Clarity is free, unlimited, and good. Any honest roundup starts by saying so. What follows is the short list of reasons to pay for something else, and which something else.
In short
It depends on why you are leaving. Hotjar for better heatmaps and surveys, Matomo or PostHog to get analytics and replay in one product, FullStory for enterprise-scale replay search, Mouseflow for form analytics, Smartlook for native mobile, and mrkr if you want replay that does not need a cookie banner and knows which campaign produced the session.
Clarity being free is not a trick, and it is not a trial. The arguments against it are specific: it requires consent, it cannot tell you where traffic came from, and Microsoft holds the data. If none of those three matter to you, keep using it.
Clarity does not know a session arrived from a paid campaign, because it is not an analytics product. mrkr records inside the analytics dataset. That comes with a real downgrade: Clarity has heatmaps, and mrkr has none.
People who decline consent differ systematically from the people who accept.
A cookieless recorder has no such problem, which is worth exactly what your consent rate is low.
Switch a site into cookie mode for cross-session identity and consent obligations come back.
The picks
Best for heatmaps and on-site surveys
The most developed heatmap and survey tooling in the category, with a research workflow built for handing findings to a design team. It costs money where Clarity is free, meters sessions per day so recording stops during a spike, and still needs consent. You would move here for the surveys and the polish, not for the recordings.
Best if you want analytics and replay in one suite
Session recording and heatmaps sit inside a complete web analytics product, so unlike Clarity it can also tell you where the traffic came from. It is heavier, and cookies are on by default. Choose it if you want one suite and will accept the configuration work.
Best if you want flags and experiments too
Replay, heatmaps, funnels, feature flags, experiments, and surveys in one platform with a generous free allowance. For a product team that will use the breadth, it is the strongest free-to-start option here. For a marketing site that wanted recordings, it is a great deal more product than the problem required.
Best for enterprise replay at scale
Retroactive search across every session ever recorded, plus automatic frustration signals. It is the deepest replay tool in this list and the least accessible: no published price, no self-serve signup, and a sales cycle before you see it working on your own site.
Best for form analytics
Replay, heatmaps, funnels, and form analytics with friction scoring. The form reporting is the reason to pick it: knowing which field people abandon is a specific answer that Clarity does not give you. Cookie-based, and thin on traffic reporting.
Best if you need native mobile replay
Web and native iOS and Android replay in one account, with heatmaps. If half your product is an app, that coverage is worth more than anything else on this page. Cookie-based, and the analytics around the replay is lighter than a dedicated analytics tool.
Best if you want replay without a cookie banner
Our product, so read the limits first: no heatmaps and no surveys. Clarity has heatmaps and mrkr does not, which is a real downgrade on that axis. What changes is the consent question and the context. mrkr records in a cookieless default mode, so recording is not gated behind a banner, and every session carries its traffic source, campaign, and revenue, which Clarity has no concept of.
Compared
| Tool | From | Banner? | Replay | Heatmaps | Funnels |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Microsoft Clarity | Free | Yes | Yes | Yes | Basic |
| Hotjar | $32/mo | Yes | Yes | Yes | Only on higher tiers |
| Matomo Cloud | ~EUR 19/mo | Depends on configuration | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| PostHog | Usage-based | Depends on configuration | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| FullStory | Quoted by sales | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Mouseflow | Recording-volume pricing | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| Smartlook | Session-volume pricing | Yes | Yes | Yes | Yes |
| mrkr | $1 for 14 days, then from $5/mo | No, in the default cookieless mode | Yes | No | Yes |
Every vendor in this table details checked against the vendor's own pricing and feature pages on 2026-08-24. Where a vendor does not publish a fixed list price, this table says how they charge rather than guessing a number. Vendors change packaging often, so confirm before you buy.
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FAQ
Three reasons. Clarity sets cookies, so consent gates the recording and you lose a biased slice of sessions. It has no traffic sources or campaign attribution, so it cannot be your reporting tool. And Microsoft is the controller of your visitors' data, which some organisations will not accept.
It is genuinely free with no session cap, which is unusual and worth saying plainly. The cost is not on the invoice: it is in the consent requirement, the missing acquisition data, and the data-sharing posture.
mrkr is cookieless by default. Matomo and PostHog can be configured to run without cookies. Hotjar, FullStory, Mouseflow, and Smartlook all set cookies and require consent in the EU, UK, and California.
Hotjar, Matomo, PostHog, FullStory, Mouseflow, and Smartlook all do. mrkr does not have heatmaps at all, so if heatmaps are why you use Clarity, mrkr is not the replacement.
Yes, and plenty of teams do exactly that. Clarity for free unlimited recordings and heatmaps, a cookieless analytics tool for the numbers you actually report. Two scripts, and only one of them needs consent.
Not in any useful way. Clarity is a behaviour tool, not an analytics product, so questions about which campaign produced a conversion are outside what it does. That is the single most common reason teams add a second tool.
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