Click, scroll and movement maps, session recordings, rage clicks and dead clicks. All of that is table stakes. The part that is not is what happens when the person in the recording fills in your form.
At that moment they stop being a session id and become a lead with three weeks of history.
Get StartedSix statements from this page that stand on their own, with where each one comes from. The first three are the ones most people evaluating a heatmap tool do not find until after they have bought one.
Hotjar stops collecting data once an account reaches its monthly session allowance. The allowance applies across the whole account rather than per project, and unused sessions do not roll over.
Hotjar, Plans, Sessions and Responses
Crazy Egg pauses heatmap and A/B testing data collection for the remainder of the month once an account reaches its tracked-pageview capacity.
Crazy Egg, Subscription Plans
Microsoft Clarity is free with no traffic limit and no sampling, but retains session recordings for 30 days unless a session is favourited, and heatmap data for 13 months.
Microsoft Clarity, Frequently Asked Questions
Inflowave does not resolve anonymous website visitors to named people or companies. A visitor remains anonymous and analytics-only until they identify themselves by submitting a form or booking a call.
Inflowave product
When a visitor identifies themselves in Inflowave, their earlier anonymous sessions are attached to that contact retrospectively, with the first visit marked as the first touch.
Inflowave product
Inflowave session recordings mask typed input by default, with passwords, email addresses and telephone numbers masked specifically, and do not capture canvas contents.
Inflowave product
Competitor claims taken from each vendor own published documentation and checked on 30 July 2026. Products in this category change often, so verify anything that decides a purchase.
Microsoft Clarity gives you heatmaps, session recordings, rage clicks, dead clicks, quick backs, more than forty filters and unlimited team members, for nothing, forever, with no traffic limit and no sampling.
If what you want is to watch what people do on your website, install it this afternoon and pay nobody, including us. It is better than we are at slicing the data, and there is no catch waiting for you three months in. Any page in this category that does not tell you that is hoping you will not find out.
So the only honest reason to read the rest of this page is that you want to do something about what you see. Not adjust a headline. Contact the person.
Because that is the thing none of them can do, and it is not a small gap. Every tool in this market shows you an anonymous session id. If you cannot connect that session to a customer, you are limited to changing your page and hoping, which is a slow way to learn and an expensive one when the traffic is paid.
Somebody has been reading your site on and off for three weeks. Today they fill in a form. In every other tool in this category those three weeks stay anonymous forever, because nothing joins them backwards.
Here they fold into that person. The pages they read, the campaign that first found them, the referrer, how many times they came back before saying anything. The first visit is marked as the first touch, so you can see what originally brought them rather than only the last click before they converted.
From then on it works forwards. Every visit lands on their timeline. A return after a quiet week is flagged as a return, which is a far more interesting event than a first visit, because a silent lead reappearing on your pricing page is a buying signal that almost nobody notices in time.
And a visit from a known lead is a workflow trigger. Notify the closer, send a message, move the deal, all while the person is still on the page rather than the following Monday.
One more thing falls out of this that is easy to miss. Every browser and device stitched to that lead is listed against them, so the phone visit and the laptop visit stop looking like two different prospects.
The identification usually comes from a form or a booking, the history lands on the deal card, and what happens next is built in workflows.
People talk about heatmaps as one thing. They are three, and using the wrong one is how a team spends a fortnight redesigning something that was never the problem.
Where people tapped, including everything that is not a button. The most valuable thing a click map ever tells you is that visitors keep pressing something you never made clickable.
How far down the page your visitors actually get, which is the single most useful number on this page and is nearly always worse than the room expects. If your offer sits below where most people stop, nothing else you change matters.
Where the cursor lingered, sampled rather than traced continuously. Weaker evidence than the other two and worth treating as a hint rather than a finding, but it is on by default because a movement tab that is always empty is worse than useless.
A conversion rate tells you that something is wrong. These tell you where. All of them are computed per site and per date range, and all of them are on the same screen.
