Best WordPress Heatmap Plugins: 6 Tools Compared

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Prices checked September 2026.

Are these heat map plugins, or hosted services with a plugin attached?

Five of the six are hosted services. The WordPress plugin does one job: it drops the vendor’s tracking snippet into your pages so you do not have to edit a theme file. The recording, the processing and the storage all happen on the vendor’s servers, and you view the results by logging in to their dashboard rather than your WordPress admin.

That matters in three practical ways. Your visitor data leaves your site. The plugin’s install count tells you how many WordPress sites use that particular installation method, not how many people use the tool. And a session limit is a cap on how much the service records, not a cap on your traffic, so exceeding it means you stop collecting data rather than getting a bill.

Slimstat Analytics is the exception. It writes hits to tables in your own WordPress database and paints the heatmap over your live pages from that data. Nothing goes to a third party, and nothing stops when you hit a quota.

The six heatmap tools worth running

Microsoft Clarity

Clarity is Microsoft’s free behavioural analytics product, and the official WordPress plugin connects a site to it in about two minutes. You get click maps, scroll maps, area maps, full session replays and a dashboard that flags rage clicks, dead clicks and excessive scrolling as filters you can jump straight into.

The distinguishing thing is the absence of a meter. There is no session allowance, no traffic tier and no upgrade path, so a page that suddenly gets 50,000 visits is recorded the same as a page that gets 50. Every other hosted tool here would either stop recording or start charging.

The honest limitation is that Clarity tells you what happened and not why. There are no on-site surveys, no polls and no A/B testing, so when the heatmap shows people abandoning a section you have to go elsewhere to ask them about it. It also means handing visitor behaviour to Microsoft, which is a decision worth making deliberately rather than by default.

Hotjar

Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare, and its pricing page redirects to the Contentsquare site, where the tiers are Free, Growth, Pro and Enterprise. The heatmaps, recordings and surveys people know Hotjar for are still there under the new ownership. There is an official plugin with more than 70,000 active installs that exists purely to insert your Site ID.

What Hotjar does that Clarity does not is ask questions. You can drop a survey widget onto the page where the heatmap shows people hesitating and collect written answers in the same tool, which turns a shrug into a reason.

Two honest limitations. The official plugin sits at 2.9 out of 5 from 18 reviews, which is the worst rating of any tool here, and it does nothing you could not do by pasting the snippet yourself. And because the plans moved under Contentsquare, the plan names and session limits quoted in most articles about Hotjar no longer describe what you will be offered.

Mouseflow

Mouseflow gives you 500 sessions a month free forever, then Essential at $25 a month for 5,000 sessions, Advanced at $109 for 25,000 and Premium at $319 for 100,000. Heatmaps and form analytics are on every tier, including the free one, which is unusual.

Form analytics is the reason to choose it. Instead of showing you that a form converts badly, Mouseflow shows you which individual field people fill in last before they leave, how long they hesitate over it and how often they re-edit it. On a checkout or a long enquiry form that is the difference between guessing and knowing.

The limitation is the plugin, not the service. The Mouseflow connector was last updated three years ago and is only tested to WordPress 6.3, so it carries the directory’s warning about untested plugins. Paste the tracking snippet into your theme or a code-snippets plugin instead and you get the same result without depending on an unmaintained connector.

Crazy Egg

Crazy Egg starts at $29 a month billed annually, which buys 5,000 tracked pageviews, five heatmap reports and 50 recordings. Plus is $99, Pro $249 and Enterprise $599. All plans come with a 30-day trial and there is no permanent free tier.

Its distinguishing feature is the Snapshot: a heatmap pinned to a fixed date range rather than a rolling live view. That makes it the easiest tool here for the specific job of proving a redesign worked, because you can put October’s snapshot next to January’s and compare the same page under two layouts.

The limitation is value. 5,000 pageviews a month is a small allowance for $29, and Clarity records unlimited traffic for nothing. The official plugin has also not been updated in two years and is tested only to WordPress 6.7.

Lucky Orange

Lucky Orange runs from $32 a month on the Build plan for 3,500 sessions, then Grow at $72 for 10,000, Expand at $199 and Scale at $839. There is a 7-day trial with everything unlocked but no permanent free plan. Its plugin is well maintained, updated within the last week and tested against WordPress 7.1.

The feature that sets it apart is live chat sitting in the same product as the recordings. You can watch someone struggle on a page and open a chat with that visitor while they are still on it, which no other tool on this list offers.

