All three tools in this guide watch where visitors click, scroll, and get stuck, but they don't charge for it the same way: Mouseflow and Lucky Orange meter by session, Crazy Egg meters by pageview, a narrower unit that buys less real traffic coverage at the same price. Before paying for any of them, know that Microsoft Clarity is free with no cap at all, and Hotjar, now priced under Contentsquare, gives away up to 200,000 sessions a month for free, numbers that cover most small sites outright. The three paid picks below earn their price with deeper retention, dedicated funnel and form analytics, live chat, or A/B testing, not with raw free-tier volume.
ToolsGavel's top pick: Mouseflow (4.4/5, from $25/mo) — Mouseflow pairs the most complete free plan in this category, 500 sessions a month with full session replay, heatmaps, and form analytics, no card required, with the cheapest paid tier of the three: $25/mo billed annually for 5,000 sessions. G2 (4.6/5, roughly 700 reviews) and Capterra (4.7/5, 122 reviews) both back it up. The catch is mostly pricing growth, not product quality: reviewers on both platforms say cost climbs quickly once you outgrow Essential, and its newer Mina AI assistant covers session replay only today, still in beta.
A session and a pageview aren’t the same unit, and the difference changes what a plan’s cap actually buys you. A session is one visit; a pageview is one page loaded during that visit, and most visits load more than one page. Mouseflow and Lucky Orange both meter by session, so their caps track real visitors directly. Crazy Egg meters by pageview on every paid tier, so its “5,000 pageviews a month” on Starter gets used up by a smaller number of actual visitors than a 5,000-session cap would; the exact ratio depends on how many pages your average visitor loads, but the direction holds regardless: pageview metering buys less real traffic coverage per dollar than session metering at the same price.
Put a number on it. If your small site gets 10,000 visitors a month, Mouseflow’s $25/mo Essential plan (5,000 sessions) and Lucky Orange’s $32/mo Build plan (up to 3,500 sessions) each track a direct, known slice of that traffic, because a session is a session. Crazy Egg’s $29/mo Starter plan (5,000 pageviews) doesn’t describe the same slice of your 10,000 visitors: since each of those visitors likely loads more than one page, the pageview cap runs out against a smaller set of real visitors than the other two plans’ session caps, even though all three plans cost roughly the same.
| Tool | Free plan | Cheapest paid plan | Metering unit | Retention (entry paid tier) | Recordings | Heatmaps | Funnels | Forms | Surveys |
|---|
| Mouseflow | 500 sessions/mo, 1 month retention, full feature set, no card | $25/mo billed annually, 5,000 sessions/mo | Sessions | 3 months | All tiers, including Free | All tiers | All tiers (1 on entry, up to 10 on top) | All tiers | All tiers |
| Lucky Orange | 100 sessions/mo, 30-day retention, full feature set, only via Shopify App Store or account settings | $32/mo billed annually, up to 3,500 sessions/mo | Sessions | 60 days | All tiers, including Free | All tiers | All tiers | All tiers | All tiers, unlimited |
| Crazy Egg | Heatmaps only, up to 1,000 sessions/day, 30-day retention, no recordings | $29/mo billed annually by default ($348/yr), 5,000 pageviews/mo | Pageviews | 6 months | Paid tiers only, not on Free | All tiers | Yes, retroactive; tier gating not confirmed | No dedicated feature | All tiers, including Free |
Two things to read off that table beyond the headline prices. Lucky Orange’s real free plan is the hardest to find of the three; it exists, but not on the page most buyers will land on first. And Crazy Egg’s free tier is the only one of the three that skips session recordings entirely, the exact feature this guide is about, so if a free plan with real session replay is the goal, Crazy Egg’s Instant Heatmaps plan won’t get you there.
Free baselines first: Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar
Before you pay for any of the three tools above, it’s worth checking what’s free elsewhere, because the free ceiling in this category moved a lot in the last couple of years.
Microsoft Clarity is completely free, with no paid tier at all. It records sessions with no daily or monthly cap, gives unlimited click, scroll, and area heatmaps across unlimited websites on one account, and adds an AI Copilot for natural-language questions over the data. It stays free because Microsoft uses the anonymized data to improve its own machine-learning models; that’s the business model, not a funnel toward a paid upgrade that doesn’t exist.
