Best Microsoft Clarity alternatives

When teams look past a free hosted tool

Staying on Clarity is often the right call. Look at alternatives when you must keep recordings in your own infrastructure, want defaults that mask inputs from the first snippet, or need a product you can deploy yourself.

When a free hosted tool stops being enough

Microsoft Clarity is often the first session replay tool a team installs, because it is free and hosted. That is a reasonable starting point. The search for alternatives usually starts later, when recordings need to live in a region you choose, when a reviewer asks what is captured by default, or when you want a hosted product with a published storage-region choice instead of a Microsoft-hosted service.

Replayly is one of those alternatives, not a clone of Clarity. It focuses on session replay and heatmaps, with input masking and Do Not Track on from the first snippet, and with a choice of EU or US storage region on the hosted cloud. It does not try to be a Microsoft analytics suite, and it does not promise a free-forever hosted plan at Clarity's scale. The free Replayly plan is limited; current quotas and retention are on the pricing page and the fact sheet.

Stay on Clarity if a free Microsoft-hosted tool still covers the job and you are comfortable with that hosting model. Look past it if you want a choice of EU or US storage region, or conservative privacy defaults you can inspect in the product.

Other honest options include staying on Clarity, considering OpenReplay or PostHog if you want a different self-hostable stack, or adopting a broader UX suite if you also need surveys. Confirm current terms on each vendor's site. This page does not invent competitor prices, limits, or unpublished roadmap items.

What to compare besides the sticker price

Price is only one axis, and Clarity's headline price is often zero. The sharper questions are where the data lives, what is masked before a recording is stored, and how much product you want. Replayly publishes its own plan prices and lets you choose an EU or US storage region on the hosted cloud. Clarity is hosted by Microsoft; read their current documentation for account requirements, regions, and privacy settings rather than assuming they match Replayly's defaults.

If you mainly need recordings and heatmaps, a focused tool can be simpler than a larger platform. If you already live in Microsoft's ecosystem and a free hosted tool is enough, switching may be unnecessary. The one-to-one table on the Replayly versus Microsoft Clarity page is the place for a side-by-side feature view; this page is about whether you should leave a free hosted tool at all.