Answer · Conversion Engineering
What’s Microsoft Clarity?
The short answer
Microsoft Clarity is a free behavior-analytics tool that records visitor sessions and generates heatmaps for any website. No session cap, no time limit, no paid tier upsell. For 90% of mid-market B2B sites, it’s the right answer over Hotjar or FullStory.
№ 01The longer answer
Microsoft launched Clarity in 2020 as a free alternative to Hotjar and FullStory. The pitch: full-featured behavioral analytics with no usage limits. The catch: aggregated data is used to improve Microsoft’s Bing and Clarity products. PII is masked by default.
Features included: click heatmaps, scroll heatmaps, full session replay, automatic flagging of “rage clicks” (repeated clicks suggesting frustration), “dead clicks” (clicks on non-interactive elements), and “excessive scroll” (scrolling indicating they couldn’t find what they wanted). Native GA4 integration.
What Clarity does NOT have: integrated surveys (Hotjar has these), real-time recording with under 1-hour delay (FullStory has this), funnel analytics (FullStory has this), BAA for HIPAA compliance. For most mid-market B2B service sites, none of these missing features matter.
Setup time: 10 minutes via GTM. Performance impact: negligible (async load, ~25KB). Data retention: 30 days for free tier (sessions); aggregated heatmap data is retained longer. Privacy: masks form fields by default; configure additional masking via CSS classes if needed.
№ 02Is it really free forever?
Microsoft has committed to keeping Clarity free with no usage caps. The business model: Microsoft uses aggregated data to improve search and recommendation products. Their incentive is to keep Clarity widely-adopted, which means free.
№ 03Does Clarity slow down my site?
Negligibly. Async-loaded, ~25KB. Typical impact: 10-30ms LCP increase, well within tolerance. We run Clarity on every site we build and have never seen a measurable performance issue.
№ 04Should I use Clarity or Hotjar?
Default to Clarity. Switch to Hotjar only if you need integrated surveys or feedback widgets. The recording-and-heatmap features are comparable; Hotjar’s edge is the qualitative layer.
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