7 best Microsoft Clarity alternatives (and when to keep Clarity too)

Hotjar is the most popular Microsoft Clarity alternative if you need surveys and user feedback. Mouseflow wins for form tracking. PostHog is the best open-source option. And Lucky Orange is the strongest all-in-one for small businesses.

Most Clarity alternatives just show you different pictures of the same problem, though. Heatmaps, session recordings, scroll maps. What none of them do is help you fix anything. For that, you need a testing tool, and that’s a different category entirely.

Below is the honest breakdown. We don’t sell heatmaps or session replay. Kirro is an A/B testing tool. So we’ve got no horse in this race, which means we can tell you what actually works.

Why people look beyond Microsoft Clarity

Let’s be fair first. Clarity is free. Not “free trial” or “free for 14 days.” Actually, permanently free.

It gives you unlimited heatmaps, unlimited session recordings (video replays of what visitors do on your site), and an AI assistant called Copilot that can summarize hundreds of sessions in plain English.

Over 520,000 websites use it, including brands like Samsung and Starbucks. It grew from 14,000 domains in 2021 to over 233,000 by early 2025, according to BuiltWith. That’s not a niche tool. That’s a default.

So why switch? Because Clarity is built for watching, not acting. It shows you where people click and where they leave. It doesn’t let you:

• Run surveys to ask visitors why they left
• Test changes with A/B testing to see which version works better
• Track forms to find exactly which field makes people abandon
• Keep recordings longer than 30 days (Microsoft’s official limit)
• Pull data at scale (the API is capped at 10 requests per day, 1,000 rows max)

If you’re getting real traffic and want to actually improve conversions (not just observe them), you’ll eventually outgrow Clarity’s “watch only” model. (For a broader look at the category, see our best session replay tools comparison.)

Our take: Clarity is the best free analytics tool on the web. We’d never tell you to ditch it. But watching recordings isn’t the same as making your site better. Most teams need Clarity plus something else.

Best Microsoft Clarity alternatives at a glance

Tool	Best for	Starting price	Free plan?	Heatmaps	Session replay	Surveys	A/B testing	Script size
Hotjar	User feedback	$32/mo	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	~470 KB
Lucky Orange	SMB all-in-one	$32/mo	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	~250 KB
Mouseflow	Form analytics	$31/mo	Yes (500 sessions)	Yes (6 types)	Yes	Yes	No	~180 KB
PostHog	Open-source teams	Free tier	Yes (5K replays)	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Varies
FullStory	Enterprise UX	Custom pricing	Yes (30K sessions)	Yes	Yes	No	No	~300 KB
Crazy Egg	Heatmaps + testing	$49/mo	Limited	Yes (5 types)	Yes	Yes	Yes	~150 KB
Plerdy	Budget CRO	$32/mo	Yes (100/day)	Yes	Yes	No	No	~200 KB

For context, Microsoft Clarity’s script is just 22 KB and adds roughly 120 ms of load time. That’s 21 times smaller than Hotjar. More on why that matters below.

1. Hotjar: best for user feedback and surveys

Hotjar merged into Contentsquare in July 2025, but the product still exists under its own name with its own pricing. If you’ve been out of the loop: Hotjar is Hotjar, it just has a new parent company.

What makes it different from Clarity: Surveys, feedback widgets, and even live user interviews. Clarity shows you a recording of someone leaving your checkout page. Hotjar lets you pop up a one-question survey asking why they left. That “why” is worth more than a hundred recordings.

Pricing: Free plan available. Paid starts at $32/month. Check the full Hotjar pricing breakdown for details on what each tier includes.

The catch: Hotjar’s script is one of the heaviest in this category at roughly 470 KB. On a Shopify store, that added about 829 ms of load time in independent benchmarks. That’s meaningful if you care about page speed. If you’re already comparing options, our Hotjar alternatives breakdown covers even more choices.

Best for: Teams who already know where visitors drop off and need to understand why.

2. Lucky Orange: best small business all-in-one

Lucky Orange tries to be the entire analytics toolkit for small businesses. And for many teams, it genuinely is. Over 500,000 websites use it.

The standout feature is co-browsing. You can actually watch a visitor’s session in real time and jump in to help them through live chat. It’s like having a shop assistant on your website.

No other tool in this list does that.

Pricing: Free plan available. Paid from $32/month.

