Hotjar, Clarity, Mouseflow or WP UX Heatmap: which one do you choose?
For a small WordPress site with fewer than fifty thousand visitors a month, WP UX Heatmap is the logical choice: fully local, without cookies and without a monthly fee. Hotjar suits marketing teams who want to combine heatmaps with recordings and surveys, while Mouseflow and Microsoft Clarity are a better fit for large organisations with a lot of traffic. Three practical examples below show you exactly when which tool makes sense.
When do you choose which tool
Instead of just putting features side by side, it is better to look at your own situation. Three concrete scenarios, each with the tool that makes the most sense for it.
Small online shop or local service business
Say you run a physiotherapy practice, a hairdresser's or a furniture shop with a WordPress site and fewer than fifty thousand visitors a month. You want to know whether people actually see your call button, contact form and main services. In this situation, WP UX Heatmap is the calmest and quickest choice. You get direct insight into click behaviour and scroll depth without cookies, without third-party scripts and without extra monthly costs.
Marketing team with multiple funnels
You are running active campaigns, testing landing page variants, and also want to combine feedback widgets, surveys and recordings with heatmaps and funnels. In this scenario Hotjar is convenient, because you have everything in one suite. For teams, a central environment is easier to manage, as long as you accept the monthly cost.
Data-driven organisation with a lot of traffic
Think of a corporate site or a large content environment with millions of pageviews, where several stakeholders keep an eye on behaviour, campaigns and UX at the same time. Then you quickly end up with Mouseflow or Microsoft Clarity. Clarity is worth considering if your starting budget is small, Mouseflow if you want to go deeper into the funnel and segments.
Three practical examples with heatmaps and scrollmaps
All these tools show clicks and scroll behaviour. The difference lies mainly in what you do with it afterwards. We see these three situations regularly with clients.
Example 1: a landing page with too much distraction
You are running adverts to a page with a large hero, three buttons, a video and a form. The heatmap shows that eighty per cent of clicks land on a secondary link in the header, not on the quote button. The fix: remove the extra button, move the primary call to action above the fold, and place an extra button below the first paragraph. A week later you look at the heatmap again and see that clicks are now concentrated around the right call to action.
Example 2: a services page nobody scrolls to the bottom of
The scrollmap shows that only twenty per cent of visitors reach the prices or packages at the bottom of the page. Most sessions end around the first long blocks of text. The fix: flip the page around. Social proof and packages first, detailed explanation only after that. The new scrollmap shows much more depth, all the way down to the call to action at the bottom.
Example 3: a blog article that gets read a lot but sells little
You have an article that pulls in a lot of traffic. The heatmap shows that readers mainly click on an internal link in the middle of the text and hardly ever on the banner at the bottom. The fix: turn that internal link into a subtle inline call to action, add a second one just above the section that gets the most attention, and measure again. With WP UX Heatmap you see this directly in WordPress, without extra dashboards.
Why WP UX Heatmap is a different category
Where Hotjar and Clarity are mainly analytics platforms, WP UX Heatmap is a UX lens on top of your existing site. Everything runs inside WordPress, and that makes a big difference for privacy, speed and ownership. The main features:
- Fully inside WordPress, no new dashboard to learn
- No cookies and no third-party scripts
- Lightweight and built for performance
- Suited to European organisations
- Click and scroll behaviour in one overview
- Works alongside existing analytics
You can happily run WP UX Heatmap alongside Hotjar or Clarity if you want to test
For many SME sites, the plugin on its own is already enough to make the main UX decisions, without constantly having to dive into external dashboards. The plugin is free and open under GPLv2: you get it from the product page for the heatmap and scrollmap plugin, which also lists the requirements and the installation steps. Want to know first exactly how those maps come about and what gets recorded per click? That is covered in the explanation of the plugin NL.
Quick score per tool
Three points that matter most in practice: privacy, learning curve and cost.
