A question that still surprises me after years of auditing small-business sites: how many people run Google Analytics and have never opened a Microsoft Clarity heatmap? GA4 tells you that 40% of visitors left the checkout page. It never tells you why. Clarity does — for $0/month, with no traffic limits and no paid tier waiting behind an “upgrade” button.
What Is Microsoft Clarity?
Microsoft Clarity is a free behavior analytics tool — Microsoft’s free heat map tool, if you want the short label — that records how visitors interact with your website or app: where they click, how far they scroll, where they hesitate. It turns that into heatmaps, session recordings, frustration signals (rage clicks, dead clicks, quick backs), code-free funnels and Copilot summaries. Microsoft lists it as “a free service forever” with no obligation to upgrade.
That makes Microsoft Clarity analytics a different animal from traffic analytics tools. GA4 answers what happened — sessions, sources, conversions. Clarity answers how: the hand on the mouse, the thumb on the phone, the user experience as it happened. Microsoft’s FAQ puts the scale plainly: over 100 million users a month.
Is Microsoft Clarity Really Free? What the Free Plan Includes
Is Microsoft Clarity free? Yes — completely, with no paid version to upgrade to and no credit card at sign-up. Microsoft’s FAQ states there are no traffic limits and no limit on the number of sites per account. The constraints that do exist are about time and volume rather than money — how long Clarity keeps what it collects, and how much of it you can pull back out.
That is the honest version of “Microsoft Clarity pricing”: Clarity is free, the free plan is the only plan, and there is no upgrade button waiting to be found later. What there is, is a set of ceilings to know before you promise a client year-over-year heatmap comparisons — straight from the Clarity FAQ and the data retention page.
| What you get | Limit on the free (only) plan |
|---|---|
| Traffic, sessions, sites, projects | No traffic limits, no sampling, unlimited projects per account |
| Heatmaps (5 types) | Unlimited; each heatmap aggregates up to 100,000 page views |
| Session recordings | Up to 100,000 sessions per project per day |
| Playback retention | 30 days; favorites, labeled sessions and a 1% (or 10/day) sample kept up to 9 months |
| Heatmap / click data retention | 9 months |
| Team members | No limit; 10 pending invites at a time |
| Custom smart events | 20 per project, plus 9 auto-detected event types |
| Data Export API | 10 requests per project per day, 1,000 rows, last 24–72 hours |
Two of those ceilings bite in practice. Thirty days of playback means you review recordings as a weekly habit, not a quarterly archive — favorite or label anything you want to keep and it stays for 9 months. And the export API is tiny: ten calls a day over a 72-hour window, so Clarity numbers won’t be landing in your warehouse. For most small sites neither limit costs you a thing; I flag them because “free” articles usually don’t.
The Five Clarity Heatmap Types and When Each Matters
Clarity generates five types of heatmaps — click, scroll, area, conversion and attention maps — for desktop, tablet and mobile, with no minimum traffic required. Clarity heatmaps (Microsoft writes “heat map” and “heatmap” interchangeably) build from data already collected, so there is no creation delay; clicks show up on a map within about 30 minutes. Each type answers a different question, and picking the wrong one is the most common beginner mistake I see.
Click maps: where users interact — including things that aren’t links
The click map ranks page elements by clicks (taps on mobile) from element-level data rather than raw cursor position, so it stays accurate across screen sizes. You can switch between all clicks, dead clicks, rage clicks, error clicks, first clicks and last clicks — first and last are the underrated pair: what people reach for on arrival, and where they gave up. Any element jumps straight to the recordings where it was clicked.
Scroll maps: how far users read and where the fold really is
Scroll maps show scroll depth — the percentage of visitors who reached each 5% increment of page height — plus an average fold line — what visitors see before scrolling at all, calculated from your real audience. Content sites should open this map first: if 70% of readers never reach your newsletter box, moving it up is a free experiment that takes ten minutes.
Area maps: clicks for a whole block, not one element
Area maps let you draw a zone — the hero, the pricing grid, the footer — and see the click-through rate for everything inside it. Useful when the question is “does this section earn its space?” rather than “does this button work?”. Zones belong to one URL or URL group and can’t be copied between heatmaps.
Attention maps: where people spend their time
Attention maps show average time spent on each part of a page and how that compares with the average session length. The scroll map tells you people passed a section; the attention map tells you whether they paused there. For long landing pages this is the map that settles “nobody reads that block” arguments with numbers.
Conversion maps: which clicks end in a purchase
Conversion maps are for e-commerce projects only: they appear once Clarity detects purchase events and show, for any zone you draw, the share of sessions that went on to buy after clicking there.
