Microsoft Clarity vs Hotjar vs Amplitude

Free

From $32 per month (indicative, Growth tier by daily sessions)

Free tier available

Free with no traffic cap. Microsoft uses aggregated data to improve its products, which is the trade you are making.

Priced by daily sessions per module; Observe, Ask and Engage are billed separately, so a full setup is several subscriptions.

Paid plans are quote-based on monthly tracked users and events; enterprise contracts are substantial.

Everything, unlimited, at any traffic level.

Free plan with a daily session limit and basic heatmaps.

Free plan with a monthly event allowance suitable for early-stage products.

Category standard

Microsoft · since 2020

Category standard

Contentsquare · since 2014

Category standard

Amplitude · since 2012

• No cost and no sampling at any volume — nothing else in the category comes close on price.
• Rage-click and dead-click detection surfaces real usability problems immediately.
• Easy to install and reasonable default masking of sensitive fields.

• Non-technical teams adopt it without training, which is why it spreads inside organisations.
• Surveys and recordings together let you ask a user about the behaviour you just watched.
• Simple installation and good default privacy masking.

• The deepest retention and cohort analysis in mainstream product analytics.
• Good free tier for early-stage products.
• Strong data-governance tooling for event taxonomy.

• Data goes to Microsoft, which is a real consideration for GDPR-sensitive deployments.
• Filtering and segmentation are shallower than paid tools.
• Support is community-based and the roadmap is not yours to influence.

• Session-based pricing across three separate modules adds up quickly.
• Sampling on lower tiers means the session you need may not have been recorded.
• Weak for engineering debugging compared to LogRocket or FullStory.

• Requires deliberate event instrumentation — nothing works without it.
• Enterprise pricing rises steeply with tracked users.
• Replay and experimentation are newer and less mature than the analytics core.

Almost anyone starting with session replay, and anyone whose paid tool is mainly used for basic replay.

Marketing and product teams that want behavioural insight without an analytics specialist.

Product teams that need rigorous behavioural analysis over time.