Amplitude vs Microsoft Clarity
Feature checklists rarely decide anything. What decides it is the pricing metric, who has to write the tests, and which limitation you can live with.
Entry price
Free tier available
Free tierFree
FreeWhat drives the bill
The metric that actually scales your invoice.
Paid plans are quote-based on monthly tracked users and events; enterprise contracts are substantial.
Free with no traffic cap. Microsoft uses aggregated data to improve its products, which is the trade you are making.
Free tier
Free plan with a monthly event allowance suitable for early-stage products.
Everything, unlimited, at any traffic level.
Open source
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
Amplitude · since 2012
Category standard
Microsoft · since 2020
Strengths
- The deepest retention and cohort analysis in mainstream product analytics.
- Good free tier for early-stage products.
- Strong data-governance tooling for event taxonomy.
- 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.
Limitations
- 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.
- 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.
Best for
Product teams that need rigorous behavioural analysis over time.
Almost anyone starting with session replay, and anyone whose paid tool is mainly used for basic replay.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.