For most small UK businesses, start with Microsoft Clarity. It is free, it has no traffic cap, and it gives you heatmaps and session recordings from day one. Hotjar earns its fee when you want to ask visitors questions directly, through on-site surveys and feedback widgets, and you have the time to act on what they tell you. Either way, the tool is only half the job. In the UK you also need to get cookie consent right, or the data you collect will be patchy.
We build and look after websites for small businesses, so we get asked this a lot. Usually it goes like this: “My site gets visitors but nobody enquires, and I have no idea why.” A heatmap or a recording will not fix that on its own, but it will show you where people give up. That is what this guide is for.
TL;DR
- Cost: Clarity is free with no traffic caps. Hotjar has a free plan limited to about 35 daily sessions, with paid plans from around $32 a month.
- Features: Both give you heatmaps and session recordings. Hotjar adds surveys and feedback widgets. Clarity adds rage-click and dead-click signals and AI session summaries.
- UK catch: Since 31 October 2025, Clarity needs a valid consent signal for visitors from the UK, EEA and Switzerland. Without it, your recordings fragment.
- Our advice: Install Clarity first. Add Hotjar only if you have a specific question that behaviour data cannot answer.
Table of Contents
- What each tool actually does
- Hotjar vs Clarity at a glance
- Cost: free is free, but read the Hotjar limits
- Heatmaps vs session recordings: when to use each
- Where Clarity wins
- Where Hotjar wins
- The UK problem: cookie consent
- Which should you choose? Five quick scenarios
- What a small business can realistically learn
- How we use these tools: our perspective
- Where we can help
- A simple set-up plan for this week
- FAQ
- Sources
What each tool actually does
Both tools watch how people use your website and turn it into something you can look at. They do it in two main ways.
Heatmaps show where visitors click, how far they scroll and what they ignore, aggregated across many visits onto a picture of one page. Session recordings replay a single visit: the mouse moving, the page scrolling, the tap on a button that did nothing.
Microsoft Clarity is a free behaviour analytics tool from Microsoft. Hotjar, now part of Contentsquare, started as a simple heatmap product and has grown into a wider suite that includes surveys and feedback tools. According to one 2026 comparison, Hotjar’s edge is its voice-of-customer tools, which Clarity does not offer, while Clarity focuses on diagnostic signals and AI summaries.
That is the whole story in two sentences. The rest of this article is about which differences matter when you run a small business with a small team and a small budget.
Hotjar vs Clarity at a glance
| Microsoft Clarity | Hotjar | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | Free, no paid tiers | Free plan plus paid tiers |
| Traffic limits | None stated | Daily session limit by plan |
| Heatmaps | Yes | Yes |
| Session recordings | Yes | Yes |
| On-site surveys and feedback widgets | No | Yes |
| Rage-click and dead-click signals | Yes | Not its focus |
| AI session summaries | Yes (Copilot) | Not its focus |
| Sharing recordings with a team | Basic | Stronger (tags, notes, Slack and Jira sharing) |
| Recording retention | 30 days, according to one 2026 comparison | Depends on plan |
Treat the table as a starting point. Both products change their limits and features regularly, so check each vendor’s own pages before you commit.
Cost: free is free, but read the Hotjar limits
Clarity’s pitch is simple: free forever, with no cap on sessions. That is why almost every comparison, including the discussion ranking in Google, ends up asking why anyone pays for Hotjar at all.
Hotjar’s free Basic plan is capped at 35 daily sessions. Paid Plus starts at around $32 a month (billed annually) for 100 daily sessions, and Business starts at roughly $80 a month for 500 daily sessions. Those are US dollar figures from a third-party write-up, so check Hotjar’s own pricing page for the current sterling price and VAT.
The sampling trap
This is the mistake we see most. Owners read “daily session limit” and assume it is a monthly traffic limit. It is not. Hotjar applies the limit per day, and if more people visit than your limit allows, it captures only a portion of them.
Here is what that looks like in practice. Say your plumbing firm’s site gets 90 visits on a quiet Tuesday and 400 after a local newspaper mention on Thursday. On a 100-session plan you would see nearly everything on Tuesday, but only about a quarter of Thursday’s visitors. The busiest day, which is the one you most want to study, is the one you see least of.
Hotjar’s own documentation also says it may not be possible to capture 100% of your visitors. Check the traffic coverage widget in your dashboard so you know how representative your recordings really are.
Heatmaps vs session recordings: when to use each
People search for this because they are not sure which one to open first. They answer different questions, so here is a rule of thumb.
