Microsoft Clarity vs Contentsquare

Free

Free tier available

Free with no traffic cap. Microsoft uses aggregated data to improve its products, which is the trade you are making.

Since absorbing Hotjar, Contentsquare sells three separately billed product lines — Experience Analytics, Voice of Customer and Product Analytics — with a free entry tier and quote-based paid plans. Enterprise annual contracts are priced by traffic and are typically six figures at scale.

Everything, unlimited, at any traffic level.

There is now a free Contentsquare plan — it replaced Hotjar's as the self-serve entry point and is considerably more generous than Hotjar's old 35-sessions-a-day limit.

Category standard

Microsoft · since 2020

Widely used

Contentsquare · since 2012

• No cost and no sampling at any volume — nothing else in the category comes close on price.
• Rage-click and dead-click detection surfaces real usability problems immediately.
• Easy to install and reasonable default masking of sensitive fields.

• Revenue attribution turns UX findings into business cases executives act on.
• Zone-based analysis is more actionable than raw heatmaps on complex pages.
• Handles very high traffic volumes without sampling.

• Data goes to Microsoft, which is a real consideration for GDPR-sensitive deployments.
• Filtering and segmentation are shallower than paid tools.
• Support is community-based and the roadmap is not yours to influence.

• The full platform is expensive, and paid tiers are quote-based rather than published.
• Substantial implementation and training effort before value appears.
• Splitting the old Hotjar bundle into three separately billed lines means you may need more than one to replace what Hotjar did.

Almost anyone starting with session replay, and anyone whose paid tool is mainly used for basic replay.

Large e-commerce, travel and financial organisations with dedicated optimisation teams — and now, via the free tier, the small teams Hotjar used to serve.