Somebody clicking the same thing over and over is a person being failed by your page in one exact spot. This is the highest-signal, lowest-effort report in the category, and most of what it finds takes ten minutes to fix.
Clicks on things that are not clickable. An image that looks like a button, a heading people expect to expand, a card that is only a card. Every one is a small promise your page made and broke.
The share of visitors who arrived and immediately went back. High quick-back on a page you are buying traffic to usually means the ad and the page are describing two different things.
The share of sessions where somebody started filling a form and did not finish. Read this next to the form itself and the fix is usually one field you did not need to ask for.
Counted per session, so you can see whether the people who failed to convert were also the people whose page was quietly broken. That connection is invisible in an error tracker and invisible in analytics.
Two numbers that settle most internal arguments about page order in one screenshot, because they are almost always worse than the room expects.
Everybody installs one of these tools, watches recordings enthusiastically for two weeks, and then stops. Not because the recordings stopped being useful, but because forty of them is a morning gone. Three things here exist purely to shorten that.
Plain language, describing what the visitor actually did: where they came from, what they clicked, how far they scrolled, whether anything broke. It is built from the recorded events rather than written by a language model, which means it is instant and it cannot invent something that did not happen. You read six of these in the time it takes to watch one recording, then watch only the one that sounds interesting.
So you know which page to point the recordings at before you start. Time to convert is the underrated half: a page people convert on slowly is a different problem from one they leave, and the fixes are opposites.
This is per page. The six-stage funnel it sits inside, from views through form submissions and appointments to closed won, is in the reporting. Read that first to find the stage that is leaking, then come back here to watch why.
A rage-click line that steps up on a particular day is the fastest bug report you will ever get, and it usually lines up with a deploy or a change somebody forgot to mention.
Two campaigns with the same cost per click can produce completely different sessions, and that difference is usually where the difference in sales comes from. Comparing cohorts on scroll depth and rage clicks tells you which creative is attracting the wrong people long before the revenue numbers do.
This is the thing people get wrong when they choose one of these, and it is not in the feature comparison because it is in the pricing page.
Most of this category meters you, and the meter does not slow down, it stops. Hotjar documents that once you reach your monthly session allowance, data collection stops until the next reset period, that the allowance covers your whole account across every project, and that nothing rolls over. Crazy Egg documents that if you hit your tracked-pageview capacity for the month, heatmaps and A/B testing pause data collection until the next billing month.
Read that again with a campaign in mind. The month your advertising finally works, your traffic triples and your measurement goes dark halfway through. The one month you most needed to see what those visitors did is the month you have the least data about them, and you find out afterwards.
There is no session allowance here. It is part of the platform rather than a metered add-on, so a spike is just a spike. Microsoft Clarity has no traffic limit either, which is another reason it deserves the credit given at the top of this page.
Whatever you end up buying, including this, go and read the sentence in their documentation about what happens at the limit. It takes two minutes and it is the most useful two minutes in the whole evaluation.
A single script carrying one opaque id, the same shape as a Meta pixel. WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Framer, Squarespace, a hand-written page, anything that lets you add a script. Register several sites under one account and each gets its own reports, which is what an agency needs on day one.
Give it your address and it fetches the page and confirms the script is there. This exists because the single most common failure in this category is a snippet that went into a staging template, followed by a month of wondering why the dashboard is empty.
The tag carries one opaque identifier and nothing else; which account it belongs to is resolved on our side. Anyone reading the source of your site learns nothing about your account structure, which matters when your snippet sits on every client site you have ever built.
The base script is small and batches its events rather than sending one request per click. The heavier recording library is only downloaded on sites that have recordings switched on, so a site using heatmaps alone never fetches it, and it comes from our own domain rather than a third-party script host.
A recording is a reconstruction of the page, not a video of a screen. Input fields are masked by default, with passwords, email addresses and phone numbers masked specifically, and canvas contents are not captured. Cursor movement is sampled rather than traced, which keeps recordings small and keeps you from accidentally building something nobody wanted to build.
