Best Live Visitor Tools in 2026 (Honest List)

whoisbrowsing is our product. We put it on the list, and we list other tools' strengths as they state them. Where a vendor's page did not say something, the table says "not stated by vendor".

The list at a glance

Tool	What "live" means there	Free option	What it keeps	Cookies on visitors
Microsoft Clarity	Live user count and live recordings of mouse movements, clicks and scrolls (docs)	"A free service forever" (overview)	Recordings, heatmaps, funnels (overview)	First- and third-party cookies (cookies)
Lucky Orange	Live View: where visitors click, scroll and engage, in real time (help)	No free plan listed; 7-day trial (pricing)	Recordings and heatmaps; storage starts at 60 days (pricing)	Lists cookies such as _lo_uid (visitor ID, 2 years), per a 2020 help article (help)
Inspectlet Live	Running count, most-viewed pages, and a visitor's screen: cursor, scroll, typing (Live)	Free plan: 2,500 recorded sessions a month, 3 sites (plans)	Recordings; 1 month on free, up to 24 on Enterprise (plans)	Not stated by vendor
Crazy Egg Astro Map	Visitors as figures grouped by page, referrer rockets, action bubbles (post)	"Web Analytics is 100% free for everyone, no matter your plan" (post)	Not stated by vendor	Not stated by vendor
Clicky Spy	"A real time stream of people on your website" (pricing)	Free plan exists, but Spy is a premium feature (pricing)	30 days of history on free; indefinite on paid, with limits (pricing)	Not stated by vendor
GA4 Realtime	Active users in the last 5 and 30 minutes, by source, page and event; one-user snapshot (help)	Not stated by vendor	Standard reports; user-level data 2 or 14 months (retention)	First-party _ga cookies (cookie usage)
Plausible	Current visitors in the last 5 minutes, dashboard updates every 30 seconds (docs)	No; 30-day trial, no card (homepage)	Aggregate stats dashboard (homepage)	"We don't use cookies" (data policy)
Fathom	Realtime count, with pages and referrers; 5-minute intervals (docs)	No; 7-day trial, card required (pricing)	Aggregate dashboard with date ranges (docs)	"Doesn't use cookies" (features)
whoisbrowsing	Every current visitor drawn on your real page: cursor, trail, clicks, phone scroll band	Free, no card, no usage limits for now	Nothing about visitors	None

Watch live sessions: Clarity, Lucky Orange, Inspectlet

Microsoft Clarity. After install you get a list of live users, live recordings that "recreate user interactions with your website", a Go Live button for the latest activity, and a notification when a live user appears (Clarity docs). It is free and keeps recordings and heatmaps too. Best for: anyone who wants recordings and a live view in one free tool. Keep in mind: Clarity says its typical usage requires non-essential cookies, and since October 31, 2025 it needs a consent signal for full functionality on EEA, UK and Swiss visits (Clarity cookies).

Lucky Orange. Live View lets you "see what people are experiencing on your website in real time" (help), alongside recordings, heatmaps, live chat, surveys and funnels, with "all features available on all plan levels" (pricing). Best for: teams that want live viewing plus chat to talk to visitors. Keep in mind: plans start at $32 a month paid annually, and no free plan is listed.

Inspectlet Live. A running count "updated every few seconds", a live-sorted list of top pages, and visitor cards that open a visitor's screen with "their cursor, their scroll, their typing" at sub-second latency (Inspectlet Live). Best for: watching one visitor closely, including form behaviour. Keep in mind: typed input is captured unless masked; passwords are always excluded (privacy guide).

Live maps and streams: Crazy Egg, Clicky

Crazy Egg Astro Map. With the date range set to Today, Web Analytics shows visitors "in real time" as figures on planets (pages), with rockets for referrers and speech bubbles for actions such as Visit, Scroll, Click, Conversion Goal or Error. Clicking a visitor shows "country, device type, referrer, and their recent activity log" (Crazy Egg). Best for: a free, playful overview of traffic as it happens.

Clicky Spy. "View a real time stream of people on your website - no refreshing required!" Spy is a premium feature; Pro is $9.99 a month, and new accounts get a 21-day premium trial (Clicky pricing). Best for: a low-cost live feed inside a classic analytics tool.

Live counts: GA4, Plausible, Fathom

GA4 Realtime shows active users in the last 5 and 30 minutes, by source, audience, page title and event, plus a snapshot of one user. Google calls it "a best effort service" and notes that the first-user-source card shows established users only (GA4 help). Best for: checking that tags and campaigns are working. More in GA4 Realtime vs a live visitor view.

Plausible counts as current visitors those "that visited your site in the last 5 minutes" and refreshes every 30 seconds (Plausible docs). Fathom's Realtime "shows how many people are actively viewing your site right now", with their pages and referrers (Fathom docs). Best for: cookieless analytics with history, plus a live number. See Plausible or Fathom vs a live view.

Live cursors on your own page: whoisbrowsing

whoisbrowsing does one thing. You open your own site and every current visitor is drawn on it: a cursor with a fading trail, clicks as ripples, a see-through band for phones and tablets, and arrows for visitors scrolled out of view. The side panel lists each person's page, source (Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, another site's link, or direct), approximate city, device, browser, operating system, time on site and pages this visit. It never identifies anyone.

Best for: seeing who is here right now, with no cookies on visitors and "nothing about your visitors is stored on our servers." Keep in mind: no recordings, heatmaps or history, and visitors from the EU/EEA, UK and Switzerland, and browsers with Global Privacy Control, are never shown. Details on how it works and privacy.

<script src="https://live.whoisbrowsing.com/s.js" data-site="YOUR_SITE_ID" defer></script>

How to choose

• You want to replay sessions later: Clarity (free), Lucky Orange or Inspectlet.
• You want to talk to visitors: Lucky Orange, which includes live chat.
• You want reports and history without cookies: Plausible or Fathom.
• You want live, on the page, with nothing kept: whoisbrowsing. Start on /try with no account.

Many sites can run two: one tool for history, one for right now. For the free options only, see real-time website visitors: free options compared.

Not on this list, and why

Hotjar is now part of Contentsquare and takes no new sign-ups (Contentsquare). Hotjar's help center says its recordings are compiled "after the user session ends" (Hotjar help), and Contentsquare lists "Live browsing heatmaps and replays" on its paid plans without explaining what they show (Contentsquare pricing), so we could not describe its live view fairly; see Hotjar live view. Smartlook says its platform will be deactivated on 30 September 2027 (Smartlook); see Smartlook alternatives. Other tools, such as FullStory and Mouseflow, are left out because we could not confirm a live feature on their official pages. All comparisons are on /compare, and the product is on the home page.