Hotjar alternatives, compared honestly
The right Hotjar alternative depends on why you are leaving. Most people are leaving over price, and for them the answer is a free hosted tool. A smaller group cannot send visitor sessions to a third party at all, and they need something they can host.
Facts about other products on this page were last checked against their own websites on . Prices and limits change; follow the source links before you decide.
The short answer
- You want it free and hosted: Microsoft Clarity. It has no paid plan at all.
- You want product analytics too: PostHog. Session replay is one part of a larger suite.
- You want simple web analytics with replay and heatmaps you can self-host: Umami.
- You need to debug a web app and want to self-host: OpenReplay or Replayowl. All self-hostable options are compared in open source session replay.
- Session data must stay on your own infrastructure: any of the self-hostable options. We build Replayowl for this case, and we say below where it falls short.
Hotjar itself is not expensive to start: its pricing page now lives at Contentsquare and lists a free plan with 200k monthly sessions. See our Hotjar pricing breakdown.
At a glance
| Tool | Free option | Cheapest paid | Self-hosted | Heatmaps |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hotjar | 200k monthly sessions, 1 project | Growth, $39 per month billed yearly | No | Yes |
| Microsoft Clarity | Free, up to 100,000 sessions per project per day | No paid plan | No | Yes |
| PostHog | 5,000 recordings per month | $0.005 per recording after that | Yes, MIT with a separately licensed ee/ folder |
Yes |
| Umami | Free self-hosting | Cloud plans | Yes, MIT | Yes, since v3.2.0 |
| OpenReplay | Free self-hosting | Dedicated from $199 per month | Yes, AGPLv3 with a separately licensed ee/ folder |
Yes |
| FullStory | 30,000 monthly sessions | Not published | Not found | Yes |
| Mouseflow | 500 sessions per month | Essential, 25 per month (currency not shown) | Not found | Yes |
| Lucky Orange | 7-day trial | $32 per month billed yearly | Not found | Yes |
| Replayowl | Free self-hosting | None | Yes, AGPL-3.0 | No |
Microsoft Clarity
Clarity is free with no paid plan. It records up to 100,000 sessions per project per day, keeps recordings for 30 days (favourites and a random sample for up to 9 months), and includes heatmaps. For most small sites leaving Hotjar over price, this is the answer.
The catch is where the data goes. Recordings are stored in Microsoft Azure, and Clarity’s terms make you and Microsoft independent controllers of the data, so Microsoft is not acting as your processor. Visitors in the EEA, UK and Switzerland need a consent signal passed to Clarity. Sources: Clarity FAQ, Clarity terms. More in Replayowl vs Clarity.
PostHog
PostHog bundles session replay with product analytics, feature flags, experiments and more. The first 5,000 recordings each month are free, then pricing starts at $0.005 per recording. Free recordings are kept for one month. The core is MIT licensed and can be self-hosted. Cloud data can be stored in the US or the EU. Sources: pricing, session replay. More in Replayowl vs PostHog.
Umami
Umami is privacy-focused web analytics that added session replay in v3.1.0 (April 2026) and click and scroll heatmaps in v3.2.0 (June 2026). It is MIT licensed and free to self-host. Replay is a feature of the analytics product: by default it samples 15% of sessions, stops a recording after 5 minutes, and keeps replays for 30 days. Source: Umami replay docs. If you want analytics and heatmaps in one self-hosted tool, Umami is a strong choice. More in Replayowl vs Umami.
Two other open source analytics tools, Rybbit and OpenPanel (both AGPL-3.0), also list session replay on their home pages.
OpenReplay
OpenReplay is an open source session replay platform aimed at developers, with features for debugging web apps. Self-hosting is free; a dedicated hosted plan starts at $199 per month, billed hourly. The repository is AGPLv3 by default with an ee/ folder under a separate license. Source: pricing. More in Replayowl vs OpenReplay.
Replayowl
Replayowl is session replay only, self-hosted, AGPL-3.0. It runs as a single Cloudflare Worker or a Node server, stores recordings in any S3-compatible bucket and summaries in D1 or Postgres. The recorder is about 8 KB gzipped.
What it does well: complete sessions across pages, replays that reproduce hover states, Shadow DOM and CSS-in-JS, console errors on the timeline, and search by your own user ID.
What it does not do: heatmaps, funnels, surveys, or analytics dashboards. If you need those, one of the tools above fits better. Try the live demo to judge the replay quality yourself.
Paid tools that are not free
FullStory has a free plan with 30,000 monthly sessions; its paid plans are not priced publicly (Replayowl vs FullStory). LogRocket starts at $176 per month billed yearly (Replayowl vs LogRocket). Lucky Orange starts at $32 per month billed yearly for 3,500 sessions. Crazy Egg starts at $29 per month billed yearly with 50 recordings. Mouseflow has a free plan of 500 sessions per month. Smartlook is being shut down, see leaving Smartlook.
Sources: FullStory, LogRocket, Lucky Orange, Crazy Egg, Mouseflow.