The interface feels busier than Clarity’s clean dashboard, though. And at ~250 KB, the script is about 11 times heavier than Clarity’s.

Best for: Small businesses that want live chat, surveys, and analytics in one monthly bill instead of three.

3. Mouseflow: best for form analytics and friction detection

Mouseflow has something most competitors don’t: friction scoring. It automatically rates each session based on how much the visitor struggled. Rage clicks, u-turns, speed browsing.

Instead of watching hundreds of random recordings, you can jump straight to the frustrated visitors.

It also has six types of heatmaps (click, movement, scroll, attention, geo, and live) plus dedicated form analytics. If your business runs on lead forms or checkout flows, Mouseflow is purpose-built for that.

Pricing: Free plan (500 sessions/month). Paid from $31/month. Over 210,000 businesses use it. See how it stacks up in our Hotjar vs Mouseflow comparison.

The downside? No built-in A/B testing. You can spot the problems, but testing fixes requires a separate tool.

Best for: SaaS companies and lead-gen sites where forms drive the business.

4. PostHog: best open-source option

Open source (the code is public and free to use) means you can run PostHog on your own servers if you want full control over your data. That’s a big deal for teams in regulated industries or anyone uncomfortable with sending visitor data to a third party.

PostHog packs more into one platform than any other tool here. Session replay, product analytics, feature flags (a way to turn features on for some visitors and off for others), A/B testing, error tracking, and surveys. It has over 35,000 stars on GitHub, which is the developer equivalent of a standing ovation.

Pricing: Free tier includes 1 million analytics events and 5,000 session replays per month. Paid replay from $0.005 per recording.

The catch: PostHog is built for engineers. The interface assumes you know what “event properties” and “cohort filters” mean. If you’re a marketer who taught yourself GA4 (Google Analytics 4), PostHog’s learning curve will feel steep.

G2 reviewers specifically note that finding relevant sessions requires understanding PostHog’s query system, which isn’t intuitive for non-technical teams.

Best for: Technical teams who want everything in one self-hosted platform. Not great for Marketing Maya.

5. FullStory: best for enterprise UX teams

FullStory’s big selling point is autocapture. You don’t configure events or tag elements. It records every click, scroll, and interaction automatically and lets you search through it later.

For large sites with thousands of pages, this saves weeks of setup.

It also detects “frustration signals” automatically: rage clicks (clicking the same spot over and over), dead clicks (clicking something that doesn’t do anything), and error clicks. You don’t have to watch recordings to find problems. FullStory flags them for you.

Pricing: Custom (read: expensive). No public pricing. Free plan gives you 30,000 sessions per month, which is generous for trying it out. If you’re exploring this space, we have a full FullStory alternatives comparison.

Enterprise pricing means enterprise budgets, though. If you’re a 10-person company, FullStory probably isn’t priced for you.

And despite all its analytics power, there’s no built-in A/B testing. You find the broken things, then you need another tool to test the fixes.

Best for: Companies with dedicated UX or analytics teams and the budget to match.

6. Crazy Egg: best for heatmaps plus A/B testing

Crazy Egg is the rare tool that bridges the gap between watching and acting. It has heatmaps, session recordings, and built-in A/B testing. Most tools in this list make you spot problems in one tool and test fixes in another.

Crazy Egg keeps it all in one place.

The “Confetti” report is unique: it shows individual clicks color-coded by traffic source. So you can see that people from Google click different things than people from email. That’s something no heatmap in Clarity can show you.

See more options in our Crazy Egg alternatives roundup.

If you want a dedicated testing tool with more depth, see how the A/B testing software category compares.

Pricing: From $49/month. Limited free analytics plan available.

The catch: The A/B testing is basic compared to dedicated tools. No math that works with smaller traffic (called Bayesian statistics), no multi-page tests, no advanced targeting. Fine for testing headlines. Not enough for a serious testing program.

Best for: Marketers who want one tool for watching and testing, and whose tests are straightforward.

7. Plerdy: best budget alternative

Plerdy tries to pack as many CRO features as possible into a low price. Heatmaps, session recordings, conversion funnels, an SEO audit tool, and even a popup builder. It’s the “utility knife” option.

Pricing: Free plan (100 heatmaps per day). Paid from $32/month.

