Hotjar vs Crazy Egg vs Microsoft Clarity: Which Heatmap Tool Wins?

Full disclosure before we referee this fight: we build Clicktics, and we'd argue there are many reasons to choose it over all three tools in this comparison — it records every session in HD (Hotjar samples), includes live chat and lead management (none of the three have either), ships funnels, UTM attribution, error capture, and Discovery AI as standard, runs on the lightest script of the bunch at ~24 KB, and costs a flat $13/site/month with a free trial of up to 180 days. That said — if you're weighing Hotjar vs Crazy Egg vs Microsoft Clarity, you deserve a real answer, not a sales page. So below is the detailed, feature-by-feature comparison we'd want if we were choosing: where each tool genuinely wins, where each falls short, and which one fits which team.

The 30-second verdict

• Microsoft Clarity — best if the budget is $0: unlimited free recordings and heatmaps, with basic analysis and no engagement features.
• Hotjar — best if you want heatmaps plus the voice of the customer: surveys and feedback are its real moat.
• Crazy Egg — best if your workflow ends in an experiment: unique heatmap views feeding a built-in A/B testing editor.
• Clicktics — best if you want one tool to do the job of four: everything above except surveys and A/B tests, plus chat, leads, funnels, and attribution the others don't have.

The three contenders in one minute

Hotjar (2014, now part of Contentsquare) turned heatmaps into a mainstream marketing tool. It's organized into Observe (heatmaps + recordings), Ask (surveys + feedback), and Engage (user interviews) — sold as separate products. Crazy Egg (2005, co-founded by Neil Patel) is the category's grandfather, famous for inventive heatmap reports and later adding recordings and a no-code A/B testing editor. Microsoft Clarity (2020) arrived with a disruptive pitch: everything free, forever, no traffic caps — funded by the value your behavioral data adds to Microsoft's ecosystem.

Feature comparison table

Feature	Hotjar	Crazy Egg	Clarity	Clicktics
Click heatmaps	Yes	Yes + confetti/overlay	Yes	Yes, on the live page
Scroll maps	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Session recordings	Sampled on lower tiers	Basic	Unlimited, free	Every session, HD
Funnels	Paid tiers	Limited	Limited	Included
Surveys / feedback	Yes — strongest	Basic CTAs	No	No
A/B testing	No	Yes — built-in editor	No	No (measure via periods)
Live chat	No	No	No	Yes, with notifications
Lead management	No	No	No	Yes, scored pipeline
AI assistance	AI surveys	Minimal	Copilot summaries	Discovery AI
JS error capture	No	Basic	Yes	Yes, per session
Free plan	35 sessions/day	Trial only (30 days)	Everything, forever	Full trial, up to 180 days
Paid entry price	~$32/mo	~$29/mo	—	$13/site/mo flat
Script weight	~47 KB	Moderate	~40 KB	~24 KB

Round 1: Heatmap types and quality

This is Crazy Egg's home turf, and it still shows. Beyond standard click and scroll maps, it offers two views nobody else matches: the confetti report, which plots every individual click colored by traffic source, device, or campaign — so you can literally see how Google Ads clicks behave differently from organic ones on the same page — and the overlay report, which pins a click count and percentage badge on every page element. For pure heatmap forensics, Crazy Egg gives you the most angles.

Hotjar's heatmaps are the most polished to look at, covering click, move (cursor movement as an attention proxy), and scroll, with engagement-zone summaries on newer plans. Clarity's click, scroll, and area heatmaps are more basic in segmentation but perfectly serviceable — and you can generate them retroactively for any page with traffic, without pre-configuring snapshots the way Crazy Egg requires.

One structural note for all three: their heatmaps render on screenshots or reconstructions captured separately from the sessions. Clicktics draws click maps over the actual recorded page with a per-element click table and side-by-side period comparison — closer to Crazy Egg's overlay in spirit, but on the page your visitors really saw.

Round winner: Crazy Egg, for confetti and overlay segmentation.

