Microsoft Clarity vs Smartlook
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedMicrosoft Clarity compared with Smartlook
Clarity is free with no session cap and covers recordings and heatmaps competently, so anything paid has to justify itself. Smartlook's case is analytical rather than observational: no-code events that populate retroactively from sessions already recorded, funnels whose every drop-off step opens into the visitors who failed it, custom user identifiers so an account or plan tier can be isolated, and retention beyond Clarity's fixed 30 days. Smartlook is free to around 3,000 monthly sessions and roughly $55 a month above that. Take Clarity when watching sessions is the whole job; take Smartlook when events and funnels are meant to drive the analysis.
Smartlook compared with Microsoft Clarity
Clarity is free with unlimited sessions and covers web heatmaps and recordings competently, so for pure web replay it undercuts everything. Smartlook justifies a paid subscription through mobile SDK support, retroactive event definition, funnels, and custom user identification, none of which Clarity matches. Web-only teams with tight budgets should start with Clarity and only move if analysis depth becomes the constraint.
Choose Microsoft Clarity if
Any small business with a website, because it costs nothing, installs in ten minutes, and answers questions that traffic analytics cannot. Particularly strong for ecommerce stores, marketing sites, and lead generation pages where the question is why visitors are not converting on a specific page.
Choose Smartlook if
Product and growth teams with a mobile app, or with both a web and app surface, that want continuous recording, retroactive events, and funnels without paying enterprise experience analytics prices.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Microsoft Clarity | Smartlook |
|---|---|---|
| Category | CRO | CRO |
| Starting price | $0 (free plan available) | Free for around 3,000 monthly sessions; paid plans from roughly $55 per month (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Free. There is no paid tier, no enterprise edition, no traffic-based metering, and no upgrade path of any kind. | Subscription priced by monthly recorded sessions, with a free tier and paid plans adding volume, retention, and advanced features. Web and mobile capture are covered by the same session-based model. |
| Free plan | Everything. Unlimited traffic, unlimited projects, unlimited sites, unlimited team members, no sampling, all features including Copilot. The only limit is 30 day data retention. | Around 3,000 monthly sessions with recordings, heatmaps, and events on a short retention window |
| Free trial | Not applicable; the entire product is free with no trial period and no credit card | Free plan plus trial access to paid features |
| Best for | Any small business with a website, because it costs nothing, installs in ten minutes, and answers questions that traffic analytics cannot. Particularly strong for ecommerce stores, marketing sites, and lead generation pages where the question is why visitors are not converting on a specific page. | Product and growth teams with a mobile app, or with both a web and app surface, that want continuous recording, retroactive events, and funnels without paying enterprise experience analytics prices. |
| Setup time | Ten minutes. Create a project, paste the tag or install the platform app, and data appears within a couple of hours. Mobile SDK installation takes longer but is a normal dependency addition rather than a project. | Web installation is under an hour. Mobile SDK integration takes longer, since it requires an app release cycle, and masking sensitive views should be configured before that build ships. |
| Learning curve | Very low. The interface is designed for people who do not do analytics for a living, insights are surfaced automatically rather than requiring you to know what to look for, and Copilot answers questions in chat. A shop owner can get value on day one. | Low. The no-code event picker is the main concept to learn, and funnels follow naturally from it. Teams accustomed to event-based analytics adapt quickly. |
| Platforms | Web via JavaScript tag, Android and iOS native SDKs, Flutter and React Native, Shopify, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and Google Tag Manager install apps | Web (JavaScript), iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, Unity and game engines |
| Compliance | GDPR ready, CCPA ready, Consent API required in consent-required jurisdictions, Microsoft enterprise security and privacy programme | GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2, ISO 27001 |
| Founded | 2018 | 2016 |
| Headquarters | Redmond, Washington, United States | Brno, Czech Republic |
| Ownership | Owned and operated by Microsoft Corporation | Acquired by Cisco (2023) |
Strengths and limitations
Microsoft Clarity
Strengths
- Genuinely free with no traffic limits, no sampling, and no upgrade pressure, at a scale where Microsoft processes over a petabyte of data a month.
- Unlimited projects and unlimited team members, which makes it the obvious default for agencies and for companies with many small sites.
