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8 Top Free Heatmap Tools For Your Industry [2023]
“I don’t perform user research and I base my strategies on instincts” – said no smart marketer ever.
Ask any marketer worth their salt, and they’ll emphasize the pivotal role of user behavioral insights in their work. And why wouldn’t they? User behavior is unique to each website and each brand. How visitors engage with your website may differ significantly from how they interact with your top competitors’ sites. Making sweeping generalizations from benchmarked reports is hardly possible.
Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide
Understanding what your users want, identifying and eliminating the friction they face, and enhancing their experience with YOUR product become possible when you analyze their actions on your website. That’s where heatmaps – an incredible usability testing method – shine bright! Heatmap solutions show captivating visual representations that provide magnificent insights into every movement of your users without overwhelming you.
Experimenting with heatmap tools is an excellent starting point for user research. It enables you to make data-driven decisions and optimize the performance of digital properties. To help you pick the best free heatmap tool, we’ve compiled a list of the top 8 heatmapping tools for you to get started.
[Read this extensive guide on Website Heatmaps]
VWO Insights
VWO Insights distinguishes itself by offering a comprehensive suite of user behavioral analysis tools, including powerful heatmaps. Even in its free starter plan, you can analyze unlimited heatmaps. Additionally, you can leverage click maps that track visitors’ clicks on specific elements on a web page. It is called one of the best heatmap tools for a reason, right?
Have you noticed something insightful about visitor or user interaction here on your website? Add it as an observation with automatically attached heatmap screenshots. This feature makes future heatmap analysis for testing and further in-depth analysis super convenient. Plus, Insights supports seamless cross-device tracking, allowing you to view heatmaps from desktop, mobile, and tablet.
Other key features – Session Recordings, Surveys, Form Analytic, Funnels
Free plan – For those looking to dip their toes into the world of behavioral analytics, VWO Insights’ free Starter plan is an ideal choice, accommodating up to 5,000 monthly tracked visitors. Of course, as and when your business scales and requirements grow, you can switch to any of VWO’s paid plans of Insights and capitalize on several other advanced features like A/B testing of variation heatmaps, view heatmaps of intractable elements like pop-ups and modals, download for offline viewing, and so on. Check out more about pricing and plans now.
Free trial – Sign up for a full 30-day free trial to explore our range of heatmap features, from basic to advanced. But that’s not all! You can also set up funnels to allow visitor data collection, track your visitors’ progress toward a goal, analyze web forms at a field level, and even conduct surveys to gather valuable user feedback. Our free trial covers insights (including heatmap software tools, of course) for mobile apps too! If you find yourself loving all these amazing features, you might just discover that upgrading to a paid plan is worth it!
Microfocus, an FTSE 250 software group, used VWO Insights’ heatmaps, scroll maps, and session recordings, for qualitative analysis of their home page and product pages. They made the below observations that later, upon A/B testing, led to a 12.37% increase in form sign-ups from their website:
- Not showing asterisk marks on mandatory fields on the sign-up form was probably a cause for low conversion rates.
- The CTA for the Free Trial page was below the fold, probably leading to low conversion rates.
- Their marketplace domain did not have product linkage to specific apps and hence was not sending traffic to Micro Focus product pages (revenue pages).
Still not sure if this is the right tool for you? Go ahead and evaluate VWO Heatmaps for free to see if it ticks off the boxes in your checklist using the free trial.
Watch how to fuel more experiments with heatmap data:
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity has got you covered with an array of visitor behavioral tools, and the best part? It’s absolutely free forever! With clickmaps, you can easily identify the areas on your pages that generate the most engagement. Scrollmaps, on the other hand, give you insights into how far your visitors scroll on a web page. And if you want to know where the action is happening, area heatmaps reveal the total clicks in specific areas, helping you identify popular click zones on your website. This heat mapping software also supports cross-device viewing of heatmaps and makes sharing with your team quite simple.
Other key features – Session recordings tool, Insights, Clarity extension, and CoPilot.
Currently, it doesn’t allow you to analyze heatmaps for interactive elements like pop-ups and modals. Further, you are also not able to view heatmaps for a web page that requires login or has dynamic URLs.
Free plan – Microsoft Clarity is an entirely free heatmap tool.
Download Free: Website Heatmap Guide
Hotjar
Hotjar is one of the impressive website heatmap tools for diving deep into visitor behavioral research. This great tool supports analysis of scroll maps and clickmaps apart from enabling cross-device viewing of all maps. Heatmaps are easily shareable, but the absence of the feature of jotting down observations can limit your chance to share your insights and brainstorm within the team. In fact, the feature to note observations with automatic screenshots and view click areas do not exist even for paid plans in this heatmap tracking tool.
Other key features – Recordings, Feedback, Surveys, and Interviews.
Free plan – With the free basic plan, you can benefit from up to 35 daily sessions.
Free trial – You can start 15-day trials for Plus and Business paid plans. To sign up for the trial of the Scale plan, you have to reach out to their sales team.
SmartLook
SmartLook is one of the must-have heatmap tools making waves in the industry. It lets you analyze all three types of heatmaps – clickmaps, movement heatmaps, and scroll maps. While you can avail of cross-device viewing of heatmaps through the free version, the tool does not let you share and download them. SmartLook offers integrations with third-party testing solutions to support your online experiments. But the downside is that you are reliant on these integrations and unable to view heatmaps of the testing variations directly within this heatmap software tool.
Other key features – Events, Session recording tool, funnels, and crash reports.
