Session recordings and heatmaps, free forever, no traffic limit
Microsoft Clarity is a free behavioural analytics tool that provides session recordings, click and scroll heatmaps, funnels, and machine learning insights such as rage clicks and dead clicks for websites and mobile apps, with no traffic limits, no sampling, and no paid tier; Microsoft funds it as part of its advertising and search business rather than selling it, and it is used on more than 2 million sites.
Overview
Microsoft Clarity is the strangest product in this category because there is no catch to explain. It is free forever, there are no traffic limits, there is no sampling, there is no upgrade path, and there is no sales team. Microsoft processes more than a petabyte of Clarity data from over 100 million users a month and charges nobody for it. The business rationale is that Clarity feeds Microsoft's understanding of the web and pulls small businesses into the Microsoft Advertising orbit, which is a real strategy but not one that costs you anything.
What you get is a competent session replay and heatmap tool. Recordings show what users did, click and scroll heatmaps show where attention landed, and machine learning insights flag rage clicks, dead clicks, excessive scrolling, quick backs, and JavaScript errors without any configuration. Since 2024 Copilot has been layered on to summarise recordings and heatmaps and answer questions about the data in chat, and 2026 additions extend into AI visibility, tracking where a site gets cited by AI assistants. Mobile SDKs cover Android, iOS, Flutter, and React Native, and more than 10,000 apps use them.
The constraint that matters most is retention. Clarity keeps data for 30 days from the time of recording, full stop. There is no longer window, no archive, and no way to buy one. Everything else about the product is generous and this single limit is absolute, which makes Clarity excellent for answering what is happening on this page right now and useless for asking what changed since last quarter. The other structural quirks follow the same pattern: you cannot delete an individual user's data without deleting the whole project, and masking of input boxes cannot be turned off in any mode.
Clarity is not a product analytics platform and should not be evaluated as one. There are no cohorts, no retention curves in the analytical sense, no experimentation, and no warehouse export. What it is, unambiguously, is the best free thing available for seeing how people actually use your website, and the correct decision for most small businesses is to install it regardless of what else they buy, because the marginal cost of having it is zero and the marginal value on a conversion problem is not.
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.
Not the right fit for
- Teams needing historical analysis; the 30 day retention window is absolute and unpurchaseable, so any question spanning quarters or comparing to last year is simply unanswerable in Clarity.
- Product teams needing cohorts, retention curves, and event-based segmentation of a logged-in application; Clarity has no serious analytical model and Mixpanel, Amplitude, or PostHog are the right tools.
- Engineers debugging frontend failures; there is no console output, no network inspection, no stack traces, and no state capture, so LogRocket or OpenReplay are the alternatives.
- Organisations with strict data governance requirements around individual deletion; Clarity cannot delete a single user's data, only an entire project, which is a genuine problem for handling a data subject erasure request cleanly.
- Anyone running a site aimed at people under 18; Microsoft's documentation states plainly that Clarity should not be used on websites or apps targeting users under that age.
How it works
- 1
You create a project and add a JavaScript tracking tag to your site, or install through the Shopify, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, or Google Tag Manager integration, which takes a few minutes and no developer. For apps, you add the Android, iOS, Flutter, or React Native SDK. Data starts appearing within about two hours.
- 2
Every session is recorded, with no sampling and no traffic ceiling. The dashboard aggregates the sessions into metrics and Clarity's machine learning insights automatically flag frustration signals: rage clicks, dead clicks, excessive scrolling, quick backs, and JavaScript errors, each of which filters the recording list down to exactly the sessions exhibiting that behaviour.
- 3
Heatmaps are generated per page URL, covering clicks, scrolls, and area attention, with the ability to compare across devices and segments. Funnels and event tracking let you define steps and see where people fall out, and segments slice everything by device, browser, country, referrer, or custom tags you pass from your own code.
- 4
Copilot sits over the top, summarising individual recordings and heatmaps in plain language and answering questions about the data conversationally, which is genuinely useful when the alternative is watching forty recordings to find a pattern. Data is retained for 30 days from recording, and the GA4 integration lets you jump from a Google Analytics segment straight to the matching Clarity recordings.
Feature breakdown
28 features in 5 modulesSession recordings
Every session, no sampling, no traffic cap.- Unlimited recording volume
- There are no traffic limits and no sampling. Microsoft states it processes over a petabyte of Clarity data from more than 100 million users a month, and a busy site is not throttled or asked to upgrade.
