Microsoft Clarity Alternative: Get the Page Fix, Not Just the Heatmap

Short answer: Microsoft Clarity is free, unmetered and genuinely good, so the honest recommendation is to keep it. What it does not do is tell you what to change. Converto audits the live page you already have and generates the headline, CTA and copy variants to ship, from $19 a month with nothing to install. Most teams run both. If you want a full field of options rather than a straight comparison, we compare nine of them on our Microsoft Clarity alternatives page.

The limit that sends most people looking: 30 days

Clarity's pricing page has one tier and it costs nothing, so almost nobody leaves over money. The limit people actually hit is written in Microsoft's documentation instead. Playback data, meaning the session recordings themselves, is retained for 30 days from the time of recording. Sessions you manually label or favorite last 9 months. Aggregated click data and heatmaps last 9 months. Microsoft's retention page states that data past those windows "is deleted after the retention period and cannot be recovered."

The word "unlimited" in Clarity's marketing is a claim about volume, not about time. That distinction costs teams a quarterly review, a bug investigation, or the before half of a before-and-after comparison, usually once, and usually at the worst moment. If you stay on Clarity, the fix is a habit rather than a setting: label sessions while you watch them, and treat heatmaps as the durable record.

What Clarity does not do at all

The three genuine gaps are A/B testing, surveys and retention. Clarity has no traffic splitter, no statistical readout and no variant editor, so testing a fix you spotted needs a separate product; we compare that field in our A/B testing tools rundown. Surveys are a separate purchase from Contentsquare at $99 a month for 500 responses. Retention is the 30-day problem above, and the cheapest fix for it is Fullstory's free plan, which keeps 12 months at no cost for up to 30,000 sessions a month, on the condition that Fullstory holds ownership rights over the anonymized data collected on that tier.

Where Clarity's heatmaps actually stop

Heatmaps are the part people assume inherits the unlimited sessions, and they do not. Microsoft publishes the caps: each heat map covers up to 100,000 page views, heat map data is retained up to 9 months, dynamic sections such as a menu that opens on hover cannot be screenshotted so clicks on them never appear, scroll maps are built for the body tag only and will not render inside a scrolling div, pages taller than 65,535 pixels get no scroll map, and Google Analytics segments cannot be applied.

For a normal marketing site none of that bites. It bites on high-traffic ecommerce category pages, where a single monthly heat map will not represent the whole month, and on sites where key interactions live behind a hover state.

The half of the job that is left over

Clarity will show you that 62 percent of visitors never scroll as far as your pricing table. It will not tell you that your headline promises something your subhead contradicts, that your primary and secondary buttons compete for the same click, that the form asks for a phone number before anyone has a reason to trust you, or that the hero image pushes your value proposition below the fold on a 390 pixel viewport. Those are the findings that move a conversion rate, and they come from reading the page rather than watching the traffic.

That is the whole of what Converto does. Paste a live URL and it audits copy, layout, CTAs, page speed and AI readability, explains what is costing conversions, and hands back variants you can ship into any builder or CMS. Nothing to install, no traffic threshold to clear first, self-serve from $19 a month. Suggestions are data-informed, not guarantees.

Should you switch, or add?

Add. We would rather say that than argue for a swap that does not make sense. Clarity costs nothing, has no session cap and no sampling, and does its job well. Leave it only if recordings need to survive past 30 days without manual labeling, you need surveys, you need to run experiments, or your legal team is not comfortable with Microsoft holding visitor behavior data, in which case the answer is a self-hosted tool such as PostHog rather than a different cloud vendor. For the pricing detail behind all of this, including what replacing each Clarity feature costs at published rates, see our breakdown of Microsoft Clarity pricing.