Question 1

Why people leave Microsoft Clarity

Accepted Answer

Consent, enforced since October 2025. Clarity now requires an explicit consent signal for visitors from the EEA, the UK and Switzerland. Microsoft publishes what happens without it, and it is not a graceful degradation: every page view becomes a new session, nobody is a returning user, funnels show a full drop-off at every step, and referrers start reporting as your own domain. The tool keeps working and the numbers stop meaning what they say.
Thirty days. Clarity keeps recordings for thirty days, and nine months for favourites and for a sampled selection. If you are investigating something that happens quarterly, the evidence has already gone.
Microsoft holds the data. Clarity's own FAQ answers "who has access to my data" with Microsoft, stores in Azure without naming a region, and describes an EU customer's data as a cross-border transfer to the United States under standard contractual clauses. For some buyers that is the entire procurement conversation.
And it is free, which is the point. None of the above is a reason to leave if it does not apply to you. If you have no European visitors, need no history beyond a month, and are content with where the data lives, Clarity is very hard to beat and this page has nothing to sell you.

Question 2

What to weigh before you pick one

Accepted Answer

Does it need consent where your visitors are? This is the reason most people are on this page. A tool that stores nothing on the device does not need the banner, and does not quietly change what its numbers mean when somebody declines.
How long is the history? Thirty days is the figure to compare against, and most paid tools beat it. Ask about recordings separately from aggregate reports. Recordings usually expire first, ours included.
Where is the data stored, and who can read it? "In the EU" and "in Azure" are answers to different questions.
What does the replay capture? Form fields should never be recorded. Whether the words on the page are captured should be a setting you control.
Does it report traffic as well? Clarity does report channel, source and referrer as filters on behaviour. Replace it with a pure behaviour tool and you lose that; replace it with an analytics tool that also records and you do not.
What will it cost once it is not free? Every alternative here has a price, and per-session pricing and per-visit pricing behave very differently on a site with a spike.

Question 3

Which to choose

Accepted Answer

If the consent banner is why you are here, it is ours or a Matomo configured to store nothing. Those are the two on this page that can run without one.
If you need more than thirty days of replays, ours or Matomo; check the retention window against your plan in both cases.
If the data must stay somewhere you choose, self-hosted Matomo, or PostHog if you accept an unsupported self-hosted edition.
If you need a survey builder, Contentsquare or PostHog.
If none of the three reasons above apply to you, stay on Clarity. It is free, it has no traffic limits, and this page would be wasting your time to argue otherwise.

	Skomi	Google Analytics	Plausible	Umami	Matomo	Cloudflare Web Analytics	Hotjar	Microsoft Clarity	Fathom Analytics	Simple Analytics	PostHog	Mixpanel	Firebase Analytics
Works without a cookie bannerOut of the box, with no configuration.	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Configurable	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	With cookieless mode on	No	No
Stores something on the visitor's deviceA cookie or an id in local storage. The law treats them the same.	No	Yes	No	No	Configurable	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	Cookies by default	Yes	Yes
Counts every visit, without samplingBoth Google and Cloudflare sample adaptively, so a small site is not sampled at all. Hotjar does not sample; it stops, at a number of sessions set by the plan.	Yes	Explorations over 10M events	Yes	Yes	Yes	Adaptive sampling	Capped per plan	Yes	Yes	Not checked	Not checked	Not checked	High-cardinality dimensions
Keeps your full history for as long as you are a customerSkomi does not: it deletes analytics once the plan's window has passed, and the window each plan sells is on the pricing page. A cell reads "Not checked" where the product publishes no figure we could verify. Plausible documents "5+ years" for Enterprise but states nothing for its standard plans, and Cloudflare documents no retention period at all.	No	Reports yes, event data 2 to 14 months	Not checked	Your own database, self-hosted	Reports forever, raw data 24 months on cloud; your own database self-hosted	Not checked	Not checked	No	Yes	No	Not checked	Not checked	No
Sites	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Web, through GA4
Mobile and desktop apps	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	No	Not checked	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Heatmaps	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	Not checked	Yes	No
Session recordings	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	No	No	Yes	Yes	No
Feedback boards	Yes	No	No	No	No	No	Yes	No	No	No	Not checked	Not checked	No
Reports where your traffic comes from	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Data stored in the EU	Yes	No	Yes	Your choice	Your choice	No	Not checked	No	Yes	Yes	Not checked	Yes	No
Open source	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	Capture script only	No	Not checked	Yes	Not checked	SDKs only
Can be self-hosted	No	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	No	No	No	Not checked	Yes, officially unsupported	Not checked	No
Surveys and user interviews	No	No	No	No	Not checked	No	Yes	No	No	No	Yes	Not checked	No
More than one site on the free planSkomi's free plan carries one site, which is a real reason to pick something else if you look after several small ones. Google and Cloudflare read "Not checked" because how many sites their free tiers cover was not verified. That they HAVE a free tier is the row above.	No	Not checked	No	Unlimited, self-hosted	Unlimited, self-hosted	Not checked	Not checked	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes
Free tierSkomi's is the Hobby plan: one site, no card.	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Self-hosted only	Yes	Yes	Yes	No	Yes	Yes	Yes	Yes

Microsoft Clarity alternatives

Why people leave Microsoft Clarity

What to weigh before you pick one

The alternatives to Microsoft Clarity

Skomi Ours

Umami

Matomo

Hotjar

PostHog

Mixpanel

All of them, side by side

Which to choose

One script, or one SDK. The same reports either way.