Use heatmaps when you are asking “what do people do on this page overall?” Is anyone clicking the button you care about? Do visitors scroll far enough to see your prices or contact form? Are they clicking something that is not a link? Heatmaps are best on a single high-traffic page, such as your homepage or a landing page, where patterns show up quickly.
Use session recordings when you are asking “why did this person leave?” A recording shows hesitation, repeated taps, a form field that kept throwing an error, a menu that did not open on a phone. One recording is an anecdote. Ten similar ones are a finding.
A good order of work:
- Look at the heatmap of a key page to spot something odd, such as a dead zone or a heavy cluster of clicks on a non-clickable image.
- Filter recordings of visits to that page and watch five to ten.
- Write down what you saw in one sentence, change one thing, and check again in a few weeks.
Both tools do steps one and two. The difference is what comes next. Clarity flags rage clicks and dead clicks for you, and its AI summaries mean you do not have to watch every recording. Hotjar lets you pop up a one-line question to the same visitors, which is a different kind of evidence.
Where Clarity wins
- It costs nothing. For a business spending a few hundred pounds a month on its website, that matters.
- No sampling worries. You are not racing a daily limit.
- Less time to insight. Practitioners point out that Clarity’s AI summaries can cut the time a small team spends watching raw recordings. If you are the owner, the marketer and the person who answers the phone, that is real.
- Good diagnostic signals. Rage clicks (someone hammering the same spot) and dead clicks (clicks that do nothing) point you straight at broken or confusing elements.
Where Hotjar wins
- Asking, not just watching. A recording shows what someone did. It cannot tell you what they were looking for. A short on-site survey, such as “What stopped you from booking today?”, can. Clarity has no equivalent.
- Team workflow. Hotjar lets you tag and note recordings and share them in Slack or Jira, which suits a team running structured optimisation. If your whole team is two people, you may never use it.
- Longer history on some plans. Clarity’s 30-day recording retention is fine for spotting problems this month but awkward for comparing against last quarter.
Industry commentary lands in the same place: Clarity is the obvious starting point for small businesses that want unlimited behavioural evidence for free, while Hotjar suits teams running a recurring research and conversion programme.
The UK problem: cookie consent
Here is the part most comparison articles skip, and it matters if your customers are in Derbyshire, Sheffield or Nottingham rather than California.
Since 31 October 2025, Clarity enforces cookie consent for page visits from the EEA, UK and Switzerland. If your site does not pass Clarity a valid consent signal, through a consent management platform or Clarity’s Consent API, it will not set its cookies. Without those cookies, recordings lose continuity and become fragmented.
In plain terms: install Clarity with a script and no consent set-up, and you may get a thin, confusing picture of your UK visitors. “Free” does not mean “set and forget”.
Three practical points:
- Check your cookie banner first. If it does not talk to your analytics tools, fix that before you judge any of the data.
- Expect fewer recorded visits than total visits. Visitors who decline cookies will not be tracked. That is how it should work, but remember it when you read the numbers.
- Mask sensitive fields. Both tools let you mask what appears in recordings. Switch it on for forms, especially anything with names, addresses or payment details.
If you want to see how consent signals should be wired up, we have a walkthrough on implementing Consent Mode v2 on UK sites. It is written for exactly this kind of small-business set-up.
Which should you choose? Five quick scenarios
You run a local trades or services business with a brochure-style site. Install Clarity. Your questions are simple: is the phone number easy to find, and does the enquiry form work on mobile? Heatmaps and a handful of recordings will answer both.
You have an online shop with a few hundred visits a day. Start with Clarity to find friction in the basket and checkout. If you still cannot explain why people abandon, add a short exit survey with Hotjar for a month.
You are redesigning your site. Run Clarity on the old site for a few weeks first. It tells you what people actually use, so you do not cut the thing your best customers rely on.
You have a team that runs conversion experiments every month. This is where Hotjar’s collaboration and survey tools pay for themselves.
You have very low traffic, say 20 visits a day. Either tool works, and the free Hotjar plan’s cap will not bite. But with so little data, a phone call to a recent customer may teach you more than any recording.
What a small business can realistically learn
Behaviour tools do not hand you answers. They hand you better questions. A few examples of what we look for when we review a site:
- Mobile tap targets. Recordings often show someone tapping a tiny link three times. Make it bigger.
- Pages that scroll past the point. If your heatmap shows most visitors stop scrolling before your call to action, move it up.
