Microsoft Clarity: free heatmaps and behaviour analysis for your website

Microsoft Clarity is a free tool from Microsoft that shows you how visitors actually use your website: heatmaps of clicks and scrolling, session recordings of individual visits, and signals like rage clicks and dead clicks. Where Google Analytics tells you how many people do something, Clarity shows you how they do it — and where they get stuck.

Clarity is the best-known free alternative to Hotjar (part of Contentsquare since the acquisition, often referred to in the market as "Contentsquare x Hotjar"). There's no limit on the number of sessions or heatmaps, and data is kept for thirteen months by default.

What you can do with Clarity

• Heatmaps — click maps (where people click), scroll maps (how far they get) and area maps per section or element.
• Session recordings — a playable view of mouse movement, scrolling, clicks and form interaction per visit.
• Frustration signals — rage clicks (rapid repeated clicking on the same spot), dead clicks (clicking on something that does nothing), excessive scrolling, quick backs and JavaScript errors.
• Filters and segments — filter by page, device, country, source, browser, or by sessions where a particular event occurred.
• Integrations — integration with Google Analytics 4, so you can click through from a segment in GA4 to the matching recordings.
• Copilot summaries — AI summaries of recordings and feedback, handy for scanning many sessions quickly.

Clarity vs Hotjar (Contentsquare)

In short: for heatmaps, recordings and frustration signals, Clarity does for free what most organisations need. If you want to work seriously with surveys, user interviews or extensive funnels, Hotjar/Contentsquare offers more.

What a heatmap does and doesn't tell you

A heatmap is a summary, not proof. What you can get from it:

• Is your main button seen and used? If the primary CTA barely gets colour while a secondary link does, your hierarchy is off.
• How deep do people read? Scroll maps show where attention drops off. If your offer or form sits below that point, move it up.
• Are people clicking on things that aren't clickable? Dead clicks on images, price blocks or icons are an expectation problem: people think it's a link.
• Where is the frustration? Rage clicks often sit on a button that responds too slowly, a dropdown that won't open, or a form field with an unclear error message.

What you won't get from it: why someone left, whether a change is genuinely better, or how representative a picture is. Heatmaps with too few sessions (say, under a few hundred per page and device) are noise. Always look at mobile and desktop separately — the behaviour differs too much to combine.

From behaviour to better UX and conversion

Use Clarity as the research part of your conversion optimisation. A workable cycle:

1. Pick one page with impact — high traffic or high revenue: homepage, category page, product page, checkout step or main landing page.
2. Look at the numbers first — where does traffic drop off in your analytics or funnel? That determines which page you open in Clarity.
3. Review the heatmaps per device — click and scroll behaviour, plus the area map of your key section.
4. Find the outliers in recordings — filter on rage clicks, dead clicks or quick backs and watch ten to fifteen sessions. A pattern usually emerges within half an hour.
5. Write down a hypothesis — "Mobile visitors don't see the size information, so they go back to the category page. If we move the size table above the button, add-to-cart should rise."
6. Fix it or test it — small, clear mistakes (a non-clickable element, unreadable contrast, a form error) you fix straight away. Debatable choices in copy, price or layout you test with an A/B test.
7. Measure afterwards — check whether the behaviour in the heatmap and the conversion in your KPIs move together, and repeat.

The order matters: numbers tell you where it's going wrong, behavioural data tells you why, and a test tells you whether your fix works. Working in the reverse order means testing a lot and learning little.

Concrete improvements that often come out of Clarity

• Forms — fields where visitors get stuck or drop off. Often: too many fields, unclear validation, or a required field that isn't necessary.
• Mobile navigation — dead clicks on a logo or tab that doesn't behave as expected, or a filter that's hard to find on mobile.
• Page layout — important information (price, delivery time, proof, contact option) sits below the point where 80% have already stopped scrolling.
• Unclear clickability — cards, images and icons that look like a link but aren't (or the other way round).
• Speed — rage clicks right after loading are often a symptom of slow interaction. Check your PageSpeed too.
• Accessibility — tap targets that are too small, low contrast, hard-to-reach buttons. See also WCAG and accessibility.

Privacy: what to watch out for

Clarity masks sensitive input by default and offers three masking levels (strict, balanced, relaxed). Even so, the responsibility for how you use it stays yours:

• Set masking strict enough that no personal data ends up in recordings (think email addresses, addresses, order details and anything behind a login).
• Mention Clarity in your privacy policy and in your cookie and consent policy.
• Load the tracking only after consent, in line with how you handle your other tracking.
• Don't keep more than you need, and limit who has access to recordings.

Frequently asked questions about Microsoft Clarity

Is Microsoft Clarity really free?

Yes. Clarity is free to use, with no limit on the number of sessions, recordings or heatmaps. Microsoft offers it as part of its advertising and analytics ecosystem.

Is Clarity a good alternative to Hotjar?

For heatmaps, session recordings and frustration signals, yes — those are the features most teams use Hotjar for. For surveys, user interviews and extensive funnel reporting, Hotjar (Contentsquare) is more complete.

Can I use Clarity alongside Google Analytics 4?

Yes, and that's the logical combination. GA4 gives you numbers and trends, Clarity the behaviour behind them. Via the GA4 integration you can click through from a segment straight to the matching recordings.

Does Clarity slow down my website?

The script is small and loads asynchronously, so the impact is limited. Still, every extra tag costs something. Don't load it twice, keep your tagging overview clean, and measure your page speed after installation.

How many sessions do I need for a usable heatmap?

Count on at least a few hundred sessions per page and per device type before drawing conclusions. Below that, focus on individual recordings and frustration signals rather than the heatmap as a whole.

Does Clarity replace A/B testing?

No. Clarity shows you where something is going wrong and delivers hypotheses. Whether your fix actually converts better, you only know after a test with enough data. See A/B test tools and the significance calculator.

Does Clarity work on every platform?

Clarity works on almost any website via a script or tag manager, and there are ready-made integrations for, among others, WordPress, Shopify, WooCommerce and Google Tag Manager.

Want to see where visitors get stuck?

We'll look at your heatmaps, recordings and numbers with you, and tell you honestly what to fix first — and what to test instead.

Get in touch or book a free strategy call.