Microsoft Clarity vs. Hotjar

Microsoft Clarify, Hotjar, and Plerdy have many overlapping features. At the same time, they also provide unique capabilities that may affect your choice of software. Microsoft Clarify goes a bit deeper than Hotjar in terms of heatmap analytics, showing dead or rage clicks. Plerdy is the most lightweight. It doesn’t affect website performance and integrates very smoothly with your software. It also allows configuring custom goals for tracking.

4.9/5
4.7/5
4.95/5

Heatmaps

Hotjar

Microsoft Clarity

Plerdy

Real-time tracking
Dynamic elements
Custom user groups
Testing first clicks
Accurate mobile analytics
Deeper segmentation
Segmentation by traffic channels
Adaptive layout and show data
Correct data after website design changes
Hide Empty clicks
Sequence of clicks
Users did not go to another page
Detect what website elements are the least effective
Find out which part of the page is making users leave

PopUps forms

Hotjar

Microsoft Clarity

Plerdy

Ready to use templates
Reports about leads
Statistics about how do people interact with a form
Display a popup to specific trigger
API integrations with (Mailchimp, Zapier, Cliclup, Intercom, Hubspot and etc.)
Video popup
Integrations virtual pageviews Microsoft Clarity UA & events GA 4
Decrease eCommerce cart abandonment
Over 20 display rules

Feedbacks & NPS

Hotjar

Microsoft Clarity

Plerdy

Surveys
Visual feedback (Emoji)
Net Promoter Score

Session recording

Hotjar

Microsoft Clarity

Plerdy

Replay video about user behavior
Custom events and more setting
Timeline recording with pages and time
Filter by traffic channels
Analyze individual user groups
Analyze mobile and desktop website versions separately
Easily share video links
Automatically delete old videos
Rage clicks

Conversion Funnels

Hotjar

Microsoft Clarity

Plerdy

Analyze funnels by devices and traffic channels
Track unique pageviews and drop-offs on every stage

SEO-checker

Hotjar

Microsoft Clarity

Plerdy

Automatics SEO audits
SEO mistakes in semantics
Comparison of duplicates of the main meta tags
Data about mobile-first index
SEO heath score
HTML page source
Historical data for 30 days
Semrush backlink analysis
Export your data to Google Spreadsheets

Google Search Console integration

Hotjar

Microsoft Clarity

Plerdy

Tips on missed keywords
Segmentation of URL data, automatically added to the search
Analysis of keywords in the title
Search for insights (impressions, clicks, positions and CTR)
Adding tags

Event / Goals Tracking

Hotjar

Microsoft Clarity

Plerdy

Configure events using a class or item ID
Automatically add up different events from a specific website page
Transfer to Google Analytics

Sales perfomance

Hotjar

Microsoft Clarity

Plerdy

Elements do customers interact with before making a purchase
Find out what don't affect sales at all
E-commerce conversion analysis
Each element is assigned a price
Analyze the impact of website elements on sales by traffic channel and device

Macro conversion

Hotjar

Microsoft Clarity

Plerdy

Items that customers interact with before ordering

Other settings

Hotjar

Microsoft Clarity

Plerdy

Cross-domain tracking
Sub-domain tracking
Email and Slack reports
Launch A/B Tests with Google Optimize Integration capabilities
Support SPA sites
GDPR & CCPA compliance

Pricing

Hotjar

Microsoft Clarity

Plerdy

Entry Level Price
Free 35 Daily sessions Free Free
Free Trial
Start, month
Observe Plus €32 Start $98
Business, month
Observe Business Starting at €80 Business $198
Enterprise, month
Comparison

Hotjar Pros & Cons

Alice Wang, Lead UX Researcher at HelloFresh:

My verdict is that Hotjar is a great tool with its drawbacks. Hotjar removes assumptions by providing contextual insights. racks user sentiment over time. It is even possible to link up Hotjar recordings to a particular a/b experiment or event trigger for specific feedback.

Rachel Harrison, UX & CRO Analyst at Epiphany Search:

Hotjar is great because there are a lot of filtering capabilities within session recordings, allowing you to find videos/users who meet your needs. But the cons of Hotjar upset me. Hotjar should provide capabilities to do numerous session recordings on different site areas at once.

Alex Richards, Chief Information Officer & Co-Founder at EvaluAgent:

I recommend Hotjar to all my colleagues. But I don`t like that Hotjar doesn't provide the opportunity to customize the dashboard view. I also don't like that Hotjar doesn't have integrations with JIRA, Github, and Bugherd.

Microsoft Clarity Pros & Cons

Ahmed Samy Elbasiouny, Founder and Digital Marketing Consultant at Capsulera:

Microsoft Clarity is easy to use. I incredibly like that with Microsoft Clarity, I can track website visitors' behaviors, including session video recording, heat maps, and scroll maps. I recommend Microsoft Clarity to anyone who wants to find an alternative to Google Analytics.

