Microsoft Clarity Pricing 2026: Free Forever, and the Real Tradeoffs

Microsoft Clarity costs nothing. Microsoft’s own documentation puts it plainly: “Clarity is a free service forever. You never encounter traffic limits or are compelled to upgrade to a paid version.”(source)

That is the whole pricing answer, and it is unusual enough to be worth stating without hedging. Most “free” analytics tools are a trial with a session cap wearing a costume. Clarity is not. There are no traffic limits, no site limits, and no seat limits.

So this post is not really about price. It is about what you are actually choosing when you choose the free option, because there are real tradeoffs, and none of them are the ones people expect.

What “free” actually covers

Straight from Microsoft’s documentation:

For scale context, Clarity’s own FAQ says it processes more than 1 petabyte of data from over 100 million users per month.(source) This is not a side project that might disappear next quarter.

Anyone telling you the catch is a hidden paywall has not read the documentation. The catches are elsewhere.

Catch 1: 30 days of replay history

This is the one that matters most in practice.

Clarity retains recordings for 30 days from the time of recording. However, Favorite recordings and randomly selected sample of recordings are retained for up to 9 months.(source)

Heatmaps are treated differently and are accessible for up to 9 months, as are labels.(source)

So the shape is: a rolling 30-day replay window, with a 9-month archive for heatmaps, favourites, and a random sample. In day-to-day use that is usually fine, because the reason you watch a replay is almost always something that happened recently. Where it bites is retrospective work. If a customer emails in October about a broken experience in August, that specific session is gone unless it happened to land in the sample.

The practical habit this creates: favourite anything interesting the moment you see it, because favouriting is what promotes a session from the 30-day bucket to the 9-month one.

Worth saying plainly: 30-day recording retention is not a Clarity weakness, it is the category norm. Propel Replays is also 30 days on every plan. And Clarity’s long heatmap window is a real advantage over us, not a tie: our heatmaps currently have no date filter, so if being able to pull up a specific historical heatmap matters to you, Clarity does something we do not.

Catch 2: the Shopify features are gated by Shopify plan

This is the detail most comparison posts miss, and it is documented:

• The Purchases feature is only available on Clarity projects of Shopify sites.(source)
• Checkout Abandonment is only available on Clarity projects of Shopify Plus sites.(source)

Read that second line again if you are on a standard Shopify plan, because it is the single most commonly cited reason merchants install a behaviour tool in the first place. Checkout abandonment analysis in Clarity is a Shopify Plus feature. If you are on Basic, Grow or Advanced, it is not available to you.

Clarity also flags that its numbers will not perfectly match Shopify’s:

Clarity calculates the Purchase Conversion rate from the data that we receive from your site. This data might not always receive the same payloads or full session scope as Shopify. As such, there might be minor differences in the rate reported.(source)

That is an honest disclosure and every script-based tool has some version of it. Just know which number you are quoting in a meeting.

Catch 3: the script can quietly fall out of your theme

Clarity’s own FAQ has an entry for this, which tells you how often it happens:

My Shopify project was collecting data previously. Why did it stop? Make sure to update your Shopify installation after major design changes. Design changes might cause the Clarity script to be removed.(source)

This is the failure mode that costs real money, because it is silent. You switch themes or take a big theme update, the script goes with it, and you do not find out until you go looking for data that was never collected. There is no error and no alert. The data is simply not there.

If you run Clarity on Shopify, put a recurring check in your calendar tied to your theme release process, and verify collection after every significant theme change. That is not a hypothetical risk, it is the vendor documenting its own most common support case.

So who should just use Clarity?

Genuinely, a lot of Shopify merchants. We would rather say that than pretend otherwise:

• You are pre-revenue or early, and budget is the binding constraint. Free with no traffic ceiling is an excellent deal and Clarity is a real product, not a toy.
• You run several sites or several brands. Unlimited projects on one account is hard to beat.
• Your traffic is large and spiky. Session-capped tools punish exactly the weeks you most want to watch. Clarity does not meter you at all.
• You want long heatmap history at zero cost. Nine months, free, is a strong offer.

If you are in one of those buckets, install Clarity and get on with running your store. We publish a fuller feature-by-feature breakdown at Microsoft Clarity vs Propel and a wider look at the category at Microsoft Clarity alternatives, but you do not need either to make this call.

When the free tool is the expensive one

The argument for paying is never “Clarity is bad”. It is that Clarity is a general web analytics tool that supports Shopify, and some problems need a tool that starts from Shopify.

The difference shows up in three places:

1. Segmenting by who the visitor is. The useful question is rarely “show me sessions”, it is “show me sessions from repeat customers with a cart over $200”. That requires Shopify customer and order context. Propel Replays filters replays by Shopify customer properties: customer tag, order count, total spent, cart value, device, country, UTM, landing page, logged in or anonymous.
2. Being told which sessions to watch. Volume is the real enemy. Replay tools give you thousands of sessions and no priority order. Propel’s insight alerts surface specific high-value session types, the biggest orders, biggest abandoned carts and biggest abandoned checkouts, so you watch the ten sessions where someone nearly spent $400 and left, instead of scrubbing five hundred.
3. Catching regressions on product pages. Product-page alerts flag significant drops in add-to-cart rate on a page, which is how you find a bad theme update or a broken image before it costs you a month.

Those are the things worth $7.43 a month, which is Propel Replays on annual Basic. There is also a free plan at 750 pageviews a month if you want to compare the two side by side on your own store before deciding.

The honest bottom line

Clarity’s price is not a trick. It is free forever, unlimited traffic, unlimited sites, and Microsoft says it does not sell your data. If you are choosing on price, choose Clarity and do not feel clever about it.

Choose something else when the cost you care about is not measured in dollars: when you need Shopify customer context in your segments, when you need checkout abandonment analysis without being on Shopify Plus, or when the thing eating your week is not the price of the tool but the hours spent watching sessions that were never going to tell you anything.

If you want the funnel numbers to size the problem before you pick a tool at all, our Shopify conversion rate benchmarks and cart abandonment benchmarks are the place to start.

Sources

• Microsoft Clarity FAQ (free forever, no traffic limits, no site limits, no member limits, does not sell data, 30-day recording retention with 9-month favourites and sample, 9-month heatmap and label retention, Shopify Purchases and Shopify Plus Checkout Abandonment gating, purchase conversion rate variance, theme changes removing the script, 1 petabyte from 100 million users monthly).
• About Clarity, Microsoft Learn (“Clarity is a free service forever. There’s no obligation to upgrade to a paid version.”).
• Propel Replays pricing and capabilities as published on /apps/replays.