Free Session Replay Tools: What the Free Tiers Include

Several free session replay tools are worth a look: Microsoft Clarity is free to use, Hotjar, PostHog and Sentry are generally known to offer free plans, OpenReplay and rrweb can be run yourself at no licence cost, and AnyReplay has a free plan during early access. None of them is free in every sense, so the useful question is which kind of free matches your traffic, your privacy review and the time your team has.

This guide describes each option from its public positioning, then covers the costs that a free plan does not show on its pricing page. If you are new to the idea itself, start with what session replay is. Plans change often, so we deliberately give no numbers for other vendors: check each site for current pricing and limits.

Free session replay tools at a glance

The tools, one by one

Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity is a free behaviour-analytics tool from Microsoft, generally known for heatmaps and session recordings behind a single script. It is the default answer to "free session recording software" for many websites, and for a marketing site with no special privacy constraints it is hard to argue with. It is a hosted service with no self-hosted option, so recordings live with Microsoft under their terms. Check their site for current terms and any limits. Our AnyReplay vs Microsoft Clarity page and the Microsoft Clarity alternatives guide go further.

Hotjar

Hotjar is generally known for heatmaps, recordings and on-page surveys aimed at marketers, designers and product teams, and is part of the Contentsquare group. A free plan is generally known to exist; check their site for what it includes and for current pricing and limits. It suits teams that want surveys and heatmaps alongside individual sessions. See AnyReplay vs Hotjar.

PostHog

PostHog positions itself as an open-source, all-in-one product platform: analytics, session replay, feature flags, experiments and surveys, available as a cloud service or self-hosted. Its cloud offering is generally known to include a free tier, and the open-source code gives a second route. If you want replay tied to product analytics, it is a strong candidate. Check their site for current limits and for what the self-hosted edition includes. See AnyReplay vs PostHog.

OpenReplay

OpenReplay is an open-source session replay tool you can run on your own infrastructure, generally known for developer-tools style debugging with network requests and console output next to the recording. A hosted option also exists. Self-hosting it costs no licence fee, but the servers, storage and upkeep are yours; check their docs for requirements and licence terms. See AnyReplay vs OpenReplay.

Sentry

Sentry is error and performance monitoring first, with session replay attached to errors on web and mobile, including React Native. A free developer plan is generally known to exist. If what you really want is to see what happened just before an exception, it is a natural fit, especially if Sentry is already installed. Check their site for how replays are counted on each plan.

rrweb

rrweb is the MIT-licensed open-source library that records the DOM and its mutations and replays them in a browser. Several products, AnyReplay's browser SDK among them, are built on it. It is free in the purest sense, but it is a library, not a product: ingest, storage, retention, search, access control and a player UI are yours to build. rrweb explained covers what it does and does not give you.

AnyReplay

AnyReplay records web and React Native sessions and lets a reviewer translate a session into English, Turkish, German, Spanish or French. It is in early access behind a waitlist, and the Free plan costs nothing: one project and 500 sessions a month with 14 days of retention. Paid plans are described on the pricing page. The SDKs are MIT-licensed; the platform itself is not open source.

The hidden costs of free session replay

A free plan removes the invoice, not the cost. These are the costs that tend to surface after installing, roughly in the order they show up.

• Data ownership. On a free hosted plan, recordings of your users sit with a third party under that vendor's terms. Read what the vendor may do with the data and where it is stored before your privacy review reads it for you.
• Sampling and limits. Free tiers commonly cap sessions, sample traffic or restrict features. A capped plan can quietly miss the one session a support ticket is about. Check whether limits stop recording, drop sessions or slow ingestion.
• Retention. Short retention on a free plan means a bug reported next month may no longer have a recording. See data retention.
• Consent work. Replay usually needs a consent decision in the EU and elsewhere. Wiring a consent banner to the recorder, and masking inputs properly, is engineering time whatever the price. Session replay and GDPR explains why.
• Self-hosting operations. Open source removes the licence fee and adds servers, disk growth, backups, upgrades and TLS. Self-hosted session replay lists what that involves.
• Switching later. Recordings rarely move between tools, so the free tool you pick now tends to become the tool you keep.

Is there a completely free session replay tool?

Microsoft Clarity is the closest to free with nothing to run, and rrweb or a self-hosted open-source tool is the closest to free with nothing owed to a vendor. Neither is free of effort. Clarity asks you to accept a hosted service on Microsoft's terms; a self-hosted tool asks for infrastructure and time. Every other option here offers a free plan or trial with limits that you should read before relying on it.

Can I self-host session replay for free?

Yes, in licence terms. rrweb, OpenReplay and PostHog's open-source code can all be run on your own servers; check each project's licence and which features its self-hosted edition includes. You still pay for compute, storage that grows with traffic and retention, and the time to keep it patched. The open-source session replay tools guide compares these in more depth. AnyReplay documents a single-host deployment, but self-hosted ingest is part of the Enterprise plan rather than a free option.

What to check before choosing a free plan

1. What happens at the limit: does recording stop, sample, or keep going and bill?
2. How long recordings are kept, and whether you can change it.
3. Whether inputs are masked by default, and whether masking happens in the browser before data is sent. See input masking.
4. Whether the recorder can wait for consent before capturing anything.
5. Where recordings are stored, and who else may process them.
6. Whether you need web only, or mobile too, and which frameworks the mobile SDK supports.
7. What moving to a paid plan or another tool would involve.

Where AnyReplay fits (and where it doesn't)

AnyReplay is not the free tool to choose if you want heatmaps, funnels or surveys: it builds none of them, and Clarity or Hotjar do. It does not capture console logs or network requests, so OpenReplay, Sentry or LogRocket suit debugging that depends on them. If you want a hosted tool that is free at any volume, Clarity is generally known as the better match, and if you need an open-source platform you can run without a contract, look at OpenReplay or PostHog.

AnyReplay fits when the people reviewing sessions do not read the language the product is written in, when you ship a React Native app and want it recorded without a native module, or when a privacy review wants masking it can read and set in one line, applied in the browser, and nothing recorded before consent. The free plan is enough to find out on real traffic; join the waitlist and see pricing for the plans after it.

Frequently asked questions

Microsoft Clarity, Hotjar, PostHog, OpenReplay, Sentry, LogRocket and rrweb are trademarks of their owners. AnyReplay is not affiliated with or endorsed by them. Descriptions are general and may be out of date; check each vendor's site for current features, pricing and limits.