Rahul Ahuja, Senior Software Engineer at Globant:

Microsoft Clarity is a good attempt by Microsoft, but Google Analytics is better. Microsoft Clarity provides basic data. Microsoft Clarity lacks A/B testing tools for UX testing and design improvements.

Emile Mostert, Cloud Based Software Specialist at iVvy Pty Ltd:

The heatmap function in Microsoft Clarity is the best. All other functions of Microsoft Clarity are basic. I expect a few extra features to the Microsoft Clarity repertoire in the near future.

About Hotjar

Hotjar is a powerful tool that helps businesses understand their users' behaviors by visually representing where users click, move and scroll on their websites. With the insights provided by Hotjar, businesses can validate their ideas and reduce assumptions by obtaining real, unbiased feedback. The platform is especially useful for product teams, including specialists, experts and business owners. In addition, it is designed to create customer delight in products, which drives product-led growth.

The Hotjar team has created a tool that provides continuous discovery, helping teams to get reliable data about the performance of their product and their customers' interactions with it. With features such as heatmaps, session recordings, incoming feedback, surveys, and integrations, Hotjar provides all the tools for businesses to reduce assumptions, prioritize their roadmap with eye-opening insights, and make changes with reliable insights from actual users.

Many businesses have used Hotjar and have left glowing reviews of the product, stating that it is useful in reducing guesswork and enabling businesses to build product features that guarantee customer satisfaction. Hotjar has helped businesses empathize with their users, spot endless opportunities to improve products, get buy-in for their ideas, and discover every issue users encounter.

Hotjar is a nice tool that helps digital marketers make their product teams more customer-focused, share user insights for smarter prioritization, and build products that customers need and love. With the wide array of features and capabilities provided by Hotjar, businesses can get started today and begin to understand their users truly.

About Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar are online analytics tools that allow website administrators to monitor user behavior and make more informed decisions. Clarity, GDPR and CCPA compliant, is a free, user-friendly application that captures how real people interact with your website. The setup is simple, and you will begin receiving data within minutes. Clarity provides distinct elements that aid in comprehending user behavior. There are no limits on the number of sites per account, and Clarity can scale to handle even the largest websites. There are also no limits on the amount of bandwidth that may be sent. Clarity processes more than 1 petabyte of data from over 100 million users each month without sampling. Clarity provides immediate heat maps that generate automatically for all your pages, session recordings, and strong insights to help you determine where people become dissatisfied and convert these issues into opportunities. Clarity also offers Google Analytics integration, allowing you to seamlessly integrate these two powerful platforms by connecting Clarity and Google Analytics.

On the other hand, Hotjar assists users in comprehending user activity on their websites. The application includes heatmaps, conversion funnels, form analytics, feedback polls, and surveys. Hotjar is designed to be incredibly user-friendly, and setting it up is simple. For instance, the platform provides heatmaps that illustrate to website owners where users click and scroll and how far down they scroll. In addition, the technology provides session recording, which enables website administrators to observe how visitors explore their sites. Hotjar offers a free trial, and the number of daily page views determines the cost.

Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar are excellent web analytics tools that can assist website owners in gaining a deeper understanding of user behavior. Both solutions include capabilities such as heatmaps and session recordings that provide website administrators with useful insights for enhancing the user experience.

Comparison of Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity

Let's look at two of the best free options on the market: Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity. Hotjar is a great tool that allows users to record their website visitors' behavior and optimize their website. While the biggest downside is the daily recording limits and the inability to filter your heatmaps, it is easy to integrate using Google Manager or directly pasting the code. On the other hand, Clarity is an ideal choice for users who need support, cross-team collaboration, and tech stack integration. Clarity offers everything that most top-tier paid plans competitors offer for no cost. It provides a great user interface and scrolls heat maps. You can improve your conversion goals by seeing video recordings of each step of the funnel, which allows seeing where friction points may appear. Besides, it is GDPR compliant and provides an advanced dashboard for analytic overview.

Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity are very similar, but some key differences exist. For example, if you want to ask users why they behave in a certain way, Hotjar can help you; Clarity cannot. If you're just starting with behavior analytics and product experience insight tools and want some support, Hotjar is here for you. If you require advanced filtering for segmentation, Clarity is a great option. In terms of cross-team collaboration, Hotjar is the better choice. Both tools offer unlimited users, but Hotjar is more collaborative, allowing you to share a link to a live URL, comment on a key moment during the recording, and keep up with how other colleagues use the platform. Finally, regarding integration with your tech stack, Hotjar has several custom-built integrations, including Slack, and A/B testing tools like Google Optimize and Optimizely, Hubspot, and Segment. In contrast, Clarity doesn't currently offer any integrations.

Here’s what users think about these tools:

“We used Plerdy to figure out how to improve e-commerce UX. Videos session recordings helped us make many changes that improved conversion”

Cristian T Executive Art Director

“Hotjar has less powerful filters than other tools”

Gabriele M UX Designer