If you don't run on Shopify, stay with Clarity. It's free, it's mature, the script is fast, the heatmaps and replays are good, and Microsoft isn't going anywhere. There's no point switching for switching's sake — and we're not going to pretend otherwise. Clarity earns its second-place slot in our roundup of the best Shopify session replay apps for 2026 for exactly that reason.
If you do run on Shopify and you need filters that understand customers, orders, and UTMs, Clarity isn't shaped for the work. Propel Replays is — replays filter by every Shopify customer field, link back to actual orders in Shopify admin, and the script measures 0ms on Core Web Vitals. Insight alerts surface the day's biggest orders, biggest abandoned carts, and biggest abandoned checkouts so you don't have to triage hundreds of sessions to find what mattered. Product-page alerts flag add-to-cart-rate drops before the weekly numbers do. Free up to 750 pageviews/mo, $6.44/mo annual after that.
The honest summary, from a real merchant: "I like it very much and it is very useful for insights — better than Microsoft clarity." — Gullye, Shopify App Store review.
Disclosure: we make Propel. We've tried to write this comparison the way we'd want a peer studio to write one against us — naming where Clarity wins, naming where Propel does, and not pretending the free option is bad just because we charge for ours.
The criteria that actually decide which one fits your store. The bolded column is the winner on each row.
Reflects each vendor's published positioning as of April 2026. Lighthouse delta is Propel's measured score with vs without the embed enabled on a Dawn theme; Clarity's impact is community-reported.
We make a competitor — and we still recommend Clarity in plenty of situations. These are the five.
Clarity's free tier is genuinely unlimited — there is no paid upgrade path because there is no paid tier. If your store is doing 10,000 pageviews/month and you can't budget any tooling spend, Clarity is the right tool. Propel's free tier covers 750 pageviews/month; past that, paid plans start at $6.44/mo (annual). We can't compete with $0.
Clarity is multi-platform by design. One Clarity project can cover a WordPress blog, a Webflow marketing site, and a Shopify store with the same dashboard, the same script, and the same login. Propel only works on Shopify storefronts; that's the entire shape of the product. If you need cross-property analytics under one roof, Clarity wins by default.
If your CRO workflow is "watch some sessions, look at heatmaps, ship a fix" without ever segmenting by who the visitor was, Clarity covers it competently. The Shopify-shape advantages don't earn their keep. Most stores graduate to needing customer-field segmentation eventually — but if you're not there yet, paying for filters you won't use is silly.
Clarity's terms allow Microsoft to use aggregated, anonymized behavioural data from your store for product improvement and analytics across its surface area (see clarity.microsoft.com/terms). For most independent stores, that's a fair trade for free analytics — honestly, it shouldn't be the top concern. If it doesn't bother you, Clarity is fine. If it does (Plus brand, regulated industry, allergic to ad-network adjacencies), that's a switch trigger.
Clarity has documentation, a community forum, and Microsoft's wider support apparatus — all decent. What it doesn't have is a team you can email and get a same-day reply from a human who's actually run a Shopify store. If you'd rather Google your way out of a problem than email someone, Clarity's support shape is fine. If you'd rather email Tom (our Support Team Lead) and have a fix by tomorrow morning, that's where Propel earns its keep.
The cases where the Shopify-shape pays for itself many times over.
"What do my VIP customers do on the checkout?" "Is this PDP working for first-time buyers?" "Why do $200+ carts abandon at the shipping step?" "What does a returning wholesale customer do differently from a new retail one?" Clarity can't filter to any of those segments because it doesn't see them. Propel's filter UI defaults to the entire Shopify customer schema. If your real questions are Shopify-shaped, the tool that answers them is too.
Both tools auto-summarize replays now — Clarity with Copilot, Propel with our own model. The difference is what the summary can see. Propel's narrative knows this is a returning VIP with three prior orders and a $240 cart; Clarity's narrative describes what happened on the page generically. For a merchant trying to figure out why this specific customer bailed, the Shopify context is what makes the summary actionable instead of just descriptive.
Propel proactively surfaces the day's biggest orders, biggest abandoned carts, and biggest abandoned checkouts — so you watch what matters first instead of triaging hundreds of sessions to find the signal. Product-page alerts catch significant drops in add-to-cart rate so you hear about a broken theme update or new friction the day it starts, not the week after. Clarity's dashboard is competent at showing you everything; Propel's job is to surface the few things that matter.
