Investing in a third-party tool for achieving business goals like gathering data for efficient decision making, data visualization, and so on is always a daunting uptake. Investing in a heatmap tool is no different.
Months of research and to-and-fro goes into it, and sometimes even this much effort on understanding the options available falls short of giving you full confidence to invest. This is why most third-party tools, whether it is for heatmapping, testing, data tracking, analysis, transcription, and so on, offer free trials before asking you to make a payment and commit. On top of the free trials, the internet is full of information on various 100% free tools that you can use for multiple purposes.
To help you make this decision and to help you get started with heatmap, listed below are some of the free heatmap tools and paid tools that offer a free trial that you can take out for a spin to understand the tool, the methodology and the relevance for your particular use case, both professional and personal:
List of Free Heatmap Tools
Free WiFi Heatmap Tools
WiFi Analyzer
With a 4.7-star rating, WiFi Analyzer is a free application that can be downloaded from your phone’s app store. Using this free wifi heatmap tool, you can generate a heatmap of your wifi’s signal strength and coverage by merely uploading the floor plan of your home. Its application is not limited to indoors only. When you are outdoors, all you need to do is use GPS and then upload the data on Google Earth for an integrated map of your wifi’s speed and coverage.
Ekahau HeatMapper
HeatMapper is a free wifi heatmap tool offered by Ekahau. Using this free tool, Windows users can visualize wifi coverage on a map, locate access points, identify available networks, and so on. It takes only a minute or so to be installed onto your devices and is 100% free.
Acrylic WiFi
Acrylic WiFi is a WiFi analysis suite for wifi planning and wifi site survey
It captures network traffic and details on users’ devices, their signal strength, and so on to plot heatmaps with detailed coverage. It also tracks network performance, detects problem areas, and offers possible solutions to fix them.
Leveraging Acrylic WiFi’s 15-day free trial offering a fully functional user experience, you can map anything ranging from a small house to a smart city and gauge the features it has to offer.
Free Geographic Heatmap Tools
Strava
While researching free heatmap tools, one particular geographic heatmap piqued my interest, and it was the Strava Global Heatmap.
It wasn’t just how beautiful the generated heatmap looked that struck a chord. It was the effort that went into building it[4] and the scale at which it showed data with only a few clicks, as can be seen in the GIF above. The current version of Strava Global heatmap is powered by two years of data collection from athletes around the world, 700 million activities, 5 terabytes of raw input data, a total distance of 10 billion miles, a total recorded activity duration of 100 thousand years, 1.4 trillion latitude/longitude points, and 7.7 trillion pixels rasterized. It is one of a kind example of how geographic heatmaps can simplify the life of users.
In case you want to visualize your own activity, powered by the location history data enabled on your device, then you can use Google Maps to generate such a heatmap.
Maptive
Although ten days may not be enough to carry out a full-blown heatmapping exercise or to exhaust all your heatmapping ideas, it is enough to figure out if the tool is best suited for your needs.
Maptive’s heatmapping tool offers a 10-day free trial before asking for your full commitment to the tool.
One of the best features of this tool is that it allows you to layer multiple geographic heatmaps so you can visualize more than just one data matrix on a single heatmap.
Free Stock Trends Heatmap Tool
Stocktwits
Stocktwits is a free heatmap tool that plots a heatmap of the trends in 8 sectors: basic materials, consumer goods, utilities, industrial goods, technology, financials, health care, and services. This is what the heatmap generated looks like this:
This tool is especially useful for stock marketers whose day to day work involves mapping trends in these sectors.
A quick look at this generated heatmap dashboard would answer many of their questions.
Free Website Heatmap Tools
Clickheat
Clickheat by Dugwood is an OpenSource heatmapping tool that plots a clickmap and represents hot and cold click areas of a webpage based on how users interact with webpages like homepages, landing pages, product pages, and so on. The only thing required of you is to clone the code (available on GitHub) or download it from the ZIP archive. It is 100% free for unlimited use.
VWO
VWO Insights’ heatmap tool can track user behavior on both static and dynamic elements, in real-time, and creates heatmaps based on where each user clicks, scrolls, and so on. It comes with the capability of creating heat maps as well as clickmaps and scroll maps.
You can leverage VWO’s 30-days free plan and evaluate first-hand if this tool ticks off the boxes against each of your requirements checklist, 100% free.
If you are looking to use heatmaps soon and don’t want to pay monthly subscription fees, checkout this special offer here. As long as this link is still up, the promotion is still valid.