# Hotjar alternatives in 2026 (now that Hotjar is part of Contentsquare)

> New Hotjar accounts can no longer be created. Eight tools compared on price, recordings, heatmaps and whether they can email your users, trade-offs included.

Source: https://behavly.io/compare/hotjar-alternatives · Updated October 10, 2026 · Competitor details checked October 10, 2026 on each vendor’s own site

New Hotjar accounts can no longer be created, so the best Hotjar alternative depends on what you used Hotjar for.

- **Microsoft Clarity**: best for free heatmaps and session recordings with no traffic limit.
- **PostHog**: best for product analytics, session replay, surveys and event-triggered email in one product.
- **Fullstory**: best for replay and product analytics at enterprise scale.
- **Mouseflow**: best for the widest range of heatmaps on a marketing site.
- **Lucky Orange**: best for recordings plus live chat with visitors.
- **Crazy Egg**: best for heatmaps plus simple A/B tests.
- **Behavly** (our product): best for heatmaps of your product’s signed-in users that lead to an email written from what each person did.
- **Contentsquare**: best if Hotjar itself suited you. It’s Hotjar’s successor, and hotjar.com now redirects there.

> Note: Prices and features below were checked against each vendor’s own pages on October 10, 2026. Where a vendor doesn’t publish something, we say so.

#### What happened to Hotjar

Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare, which describes the two as merged into a single experience intelligence platform. Both hotjar.com and its pricing page permanently redirect to Contentsquare. Contentsquare’s Hotjar page says plainly: “It’s no longer possible to create a new account on Hotjar.” New users are sent to Contentsquare’s Free plan instead.

Hotjar’s plans now live inside two Contentsquare products: **Experience Analytics** (recordings, heatmaps and funnels) and **Voice of Customer** (surveys and feedback widgets). The old plan names (Observe, Ask and Engage) no longer appear on the pricing page. Any guide that quotes Hotjar plans and prices is describing something you can no longer buy.

> Warning: Several 2026 “Hotjar alternatives” lists still recommend **Smartlook**. Its pricing page says no new subscriptions have been sold since May 31, 2026. The platform will be shut down, with remaining customer data deleted, on September 30, 2027. It isn’t covered below for that reason.

#### Hotjar alternatives at a glance

| Tool | Best for | Free plan | Paid from | Session replay | Heatmaps | Can it email users? |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Microsoft Clarity | Free heatmaps and recordings | Yes, no traffic limit | No paid plan | Yes | Click, scroll, area, conversion | No |
| PostHog | Engineering-led SaaS teams | Yes: 1M events and 5,000 recordings a month | Usage-based past the free tier, e.g. $0.005 per recording | Yes, web and mobile | Heatmap, clickmap, scrollmap | Yes, through Workflows, from templates you write |
| Fullstory | Replay and product analytics at company scale | Yes: 30,000 sessions a month | Not published | Yes, plus live sessions | Click, scroll | No; feeds tools such as Braze |
| Mouseflow | Detailed heatmaps and form analytics | Yes: 500 sessions a month | 25 per month billed yearly (5,000 sessions), currency not shown | Yes | Click, scroll, geo, attention, movement, friction | No |
| Lucky Orange | Recordings plus live chat with visitors | No, 7-day trial | $32/month billed yearly (3,500 sessions) | Yes | Dynamic heatmaps | No; on-site chat, surveys and announcements |
| Crazy Egg | Landing page heatmaps and A/B tests | Yes, limits not stated | $29/month billed yearly (5,000 pageviews) | Yes, capped by plan | Click, scroll, confetti, overlay, list | No; on-site popups |
| Behavly | Acting on what signed-in users did | Yes: 100 tracked contacts | $79/month (2,500 tracked contacts) | No | Clicks, movement, scroll, elements; for everyone or one person | Yes, written from each person’s activity, sent from your mailbox |
| Contentsquare | Hotjar users who want the least change | Yes: up to 200,000 sessions a month | $39/month billed yearly (7,000 sessions) | Yes | Click, move, scroll, zones | No; passes data to other tools |

#### Microsoft Clarity

Clarity is Microsoft’s free heatmap and session recording tool. It has click, scroll, area and conversion heatmaps, always-on recordings, rage-click and dead-click detection, funnels and Copilot summaries of sessions and heatmaps. Its Identify API attaches your own user ID, hashed in the browser, so you can filter recordings and heatmaps down to one person.