A visitor whose system asks for reduced motion is not movement-tracked. A small courtesy that costs a fraction of one report and is the sort of thing an audit notices.
We do not identify anonymous visitors, and we do not buy identity data to match them against. A visitor stays anonymous and analytics-only until they fill in a form or book a call. That line is drawn in the code rather than in a policy document.
Disclosure is still yours. Behaviour analytics belongs in your privacy policy, and in Europe behind your consent banner. Take advice if you operate in Europe or California. We have built this so you can do it properly; any vendor telling you their script is automatically lawful everywhere is selling you a future problem rather than a feature.
There is an excellent free product in this category, so the honest list matters more here than almost anywhere else on this site.
This is the honest qualifier for the whole page. If your sale involves a conversation, then knowing that a specific named lead spent four minutes on your pricing page last night is worth more than every heatmap on this site put together. If your sale is a self-serve checkout that nobody ever talks to, most of what makes this different is wasted on you and the free tools are a better fit.
That signal lands on the deal card alongside everything else you know about them.
A conversion rate tells you that you wasted the money. A scroll map and five recordings tell you where. And grouping behaviour by the ad that produced it catches the campaign attracting the wrong people weeks before the revenue figures admit it. The cap matters most to this reader too, because paid traffic is exactly what produces the spike that switches other tools off.
The ad-account side of that is in ads reporting.
Several sites under one account, each with its own reports. The reason agencies end up keeping this is not the reporting, it is the meeting: showing a client a recording of a real visitor failing to find their phone number ends an argument that a traffic chart would have prolonged for a month. Then showing the same page working afterwards is a renewal conversation rather than a report.
More in the agency use case and what we build for agencies.
Salons, clinics, studios, trades, dealerships, firms of four people. The website was built once, by somebody who has since stopped answering emails, and nobody has any idea whether it works. The first useful afternoon here is almost always the same discovery: half your visitors never scroll far enough to see the phone number.
A business this size does not need a conversion programme. It needs three fixes and then to be left alone. Where the phone number sits, what the enquiry form asks for, and whether the thing people keep clicking is actually a link. All three come out of one scroll map and one rage-click list.
The identity half matters more at this size than at any other, because the volumes are small enough to act on individually. An agency seeing a returning lead sees a percentage. A kitchen fitter seeing that the customer who asked for a quote three weeks ago is back reading the prices page has a reason to ring somebody this afternoon, and that one call pays for the software several times over.
See how small businesses use Inflowave and what it costs for a small team.
Nothing can be learned from a page with nine sessions, and the urge to redesign on day two is strong and always wrong. Run the install check so you know it is collecting, then leave it.
The map tells you which page and which part of it to care about. Going straight to recordings is how people spend a morning watching sessions of a page that was working perfectly well.
This is where the ten-minute fixes live. It is also the least glamorous list in the product and the one that pays back fastest, so do it before anything creative.
Five is enough. Skim the written summaries first and watch the ones that sound wrong. It is a genuinely uncomfortable half hour and it usually turns a planned redesign into a two-line change.
This is the step nearly everybody skips and the one with the best return, because it is the only one that keeps working after you stop paying attention. A known lead coming back to the pricing page should tell somebody, now. Set it once.
The first four rows are table stakes and everybody passes them. Read the ones about caps and about what happens after somebody identifies themselves, because that is where these products actually differ.
