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

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 provide the core analytics tools (session replays and heatmaps) that reveal that information for you—and for free.

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. (Plus, with Contentsquare you get complete ownership of your data.)

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

Key takeaways

Microsoft Clarity is a free behavior analytics platform that offers heatmaps, session replays, and simple funnel analysis.

Contentsquare is a scalable Experience Intelligence platform that combines Experience Monitoring, Experience Analytics, Product Analytics, and Voice of Customer to transform every digital interaction into measurable business growth.

Capabilities

• Both Clarity and Contentsquare offer free heatmaps and session replays, but Contentsquare also provides advanced features like AI-powered journey analysis and revenue impact quantification

• Both offer funnel analysis, but only Contentsquare quantifies the revenue impact of drop-offs and provides side-by-side funnel comparison

• Contentsquare includes Voice of Customer tools and user testing capabilities, while Clarity focuses solely on behavior analytics

• Clarity provides basic AI insights for session analysis, while Contentsquare's AI automatically finds optimization opportunities and suggests next steps

Scalability

• Clarity caps at 100,000 sessions per day, while Contentsquare’s Free plan includes 20,000 sessions per month. (For larger organizations, Contenstquare’s Growth plan scales to 10M sessions per month.)

Data ownership and governance

• Contentsquare gives you complete ownership of your data, while Microsoft's terms grant them rights to use your Clarity data for their own purposes

• Contentsquare offers individual GDPR data deletion, while Clarity requires deleting entire projects to comply with user data requests

Integration

• Both integrate with Google Analytics, but Contentsquare connects with 100+ additional tools including Jira, Slack, and Microsoft Teams

Support

• While Clarity offers no guaranteed support, Contentsquare provides guaranteed support for both free and paying customers

Contentsquare vs. Microsoft Clarity: key differences

Both Contentsquare and Clarity offer unique features for understanding user behavior, but the real question is: which one is the best fit for your business and your goals? 

Let’s compare Clarity vs. Contentsquare in terms of common use cases. 

Choose Contentsquare if you need

• Complete experience intelligence combining behavioral data with user feedback

• Revenue impact analysis to prioritize improvements

• Enterprise-grade privacy controls and practical GDPR compliance

• Holistic insights across the entire customer journey

Choose Microsoft Clarity if

• You're primarily focused on basic session replay and heatmaps

• You don't require advanced privacy controls or individual user data deletion

• Your team doesn't need dedicated support or advanced integrations

Ultimately, the key difference between Clarity and Contentsquare isn't about the features they offer—it's about the outcomes you can achieve with them. 

While Clarity offers solid basic experience analytics tools that will help you understand elements of your user experience, Contentsquare transforms user behavior data into actionable insights that directly impact revenue. 

This becomes especially valuable as your business scales and you need a deeper understanding of customer experiences to drive growth.

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

• Area/zone maps grouping interaction data for page elements

• 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, Pro and Enterprise plan users of Contentsquare are able to 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 robust session replay capabilties which include

• 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 

• 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 leverage AI to enhance analysis and save you time.

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.

By contrast, Contentsquare’s AI 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 next steps from qualitative survey responses

• CoPilot assistant

  • 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

• 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 CoPilot

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 Clarity and Contentsquare tools also allow basic filtering to help you dig deeper into your third-party data—to, for example, analyze how users from different traffic sources interact with your site or compare behavior across different device types.

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 platform, both are great options. (Here’s our pricing page.)

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

Microsoft Clarity is free forever but comes with a hard limit of 100,000 sessions per day, 100,000 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 20,000 sessions monthly)

• Experience Analytics Growth plan 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 Managerat at TotalEnergies

What Microsoft Clarity does best

Mobile app session replay

One standout feature of Microsoft Clarity which Contentsquare’s Experience Analytics Growth plan doesn’t offer is mobile app session replay. If, therefore, you’re looking for a no-cost solution for optimizing app experience, Clarity is a solid choice. 

However, Contentsquare does provide mobile app analytics for SMBs via its Product Analytics offeringboth with the Product Analytics Free and Growth plans (powered by Heap).

