Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity — and the option that knows who was in the session

Name: BusinessMCP
Brand: BusinessMCP

Clarity wins on price, Hotjar on surveys and history; neither tells you which company you are watching. Here is the whole picture, verified September 2026.

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Price: Clarity: $0, unlimited traffic, 30-day playback. Hotjar (Contentsquare): Free to 200k sessions, Growth from $49/mo annual. BusinessMCP: replay from $79/mo.
Switching gets you: Picking Clarity gets you free replay; Hotjar adds surveys and 13 months of data; BusinessMCP adds the company name, a CRM and an AI business analyst on the same data.
Stay with Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity if: Free replay is all you need; stay on Hotjar if surveys and long history matter more than knowing who the visitor was.

Feature comparison — pricing verified September 2026. Sources: public pricing pages + published teardowns.
	BusinessMCP	Hotjar (Contentsquare)	Microsoft Clarity
Entry price for replay	$79/mo (Growth); free plan is analytics-only	Free (200k sessions/mo) · Growth $49/mo annual · Pro/Enterprise custom	Free forever, no traffic limit
Replay retention	7 days · 30 days · unlimited (Growth · Scale · Business)	1 month free · 2 months on Growth · up to 24 months on Pro	30 days (favourites + heatmaps 9 months)
Rage + dead-click detection	Yes	Yes	Yes
AI analysis of a recording or heatmap	Yes	Yes (Contentsquare AI summaries)	Yes (AI summaries + chat)
Friction → A/B test (AI opens the PR)	Yes (Scale, $199/mo)	No	No
Knows which company the session was	Yes	No	No
Cookieless, consent-aware capture	Yes	Sets its own cookies; consent handled by you	Sets first-party cookies; consent handled by you
Analytics + CRM in the same tool	Yes	No	No

The full picture

Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity are the two names every team hears first when they want to watch real sessions, and in 2026 both have changed. Hotjar has merged into Contentsquare — hotjar.com/pricing redirects there — and is sold as Free, Growth (from $49/month billed annually), Pro and Enterprise. Clarity is still exactly what it was: free forever, no traffic limits, recordings kept 30 days, heatmaps nine months, plus rage and dead-click detection and AI summaries.

They also share the same gap. Both show you an anonymous session; neither tells you which company it came from, keeps a CRM, or lets an AI reason across replay, analytics and pipeline together. BusinessMCP exists for that gap: replay and heatmaps on the same cookieless script as analytics and CRM, every recording linked to a person or a resolved company, from $79/month.

Why teams switch

Price: Clarity, by a mile

Clarity is free with no traffic limit and no paid tier. Contentsquare’s free plan is generous (200k sessions/month) but its Growth plan scales with volume from $49/month annual. BusinessMCP replay starts at $79/month — the most expensive of the three for replay alone, and the only one that includes analytics, identification and a CRM.

Retention: Hotjar on history, Clarity on the short end

Clarity keeps playback 30 days. Contentsquare Growth keeps 13 months of data with two months of replay access (up to 24 months on Pro). BusinessMCP keeps 7 days on Growth, 30 on Scale and unlimited on Business, while the durable session record is kept forever on every plan.

Frustration signals: all three, defined differently

All three flag rage and dead clicks. BusinessMCP’s definitions are deterministic and published (rage = 3 clicks within 700ms and 30px; dead = an interactive-looking target with no visible response within 1s), adds a per-recording frustration score with jump-to-first-rage, and on Scale turns the friction into a proposed A/B test with an AI-written pull request.

Who was it: only one of the three answers

Hotjar and Clarity show an anonymous session. BusinessMCP links it to the identified contact or the company resolved from IP — roughly 20–35% of B2B visits — and the recordings list filters to identified sessions only. If replay is a sales input rather than a UX input, this is the row that decides it.

Real data, not a mockup

What it looks like in BusinessMCP

Recorded on our own site, PII scrubbed — the same product you get on the free plan.

app.businessmcp.com/replays

Hotjar vs Clarity pricing, side by side

Hotjar’s plans are Contentsquare’s as of September 2026 and are still being reorganised; verify before you commit to a session band.

Plan	Price	Notes
Microsoft Clarity	$0	free forever, no traffic limits; 30-day playback, 9-month heatmaps
Hotjar (Contentsquare) Free	$0	up to 200k sessions/mo, 1 month of data + replay access
Hotjar (Contentsquare) Growth	from $49/mo	billed annually; scales with sessions (teardowns cite up to ~$739/mo at 200k); 13 months data, 2 months replay
Hotjar (Contentsquare) Pro / Enterprise	Custom	unlimited sessions, up to 24 months of replay access
BusinessMCP Growth	$79/mo	replay + heatmaps (7-day), analytics, company ID, CRM; Scale $199 for 30-day + A/B tests

Sources: contentsquare.com/pricing, clarity.microsoft.com, Microsoft Learn data-retention page, and two 2026 Hotjar teardowns.

Where BusinessMCP is NOT the right choice

An alternatives page you can trust has to cut both ways. Honestly:

There is no free replay tier. Microsoft Clarity is free forever with no traffic limit and Contentsquare (Hotjar) records up to 200k sessions a month for $0; BusinessMCP recordings start on the $79 Growth plan with 7-day retention.
Our replay retention is shorter unless you are on Business. Growth keeps 7 days and Scale 30; keeping recordings for the life of the account is a $499/mo feature, and raw heatmap events expire at 30 days on every plan. Contentsquare Growth keeps 13 months of data access, and FullStory Free keeps 12 months.
We do not ship surveys, feedback widgets, NPS or funnel-in-replay reports. Hotjar, Lucky Orange and Mouseflow bundle those; with us, a survey tool is a separate purchase.
Replays capture the DOM, not the console or network. FullStory and Smartlook record JS errors and requests alongside the session; if engineers are your main replay audience, that matters.
We are a younger product with fewer integrations and coarser sampling controls than FullStory’s segment-based capture rules, and there is no native mobile-app SDK — web only.

Frequently asked questions

Which is better, Hotjar or Microsoft Clarity?

For free replay and heatmaps, Clarity — it has no traffic limit and no paid tier. Hotjar (Contentsquare) is better if you want surveys, longer data history and a path to enterprise capture. Neither identifies the visiting company; if you need that, BusinessMCP is the third option.

Is Hotjar free like Clarity?

Contentsquare’s free plan includes up to 200,000 sessions a month with one month of data, which is more than most small sites need. Beyond that, Growth starts at $49/month billed annually and scales with session volume. Clarity has no paid plan at all.

Do Hotjar and Clarity keep recordings for the same time?

No. Clarity keeps playback for 30 days (favourites and heatmaps 9 months). Contentsquare Growth offers two months of replay access with 13 months of data, and Pro up to 24 months. BusinessMCP keeps 7, 30 or unlimited days depending on plan.

Can any of these tell me which company visited?

Only BusinessMCP. Replay runs on the same script as its analytics and CRM, so an anonymous session carries the company resolved from IP and an identified session opens against the contact. Hotjar and Clarity show sessions anonymously.

Other honest alternatives

FullStory

Enterprise replay with console + network capture; quote-only, ~$10k–$116k/yr contracts.

Compare

Mouseflow

Self-serve from $25/mo with funnels and form analytics.

Compare

Lucky Orange

All features on every plan from $32/mo annual; 60-day storage.

Compare

Sources & verification

Every price on this page traces to a public source, last verified September 15, 2026. Spotted a change? Tell us and we'll re-verify.

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