- Filterable recording lists
- Sessions can be filtered by device, browser, country, referrer, page visited, session duration, number of pages, and by any of the automatic frustration signals, which is what makes a large recording volume usable rather than overwhelming.
- Custom tags and identifiers
- You can pass your own tags and a user identifier from your code, so recordings can be filtered by plan tier, account, experiment variant, or anything else your application knows.
- Copilot recording summaries
- Plain-language summaries of what happened in a session, which turns a triage pass over dozens of recordings into a reading exercise rather than a watching one.
- Unlimited projects and sites
- There is no cap on the number of projects per account, so an agency managing thirty client sites pays the same as a business managing one, which is nothing.
Heatmaps
Click, scroll, and area attention maps generated from every session.- Click heatmaps
- Aggregate click density per page with element ranking, showing which elements attract clicks including the ones that are not links and therefore do nothing.
- Scroll heatmaps
- Where users stop scrolling on a page, which is the fastest way to discover that the call to action sits below the point 70 percent of visitors abandon.
- Area and attention maps
- Aggregated attention across regions of a page rather than individual elements, useful for layout decisions where per-element clicks are too granular.
- Device and segment comparison
- The same page compared across desktop, tablet, and mobile or across any segment, which routinely reveals that a design works on one and fails on another.
- Copilot heatmap analysis
- One-click summaries of what a heatmap is showing, aimed at users who can see the colours but are not sure what to conclude from them.
Insights and analysis
Automatic problem detection plus basic funnels, no configuration required.- Rage clicks
- Repeated rapid clicking on the same element, automatically detected and available as a filter. The single most reliable indicator that something the user expected to work does not.
- Dead clicks
- Clicks on elements that produce no response, which usually means a visitor believes something is interactive when it is not.
- Excessive scrolling and quick backs
- Users hunting for something they cannot find, and users who land on a page and immediately return, both flagged without setup.
- JavaScript error detection
- Sessions where a script error occurred are flagged and filterable, which is not full error monitoring but is enough to notice a broken page nobody reported.
- Funnels and event tracking
- Define a sequence of pages or events and see where users fall out, with the ability to open the recordings behind any drop-off step.
- Segments
- Saved slices of traffic by device, geography, source, page, behaviour, or custom tag, applied consistently across recordings, heatmaps, and metrics.
- Copilot chat over your data
- Ask questions about the project conversationally rather than assembling filters, which lowers the skill floor for getting an answer considerably.
Platforms and integrations
Web, mobile, and the ecosystem connections that make installation trivial.- Mobile SDKs
- Android, iOS, Flutter, and React Native SDKs bring recordings and heatmaps to native apps, used by more than 10,000 apps according to Microsoft.
- Google Analytics 4 integration
- Connects Clarity to GA4 so a segment identified in Google Analytics can be opened as the matching Clarity recordings, which is the pairing most marketing teams actually run.
- Platform install apps
- One-click installation on Shopify, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and Google Tag Manager, so a non-technical owner can install it without touching code.
- AI visibility and citations
- Tracking of where and when a site is cited by AI assistants, generally available in 2026, alongside reporting on which pages perform in that context.
- Open source tracking code
- The code that captures interactions is published on GitHub under the microsoft organisation, so what the tag does is auditable rather than a black box.
Privacy and data handling
Strong defaults on masking, awkward defaults on deletion.- Masking modes
- Content masking is configured per project with selectable modes, and input box content is masked in every mode with no option to unmask it, which removes the most dangerous category of accidental capture entirely.
- Element-level mask and unmask
- Specific elements can be masked or unmasked with attributes, so a team can reveal non-sensitive text for readability while keeping everything else hidden.
- URL parameter masking
- Query string parameters can be masked on request to Clarity support, replacing values in page URLs, which matters for sites that put search terms or identifiers in the query string.
- Consent API
- A documented consent API must be called on every page in consent-required jurisdictions; without valid consent Clarity limits data collection in those regions rather than collecting regardless.
- EU contracting through Microsoft Ireland
- EU customers contract with Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited, which holds standard contractual clauses with Microsoft Corporation covering cross-border transfer, so the counterparty is an EU entity.
- Thirty day retention
- Data is retained for consumption for 30 days from the time of recording. This is the product's defining constraint and cannot be extended.
Use cases
4 documentedEcommerce store owner losing sales at checkout
Analytics shows a 40 percent drop between cart and payment and the owner has no idea whether it is price, shipping, or a broken field.