All five maps support filters, segments, device switching, a before/after compare view, and CSV or PNG download. To see how they line up against other tools, my ranking of free heatmap tools by real free-tier limits puts them side by side.
Session Recordings: Watch Real Users Navigate Your Site
Recordings are the other half of the Clarity tool, and the closest thing to standing behind a visitor’s shoulder. Technically they aren’t video: Clarity reconstructs the page from captured HTML and user events, which is why it can’t show what happens inside a <canvas> or a third-party iframe. A session ends after 30 minutes of inactivity. From the player you can skip inactivity, favorite, label, share, and open the heatmap for the same screen.
Generous: capture keeps running at volumes a small site never reaches, recordings appear as soon as the tag is live, and you can watch up to 100 live sessions in real time. Strict: you can’t download or delete an individual recording, and once the playback window closes, only favorites, labeled sessions and the sampled slice survive.
Rage Clicks, Dead Clicks and Quick Backs: Frustration Signals Explained
Clarity tags every session with behavioral signals automatically — rage clicks, dead clicks, quick backs, excessive scrolling, JavaScript errors and click errors — so you filter to the broken experiences instead of watching hundreds of normal ones. What each one means, per Microsoft’s behavioral insights metrics:
- Rage clicks — several clicks in a small area in rapid succession: an element that looks interactive and isn’t, or a button slow to respond.
- Dead clicks — a click with no visible change and no navigation within a reasonable time: product photos people expect to zoom, headings that look like links.
- Quick backs — a visitor clicks through to another page and comes straight back faster than the expected dwell time for that page. A signal the link promised something the page didn’t deliver.
- Excessive scrolling — much more vertical scrolling than the average session. People hunting for something they can’t find.
- JavaScript errors and click errors — errors thrown during the session, and specifically right after a click, each listed with a count and a link to the affected recordings.
My routine on a new client site: filter recordings to rage clicks and dead clicks for the last seven days, watch five. That half-hour finds more real problems than a month of staring at GA4 bounce rates.
Smart Events, Funnels, Filters and Segments — No Code Required
Clarity auto-detects nine smart events — Purchase, Add to Cart, Begin Checkout, Contact Us, Submit Form, Request Quote, Sign Up, Login, Download — and lets a project admin define up to 20 custom ones from button clicks, page visits or API calls, without code. Those events become filters and funnel steps; funnels report conversion rate, sessions converted and median time to convert, with every stage linking to the matching recordings and heatmaps.
There are 30-plus filters — device, browser, location, traffic source/medium/campaign, page path (with regex), Core Web Vitals scores, the frustration signals above, and any custom tags you pass from your own code (no project-level cap, though a page ignores anything past 128). Save a filter set as a segment and it follows you across Recordings, Heatmaps and the Dashboard. It won’t replace GA4 event reporting, but for “show me the sessions that added to cart and didn’t check out”, it’s enough.
Copilot: How Far to Trust the AI Summaries
Copilot in Clarity uses generative AI to answer questions about your project in plain English and to summarize recordings and heatmaps. Microsoft documents five features: Chat (ask “which pages had the most rage clicks this week?”), Session Insights (a written takeaway for one recording), Grouped Session Insights (several recordings at once), Heatmap Insights (a page’s maps across all three devices) and Ad Campaign Insights. Each can be switched off in Settings → Copilot.
Know the limits before you build a workflow around it. Session Insights aren’t generated for sessions under five seconds, aren’t available for mobile-app projects, and can’t be shared or downloaded. Microsoft’s own note says the models “can sometimes misinterpret or generate incorrect information” — so treat a Copilot summary as a pointer to which recording to open, not as the finding itself. Used that way, summarizing the first ten recordings of a filtered list gets you oriented in two minutes.
Installing Clarity: Script, Google Tag Manager, WordPress, Shopify
Setup is the easy part. Sign up at clarity.microsoft.com, create a project (name plus website URL), and you land in Settings → Setup with three routes: a third-party platform, a manual snippet, or NPM. One rule applies to all of them: Microsoft says Clarity must not be used on sites or apps aimed at users under 18.
Paste the snippet yourself
Select Get tracking code, copy the small JavaScript block, paste it inside your site’s <head>. Each project has its own code; the same snippet works across subdomains of one site. The Setup page shows live users as soon as the first visit lands.
Google Tag Manager
Clarity detects GTM on your site and offers a one-click Finish setup that signs into your Google account, picks a container and publishes the tag for you. The manual route is the community template Microsoft Clarity – Official: new tag, paste the project ID from your Clarity URL, trigger on All Pages, publish. Tag Manager is also the natural place to gate Clarity behind consent. One GTM tag links to one Clarity project at a time.