Privacy and data ownership
- Hotjar: good, but external
- Clarity: data sits with Microsoft
- WP UX Heatmap: fully local
Complexity and learning curve
- Hotjar: extensive and busy
- Clarity: fairly simple
- WP UX Heatmap: right there in your page overview
Cost as traffic grows
- Hotjar: increases per plan
- Clarity: free, but with data sharing
- WP UX Heatmap: no extra monthly costs
| What you are comparing | Hotjar | Clarity | WP UX Heatmap |
|---|---|---|---|
| Where your data sits | with an external provider | with Microsoft | on your own WordPress |
| Cookies and third-party scripts | yes | yes | none |
| Learning curve | extensive and busy | fairly simple | in your page overview |
| Cost as traffic grows | increases per plan | free, with data sharing | no extra monthly costs |
| Recordings and surveys | yes, extensively | yes | no, deliberately not |
| What it is built for | analytics platform | analytics platform | a lens on your own site |
What a heatmap does not tell you
A heatmap is addictive to look at, and that makes it dangerous too. You see warm patches, you feel like you understand something, and before you know it you are rebuilding a page based on a picture that says something different from what you think. Five things that none of these four tools solve for you.
The why is not in there.
You see a lot of clicks on a word in the middle of your text. Whether that is because people think it is a link, or because they are selecting the text to read it, you do not know. A map like that gives you the question, not the answer. For the answer, you need to have someone use the screen while you watch, and that costs half an hour and two people.
Dead clicks look exactly the same as good clicks.
A bright patch on an image that is not a link is not a success but a mistake: people expect something there. You have to make that distinction, not the tool.
Mixing mobile and desktop is an average of two different sites.
On mobile your sidebar sits at the bottom and your menu is collapsed. Anyone looking at both in one map is looking at a page that does not exist. Always split them, whichever tool you use.
One page with two kinds of visits is also an average.
If half your traffic arrives through an advert and half through Google, those two groups behave differently. The average map then belongs to no one.
And most importantly: a heatmap measures attention, not revenue.
A button that gets clicked more often does not automatically bring in more customers. When you change something, look not just at the map but also at what happened afterwards: enquiries, phone calls, orders. Otherwise you are optimising your page for more clicks and less work.
How long you need to measure before you can draw a conclusion
This is where almost everyone goes wrong, and it costs no money to get it right. After just an hour, a map like that already looks like it is telling you something. It is not.
Count clicks per element, not visitors.
There is no magic number of visitors above which a map becomes accurate. What counts is how many times the thing your question is about was clicked. Two clicks on a button is an anecdote, even if a thousand people were on the page.
Always measure in full weeks.
Tuesday behaves differently from Sunday, and for business services that difference is large. Comparing a measurement from Wednesday to Friday with one from Friday to Sunday produces a difference that has nothing to do with your page.
See a campaign through to the end.
If your adverts switch on or off halfway through the measurement, you are measuring that switch, not your page.
Change one thing at a time.
If you move the button and rewrite the heading and remove a photo, you will not know afterwards which of the three did it. With little traffic that takes longer, and that is annoying, but it is the honest price of a conclusion.
Keep a screenshot from before the change.
Sounds unnecessary, is not. In two months' time nobody remembers what the page looked like, and then you end up arguing about whether it got better or worse with nothing to compare against. One image and one line in a document with the date on it is enough.
Consent and privacy for these four
This chapter is not legal advice, and we are not lawyers. What we can do is line up the questions you, your lawyer or your data protection officer should ask before switching on a tool like this. Those questions come back for three of the four, and less so for one.
Question one: is anything placed on or read from the visitor's device?
That is the question the cookie rules turn on, and it is not just about cookies but about everything stored in the browser. Hotjar, Clarity and Mouseflow are external scripts that run in the browser, so do not simply assume that nothing gets stored. Look up what each tool sets and put that in your cookie policy NL.
Question two: is personal data processed, and by whom?
Session recordings are the sharpest case here. Anyone who keeps a recording of a session can end up watching exactly what someone types into a form. That is why every serious tool offers input field masking, but you do have to switch it on and check it. Test it yourself: fill in your own form with a made-up name and check the recording afterwards to see whether that name shows up.
Question three: where does the data sit, and who do you share it with?
With Clarity, the price for free is that your data sits with Microsoft. Not a criticism, by the way, it is a trade-off, and you need to make that trade-off consciously and write it down. For an external processor you also need agreements on paper; our own data processing agreement NL shows what a document like that looks like.
Question four: how long do you keep it?
Behavioural data from three years ago helps no one and is now only a risk. Set a retention period and stick to it.
The fact that WP UX Heatmap runs locally and sets no cookies largely removes question one and question three
Questions two and four still stand even then, because data stored locally is still data. How we handle that is set out in our privacy policy NL.
Comparing it yourself in four weeks
Every comparison on the internet, this one included, is about an average situation. Your site is not one. This is the schedule that gets you to your own answer within a month, without paying anything for it.
