Contentsquare vs. Clarity: which is best for your business?

The information on this page is correct as at 13/01/2026 to the best of Contentsquare's understanding.

Want to know how visitors to your website are interacting with your site, where they’re getting stuck and frustrated in your journeys, and where they’re abandoning the journey altogether? 

Both Microsoft Clarity and Contentsquare (that’s us, hello! 👋) provide the core experience analytics tools (like session replays and heatmaps) for free (Contentsquare’s free plan now covers up to 200k monthly sessions).

However, while Clarity is 100% free, it has some severe limitations in terms of how it scales, who owns your data, and what value you can get out of it—all of which might be deal-breakers for your business. 

By contrast, Contentsquare has a scalable pricing plan that brings with it many value-adding additional features, like Voice of Customer tools, journey analysis, revenue impact quantification, and dedicated support—all in a single platform designed to grow your business.

Still unsure? Let's break down exactly how Microsoft Clarity and Contentsquare compare across the features that matter most to your goals.

Key takeaways

• Clarity shows behavior. It’s a free tool for heatmaps, replays, and basic funnels, with limited ability to explain impact or guide action

• Contentsquare drives outcomes. It connects behavior, feedback, performance, and product usage, then applies AI to prioritize what moves revenue

• While both offer free plans, Contentsquare is built to scale, adding advanced AI, governance, and cross-team workflows as your optimization program grows

Contentsquare vs. Microsoft Clarity: key differences

Both Contentsquare and Clarity reveal user behavior. The real difference is how far you can take those insights as your traffic, teams, and goals scale.

Let’s compare Clarity vs. Contentsquare across the most common use cases. 

What Contentsquare and Clarity both do well

Let’s start with the overlap—and what you can achieve with either Microsoft Clarity or Contentsquare. 

Heatmaps and session replay

At their core, both Clarity and Contentsquare provide robust heatmap visualizations to help you understand how users interact with your site or app, including

• Click maps showing where users click and tap

• Scroll maps revealing how far visitors scroll on any page

• Advanced filtering options to segment your data

• Rage click detection to identify user frustration points

• Side-by-side heatmap comparison for analyzing A/B tests or different traffic sources

However, Contentsquare users on paid plans can take heatmap analytics further with business-critical and user-friendly features, including

• Revenue attribution and conversion metrics for each page element

• Live analysis using Contentsquare's CS Live Chrome extension

• Built-in form analysis to discover where and why customers struggle to complete forms

See exactly which elements drive revenue with Contentsquare heatmaps

Session replays are recreations of individual user browsing sessions. Both Clarity and Contentsquare offer core session replay capabilities like

• Recording of user clicks, scrolls, and mouse movements

• Ability to filter and search recordings

• Automatic error detection during sessions

• Privacy masking of sensitive data

Once again, however, Contentsquare’s session replays offer more advanced features than Clarity’s, including

• AI-powered session prioritization: use Frustration Score analysis to automatically surface the most valuable sessions to watch 

• AI session summaries: condense hours of session data into the actionable highlights

• Quantify impact: see how behaviors in any session affect conversion and revenue across all users

• Advanced privacy controls: granular permissions and data governance for enterprise compliance

• Cross-journey context:seamlessly connect session replays to Journey Analysis, showing how individual sessions fit into larger customer paths

• Technical diagnostics: detailed network waterfall, console logs, and error tracking for faster issue resolution

• Collaborative features: team annotations, sharing, and integration with common workflow tools like Jira and Linear

• Retroactive search: find any text or error across historical sessions, even if you weren't specifically tracking it

Contentsquare session replays

AI insights

​​Both Clarity and Contentsquare use AI to reduce manual analysis and speed up time to insight.

Microsoft Clarity's main AI features are

• Automated session replay summaries

• Heatmap summaries

• Chatting with your data using Microsoft Copilot

These are useful features, especially for a free tool, but you can only use them to analyze the data that Clarity collects.

Contentsquare’s AI (we call it Sense) gives you everything you need to leverage AI across every user interaction and touchpoint in the customer journey. You’ll get

• AI for Voice of Customer

• Auto-generate the most effective survey questions

• Analyze and tag feedback sentiment automatically

• Generate reports and next steps from qualitative survey responses

• Analyze customer chats with Conversation Intelligence

• Sense Chat

• Use Ask plain text questions to get answers about conversion, engagement, retention, or any metrics you’re looking for

• Generate supporting charts and explanations

• Get step-by-step guidance on next actions

• Sense Analyst

• Agentic AI to automatically run deep, multi-step analyses

• Tell Sense what you need and it will generate clear insights and recommendations using your Contentsquare data

• Sense Mapping Assistant

• Automatically capture every interaction and map your page structure without manual tagging

• MCP Server

• Interact with all your Contentsquare data directly from your favorite LLM tool, like Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, or Dust

• Smart dashboards and automated insights

• Find problem areas and key trends automatically

• Receive smart alerts and recommendations wherever you need them

Chat with your data using Contentsquare Sense

While Clarity offers basic AI assistance for session analysis, Contentsquare's comprehensive AI helps you not just understand user behavior, but transform those insights into measurable improvements across your entire digital experience.

