11 Best Heatmap Software Tools (2025 Pros And Cons)
Looking for the best heatmap software? You’re in the right place.
The first step in optimizing your website or mobile app is understanding how visitors interact with it. And for that, you need heatmap software.
I recently tried and tested all the most popular heatmap tools on the market so that you don’t have to.
In this post, I’ll review and compare all of my top picks in detail. I’ll discuss what I liked and didn’t like about each of them, explain how they work and what they can do, and tell you everything else you need to know.
The top heatmap software compared
TL;DR:
- Mouseflow – Best overall heatmap software.
- Instapage – Powerful landing page builder with built-in heatmaps.
- Lucky Orange – Best real-time heatmap tracking tool.
- VWO – Best heatmap tool with built-in A/B testing.
#1 – Mouseflow
Mouseflow is my top pick for the overall best heatmap software on the market right now. It has everything marketers and UX designers need to analyze and optimize their websites in one place.
Mouseflow offers more types of heatmaps than most other tools I’ve tried. You can choose between six different options: click maps, scroll maps, movement maps, attention maps, live maps, and geo maps.
Each of these visualizes different types of user behaviors. For example, click heatmaps show you the ‘hotspots’ where most users click, movement maps track mouse positions, and scroll maps show you how far users scroll down the page (and where the average page fold is).
I particularly like the attention heatmap. It combines both click and scroll data together to visualize which areas of your site users devote most of their attention to, so you can quickly figure out where to place important elements like your CTAs and buy buttons.
Now, heatmaps alone don’t give you all the information you need to improve your website conversion rates, because they only tell you what users did on one specific page.
They don’t tell you what those users did before they reached that page, or whether or not they converted after clicking a button.
That’s where all of Mouseflow’s other features come in.
Aside from heatmaps, you also get access to session replays, so you can view what a user’s entire journey on your site looks like from start to finish.
Plus, conversion funnels, user feedback, journey mapping, and my favorite feature—friction scoring.
Automatic Friction Scores allow you to pinpoint your most unhappy users at a glance, so you can dive into their session recordings and heatmaps to see what went wrong. This is something you don’t get with a lot of other heatmap tools, and it’s a feature that I found super useful.
Pros and cons
Pricing
Free plan available. Plans start from $39/month and you can save up to 20% with annual billing. Get started with a 14-day free trial.
#2 – Instapage
Instapage is a great choice if you’re looking for a landing page builder with heatmaps built-in, so you can both analyze and design website pages from the same platform.
Instapage’s heatmaps aren’t quite as detailed or feature-rich as dedicated software like Mouseflow, but they show you all the important stuff.
They track and visualize visitor mouse movements, clicks, and scroll depth—and that’s all most marketers and UX designers care about anyway.
But what makes Instapage really powerful is its top-of-the-line page-building and optimization tools. So you can take what you learned from your heatmaps and use it to edit and improve your landing pages without switching software.
For example, I like Instapage’s drag-and-drop, AI-powered editor. It’s loaded with powerful features like global content blocks that save a ton of time.
You can run A/B tests to compare multiple page variants, gathering analytics and user behavior data to see which one converts best. And you can even intelligently route visitors to personalized landing pages, e.g. by sending traffic from ad clicks to pages that align with that ad’s message.
Just keep in mind that you’ll need a Custom plan to unlock heatmaps as they’re not included in the Instapage’s default Create and Optimize plans. I’m not sure how much this will cost as you need to reach out for a quote but expect to pay more than you would with Mouseflow.
Pros and cons
Pricing
Plans start from $99/month, and save up to 20% with annual billing. Get started with a 14-day free trial.
Read our Instapage review.
#3 – Lucky Orange
Lucky Orange is one of the few heatmap tools that can track user behavior in real time. In other words, it can show you how people interact with your website live as they browse.
That’s not the only cool thing about Lucky Orange either—it has plenty of other useful features.
One I find particularly helpful is the ability to segment your heatmaps by different parameters. This allows you to hone in on how specific audience groups engage with your site.
For instance, you might use filters so your heatmaps only show insights from visitors who clicked through to your site from your Google PPC ads, or Facebook, Twitter, etc.
I also like that Lucky Orange doesn’t do sampling (like a lot of other heatmap software). It captures every single site visitor so your heatmaps are an accurate reflection of your website traffic.
In addition to heatmaps, you get a bunch of other analytics features like session recordings, surveys, conversion funnels, form analytics, live chat… basically everything you need to uncover actionable insights that you can use to improve your website UX and conversion rates.
The price of Lucky Orange depends on the number of monthly sessions you want to track, but overall, I’d say it’s pretty good value for money.
Pros and cons
Pricing
Free plan available. Paid plans start from $39/month, save 20% with yearly billing. Get started with a 7-day free trial.