- **Where it’s strong**: Price. There’s no paid plan and no traffic limit, and it covers unlimited websites and team members. For recordings, heatmaps and spotting frustrated clicks, it does the job at no cost.
- **Where it falls short**: Recordings are kept for 30 days and heatmap data for 9 months. Surveys aren’t among its listed features. Microsoft says it uses the behavioral data Clarity processes to improve the machine learning models behind its products. It also says it never shares the data with third parties. Its documentation says Clarity shouldn’t be used on sites or apps aimed at people under 18. It records and reports; it doesn’t contact your users.
- **Pricing**: Free, with no paid tier.

#### PostHog

PostHog is a product analytics platform for software teams. It also includes session replay, heatmaps, surveys, feature flags, experiments and error tracking. Since its Workflows product became generally available on December 30, 2025, it sends email too.

Its identify call merges a visitor’s anonymous history into their signed-in profile. That suits SaaS products, where the interesting behavior happens after login.

- **Where it’s strong**: Breadth, and a free allowance on every product that resets monthly, with no credit card. It covers 1 million events, 5,000 web recordings, 1,500 survey responses and 10,000 workflow messages per channel. Workflows sends email from your own verified domain when any PostHog event fires, with delays, audience splits and drip sequences. It can also send push notifications, SMS, Slack alerts and webhooks.
- **Where it falls short**: It’s built for engineers. You define the events and identify calls yourself, and emails are templates you write and wire into a workflow. On the free plan, recordings are kept for 1 month and heatmaps are collected on 3 pages. Viewing heatmaps in the toolbar needs pay-as-you-go. Billing is per product and per unit, so you need to estimate volume and set billing limits.
- **Pricing**: Free up to each product’s monthly allowance, then pay as you go with no monthly minimum. Prices start at $0.00005 per event, $0.005 per recording, $0.10 per survey response and $0.003 per email, and unit prices fall at volume. Pay-as-you-go keeps recordings for 90 days and events for 7 years.

#### Fullstory

Fullstory is a digital experience platform for larger product and digital teams. It offers session replay with live session viewing and developer tools, click and scroll maps, and product analytics such as funnels, journeys and retention. A `setIdentity` call ties sessions to your own user ID.

- **Where it’s strong**: The free plan is generous for replay: 30,000 sessions a month, 12 months of retention and up to 10 users. It also works as a data layer for companies running other tools, with warehouse export and webhooks. Its Activation feature streams behavioral signals to tools such as Braze, Intercom and Zapier.
- **Where it falls short**: Paid prices aren’t published, so you can’t estimate cost without requesting pricing. Surveys and mobile analytics are paid add-ons, and the free plan leaves out Dashboards and StoryAI. It doesn’t send email itself; acting on what it sees means connecting a separate email or messaging tool.
- **Pricing**: Free plan as above. Business, Advanced and Enterprise plans are priced on request.

#### Mouseflow

Mouseflow is a session replay and heatmap tool for conversion and UX work on websites. It has the widest set of heatmap types on this page: click, scroll, geo, attention, movement and friction. It also has funnels, form analytics, journey analytics, friction detection, feedback surveys and MCP support.

- **Where it’s strong**: Detailed heatmaps and form analytics at a low entry price, with unlimited users on every plan.
- **Where it falls short**: The free plan is small: 500 sessions a month, 1 funnel and 1 month of retention. Funnels and websites are capped by plan (1 funnel on Free and Essential). Mouseflow’s docs say identifying users is available only on select plans, without listing which. Ask before relying on it for signed-in users. It doesn’t send email.
- **Pricing**: The pricing page shows no currency symbol. Essential is 25 per month billed yearly, or 39 billed monthly, for 5,000 sessions. Advanced is 109 per month billed yearly for 25,000 sessions. Premium is 319 per month billed yearly for 100,000 sessions. There’s a 14-day free trial and a 14-day money-back guarantee.