Integrations and basic filtering

Both Microsoft Clarity and Contentsquare offer integrations with popular third-party platforms, including:

• Google Analytics

• Shopify

• AB Tasty

• Optimizely

Contentsquare also integrates with +100 more apps—including Jira, Asana, Slack, and Microsoft Teams)—so your team can bring experience insights into existing workflows, keep a single source of truth, and act on data faster.

Both platforms also support basic filtering so you can analyze behavior by attributes like traffic source, device type, or page.

Contentsquare goes further by letting you apply consistent filters across heatmaps, session replays, journeys, funnels, and lifecycle analysis, so insights stay connected instead of living in silos.

Funnel analysis

Both Microsoft Clarity and Contentsquare include funnel analysis capabilities to help you understand where users drop off in critical conversion paths, and both

• Let you create custom funnels to track multi-step conversion paths

• Show conversion rates and drop-offs between steps

• Connect funnel steps to session replays to investigate why a drop off or conversion occurred 

While Clarity offers straightforward funnel visualizations based on URL visits and smart events (like adding an item to cart), we've built our platform to go further, giving you

• AI-powered analysis to automatically surface hidden friction points and funnel opportunities

• More granular filtering options for segmenting funnel data

• Direct quantification of revenue impact at each funnel step—use this to prioritize which funnels to fix first

• Side-by-side funnel comparison across segments

• Integration with Journey Analysis to understand the full context of funnel drop-offs beyond session replays

Analyze conversion funnels in Contentsquare

A great price

Both Microsoft Clarity and Contentsquare offer free versions that provide enough session volume capacity for 80% of small-to-medium businesses (SMBs) in the market. 

If you’re looking for a free Clarity alternative, Contentsquare’s free plan tracks up to 200,000 monthly sessions, 10,000 replays, and unlimited heatmaps. 

But remember: value isn't just about price—it's about ROI. 

Microsoft Clarity is free forever but comes with a hard limit of 100k sessions per day, 100k pageviews per heatmap, and no option to scale. At some point, you’ll run into limitations, in pageviews and features.

By contrast, Contentsquare offers flexible options that grow with your business.

These options are:

• Free plan for getting started (up to 200,000 sessions monthly)

• Experience Analytics Growth and Pro plans that scales from 7,000 to 10M monthly sessions

• Enterprise solutions available for unlimited scaling

Additional capabilities unlock as you grow, including:

• Impact Quantification and advanced filtering

• Enhanced heatmaps with engagement zones

• Expanded integrations

• Advanced AI-powered insights

While both Clarity and Contentsquare serve smaller businesses well, we've designed our pricing structure and architecture to support your analytics needs at every stage of growth—from startup to enterprise level. 

Our customers consistently tell us they see rapid ROI through increased conversions, reduced development costs, and improved team efficiency.

The investment of Contentsquare does pay itself back directly because we can easily conduct analyses that not only identify where customer pain points are but also why they arise. These insights are invaluable to optimize our website according to our customers’ needs, improve customer satisfaction and, ultimately, boost acquisition. - Dirk Biesmans, Performance Marketing & Sales Manager at TotalEnergies

In fact, Forrester found that Contentsquare delivers an average 602% ROI and helped brands recover over $3.2 million in revenue in just 6 months. 

What Contentsquare provides that Microsoft Clarity doesn’t

• While Microsoft Clarity is a popular free tool for observing behavior, Contentsquare is built for teams who want to know what to fix next with confidence.

Here are the powerful growth capabilities our platform offers that you won't find in Clarity.

Customer feedback, connected to behavior

While Clarity shows what users do, Contentsquare connects that behavior to direct feedback so you understand intent, frustration, and motivation.

With Contentsquare Voice of Customer, you’ll benefit from

• AI-powered surveys: automatically generate relevant surveys based on your goals, tag sentiment, and generate reports and next steps in a click

• Strategic feedback collection: add exit-intent surveys, NPS® surveys, and feedback buttons at critical moments in the customer journey

• Instant insights

• Automatically analyze sentiment across all feedback

• Identify trending topics and common pain points

• Connect feedback directly to user behaviors

• Quantify the revenue impact of user frustrations

The real power of Contentsquare comes when you combine feedback with analytics to

• Segment users based on their feedback and analyze their journeys

• Compare behaviors between satisfied and unsatisfied customers

• Identify the experience issues which are hurting customer satisfaction the most most

• Prioritize improvements based on customer sentiment and business impact

This holistic approach helps you collect feedback and turn it into actionable insights that drive meaningful improvements to your customer experience.

