Customer experience analysis is complex. Despite your best efforts, you might misinterpret user data or miss crucial website issues.

User behavior tools can simplify this process, offering accurate insights into website performance and user experience.

Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity are popular user behavior analytics software that provide insights into how users interact with your website or web apps. However, each has limitations—Hotjar may slow down your site during UX analysis, while Microsoft Clarity lacks advanced behavior analytics features.

These drawbacks often push users to seek alternatives.

In this comparison article, we'll explore the main differences between these two tools to help you decide which is best for your team.

We'll also introduce FullSession, which combines the key features of Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity and goes a step further by offering advanced dynamic element analysis and comprehensive user engagement tracking—features these tools lack.

Start a free trial or book a demo to learn more.

Key Takeaways

1. Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity are user behavior analytics tools that help businesses understand how visitors interact with their websites.
2. FullSession is the best alternative, combining the strengths of both solutions while introducing unique features. It excels in real-time analysis of user interactions with dynamic content without compromising website performance. Book a demo today to see FullSession in action.
3. FullSession captures all user interactions in real-time, provides visual reports, and allows you to analyze key user behavior metrics in one place to boost your website optimization. It also helps identify frustration signals that lead to funnel drop-offs and decreased conversion rates. 
4. While Hotjar offers a comprehensive suite of user behavior tools, Microsoft Clarity primarily focuses on heatmaps and session recordings and lacks customer feedback tools, funnel and conversion tracking. FullSession, however, includes the same features as Hotjar and adds advanced customer feedback forms, analysis, and reports. It connects each feedback to a session recording, providing deeper insights into user sentiments and frustrations.
5. Hotjar handles user data responsibly, whereas Clarity grants Microsoft rights to use the data collected, raising privacy concerns. FullSession, on the other hand, is GDPR, CCPA, and PCI compliant, ensuring robust data security and user privacy.
6. Microsoft Clarity is entirely free but comes with a limited feature set. Both Hotjar and FullSession start at $39 per month. However, FullSession grants access to all key features and allows tracking of up to 5,000 monthly sessions, compared to Hotjar's limit of 100 daily sessions. FullSession also offers a 20% discount on the annual plan, providing more value for businesses with higher traffic. Visit the Pricing page for more details.

While Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity each offer valuable features, FullSession stands out as the best option due to its comprehensive feature set, superior tracking capabilities for dynamic elements, strong data privacy compliance, and competitive pricing.

Its ability to provide real-time insights and connect user feedback directly to session recordings makes it invaluable for businesses looking to improve user experience and optimize their websites.

What is FullSession?

FullSession is a web analytics software that helps e-commerce businesses, product teams, and digital marketing teams track and analyze user engagement data to understand better how web visitors engage with various site features.

With FullSession, you can identify funnel drop-offs and areas where users experience setbacks when navigating your site so you can fix website issues and boost conversions.

Start a free trial or book a demo today.

What is Hotjar?

Hotjar is a user behavior analytics software that helps businesses understand how website visitors interact with various website pages via session recordings, heatmaps, surveys, and website feedback widgets.

With Hotjar, you can see how users navigate specific web pages and answer questions like; 

• Do users scroll excessively? 
• What buttons do they give the most attention to? 
• Which page elements are blocking conversions?

Hotjar doesn’t just let you visualize user activities; it also enables you to uncover the reasons behind their actions to learn what works or not to improve user experience.

If you want to learn about other analytics tools and how they compare to Hotjar, you can read the following comparison articles: 

1. Hotjar vs Mixpanel
2. Hotjar vs MouseFlow 
3. Smartlook vs Hotjar
4. Decibel Insight vs Hotjar
5. Lucky Orange vs Hotjar
6. Hotjar vs Inspectlet

What is Microsoft Clarity?

Microsoft Clarity is a Microsoft product that visually represents user behavior across individual website pages.

This web behavior analytics tool creates detailed heatmaps determining which parts of the website drive maximum user engagement and provides information about rage clicks, dead clicks, excessive scrolling, user inactivity, and JavaScript errors. 

It also allows you to record individual user behavior sessions, too.

Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: How They Compare and Contrast

Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity are behavior analytics tools that help you analyze user engagement data. In this section, we'll evaluate their strengths and weaknesses to help you choose the right tool for your business. 

Additionally, we'll highlight the benefits of FullSession and how you can use them to your advantage.

Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: Basic differences

When comparing Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity, it's essential to understand their key differences. Here are four fundamental distinctions:

1. Integrations: Hotjar integrates with numerous third-party tools, such as Slack, Segment, HubSpot, and Google Optimize, and offers over 1,000 integrations via Zapier. In contrast, Microsoft Clarity integrates only with Google Analytics.
2. Feedback collection: Both tools provide session recordings and heatmaps, but Hotjar also offers surveys and a feedback widget to capture user sentiments. Microsoft Clarity does not support user feedback collection.
3. Behavioral insights: Microsoft Clarity provides an overview of user behavior and experience on your website. Hotjar, however, does not offer an overview of user behavioral trends.
4. Target audience: Hotjar includes advanced behavior analytics tools designed for team collaboration, while Microsoft Clarity is more suited for individuals who do not require team-based features.

Having introduced Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity and highlighted their differences, let's explore their user ratings, deployment, use cases, pricing, integrations, and features.

Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: User rating

To understand user feedback on both tools, we checked G2 reviews. Hotjar scores 4.3 out of 5 from 260 reviews, while Microsoft Clarity scores 4.4 out of 5 from 15 reviews.

Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: Use cases

Hotjar suits e-commerce, digital marketing, product development, and research analysis teams.

Microsoft Clarity is a good option for site owners with differing traffic levels, from bloggers to enterprises. However, it has some drawbacks; due to diverse analytics needs across industries, Microsoft Clarity may not effectively meet all requirements.

FullSession best suits e-commerce, SaaS/web apps and general websites. It helps individuals and teams in quality assurance, customer support, product development, marketing, sales, UX design and data analytics.

Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: Deployment

Microsoft Clarity, Hotjar and FullSession allow you to use their web analytics features similarly. To deploy each solution, you must install its code snippet into your site’s source code. 

The code snippet logs analytics data like mouse trails, button clicks, scroll depth, browser information, and text inputs.

Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: Key features comparison

In this section, we'll explore the key features of Microsoft Clarity, Hotjar, and FullSession, and discuss what distinguishes each of these user behavior analytics solutions.

1. Session recordings

While both Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar offer session recordings to observe user navigation, Hotjar provides additional collaboration features. 

It allows you to skip user inactivity in sessions, making it easier to find relevant activities quickly. Hotjar also enables the use of custom tags to mark challenging recording sessions.

How FullSession session recordings and replays work

Our session recordings and replay tool help you see every user activity on your website. 

With this feature, you can see how users interact with individual web pages, including how they scroll, areas they rage click, and the web content they find most useful. Here is what you can accomplish with our session recordings:

1. Identify broken links, website bugs, or usability problems 
2. Track the total time users spend on your web pages
3. Evaluate overall user trends 
4. Monitor the total pages that users visit 
5. Measure the performance of specific marketing campaigns to maximize advertising ROI

Session recordings and replays are important analytics features that help you skip the guesswork and use real-time user engagement data to understand how people interact with your site.

Our session recording and replay also allows you to analyze user behavioral data such as

• User location and IP address 
• Total time on page
• Clicked URLs
• Session events 
• Session list
• Visited web pages 
• Referrals 

In addition to providing a complete picture of users’ activities, you can apply advanced filters to identify critical events in a user session.

2. Heatmaps

Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity offer heatmap tools, but Hotjar comes with additional functionality. While both provide scroll and click maps, Hotjar also includes move maps that are unavailable in Microsoft Clarity. 

FullSession provides interactive and data-driven heatmaps

Our website heatmap tools provide visual reports of web pages with the highest user engagement. This feature allows you to visualize the user journey on your website. 

For instance, if you own an e-commerce site, you can answer questions like: 

1. Which product images do users give the most attention to? 
2. Are users paying any attention to the CTA button or ignoring it? 
3. Do users have any issues with web forms?

Even more, we provide three types of heatmaps 

• Scroll maps to analyze the scroll depth of your site
• Click maps to gather data and identify the areas where users click the most
• Move maps to see how users behave while navigating your site

These essential features serve as pointers for detecting potential usability issues, low engagement data, or dead links.

You can also use the FullSession interactive heatmaps to filter user actions and perform the following activities:

• Preview the heatmap on different devices
• See the URL the user visited
• See the number of total views and total clicks
• Watch error clicks
• Track rage clicks
• Monitor dead clicks
• See the average load time on page
• See the average time on page
• Track the number of users that visited the page

You can use these analytics data to filter necessary customer actions and optimize your site’s functionality for better performance.

Click map example

Scroll map example

 Mouse movement map example

3. Survey and user feedback tools

Hotjar enables you to gather feedback from web visitors, helping you understand their thoughts on your website’s functionality and online experience. 

In contrast, Microsoft Clarity lacks survey and user feedback tools, limiting your ability to collect crucial information about user issues.

FullSession provides customer feedback widget to collect user feedback

With our customer feedback widget, you can collect customer feedback in real-time to understand how users feel about your website's performance.

