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testcritic

Microsoft Clarity vs Mixpanel

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

Free

Free tier available

Free tier

What drives the bill

The metric that actually scales your invoice.

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

Growth now starts at $0 and scales with event volume up to 20M events a month, with the first million free; annual billing saves around $480 a year. Enterprise is quote-based. Event-volume pricing stays generous for early products but climbs with a chatty event schema.

Free tier

Everything, unlimited, at any traffic level.

Free forever, up to 1M events a month.

Open source

Self-hostable

No-code authoring

Languages

JavaScriptCodeless
JavaScriptTypeScriptPythonJavaSwiftKotlinPHP

Platforms

WebiOSAndroid
WebAPIiOSAndroid

Fits teams

Solo / side projectStartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise
StartupScale-up / mid-marketEnterprise

Adoption

Category standard

Microsoft · since 2020

Category standard

Mixpanel · since 2009

Strengths

  • 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.
  • Genuinely self-serve — product managers build their own reports without help.
  • Large free tier that carries an early-stage product a long way.
  • Fast query performance on large event volumes.

Limitations

  • 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.
  • Requires disciplined event instrumentation and naming.
  • Weaker on user-level qualitative investigation than replay tools.
  • Costs scale with event volume, which grows faster than user count.

Best for

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

Product teams that want fast, self-serve behavioural reporting.

Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.