Free plan – SmartLook’s free plan is best for anyone who wants to explore it for personal use. To use it within a team, you’ll have to switch to either the Pro plan or Enterprise plan to use more advanced heatmap features.
Free trial – All paid plans offer a 30-day trial period.
Mouseflow
Mouseflow is powered with an advanced heatmap feature set, including click, scroll, movement, geo, and attention. Rightly called one of the sought-after website heatmap tools, it goes the extra mile to show you friction scores to flag areas that visitors have trouble interacting with and can be improved. You can also share heatmaps and session recordings within your team. What Mouseflow does not offer is element list reports that show a unified view of clicks on each element of a particular web page, including links, headers, list items, etc.
Other key features – Session replay tool, funnels, forms, and user feedback.
Free plan – Mouseflow’s free plan provides you with 500 recordings every month and unlimited pageviews.
Free trial – You get a 14-day free trial for all paid plans.
Lucky Orange
With Lucky Orange, you gain access to dynamic heatmaps, allowing you to explore not just static areas of your website but also dynamic elements like modals and pop-ups. Plus, you can deep-dive into the performance of each web page with element analytics. Deep segmentation allows you to analyze and compare visitor behavior across traffic sources and marketing campaigns. However, this heatmap tool lacks project management capabilities that enable users to jot down observations about heatmaps for further analysis.
Other key features – Sessions Recordings, Surveys, Conversion funnels, Form Analytics, and Live Chat.
Free plan – Lucky Orange’s free plan supports 500 page views per month for unlimited team members. Plus, you can get access to all integrations within this plan.
Free trial – A 7-day free trial is available for the free plan and all paid plans.
FullStory
FullStory lets you track mouse movements to analyze all three types of maps representative of visitor behavior – heatmaps, scrollmaps, and clickmaps. Through session replays, you can also step into visitors’ shoes and identify the problems they face on your website. You can also easily create a note at an important moment during a session replay and generate a link to the replay to share it with your team. Integrations with third-party testing tools allow you to use observations made on FullStory to run tests and improve conversion rates.
Other key feature groups – Product analytics and Complete Data Capture (DX Data Engine)
Free plan – When you sign up for a free trial, you’ll get a 14-day trial of FullStory’s Business edition with up to 5,000 sessions. During the trial, you can switch to a Free plan or contact us to explore the best plan for your business.
Free trial – The free trial is only available for the Business plan. There is no free trial for Enterprise and Advanced plans.
Inspectlet
Inspectlet’s free plan lets you access its entire suite of heatmap software tools that cover eye-tracking heatmaps, click heatmaps, and scroll heatmaps. With this tool, you can capture videos of your website visitors in action, providing a comprehensive view of their interactions.
Other key features – A/B testing, Feedback tools like surveys, Form analytics tools, and Error Logging
Free plan – Inspectlet has a free plan offering 25,000 pageviews per month.
Free trial – Not sure if they offer a free trial period.
With the right tool, plunge into visitor insights that are worth their weight in gold
All impressive heatmap tools, right? Selecting the best free heatmap tool can be tough with so many amazing choices. Our recommendation? Give VWO Insights a try. It offers a feature-packed heatmap suite along with funnel analysis, survey, goals, and more. When you select a comprehensive conversion rate optimization platform that integrates experimentation, insights, plan, and CDP, your experiments can drive significant results. So, are you ready to kick-start your user research with this best free heatmap software? Sign up for a free trial and watch the results. Wishing you a treasure trove of user insights to propel your business to growth and success!
FAQs on heatmap tools
In order to select the right heatmap tool, free or paid, it is important to do research, find out the various options in the market, figure out your requirements, and then test out the chosen few heatmap tools within your business use case.
There are several good heatmap tools in the market that offer both free and paid plans. For example, VWO Insights is a great tool that offers a free trial. We have shared a comprehensive list of tools in this post.
Heatmap analytics tools visually represent visitor interactions on your website or mobile app. They deploy color-coded overlays to show hotspots and coldspots, implying where visitors engage the most or least. Such heatmap visualization software provides valuable insights into visitor behavior to help businesses optimize their websites or apps and improve conversion rates.
WiFi Analyzer offers an easy way to find information on your iPhone. The Free Wi-Fi heatmap tool allows the creation and uploading of a heatmap of the WiFi signal power in any location. It has a wide range of uses in interior and exterior spaces.
Google’s Chrome extension Pages Analytics (from Google) provides a heatmap. After installation the site displays which visitors are clicking through.
Graphic representations of data using a color-coding system can be made up of different values in heat maps. Heatmaps use various analytical tools and are often employed in the display of user behavior on a particular website or template.
There are several top-performing heatmap tracking tools available in the market. It would be a tad difficult to pick the best. But we suggest that you try VWO Insights not only because it has rich visitor behavior analysis tools (including advanced heatmaps) but also because it connects best heatmap software tool with experimentation, planning, CDP, and feature management which can ultimately scale your optimization program.
VWO’s AI-powered free heatmap generator generates predictive attention heatmaps that you will receive directly in your inbox, showing how visitors are likely to interact with your webpage. With this heatmap creator, you can identify bottlenecks your users might face, overview of clicks on key elements on a page, and also get inputs for designing an optimized website.
Heatmap tools offer a visual representation of user engagement, allowing designers to identify areas of high user activity. With heatmap analysis, they can pinpoint potential usability issues and validate design decisions based on actual user behavior. They work in close collaboration with marketers and CRO strategists to create user-centric experiences and improve conversion for businesses.
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