#4 – VWO (Visual Website Optimizer)
VWO is probably the most powerful heatmap software on this list. It’s an enterprise-level ‘digital experience optimization platform’ with lots of great features, but it’s very expensive. It’s also technically complex with a higher learning curve than the other tools we’ve looked at.
All of that makes it better suited to large brands with complex CRO needs, and less suitable for beginners who just need basic heatmapping functionality.
VWO is one of the few heatmap tools in this list that works for both websites and mobile apps. For websites, you can view all the usual heatmaps: scrollmaps, click maps, etc. and for apps, you can view ‘tap’ heatmaps.
Heatmaps can be filtered using complex ‘and/or’ bracketing logic conditions. And you can quickly segment using pre-defined filters. For example, you can compare heatmaps for new vs returning visitors, device type (i.e. desktop vs mobile vs traffic), geographical location, etc.
You can also view dynamic heatmaps with VWO. Unlike static heatmaps, which offer a snapshot of aggregated user interactions over a certain period, dynamic heatmaps let you see what visitors are doing on your website as they’re using it.
This is useful for gaining insights into how users react to new website/app changes and can help you immediately identify (and fix) issues with user engagement before they cause problems for your business.
Because VWO is a full-featured CRO platform rather than a dedicated heatmap tool, it also comes with lots of other useful analytics, experimentation, and optimization tools, including multivariate and A/B testing, usability testing, and more.
The exact features you get access to will depend on what pricing package you sign up for. For heatmaps, you’ll need one of the VWO Insights plans, but there are various pricing tiers to choose from and add-ons available.
Pros and cons
Pricing
Free plan available. Plans start from $198/month billed annually. Get started with a free trial.
#5 – Hotjar
Hotjar is a good choice for anyone serious about UX design. In addition to heatmaps, it provides a bunch of other tools to help you gather deeper insights about customer experiences on your site.
Hotjar provides several different heatmap types. There’s the usual stuff like click maps, scroll maps, and move maps. Plus, a few options I haven’t seen elsewhere.
One of my favorites is the ‘rage click map’. It shows you where on the page your customers are getting annoyed and ‘rage clicking’, making it easy to pinpoint points of frustration in your website design.
I like how all of Hotjar’s different analytics features are seamlessly integrated too. For instance, as you’re browsing a heatmap, you can click on a hotspot and then click ‘view recordings’ to zoom into specific session recordings for a full view of the customer journey that led up to the clicks.
Or you can zoom out to Trends and view charts that show you how clicks on specific page elements evolve over time.
Aside from the quantitive data you get from Hotjar’s heatmaps, you can also use it to gather qualitative data.
For example, the Feedback feature lets your site visitors rate their experience on your site and send notes on what they think you can improve. And you can leverage Surveys and Interviews to gather more detailed feedback from your users.
Pros and cons
Pricing
Free plan available. Plans start from $39/month, save 20% with yearly billing. Get started with a 15-day free trial.
#6 – Clicky
Clicky is one of the most affordable tools on this list. It’s a simple, privacy-friendly website analytics solution with built-in heatmaps.
Clicky doesn’t have all the bells and whistles you get with more advanced heatmap software, and its user interface isn’t the best—it’s more than a little dated.
But looking past that, Clicky has a lot going for it. First off, it’s super cheap, with plans starting at a fraction of the cost of its competitors. There’s a free plan too but unfortunately, free users can’t access heatmaps.
Speaking of which, Clicky’s heatmaps can be filtered by page, visitor, or segment. They only show where users click—you can’t see where they scroll or move their cursor like you can with other tools. But if that’s all you need, they’ll do the job.
Another thing Clicky has going for it is that it’s privacy-friendly. It doesn’t use any tracking cookies and it’s fully GDPR-compliant.
Aside from heatmaps, you also get access to real-time web analytics (think metrics like visitors, actions, bounce rate, time per visit, etc.), anonymized action logs, round-the-clock uptime monitoring, and more.
Pros and cons
Pricing
Free plan is available (but it doesn’t include heatmaps). Paid plans that include heatmaps start from $14.99/month. You can save 33% with annual billing.
#7 – Zoho PageSense
Zoho PageSense is a feature-rich conversion optimization & personalization platform that includes heatmaps and much more.
One of the best things about PageSense is that it’s one of the only tools I’ve tried that offers consolidated heatmaps.
Unlike regular heatmaps that only visualize visitor behaviors on a single page, consolidated heatmaps track interactions on elements that stay the same across multiple pages (think your header, footer, sidebar, etc.).
It also supports both static and dynamic elements, which means you can see interactions on elements that change during the visitor session, like pop-up menus, slider carousels, drop-down menus, etc. This is something a lot of other heatmap tools struggle with.
And heatmaps are just a small part of what you can do with Zoho. You also get access to tons of other tools to help you personalize your site and optimize it for maximum conversions.
That includes web analytics, form analytics, funnel analysis, personalization, session recordings, pop-ups, push notifications, and some of the best A/B testing tools I’ve seen anywhere.