The limitation is that 3,500 sessions is a low ceiling for the entry price, and with only a 7-day trial you have very little time to decide whether the tool earns $32 a month before the card is charged.

Slimstat Analytics

Slimstat Analytics is a full analytics plugin with more than 70,000 active installs and a 4.8 rating from 817 reviews, which makes it the most reviewed tool on this page by a distance. The core analytics are free; the heatmap overlay is part of the Pro Pack at $39 a year for one site, $99 for five or $199 for unlimited.

It is the only option here that never sends a visitor to a third party. Hits are written to your own WordPress database and the heatmap is painted over your live pages from that data, so there is no processor to name in a privacy policy and no data-transfer question to answer.

The limitation is the flip side of the same design. Every pageview becomes a database row on your own hosting, so a busy site accumulates large tables and needs a retention setting configured rather than left alone. If your host is a cheap shared plan, that cost is real.

What does session recording mean for privacy and GDPR?

A heatmap that only counts clicks is fairly benign. Session recording is a different thing: it replays what a visitor did on the page, and depending on configuration it can capture text as it is typed into forms. Under GDPR that is processing personal data, and it needs a lawful basis before the script runs, not a cookie banner that appears after it has already loaded.

Check the masking settings before you switch recording on. The tools differ in what they capture by default, and the safe approach is to mask all input and then unmask only the specific fields you have decided are harmless. Payment fields and passwords should never be recorded under any configuration.

Name the tool in your privacy policy and put it behind your consent banner in the same category as your other analytics. If you cannot get comfortable with a third party holding recordings of your visitors, Slimstat is the only tool on this page that removes the question entirely by keeping everything in your own database.

Which should you pick?

For most people, Microsoft Clarity. It is free, it has no traffic ceiling, and the plugin is maintained by Microsoft and tested against current WordPress. Start there, and only move if you hit something it cannot do.

For a harder case, it depends which wall you hit. If your problem is a form or a checkout that leaks people, Mouseflow’s form analytics is worth the $25 a month, and you can test the idea on its free 500-session tier first. If your data genuinely cannot leave your infrastructure, Slimstat Pro at $39 a year is the only answer here.

The one to skip is Crazy Egg, unless dated snapshots for a redesign comparison are specifically what you came for. At $29 a month for 5,000 pageviews it is the weakest value on the page, and its plugin has been untouched for two years.

If you are still running the Smartlook or SessionCam connector from an older setup, remove it. Both plugins are closed on WordPress.org and receive no updates. Microsoft Clarity replaces either of them at no cost.

Heatmaps tell you where attention goes; they do not tell you whether a change is an improvement. Once you have a hypothesis, test it properly with one of the A/B split testing plugins that runs real experiments, and keep an eye on caching so the extra third-party script does not undo your speed work.

WordPress heatmaps: questions people ask

What is the best free WordPress heatmap plugin?

Microsoft Clarity, because it is free with no traffic limit and no paid tier, and its official plugin has more than 200,000 active installs. It records click maps, scroll maps and full session replays. Mouseflow is the alternative if you need form analytics, and its free plan covers 500 sessions a month.

Do heatmap plugins slow down WordPress?

The plugin itself does almost nothing. It adds a small snippet that loads the vendor’s script from their servers, so the cost appears as a third-party request and extra script execution on each page view rather than as load on your host. Slimstat Analytics is the exception, because it writes every hit to your own WordPress database and the cost lands on your server instead.

Do I need consent before running heat maps and session recordings?

In the EU and UK, yes, in almost all cases. Session recording replays what a visitor did and can capture text typed into forms, which makes it personal data processing under GDPR, so it needs a lawful basis before the script runs rather than a banner that appears afterwards. Mask all form input by default, never record payment or password fields, and name the tool in your privacy policy.

Can I run a heat map on WordPress without sending data to a third party?

Yes, with Slimstat Analytics. It stores hits in tables inside your own WordPress database and paints the heatmap over your live pages from that data, so no visitor information reaches an external processor. The heatmap is part of the Pro Pack, which costs $39 a year for one site.

Is Hotjar still free?

Hotjar still has a free plan, but it is now part of Contentsquare and its pricing page redirects to the Contentsquare site, where the tiers are Free, Growth, Pro and Enterprise. The heatmaps, recordings and surveys are unchanged. Older articles quoting Hotjar Basic, Plus and Business plan limits no longer describe what you will be offered.