Analytics tools with heatmaps

Entry price is the lowest monthly price the vendor lists; “Free” means a free plan or free self-hosting. “At 100k” is the monthly price for 100,000 units, as the vendor bills them. Dates under statuses, prices and script sizes show when we checked them. See how we check every value.

What a heatmap actually measures

A counter tells you that four hundred people opened a page. A heatmap tells you what they did once it was on the screen, and it does that by drawing their behaviour on top of the page itself.

Three different pictures are sold under the one word.

Click maps mark where people pressed. The useful finding is usually not the button that works — it is the piece of text nobody can click that everybody tries to.

Scroll maps mark how far down the page people got. They answer one question the counter cannot: whether the thing you put at the bottom was ever seen at all.

Movement or attention maps follow the cursor, or the part of the page held in view. These are the weakest of the three, because a cursor is not an eye, and vendors differ in how honestly they say so.

Why this is a different measurement from a counter

A page view is one number and it is cheap to store. A heatmap is a recording of many small events for every visitor, and that difference shows up in three places.

It needs traffic. On a page with thirty visits a week the map is a handful of dots, and a handful of dots is an anecdote rather than a measurement.

It usually samples. Most tools record a share of sessions rather than all of them, and the share is often decided by your plan. The map you are reading is a sample whose size the interface rarely shows you.

And it changes what you collect. A heatmap needs the position of things on a real screen, which is why the feature normally arrives coupled with session recording. That is a heavier kind of data than a visit count, and it is the part worth thinking about before you switch it on.

How this list was built

Every tool in the directory was checked against one rule: does the vendor ship click or scroll heatmaps as its own feature, documented on the vendor’s own site. Ten of the forty-four do, and nine of them are in the table above.

The tenth is Hotjar, and it is worth a paragraph of its own. Hotjar is the name most lists still put first, but it is no longer sold as Hotjar: new accounts cannot be created, and existing ones are being moved to Contentsquare Growth from 26 August 2026. It keeps its card in the directory and stays out of the lists of what to buy, because you cannot buy it.

Two kinds of near-miss were excluded deliberately. A vendor writing a blog article about heatmaps is not a vendor with heatmaps. And an “activity heatmap” in the sense of a calendar grid — days of the week shaded by traffic — is a different picture with the same name, so it does not belong here either.

The check was run on 27 September 2026 against each vendor’s own page. A control group of eight tools that do not offer heatmaps was run through the same check, and all eight came back negative.

What this list is not

It is not a ranking of heatmap software. The dedicated heatmap and session-replay vendors are their own market, and they are not in this directory yet — so this is the answer to “which analytics tool can also draw a heatmap”, not to “which heatmap tool is best”.

That distinction matters in practice, because the two things get bought for different reasons. A dedicated tool is bought to study one page in depth. The heatmap in your analytics tool is bought so you do not add a second script to the site.

How to choose

  1. Check whether the heatmap is part of the product or a separate purchase. Vendors differ, and the price on a tool’s card is the price of the analytics, not necessarily of the map.
  2. Find the sampling rule before you trust a picture. Ask what share of sessions is recorded on your plan, and whether it changes when traffic rises.
  3. Decide whether you also want session recording. On most tools it arrives with the heatmap rather than beside it.
  4. Look at where the recordings are stored and for how long. This is personal data in a way that a visit count is not, and the EU-data list narrows the field if that matters to you.
  5. Self-hosted is possible. Three of the nine can run on your own server, which keeps the recordings on infrastructure you control.

Questions and answers

More often than a plain counter does. A heatmap normally captures how an individual moved through a page, and in most jurisdictions that is a stronger form of processing than counting visits. The honest answer depends on your setup and your country, but the safe assumption is that a heatmap changes the answer you had for your analytics.

Can I use a heatmap on a page with little traffic?

You can switch it on, but read it with care. With a few dozen visits the map shows individuals rather than patterns, and the temptation is to redesign a page around one person’s confusion.

Why do two tools draw different maps for the same page?

Because they sample different sessions, they record at different moments, and they place clicks differently when the layout moves. Compare a page against itself over time in one tool rather than comparing two tools on one day.

Is a free heatmap good enough?

For finding the obvious — a dead element everybody clicks, a section nobody scrolls to — usually yes. The paid tiers buy you sample size, retention and the ability to filter recordings, which matter once you are testing changes rather than discovering problems.

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