Round 2: Session recordings

Clarity wins the volume game outright: unlimited recordings at zero cost, retained for 30 days by default. It also auto-flags frustration — rage clicks, dead clicks, excessive scrolling, quick-backs — which makes triage genuinely fast. The catch is depth: filtering is shallow, and there's no way to act on what you see beyond watching.

Hotjar's recordings are well-integrated with its heatmaps (jump from a hot spot to the sessions behind it), but the decisive weakness is sampling: on free and lower paid tiers, Hotjar records only a subset of traffic. When a customer emails "checkout is broken," the session you need has often simply not been captured. Crazy Egg added recordings years after its heatmaps and it shows — they work, but filtering, speed controls, and depth trail both rivals; they're a supporting feature, not the star.

For comparison, Clicktics records 100% of sessions in DOM-accurate HD with the visitor's full journey, device, location, and source attached — the Clarity-style completeness with the analytical depth Clarity lacks. (Primer on why DOM-based capture matters: how session replay works.)

Round winner: Clarity on volume and price; Hotjar on integration polish — as long as sampling doesn't bite you.

Round 3: Analytics, funnels, and reporting

None of the three is a real analytics platform, but the gaps differ. Hotjar's paid tiers offer trends and funnels that connect behavior to conversion steps — useful, though gated behind higher plans. Clarity provides dashboard filters (rage clicks by page, JavaScript errors, device splits) and a clean Google Analytics integration, but segments are limited and there's no proper funnel builder. Crazy Egg's reporting revolves around per-snapshot stats and A/B test results rather than site-wide analytics.

Notably, none of the three ties behavior to traffic source in a serious way — no UTM-level attribution connecting campaigns to on-page behavior and conversions. That's a gap Clicktics fills with built-in funnels, source attribution, and Search Console integration on every plan.

Round winner: Hotjar, narrowly, if you pay up; otherwise a three-way shrug.

Round 4: Surveys, feedback, and testing

Here the three finally differentiate cleanly. Hotjar's Ask suite is the best voice-of-customer tooling in this comparison — on-page polls, full surveys with AI-assisted question drafting, feedback widgets, and even recruited user interviews via Engage. If "why did you leave?" is the question keeping you up, Hotjar answers it directly.

Crazy Egg owns testing. Its visual editor lets a marketer draft a variant — new headline, moved CTA, different image — and run an A/B test without a developer, with results tied back to its heatmap reports. Neither Hotjar nor Clarity offers anything comparable.

Clarity offers neither surveys nor testing; its answer is AI: Clarity Copilot summarizes sessions and heatmap takeaways in natural language, which is genuinely helpful for triage at zero cost. (Clicktics' Discovery AI plays the same role — ask questions of your visitor data in plain English — with chat and lead tools attached for acting on the answers.)

Round winner: tie — Hotjar for feedback, Crazy Egg for testing.

Round 5: Performance and privacy

Script weight is the silent tax of behavior tools, and the three land in a band from acceptable to heavy: Clarity around 40 KB gzipped, Hotjar around 47 KB, Crazy Egg in the middle depending on configuration. All three load asynchronously, but on Core-Web-Vitals-sensitive pages (and paid landing pages, where speed feeds Quality Score) every kilobyte is felt — for reference, Clicktics' full-featured tag is ~24 KB.

On privacy: all three mask keystrokes/sensitive input by default and offer GDPR-oriented controls, and all three require your consent banner to gate them in the EU (details in our session recording GDPR guide). The structural difference is Clarity's business model — the product is free because aggregated behavioral data benefits Microsoft's advertising and AI work. That's disclosed and legal, but organizations with strict data governance often rule it out on principle, and it's the first question to clear with your DPO.

Round winner: draw — pick based on your data-governance stance.

