The Microsoft Clarity alternative for teams who need to know who was in the session

Name: BusinessMCP
Brand: BusinessMCP

Clarity is free and good. If you need replays tied to a company, longer retention, or a CRM and AI business analyst on the same data, this is the upgrade path.

Try BusinessMCP free How we do session replay & heatmaps

Free plan available · No credit card

Price: Clarity: $0, no traffic limit, 30-day recordings. BusinessMCP: replay from $79/mo (Growth); cookieless analytics + CRM free.
Switching gets you: Recordings that name the visiting company, 7–unlimited-day retention, deterministic frustration scoring, and an AI business analyst that can query the same data.
Stay with Microsoft Clarity if: Free matters more than identification, 30 days of playback is enough, and you are fine with Microsoft processing your behavioural data.

Feature comparison — pricing verified September 2026. Sources: public pricing pages + published teardowns.
	BusinessMCP	Microsoft Clarity
Entry price for replay	$79/mo (Growth); free plan is analytics-only	Free forever, no traffic limit
Replay retention	7 days · 30 days · unlimited (Growth · Scale · Business)	30 days (favourites + heatmaps 9 months)
Rage + dead-click detection	Yes	Yes
AI analysis of a recording or heatmap	Yes	Yes (AI summaries + chat)
Friction → A/B test (AI opens the PR)	Yes (Scale, $199/mo)	No
Knows which company the session was	Yes	No
Cookieless, consent-aware capture	Yes	Sets first-party cookies; consent handled by you
Analytics + CRM in the same tool	Yes	No

The full picture

Let us say the obvious first: Microsoft Clarity is free forever, has no traffic limits, and ships session recordings, heatmaps, rage and dead-click detection and AI summaries. If you have never watched a session on your site, install Clarity today — you will not regret it. There is no honest way to beat $0 on price, and we are not going to try.

What Clarity does not do is tell you who was in the recording, keep it longer than 30 days, or connect it to anything commercial. It has no company identification, no CRM, no attribution, and the data lives in Microsoft’s cloud under Microsoft’s terms. BusinessMCP is the tool you move to when a recording needs a name on it: replay and heatmaps run on the same cookieless script as analytics and CRM, every session is linked to the identified person or resolved company, and an AI business analyst can read the recording, the funnel and the pipeline in one question.

Why teams switch

Who, not just what

Clarity shows an anonymous session. BusinessMCP shows the same session attached to a contact or to the company resolved from IP — around 20–35% of B2B visits — and lets you filter recordings to identified visitors only. For a B2B team, the difference between “someone abandoned the demo form” and “a director at Acme abandoned the demo form” is the whole lead.

Retention you choose

Clarity keeps playback data for 30 days; only favourites and heatmaps survive to nine months. BusinessMCP keeps 7 days on Growth, 30 on Scale and unlimited on Business — and the durable session record (pages, goals, revenue) is kept forever regardless of plan.

Your data, on your terms

Clarity is free because Microsoft runs it; read its terms for how collected data may be used to improve Microsoft services. BusinessMCP is a paid product with a data-processing agreement, a public sub-processor register, cookieless capture and consent-aware recording. You pay in dollars instead of data.

From friction to a fix

Both tools flag rage and dead clicks. BusinessMCP goes on to score frustration per recording, jump to the first rage click, propose an A/B test from the friction it finds and — on Scale — implement the variant as a GitHub pull request for you to review.

Real data, not a mockup

What it looks like in BusinessMCP

Recorded on our own site, PII scrubbed — the same product you get on the free plan.

app.businessmcp.com/replays

Microsoft Clarity pricing, broken down

Plan	Price	Notes
Clarity	$0	“Free forever”; no traffic limits, no paid tier, no credit card
Recording retention	30 days	playback data; favourited/labelled sessions and heatmap click data kept 9 months
Live sessions	up to 100	viewable at once, per the Clarity FAQ
Visitor identification / CRM	Not offered	no company or person resolution; no pipeline

Sources: clarity.microsoft.com and the Microsoft Learn data-retention and FAQ pages. Clarity is genuinely free with no upgrade path; the trade is retention, identification and where the data lives.

Where BusinessMCP is NOT the right choice

An alternatives page you can trust has to cut both ways. Honestly:

Clarity is free forever with unlimited recordings and no traffic cap. BusinessMCP recordings start on the $79 Growth plan with 7-day retention — if you only need replay, Clarity costs nothing and we cannot compete on that.
Our replay retention is shorter unless you are on Business. Growth keeps 7 days and Scale 30; keeping recordings for the life of the account is a $499/mo feature, and raw heatmap events expire at 30 days on every plan. Contentsquare Growth keeps 13 months of data access, and FullStory Free keeps 12 months.
We do not ship surveys, feedback widgets, NPS or funnel-in-replay reports. Hotjar, Lucky Orange and Mouseflow bundle those; with us, a survey tool is a separate purchase.
Replays capture the DOM, not the console or network. FullStory and Smartlook record JS errors and requests alongside the session; if engineers are your main replay audience, that matters.
We are a younger product with fewer integrations and coarser sampling controls than FullStory’s segment-based capture rules, and there is no native mobile-app SDK — web only.

Frequently asked questions

Is Microsoft Clarity really free?

Yes. Clarity’s FAQ states it is a free service forever with no traffic limits and no paid version. There is no catch on price; the trade-offs are 30-day playback retention, no visitor identification, and Microsoft processing the data under its own terms.

How long does Clarity keep recordings?

Microsoft’s data-retention page says playback data is retained for 30 days; favourited or labelled sessions and heatmap click data are kept for 9 months. BusinessMCP keeps recordings 7 days on Growth, 30 on Scale and unlimited on Business.

Does Clarity identify companies or people?

No. Clarity shows anonymous sessions with device, country and page context. BusinessMCP links each recording to the identified contact or the company resolved from the visitor’s IP, and puts them in a CRM pipeline.

Why would I pay $79 for something Clarity gives me free?

You would not, for replay alone. The Growth plan is worth it when you need replay attached to a name, cookieless analytics with attribution, a CRM, comment-to-DM automation and an AI business analyst that can query all of it — Clarity does none of those.

Can I run Clarity and BusinessMCP together?

Yes. Both are a single script and they coexist. Many teams keep Clarity for free long-tail replay volume and use BusinessMCP for the identified sessions, the CRM and the AI business analyst.

Other honest alternatives

Hotjar (Contentsquare)

Free up to 200k sessions; Growth from $49/mo annual; surveys as a separate product.

Compare

Mouseflow

From $25/mo with funnels and form analytics; 1–12 months retention by tier.

Compare

Smartlook

End of sale under Cisco since May 2026; servers shut down August 2027 — do not start here.

Compare

How to migrate

1
Keep Clarity running — it is free and the two scripts do not conflict.
2
Install the BusinessMCP script, switch on heatmaps + recordings in Overview → Heatmaps, and compare a week of sessions side by side.
3
Use the identified-only filter in the recordings list to find the sessions Clarity could never attribute; those are your first qualified leads.
4
Once the CRM is doing the work, decide whether Clarity’s free replay still earns its slot in your page weight.

Sources & verification

Every price on this page traces to a public source, last verified September 15, 2026. Spotted a change? Tell us and we'll re-verify.

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