What is the best Hotjar alternative?
It depends on the job. For free recordings and heatmaps on any amount of traffic, Microsoft Clarity is hard to beat. For surveys and feedback widgets, Hotjar itself remains the stronger tool. If you want to see which sessions, clicks and channels led to paying customers, Statsy is built for that.
Replays and heatmaps on their own are no longer rare. Clarity gives them away. The question worth asking is what you do with them. Most teams watch recordings to find out why people buy or leave. That works better when you can filter to the visitors who actually paid.
Statsy starts from revenue. Payments arrive through signed webhooks from your payment provider. Each payment is matched to the visitor who made it. Replays and heatmaps then answer a sharper question: what did buyers do that other visitors did not?
How is Statsy different from Hotjar?
Hotjar focuses on behaviour and feedback: replays, heatmaps, funnels and surveys. Statsy focuses on behaviour tied to money. Its replays can be filtered to sessions that paid, and its heatmaps can show revenue instead of clicks. Statsy also includes full web analytics and multi-touch revenue attribution. It has no surveys.
What Statsy adds
- Replay filters built on payments. Show all sessions, sessions that paid, refunded sessions, high-intent sessions without a purchase, or sessions with rage clicks.
- A revenue view on heatmaps. Switch from clicks to revenue to see which clicked areas were followed by a payment from the same visitor within 30 days.
- Revenue by channel. Every sale is credited to the post, search, referrer and campaign that brought the buyer, under five attribution models. See how Statsy attributes revenue.
- Web analytics in the same place. Visitors, sources, pages, goals, funnels, journeys, alerts and email reports.
What Hotjar has that Statsy does not
- Surveys and feedback widgets. Contentsquare lists basic surveys on Hotjar’s free plan.
- A generally available product with a public price list. Statsy is in private beta.
Is Microsoft Clarity a better free option?
If free is the requirement, yes. Microsoft describes Clarity as free forever with no limits on traffic, and it includes heatmaps and session recordings. Clarity keeps recordings for 30 days and heatmap data for 9 months. It does not connect sessions to payments from providers such as Stripe.
Clarity is a good tool, and many teams should simply use it. According to Microsoft’s cookie documentation, Clarity sets first-party cookies such as _clck and _clsk. Starting 31 October 2025, Clarity enforces consent signal requirements for visits from the EEA, the UK and Switzerland.
Its integrations page lists tools such as HubSpot, Shopify and Zapier, but no payment providers. Statsy counts EU, EEA, UK and Swiss visitors without cookies in its default Auto mode, and takes revenue straight from payment webhooks.
How do Statsy, Hotjar and Clarity compare?
All three record session replays and heatmaps. They differ on price, how long recordings are kept, and whether payments are part of the picture. The table uses each vendor’s own pages as of September 2026. Plans and limits change often, so check the linked sources before you decide.
| Statsy | Hotjar (Contentsquare) | Microsoft Clarity | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Price | Free during the private beta, by invitation | Free plan with 200k monthly sessions; Growth plan listed from $49 for 7k monthly sessions | Free, with no limits on traffic |
| Session replays | Yes, kept 90 days | Yes; Growth plan keeps replays for 2 months | Yes, kept 30 days |
| Heatmaps | Yes, with a revenue view; totals kept up to 400 days | Yes, on the free plan | Yes, data kept 9 months |
| Revenue data | Payments from Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, Polar and Razorpay webhooks, credited to channels | “Revenue goals & tracking” listed on the Pro plan | No payment provider in its integrations list |
Sources, checked September 2026: Hotjar plans from Contentsquare pricing; Clarity from clarity.microsoft.com, its data retention page and its integrations page. Statsy figures come from our privacy policy.
When should you choose Hotjar or Clarity instead?
Choose Hotjar when surveys and on-page feedback matter as much as recordings. Choose Clarity when you want free replays and heatmaps and do not need revenue data. Choose Statsy when the question is which visitors and channels turn into paying customers, and you take payments through a supported provider.
- You need a generally available product with a price list and uptime commitment today. Statsy is invite-only during the beta.
- You need recordings of every visitor, including cookieless ones. Statsy records replays only for visitors tracked in Full mode.
- You sell through a checkout that cannot send a webhook or call the Statsy Payment API.
How do you switch from Hotjar to Statsy?
You can run both tools side by side while you compare. Add the Statsy script, turn on replays and heatmaps in site settings, and connect your payment provider’s webhook. Once you trust the numbers, remove the Hotjar tag. Most of the work is pasting one script tag and one signing secret.
- Add the Statsy script (about 3 KB gzipped) to every page, or ask your AI coding agent to do it.
- Turn on session replays and heatmaps in the site’s settings. Both are off by default.
- Connect Stripe, Lemon Squeezy, Paddle, Polar or Razorpay with a webhook URL and signing secret.
- Compare for a week or two, then remove the Hotjar tracking code if Statsy covers what you need.