Recordings filtered to rage clicks show repeated clicking on a disabled continue button when the postcode field rejects a valid format. The fix costs an hour and Clarity cost nothing.
Marketer optimising a landing page
A campaign page converts at 1.2 percent and the team is arguing about copy without evidence.
The scroll heatmap shows 68 percent of visitors never reach the form. The form moves above the fold, conversion doubles, and the argument ends without anyone having to be persuasive.
Agency managing thirty client websites
Every client wants behavioural insight, and no client wants to pay for another subscription.
Unlimited projects at zero cost means every client site gets recordings and heatmaps, and the agency has evidence for its recommendations in every monthly report without a line item.
Small SaaS company pairing free tools
The team runs a product analytics tool for the application but has nothing watching the marketing site and pricing page.
Clarity covers the public site with recordings, heatmaps, and frustration signals at no cost, and the paid analytics tool's event budget is spent entirely on in-product behaviour where it belongs.
Pricing
from $0Free. There is no paid tier, no enterprise edition, no traffic-based metering, and no upgrade path of any kind.
| Plan | Price | Includes |
|---|---|---|
| Clarity for web | $0 forever |
Data is retained for 30 days from the time of recording, and that window cannot be extended by any means. |
| Clarity for mobile apps | $0 forever |
The mobile SDKs arrived later than the web tag and the feature surface is slightly behind it. |
Billing notes
- There is no bill. Microsoft funds Clarity as part of its advertising and search business rather than selling it, and the documentation states plainly that you never encounter traffic limits or are compelled to upgrade.
- The real cost is the 30 day retention window. If you need historical comparison, you are paying in capability rather than in money, and you will need a second tool for anything longitudinal.
- The second real cost is data governance friction: you cannot delete an individual user's data, only the entire project, which is an awkward answer to a data subject erasure request.
- There is no support contract to buy. Support is a shared email address and documentation, which is a fair trade at this price but not something to build an SLA-dependent process around.
- Because there is no commercial relationship, there is also no commercial commitment. Microsoft can change the terms of a free product at any time, and buyers should not build a business-critical workflow on the assumption that it will never change.
Value assessment: 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.
Strengths & limitations
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.
- Input box content is masked in every masking mode with no option to unmask it, which eliminates the most common category of session replay privacy accident by design rather than by configuration.
- The tracking code is open source on GitHub, so what the tag collects is auditable rather than a matter of trust.
- Copilot summaries and chat lower the skill floor considerably, letting a non-analyst get an answer without knowing which filters to build.
- Backed by Microsoft, so the vendor is not going to run out of runway, and EU customers contract with an EU entity in Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited.
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.
- No warehouse export, no data pipeline, and no meaningful API for getting your data out, so Clarity is a place data goes rather than a place it flows through.
- Microsoft's documentation states Clarity should not be used on websites or apps targeting users under 18, which rules out a category of sites entirely.
- Support is a shared email address and documentation with no purchasable SLA, and being free means Microsoft owes you nothing if the terms change.
- Consent handling is your responsibility per project and per domain, and without valid consent Clarity restricts collection in consent-required jurisdictions, which can quietly leave gaps in your data.
Head-to-head comparisons
4 alternativesMicrosoft Clarity vs Mouseflow
from $0 (Free, 500 sessions per month), then $25 per month (Essential)Mouseflow is the paid version of roughly the same idea, from $25 a month, and what the money buys is form analytics, friction scoring, longer retention up to 12 months, and conversion-focused funnels aimed at marketers. Clarity is free with unlimited traffic but keeps only 30 days. Use Clarity if 30 days of history answers your questions, which for page-level optimisation it usually does; pay for Mouseflow when you need form field analysis or a retention window that spans a quarter.
Full Microsoft Clarity vs Mouseflow comparisonMicrosoft Clarity vs LogRocket
from $0 (Free, 1,000 sessions per month), Core from around $176 per month at 25,000 sessionsClarity shows what the user saw; LogRocket shows what the application did, including console output, network calls, stack traces, and Redux state, from around $176 a month. They serve different people. Put Clarity on the marketing site and LogRocket in the application and you have covered both jobs for the price of one subscription, which is what most software companies should do.
