Microsoft Clarity vs PostHog

Free

Free tier available

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

Usage-based pricing per product with a substantial free tier; most small teams stay free indefinitely.

Everything, unlimited, at any traffic level.

Large monthly free allowance across every product, plus free self-hosting.

Category standard

Microsoft · since 2020

Widely used

PostHog · since 2020

• 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.

• Replaces four or five separate subscriptions with one bill and one SDK.
• Free tier is large enough for real production use at startup scale.
• Open source with a credible self-hosting path.

• 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.

• Individual modules are less deep than category specialists.
• Self-hosting at scale is a serious infrastructure undertaking.
• The product surface changes fast, which means occasional churn.

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

Startups and scale-ups consolidating analytics, replay and flags into one platform.