#### Lucky Orange

Lucky Orange combines session recordings, dynamic heatmaps, conversion funnels, form analytics and a live view of who’s on your site. It adds ways to talk to visitors there: live chat with proactive chat invites, on-site surveys and targeted announcements. Its identify call works in the browser and from a Node server, merging both into one visitor profile.

- **Where it’s strong**: Every feature is on every plan, with unlimited team members. It’s one of the few tools here that responds to behavior while the visitor is still there. For example, a chat invite can go out when someone stalls or rage-clicks.
- **Where it falls short**: There’s no free plan, only a 7-day trial. Data is stored for 60 days by default, and longer storage costs extra. The cheapest plan covers 3,500 sessions a month, and Discovery AI is an add-on. What it does with behavior happens on your website: its own pages don’t mention email.
- **Pricing**: $32/month billed yearly (3,500 sessions), or $39 billed monthly. Grow is $72/month billed yearly (10,000 sessions). Extra websites are $5 each.

#### Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg is a heatmap and testing tool for marketing sites. It has five heatmap views (click, scroll, confetti, overlay and list), capped session recordings, funnel reports and unlimited surveys. From the Plus plan, it adds A/B testing and popup calls to action.

- **Where it’s strong**: Simple and inexpensive for landing page work. Confetti maps break clicks down by referrer or segment, and every plan includes unlimited domains and team members with no overage charges.
- **Where it falls short**: Recording caps are low (50 a month on Starter) and heatmap reports are limited per plan. Only yearly billing is shown. We found no official documentation for identifying signed-in users, so it isn’t designed for following individuals inside a product. It acts on behavior through on-site popups; it doesn’t send email.
- **Pricing**: $29/month billed yearly (5,000 tracked pageviews and 50 recordings). Plus is $99/month billed yearly (150,000 pageviews and 1,000 recordings). Each plan starts with a 30-day free trial, and a free plan exists, though its limits aren’t stated.

#### Behavly

Behavly is our product, and it’s on this list because it has heatmaps. It sits this far down because heatmaps are a means to an end in Behavly, not the product. At its core, it’s an AI agent for SaaS teams that tracks what each signed-in user does in your product and writes every email from that person’s own activity.

[Heatmaps](https://behavly.io/help-center/user-activity/heatmaps) paint four layers over your live site: clicks, movement, scroll, and a count per button or link that holds even when a redesign moves it. The Heatmaps page also lists rage clicks and dead clicks, with the people behind them.

The per-person view is where Behavly differs. One script tag recognizes who is signed in, with no identify call, so every user gets a heatmap of their own across every browser they used. Their row in Identified Users also shows their pages, sessions and when they were last seen.

Then you act on it. Behavly finds groups of users by behavior, and a one-time campaign or an always-on Agent writes each person an email about what they did. The email goes out from your own mailbox.

- **Where it’s strong**: Going from what someone did to what you say to them. A per-person heatmap shows where one customer clicked and how far they scrolled, and Behavly can write the email that follows from their own activity. You approve the emails before they go out. Heatmaps are on every plan, Free included, and the snippet doesn’t store IP addresses.
- **Where it falls short**: There are no session recordings: you get heatmaps and each person’s activity, not a video of their visit. There’s no funnel builder (Insights shows one built-in funnel) and no surveys. It’s built for the signed-in users of your own product, not for analyzing anonymous traffic on a marketing site. Anonymous visitors are listed one row per browser, and only on paid plans. And its point is acting on behavior by writing the follow-up, not deep UX research. A research team will find Fullstory or Contentsquare far more complete.
- **Pricing**: A free plan with no time limit (100 tracked contacts, 30 days of behavior data, 50 AI-written emails a month, one-time campaigns only). Paid plans start at $79/month (2,500 tracked contacts and one always-on Agent), priced by how many people you track rather than by sessions.

#### Contentsquare, if you’re staying with Hotjar’s successor

If Hotjar worked for you, the least disruptive option is the product it became. Experience Analytics covers what Hotjar’s recordings and heatmaps did, plus funnels, journey analysis and error and performance monitoring. Voice of Customer covers surveys and feedback widgets. Sense AI summarizes replays and heatmaps, and there’s an MCP connector.

