no traffic or session limits
- Heatmaps, scroll maps, session recordings, rage click detection, AI session summaries
- Installs with a small code snippet or WordPress plugin
- GDPR and CCPA ready
- Best for: Most small businesses — it's completely free and genuinely good
Hotjar — polished, but the free plan is capped
- Free plan: 35 sessions/day for heatmaps and recordings
- Very polished interface and easy setup — paste one code snippet
- What changed: Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare, and hotjar.com/pricing redirects to contentsquare.com. Since the 2025 pricing merge, heatmaps and recordings are sold as Experience Analytics (from roughly $49/month) and surveys as a separate product line. Contentsquare is still moving tiers around, so check the current price before you commit
- Best for: Sites that want heatmaps and on-site surveys from one vendor and are willing to pay for it
Crazy Egg — best if you also want A/B testing
- No free plan. Starter is $29/month for 5,000 tracked pageviews
- Adds A/B testing on top of heatmaps, which Clarity does not do
- Best for: Businesses actively running conversion optimisation experiments
How to use heatmap data
After collecting 1–2 weeks of data:
- Check your homepage scroll map — is your main CTA above where most visitors stop scrolling?
- Check click maps — are visitors clicking things that aren't links? (Add links or remove the confusion)
- Watch 5–10 session recordings of visitors who didn't convert — where did they get stuck?
Don't have a site to test yet?
Heatmaps only help once you have a live website pulling in traffic. If you're still getting set up, start with a fast, beginner-friendly host — Bluehost includes a free domain and one-click WordPress, so you can be live and collecting heatmap data the same day.
Related questions
Frequently asked questions
- What is the best completely free heatmap tool?
- Microsoft Clarity. It is free with no traffic limits and includes click maps, scroll maps, session recordings and rage-click detection — the same core features other tools charge for. For most small business websites there is no practical reason to pay for a heatmap tool instead.
- Does Hotjar still have a free plan?
- Yes, but it is capped at 35 sessions per day (roughly 1,050 a month). Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare, and hotjar.com/pricing redirects to contentsquare.com — heatmaps and recordings are sold there as Experience Analytics, with paid tiers starting around $49 a month at the time of writing. The free plan is the only free option and it fills up quickly on a busy site.
- Is Crazy Egg free?
- No. Crazy Egg has no free plan. Its cheapest tier is Starter at $29 a month for 5,000 tracked pageviews. It is worth paying for only if you want built-in A/B testing alongside your heatmaps — for heatmaps alone, Microsoft Clarity does the same job for nothing.
- How much traffic do I need before a heatmap is useful?
- Enough for a few hundred sessions on the page you care about — usually one to two weeks of normal traffic for a small business site. Below that, the patterns you see are more likely to be random than real, and you are better off watching a handful of individual session recordings instead.
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