Microsoft Clarity Alternatives: Best Microsoft Clarity Competitors, Alternatives to Clarity and 2026 Pricing Compared

Short answer: the best Microsoft Clarity alternatives in August 2026 are Hotjar (billed through Contentsquare) if you want surveys next to your recordings, PostHog if you want replays plus product analytics on one free tier, Mouseflow if forms are where you lose people, FullStory if you need 12 months of history at no cost, and Lucky Orange if you want a cheap paid tool that does not meter you into a sales call. Clarity itself costs nothing, has no traffic cap and no paid tier at all, so the only reasons to move are retention, A/B testing, surveys, and data governance. Its hardest limit is that session recordings are kept for 30 days.

Microsoft Clarity pricing, as published in August 2026

There is one tier. Microsoft's FAQ, last updated June 30, 2026, states that "Clarity is a free service forever" and adds that "there are absolutely no limits on the number of sites per account" and no traffic limits or sampling. Nothing on this ladder is gated behind money, so the comparison that matters is not price, it is what the product does and does not keep.

The 30-day cliff, which is the real limit nobody writes about

This is the number to take away from this page. Microsoft's data retention documentation lists three separate retention periods, and they are far apart. Playback data, meaning the recordings themselves, is kept for 30 days from the time of recording. Aggregated click data and heatmaps are kept for 9 months. Sessions you manually label or favorite are also kept for 9 months.

The practical consequence is that Clarity's evidence expires on a rolling monthly basis unless someone remembers to star it first. A quarterly conversion review has no recordings from the first two months of the quarter. A bug reported by a customer three weeks after it happened is at the edge of recoverable. If you run a redesign and want to compare how people behaved before and after, the before is gone within a month unless you saved it deliberately.

None of this makes Clarity a bad tool. It makes Clarity a tool with a workflow requirement: label sessions as you watch them, and treat the heatmaps, which last 9 months, as your long-term record. Teams that get burned are the ones that assumed free also meant permanent.

How long each free tier keeps a recording

Retention is the single axis on which the free tools genuinely differ, and it is almost never in a comparison table, so here it is.

FullStory is the outlier worth noticing. It gives away 12 months of history on a free plan while Clarity, the tool everyone calls unlimited, gives 30 days. If your reason for looking at alternatives is that a recording disappeared, FullStory's free tier solves that specific problem at no cost, at the price of a 30,000 session ceiling.

The alternatives, one by one

Hotjar, if you want to ask users why

Hotjar is no longer sold as a separate brand. hotjar.com redirects to contentsquare.com and the product is billed as Contentsquare Experience Analytics, which runs 16 published rungs from $49 to $739 a month covering 7,000 to 200,000 sessions, then goes quote-only. The free plan is large: 200,000 monthly sessions, 10,000 replays, and one month of history. Surveys are sold separately as Voice of Customer from $99 a month for 500 responses, so the cheapest paid setup that matches what people remember Hotjar being is about $148 a month.

Where it beats us and beats Clarity: asking users a question at the moment they hesitate is a different kind of evidence from watching them hesitate, and Hotjar has always been good at putting the survey next to the recording. Where it does not: the replay allowance is frozen at 20,000 from $119 all the way through $469 while the price climbs 294 percent, which we cover in full on our Hotjar alternatives page.

PostHog, if there are engineers on the team

PostHog gives away 1 million events, 5,000 web recordings, and 1 million feature flag requests a month, with no platform fee. Past the free allowance it is usage-priced: $0.00005 per event between 1 and 2 million, falling with volume, and $0.0050 per recording down to $0.0015 at 500,000 and above. It is also open source and self-hostable, which is the honest answer to anyone searching for an open-source Clarity alternative.

Where it beats us: it is the only tool here that puts replays, product analytics, and feature flags on one bill, so you can watch a session, check the funnel it belongs to, and ship the fix behind a flag without leaving the product. Where it does not: it is built for people comfortable in a query editor, and a marketer who wants a heatmap will find Clarity faster and friendlier.

Mouseflow, if forms are where you lose people

Mouseflow runs Free Forever at 500 sessions a month, Essential at $25 for 5,000, Advanced at $109 for 25,000, and Premium at $319 for 100,000. Its edge is form analytics: it tells you which specific field people abandon, how long each one takes, and which ones get retried, and it scores friction automatically.

Where it beats us and beats Clarity: Clarity will show you that people leave your form, and Mouseflow will tell you it was the phone number field. That is a direct answer rather than an inference, and it pairs well with our own reading of the Baymard data that the average checkout carries 11.3 form elements against an optimal 7 to 8. Where it does not: 500 free sessions runs out in a day on any real site.

FullStory, if you need history without a budget

FullStory's free plan is 30,000 sessions a month, up to 10 users, with 12 months of data retention. Paid tiers are quote-only, which puts it on the wrong side of the price transparency line below.

