Hotjar, Microsoft Clarity, FullStory and Lucky Orange all show you clicks, scrolls and recordings — but they meter them very differently. One is free with no paid tier at all, one now only exists inside Contentsquare, one hides its paid prices behind a sales call, and one charges purely by session volume. This guide compares them on the structure that decides your bill: sessions, capture rates, retention, and what happens when you hit your limit.
No session charges and no upgrade to sell you. The limits are retention and depth, not volume.
Growth price is billed annually at the 7,000-session entry tier; $49/mo on monthly billing. New sign-ups go through Contentsquare — see the note below.
FullstoryFree covers 30,000 sessions/month with 12 months of retention. Business, Advanced and Enterprise prices are not published.
Build plan, 3,500 sessions/month. Monthly billing is $39/mo. Every feature is on every plan — you pay only for session volume.
Important — what happened to Hotjar: on 1 July 2025, Hotjar merged into the Contentsquare Group. The old Hotjar plans (Basic / Plus / Business, priced by daily sessions) are no longer sold to new customers, hotjar.com/pricing now leads to Contentsquare's pricing, and new accounts sign up for Contentsquare. Most older "Hotjar pricing" articles describe plans you can no longer buy. This guide uses the current Contentsquare structure wherever it says Hotjar.
| Microsoft Clarity | Hotjar / Contentsquare | FullStory | Lucky Orange | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Any site that wants behaviour data without a bill | Marketing and UX teams that also run surveys and feedback | Product teams analysing behaviour across a web app or site | Small businesses and stores that want live view and chat alongside recordings |
| Pricing model | Free. There is no paid tier | Free plan, then session-tiered Growth; Pro / Enterprise by quote | Free plan, then Business / Advanced / Enterprise by quote only | Session tiers, all features included on every tier |
| Free option | The product itself: free, no traffic limit in its published terms | Free: up to 200,000 analytics sessions/mo, 1 project | FullstoryFree: 30,000 sessions/mo, up to 10 users, no card required | No free plan on the main pricing page — a 7-day trial. A small free tier (100 sessions/mo) appears in its Shopify App Store listing |
| Paid plans from | — | Growth $39/mo billed annually ($49 monthly) at 7,000 sessions/mo; $127/mo billed annually at 30,000 sessions | Not published — request pricing / demo | Build $32/mo billed annually ($39 monthly), 3,500 sessions; Grow $72/mo (10,000); Expand $199/mo (from 50,000); Scale $839/mo (from 300,000) |
| How capture works | No sampling in the published model; up to 100,000 sessions recorded per project per day, and beyond that not every session is guaranteed a replay | Analytics data captured in full up to your allowance, but replays are sampled: 5% of sessions on Free (max 10,000/mo), 15% on Growth, up to 100% only on Pro / Enterprise | Fullcapture records sessions until your plan's session cap is reached; a session is one visit, split after 30 minutes of inactivity | Sessions are tracked until your plan's monthly allowance is used up |
| Data retention | Replays: 30 days. Labelled / favourited sessions and heatmap data: 9 months | Free: 1 month of data access, replays kept 30 days. Growth: 13 months of data access, replays kept 2 months | Free: 12 months. Paid: 12 months by default per published material, longer retention is a contract item | 60 days included on paid plans; extendable to 90, 180 or 365 days for a fee |
| When you hit your limit | There is no billing limit to hit — the practical ceiling is the 100,000 recordings/day cap | Collection stops until the next month once the allowance is used up | Capture pauses until the next cycle (per the vendor's help centre); past sessions stay viewable, and admins are warned as you approach the cap | Tracking stops — and surveys, announcements and live chat stop too — until the next cycle, unless the optional "Keep Me Tracking" auto-upgrade is on, which moves you to the next plan at a prorated amount |
| Beyond heatmaps & replay | Copilot AI session summaries, GA4 integration, rage / dead click and other friction signals | Surveys and feedback, funnels, journey analysis, error and performance monitoring, zone-based heatmaps on Growth | Retroactive autocapture analysis, funnels and journeys on paid plans, frustration / sentiment signals, StoryAI on paid plans | Live visitor view, live chat, conversion funnels, form analytics, unlimited surveys and announcements; Discovery AI is an add-on |
| Trade-off to know | 30-day replay retention is short, and there is no paid tier to extend it; review Microsoft's data terms if your privacy policy is strict | The name changed, the plans changed, and replays are sampled on the affordable tiers — the specific session you need may not have been recorded | You cannot comparison-shop the paid price: there is no public number until sales quotes you | Plan steps are steep (10,000 → 50,000 sessions), so outgrowing a tier can multiply the bill; base retention is only 60 days |
Prices checked November 2026. All prices are USD, before tax, as published by the vendors; Contentsquare also displays some prices in EUR depending on region. Session counts, capture rates and retention periods change — always confirm the current figures on the vendor's pricing and documentation pages before you buy.
