Amplitude vs Microsoft Clarity

Amplitude is a digital analytics platform from San Francisco, founded in 2012 by Spenser Skates, Curtis Liu and Jeffrey Wang and listed on Nasdaq (AMPL) since its 2021 direct listing. It started as event-based product analytics for mobile apps and now helps product, growth and marketing teams see how people use their apps and websites and what drives conversion and retention.

The platform combines product and web analytics (funnels, retention, cohorts, journeys), session replay and heatmaps, feature flags and A/B testing, in-app guides and surveys (from the 2024 Command AI acquisition) and audience syncing to ad and messaging tools. AI agents can monitor dashboards, explain metric changes and answer questions, and an MCP server exposes Amplitude data to AI tools. Free covers 2 million events a month; Plus is usage-based; Growth and Enterprise are custom-priced through sales.

It fits product-led companies that need self-serve analysis for non-technical teams. Mixpanel is the closest rival with simpler pricing; PostHog is cheaper and open source with an engineering focus; Pendo is stronger on in-app guidance for B2B software; Google Analytics is free but built for marketing attribution.

In July 2026 Amplitude dropped the fixed 49 dollar Plus tier based on monthly tracked users for event-based pricing from 0 dollars, and the Free plan now includes session replay, guides and AI agents. Startups with under 20 employees and under 10 million dollars raised can apply for a free year of Growth.

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.