Microsoft Clarity review

There is no Clarity Pro, and that is the point

Microsoft Clarity does one job: it shows you what people actually did on your pages. You get session recordings, click, scroll and area heatmaps, and machine-generated insights that flag rage clicks, dead clicks, excessive scrolling, and quick backs. It is the direct free competitor to Hotjar, and it is free in a way almost nothing else is.

We want to be plain about why that is unusual. Nearly every tool in this category has a free tier that exists to sell you the paid one. Clarity has no paid one. Microsoft's own FAQ states that it is free forever, with no traffic limits and no sampling. Microsoft is not running this as a loss-leader for a Clarity Pro; it is running it because behavioral data at that scale is useful to Microsoft. That is the actual price, and you should decide whether you are comfortable with it before you install the script, not after.

Made for anyone with a conversion problem and no budget

• Anyone who wants to see why a page converts badly and has no budget
• Marketing and UX teams who were quoted a Hotjar figure and flinched
• High-traffic sites, since there is no session cap to blow through
• Running alongside Umami, Plausible, or GA4 rather than replacing them

One plan, no price, and nothing to upgrade to

No traffic limits, no sampling, unlimited projects per account, unlimited team members (with a cap of 10 pending invites at a time). Verified against Microsoft's documentation on 20 July 2026.

The limits that do exist are about time, not volume. Session recordings are retained for 30 days. Sessions you favourite, plus a random sample, are kept up to nine months, and heatmap data is kept up to nine months. You can view a maximum of 100 live sessions. For most teams the 30-day recording window is the constraint that eventually bites, particularly if you only investigate a drop-off weeks after it happened.

Thirty days of recordings, and four other limits

• Thirty-day recording retention is short, and there is no way to pay for more
• It is a behaviour tool, not a web analytics tool. There are no proper acquisition reports, no revenue attribution, no goal tracking in the way GA4 or Matomo mean it
• Your visitors' behavioral data goes to Microsoft. For some organizations and some jurisdictions that alone rules it out
• It uses cookies, so it does not remove your consent banner the way Plausible or Umami do
• The hosted service cannot be self-hosted. Only the client-side libraries are MIT licensed

Yes, but pair it with a real analytics tool

Clarity is the clearest recommendation on this whole list, as long as you understand what you are trading. If your question is "why did people not click the button", install it this afternoon and stop reading. Just do not mistake it for your analytics platform: pair it with something that handles traffic and conversions, keep an eye on the 30-day recording window, and be honest with yourself about handing visitor behaviour to Microsoft before you decide it is free.