Collect and analyze customer feedback in Contentsquare

User testing and interviews

Contentsquare includes built-in user testing and interviews, so Product and UX teams can

• Run unmoderated tests and interviews at scale

• Validate new designs, copy, or flows before rolling out changes

Run user interviews in Contentsquare

Because Contentsquare is an all-in-one experience intelligence platform, these insights don’t live in isolation. You can connect what users say directly to what they do by linking interviews and tests to session replays, journeys, and behavioral data.

This closes the gap Clarity leaves open: moving from observation to confident decisions, without relying on guesswork or external tools.

One-click impact quantification

Spotting an issue is easy. Deciding whether it’s worth fixing is where most teams get stuck.

Click to quantify any insight in Contentsquare

Contentsquare paid plans (from $40/month) come with Impact Quantification. Use it to in every part of the platform to

• Quantify how often a behavior or issue occurs

• See its impact on conversions and revenue

• Track how that impact changes over time

No more guessing or debating priorities when everyone works from the same, data-backed source of truth.

A more practical way to comply with GDPR/CCPA

A significant advantage of Contentsquare over Microsoft Clarity is that it makes compliance with GDPR and CCPA easier. 

For example, if a user asks you to delete their data under the rights granted to them by GDPR, Contentsquare makes it easy for you to delete individual user data without losing the entire dataset. 

In contrast, Microsoft Clarity’s documentation states that to delete user data, you would need to delete the entire project. This means you risk losing all your historical data to remain compliant with GDPR.

Similarly, when a user wants to be excluded from being recorded, Microsoft Clarity documentation states that this is not possible. 

Ownership of your data

One crucial factor when choosing between Clarity and Contentsquare is data ownership. 

Microsoft’s terms state that both you and Microsoft act as independent data controllers when using Clarity. This means that while you can access your data, Microsoft also has rights to access and use it in accordance with its terms.

In contrast, with Contentsquare, you’re the sole owner of your data—giving you full control over how it’s used and shared. Read more on our Privacy Center. 

Guaranteed support and customer success

Both Contentsquare and Microsoft Clarity have excellent documentation and tutorials but when you’re trusting software to track every user action on your website or product, it’s important to be able to get your questions answered by a real human.

While Microsoft Clarity doesn’t guarantee any customer support, Contentsquare goes the extra mile and provides personalized support for both free users and paying customers. 

We also offer dedicated Customer Success Managers to customers above a certain size to help optimize the use of data and insights to improve your digital performance.

The key selling point of Contentsquare was its ease of implementation and impressive client success program. Knowing we’d get dedicated support from Contentsquare while onboarding and upskilling made the decision easy. - Gareth Cottiss, Senior Ecommerce Merchandising Manager at Co-op

Scalability beyond basic traffic volumes

Microsoft Clarity is free, but it doesn’t scale. Data capture is capped and throttled, with no paid option to increase coverage or guarantee complete data as traffic grows. Once you approach high daily session volumes, sampling and data loss become unavoidable.

Contentsquare is built to scale with your business. Our Free plan supports meaningful analysis at lower volumes (up to 200,000 sessions), while paid plans expand coverage into the millions with consistent capture, advanced analytics, and full governance.

With full data coverage, you get

• More accurate heatmaps that truly represent user behavior

• Reliable funnel analysis that captures every customer journey

• Powerful segmentation that reveals insights about niche audience groups

• Perfect alignment with your other analytics tools like GA4

• Confidence that you're making decisions based on complete data

A platform that grows with your success

As your business grows, so do your questions. What worked at 50,000 sessions won’t hold up at 500,000, and basic tools start to crack under real-world complexity.

Contentsquare is built to scale with you. You can start with our free plan, then grow into more advanced analytics, AI-driven insights, and deeper governance without changing tools or losing historical data.

Clarity vs Contentsquare: which is right for you?

When it comes to digital experience optimization, being able to observe user behavior is only the first step. The real challenge is transforming insights into measurable revenue growth.

Microsoft Clarity is a cheap and easy way to get surface-level visibility into what’s happening on your website. . But as your business grows, you need more than just data—you need to know what it means and how to act on it.

Contentsquare goes beyond basic observation by combining behavior, performance, product usage, and customer feedback in one platform, with AI built in to surface insights automatically and quantify their business impact. 

Instead of guessing or debating priorities, every digital team can align around a single source of truth and focus on the changes that actually drive growth.

Whether you're launching your first optimization program or scaling enterprise-wide initiatives, we provide the tools and support to turn every user interaction into a growth opportunity.Ready to join us? Take a product tour or simply sign up for our free forever plan today.  

FAQs about Contentsquare vs. Microsoft Clarity