Pros and cons
Pricing
Plans start from $20/month, save 40% with yearly billing. Get started with a 15-day free trial.
#8 – Crazy Egg
Crazy Egg is a good choice for beginners and novices. I like its clean navigation and intuitive UI—it’s much easier to use than most other tools I’ve tried.
You access heatmaps through Crazy Egg’s Snapshots tool. Snapshots are easy-to-understand reports that visualize your site visitor behavior.
There are five different Snapshots to choose from. The first is the standard Heatmap report, which shows you color-coded hotspots of click activity on the page.
Then you have the Scrollmap, which uses colors to show you where the most popular scroll depth is. It’s useful for pinpointing where your page fold falls for most users and identifying problematic ‘false bottoms’.
The Confetti report is interesting—it’s a type of heatmap I haven’t seen anywhere other than Crazy Egg.
It uses color-coded dots (i.e. confetti) to show you individual clicks on your web pages, which can be segmented by metrics like time on site, geography, etc. It’s useful if you want to compare behaviors of different audience segments side-by-side.
I also found the Overlay report useful. Rather than using hotspots, it uses information boxes to tell you the percentage breakdown of clicks to each web page element.
And finally, there’s the List report, which is a purely numerical list of the number of clicks to each element. It’s boring, but it’s useful for raw data analysis when you just need to crunch the numbers without any fancy data visualization.
In addition to Snapshots, Crazy Egg also comes with other analytics and optimization features including session recordings, traffic analysis, error tracking, a/b testing, surveys, and more.
Pros and cons
Pricing
Plans start from $99/month billed annually. Get started with a 30-day free trial.
#9 – Plerdy
Plerdy is interesting in that it combines both UX and SEO optimization tools in one platform. So aside from the core heatmap software functionality, it also comes with other features to help you rank on Google and earn more conversions.
One thing I like about Plerdy is its advanced segmentation options. You have a lot of flexibility when configuring your heatmaps, so you can see how specific visitors from different organic or paid channels behave.
For example, you can view heatmaps only for traffic that clicked through from Google Ads and compare it to traffic that came from organic Google search, etc.
I also like that Plerdy shows you click sequences. So you can look at click maps to see where on the page users click most often, but then zoom in to see what they clicked after that. In doing so, you can map out a typical site visitor’s journey to conversion or figure out where they tend to drop off.
Aside from clicks, Plerdy’s heat maps can also show you scroll depth, cursor movements, and other insights. And they work with dynamic, interactive elements like pop-ups, sliders, and menus.
Pros and cons
Pricing
Free plan available. Paid plans start from $32/month, save 35% when you pay yearly. Get started with a 14-day free trial.
#10 – Inspectlet
Inspectlet is another powerful tool that provides heatmaps as well as session recordings, A/B testing tools, feedback surveys, error logging, and more.
Aside from click maps and scroll maps, Inspectlet is one of the few tools that provides eye-tracking heat maps.
It does this by looking at mouse movements. Studies show that mouse movements correlate strongly with eye movement, so Inspectlet is able to predict where users are looking and use that to create eye-tracking maps.
Inspectlet’s session recordings and feedback surveys can be used to provide more context to your heatmaps and gather qualitative insights. And you can use the A/B testing tool to compare different variations of your website pages and see which performs best.
Pros and cons
Pricing
Free plan available. Paid plans start from $39/month, save 15% with annual billing.
#11 – Smartlook
Smartlook is another feature-rich tool that goes beyond heatmaps. It also provides session recordings, event tracking, and funnel analysis so you can better understand why your users behave the way they do.
You get three types of heat maps with Smartlook. Click Maps show you where users click and how often, Move Maps show you where users move their cursors, and Scroll Maps show you how many users reach each part of your pages.
I like that you can click on the hotspots on your heatmaps to see additional insights. For example, highlighting an area on a click map will show you the exact number of clicks recorded, and what percentage of the total clicks on the page went to that section.
I also like that any new heatmaps you create get instantly populated with as much historical data as is available in your plan, so you don’t have to wait forever for the tool to gather data every time.
Pros and cons
Pricing
Free plan available. Paid plans start from $55/month. Get started with a 30-day free trial.
Final thoughts
Each of the heatmap software tools we’ve looked at has its own set of pros and cons.
The best choice for you will depend on what kind of events you want to track, the other features you need (e.g. session recordings, page building, A/B testing, etc,), and your budget.
You’ll also need to think about integrations and will probably want to choose a tool that plays nicely with the rest of your tech stack, like your CMS, Google Tag Manager, Google Analytics, etc.
And remember: Most of the tools I’ve included in this list offer either a free plan or free trial, so you can always test them out to make sure they’re a good fit before you buy.
Ready to optimize your website to get more conversions? Here are the best landing page builders and email capture tools for the job. I’d also suggest checking out our guide to the anatomy of a high-converting landing page, and these useful landing page stats.
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