Open a page's analytics and you see, say, four thousand views. Open its heatmap and the click count is a fraction of that. Nothing is broken. The two are measuring different things, on purpose.
They start from different data
Page views are counted at ingestion: one row per load, every time.
A heatmap is drawn from interaction capture: the clicks and scrolling recorded while somebody is on the page. That is a heavier thing to collect, and it is deliberately not collected from everybody.
Four reasons the numbers differ
Recording is sampled. There is a sample rate per site, and it exists because capturing every session on a busy page is expensive to gather, to store and to draw. A heatmap is a shape, and a shape does not need every visit to be clear.
Some visitors opt out. A site can be set to honour Global Privacy Control, and where it does, a browser sending that signal is excluded from interaction capture while still being counted as a visit. That is the correct outcome and it makes the two numbers differ.
Parts of the page can be blocked. Masking rules and blocked selectors keep chosen regions out of what is captured. A section nobody appears to touch may simply be one you excluded.
Not every visit has interactions to record. A visitor who lands, reads and leaves without clicking contributes a page view and almost nothing to a click map.
Which to trust for what
Use analytics for how many: visits, entry pages, conversions, anything you would put in a report.
Use the heatmap for where: what people reach for, how far down they get, which of two calls to action wins. It answers a question counting cannot, and it is the wrong instrument for arithmetic.
The failure worth avoiding is quoting a heatmap's totals as traffic figures. They were never meant to be that, and on a sampled site they will be wrong by whatever the sample rate is.
When they disagree in the other direction
If the heatmap shows clicks on a page your analytics says nobody visited, look at your exclusions. The two systems do not always share a filter, and an exclusion added for one is the usual explanation.
The two drawings answer different questions, and the glossary keeps them apart: a click map shows where people pressed, an attention map shows where they stayed, and scroll depth is neither.
Related: when you need session recordings, what bounce rate actually measures, and Behavior.