Analytics

Hotjar (now part of Contentsquare) vs Microsoft Clarity: Full Comparison

Published October 7, 2026

Microsoft Clarity gives away session recordings and heatmaps with no traffic cap. Hotjar, meanwhile, has been folded into Contentsquare and is now sold as part of an enterprise analytics platform. That changes the comparison considerably.

The usual framing of this comparison is that Hotjar is the mature paid tool and Microsoft Clarity is the free alternative you tolerate. That framing is out of date, and in two directions at once.

Clarity is no longer a thin free tool. Its pricing page says it is free forever, with no traffic limits and no forced upgrade, and lists rage and dead click insights, 40+ segmentation filters, conversion heatmaps and Copilot summarisation as included. Hotjar, meanwhile, is no longer sold as Hotjar. Visit hotjar.com and you land on Contentsquare; ask for Hotjar’s pricing page and you get Contentsquare’s. The paid option in this comparison is now a module of an experience analytics platform.

That does not make Clarity the automatic answer. It does mean the question has changed from “is Hotjar worth the money” to “what does a platform give you that a free recorder does not”.

At a Glance

Microsoft Clarity has one tier. The pricing page is a single page explaining that there is no paid version, that Clarity supports unlimited heatmaps, websites and team members, and why Microsoft gives it away: Microsoft processes anonymous behaviour data to improve the machine learning models behind its products, and Clarity is one of the ways it gathers that data. It also states it will never share your data with third parties. That is an unusually direct explanation of a business model, and you should read it before deciding, not after.

Contentsquare sells a ladder. A Free plan at $0 covering 200k monthly sessions and 1 project, with replays, heatmaps, funnels, error and performance monitoring and basic surveys. Growth for Experience Analytics at $49 pay monthly or $39 pay yearly, from 7k monthly sessions, adding 13 month data access, 3 projects, zone-based heatmaps, journey analysis, impact quantification and AI summaries. Pro and Enterprise are quoted rather than listed. Voice of Customer is a separate module, with its Growth plan at $79 for 500 monthly responses.

The structure is worth noticing. Contentsquare prices by module and by session volume, so the figure on the card is a starting point for a configuration rather than a price for the product.

Pricing Comparison

Two things in that table do most of the work.

The first is that Clarity has no meter. For a content site doing real traffic, session-metered pricing is the line item that grows while you are not looking, and a free tool with no cap removes an entire category of budget conversation. Contentsquare’s free plan at 200k monthly sessions is generous, but it is a ceiling, and 1 project means one site.

The second is surveys. Clarity does not have them. If part of why you wanted Hotjar was the on-page poll asking people why they did not buy, Clarity is not a replacement for that at any price, and no amount of free recordings closes the gap.

When to Choose Contentsquare

Choose the paid option when you need something Clarity structurally does not do.

Surveys and feedback are the clearest case. Recordings tell you where people struggled. A survey tells you why, in their words. Teams that run both together make better calls than teams with either alone, and the Voice of Customer module at $79 for 500 monthly responses is the priced version of that capability.

The second case is prioritisation. Journey analysis and impact quantification exist to answer a specific question: of the twenty problems we can see, which one costs us the most. Clarity will show you twenty problems and leave the ranking to your judgement. On a large site with a team arguing about what to fix next, a tool that ranks by consequence earns its licence quickly.

The third is revenue. Revenue goals and tracking on the Pro plan connect behaviour to money by channel and product. For an ecommerce business where a conversion rate change is worth a measurable amount, that link is the difference between an interesting recording and a business case. Note that Pro is quoted, so treat the published figures as the floor of the platform rather than its price.

And there is the data argument, which is not really about features. Microsoft is explicit that Clarity exists partly to collect anonymous behaviour data for its own models. If that is unacceptable to your business, your legal team or your clients, paying a vendor who has no such arrangement is a legitimate reason to choose Contentsquare, independent of what either tool can do.

When to Choose Microsoft Clarity

Choose Clarity when the recordings and heatmaps are what you actually wanted, and the rest is a nice-to-have.

For the large majority of sites, they are. The reason most teams install a behaviour tool is to watch a few sessions, see where people stop scrolling, and find the button nobody is clicking. Clarity does all of that, on every page, with always-on recordings, rage and dead click detection and 40+ filters to segment by. It states it has no traffic limits, which means the tool does not become more expensive precisely when your marketing starts working.

The GA4 connection is the underrated part. Clarity integrates with Google Analytics so a segment that looks wrong in GA4 can be opened as the sessions behind it. That closes the oldest gap in web analytics, which is the distance between a number that dropped and the behaviour that caused it. If you already live in GA4, this is the shortest path to a useful answer.

The practical argument is adoption. A tool with no licence, no seat count and no procurement step gets installed, and a tool that gets installed on everything beats a better tool installed on one site. Unlimited websites and unlimited team members mean you can put Clarity on every property you touch, including the ones nobody has budget for, which is where the surprising findings tend to be.

Where They’re Genuinely Different

The deepest difference is what each company is selling you. Contentsquare sells software and charges for it. Microsoft gives away software and tells you, on the pricing page, that aggregated anonymous behaviour data is part of what it gets in return. Neither is hidden and neither is disqualifying, but they are different trades and you should make the one you actually prefer rather than the one that is cheaper.

The second difference is direction of travel. Hotjar was a focused product at a small-business price. It is now a plan inside an enterprise platform, with the brand’s own domain redirecting to the acquirer. Platforms get more capable and they also get more expensive, more sales-led and less interested in the smallest customers. If you are choosing a tool to still be using in three years, that trajectory is a real input.

The third is depth versus coverage. Contentsquare goes deeper on one site than Clarity goes on any site: retroactive precision filtering, multi-session replay summaries, revenue tracking, error summaries, data feeds. Clarity goes wider: every site you own, every teammate, no cap. Deep matters when one site carries the revenue. Wide matters when you are responsible for many.

One honest caveat on both: a session recorder is a research tool, not a measurement tool. Neither of these replaces proper conversion tracking, and teams who install one expecting it to explain their numbers usually end up with a folder of interesting videos and the same unanswered question.

The Honest Verdict

Install Microsoft Clarity. Whatever else you decide, there is no cost to having it, no traffic ceiling to plan around and no licence to defend. For most sites it is the whole answer, and for the rest it is still worth having alongside whatever you buy.

Then ask one question before spending anything: do you need to ask your visitors questions, or rank your problems by what they cost you? If yes, Contentsquare’s Growth plan at $39 pay yearly is a reasonable place to start, with the Voice of Customer module at $79 if feedback is the part you need. If no, you are considering paying for a better version of something you are already getting free.

The decision that actually matters here is not which tool. It is whether anyone on your team has committed time each month to watching sessions and acting on them. Both of these tools are cheap relative to that commitment, and both are worthless without it.