Microsoft Clarity Review & Clarity Vs. Hotjar & CrazyEgg

Microsoft Clarity is a completely free heatmap and session recording tool. Learn its pros and cons and how it compares to CrazyEgg and HotJar.

What is Microsoft Clarity?

Microsoft Clarity is a SaaS tool that provides light website analytics reporting, website session recordings, error debugging, and visual page click/scroll heatmaps. Digital marketing and web growth teams of all sizes can use Microsoft Clarity to learn about their visitors and supplement quantitative data with qualitative data from heatmaps and session video recordings.

Microsoft Clarity is very similar to CrazyEgg, replicating metrics like "Rage clicks", browser plug-in functionality, and session recording filtering options. 

Microsoft Clarity Pros

Price

Microsoft Clarity is free-of-charge for any size company, providing significant reporting and tracking functionality that other competitors charge for or that may even require a yearly subscription plan (ie CrazyEgg). 

No sampling / no limits

Unlike many competitors, Microsoft Clarity provides data for all visitors and does not sample or limit the eligible traffic being recorded providing a more accurate picture of aggregate website behavior.

Easy to install

Microsoft Clarity is easy to install in Google Tag Manager and also integrates into common marketing CMS systems like Shopify, Webflow, and WordPress. Even flat-file CMS systems like Gatsby are supported.

Custom segmenting

Microsoft Clarity has great documentation that includes screenshots, and enough technical implementation details on how to customize your implementation (such as tracking users via custom user IDs, sessions, or tags).

Being able to segment session recordings or heatmaps by custom users (such as if you have a login or are using a product data layer) makes this functionality critical for high-traffic websites that may have many different customer segments. 

Browser Plugins show Heatmap for Interactive Elements 

Using the Microsoft Clarity plugin for Chrome or Edge allows overlaying actual user heatmaps onto live websites, which makes it easy to identify clicks or interactions on common elements that may not be immediately visible (ie. drop-down navigation, collapsable components like FAQs, etc.)

Regular Expressions (RegEx Filtering)

Microsoft Clarity supports regular expressions when filtering dashboard data, recordings, and heatmaps instead of being limited to simple filtering like "contains" or "does not contain". Regular expressions are fantastic and it's awesome to see Microsoft include these when tools like Google Analytics 4 have removed regular expression filtering from default reports.

Microsoft Clarity Cons

No ability to turn off video recordings

Session replay tools or video recordings create significantly more latency for websites due to the amount of server calls back and forth to continue tracking user activity in real time. I wish Microsoft Clarity offered the ability to turn these off for performance reasons or if companies only want to leverage heatmaps.  

No integrated a/b testing screenshot ability

Microsoft Clarity does not play well with a/b testing as it cannot "force" screenshots by a/b test versions. While it's possible to use custom tags to determine which a/b version a user is in, there is no ability to separate the visual heatmap from one version to another. If you're running significantly different a/b test versions this makes Microsoft Clarity a non-starter to supplement mature a/b testing roadmaps. Only CrazyEgg offers this functionality to date.   

Microsoft Copilot AI summary is unreliable

Microsoft Clarity offers a great feature in the ability to summarize learnings from session replay or screenshots by leveraging Microsoft Copilot. Unfortunately, the summaries tend to be extremely generic or high-level and don't provide actionable business insights regardless of your user traffic.

Reliance on automatic page screenshot engine

Screenshots are automatically generated by Microsoft Clarity without the ability to take a screenshot locally to force that version or take a larger breakpoint screenshot. For example, the desktop dimension used by Microsoft Clarity doesn't match common breakpoints (ie. 1024 px width or larger). As of this writing, Microsoft Clarity also does not provide the ability to re-take a screenshot or change it in any way. 

Limited session replay video recording storage

Session replay video recordings are only stored for 30 days. The only ability to exceed this storage is to favorite a recording, which will save it for up to 13 months. I wish Microsoft Clarity provided an extended recording window, even if it were at an additional paid cost. 

Microsoft Clarity vs. HotJar

I've used HotJar in a few professional experiences, but to be honest I have always switched to a different tool due to HotJar's UI issues and product limitations. HotJar was acquired by ContentSquare in 2021 and I saw a marked drop in tool functionality ever since. The ability to feed in custom events, screenshots, or a/b test versions reliably was a big blocker and ultimately I felt the reporting options were very limited for a paid tool.

For the functionality and price alone, I would recommend Microsoft Clarity over HotJar. 

Microsoft Clarity vs. CrazyEgg

CrazyEgg was one the earliest players in providing website heatmaps and I've used it for over 10 years. CrazyEgg heatmaps play especially well with a/b testing as they provide fantastic screenshot integration capabilities. Unfortunately, their pricing model locks you into a year minimum and they have maximum monthly unique traffic limits which forces sampling - these are significant cons. Notably, recordings, screenshots, a/b tests (when created in CrazyEgg), and surveys all count against the monthly unique traffic limit. Additionally, much of CrazyEgg's functionality (heatmaps, session replay, browser plugins, code error tracking) is replicated by Microsoft Clarity. 

CrazyEgg still does offer some unique additional functionality over Microsoft Clarity:

• Light A/B Testing: CrazyEgg offers "light" a/b testing that supports editing text, images, or custom HTML. They also offer AI-based content copy suggestions. However, the a/b testing functionality is very limited - the experiences broke when I tried to use custom stylesheets or run custom code changes (ie. form testing) so I would not rely on this for enterprise testing. Additionally, I saw significant "flicker" from how CrazyEgg implements a/b testing.
• Longer Data Storage: CrazyEgg saves data for up to 1 year or 2 years depending on your plan.
• Survey Tools: Easy to build surveys to get customer feedback, rate pages, etc. I've used these to get feedback on new product launches, website redesigns, or even within a/b tests (ie. pricing page) to collect visitor feedback. The feature is nice to have, but something that can easily be replicated with custom code.  
• Custom Screenshot Engine: This is where CrazyEgg stands out uniquely against competitors like Microsoft Clarity or HotJar. CrazyEgg has a browser plugin called Page Camera which makes it easy to take local screenshots or edit the automatically-generated screenshots.
  • Easily take one or multiple screenshots of a/b tests and have each a/b test experience have its own unique screenshot and data (see below example)
  • Easily re-take screenshots, especially if the automatically-captured screenshot is not correct
  • Easily take screenshots of authenticated pages or otherwise hidden environments.

CrazyEgg is still better for a/b testing and page heatmaps due to its screenshot engine.

Different CrazyEgg a/b test experience heatmaps for a trial form test running on the same page