Plus, if your business scales and mobile optimization becomes a priority, Contentsquare’s Enterprise solutions are specifically designed to handle mobile app analytics in a way that larger companies trust.

What Contentsquare Growth provides that Microsoft Clarity doesn’t

While it's a solid analytics tool, Microsoft Clarity has some major limitations that Contentsquare addresses, namely: 

• A lack of qualitative tools 

• Limited data governance capabilities 

• Restricted scaling options 

• Basic visualization features that make it difficult to derive actionable insights at scale

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

Customer feedback collection

While Clarity helps you see what users do, Contentsquare helps you understand why they do it. 

Our Growth plan combines powerful behavior analytics with direct Voice of Customer feedback through surveys and feedback widgets, giving you the complete picture of your customer experience.

Here's how we help you collect and act on customer feedback.

• AI-powered survey creation:automatically generate relevant surveys based on your goals

• 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

Need to validate your designs with real users? Contentsquare’s Growth plan includes +100 interviews and unmoderated user tests to help Product and UX teams improve their digital experiences. 

This gives you a great starting point for gathering direct user feedback, with the ability to scale up testing capacity in our higher-tier plans. 

Run user interviews in Contentsquare

Because Contentsquare is an all-in-one experience platform, this means you can seamlessly connect user feedback with behavior insights and have all the information you need to improve customer experience in a single source of truth.

One-click impact quantification

Ever spot an interesting behavior in a session replay and wonder if it's an outlier or something to prioritize? Anyone on Contentsquare’s Growth plan or above can select any behavior in our session player, and quantify and trend the frequency with a single click.

Click to quantify any insight in Contentsquare

One-click Impact Quantification also works from other Contentsquare tools, including Journey Analysis and zone-based heatmaps.

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 and conditions state that you and Microsoft are co-owners of your data when using Clarity. This means that while you have access to your data, Microsoft also has rights to it.

To quote Microsoft:

You and Microsoft are independent Controllers of the Personal Data Processed in connection with the Offering…Microsoft may use the Personal Data it collects in connection with the Offering for any purpose in accordance with the Microsoft Privacy Statement, including to provide the Offering; improve Microsoft’s products and services, including reporting and performance analysis; and create user profiles for purposes that include advertising. Microsoft may also use nonpersonal data it collects in connection with the Offering to provide and improve Microsoft’s products and services.

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 above 100,000 sessions per day 

Clarity caps out at 100,000 sessions per day with no option to increase coverage. Contentsquare’s Growth plan scales higher than that—up to 10M sessions a month. 

And this isn't just about numbers—it's about the quality of insights you can unlock.

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 will your data needs. Contentsquare’s Growth plan is a great starting point for SMBs, but the beauty of Contentsquare is its growth path. 

As you scale, you can seamlessly transition to Enterprise solutions that offer advanced analytics, user journey tracking, and conversion insights—without having to learn an entirely new tool.

For example, Contentsquare’s Enterprise plans give you access to features like:

• Behavioral analytics that tie user actions to downstream outcomes, helping you make decisions about which content will move the needle.

• The ability to surface experience issues like technical errors, slow load speeds, or points of friction that could be hurting your conversion.

• Insights into typical customer journeys across devices and sessions, enabling you to prioritize investments for better customer retention and lifetime value.

• The ability to quantify behavior issues and measure their impact on conversion and revenue, so you can prioritize fixes that will make the biggest impact.

With these advanced capabilities, Contentsquare’s Enterprise solution helps you drive growth at scale—far beyond what's possible with Clarity's free tool (or even with our own Growth plan).

Clarity vs Contentsquare: which is right for you?

When it comes to digital experience optimization, being able to observe user behavior is just the first step. The real challenge is transforming the insights you get from this observation into measurable revenue growth.

Microsoft Clarity offers a solid foundation with free session replays and heatmaps. 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 analytics by combining AI-powered insights, revenue impact quantification, and voice of customer feedback into one seamless solution. 

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 take the next step? Take our product tour or let us help you choose the best solution for your business. Together, we’ll make sure you get the most out of your digital experience!

FAQs about Contentsquare vs. Microsoft Clarity