| Capability | Inflowave | Hotjar | Clarity | Crazy Egg |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Click, scroll and movement heatmaps | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Session recordings | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Frustration signals: rage clicks, dead clicks, quick backs | Yes | Yes | Yes | Partly |
| Filtering and saved segments | Partly | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Collection keeps running when you get a traffic spike | Yes | No | Yes | No |
| Free | No | Partly | Yes | No |
| A/B testing built in | No | No | No | Yes |
| On-site surveys and feedback widgets | No | Yes | No | Partly |
| A plain-language summary of what a visitor did | Yes | Partly | Partly | Partly |
| The recording is attached to a named person in your CRM | Yes | No | No | No |
| Visits from before they identified themselves are kept | Yes | No | No | No |
| A return visit can start an automation | Yes | No | No | No |
| Cross-device: which browsers and devices are the same person | Yes | No | No | No |
| Live list of who is on the site now | Yes | No | No | No |
Where the others are stronger. Microsoft Clarity is free forever, has no traffic limit, does not sample, and has more than forty filters and saved segments against our three. On the narrow job of watching what people do on your website it is excellent, it is better than us at slicing the data, and it costs nothing. Install it today and pay nobody, including us. Hotjar has on-site surveys and feedback widgets that we do not have at all, and as part of Contentsquare it reaches further into enterprise analytics than we ever will. Crazy Egg includes A/B testing and error tracking that we do not. And if you want to own the whole thing, PostHog is open source and gives 5,000 replays a month free on their cloud, although they themselves only recommend self-hosting up to roughly three hundred thousand events a month with no commercial support.
Two things separate this from all of them. The first is that collection does not stop: Hotjar pauses at your monthly session allowance and Crazy Egg pauses at your tracked-pageview capacity, which means the month a campaign finally works is the month the data goes dark. The second, and the real one, is that a recording here is a person rather than a session id. When somebody fills in a form their previous anonymous visits fold into their contact record with the first touch marked, every later visit lands on their timeline, a return after a quiet week is flagged, and a known lead arriving on your pricing page can start a workflow while they are still reading it. Watching a recording is only worth the half hour if you can act on it, and everywhere else the person in the recording is a stranger.
The table is the evidence. This is the verdict, one at a time, with the case for choosing them stated first, because for the first of these it is very hard to argue with.
Buy theirs when: Free forever, no traffic limit, no sampling, more than forty filters, saved segments, frustration signals and unlimited seats. It is the best free product in this category by a wide margin and there is no catch to find. If watching recordings and reading heatmaps is the whole job, install Clarity and stop shopping.
Buy ours when: It tells you what an anonymous session did. It cannot tell you that the recording you just watched is the person who asked for a quote on Tuesday, and it cannot tell your closer they are back on the pricing page right now. Their recordings are also kept for thirty days unless you favourite them, which is short if your sales cycle is not. We are not a better recorder. We are a recorder wired to a CRM.
Buy theirs when: On-site surveys and feedback widgets, which we do not have at all, and a deeper analytics product now that it is part of Contentsquare. For a dedicated CRO or UX team that lives in this tool daily, it is the more serious instrument and the survey side alone can justify it.
Buy ours when: Their own documentation is explicit that when you hit your monthly session allowance, data collection stops until the reset, account-wide, with nothing rolling over. That is a strange property for a measurement tool: it works least well exactly when you have the most traffic. Beyond the cap it is the same gap as Clarity, which is that the session is not somebody you can ring.
Buy theirs when: A/B testing and error tracking in the same product as the heatmaps, unlimited domains and team logins, no overage charges, and a genuinely simple product that has been doing this longer than most. If you want heatmaps and page testing in one cheap subscription, it is a sensible buy at twenty-nine dollars a month.
Buy ours when: It is metered by tracked pageviews and their documentation says heatmaps and A/B testing pause data collection when you hit capacity for the month. Recordings are also sampled and capped, from fifty a month at the bottom of the range, so you are choosing in advance which traffic to look at. And as with the others, a recording there is a session rather than a contact with a pipeline stage.
Taken from vendor documentation, checked 30 July 2026. Pricing and limits in this category change often, so verify any row that decides your choice.
A website heatmap is a picture of one of your pages with visitor behaviour drawn on top of it. A click map shows where people tapped, a scroll map shows how far down the page they got before leaving, and a movement map shows where the cursor lingered. Warmer colours mean more activity. The useful ones tell you something you did not expect, such as that almost nobody reaches the section your team argued about for a week, or that visitors keep clicking an image that is not a link.