WordPress and WooCommerce
Install the official Microsoft Clarity plugin from the WordPress directory, sign in from the plugin screen, and connect an existing project or create a new one. Dashboard, Recordings, Heatmaps and Insights then show up inside wp-admin. Blogs can add data-clarity-region="article" to the post’s <article> tag to turn on Content Insights (reading metrics per post). Clarity can also be installed through the AIOSEO and SEOPress plugins if you’d rather not add another one.
Shopify, Wix, Squarespace, Webflow and the rest
Shopify has a dedicated app (Microsoft Clarity: AI Insights): install it, toggle the Clarity JS on in app settings, and allow a few hours for the dashboard to fill; Shopify Plus stores get checkout pages tracked through Shopify’s Pixel. Microsoft’s supported-platforms list also covers Wix, Squarespace, Webflow, Weebly, Joomla, Bubble, ClickFunnels, Softr, Unbounce and Zapier. HubSpot is not an install route — it is a separate integration: connect it in Settings → Integrations and Clarity session recordings show up in the HubSpot contact timeline for contacts HubSpot has identified. Native mobile apps use the Clarity SDK.
To verify any install: open your site, hit Inspect → Network, and look for POST requests to clarity.ms/collect. The full three-tool walkthrough — GA4, Clarity and Search Console together — is in my guide to building a complete analytics stack for $0.
Clarity vs Google Analytics 4: Do You Need Both?
Yes. Clarity and GA4 answer different questions and neither replaces the other. GA4 measures traffic and conversions — sessions, channels, revenue, custom events. Clarity shows behavior on the page — heatmaps, recordings, frustration. Run both; they’re both free, and the Google Analytics integration lets you filter Clarity recordings by the traffic data GA already has.
| Question | Use |
|---|---|
| Which channel sends visitors who convert? | GA4 |
| Where do visitors click, and how far do they scroll? | Clarity |
| How many people completed the checkout this month? | GA4 |
| Why did visitors abandon the checkout? | Clarity (recordings, rage and dead clicks) |
| Long-term trends, year-over-year | GA4 — Clarity’s history is far shorter |
About that integration: it connects one GA web property per Clarity project and pulls GA data into Clarity — audience overview, acquisition (source/medium, channel), popular pages, country and device — with each card linking to the matching recordings and heatmaps. It does not push playback links into GA4 reports, and GA4 segments aren’t supported. The practical win is “show me recordings from the paid-social campaign” without leaving Clarity. Add Google Search Console and the three of them make a complete stack for $0/month. If you’re weighing how much to rely on GA4 at all, my breakdown of the true cost of “free” Google Analytics is the companion read.
Clarity vs Hotjar and Other Paid Heatmap Tools
Hotjar is the name most people reach for when they hear “heatmap tool”, and I keep a full, price-checked comparison in Microsoft Clarity vs Hotjar. Hotjar reworked its plans in 2026: the free plan bundles heatmaps, replays and funnels into one project with a cap on replays, and paid tiers are priced by monthly sessions. Clarity has no tier to climb. Where Hotjar earns its money is qualitative feedback — surveys, feedback widgets, user interviews — which Clarity doesn’t offer.
The same logic applies to FullStory, Lucky Orange, Mouseflow and the rest of the paid field: they win on add-ons such as form analytics, enterprise product analytics, live chat and longer retention. For the core job — see where people click, watch where they struggle — Clarity does it for free, and the money is better kept for an A/B testing tool to act on what the heatmaps show.
Privacy: Cookies, Masking and Consent
Clarity sets cookies and records user behavior, so it needs the same consent treatment as GA4 — and since October 31, 2025 Microsoft enforces that for visitors from the EEA, UK and Switzerland. Without a valid consent signal, Clarity doesn’t set cookies in those regions; recordings still happen but sessions fragment into single pageviews, funnels show full drop-off and returning-user counts go to zero. Masking of sensitive content is on by default.
Which cookies does Clarity use?
Per the cookie documentation, seven in total: two first-party (_clck keeps the pseudonymous user ID, _clsk stitches page views into one session) and five third-party Microsoft cookies (CLID, ANONCHK, MR, MUID, SM). MUID is the one privacy teams ask about: it identifies browsers across Microsoft sites and is used for advertising. Clarity’s features rely on the first-party pair, so Chromium’s third-party cookie changes don’t affect it.