Full Microsoft Clarity vs LogRocket comparisonMicrosoft Clarity vs OpenReplay
from $0 self-hosted, or $199 per month for a managed Dedicated instanceOpenReplay is open source session replay you can self-host for free or run managed from $199 a month, with devtools, network capture, and full data ownership inside your own infrastructure. Clarity costs nothing and requires no operations, but sends data to Microsoft and keeps it 30 days. Choose OpenReplay if data residency or engineering depth matters and you can run infrastructure; choose Clarity if you want something useful working this afternoon at no cost.
Full Microsoft Clarity vs OpenReplay comparisonMicrosoft Clarity vs Matomo
from Free self-hosted (Community edition), or 29 euros per month for Matomo Cloud at 50,000 hitsBoth are answers to the same instinct, which is not wanting to pay a per-session meter, but they resolve it differently. Matomo gives you traffic analytics plus session recording and heatmaps with EU hosting from around 29 euros a month or free self-hosted, with retention you control. Clarity gives richer behavioural insights and Copilot for nothing, but only 30 days and no data ownership. Take Matomo when GDPR posture and data ownership are the point; take Clarity when free and immediate is the point.
Full Microsoft Clarity vs Matomo comparisonImplementation & onboarding
- 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.
- 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.
- Onboarding
- Entirely self-serve with no account management, no sales contact, and no paid onboarding to decline. Documentation lives on Microsoft Learn and the platform integrations handle installation for non-technical users.
- Migration notes
- Nothing to migrate, because there is nothing to leave behind and nothing to import. Data cannot be brought in from another tool and cannot be exported meaningfully, so the practical approach is to install Clarity alongside whatever you already run and let the 30 day window fill. Teams arriving from Hotjar, which no longer sells under its own brand after being folded into Contentsquare, will find the recordings and heatmaps immediately familiar.
Platform, API & security
- Platforms
- Web via JavaScript tagAndroid and iOS native SDKsFlutter and React NativeShopify, WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and Google Tag Manager install apps
- API
- No general-purpose data export or warehouse pipeline. A data export API exists in limited form, a consent API must be implemented per project in consent-required jurisdictions, and custom tags and identifiers can be passed from your own code. The tracking code itself is open source on GitHub.
- Compliance
- GDPR readyCCPA readyConsent API required in consent-required jurisdictionsMicrosoft enterprise security and privacy programme
- Data residency
- Data is processed by Microsoft. EU customers contract with Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited, which holds standard contractual clauses with Microsoft Corporation in the United States covering cross-border transfer, so the contracting entity is European even though processing is not exclusively so.
- SSO
- Sign-in through Microsoft, Google, or Facebook accounts; no enterprise SAML provisioning.
- Security notes
- Input box content is masked in every masking mode and cannot be unmasked. Masked content is not uploaded to Clarity at all. URL parameter masking is available on request. Data is retained 30 days from recording, and individual user data cannot be deleted without deleting the entire project. Microsoft states Clarity should not be used on sites or apps targeting users under 18.
Support & resources
- Channels
- Email support at a shared Clarity support addressIn-product feedback buttonNo paid support tier and no SLA
- Documentation
- Full documentation on Microsoft Learn covering setup, masking, consent, integrations, mobile SDKs, and troubleshooting, kept current and unusually thorough for a free product.
- Community
- A large informal community across marketing and ecommerce forums given the 2 million site install base, plus a Clarity blog and YouTube channel run by Microsoft.
Company
- Founded
- 2018
- Headquarters
- Redmond, Washington, United States
- Ownership
- Owned and operated by Microsoft Corporation
- Employees
- Not disclosed; Clarity is a team within Microsoft rather than a standalone company
- Funding
- Not applicable. Clarity is funded internally by Microsoft as part of its advertising and search business and is not monetised directly.
Timeline
- 2018Clarity begins as a closed beta inside Microsoft, offering session recordings and heatmaps to a limited set of websites.
- 2020General availability on 28 October, released free to everyone with no traffic limits and no paid tier, immediately undercutting the entire paid heatmap and replay market.
- 2022Adds funnels, events, and richer segmentation, plus a Google Analytics 4 integration that becomes the standard pairing for marketing teams.
- 2024Copilot arrives, summarising recordings and heatmaps and answering questions about project data conversationally.
- 2025Clarity for mobile apps ships with Android, iOS, Flutter, and React Native SDKs, and the product passes five years of general availability with over 2 million sites installed.
- 2026AI visibility and citation tracking reach general availability, reporting where a site is referenced by AI assistants and which pages perform in that context.