The catch: Jack of all trades, master of none. Each feature is functional but not as deep as the dedicated tools above. If form analytics matters most, Mouseflow is better. If surveys matter most, Hotjar is better.

Plerdy is for teams who want a bit of everything without paying for five separate subscriptions.

Best for: Teams watching their spending who want the broadest feature set at the lowest price.

How we evaluated these alternatives

We looked at these alternatives across seven areas:

• Heatmap quality: How many types? How accurate?
• Session replay depth: Filters, playback speed, search
• Extra features: Surveys, A/B testing, form analytics, funnels
• Pricing and free tier: What do you actually get for free?
• Script performance: How much does it slow your site? (Most comparison articles ignore this completely)
• Privacy and compliance: Where is your data stored? Who else can access it?
• Ease of setup: Can a non-developer install it?

The performance data comes from ThunderPageSpeed benchmarks that measured actual script sizes and load times on Shopify stores. The privacy analysis draws from Microsoft’s official documentation and CNIL’s draft guidelines on session replay tools.

The performance cost nobody talks about

This is the elephant in the room that every “Clarity alternatives” article ignores. You’re looking for a tool to improve your website’s conversions, but the tool you install might actually hurt them.

Every analytics script adds weight to your pages. More weight means slower loading.

90% of web pages already include at least one third-party script. The average website runs 48 trackers, and third-party scripts eat up 57% of all JavaScript execution time.

Here’s what that looks like for heatmap tools specifically:

Tool	Script size	Added load time	Compared to Clarity
Microsoft Clarity	22 KB	+120 ms	Baseline
Crazy Egg	~150 KB	~350 ms	7x heavier
Mouseflow	~180 KB	~410 ms	8x heavier
Plerdy	~200 KB	~450 ms	9x heavier
Lucky Orange	~250 KB	~520 ms	11x heavier
FullStory	~300 KB	~600 ms	14x heavier
Hotjar	~470 KB	~829 ms	21x heavier

That’s a real trade-off. If your CRO software is slowing your site down, it’s working against itself.

What you can do about it: Load your analytics script after the page renders (called “deferred loading”). Use a tag manager (a tool that controls when scripts fire on your site) to decide what loads when. And don’t stack three analytics tools on the same page unless you have a good reason.

If you’re running Clarity plus Hotjar plus GA4 plus a chat widget, your visitors are downloading a small novel before they see your content.

Our take: Clarity’s 22 KB script is a genuine competitive advantage that doesn’t get enough credit. If you switch to a heavier tool, make sure the extra features are worth the speed cost.

The observe-vs-act gap (and why it matters)

Every tool in this list has something in common: they’re all observation tools. They show you what visitors do. Clicks. Scrolls. Recordings. Heatmaps.

Jakob Nielsen, founder of Nielsen Norman Group, put it bluntly: “A big red blob does not tell you why users are confused, only that they clicked a lot.”

That’s the gap. You see a heatmap that shows nobody clicks your call-to-action button. Great. Now what? You need to change the button and test whether the new version actually works better. That’s A/B testing, and none of these heatmap tools do it well (except Crazy Egg, with limits).

The smartest approach? Pair a free observation tool with a focused testing tool:

1. Watch with Clarity (free) to spot where visitors struggle
2. Ask with Hotjar or Lucky Orange to learn why
3. Test with an A/B testing tool to see which fix wins
4. Repeat

This “observe, then act” workflow is how teams that actually improve conversion rates work. Not by buying one expensive all-in-one tool that does everything at a B-minus level.

If you want to go from watching problems to testing fixes, you can set up a free A/B test with Kirro in about three minutes. It pairs well with any of the tools above.

Privacy and compliance: the hidden selection factor

This section won’t win any excitement awards. But if your business serves European visitors, it might be the most important one.

Session replay tools record what real people do on your website. Mouse movements, clicks, scrolling, form entries. Under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR, the privacy law that applies to any site with European visitors), that’s personal data.

Three things to know:

Microsoft Clarity stores data in the US. Since October 2025, Clarity requires a valid consent signal before tracking visitors from the EU, UK, and Switzerland. Without consent, your heatmaps and recordings will be incomplete or empty.

If your cookie banner isn’t set up correctly, you might be collecting less data than you think.

France’s data authority (CNIL) published draft rules for session replay in 2026. The official guidelines say that session replay requires prior consent, that using it for advertising is prohibited, and that you need to block passwords and payment data from recordings. These rules aren’t law yet, but they signal where regulation is heading across Europe.

