Question 1

Where Skomi differs from Microsoft Clarity

Accepted Answer

Nothing on the visitor's device, so no consent gate. Clarity's FAQ answers "do I need to inform my users of the cookie Clarity uses?" with a plain yes, and its documentation lists what degrades without consent in Europe: sessions counted as page views, every user new, funnels showing a full drop-off. Skomi derives identity on the server from a secret replaced every day: no cookie, no local storage, and no region where the product quietly stops working.
Your data stays in the EU, and stays longer. Clarity stores data in Azure and describes an EU customer's data as a cross-border transfer to Microsoft Corporation in the United States under standard contractual clauses; it keeps 30 days. Skomi stores in the EU and keeps analytics for the window your plan sells: 90 days on the free plan, up to five years on the largest. Recordings on Skomi's smaller plans are kept 30 days too, which is a tie.
Acquisition and feedback in the same place. Clarity reports channel, source and referrer as filters on behaviour; it has no feedback widget, no public board and no surveys. Microsoft's own blog pairs it with a third-party WordPress plugin for those. Skomi's feedback widget and board share the account, the site and the bill with its analytics.

Question 2

What Microsoft Clarity does better

Accepted Answer

It is free with no limits, and that is not a trial. No traffic cap, no sampling, unlimited projects, and heatmaps and recordings on all of them. Skomi's free plan carries one site and one app and meters behaviour as credits. If the bill is the deciding factor, Clarity wins and it is not close.
The insight layer. Dead clicks, quick-backs, excessive scrolling and JavaScript errors surfaced automatically, session summaries written by Copilot, funnels, smart events and a benchmark against other sites. Skomi records and shows; it does not narrate.
Microsoft behind it. A Google Analytics integration, an advertising dashboard, SDKs for Android, iOS, Flutter and React Native, and a support organisation Skomi does not have.

Question 3

Which to choose

Accepted Answer

Choose Microsoft Clarity if the budget is zero, you are content to run a consent banner for European visitors and to have Microsoft hold the data (its FAQ says plainly that Microsoft has access to it) and you want the deepest free behaviour tooling there is.
Choose Skomi if you want heatmaps and recordings without cookies or a consent gate, data stored in the EU and kept longer than a month, and traffic, behaviour and feedback in one account.

	Skomi	Microsoft Clarity
Works without a cookie bannerOut of the box, with no configuration.	Yes	No
Stores something on the visitor's deviceA cookie or an id in local storage. The law treats them the same.	No	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	Yes
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	No
Sites	Yes	Yes
Mobile and desktop apps	Yes	Yes
Heatmaps	Yes	Yes
Session recordings	Yes	Yes
Feedback boards	Yes	No
Reports where your traffic comes from	Yes	Yes
Data stored in the EU	Yes	No
Open source	No	Capture script only
Can be self-hosted	No	No
Surveys and user interviews	No	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	Yes
Free tierSkomi's is the Hobby plan: one site, no card.	Yes	Yes

Skomi and Microsoft Clarity