Matomo vs Microsoft Clarity

From $29 per month (Cloud, 50k hits; annual billing gives 2 months free)

Free

Self-hosting is free but plugins such as heatmaps and A/B testing are paid add-ons. Cloud scales with hits.

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

Self-hosted Community edition is free forever with unlimited users and hits; premium plugins are paid.

Everything, unlimited, at any traffic level.

Widely used

InnoCraft · since 2007

Category standard

Microsoft · since 2020

• Complete data ownership with no third-party processing — the strongest GDPR position available.
• No sampling, unlike free tiers of hosted analytics.
• Can be configured to run without cookies or consent banners.

• 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.

• Self-hosting requires PHP and MySQL operations, including performance tuning at scale.
• The interface is less refined than modern product analytics tools.
• Advanced features are paid plugins even on the free self-hosted edition.

• 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.

Public sector, healthcare and European organisations with strict data-residency requirements.

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