Microsoft Clarity Pricing 2026: Is It Free?

Short answer: Microsoft Clarity costs nothing. There is one tier, it is free, and Microsoft's own documentation says so in plain language: "Clarity is a free service forever. You never encounter traffic limits or are compelled to upgrade to a paid version." There is no paid plan, no session cap, no sampling, and no limit on how many sites you attach to one account. What Clarity costs you is not money. It is retention, missing capabilities, and a data relationship worth understanding before you install the script.

This piece prices the thing properly: what the free tier actually includes, the three retention periods Microsoft publishes and almost nobody reads, what you would have to pay to replace each piece of it, and where the real ceiling sits.

Microsoft Clarity pricing in 2026: the whole ladder

Here is the entire price list.

That is not a summary. That is the complete ladder. Most tools in behavior analytics run six to sixteen rungs; Contentsquare, which now bills Hotjar, publishes sixteen of them from $49 to $739 a month. Clarity publishes one, at zero, and Microsoft's FAQ states there are "absolutely no limits on the number of sites per account" and that the service handles more than 1 petabyte of data from over 100 million users a month without traffic limits on those sites.

Why is Microsoft Clarity free?

The usual assumption is that a free product must be a loss leader for a paid one, and here it genuinely is not, because no paid version exists to upsell you into. Clarity sits inside Microsoft's advertising and analytics business. Aggregate insight into how people behave on the web has value to Microsoft independent of a subscription line, and the product doubles as a distribution channel into the Microsoft Advertising ecosystem.

Microsoft is direct about the boundaries. Its FAQ states that Clarity does not sell data, and separately that "Microsoft/Clarity has access to the data." Clarity uses some third-party cookies for what the documentation calls "operational purposes like advertising," with an opt-out available through the Digital Advertising Alliance. It supports Global Privacy Control. It does not respond to browser Do Not Track signals.

For most businesses that is an acceptable trade for a capable, unmetered tool. For a company handling regulated data, or one whose legal team has a policy about which third parties may observe customer sessions at all, it is the actual cost, and it does not appear on any pricing page.

The 30-day cliff: what free does not include

This is the number that changes decisions, and it is buried in the documentation rather than advertised. Microsoft publishes three separate retention periods for three kinds of Clarity data.

Microsoft's retention page is explicit about what happens next: "Data on Clarity servers, including backups, is deleted after the retention period and cannot be recovered."

Read that against how teams actually work. A monthly conversion review looks at the last four weeks and is fine. A quarterly review has no recordings from two thirds of the quarter. A customer who reports a checkout bug five weeks after it happened cannot be investigated by watching what they did. A before-and-after comparison across a redesign has no before, unless somebody starred those sessions while they still existed.

The workaround is real but it is a workflow discipline, not a setting. Label sessions as you watch them and they survive nine months. Treat heatmaps, which also last nine months, as your durable record and recordings as a rolling 30-day window. Teams get caught out because "unlimited" is a claim about volume and they read it as a claim about time.

What each free feature would cost you elsewhere

The cleanest way to price a free tool is to ask what the same capabilities cost from vendors that charge. Every figure below is read off the vendor's own page in August 2026.

Add up only the rows Clarity covers and you get roughly $78 a month of value given away. Add up the rows it does not cover and you get the honest shape of the decision: the things worth paying for around Clarity are surveys, experiments, form analytics and longer history, not a replacement for what it already does well.

The limits Microsoft publishes on heatmaps

Heatmaps are the part people assume is unlimited because the sessions are. They are not, and the constraints are specific enough to plan around.

• Each heat map covers up to 100,000 page views. Past that, it stops being a complete picture of the period you selected.
• Heat map data is retained up to 9 months.
• Clarity cannot screenshot dynamic sections such as a menu that opens on hover or click, so clicks collected on those elements do not appear.
• Scroll maps are built for the <body> tag only, so a scrolling <div> container will not produce one.
• Scroll maps only render on pages up to 65,535 pixels tall.
• Google Analytics segments cannot be applied to heatmaps.

None of these are dealbreakers for a normal marketing site. The 100,000 page view cap matters if you run a high-traffic ecommerce category page and expect a single heat map to represent a full month. The dynamic-section limitation matters if your navigation or your product configurator lives behind a hover state, because those interactions simply will not show up.

Is there a paid version of Microsoft Clarity?

No, and this is worth stating clearly because a lot of comparison content hedges on it. There is no Clarity Pro, no Clarity Business, no enterprise SKU, and no add-on marketplace. Microsoft's FAQ says you are never "compelled to upgrade to a paid version," which only makes sense as a statement because none exists. Every feature, including the AI Copilot summaries, funnels, custom tags and segments, is available to every account at no cost.