Microsoft’s privacy terms are worth reading. Clarity is free. Microsoft covers the cost. PostHog is the only competitor that openly notes Microsoft uses anonymized behavioral data to improve its own machine learning models. That’s the trade-off for “free.” If you work in healthcare, finance, or any regulated industry, understand what happens to the data before you install.

The self-hosted alternatives (PostHog, OpenReplay) give you full control over where data lives. For everyone else, check your tool’s data processing agreement and make sure your cookie consent banner covers session replay.

Microsoft Clarity vs. switching: what you actually lose

Before you switch, be honest about what Clarity does well:

• Price: Free. No caps, no session limits, no “upgrade to unlock” gates
• Performance: The lightest script in the category at 22 KB
• Copilot AI: Summarizes up to 250 recordings, answers questions in plain English
• Dead click detection: Automatically flags clicks on non-interactive elements
• JS error tracking: Catches JavaScript errors your developers might miss
• Google Analytics integration: Connects directly with GA4

If you switch to a paid tool, you gain surveys, form analytics, longer data retention, and better segmentation. But you lose the price (obviously) and often the page speed advantage.

Our recommendation: Don’t switch from Clarity. Add to it.

Most teams are better served by keeping Clarity for free observation, then adding a specialized tool for whatever Clarity can’t do. Need surveys? Add Hotjar’s free plan. Need form analytics? Add Mouseflow’s free tier. Need A/B testing? Kirro starts at EUR 149/month and pairs with Clarity without conflicts.

The “Clarity plus one” approach costs less than any all-in-one tool and gives you the strongest tool in each category. Compare it to VWO vs Optimizely pricing or browse Optimizely alternatives. The savings are dramatic.

If you want to start testing what you’re seeing in Clarity’s recordings, try Kirro free. Three minutes to set up. No developer needed.

FAQ

Is Microsoft Clarity really free?

Yes. Fully free with no session limits, no time limits, and no paywalls. Microsoft doesn’t charge for Clarity because it’s part of their broader ecosystem (Azure, advertising, Bing). The trade-off: Microsoft’s privacy terms allow using anonymized data to improve their own products and ad targeting. For most small businesses, that’s a fine trade. For regulated industries, it’s worth a closer look.

What is the Google equivalent of Microsoft Clarity?

There isn’t a direct one. Google had Google Optimize for A/B testing, but shut it down in September 2023. Google Analytics 4 handles traffic analytics but doesn’t offer heatmaps or session recordings. If you want the Google-ecosystem approach, GA4 plus Clarity (which integrates with GA4) is the closest combination.

What is the difference between Lucky Orange and Clarity?

Clarity is free and focuses on heatmaps plus session replay. Lucky Orange adds live chat, surveys, form analytics, and conversion funnels starting at $32/month. Lucky Orange also lets you watch sessions in real time and co-browse with visitors. The trade-off: Lucky Orange’s script is about 11 times heavier than Clarity’s, which affects page speed.

Can I use Microsoft Clarity with another analytics tool?

Absolutely. Most teams run Clarity alongside GA4, and you can layer on additional tools without conflicts. A common lightweight stack: GA4 (free, traffic analytics) + Clarity (free, heatmaps and recordings) + a testing tool like Kirro (from EUR 149/month, A/B testing). That gives you the full observe-ask-test workflow without enterprise pricing.

If you want to understand how A/B testing tools compare to tools like AB Tasty or Kameleoon, we’ve broken those down separately.

Does Microsoft Clarity slow down my website?

Barely. Clarity’s 22 KB script adds roughly 120 ms to load time. That’s the lightest among all major heatmap and session replay tools. By comparison, Hotjar adds around 829 ms and Lucky Orange about 520 ms, based on independent Shopify benchmarks. Performance is one of Clarity’s genuine strengths.

Are there open-source alternatives to Microsoft Clarity?

Yes. PostHog (35,000+ GitHub stars) offers session replay plus product analytics, feature flags, and A/B testing. OpenReplay (12,100+ GitHub stars) is a dedicated session replay tool you can self-host for free. Both let you keep all visitor data on your own servers, which solves the data residency question entirely. Self-hosting requires technical setup, so these are better fits for teams with a developer on board.