How consent works
Consent Mode is on by default for EEA/UK/CH visitors, and Clarity reads two signals, analytics_storage and ad_storage. You pass them via a consent management platform (CookieYes is among those listed), the Clarity consent API (clarity("consent", false) revokes), or Google Consent Mode, which Clarity honors automatically if your site already uses it. A consent is treated as valid for up to 9 months; each project needs its own signal. Categorize Clarity as non-essential in your banner. No visitors from those regions? Nothing changes.
Masking: what Clarity never records
Text inside input boxes and dropdowns is masked in every mode and can’t be unmasked. Beyond that you choose a mode in Settings → Masking: Balanced (default — numbers and email addresses masked), Strict (all text) or Relaxed (inputs only), and override per element with a CSS selector or a data-clarity-mask="True" attribute. Masked content never leaves the browser. Changes take up to an hour and aren’t retroactive; content inside stylesheets isn’t masked.
On the legal side: data lives in Azure, and EU customers contract with Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited under Standard Contractual Clauses for US transfers. Clarity ignores browser Do-Not-Track but honors Global Privacy Control. Put Clarity in your privacy policy — Microsoft publishes sample wording — and you’re covered for the same reasons GA4 is.
What Clarity Can’t Do
Three gaps decide whether Clarity fits a project at all:
- No A/B testing. Clarity observes; it doesn’t serve variants. The Compare view puts two date ranges next to each other, which is a before/after look, not an experiment.
- No way to ask a question. No surveys, no feedback widget, no field-by-field form report — you see what people did, never what they meant to do.
- Nothing for regulated data. Microsoft documents GDPR and CCPA compliance for Clarity and makes no HIPAA claim, and there is no per-user erasure: the smallest thing you can delete is the whole project. Patient-facing and other regulated pages need a vendor willing to put that in writing.
Where the Free Heatmaps Pay Off First
Content sites: open the scroll map on your ten best posts; if most readers never reach the call to action, move it. E-commerce: filter recordings to rage clicks on cart and checkout, then read the conversion map. SaaS and web apps: watch onboarding sessions with the first-clicks map open. Ad landing pages: the attention map shows whether visitors read the value proposition, and the GA integration filters to one campaign’s traffic. For a second opinion on your whole toolset, my free vs paid analytics decision framework covers when it’s time to spend.
Frequently Asked Questions
Does Clarity slow down my website?
Microsoft’s answer is no: the Clarity JavaScript loads asynchronously and doesn’t affect how quickly a page loads, and heatmaps are built from data already collected. Clarity even reports Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS at the 75th percentile) in its own Performance widget. As with any tag, load it through GTM or your consent tool so it’s one managed script among others.
Is there a catch to Clarity being free?
No hidden fee, no premium tier, no sign-up card. What Microsoft states in its FAQ is narrow and worth quoting as-is: Clarity “doesn’t sell data”, and the code that captures behavior on your pages is open source on GitHub. Nowhere does Microsoft explain why it gives the tool away — my reading is that a free behavior analytics product keeps businesses inside the same account, advertising and cloud ecosystem the MUID cookie already belongs to. Either way the trade is structural rather than financial: Microsoft is the data controller, not you, and retention is short. If you can live with that, as you already do with GA4, there is nothing else to pay.
How long does Clarity keep my data?
Recordings for 30 days; favorited or labeled recordings and a random sample (1% or 10 per day, whichever is higher) for up to 9 months; heatmap and click data for 9 months. After that, Microsoft deletes the data including backups and it can’t be recovered.
Is Microsoft Clarity GDPR compliant?
Microsoft states Clarity is GDPR-compliant as a data controller and CCPA-compliant. Your side of the job: obtain consent before cookies are set for EEA/UK/CH visitors (enforced since October 31, 2025), pass that signal to Clarity, keep masking on, and disclose Clarity in your privacy policy.
Does Clarity work for mobile apps?
Yes, through the Clarity Mobile SDK for Android (API level 29–36) and iOS (15–18), including React Native, Flutter, Cordova and Ionic: recordings, tap heatmaps and a metrics dashboard. Copilot session insights aren’t available for app projects yet.
What is the Clarity Live browser extension?
A free Chrome/Edge extension that overlays instant heatmaps and recent recordings on any page of your own site while you browse it — handy for showing a client a scroll map on the page itself. It needs the Clarity tag installed on that site and costs nothing.
What to Do This Week
Install Clarity through GTM or your platform’s plugin, wire it into your consent banner, then leave it alone for seven days — every map needs traffic behind it before it says anything true. Come back to whichever map your kind of site calls for above, change one thing, and check the same map a week later. Cost of the whole exercise: $0.
You don’t need to spend a dime to understand your users. When the playback window starts to pinch or you want surveys on top, that is the moment to read the Clarity vs Hotjar comparison — not before.