Microsoft Clarity has no paid tier to push you towards

Generosity scores 93, the highest number anywhere in this file, and it should. No traffic limit, no sampling, no project limit, no seat limit and no paid tier is the strongest position on cost that a hosted tool can take. Feature depth at 84 says the same thing about the job Clarity does, which is replay and heatmaps rather than web analytics.

The total lands at 77 because freedom scores 50, and that pillar is not measuring price. Clarity uses cookies, only the client libraries are MIT while the backend cannot be self-hosted, retention on the one and only tier is 30 days, and the behavioural data goes to Microsoft. That is a coherent exchange rather than a trick, and it is the reason a tool with a perfect cost story does not top this category. The pillar reasoning below sets out both sides.

Everything is on the free plan because there is only one plan. What exists instead of quotas is a clock (as of July 2026):

• Session recordings are retained 30 days. Sessions you mark as favourites, plus a random sample, are kept up to nine months, and heatmap data up to nine months.
• 100 live sessions viewable at once.
• Unlimited projects and unlimited team members, with a cap of 10 pending invites at a time.

The 30-day window is the constraint that eventually bites, and it bites in a specific way: you notice a drop-off weeks after it happened, go looking for the sessions, and they are gone. There is no way to pay for more, because there is nothing to pay.

The other limits are about scope rather than volume. Clarity is a behaviour tool, not a web analytics tool, so there are no acquisition reports, no goal tracking and no revenue attribution in the way GA4 or Matomo mean it. Most teams run it beside something that handles traffic numbers, and Clarity ships a documented Google Analytics integration for exactly that.

And the one that rules it out for some organisations entirely: it uses cookies, so it does not remove your consent banner, and the hosted backend cannot be self-hosted at any price.

We normally use this section to explain what the first paid step buys and whether the jump is proportionate. There is no first paid step. Microsoft's FAQ is direct about it: Clarity is a free service forever, you never encounter traffic limits, and you are never compelled to upgrade to a paid version. As of 20 July 2026 no paid tier exists.

So the useful question is not what upgrading costs, it is why the product is free at all, and the answer is not charity. Microsoft is not running Clarity as a loss-leader for a Clarity Pro that will appear later. It is running it because behavioural data at that scale is useful to Microsoft. That is the actual price, and you should decide whether you are comfortable with it before the script goes on the site rather than after.

For comparison, the paid version of this job is Hotjar's free plan and the Contentsquare ladder above it, which climbs from $49 at 7,000 monthly sessions to $739 at 200,000. Clarity does the two headline jobs at any volume for nothing. What Hotjar sells that Clarity does not have is 13-month data access, and if your analysis happens in quarters rather than weeks, that is a real reason to pay somebody.

Yes. This is the clearest answer in the category: no cap, no card, no upsell and no plan above the one you are on. We are landing a band above where a 77 usually sits because the freedom pillar that holds the score down is measuring a data trade, not a paywall, and the question this page asks is whether zero dollars gets the job done. It does, at any traffic volume, indefinitely.

Who should install it this afternoon: anyone whose question is why a page converts badly and who has no budget, any marketing or UX team that flinched at a Hotjar quote, any high-traffic site that would blow through a session cap elsewhere.

Who should not: organisations that cannot send visitor behaviour to Microsoft, teams in jurisdictions where that alone rules it out, anyone who needs the consent banner gone (Clarity uses cookies, so it will not go), and anyone who needs to review sessions older than 30 days.

Pair it with something that counts traffic rather than treating it as your analytics platform. Umami's free plan is the natural partner, free Microsoft Clarity alternatives lists the others, and the best free analytics tools ranks the category.