Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity

What the numbers say

Status and price carry this comparison. Hotjar takes no new customers: the vendor states that creating an account is no longer possible, so its price cells read no longer sold and no script size stands behind its row. Clarity sits at the other end, with a pricing page that offers every feature at no cost, with no traffic limits and no forced upgrade, while its terms keep Microsoft’s right to introduce fees later, disclosed before they take effect.

What the free one asks for instead is written in those terms: you and Microsoft each act as a separate controller, and Microsoft may use personal data from Clarity to improve its products and to build user profiles for purposes that include advertising. The same terms rule out sites handling sensitive material such as health care, financial services or government information, and say Clarity should not be used on sites aimed at people under 18.

Cookies and storage separate them by mechanism. Clarity sets first-party and third-party cookies by default, among them Microsoft’s MUID, and consent mode is a per-project setting; since 31 October 2025 it enforces a consent signal for visits from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, where that mode is on by default. Without cookies, page views are no longer joined into sessions, which changes the unit its reports count. Hotjar’s code set a user cookie lasting 365 days and did not track visitors who blocked cookies; its data sat in Ireland against Microsoft’s US data centres, which is what the EU row records. Retention runs nine months for dashboards and heatmaps against 365 days on the other side.

Who picks which

For a new site the choice is already made, so the question becomes whether Clarity’s terms fit. Smart events detect purchases, sign-ups, form submissions and downloads without code, funnels are assembled from those events or from page visits, masking has three modes with the balanced default hiding numbers and email addresses, and bot detection is on by default. The limits are mostly on the way out: recordings kept 30 days unless labelled, a cap of 100,000 recordings per project a day, and an export API answering ten requests a day over the last one to three days.

An existing Hotjar account is a migration question rather than a comparison. The vendor’s own path is Contentsquare, which calls for a new tag on the site, a different set of domains in any Content Security Policy, and a fresh look at masking, since the new account masks all text and numbers until you change it. Recordings, heatmaps and survey responses have to leave before the account stops being readable, and a replacement run alongside will not match the old figures, because each tool counts sessions by its own rules.

Questions and answers

Can I still sign up for Hotjar?

No. The vendor states that new Hotjar accounts can no longer be created and sends new users to Contentsquare. Existing accounts keep working for now, so the row keeps its status and date here, and the market log carries the change.

Clarity costs nothing. What does that buy Microsoft?

Data. The pricing page says Clarity is one of the ways Microsoft gathers anonymous behavioral data for the machine learning behind its products, and the terms a site owner accepts on installing it allow personal data from Clarity to be used for advertising profiles as well.

Do I need a consent banner for Clarity in Europe?

That depends on the rules where you and your visitors are, on how the project is configured and on what else your pages load; this directory does not give legal advice. What is documented is the mechanism: the signal reaches Clarity through a supported consent platform or its own consent API, and without it the documentation says no cookies are set.