Microsoft Clarity vs PostHog

Microsoft Clarity

Free heatmaps and session recordings

Microsoft Clarity is a free behaviour analytics tool for websites. It records anonymised user sessions, generates heatmaps of clicks and scrolling, and highlights moments of frustration, helping site owners see how real visitors interact with their pages. Its headline feature is the price: Clarity is completely free, with no traffic limits and no paid tier. Competing tools typically sample sessions or charge more as traffic grows, so Clarity has become a common first choice for small businesses, startups, marketers and designers who want qualitative insight without a budget. Microsoft uses aggregated, anonymised data to improve its products and does not sell it, according to its documentation. The feature set covers the essentials of behaviour analytics. Session recordings replay what users did, including mouse movement, clicks and scrolling. Heatmaps show where people click and how far they scroll on each page. Clarity automatically flags signals such as rage clicks, where users repeatedly click something in frustration, dead clicks on elements that do nothing, excessive scrolling and quick backs, which point to usability problems. Filters and segments let you find sessions from particular sources, devices or pages, and Copilot features summarise recordings and insights in plain language. Integration with Google Analytics lets users jump from GA segments to matching recordings. Installation is a single script, and the tool masks sensitive content by default to reduce privacy risk, though site owners remain responsible for consent requirements in their jurisdiction. The trade-offs are depth and customisation compared with commercial platforms: there are fewer advanced analysis features, survey tools and integrations, and support is community-based rather than contractual. Alternatives include Hotjar, which adds surveys and feedback widgets; FullStory and Contentsquare for enterprise digital experience analytics; PostHog and LogRocket for session replay combined with product analytics or debugging; Mouseflow and Lucky Orange for similar small-business tools; and Smartlook for mobile app recordings. Choose Microsoft Clarity when you want heatmaps and session recordings at no cost. Choose a paid tool when you need surveys, deeper analysis or enterprise support.

PostHog

Open-source product analytics, session replay, and feature flags

PostHog is an open-source product platform that bundles product analytics, session replay, feature flags, experimentation, surveys, error tracking, and a data warehouse into one tool, available as cloud or self-hosted. The problem it targets is stack sprawl. A typical product team wires up Mixpanel or Amplitude for analytics, LaunchDarkly for feature flags, FullStory or Hotjar for session replay, Sentry for errors, and Typeform for surveys - five contracts, five SDKs, five sets of user identities that do not join up. PostHog's bet is that these are all the same data, so they belong in one product where you can watch the session replay of the user who dropped out of the funnel, behind the feature flag you shipped last week. Pricing is usage-based with a large free tier, and PostHog states that more than 90% of its customers use it for free. The monthly free tier resets every month and applies on every plan, including paid ones: 1 million analytics events, 5,000 session recordings, 1 million feature flag requests, 100,000 error tracking exceptions, 1,500 survey responses, 1 million data warehouse rows, 10,000 pipeline events, 100,000 AI observability events, and 10 GB of ingested logs. No credit card is required, and the free plan includes 1 project, 1-year data retention, unlimited team members, and a choice of US (Virginia) or EU (Frankfurt) hosting. Past the free tier, pricing is per unit and the rate falls with scale. Product analytics starts at $0.00005 per event for the first 1-2 million events beyond the free tier, dropping through $0.0000343 (2-15 million), $0.0000295 (15-50 million), $0.0000218 (50-100 million), $0.0000150 (100-250 million), to $0.0000090 per event above 250 million. Adding a card also raises the account to 6 projects, 7-year data retention, and email support. Per-product billing limits can be set so a traffic spike cannot produce a surprise invoice. Who it is for: engineering-led product teams, especially at startups, who would rather instrument once and get five tools than integrate five vendors. Self-hosting suits teams with data residency constraints, though PostHog's EU cloud region covers most of that need without the operational burden. How it compares: Mixpanel and Amplitude are more refined as pure analytics products and are the better choice if analytics is all you need. LaunchDarkly is a stronger standalone feature-flag platform with more governance. Sentry is a better error tracker. PostHog rarely wins any single category head-to-head - it wins on consolidation, price at low volume, and the fact that the tools share one user identity. Evaluate it when you are about to buy your third point solution.