- **Where it’s strong**: The largest free recording allowance on this page: up to 200,000 sessions and 10,000 replays a month. Heatmaps, funnels and basic surveys are in the same free plan. Pro and Enterprise plans sit behind it if your needs grow.
- **Where it falls short**: The free plan keeps 1 month of analytics data, and on Growth, replays are kept for 2 months with a fixed replay allowance. Contentsquare’s own identify call, which ties sessions to a signed-in user, requires its Product Analytics plan or an add-on module. Every Product Analytics tier is priced on request. It doesn’t email your users; survey integrations and enterprise data feeds pass data to other tools that do.
- **Pricing**: Experience Analytics Growth from $39/month billed yearly (7,000 sessions and 7,000 replays), or $49 billed monthly. Voice of Customer Growth from $79/month billed yearly (500 responses). Its FAQ says customers outside Europe are billed in US dollars.

#### What to check before you switch

- **How it identifies signed-in users.** In a SaaS product, most of the useful behavior happens after login. Clarity, PostHog, Fullstory and Lucky Orange document an identify call, Mouseflow limits it to some plans, and Behavly detects the signed-in session without one.
- **Retention.** If you compare this quarter with the last, 30 days of recordings (Clarity, or PostHog’s free plan) won’t cover it.
- **The unit you’re billed on.** Sessions (Contentsquare, Mouseflow, Lucky Orange), pageviews and recordings (Crazy Egg), events and recordings (PostHog) or tracked people (Behavly).
- **Your history.** Plan on starting fresh in the new tool, and export anything you want to keep from the old one first.

#### How to choose

- **You want heatmaps and recordings for free:** Microsoft Clarity. Add a separate tool if you need surveys or recordings older than 30 days.
- **You want analytics, replay, surveys and event-triggered email in one product, and have engineers to set it up:** PostHog.
- **You need replay and product analytics at company scale, feeding other tools:** Fullstory.
- **You optimize a marketing site and want every kind of heatmap plus form analytics:** Mouseflow.
- **You run a store or marketing site and want to chat with visitors while they’re there:** Lucky Orange.
- **You test landing pages and want heatmaps with A/B tests:** Crazy Egg.
- **You want to see what your product’s signed-in users do, then send each a follow-up written from it:** Behavly. Use it alone, or next to Clarity if you also want recordings.
- **You liked Hotjar and want the least change:** Contentsquare.

## Questions

### Is there a free Hotjar alternative?

Yes. Microsoft Clarity is free, with no paid tier and no traffic limit, and includes heatmaps and session recordings. PostHog, Fullstory, Mouseflow and Contentsquare also have free plans with monthly limits, and Behavly’s free plan covers 100 tracked contacts.

### Can I still sign up for Hotjar?

No. The hotjar.com site now redirects to Contentsquare, which says new Hotjar accounts can no longer be created. New users are offered Contentsquare’s Free plan instead, which includes recordings, heatmaps, funnels and basic surveys.

### What is better than Hotjar for SaaS?

In a SaaS product the behavior that matters happens after login, so pick a tool that ties activity to signed-in users. PostHog suits engineering-led teams that want analytics, replay and event-triggered email in one product. Behavly suits teams that want heatmaps of signed-in users and follow-up emails written from each person’s activity, without session recordings. Fullstory suits larger teams that need replay and product analytics feeding other tools.

### Does Microsoft Clarity replace Hotjar?

For heatmaps and recordings, largely yes, and it’s free. It keeps recordings for 30 days and heatmap data for 9 months. Surveys aren’t among its listed features, so teams that relied on Hotjar’s surveys need a separate survey tool.

### Which Hotjar alternatives can email users?

PostHog sends email through Workflows, from templates you write and trigger on events. Behavly writes each email from that person’s own activity and sends it from your mailbox. Fullstory and Contentsquare pass behavioral data to other tools that send email, while Lucky Orange and Crazy Egg act on your website with chat, announcements and popups.

## Related

- [Customer.io alternatives for SaaS teams in 2026](https://behavly.io/compare/customer-io-alternatives)
- [Loops alternatives for SaaS teams in 2026](https://behavly.io/compare/loops-alternatives)
- [What is behavioral email? A practical guide for SaaS](https://behavly.io/guides/behavioral-email)
- [Heatmaps](https://behavly.io/help-center/user-activity/heatmaps)