- Automatic machine learning insights (rage clicks, dead clicks, excessive scrolling, quick backs, JavaScript errors) require no configuration and are the fastest route to finding a broken page.
- Installation is genuinely ten minutes through Shopify, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or Google Tag Manager, with no developer required.
Limitations
- Thirty day data retention, absolute and unpurchaseable. No historical comparison, no quarter-over-quarter analysis, no year-ago baseline.
- You cannot delete an individual user's data. The only deletion mechanism is deleting the entire project, which is a poor fit for a clean data subject erasure process.
- No product analytics model worth the name: no behavioural cohorts, no proper retention analysis, no experimentation, and only basic funnels.
- No engineering context in recordings. There is no console output, no network inspection, no stack traces, and no application state, so it cannot be used to debug frontend failures.
Smartlook
Strengths
- Genuine first-class support for native mobile app recording, including gestures, screen flows, and crashes.
- Always-on capture rather than sampling, so the session you need is usually available.
- Retroactive no-code events mean analysis is never blocked by a missing tag.
- Funnels link directly to the recordings behind each drop-off, closing the quantitative and qualitative loop.
Limitations
- No A/B testing or personalization, so validation of fixes needs another tool.
- Web-only teams get less differentiated value than the mobile story suggests.
- Retention on lower tiers is short enough to constrain historical investigation.
- Roadmap independence is a fair question following acquisition by a large parent company.
Pricing compared
Microsoft Clarity
Free. There is no paid tier, no enterprise edition, no traffic-based metering, and no upgrade path of any kind.
- Clarity for web$0
- Clarity for mobile apps$0
There is no meaningful value analysis to perform because the price is zero at every volume. At 10,000 monthly users it is free with no sampling. At 100,000 monthly users it is free with no sampling. At ten million it is still free with no sampling, which is not true of a single other product in this category. What you are trading is retention, analytical depth, and engineering detail: 30 days of history, no cohort analysis, no console or network capture, no warehouse export, and no ability to delete a single user's data. For a small business whose behavioural question is about a specific page in the last month, Clarity is unbeatable and the only correct answer is to install it. For anything longitudinal or analytical, it is a supplement rather than a substitute, and the right posture is to run it alongside whatever you actually pay for.
Smartlook
Subscription priced by monthly recorded sessions, with a free tier and paid plans adding volume, retention, and advanced features. Web and mobile capture are covered by the same session-based model.
- Free$0
- ProFrom about $55
- EnterpriseQuoted
Smartlook's pitch is coverage per dollar: continuous recording rather than sampling, mobile and web on one meter, and retroactive events so nothing has to be tagged in advance. For an app-first company that would otherwise buy a mobile analytics tool and a web replay tool separately, the consolidation is worth real money. For a content site with no app, cheaper or free alternatives cover the same ground, and the mobile strength that justifies the price goes unused.
Editorial verdict on each
Microsoft Clarity
Best ValueEvery small business with a website should install Microsoft Clarity, and the argument takes about one sentence: it is free at any traffic volume, it installs in ten minutes, and it will show you a broken page you did not know about within the first week. Rage clicks and scroll heatmaps answer conversion questions that traffic analytics cannot, and the Copilot layer means a non-analyst can get the answer without knowing what to filter on. It is not a product analytics platform, it is not a debugging tool, and its 30 day retention window means it cannot answer a single historical question. Treat it as the free thing you run alongside whatever you pay for, not as the thing that saves you from paying, and it is the best value in this category by an enormous margin.
Read the full Microsoft Clarity profileSmartlook
Smartlook is the sensible choice for teams whose product spans both a website and a native app, because it treats the app as a real recording surface instead of a checkbox and puts both on one session meter. Always-on capture with retroactive event definition removes the most frustrating limitation of event-based analytics, and the funnel-to-recording link is exactly the workflow that turns a drop-off percentage into a fix. The gaps are predictable: no experimentation, lighter product analytics depth than dedicated tools, and retention windows on cheaper tiers that limit historical work. Web-only teams on a budget should test free alternatives first; app-first teams will find the price fair.
Read the full Smartlook profileMicrosoft Clarity profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Smartlook last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.