Round 6: Setup and ease of use

All four tools install the same way — one script in the page head or via Google Tag Manager — so day-one effort is identical. The differences appear on day two. Clarity is the fastest to first insight: recordings and heatmaps simply appear, and Copilot summarizes them; there's almost nothing to configure and almost nothing to tune. Hotjar asks slightly more of you (choosing pages for heatmaps on some plans, building surveys) but rewards it with a famously clean interface that non-technical marketers navigate without training. Crazy Egg is the most setup-dependent of the three: its best reports revolve around snapshots you define per page, and its A/B editor invites ongoing hands-on work — powerful, but it assumes a team that will show up weekly. Clicktics follows the Clarity philosophy — everything on by default, every session recorded, funnels and heatmaps configured in minutes — while keeping the deeper levers (events, conversions, lead stages) one click away when you're ready for them.

Round winner: Clarity for instant gratification; Hotjar for guided polish.

Round 7: Pricing

• Clarity: free, full stop. No tiers, no caps. Unbeatable number, with the data trade-off above.
• Hotjar: freemium with a squeeze. The free plan's 35 daily sessions demo the product; real usage lands on Observe/Ask plans from roughly $32/month each — and the module split means the full experience costs more than the sticker.
• Crazy Egg: paid only. A 30-day trial, then plans from about $29/month. Fair value if you'll use the testing editor; hard to justify for heatmaps alone when Clarity is free.
• Clicktics: $13/site/month flat, every feature included, after a free trial of up to 180 days with 10,000 sessions per site — deliberately positioned below all paid options here while covering more surface.

Round winner: Clarity on price alone; Clicktics on price-per-capability.

Which heatmap tool should you choose?

• Choose Clarity if you need competent recordings and heatmaps at $0 and can accept basic analysis and the Microsoft data model.
• Choose Hotjar if surveys and user feedback are central to your research and you'll pay for the modules you actually use — mind the session sampling.
• Choose Crazy Egg if your team ships A/B tests weekly and wants heatmap segmentation (confetti!) feeding the experiment queue.
• Choose Clicktics if you'd rather not choose at all: complete recordings, live-page heatmaps, funnels, attribution, error capture, chat, and a lead pipeline in one ~24 KB script — the watching and the acting. We've also written full alternative guides to Hotjar and the other top recording tools if you're still mapping the market.

Frequently asked questions

Is Microsoft Clarity better than Hotjar?

For value, yes — Clarity gives unlimited free recordings and heatmaps where Hotjar's free plan samples 35 daily sessions. For capability, Hotjar's paid tiers add surveys, feedback, and funnels that Clarity doesn't have. Budget teams pick Clarity; research-driven teams pay for Hotjar; teams that want both depth and engagement tools typically look at an all-in-one like Clicktics.

Is Crazy Egg still worth it in 2026?

If you'll use its A/B testing editor and confetti/overlay reports, yes — nothing else here matches those. If you only want heatmaps and recordings, it's hard to justify $29/month against Clarity at free, and its recordings trail both rivals.

Which heatmap tool is completely free?

Microsoft Clarity — free forever with no traffic limits. Clicktics is free for up to 180 days with every feature; Hotjar has a limited free tier; Crazy Egg offers only a 30-day trial.

Do Hotjar, Crazy Egg, or Clarity offer live chat or lead capture?

No — all three are observation tools. If you want to act on behavior in real time (chat with a struggling visitor, score and follow up leads), you need a platform that includes engagement, which is the core reason we built Clicktics the way we did.

Can I use Clarity and Hotjar together?

Technically yes, and some teams run Clarity (free recordings) alongside Hotjar (surveys). But two behavior scripts double the page-weight cost and split your data across dashboards — pick the smallest set of tools that covers your questions.

Or skip the trade-offs entirely

Every option above makes you choose: free but shallow, insightful but sampled, testable but paid-only. Clicktics was built to end that menu — every session recorded in HD, heatmaps on the real page, funnels, UTM attribution, error capture, live chat, and lead management in one ~24 KB script, free for up to 180 days with no credit card, then a flat $13/site/month.

Start your free trial → or compare us feature-by-feature on the features page.