Entry prices are misleading in this category, because every paid tool here meters sessions. The honest comparison is a yearly total at your traffic level. Both examples below are calculated only from the published prices in the table above, on annual billing.
A site with 10,000 sessions a month (120,000 a year): Clarity costs $0. FullStory costs $0 — 10,000 sits inside FullstoryFree's 30,000 cap. Lucky Orange needs its Grow tier, which fits 10,000 exactly: $72 × 12 = $864/year. Contentsquare Growth starts at $39/mo, but that buys 7,000 sessions, so a 10,000-session site pays for a higher session tier — at least $468/year, with the exact figure set by the pricing page's session slider.
A site with 30,000 sessions a month (360,000 a year): Clarity is still $0. FullstoryFree is still $0, but you are sitting exactly on its cap — one busy month pauses capture. Contentsquare Growth at the published 30,000-session price is $127 × 12 = $1,524/year. Lucky Orange's Grow tier (10,000 sessions) no longer fits, so you land on Expand at $199 × 12 = $2,388/year. Same traffic, a spread of $0 to $2,388 — driven by where the free ceilings and plan steps fall, not by headline prices.
The per-session maths explains why: at each plan's full allowance, Lucky Orange works out to about $9.14 per 1,000 sessions on Build, $7.20 on Grow and $3.98 on Expand; Contentsquare Growth is about $5.57 per 1,000 at its entry tier and $4.23 at 30,000 sessions. Smaller plans always cost more per session — the "cheap" entry tier is the most expensive way to buy a session.
Clarity is Microsoft's behaviour analytics tool: session recordings, five heatmap types (click, scroll, area, attention, and conversion maps for Shopify stores), friction signals such as rage clicks, dead clicks, excessive scrolling and quick backs, funnels, and Copilot AI summaries of sessions. The commercial model is the simplest in this comparison: it is free, there is no paid tier, and its published terms promise no traffic limits and no sampling. The real ceilings are elsewhere. Recordings are kept for 30 days (sessions you label or favourite, and heatmap data, are kept for 9 months), and Clarity records at most 100,000 sessions per project per day — above that, a replay is not guaranteed for every session. On privacy, Clarity's published masking system has three modes: Balanced (the default) masks content it classifies as sensitive such as numbers and email addresses, Strict masks all content, and Relaxed masks only input boxes and dropdowns, which are masked in every mode; masked content is not uploaded. Since 31 October 2025, visitors from the EEA, UK and Switzerland need a valid consent signal for full functionality. Because Microsoft is involved in handling the data under its own terms, teams with strict data policies should read those terms before rolling it out — that review, not price, is the usual reason organisations hesitate.
If you used Hotjar before, the product you knew now lives inside Contentsquare, and new accounts are Contentsquare accounts. The current structure is: Free ($0) — up to 200,000 analytics sessions a month on one project, with heatmaps, replays, funnels and basic surveys, but only one month of data access and replays captured for just 5% of sessions (up to 10,000 a month), kept for 30 days. Growth (from $49/mo monthly, $39/mo billed annually at 7,000 sessions; $159/mo monthly or $127/mo billed annually at 30,000 sessions) — up to three projects, 13 months of data access, replays kept two months at a 15% capture rate, plus zone-based heatmaps, journey analysis and frustration scoring. Pro and Enterprise are quote-only, start around a million sessions, and are where replay capture reaches up to 100%. The distinction that matters most: Contentsquare describes analytics data as captured in full up to your allowance, while replay is the sampled part — so aggregate heatmaps can look complete while the one individual session you need was never recorded. Once the monthly allowance is used up, collection stops until the next month. Contentsquare also provides data-suppression settings to exclude visible text or images from capture on specific pages or site-wide; check them against your own privacy policy during setup.
FullStory (now styled Fullstory) is a digital experience analytics platform built on Fullcapture: it records the page structure and interactions of sessions automatically, so you can search and segment behaviour later — including events nobody thought to tag in advance. A session is a single visit, split after 30 minutes of inactivity, and capture runs until your plan's session cap is reached; the vendor's help centre states that capture then pauses until the next cycle, with past sessions still viewable and admins warned as usage approaches the cap. FullstoryFree ($0) covers 30,000 sessions a month, up to 10 users, with session replay, basic analytics and debugging tools — and a notably long 12 months of retention. Dashboards, mobile analytics and StoryAI sit outside the free tier, and heatmaps, funnels and journey analysis are presented in the paid plans' comparison. Those paid plans — Business, Advanced and Enterprise — publish no prices; every figure requires a quote, and add-ons such as mobile are priced on top. On privacy, FullStory publishes a "Private by Default" model with element-level Exclude / Mask / Unmask rules and states that sensitive fields such as passwords and card numbers are never captured; masked elements render as wireframe-style placeholders in replay.