Using several classifications, you can analyze our customer feedback report to evaluate the feedback you receive from customers. For instance, you can see the user information, such as 

• Email address
• Location
• The feedback customers submitted
• Device type
• Date of feedback
• URL they engaged with

You can also watch a session recording connected to the feedback to understand better what happened during the session.

Additional features of FullSession user behavior software

Now, let’s explain some additional FullSession features that make it a smarter choice than Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity.

Advanced user analytics to gain actionable insights

With FullSession advanced analytics, you can capture every aspect of your users’ sessions to gain valuable insight into their behavior. Here are some of the metrics you can evaluate in our analytical dashboard:

• User trends
• Segment health
• Feedback trends
• Device breakdown
• Browser breakdown
• User feedback trends
• Top referrers
• Screen resolution breakdown
• Error clicks and rage click

Advanced user segmentation and filtering options

With advanced user and event segmentation and filtering options, you can create unique user segments to filter important user events and identify questionable sessions.

Funnels and conversion tracking

The FullSession web analytics tool provides conversion and funnel tracking features and offers a detailed analysis of user journeys to help you optimize conversion funnels. It includes:

• Funnel steps: Visualize user progression, conversion, and drop-off rates.
• Funnel trends: Monitor changes in user flows and conversion rates over time.
• Top events: Identify key actions that boost conversions.
• Top issues: Detect obstacles that reduce conversions and implement fixes.
• Time engaged: Measure interaction time to identify frustration points.
• Top engaged: Highlight the most engaging steps or features.
• Revisit rate: Track exits before advancement to identify issues.
• Segment analysis: Compare performance across user segments.
• Time period comparison: Analyze trends over different periods.

Error analysis

FullSession error analysis identifies, analyzes, and resolves errors impacting user experience using data on error clicks, network errors, console errors, error logs, and uncaught exceptions.

This feature provides actionable insights to enhance reliability and user satisfaction.

• Error clicks: Detect and fix non-responsive elements with session replays.
• Network errors: Monitor and analyze server request failures.
• Console errors: Log and analyze JavaScript errors with session replays.
• Error logs: Capture detailed error information for debugging.
• Uncaught exceptions: Monitor and handle critical errors to prevent crashes.
• Error trends: Segment data and visualize error trends over time.
• Alerts: Get real-time alerts via Slack and customize notifications.

Experience the power of advanced dynamic element analysis and comprehensive user engagement tracking to optimize your website's performance.

Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: Languages

Microsoft Clarity offers analytical web services in multiple languages, including English, Spanish, French, and German. 

Hotjar's primary interface and documentation are in English, but its surveys and feedback tools support other languages. 

FullSession fully supports English, French, and Arabic.

Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: Integrations

Regarding integrations, both analytics tools offer different options. 

Hotjar integrates with many third-party apps, such as Slack, Segment, WordPress, HubSpot, Shopify, and Google Optimize and offers over 1,000 integrations via Zapier. 

Microsoft Clarity integrates with Google Analytics and various AB testing, CRO, marketing, and e-commerce tools.

FullSession integrates with Zapier and platforms like Shopify, Wix, BigCommerce, and WordPress.

Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: Support

Hotjar offers diverse support options, including support tickets, a knowledge base, product tours, and video demos. 

Microsoft Clarity provides support through FAQs, documentation, and email contact. 

FullSession supports users via live chat and a knowledge base.

Now, let’s move on to the pricing structure for each software.

Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: Pricing

Microsoft Clarity offers free access to all its web analytics features without requiring an upgrade to a premium plan.

Hotjar provides a free plan with limited features, necessitating an upgrade for more data. It charges monthly and yearly fees for its modular paid plans—Observe, Ask, and Engage:

• Observe Plan: Heatmaps and recordings range from $39/month for up to 100 daily sessions to $213/month for tracking 500 to 270k daily sessions.
• Ask Plan: Surveys and feedback features range from $48/month for 250 monthly responses to $128/month for unlimited responses.
• Engage Plan: The cost of user interviews ranges from $39/month for three monthly interviews to $440/month for 12 interviews.

FullSession offers a 14-day free trial and a 20% discount on yearly plans.

Unlike Hotjar's modular approach, FullSession combines all necessary features—heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, conversion and funnel tracking, error tracking and user feedback—into one cohesive platform, simplifying user experience and management.

The Starter Plan, at $32/month, includes all essential features and allows tracking up to 5,000 monthly sessions. The Business Plan consists of all advanced features at $60/month and allows tracking up to 100,000 monthly sessions, providing more value for money.

We also offer an Enterprise plan we can customize to your needs.

