PostHog 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.
Usage-based pricing per product with a substantial free tier; most small teams stay free indefinitely.
Free with no traffic cap. Microsoft uses aggregated data to improve its products, which is the trade you are making.
Free tier
Large monthly free allowance across every product, plus free self-hosting.
Everything, unlimited, at any traffic level.
Open source
MIT (core) / proprietary enterprise modules
Self-hostable
No-code authoring
Languages
Platforms
Fits teams
Adoption
Widely used
PostHog · since 2020
Category standard
Microsoft · since 2020
Strengths
- 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.
- 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
- 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.
- 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
Startups and scale-ups consolidating analytics, replay and flags into one platform.
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.