Where it beats us and beats Clarity: 12 months of retained history on a free plan, against Clarity's 30 days, is the single biggest free-tier advantage in this comparison. Its search over sessions is also genuinely deeper than Clarity's filters. Where it does not: once you outgrow 30,000 sessions you are in a sales conversation with no public number to anchor to.

Lucky Orange, if you want a cheap paid tool with a real price list

Lucky Orange publishes Build at $32 a month billed annually for 3,500 sessions, Grow at $72 for 10,000, Expand at $199 for 50,000, and Scale at $839 for 300,000, with a 7-day trial. Billed monthly those become $39, $249, and $1,049 on the middle and upper rungs.

Where it beats us: it bundles recordings, heatmaps, live chat, surveys, and conversion funnels for less than most rivals charge for recordings alone. Where it does not: at 3,500 sessions the entry plan is small, and the per-session cost only becomes competitive higher up the ladder.

Crazy Egg, if you think in page views rather than sessions

Crazy Egg is $29 a month for 5,000 page views, $99 for 150,000, $249 for 500,000, and $599 for 1 million, billed annually. It meters page views, not sessions, which makes direct comparison with everything else on this page misleading unless you convert first. We broke the whole ladder down, including the free plan its pricing table leaves out, in Crazy Egg pricing.

Where it beats us: its snapshot model, where you set a heatmap running on a specific page and come back to it, suits people who test one page at a time. Where it does not: page-view metering punishes content-heavy sites, and Clarity does the same heatmaps for nothing.

Mixpanel and Heap, if the real question is analytics

Plenty of people arrive at Clarity alternatives when what they actually want is funnels and retention. Mixpanel is free to 1 million monthly events with 10,000 replays, then roughly $0.28 per 1,000 events past the first million. Heap, owned by Contentsquare since December 2023, gives roughly 10,000 monthly sessions free with about 6 months of history, and its Growth tier is reported near $3,600 a year, which is a third-party figure rather than a published one.

Where they beat us: Heap's autocapture removes a genuine failure mode, namely discovering three months later that nobody instrumented the event you now need, and Mixpanel owns funnel and retention analysis outright. Where they do not: neither will tell you what to write on the page.

Matomo, if the requirement is self-hosted and open source

Matomo's Community edition is free forever, self-hosted, with unlimited users and hits, and Cloud starts at EUR 29 a month for 50,000 hits (a European vendor quoting euros, so budget for the conversion). The catch that matters for this page: session recording and heatmaps are paid add-ons rather than base features, so the free self-hosted Matomo does not do the two things you came to Clarity for. Treat add-on pricing as reported until you see it in your own cart.

Converto, if you already know where people drop off

We do not record sessions and we are not trying to. Clarity tells you that 62 percent of visitors never reach your pricing table. It will not tell you that your headline makes a claim your subhead contradicts, that your primary CTA repeats the word "submit," or that your hero takes 4.1 seconds to render on mobile. Paste a live URL into Converto and it audits copy, layout, CTAs, page speed, and AI readability, then generates ready-to-ship variants, from $19 a month with nothing to install and no traffic to accumulate first. Most teams that use both run Clarity to see the behavior and Converto to fix the page. Our suggestions are data-informed, not guarantees.

What it costs to replace a free tool

If you did leave Clarity, this is the bill, assembled from published prices only.

Read that table honestly and the conclusion is that replacing Clarity like for like costs at least $49 a month for a worse volume allowance. The only pieces genuinely worth paying for are the ones Clarity never had: surveys, experiments, and the fix itself.

Who will actually show you a price

Price transparency in this category tracks almost perfectly with who the product is sold to. Tools sold to a marketer with a company card publish a full ladder. Tools sold to procurement publish a form.

The consolidation ledger: what happened to this shortlist since 2023

A large share of the advice you will read about Clarity alternatives is confidently out of date, and there is a structural reason. Almost every tool on a 2023-era shortlist has changed owner, changed pricing model, or stopped existing.

Six of the names on a typical shortlist from three years ago now point somewhere else. If you are migrating off Smartlook specifically, we keep a live page on the Smartlook alternative question and a longer piece on the Smartlook end of life timeline, including the part most migration advice misses: session replays are not portable between vendors, so there is nothing to export and re-import.

What the roundups get wrong about Microsoft Clarity

So should you actually leave Microsoft Clarity?

For most sites, no, and we would rather say that than sell you something. Clarity is free, unmetered, unsampled, and good at the job it does. Leave it only for one of four specific reasons: you need recordings to survive longer than 30 days without manual labeling, you need surveys, you need to run experiments, or your legal team is not comfortable with Microsoft holding the data.

What is worth adding rather than switching is the step Clarity was never built for. Behavior analytics tells you where attention dies. It does not write the replacement headline, restructure the offer, or catch the three-second render on mobile that caused the drop in the first place. That gap is why teams end up running two tools, and it is the one we fill. If you want to see the shape of the audit before paying for anything, our landing page analyzer runs on any live URL, and the best session replay tools comparison covers the observation half in more depth.