The practical implication for planning is that Clarity will never surprise you with an invoice, an overage, or a renewal step change. That is genuinely unusual. In the adjacent landing page builder category, the tier that unlocks A/B testing runs from two to almost ten times the advertised entry price depending on vendor, and in the popup category one vendor's first-year discount means every tier costs exactly 2.5 times more in year two. Clarity has no version of that problem.

Microsoft Clarity vs paid session replay: when the free tool stops being enough

Four situations justify spending money alongside or instead of Clarity.

You need history. Thirty days is short. If your sales cycle, your reporting cadence or your bug-triage process runs longer than a month, either commit to labeling sessions or use a tool that keeps them. FullStory's free plan holding 12 months is the cheapest fix and it costs nothing.

You need to ask users why. Watching someone hesitate over a price is not the same evidence as them telling you the shipping cost surprised them. Surveys are the gap, and they are a separate purchase from Contentsquare at $99 a month.

You need to run experiments. Clarity has no experiment engine, no traffic splitter and no variant editor. Spotting a problem and testing a fix are two different products, and you can compare the testing half in our rundown of A/B testing tools.

Your data policy will not allow it. If the requirement is that no third party observes visitor sessions, the answer is architectural rather than commercial: a self-hosted, open-source tool such as PostHog, not a different vendor's cloud.

The part free analytics never solves

There is a step that neither Clarity nor any paid replay tool covers, and it is the expensive one. Behavior analytics tells you where attention dies. It does not tell you what to write instead.

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

That reading is what our landing page analyzer does. Paste a live URL and Converto audits the copy, layout, CTAs, page speed and AI readability, explains what is costing you conversions, and generates ready-to-ship variants, with nothing to install and no waiting for data to accumulate. It runs from $19 a month, and suggestions are data-informed rather than guaranteed. Plenty of teams run both: Clarity to see the behavior, Converto to fix the page. There is also a practical reporting wrinkle worth mentioning, because it eats an afternoon a month for anyone doing client work. Clarity lets you download a heat map image, but a stakeholder readout needs those exports arranged into something a person will actually read, and turning a folder of analytics exports into a presentation is its own chore that has nothing to do with CRO.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Microsoft Clarity cost?

Nothing. Microsoft Clarity is free with a single tier, no paid upgrade, no session cap, no sampling and no limit on sites per account. Microsoft's documentation describes it as "a free service forever." The costs are non-financial: 30-day retention on session recordings, no A/B testing, no surveys, and Microsoft having access to the behavior data your script collects.

Is Microsoft Clarity free forever?

Microsoft states that it is, in those words, and there is no paid tier to migrate you toward. No sunset or repricing has been announced. That contrasts sharply with the rest of the category, where the free experimentation tier has been collapsing: Google Optimize shut down in September 2023 with no replacement, and VWO removed public prices and began closing its free Starter plan in 2026.

Does Microsoft Clarity have limits?

Yes, functional ones. Session recordings are retained 30 days, labeled sessions and heatmaps 9 months, each heat map covers up to 100,000 page views, dynamic sections such as hover menus cannot be captured, scroll maps only work on the body tag and on pages under 65,535 pixels tall, and there is no A/B testing, no surveys and no revenue attribution.

Why would anyone pay for Hotjar when Clarity is free?

For surveys, for retention, and for the qualitative layer. Hotjar is now sold as Contentsquare Experience Analytics, from $49 a month across sixteen published rungs to $739, with Voice of Customer surveys priced separately from $99 a month. What you are buying is the ability to ask users a question at the moment they hesitate and to keep the answers for up to 13 months, neither of which Clarity does.

What is the best free alternative to Microsoft Clarity?

FullStory, if the reason you are looking is retention: its free plan covers 30,000 sessions a month with 12 months of history, against Clarity's 30 days. PostHog, if you want replays alongside product analytics and feature flags, or if self-hosting matters. Both are compared in full on our Microsoft Clarity alternatives page.

Does Microsoft Clarity slow down my website?

Microsoft states that Clarity does not impede site performance, and the tracking script is small and loads asynchronously. That said, any third-party script adds a request. If page speed is already a suspect in your conversion problem, measure it directly rather than assuming, since Largest Contentful Paint above 2.5 seconds and Interaction to Next Paint above 200 milliseconds are the thresholds Google treats as the boundary between good and needs improvement.