Microsoft Clarity is genuinely free, but “free” here describes price, not absence of constraints. Sessions expire, cookies change what gets linked, sensitive content stays masked, and some page elements never appear in a recording. This guide covers what the free tier includes, what it quietly costs you, and how to set it up sensibly.
How This Guide Was Built
This guide was built from Microsoft’s official documentation, pricing pages, and community reports available on 2026-09-21, not from hands-on testing. No Clarity project was created, no snippet was installed, no recordings were watched, and no Export API requests were sent. Numbers come from Microsoft’s published limits.
Specifically, the following were not tested: recording accuracy on real traffic, heatmap rendering across viewports, AI summary quality, mobile SDK behavior on physical devices, and the dashboard experience for multi-seat teams. Every product claim below links to Microsoft’s own pages so you can verify it directly.
What Microsoft Clarity’s Free Tier Actually Includes
Microsoft Clarity is free forever, with no paid tier, upgrade pressure, or traffic ceiling; Microsoft also sets no limit on the number of sites per account. Traffic is not sampled, so recordings and behavioral signals reflect all eligible visitors rather than a subset.
That scope is unusually broad. Every analysis surface ships at zero cost: session recordings, session highlights, heatmaps, rage clicks, dead clicks, excessive scrolling, quick-back clicks, error clicks, and script-error reporting, alongside the AI summaries, AI chat, AI visibility, and Brand agents listed on Microsoft Clarity. Mobile teams are covered too, since Microsoft Clarity’s mobile SDKs support Android, iOS, Flutter, and React Native.
What it is not is a product-analytics replacement. The Clarity FAQ documents no native funnels, no conversion goals, no ecommerce revenue tracking, and no multi-year trend history. Clarity answers “why did this visitor struggle?” A quantitative tool answers “how many, from where, and is it growing?”
The Four Real Costs of “Free”
Free does not mean zero cost: retention, consent and cookie configuration, Microsoft-side data handling, and capture limits each affect how you should operate Clarity. None of these cost money, but each one changes how you run the tool day to day.
Retention. Ordinary playback is available for 30 days. Labeled or favorited sessions, heatmaps, and click data persist for 9 months, and deleted data cannot be recovered, per Microsoft’s data retention documentation. Anything you have not explicitly marked disappears quickly.
Consent and cookies. The cookies toggle governs whether recordings link into continuous multi-page sessions. Turn cookies off and you must pass consent, and each recording becomes a single-page artifact instead of a journey through your product, as described in Clarity setup.
Microsoft-side data handling. Clarity is hosted by Microsoft on Azure and described as GDPR- and CCPA-compliant, with EU customers contracting Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited under standard contractual clauses. There is no self-hosted option, so the data sits on Microsoft infrastructure and nowhere else (Clarity FAQ).
Capture limits. Canvas elements and third-party iframes are invisible to Clarity, and the service must not be used on sites or apps targeting users under 18 (Clarity setup). If your product lives inside a canvas-based editor or an embedded third-party widget, large parts of the experience will simply never appear.
Install and First-Week Checklist
Create one Clarity project per site or app, install the project-specific tracking code in the page head, and verify collection before you change any defaults. The same script can be reused across subdomains, so a single project usually covers a whole product surface. Start with defaults, then adjust once you know what is being recorded.
Choose an installation route
Microsoft documents three routes in Clarity setup: a supported third-party platform such as WordPress, Shopify, Squarespace, Wix, or Google Tag Manager; a manual paste into the page <head>; or the Clarity NPM package if your front end builds through JavaScript tooling. Pick the least invasive one that fits your stack.
Verify live collection
Confirm collection two ways: watch the browser network panel for POST requests to https://www.clarity.ms/collect, and check the dashboard for live users. Google Tag Manager installs are detected automatically, which makes them the fastest path to a confirmed setup if you already load GTM.
Set masking, consent, and bot detection
Keep default masking on until you have reviewed what it hides. Administrators can mask and unmask from dashboard settings, so test forms, account pages, support widgets, and dynamic components before inviting teammates. Bot detection is on by default, and excluded bot sessions appear at the top of the dashboard, so leave it enabled.
Link one GA4 property
Clarity supports exactly one GA4 web property per project, and the GA4 integration links session playbacks to it. Clarity may attempt to create a GA custom dimension on your behalf, and that can fail if your property has already hit its custom-dimension limit. Segments are not supported, and playback URLs are never sent to GA4.
Run a first-week review
After seven days, watch a handful of mobile and desktop recordings, filter for rage clicks and dead clicks, and inspect heatmaps on your key landing pages. Write what you find into an issue tracker instead of keeping it in your head, and start labeling sessions while they are still inside the 30-day window.
Retention Math: How to Keep What Matters
Clarity runs on two retention clocks: thirty days for ordinary playback and nine months for labeled or favorited sessions, heatmaps, and click data, so keeping evidence requires a weekly habit. Data and backups are deleted at the end of each window and cannot be recovered afterwards.
Label and favorite workflow
Treat labeling as your archive step. Each week, filter for one meaningful problem, watch representative sessions, write the finding into your issue tracker, and label or favorite the sessions that justify it. Consistent labels such as onboarding, checkout, mobile, rage-click, and bug-confirmed keep the nine-month window searchable, per Microsoft’s retention guidance. Favorite only your strongest examples.
