Microsoft Clarity vs Hotjar: Which session recording tool is right for you?
Understanding how users behave on your website is essential if you want to improve conversions, fix UX issues, or simply make your content more engaging. That’s where tools like Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar come in. Both offer session recording and heatmap features, but they take very different approaches especially when it comes to price, functionality, and user insights.
What are these tools for?
At a glance, both Clarity and Hotjar offer similar core functionality: they let you see how visitors interact with your site. You can watch recordings of individual sessions, view aggregated heatmaps of where people click, scroll and move, and use these insights to inform design or performance improvements. But that’s where the similarities end. Microsoft Clarity is free and built for scale, offering unlimited recordings and heatmaps with no cost attached. Hotjar, on the other hand, is a more comprehensive behavioural analytics platform, offering additional tools like surveys, on-site polls, and in-depth user feedback features but at a price.
Pricing & data limits
Microsoft Clarity’s biggest selling point is that it’s completely free, no matter how much traffic your site gets. It doesn’t cap the number of recordings or heatmaps, which makes it ideal for high-traffic sites or businesses just starting out. Hotjar offers a limited free plan that gives you 35 sessions per day and a handful of heatmaps, which may be enough for small websites. But to get the full suite of features, including more sessions, longer data retention, and more integrations, you’ll need a paid plan. Pricing starts from around £26/month, depending on your traffic volume and features required.
Session recordings: what’s the difference?
Both tools let you watch individual user sessions to see how visitors interact with your website. However, Clarity has some standout features: it automatically detects "rage clicks", "dead clicks", and JavaScript errors, so you can identify points of frustration or failure without manually reviewing every recording. Hotjar offers similar recording functionality, but goes a step further with user tagging, engagement scoring, and collaborative features like session sharing via Slack or Jira. Clarity supports link or email sharing, but is a little more limited when it comes to collaboration.
Heatmaps and visual insights
Heatmaps are where both tools shine. Clarity’s heatmaps are dynamic, covering clicks, scrolls, and even dead-clicks or rage-clicks. You also get an "Area Map" feature, which can give you a more granular view of interaction hotspots. Hotjar offers click and scroll heatmaps too, but also includes move maps which tracks where the user moves their mouse (which often correlates with eye movement). You can also compare heatmaps across devices and timeframes more flexibly in Hotjar, which may be helpful for larger teams or those running ongoing CRO campaigns.
User feedback and surveys
This is where Hotjar clearly pulls ahead. It includes built-in tools for collecting user feedback like on-site surveys, polls, and NPS forms. These features allow you to gather real-time sentiment alongside behavioural data, which is incredibly valuable for understanding why users behave a certain way. Microsoft Clarity currently doesn’t offer native user feedback tools. If you want to collect feedback with Clarity, you’d need to integrate a separate platform.
Privacy, data use, and compliance
Both platforms claim to be GDPR and CCPA compliant, but with some differences under the surface. Hotjar takes a privacy-first approach, it doesn’t use customer data for anything other than reporting. Clarity is more transparent about its use of machine learning and AI to improve Microsoft’s products. While this doesn’t necessarily compromise compliance, some organisations may prefer Hotjar’s stricter stance on data handling especially in sectors like health or finance.
Performance and integration
Clarity is impressively lightweight and has a minimal impact on site performance, even at high volumes. It also integrates seamlessly with tools like Google Analytics, GTM, HubSpot, and even WordPress. Hotjar, meanwhile, supports a wider range of integrations and works well with analytics, CRM, and A/B testing tools like Mixpanel, Slack, and Jira. That said, Hotjar’s additional features and JavaScript payload can slightly affect page speed, something to keep in mind for sites where performance is critical.
So, which one should you use?
It depends on your priorities. If you're looking for a cost-effective, zero-barrier tool that delivers excellent behavioural insights at scale, Microsoft Clarity is hard to beat. It gives you access to detailed recordings, click data, and frustration metrics, all completely free. On the other hand, if you're serious about user feedback, in-depth segmentation, and integrated CRO processes, Hotjar’s premium plans offer the kind of detail and flexibility larger teams will appreciate. In fact, many marketers choose to use both: Clarity for high-level session analysis and Hotjar for deeper feedback and segmentation.