Hotjar now operates under Contentsquare branding after the two companies merged, and hotjar.com/pricing redirects straight to contentsquare.com/pricing. Its free plan, confirmed directly on that page as of October 23, 2026, gives up to 200,000 sessions a month at $0, with 1 month of data access and 1 project, a figure Contentsquare’s own marketing calls roughly 190 times larger than Hotjar’s old standalone free limit before the merger. Paid “Growth” starts at $39/mo billed annually ($49/mo monthly) for a 7,000-session entry tier, scaling up to roughly $739/mo at 200,000 sessions, with 13 months of data retention on paid versus 1 month on Free. G2 rates it 4.3/5 from 345 reviews under the “Hotjar by Contentsquare” listing.
For a genuinely small site, this changes the math. Clarity has no cap to outgrow, and Hotjar’s 200,000-session free ceiling covers more monthly traffic than most small sites see in a year, let alone a month. Try one of those two before paying anyone. What the three ranked tools above argue for buying past that free baseline: dedicated funnel and form-analytics modules (Mouseflow and Lucky Orange both name these as standalone features; nothing in Clarity’s or Hotjar’s own materials names an equivalent), live chat bundled into every tier (Lucky Orange only), unlimited A/B testing (Crazy Egg, from Plus up), explicit no-overage billing language (Mouseflow and Crazy Egg both state this plainly), and natural-language AI layers over the session data (Mouseflow’s Mina AI, Lucky Orange’s Discovery AI, both still maturing). None of that shows up in Clarity’s or Hotjar’s free tier, so that’s the real question to ask before upgrading: do you need one of those five things, or just more free session volume, which you may already have.
How we picked
Every price, limit, and review score in this guide came from each vendor’s own pricing page, checked directly on 2026-10-23, cross-referenced against G2, Capterra, and Trustpilot, plus the Shopify App Store listing for Lucky Orange specifically, since it’s heavily used by Shopify store owners. Where a figure came from search corroboration rather than a direct page fetch, such as monthly (non-annual) prices sitting behind a billing toggle a static fetch can’t read, that’s noted in each tool’s full review.
The ranking above is editorial. ToolsGavel may earn a commission if you sign up through a link on this page; that never changes which tool gets which badge or where it lands in the order.
Deals & price changes
Price changes and deals for heatmaps & session replay
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Frequently asked questions
What's the best free session replay tool for a small site?
Before paying for any of the three tools ranked below, check Microsoft Clarity and Hotjar first. Clarity is free with no session cap, no paid tier, and unlimited heatmaps; Hotjar, now priced under Contentsquare, gives a free plan of up to 200,000 sessions a month. Neither of those numbers is matched by Mouseflow, Lucky Orange, or Crazy Egg's free tiers, which top out at 500, 100, and roughly 30,000 sessions a month respectively. If you only need session replay and basic heatmaps and your traffic fits under those caps, Clarity or Hotjar's free plan likely covers you without ever paying.
What's the difference between session-based and pageview-based pricing?
A session is one visit to your site; a pageview is one page loaded during that visit, and most visits load more than one page. Mouseflow and Lucky Orange both meter by session, so a 5,000-session plan tracks 5,000 real visits. Crazy Egg meters its paid plans by pageview instead, so a 5,000-pageview cap on its Starter plan gets used up by a smaller number of actual visitors, since each one burns through more than one pageview. At the same dollar price, pageview metering generally buys less real traffic coverage than session metering.
Which of these three tools includes live chat?
Only Lucky Orange. It bundles live chat on every plan, including its free tier, alongside heatmaps, session recordings, funnels, form analytics, and surveys. Neither Mouseflow nor Crazy Egg offers live chat at any price.
Is Crazy Egg's annual billing a dealbreaker?
It depends on how you sign up. Every Crazy Egg plan bills as a single annual charge by default, with no self-serve monthly toggle on the pricing page, and multiple Trustpilot reviewers describe the checkout as burying that disclosure under a bold monthly price, with some reporting surprise charges over $1,100. A monthly option does exist, but only by contacting Crazy Egg's support directly before you sign up. If you want month-to-month billing, ask for it first; don't assume the pricing page will offer it.