Export API limits
The Data Export API returns recent quantitative summaries, not recordings. A project admin generates a JWT bearer token under Settings → Data Export:
curl -X GET "https://www.clarity.ms/export-data/api/v1/project-live-insights?day=1" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer <API_TOKEN>" \
-H "Accept: application/json"Each request covers only 1, 2, or 3 days, accepts a maximum of three dimensions, returns at most 1,000 rows with no pagination, and is capped at 10 requests per project per day. Exceeding the daily limit returns HTTP 429, and all results are in UTC. Dimensions include browser, device, country/region, operating system, source, medium, campaign, channel, and URL; metrics include traffic, popular pages, scroll depth, engagement time, rage clicks, dead clicks, and error signals.
Feature Map That Matters to Indie Hackers
The free tier’s practical value comes from session recordings and highlights for diagnosing hesitation, heatmaps and rage/dead-click filters for prioritizing friction, and AI features for triage. Everything below is included at zero cost, subject only to retention windows. None of it requires a credit card or an upgrade conversation.
Session recordings and highlights surface hesitation, repeated actions, and broken interactions directly, as long as you work inside the 30-day window. Heatmaps show page-level patterns while rage-click and dead-click filters point at specific friction, and both enjoy the longer nine-month retention. AI summaries and AI chat speed up triage, but validate their output against real sessions before acting on it.
AI visibility is the newest addition: it tracks when AI experiences cite your brand and when AI crawlers visit, which complements conventional search and referral reporting. Mobile SDKs for Android, iOS, Flutter, and React Native extend the same behavioral lens beyond the browser, provided your consent design meets Clarity’s restrictions.
Honest Limitations and When to Add a Second Tool
Add a quantitative tool when you need durable acquisition trends, conversion funnels, goals, ecommerce revenue, cohort analysis, or event-based product analytics. Clarity’s thirty-day playback window also makes it a poor sole long-term archive; its documented limitations exclude the reporting shapes most product teams depend on (Clarity FAQ).
GA4 is the natural companion for web traffic and conversions, and the GA4 integration keeps playback attached to your property. If you want product events and replay in one system instead of two, PostHog is a reasonable second tool to weigh. Clarity stays the qualitative layer: it tells you why a session went wrong, not how many sessions converted last quarter.
Comparison Table: Clarity vs Free-Tier Alternatives
Clarity’s unlimited-traffic model contrasts with event-based or self-hosted tools, but its short retention and managed infrastructure shape where it fits. The table below compares it with four tools indie hackers commonly weigh against it. Read the trade-off column before the free-offering column, because the trade-off is what you live with.
| Tool | Free offering | Important trade-off |
|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Clarity | Free forever; unlimited sites, traffic, and unsampled usage; recordings, heatmaps, diagnostics, and current AI features. (FAQ, Clarity) | 30-day ordinary playback; nine-month labeled/favorited and heatmap/click data; hosted on Microsoft infrastructure; no Canvas or third-party iframe capture. (Retention, Setup) |
| PostHog | Free tier includes 1 million events per month, including session replay, according to PostHog’s pricing page. (PostHog pricing) | Event-based limits and a different product-analytics model; confirm current replay and retention terms before migrating. (PostHog pricing) |
| Hotjar | Free plan exists, but current session, heatmap, and retention limits should be checked directly in Hotjar’s pricing documentation. UNVERIFIED: exact 2026 quotas. (Hotjar pricing) | Paid tiers and plan limits make it materially different from Clarity’s unlimited-traffic model. (Hotjar pricing) |
| Matomo On-Premise | Self-hosted analytics software that can be downloaded and operated on your infrastructure. (Matomo On-Premise) | You own hosting, maintenance, security, backups, and implementation; session-replay capabilities differ from Clarity. (Matomo On-Premise) |
| OpenReplay | Open-source session replay platform with a self-hosting option. (OpenReplay GitHub) | Infrastructure and operational work move to you; verify current feature and licensing details before production use. (OpenReplay documentation) |
The pattern is consistent: the tools that give you long retention or self-hosting make you pay in operations. A self-hosted route like Matomo trades license cost for server maintenance, upgrades, and security patching that Clarity absorbs for you. Clarity trades those responsibilities away in exchange for a short playback window and Microsoft-held data.
FAQ
These are the three questions that come up most often before Clarity goes on a production site: whether the pricing promise is real, how long recorded evidence survives, and whether a behavioral tool can stand in for product analytics. Short answers below, with links to Microsoft’s documentation.
Is Microsoft Clarity really free forever?
Yes. The Clarity FAQ states plainly that Clarity is a free service forever, that you never encounter traffic limits, and that you are never compelled to upgrade to a paid version. There is no account-level traffic charge and no cap on how many sites you can add to one account.
Can I keep recordings longer than 30 days?
Not as ordinary playback. Label or favorite the sessions that matter and they remain available for up to nine months, alongside heatmap and click data. Everything else, including backups, is deleted at the thirty-day mark and cannot be recovered, according to Microsoft’s data retention page.
Does Clarity replace GA4 or a product-analytics tool?
No. Clarity is behavioral and qualitative: it shows what people did and where they struggled. It has no native funnels, conversion goals, ecommerce revenue, or multi-year trend history. Pair it with GA4 through the GA4 integration for traffic and conversions, or with a product-analytics tool for event-level analysis.