Microsoft Clarity is, without question, the best free behaviour analytics tool available. It offers session recordings and heatmaps with no session limits, no data caps, and no paid tier whatsoever. You install a small JavaScript snippet, connect it to your Google Analytics 4 account if you want, and within hours you’re watching real recordings of how visitors use your site. The fact that this is entirely free still feels remarkable.
The AI-powered insights surface patterns in your data automatically, flagging things like rage click hotspots, dead click areas, and sessions where users showed signs of frustration, without you having to watch every recording manually. The dashboard also highlights which pages have the highest scroll depth, which devices have the highest frustration rates, and which traffic sources are delivering the most engaged visitors. For prioritising where to focus your optimisation work, these insights are genuinely useful.
The Google Analytics integration is particularly clever: you can segment your Clarity recordings by GA4 audiences, goals, and events, so instead of watching random sessions you can filter to specifically watch sessions from, say, organic search visitors who reached the checkout but didn’t convert. I find Clarity indispensable as a companion to standard analytics tools. The only consideration is that data is processed by Microsoft, which may require disclosure in your privacy policy. But as a free alternative to Hotjar, Clarity is difficult to argue with.