Lucky Orange Alternative: Free, Live, No Recordings
Updated
TL;DR
If you mostly used Lucky Orange to watch visitors as they browse, whoisbrowsing is a free alternative: one script tag draws every current visitor's cursor on your real page, tells you where each one came from, and stores nothing. If you rely on Lucky Orange's recordings, heatmaps, surveys or chat, Lucky Orange is still the better fit, and whoisbrowsing does not try to replace those.
What Lucky Orange is, in its own words
Lucky Orange is a full behaviour-analytics suite. Its pricing page lists dynamic heatmaps, session recordings, surveys and announcements, live chat, Live Visitor View, conversion funnels, and page and form analytics, and says it keeps "all features available on all plan levels" (Lucky Orange pricing).
Live View is the part many people mean when they look for an alternative. Lucky Orange's help center says live view "lets you see what people are experiencing on your website in real time" and that "you can see where they click, scroll and engage with different parts of your website" (Lucky Orange help). You open it from Visitors, Visitor Profiles or the Dashboard. Its WordPress plugin page describes it as "every movement, scroll, and click in real time" (WordPress.org listing).
On price, the pricing page shows plans from $32 a month (paid annually, up to 3,500 monthly sessions) to $839 a month (paid annually, starting with 300,000 monthly sessions), a custom Enterprise tier, $5 per additional website, and a 7-day free trial. It does not list a free plan (Lucky Orange pricing).
Lucky Orange vs whoisbrowsing at a glance
| Lucky Orange | whoisbrowsing | |
|---|---|---|
| See current visitors live | Yes, Live View: clicks, scrolls and engagement in real time (help) | Yes: every visitor's cursor with a fading trail, clicks as ripples, drawn together on your real page |
| Session recordings | Yes (pricing) | No |
| Heatmaps | Yes, dynamic heatmaps (pricing) | No |
| Live chat, surveys, funnels | Yes (pricing) | No |
| Data kept | Base storage starts at 60 days; 90, 180 or 365 days available (pricing) | "Nothing about your visitors is stored on our servers." |
| Price | From $32/mo paid annually; 7-day trial; no free plan listed (pricing) | Free, no credit card, no usage limits for now |
| Additional websites | $5 per site (pricing) | Each website is separate, all free |
| Cookies on visitors | Its help center lists cookies the tracking script may set, including _lo_uid (a unique visitor ID, 2 years) and _lo_rid (the current recording, 30 minutes); the page was last updated in 2020 (help) |
No cookies on your visitors |
| Install | Script snippet; a WordPress plugin exists (WordPress.org) | One script tag, under 4 KB gzipped |
What you see in whoisbrowsing
You open your own website, and every current visitor is drawn live on top of the real page:
- Desktop visitors appear as a coloured cursor with a fading trail, and their clicks show as ripples.
- Phone and tablet visitors appear as a see-through band over the part of the page they are looking at.
- Visitors scrolled out of view show as arrows at the edge of the screen.
- A side panel lists live counts per page, busiest first, and one line per person.
For each visitor you see the page they are on and where they came from (Google, Bing, ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini, Copilot, Claude, another site's link, or direct), an approximate city such as "near Austin, TX" (never an identity), their device, browser and operating system, and their time on site and pages this visit. The dashboard can also send a browser notification when someone new arrives, naming the landing page, from the dashboard tab you keep open. How it works walks through each part.
What you give up by switching
Be clear about this before you remove anything:
- No recordings, replays or heatmaps. If you were not watching when a visitor came by, there is nothing to look back at.
- No reports or history. whoisbrowsing shows right now, not last week.
- No chat. You can watch, but you cannot message a visitor.
- Some visitors are never shown. Visitors from the EU/EEA, UK and Switzerland, and browsers with Global Privacy Control, are never shown. That is on purpose, and the privacy page explains why.
- Phones show as a band, not a cursor, because there is no pointer on a touch screen.
What you get in exchange is a smaller privacy footprint. In our own words: "Your visitors' browsers send the page, pointer position, clicks, scroll, device type, source, browser and operating system, and time on site. Never keystrokes, form values or page text."
When to pick Lucky Orange instead
Pick Lucky Orange, or keep it, if any of these are true:
- You need to replay what happened after a visitor left, for example to debug a broken checkout or answer a support ticket.
- You use heatmaps, funnels, surveys or form analytics to make design decisions.
- You want to chat with visitors while they are on the page.
- A large share of your audience is in Europe, where whoisbrowsing will show nobody.
If you want recordings and heatmaps but not the bill, Microsoft Clarity is worth a look: its docs call it "a free service forever" (Clarity overview), and it has live recordings too. We compare it fairly in Clarity live users vs whoisbrowsing.
Switching takes one line
Add this tag to every page, then click Watch in your dashboard and open your site:
<script src="https://live.whoisbrowsing.com/s.js" data-site="YOUR_SITE_ID" defer></script>
Your own browser is never counted. To check that it works, open your site in a Chrome Incognito or Safari private window and you will appear as a normal visitor. You can start without an account on /try and claim the site later with Google sign-in, or follow a platform guide such as any HTML site or WordPress. If you use Claude Code, Cursor or Codex, paste this prompt: Add whoisbrowsing (live visitor view) to this project. Follow https://whoisbrowsing.com/SKILL.md exactly.
Related comparisons
- Hotjar live view: what to use instead
- Best live visitor tools in 2026
- Live view vs session replay
- All comparisons on /compare, or start from the home page
Frequently asked questions
- Does Lucky Orange have a free plan?
- Lucky Orange's pricing page lists paid plans starting at $32 a month (paid annually, up to 3,500 monthly sessions) and a 7-day free trial. It does not list a free plan.
- Is whoisbrowsing a full Lucky Orange replacement?
- No. whoisbrowsing replaces only the live part: seeing who is on your site right now. It has no recordings, heatmaps, surveys, chat or history. If you need those, keep Lucky Orange, or look at Microsoft Clarity, which is free and keeps recordings.
- Can I run whoisbrowsing next to Lucky Orange while I decide?
- Yes. whoisbrowsing is one script tag under 4 KB gzipped, loaded with defer, and it never changes how the page looks, so you can add it beside your current snippet and compare the two.
- Why are some of my visitors missing from whoisbrowsing?
- Visitors from the EU/EEA, UK and Switzerland, and browsers with Global Privacy Control, are never shown, by design. Your own browser is never counted either. To see yourself, open your site in a Chrome Incognito or Safari private window.