Lucky Orange rebuilt its pricing in early 2026 around a simple rule: all features on all plans; you pay for session volume. Dynamic heatmaps (which render on interactive elements such as dropdowns and pop-ups), session recordings, conversion funnels, form analytics, unlimited surveys and announcements, a live visitor view and live chat are included from the entry tier, with unlimited team members. On annual billing: Build $32/mo (3,500 sessions), Grow $72/mo (10,000), Expand $199/mo (from 50,000), Scale $839/mo (from 300,000), and Enterprise is custom from around 700,000 sessions; monthly billing runs higher ($39 / $89 / $249 / $1,049 for the same tiers). Base data storage is 60 days, extendable to 90, 180 or 365 days for a fee, extra websites cost $5/site/month, and the Discovery AI analysis feature is an add-on. Two things to know before you rely on older reviews: the main pricing page no longer lists a free plan — only a 7-day trial — although a 100-session free tier still appears in its Shopify App Store listing; and when you exhaust your monthly sessions, tracking stops and so do your surveys, announcements and live chat, unless you enable "Keep Me Tracking", which automatically upgrades you to the next plan at a prorated amount instead of pausing.
Pull last month's session count from your existing analytics before you look at any plan. Every paid price in this category is a function of that one number, and "a session" is a visit — one person visiting five times is five sessions. Under ~30,000 a month, both Clarity and FullstoryFree can cost you $0.
If you review behaviour weekly and move on, Clarity's 30-day replay window may never bite. If you compare quarters, investigate complaints weeks later, or keep evidence for stakeholders, retention is the real product: 12 months on FullstoryFree, 13 months of data access on Contentsquare Growth, paid extensions on Lucky Orange.
Tools differ more at their limits than in their feature lists. Contentsquare samples replays before you ever reach a cap; FullStory pauses capture at the cap; Lucky Orange pauses recording and its chat and surveys, or auto-upgrades you if you opt in; Clarity has no billing cap, only a 100,000-recordings-per-day ceiling. Pick the failure mode you can live with.
Surveys and feedback point to Contentsquare. Live chat and a live visitor view point to Lucky Orange. Retroactive, untagged analysis of a product's behaviour points to FullStory. None of those needs? Start with Clarity, and only pay when a specific missing capability — retention, support, depth — shows up in your work.
On price, yes: Clarity has no paid tier, and Microsoft describes it as a free service with no traffic limits. The trade-offs are not monetary — replays are kept for 30 days (favourites and heatmap data for 9 months), recordings are capped at 100,000 per project per day, there is no paid support tier, and Microsoft's own terms govern how the collected data is handled, which strict privacy policies will want to review. Whether that exchange suits you depends on your site's requirements, not on a hidden price.
The older ones describe the pre-merger product. Hotjar merged into Contentsquare on 1 July 2025; the Basic / Plus / Business plans priced by daily sessions are no longer sold to new customers, and signing up now means a Contentsquare plan (Free, Growth, Pro, Enterprise). Existing Hotjar customers are being migrated through 2026, which is why both sets of numbers still circulate.
One visit to your site. If the same person comes back later, that is another session. FullStory publishes the clearest definition: a single visit, split after 30 minutes of inactivity. This is why session-based pricing punishes sites with loyal, returning visitors more than raw visitor counts suggest — check your analytics' session number, not your unique-visitor number, before choosing a tier.
Each vendor publishes masking or suppression controls for this. Clarity masks input boxes and dropdowns in all modes and offers Balanced (default) and Strict masking, and masked content is not uploaded. FullStory publishes Exclude / Mask / Unmask rules and a Private by Default mode, and states that password and card fields are never captured. Contentsquare offers settings to suppress visible text or images from capture. None of that removes your own responsibilities: you still need to configure the tool, exclude pages that handle sensitive data where appropriate, and describe the tool in your privacy notice. This page summarises published vendor information; it is not legal advice.
No tool on this page can promise that, and this guide makes no such claim. These products show you where visitors click, scroll, hesitate and leave; what you change in response, and whether it works, depends on your site and your testing. Be wary of any comparison that guarantees results from buying a recording tool.
Because this guide is compiled from the vendors' published pricing, documentation and help centres, not from hands-on testing. Where a judgment appears — for example, that small plans cost more per session — it is arithmetic on the published prices, shown next to it so you can check it yourself.