Clarity's script loads through theme.liquid as a third-party tag — it may add Lighthouse cost depending on theme; we don't have a published benchmark on it. Propel measures 0ms impact — the script ships as a Shopify theme app embed, which Shopify injects at the bottom of the page after the rest of the theme has loaded, async, with the script itself non-blocking. Lighthouse scores are identical with Replays installed and disabled. If you're already squeezing every percentile of speed, a Shopify-native embed is the structurally cleaner shape.
Clarity's UI is competent but generic — designed for any website, not for the rhythm of a Shopify store. Propel's dashboard is shaped like Shopify: the segment dropdown is full of Shopify customer fields by default, replays carry an order-link button that drops you straight into Shopify admin, the empty states reference real Shopify objects, and the URL-pattern filters understand collection pages and product handles. Craft compounds — a tool that fits your stack reduces friction every time you open it.
Propel data lives on infrastructure we control. We don't allow ourselves to use your replays, heatmaps, or events for anything other than serving your dashboard — no model training on it, no sharing it with ad networks, no aggregated-product-improvement carve-out. If you cancel, we delete it. For Plus brands, regulated stores, and anyone with a privacy-first brand promise, that's a defensible answer to "where does my visitor data go?"
Tom (our Support Team Lead) shows up by name in five-star App Store reviews more times than any of us care to count. Tickets are answered by humans, often the same person who built the feature. Replies are typically same-day, often within hours. Clarity has docs and a forum. The two are not substitutes.
Free up to 750 pageviews/month. $6.44/mo (annual) for 20,000 pageviews. $9.69/mo for the Plus plan. $25.94/mo for Premium. No surprise tier jumps, no contact-sales gates, no "let's hop on a call" before showing you the price. The independent studio behind it has been bootstrapped and profitable since 2019; pricing isn't a runway problem to solve later.
The core feature for both tools — and where the differences start to matter.
The honest take: Clarity wins on raw capture volume — unlimited sessions on a free tier is a number Propel can't beat. Where Clarity stops earning is the moment the question gets specific. "Show me replays from VIP customers who hit checkout in the last seven days" is two clicks in Propel and not possible in Clarity. The per-replay AI summary is the other separator: it's not a feature checkbox, it's a workflow shift — most Propel merchants stop watching full replays after a couple of weeks because the summaries surface the answer first.
Both tools cover the basics well. Segmentation is where Shopify-shape pays off.
The honest take: on a single page, the two tools' click heatmaps look similar — both are accurate, both are readable. Clarity has more heatmap types today (scroll and movement); Propel has those on the near-term roadmap. Where Propel earns its place is the broader workflow: replays carry the Shopify-customer filtering, replays link to actual orders in admin, and the script is 0ms on Lighthouse. Heatmaps are one slice of the picture; how you get from "heatmap shows a problem" to "I know which customers are hitting it" is the Shopify-shaped half.
The most under-discussed difference, and the one Plus brands and regulated stores raise first.
The honest take: Clarity has Microsoft's full security and compliance posture — SOC 2, ISO 27001, the whole stack — and a more mature legal apparatus than any small studio. Where it gets uncomfortable is the "use of aggregated, anonymized behavioural data for product improvement and analytics" allowance in the terms (see clarity.microsoft.com/terms). For most independent stores, that's fine. For Plus brands, regulated industries, or any business whose brand promise includes "we don't sell your data," it's the line that gets crossed. Propel's terms don't carry that clause; if you cancel, the data is gone.
The category Clarity has zero coverage on. This is where the comparison stops being symmetric.
The honest take: this isn't a category Clarity has chosen to compete in. Clarity's strategy is "free, multi-platform, Microsoft-backed" — the Shopify partner page is roughly 500 words and exists as a checkbox, not a position. For a Shopify merchant whose questions are Shopify-shaped, every row above is a real workflow gap. For a multi-property analytics setup that includes a Shopify store as one of three properties, Clarity's choice is defensible — you don't pay extra for capabilities you wouldn't use.
Clarity wins this category — and we're not going to pretend otherwise. Here's where the cost-of-free shows up.