Week 1: choose three pages and three questions.
Not your whole site. Take the page your adverts go to, your main services page and one blog article that pulls in a lot of traffic. Write down, in one sentence per page, which question you want answered. For example: do people see the quote button, or do they scroll straight past it. Without that sentence you will end up looking at nice pictures without making a decision.
Week 2: switch on two tools at once.
The light plugin and one of the three platforms. Running them side by side is fine, as long as your site stays fast. Actually check that speed, because an extra script always costs something.
Week 3: just let it run, and do not look.
Seriously. Anyone who looks every day sees noise and starts drawing conclusions too early. Put an appointment in your calendar for the end of the week.
Week 4: answer your three questions, and count your own clicks.
Not your visitors' clicks, but your own: which dashboard did you actually open that month, and which one answered the question you had written down. In practice, the decision almost always falls there. A tool you never open is the most expensive tool you have, even if it is free.
One warning about this schedule: stick to the three pages
The temptation to measure everything is strong, and the result is that you end up changing nothing anywhere.
Not enough traffic for a heatmap: what then
A large share of the readers of this article do not have fifty thousand visitors a month but a few hundred. For that site, the honest conclusion is that none of these four tools will produce a reliable map within any reasonable time. That is no reason to do nothing, but it is a reason to do something else, and that something else also costs you less.
Ask five people.
Five user tests on your phone deliver more than three months of waiting for enough clicks. Ask a customer, your neighbour and someone who knows nothing about your trade to find something on your site, and say nothing while they look for it. Wherever they hesitate, that is where your problem is. This costs you an afternoon and nothing else.
Look at the forms you already have.
How many enquiries were started and not finished? You often already have that number, and it points more precisely than a map with forty clicks.
Listen on the phone.
Every question that gets asked three times a month is a part of your site that is not clear. Write them down for two weeks, and you will have a better list of improvements than any heatmap you switch on.
And switch on the map anyway.
The light plugin costs you nothing and keeps collecting in the meantime. In six months' time you will have enough material to actually read something from it, while you use the time until then for the three points above.
Frequently asked questions about heatmaps and WP UX Heatmap
Does it make sense to use several tools at once?
Yes, as long as your site stays fast. Many organisations use Hotjar or Clarity as their central analytics solution and run WP UX Heatmap alongside it on landing pages and important services pages. That way you keep the heavy analysis off your site, while still seeing what happens right inside WordPress.
Is WP UX Heatmap enough for a serious online shop?
For many online shops, WP UX Heatmap is enough to see whether filters, product tiles, buttons and basket actions are being used well. If you also want funnels, interview widgets and surveys, an extra tool such as Hotjar can be useful, but it is not strictly necessary.
How does WP UX Heatmap relate to privacy rules in Europe?
Because everything stays within your own WordPress environment and no data goes to external servers, WP UX Heatmap fits well with stricter interpretations of privacy law. You keep control over storage, retention periods and security, without extra data processing agreements.
Why does the interface look like a native WordPress feature?
WP UX Heatmap is deliberately designed as a thin layer on top of WordPress. You do not have to learn a new dashboard, and you see click and scroll behaviour in the same place where you edit your pages and posts.
From insight to more results
A heatmap tells you what visitors do, not how to get more of the right visitors. Want us to look at your visibility and conversion with you? Take a look at our approach to improving your SEO. Prefer to get started yourself first? Our Knowledge base has more practical articles like this one.
Behaviour on your site is also changing fast because of AI
Read, for example, how customers use ChatGPT to find a tradesperson and what llms.txt means for the future of SEO. That way you know not just what visitors do on your page, but also how they will get there next.
The cheapest tool is the one you open
If you reduce this comparison to one line: choose the tool whose dashboard you are still opening in a month's time. For a WordPress site under fifty thousand visitors, that is usually the plugin that simply sits in your page overview, because you come across it while you are already working. If you are running campaigns with multiple funnels, a suite such as Hotjar earns back its monthly fee, provided someone on your team is responsible for it. And do not forget that you do not have to choose for good: the four-week schedule above lets you make the choice based on your own numbers instead of on this page.
Getting stuck on the third point, on what to do with the outcome? That is exactly where we spend our days. Send us your page and the question you wrote down, and in a short call we will look at the map with you and talk through what we would change and in what order. It costs you half an hour, and you are not committed to anything afterwards. Prefer to email first? You can, at sales@theseo.nl, or via the contact page.