You add one small script to the page and behaviour is collected from the next visitor onwards. Heatmaps cannot be generated retroactively, so the answer to when should I install this is always today. Here it is a single line carrying one opaque id, it goes on any platform that lets you add a script, and there is a built-in check that fetches your page and confirms the script is really firing before you spend a week wondering why the dashboard is empty.
Only for a site you own or have been given access to. Heatmaps are built from behaviour collected by a script installed on that specific site, so there is no way to generate one for somebody else website from the outside, and any tool claiming otherwise is showing you a guess. For your own pages, pick the page and the date range and the map is drawn from your real sessions.
Honestly, if heatmaps and recordings are the whole job, use Clarity. It is free forever, it has no traffic limit, it does not sample, and it has far more ways to filter and segment than we do. We are not going to pretend otherwise to sell you something. The reason to be here instead is that Clarity shows you an anonymous session, and this shows you a person: when the visitor eventually fills in a form, their earlier visits fold into that contact, later visits land on their timeline, and a return can start an automation. If nobody in your business would ever act on a recording by contacting the person in it, Clarity is the better answer.
Nothing. Collection carries on. This is worth checking on whatever else you are considering, because it is the failure mode people do not expect: Hotjar documents that when you hit your monthly session allowance, data collection stops until the reset, account-wide and with nothing carried over, and Crazy Egg documents that heatmaps and A/B testing pause when you reach your tracked-pageview capacity for the month. The practical effect is that the month a campaign finally works is the month the data goes dark.
A heatmap is many visitors summarised into one picture, so it tells you what is generally true and where to look. A recording is one visitor in full, so it tells you why. Use them in that order: read the scroll map to find the page that is failing, then watch five recordings of that page to find out what is actually happening. Starting with recordings is how people spend an afternoon watching sessions of a page that was fine.
The recording is a reconstruction of the page and what the visitor did on it, not a video of their screen. Typed input is masked by default, with passwords, email addresses and phone numbers masked specifically. Canvas contents are not captured, and cursor movement is sampled rather than traced continuously. The recording library is only downloaded at all on sites that have recordings switched on, and it is served from our own domain rather than a third-party script host.
It depends on where your visitors are and on what you disclose, and anyone giving you a flat yes is not being careful. The technical groundwork is here: input is masked, we do not identify anonymous visitors, and the tenant is resolved on our side so your account id is not in the snippet. What is yours is disclosure. Behaviour analytics belongs in your privacy policy, and in Europe behind your consent banner. Take advice if you operate in Europe or California; a vendor telling you their script is automatically lawful everywhere is selling you a future problem.
No. That is a different category of product and we are not in it. A visitor stays anonymous and analytics-only until they identify themselves by filling in a form or booking a call. Everything on this page about people and pipelines applies from that moment forwards and backwards over their own earlier visits, and never to somebody who has not told you who they are.
Yes, and that is how most people use it. One line on WordPress, Shopify, Webflow, Framer, Squarespace or anything else that lets you add a script. You can register several sites under one account, which is what agencies do, and each gets its own reports. Or build the site here and skip the install.
The base script is small and sends events in batches rather than one request per click. The heavier recording library is only fetched on sites that have recordings enabled, so a site using heatmaps alone never downloads it. Cursor movement is sampled rather than captured continuously, and a visitor whose system asks for reduced motion is not movement-tracked at all.
Yes, there is a live list of current sessions. On its own it is a novelty that people watch for a week and then forget. It becomes useful when combined with identity: a known lead appearing on your pricing page is a reason to pick up the phone, and that is a workflow trigger rather than something you have to be watching a screen to catch.
No surveys or feedback widgets; Hotjar has those and it is a fair reason to choose them. Page split-testing does exist, but it lives with the website builder rather than here, and Crazy Egg bundles A/B testing into this kind of product in a way we do not. Page testing in the builder.
It is part of the platform rather than a separate subscription, and it is not metered per session, so there is no allowance to run out of and no month where collection stops. What changes between plans is seats and the number of client workspaces. Compare the plans.
One line of script. Heatmaps and recordings from the next visitor onwards, and a name on them the moment somebody fills in your form.
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