The honest take: on price, Clarity wins outright at any volume. Propel's free tier is fine for stores doing a few hundred sessions a day, but past 750 pageviews/month you're paying. The math we'd run as a merchant: $6.44/mo against the cost of Clarity's filter ceiling. If your store does 5,000 sessions a month and you spend an hour a week trying to answer a Shopify-shaped question that Clarity's filters can't reach, the $6.44/mo is the cheapest hour you'll buy all year. If your store is doing 5,000 sessions a month and you don't ask Shopify-shaped questions, Clarity is the right call. Both are reasonable; only one is honest about what it is.
Where being a small studio earns its keep.
The honest take: Microsoft's docs are professionally written and the community forum has real signal. What's missing is the "I'll email Tom and he'll reply by lunch" experience. For solo founders and small teams who can't afford a multi-hour debugging session every time something breaks, that experience has a real dollar value — and it's a kind of support a free Microsoft product structurally can't deliver.
Easier than switching from Hotjar or Lucky Orange. Five minutes of setup; two weeks of overlap if you want to compare.
One click. Replays adds itself as a Shopify theme app embed — no GTM, no theme.liquid edits, no code. The tracking script ships async at the bottom of the page after Shopify's done its work, which is why we measure 0ms impact on Core Web Vitals. First replay typically lands in your dashboard within a minute of normal traffic.
We genuinely recommend this. The two scripts don't interfere — Clarity loads through your theme.liquid, Propel loads via the theme app embed. Watch the same week's traffic in both tools. Compare which surfaces the answers faster, which filters fit your questions, which one you actually open in the morning. After two weeks the call is usually obvious.
Switching from Clarity is easier than switching from Hotjar or Lucky Orange because there's nothing to anxiously preserve. Clarity doesn't offer session export — historical replays live with Microsoft regardless of what you do next. Heatmap aggregates can't be exported either. So the question of "do I lose my Clarity data" is moot: that data was never yours to keep. Start fresh; a week of Shopify-shaped data tends to be more useful than a year of generic data.
Once you've made the call, pull the Clarity snippet out of theme.liquid (or remove the GTM tag, or uninstall the Clarity Shopify partner integration — depending on how you installed it). One fewer third-party script in your theme is, separately, a small Lighthouse win. If you'd like a hand and you're stuck, our support team — Tom in particular — has walked dozens of merchants through this. Email us; replies usually land the same day.
Microsoft Clarity is a genuinely good product. It's free, it's fast, the dashboards are clean, and Microsoft is a stable home for it. For non-Shopify sites, multi-property setups, or stores that don't need customer-, order-, or cart-value segmentation, it's the right tool. We're not going to pretend otherwise just because we make a competitor.
Where Clarity stops being the right tool is the moment your questions get Shopify-shaped. "What do my VIP customers do at checkout?" "Why do $200+ carts abandon at the shipping step?" "Is this PDP working for first-time mobile buyers from paid traffic?" Those are filter combinations Clarity can't see, because Clarity's data model doesn't include Shopify customers, orders, carts, or Markets. You can't ask the question; you certainly can't answer it.
Propel Replays is the tool we built because we ran a Shopify store and couldn't answer those questions either. The Shopify-shape is real, not marketing — replays filter by every customer field, link back to actual orders in Shopify admin, the script measures 0ms on Core Web Vitals, AI summaries see Shopify customer and order context, insight alerts surface the day's biggest orders and biggest abandoned carts and checkouts, the support team replies same-day, and your data stays yours. The cost of admission is $6.44/mo annual past the free tier. For a Shopify merchant whose conversion rate matters more than their tooling budget, that's the cheapest CRO investment you'll make.
Our actual recommendation: install both on the free tiers. Run them in parallel for two weeks. Watch which one you open in the morning. The answer is usually clear by week two — and we're confident enough in that outcome to ask you to compare against the strongest free competitor in the category, on your own store, with your own traffic.
One last verbatim, from a merchant who did exactly that: "I like it very much and it is very useful for insights — better than Microsoft clarity." — Gullye, Shopify App Store review.
Install Propel Replays free on the Shopify App Store. Free up to 750 pageviews/mo. 7-day free trial on every paid plan. 35% off when billed annually. Run it side-by-side with Clarity for two weeks — pick whichever fits.