Head to head
Absolutely Analytics vs Microsoft Clarity
Free for your data, or paid for your privacy. Scored on ten weighted measures, with every price read on the same day.
Absolutely Analytics
8.9/10
No. 1 of 30
Microsoft Clarity
5.9/10
No. 20 of 30
Clarity gives you session recordings, click maps, scroll maps, rage-click detection and AI summaries at any traffic volume, for nothing. Not a free tier with a session cap: the entire product, with no paid plan behind it. More than two million sites run it. On price there is no argument to have.
So the honest version of this comparison is not about features, it is about what the price actually is, and what you get for the fourteen dollars that would buy you the same reports elsewhere.
The verdict
It depends on whether a consent banner is acceptable to you, and whether you mind an advertising company's script on every page.
Clarity is not charity. It sets cookies, and Microsoft's own documentation describes using the data it collects for its own purposes, inside a company that sells advertising. That is disclosed, it is legal, and for a great many sites it is a perfectly reasonable trade. But it means a consent banner in the UK and EU, which costs you a share of the very visitors you were trying to understand, and it means limited export, so your history does not travel with you.
Absolutely Analytics charges fourteen dollars for click, scroll and attention maps, and nineteen more for masked replay, and in exchange there is no banner, no cookie, no IP stored and no advertising business in the middle. Its replay masks every input in the browser before transmission rather than redacting on arrival, which is the distinction your data protection officer will focus on if your pages carry a login or a checkout.
Take Clarity if the budget is genuinely zero and the alternative is no behaviour tooling at all, which for a lot of small businesses it is. Take Absolutely Analytics if the consent banner is a cost you are already trying to remove, in which case adding Clarity would undo the whole point.
Side by side
| Absolutely Analytics | Microsoft Clarity | |
|---|---|---|
| Overall score | 8.9 / 10 | 5.9 / 10 |
| Rank on this list | No. 1 of 30 | No. 20 of 30 |
| From | $9 per month | Free at any volume |
| What that buys | 10,000 pageviews and custom events a month, rising in eight published rungs to 10M | No paid tier, no traffic limit, no session cap |
| Free tier | No free tier. A 30-day trial of the exact tier you picked | The whole product is free |
| Cookies | None, so no consent banner | Yes |
| Script size | 1,270 bytes gzipped | Tens of kilobytes |
| Hosting | Hosted, with a choice of storage jurisdiction | Microsoft |
| Trading since | 2024 | 2020 |
| Price | $14/mo for heatmaps, +$19 for replay | Free at any volume, no session cap |
| Cookie banner needed in the UK and EU | No | Yes |
| Who else sees the data | Nobody; no IP is stored | Microsoft, per its published data-use terms |
| Replay masking | In the browser, before transmission; opt fields back in | Server-side masking, configured by you |
| Traffic analytics | Full dashboard, goals, segments, funnels on Business | Shallow; a companion to another tool |
| Export and portability | CSV export on every tier | Limited |
| Business model | Your subscription | Undisclosed value to Microsoft |
The ten measures, scored
| Measure | Absolutely Analytics | Microsoft Clarity |
|---|---|---|
| Insight quality | 9 | 6 |
| Privacy architecture | 10 | 3 |
| Value for money | 8 | 10 |
| Setup and time to data | 10 | 8 |
| Script weight | 10 | 4 |
| Analytical depth | 6 | 4 |
| Behaviour tooling | 8 | 9 |
| Data ownership | 7 | 3 |
| Accuracy | 9 | 5 |
| Vendor conduct | 10 | 6 |
| Weighted overall | 8.9 | 5.9 |
Higher is better. The overall figure is the weighted mean, relative to the 30 tools on this list. How this works.
Which one should you pick
Choose Microsoft Clarity if
The budget is zero, a consent banner is acceptable, and the realistic alternative is having no behaviour data at all.
Choose Absolutely Analytics if
You have removed the consent banner, or want to, and adding an advertising company's script would defeat the purpose.
Common questions
Is Microsoft Clarity really free?
There is no charge and no paid tier, at any traffic volume. It is not free of cost: Clarity sets cookies and Microsoft's own documentation describes using the collected data for its own purposes. You are paying with data rather than money, which for many sites is a fair trade made knowingly.
Does Clarity need a cookie banner?
In the UK and EU, yes. It sets cookies and records sessions, which is the more demanding end of the consent requirement. Absolutely Analytics sets no cookies and needs no banner.
Can I use Clarity alongside a cookieless tool?
Technically yes, but it partly defeats the purpose. Once Clarity is on the page you need the consent banner anyway, and the visitors who decline are lost to both tools. If avoiding the banner was the reason you left Google Analytics, adding Clarity puts it back.
Which has better session replay privacy?
Absolutely Analytics, on architecture. It masks every input, textarea and contenteditable element in the browser before the recording is transmitted, and you opt individual fields back in. Clarity masks server-side according to settings you configure, which means the content is transmitted first.
Both entries above are desk reviews written from published evidence, and every judgement is my opinion rather than a statement of fact. Read the full reviews for Absolutely Analytics and Microsoft Clarity, or tell me where I have got something wrong.