For more details, visit the Pricing page or book a demo today.

Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity vs FullSession: A Summary

Here is a brief comparison table highlighting the features of Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity, and FullSession.

Features/similarities and differences	Hotjar	Microsoft Clarity	FullSession
Real-time session recording	✔	✔	✔
Funnel analysis	✘	✘	✔
Customer segmentation	✔	✔	✔
Customer journey mapping	✔	✘	✔
Conversion tracking	✔	✘	✔
Interactive heatmaps	✘	✘	✔
Surveys and customer feedback	✔	✘	✔
Insights	✘	✔	✔
Free version	✔	✔	✘
Free trial	✔	✔	✔
Analysis of dynamic elements	✘	✘	✔
Customer Support	✔	✔	✔

What Makes FullSession Stand Out

When you examine the FullSession platform closely, you’ll notice some similarities to Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity. However, numerous aspects make it unique. 

Here are the most important ones:

1. Using FullSession, you can track and analyze how your site users interact with website elements like headers, hamburger menus, product images, and forms. You can use the insights to improve site performance and increase conversions.
2. FullSession visualizes your best-performing web content and pages with the least engagement.
3. With FullSession, you can conduct UX analysis without slowing your website performance, unlike Hotjar, which can significantly slow down your site’s loading speed.
4. FullSession helps you run surveys and collect customer feedback to understand the “why” behind visitor behavior and user actions.
5. Our insights feature provides an analytical overview of various user events so you can quickly grasp user behavior and website performance.

Now that we’ve highlighted the traits that make FullSession stand out, let’s explore why FullSession is an excellent tool for monitoring visitor behavior and user actions.

Five Reasons to Use FullSession

Here are five reasons why FullSession is ideal for tracking user events and behavior:

1. FullSession helps you save time and improve web user experience by identifying key events within a session.
2. Our website optimization software provides a 14-day free trial so that you can test our analytics features.
3. With FullSession, you can quickly identify your web pages with broken links, low engagement, rage clicks, and areas blocking conversions.
4. FullSession provides advanced audience segmentation and filtering options. These options allow you to create specific user attributes that can be used to filter critical events in a session.
5. You can dig deeper into customer insights by collecting feedback through a user and form system.

Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: Final Words

Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity are analytics-tracking applications that help you identify and fix website bugs to improve your web performance.  

A significant difference between the two software programs is that Hotjar is designed for cross-functional team collaboration and provides more advanced behavior analytics features than Microsoft Clarity.

Microsoft Clarity is suitable if you have a site with less traffic and need basic web tracking features.

Also, if you want to learn more about other analytics tools, you can check out our in-depth review of Hotjar alternatives. You can also read our Hotjar vs Crazy Egg and Hotjar vs FullStory comparison articles.

FullSession, our user behavior analytics platform, helps you perform accurate UX analysis without affecting your site’s performance. It enables you to understand user behavior and track mouse movements, scroll patterns, and text inputs to improve the user experience.

FullSession also doesn’t require advanced technical skills. It offers real-time user session recordings, interactive heatmaps, conversion and funnel analysis, error tracking tools and customer feedback to help you make better product development and optimization decisions.

See your website through your users' eyes. Discover advanced insights and optimize your user experience!

Book a demo today. 

FAQs About Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar

Who uses Microsoft Clarity?

Microsoft Clarity is used by website owners, digital marketers, UX/UI designers, and developers. It's beneficial for anyone looking to understand user behavior, improve website performance, and enhance user experience through detailed analytics.

What is the difference between Hotjar and Google Analytics?

Hotjar focuses on user behavior insights with tools like heatmaps, session recordings, and feedback polls. Google Analytics provides comprehensive website traffic data, including visitor demographics, traffic sources, and conversion tracking.

While Hotjar offers qualitative data about user interactions, Google Analytics provides quantitative data on overall site performance. To learn more about the difference between Hotjar and Google Analytics, you can check out our Hotjar vs Google Analytics comparison article.

Is Microsoft Clarity better than Hotjar?

It depends. Clarity is free and integrates with Microsoft products. Hotjar offers more features like surveys and conversion funnels but requires a subscription for advanced features.

What are the disadvantages of Hotjar?

Hotjar's advanced features are costly, data retention is limited on free plans, scripts can slow down websites, and the free plan has restricted features. Some advanced tools can be complex to set up.

Is Microsoft Clarity really free?

Yes, Microsoft Clarity is completely free with no hidden costs or premium plans.

What is the point of Microsoft Clarity?

Microsoft Clarity provides insights into user behavior with heatmaps and session recordings, helping improve website performance and user experience, all for free.