We Tried Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: Here’s Our Feedback

Customer experience analysis is not an easy task. Even with the best intentions, you could end up misinterpreting user behavioral data or fail to address the issues you need to solve. User behavior tools help you ease your web analysis journey, analyze your website functionality and improve the user experience by providing accurate data on user actions.

Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity are two user behavior analytics software that can assist you in gaining insights into how users interact with your website or apps. Both tools offer numerous features, but they have some limitations. 

For instance, Hotjar can slow down your site’s loading speed when conducting UX analysis, while Microsoft Clarity lacks advanced behavior analytics features. Due to this reason, users are motivated to find other options for their web analysis.

In this comparison article, we’ll examine the main differences between these two solutions and see which might be best for your team. We’ll also introduce FullSession, as an excellent alternative you can consider.

FullSession helps you go beyond quantitative data and understand user behavior via session recording and replay tools and website heatmap tools. You can also collect customer feedback through a user and form system.

Feel free to sign up for a 14-day free trial to test our features and collect and analyze user behavioral data. You can also book a demo for more information

Let’s begin this article by explaining Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity, and FullSession.

What is Hotjar?

Image source: G2

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?

Even more, 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.

What is Microsoft clarity?

Image source: Search Engine Land

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

This web behavior analytics tool creates detailed heatmaps that determine 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; however, they share some similarities and differences. In this section, we’ll evaluate their strengths and weaknesses, so you can determine the tool that’s right for your business.

Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: Basic differences

When considering both tools, it’s common to ask—how is Hotjar different from Microsoft Clarity? Let’s go through four fundamental differences between these solutions.

1. Hotjar integrates with many third-party tools like Slack, Segment, Hubspot, and Google Optimize and offers over 1000 integrations via Zapier. Microsoft Clarity allows you to integrate with only one platform, Google Analytics.
2. While Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity provide session recordings and heatmap tools, Hotjar provides surveys and a feedback widget to learn what users think and feel about your site’s performance. Microsoft doesn’t allow you to collect user feedback.
3. Microsoft Clarity provides an overview of user behavior and experience on your website. Hotjar doesn’t provide an overview of user behavioral trends. 
4. Hotjar provides advanced behavior analytics tools for teams. At the same time, Microsoft Clarity is more suitable for individuals who don’t need team collaboration.

So far, we’ve introduced Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity and highlighted their differences. Let’s highlight their user rating, deployment, use cases, pricing, integrations, and features. 

Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: User rating

To know what users say about both tools, we checked G2 for user reviews. Hotjar scores 4.3 out of 5 based on 260 user reviews, while Microsoft Clarity scores 4.4 out of 5 based on 15 user reviews.

Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: Use cases

Hotjar works for specific industries like e-commerce, digital marketing, product development, and research analysis.

On the other hand, Microsoft Clarity is built for site owners with traffic, from bloggers to enterprises, and has a few drawbacks. For instance, each industry has different analytics needs, so Microsoft Clarity may not be able to meet up with all of them.

Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: Deployment

Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar allow you to use their web analytics features similarly. To deploy each tool, you must install their 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: Features

In this section, we’ll look at the standard features of both user behavior analytics solutions and those that distinguish them.

1. Session recordings

While Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar provide session recordings to help you watch what users do as they navigate your site, Hotjar wins in this part. It provides more collaboration features than Microsoft Clarity and lets you skip user inactivity in a session to find the user activities you’re interested in faster. Hotjar also allows you to use custom tags to mark a challenging recording session.

2. Heatmaps

Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity provide heatmap tools, but Hotjar comes with more functionality. For instance, both analytics tools offer scroll and click maps, but Hotjar provides move maps, which you won’t find in Microsoft Clarity.

Hotjar also provides survey and user feedback tools besides session recording and heatmaps. Let’s go further into how they work.

      3. Survey and user feedback tools

Hotjar helps you receive feedback from web visitors and users to know what they think about their online experience and your website’s functionality.

On the other hand, Microsoft Clarity doesn’t provide survey and user feedback tools for collecting vital information about user issues.

Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: Languages

Microsoft Clarity provides analytical web services in numerous languages like English, Spanish, French, German, and more.

Hotjar provides web analysis in the English language only. 

Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: Integrations

Regarding integrations, both analytics tools provide different integration options.

Hotjar integrates with many third-party apps like Slack, Segment, WordPress, Omniconvert, Hubspot, Shopify, and Google Optimize and offers over 1000 integrations via Zapier, while Microsoft Clarity allows you to integrate with only one tool, Google Analytics.

Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: Support

Hotjar offers different means to educate and support its users. For instance, you can contact the Hotjar team via support tickets. Hotjar also provides a knowledge base, product tour, and video demos for extra support.

Microsoft Clarity comes with support content that includes FAQs, documentation, and direct contact via email.

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

Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: Pricing

Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity provide similar pricing structures but with a twist.

Microsoft Clarity provides free usage of its web analytics features and provides users the same access to all its features without forcing them to upgrade to a premium plan.

Hotjar provides free usage via its free plan, but you’d have to upgrade to a premium plan for more data. It charges a monthly and yearly fee for its paid plans—Observe and Ask. Here’s more information on each plan.

The Observe plan helps you to track and analyze user actions using session recording and heatmap analytics tools. It includes:

• Basic plan—it’s free and provides access to 1050 sessions/month
• Plus plan— costs $48/month and helps you analyze 3,000 sessions/month
• Business plan—the starting price is $80/month and allows you to track 500 daily sessions
• Scale—offers customized pricing and enables you to track unlimited daily session recordings 

The Ask plan allows you to collect user feedback via online surveys, forms, and a feedback widget. It includes

• Basic plan—it’s free and gives you access to 20 monthly user responses
• Plus plan—costs $48/month and helps you collect 250 monthly customer feedback
• Business plan—the starting price is $64/month and enables you to collect up to 500 customer feedback
• Scale—offers customized pricing and enables you to receive unlimited monthly user responses

So far, we’ve highlighted how Hotjar and Microsoft Clarity compare and contrast.

In the next section, we’ll introduce our user behavior analytics software—FullSession, which enables you to track and analyze user actions and improve website performance.

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.

What features FullSession provides

FullSession offers web analytics features that help you analyze user engagement and provide comprehensive insights into your site’s overall performance, including areas where visitors experience issues and drop off the marketing or sales funnel.

Let’s explore the functionality of each web analytics tool.

1. Session recordings and replays to track user behavior

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.

To top it all, our session recording and replay 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. Interactive heatmaps to understand user actions

Our heatmap tool provides visual reports of web pages with the highest user engagement. With this feature, you can 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 giving the CTA button any attention 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. Advanced user analytics

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

4. 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 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

5. Advanced user segmentation and filtering options

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

6.  Notes with sharing feature

You can use notes to record critical user events and share them with your team to improve collaboration. This way, you can reflect on your site’s performance issues and how they affect the customer experience.

7. Conversion tracking

To determine whether or not your website provides a good user experience, you can use our conversion tracking feature to track conversion data, such as average user counts and the time to convert.

What makes FullSession stand out

When you take a closer look at the FullSession platform, you’ll notice that it has 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 and 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. In the next section, we’ll dive into why FullSession is an excellent tool for monitoring visitor behavior and user actions.

Four reasons to use FullSession

Here are four 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 that allow you to create specific user attributes that you can use to filter critical events in a session.

So far, we’ve explained the significant similarities and differences between Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar. We’ve also introduced FullSession, our web analytics software, highlighting its unique traits and strengths.

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

In the next section, we’ll provide a table briefly summarizing each software’s essential features, similarities, and differences.

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	✔	✔	✔

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 both software is that Hotjar is made 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.

Even more, our software doesn’t require advanced technical skills. It offers real-time user session recordings, interactive heatmaps, and customer feedback to help you make better product development and optimization decisions.

Try FullSession for free

FullSession provides free usage for 14-days.

You can sign up today and learn how to use our analytics features to conduct web analysis. You can also request a demo if you need further information.

Hotjar vs Microsoft Clarity: FAQ

Is Microsoft clarity safe?

Yes, Microsoft Clarity is entirely safe as it is GDPR compliant.

What is Clarity MS used for?

Microsoft Clarity is an analytics tool that provides information on how people use your site. You can watch user interactions and see which website areas work well and which don’t.

Who uses Microsoft clarity?

Microsoft Clarity is designed for website owners —from bloggers, SMBs, digital agencies, and enterprises.

What is the difference between Hotjar and Google Analytics?

Hotjar is a user behavior analytics platform that goes beyond quantitative data to help you understand how users engage with your web pages via session replay, heatmaps, and customer feedback tools. 

Google Analytics is a website analytics tool that provides only quantitative data like bounce rates, time on page, most visited web pages, etc., to help you understand what users do on your site. To learn more about the difference between Hotjar and Google Analytics, you can check out our Hotjar vs Google Analytics comparison article.