- Forms that eat people. Watch where visitors abandon a form. It is usually one field, often phone number or a vague “message” box.
- Slow loading. If recordings show visitors waiting on a blank screen, that is a speed problem, not a design problem. Our piece on page speed and Core Web Vitals covers what to fix.
Once you have a hunch, test one change at a time. Our guide to improving your website’s conversion rate covers what is worth changing first, and the conversion rate benchmarks for 2026 will tell you whether your numbers are actually a problem.
How we use these tools: our perspective
We will be candid: we do not think the Hotjar vs Clarity question is the one that decides whether your website makes you money. We have seen businesses with beautiful heatmaps and no change in enquiries, because nobody had time to act on them.
Our view is simple. Use the free tool, look at it for twenty minutes a fortnight, and make one change each time. A small business that does that for six months will beat one that pays for a more powerful dashboard and opens it twice a year.
We also think the consent set-up deserves more attention than the tool choice. A tool that quietly records half your visitors gives you confident-looking, wrong answers. Get consent working first, and the rest gets much easier.
Where a paid tool is worth it is when you have a clear question the behaviour data cannot answer. Then a survey is the right instrument. But that is the exception for a small site, not the starting point.
And one more thing we say to every client: do not let analytics become a reason to delay fixing the obvious. If your site is slow, hard to use on a phone, or has no clear next step, you do not need a recording to know that.
— Chris
Where we can help
If you would rather not wire up consent, tracking and reporting yourself, that is part of what we do. Our web design plans start at £120 per month (Starter), with Growth at £170 per month and Smart at £560 per month, and we can set up behaviour tracking as part of a site build or ongoing improvement. If the real problem is that enquiries arrive by WhatsApp, email and phone and get lost, our SmartFlowCRM pulls those channels into one place, with Silver at £130 per month and Gold at £260 per month. And if you want to be found by local customers in the first place, our SEO service starts from £150 per month.
We are a Derbyshire-based team, and we are happy to talk it through in person or on the phone.
A simple set-up plan for this week
- Sort consent. Check that your cookie banner passes consent choices to your analytics. Fix it before installing anything.
- Install Clarity on your whole site. It takes minutes with a standard tag or plugin.
- Pick three pages that matter most: usually the homepage, your top service page and the contact page.
- Wait two weeks, then open the heatmaps for those pages.
- Watch ten recordings of visits that did not end in an enquiry. Note what you saw.
- Change one thing. Then wait another two weeks and compare.
- Revisit the decision in three months. If you keep hitting questions that need answers from visitors themselves, trial a survey tool for a month.
If your landing pages are where visitors leave, our guide to high-converting landing page design is a good companion to this routine.
FAQ
Is Microsoft Clarity any good?
Yes, for what it is. It gives you unlimited heatmaps and session recordings for free, plus rage-click detection and AI summaries. Its limits are shorter recording retention and fewer survey and collaboration tools. For most small business sites it is more than enough.
Is Clarity really free, and what is the catch?
Microsoft states it is free forever, and there are no paid tiers. The practical cost is your time: you must configure consent properly for UK visitors, mask sensitive fields and actually look at the data. Whether Microsoft’s data terms suit your business is worth a read of its privacy documentation before you install.
Do I need Hotjar if I already use Clarity?
Usually not. Add Hotjar only if you want to ask visitors questions through surveys or feedback widgets, or if your team needs more structured sharing of recordings. Check its session limits against your daily traffic first, because it samples visitors once you pass your plan’s cap.
Do heatmaps and recordings work if visitors decline cookies?
Not for those visitors. In the UK, Clarity will not set its cookies without a valid consent signal, so people who decline will not be tracked properly. Expect your data to represent consenting visitors only, and read it with that in mind.
Which is better for WordPress sites?
Both install on WordPress with a tag or plugin, so the choice comes down to the same factors: budget, questions and consent. Start with Clarity, and make sure your consent plugin is connected to it. If your site is slow or plugin-heavy, fix that too, as a heavy script stack can hurt page speed.
Sources
- Microsoft Clarity: free heatmaps and session recordings
- Clarity cookie consent update: what site owners need to know
- Hotjar documentation: how sampling works
- Hotjar documentation: does Hotjar track all your users?
- Hotjar pricing 2026: free vs paid plans
- Microsoft Clarity vs Hotjar in 2026: honest comparison
- Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: free vs broader UX insights
- Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity (2026): free vs paid heatmaps
