Microsoft Clarity vs PostHog
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
FreeFree tier available
Free tierWhat 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.
Usage-based pricing per product with a substantial free tier; most small teams stay free indefinitely.
Free tier
Everything, unlimited, at any traffic level.
Large monthly free allowance across every product, plus free self-hosting.
Open source
MIT (core) / proprietary enterprise modules
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Category standard
Microsoft · since 2020
Widely used
PostHog · since 2020
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.
- 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.
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.
- 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.
Best for
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.
Pricing last reviewed August 2026 and is indicative only — confirm on each vendor’s own page.