Integrations
- Google Analytics 4
- Shopify
- WordPress
- Wix and Squarespace
- Google Tag Manager
- Microsoft Advertising
- Custom tags and user identifiers passed from your own code
- Android, iOS, Flutter, and React Native SDKs
Frequently asked questions
10 questionsWhat is Microsoft Clarity?
Clarity is a free behavioural analytics tool from Microsoft that records user sessions on your website or app, generates click and scroll heatmaps, tracks events and funnels, and automatically flags frustration signals such as rage clicks and dead clicks. Copilot features summarise recordings and answer questions about the data in chat. It is used on more than 2 million sites.
Is Microsoft Clarity really free, and what is the catch?
It is genuinely free forever with no traffic limits, no sampling, no project cap, and no paid tier to upgrade to. Microsoft's own documentation states you never encounter traffic limits or are compelled to upgrade. The catch is not money, it is scope: data is retained for only 30 days, there is no serious analytical model, no engineering detail in recordings, and no meaningful data export. Microsoft funds it as part of its advertising and search business.
How long does Clarity keep my data?
Thirty days from the time of recording, and this cannot be extended by any means. It is the product's single hard constraint. Any question that requires comparing this quarter to last, or checking what a page looked like before a redesign six months ago, cannot be answered in Clarity. Plan for a second tool if longitudinal analysis matters to you.
Does Clarity sample my traffic on a busy site?
No. Microsoft states explicitly that there is no sampling, meaning no tracking of only a portion of traffic, and no traffic limits on sites. Microsoft reports processing over a petabyte of Clarity data from more than 100 million users a month. This is a meaningful difference from free tiers elsewhere, which typically cap recordings per month or per day.
Is Clarity GDPR compliant?
It is described as GDPR and CCPA ready, input box content is masked in every masking mode with no way to unmask it, and masked content is never uploaded. EU customers contract with Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited, which holds standard contractual clauses covering transfer to Microsoft Corporation in the United States. You are still responsible for implementing the consent API on every page in consent-required jurisdictions, and without valid consent Clarity limits collection in those regions. The weak point is deletion: you cannot remove one user's data without deleting the whole project.
Can Clarity replace Google Analytics?
No, and it does not try to. Clarity answers behavioural questions about how people interact with specific pages; Google Analytics answers traffic, acquisition, and conversion questions across time. They are complementary, and Clarity ships a GA4 integration precisely so you can jump from a Google Analytics segment to the matching Clarity recordings. Most teams run both.
Can Clarity replace a product analytics tool like Mixpanel?
No. Clarity has no behavioural cohorts, no proper retention analysis, no experimentation, only basic funnels, and 30 days of history. For a logged-in application where the questions are about activation, retention, and feature adoption, you need an event analytics tool. The sensible arrangement is Clarity on the public site and a paid analytics tool inside the product.
Does Clarity work with mobile apps?
Yes. SDKs are available for Android, iOS, Flutter, and React Native, and Microsoft reports over 10,000 apps using them. The mobile support arrived after the web tag and its feature surface trails the web version somewhat, but recordings, heatmaps, insights, and Copilot are all present.
What are Clarity's machine learning insights?
Automatically detected behaviour patterns that require no configuration: rage clicks, where a user clicks the same element repeatedly out of frustration; dead clicks, on elements that do nothing; excessive scrolling, where someone cannot find what they came for; quick backs, where a visitor immediately leaves a page; and JavaScript errors. Each becomes a filter on the recording list, which is the fastest path from having a lot of recordings to finding the broken thing.
What should I be careful about with Clarity?
Three things. The 30 day retention window means you should export or screenshot anything you want to keep. Data subject erasure requests are awkward because deletion only works at project level. And Microsoft states Clarity should not be used on websites or apps targeting users under the age of 18, which rules out a whole category of sites. Beyond that, it is free, so the downside of installing it is close to nothing.
Editorial verdict
Every 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.
Written by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Awards, when shown, are judged against the published criteria in our methodology.
Awards & badges
1 heldMicrosoft Clarity holds 1 award from the SaaSTracker editorial program. Badges may be displayed by the vendor; each embed links back to this profile.
Best Value · Product Analytics & Session Replay
“Session recordings and heatmaps, free forever, with no traffic limit.”
<a href="https://saastracker.org/products/microsoft-clarity"><img src="https://saastracker.org/badges/embed/microsoft-clarity/best-value-summer-2026.svg" width="180" height="180" alt="Microsoft Clarity: Best Value, Product Analytics & Session Replay. SaaSTracker Summer 2026 Awards." /></a>