Adjust vs Microsoft Clarity

Adjust is a mobile measurement partner (MMP) founded in Berlin in 2012 and acquired by AppLovin in 2021 in a deal valued at about $1 billion. It tells app marketers which ad networks, campaigns and creatives drove installs, in-app events and revenue, so budget can move to the channels that actually pay back. Its SDK runs inside iOS, Android and Unity apps.

The platform covers attribution and deep linking, Datascape dashboards and cohort reporting, a Fraud Prevention Suite that blocks click spam and fake installs, and support for Apple's SKAdNetwork and AdAttributionKit privacy frameworks. Add-on modules include InSight for incrementality testing with synthetic control groups, Audience Builder, CTV AdVision for connected-TV campaigns and SpendWorks for ad-spend mapping. The free Base plan covers up to 1,500 attributions per month; Core and Enterprise are custom-priced annual contracts.

Adjust suits app publishers, games studios and fintech or ecommerce apps with real paid user-acquisition budgets. AppsFlyer is its biggest rival with a larger partner ecosystem, while Singular leans harder into cost aggregation. Northbeam and Rockerbox, also in our catalog, solve web and DTC attribution rather than app installs, so they are not like-for-like replacements.

In May 2025 Adjust launched Growth Copilot in beta, an AI assistant that answers reporting questions in plain language and, with Pulse, can publish scheduled AI reports. When negotiating, ask for fraud prevention to be bundled, since it is often quoted as a separate add-on.

Microsoft Clarity is a free behavior analytics tool from Microsoft that records how visitors use a website or mobile app. Microsoft released it publicly in 2020, and it has stayed free with no traffic limits ever since. Its core job is showing why visitors struggle: where they click, how far they scroll, where they rage-click and where they leave.

Clarity combines session recordings with highlights of key moments, click, scroll and area heatmaps, and automatic detection of rage clicks, dead clicks and quick backs. Copilot features summarize recordings and heatmaps and let you ask questions about the data in chat. A lightweight SDK covers Android, iOS, Flutter and React Native apps, and an MCP server lets AI tools query Clarity data. Sensitive text is masked by default, and the tracking script is open source. There are no paid tiers: recordings are kept for 30 days and heatmap data for 13 months.

Clarity suits any site that wants qualitative UX insight without a budget, from blogs to large ecommerce stores. It lacks Hotjar's surveys and interview tools, offers limited funnel and product analytics compared with PostHog or Mixpanel, and short recording retention means you must favorite sessions you want to keep. Pair it with Google Analytics for traffic metrics.

In January 2026 Microsoft added Bot Activity reports on how AI crawlers access your site, later joined by Citations reports on when AI answers cite your pages, and launched Brand Agents, a conversational shopping assistant for Shopify stores.