Is Microsoft Clarity free? What "free forever" actually costs a Shopify store

A genuinely free enterprise-grade tool creates a specific kind of suspicion, and Microsoft Clarity creates it more than most. Unlimited session recordings, unlimited heatmaps, no traffic cap, no upgrade prompt, from a company worth trillions. The most common follow-up search after "microsoft clarity shopify" is some version of why is this free, and the ranking pages answer it with a shrug.

So here is a straight accounting for a Shopify merchant. The money price is genuinely zero and I will show you Microsoft saying so. The real costs are paid in retention, coverage and cookies, and every one below is a verbatim quote from Microsoft's own pricing page or documentation, read on 9 August 2026, with the URL attached. Nothing here is a competitor's characterisation. Clarity is a very good tool that has four documented limits no page currently ranking for it mentions.

What Microsoft Clarity actually is

TL;DR Behaviour analytics: session recordings, heatmaps, funnels, rage and dead click detection, AI summaries. On the Shopify App Store it is rated 4.6 from 1,824 reviews. It is a good product, and the rest of this page assumes that.

Microsoft's definition is plain: Clarity is "a user behavior analytics tool that helps you understand how users interact with your website", with session recordings, heatmaps and ML insights as the headline features (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/faq). In merchant terms, you watch anonymised replays of real shoppers moving through your store, and you read click, scroll and area maps showing where attention actually lands versus where you assumed it would.

The feature list on the pricing page is longer than most paid competitors offer at their entry tier: always-on recordings; instantaneous click, scroll, area and conversion heatmaps; rage click and dead click insights; rich segmentation with 40+ filters; smart events; a Google Analytics integration. Microsoft describes the whole thing as unlimited: "Clarity supports unlimited heatmaps, websites, and team members" (clarity.microsoft.com/pricing, read 9 August 2026).

Two signals of maturity worth stating before the criticism starts. The Shopify App Store listing, "Microsoft Clarity: AI Insights", is rated 4.6 out of 5 from 1,824 reviews and is priced Free with no in-app charges (apps.shopify.com/microsoft-clarity, checked 9 August 2026). Clarity's own front page claims 2M+ sites and apps globally. This is not an abandoned side project, and a rage-click report you did not pay for, on a store you were guessing about, is a real gift.

What follows is not an argument against installing it. It is the four things to know before the data you were counting on turns out not to be there.

Is Microsoft Clarity really free? Yes, and there is no paid tier

TL;DR There is no upgrade path, no traffic cap, and no sampling. Microsoft says so in two independent places. If you were waiting for the pricing catch, there is not one.

Plenty of "free" analytics tools mean free until 10,000 sessions. Clarity does not. The pricing page is headed "It's free, forever" and the sentence under it reads: "Enjoy all the features of Clarity at absolutely zero cost. You'll never run into traffic limits or be forced to upgrade to a paid version" (clarity.microsoft.com/pricing). There is no plan selector on that page, because there are no plans.

Microsoft's documentation repeats it independently: "Clarity is a free service forever. You never encounter traffic limits or are compelled to upgrade to a paid version" (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/faq, updated 30 June 2026). The same FAQ adds two things that matter more to a merchant than the price does:

• No sampling. Verbatim: "No sampling (that is, tracking only a portion of your site's traffic)." Sampling is how a lot of free tiers quietly degrade. Clarity does not do it.
• No per-site limit. "There are absolutely no limits on the number of sites per account." Three storefronts means three projects at no cost.

Microsoft frames its scale as evidence it can afford this: Clarity "processes more than 1 petabyte of data from over 100 million users per month. Also, there are no traffic limits on these sites."

There is exactly one documented ceiling and it is capacity, not commerce: "Clarity records up to 100,000 sessions per project per day." A store hitting that in a single day has a bigger analytics budget than this article assumes. The dollar price of Clarity is zero and stays zero.

Why Microsoft gives it away, in Microsoft's own words

TL;DR Microsoft states the trade openly on the pricing page: your visitors' anonymised behaviour helps train its machine learning models. It also states it will never share that data with third parties. Both halves are quotes.

This is the question the SERP keeps asking and nobody answers with a source. Microsoft answers it directly, under a heading on its pricing page called "Why is it free?".

The relevant passage, verbatim: "Clarity is built by Microsoft, one of the largest technology companies in the world. Microsoft processes a massive amount of anonymous data around user behavior to gain insights and improve machine learning models that power many of our products and services." Microsoft then says Clarity is one of the ways it gathers that data, and that this is the reason the product is available for free (clarity.microsoft.com/pricing, read 9 August 2026).

That is the deal, stated by the vendor without being asked. You get a mature behaviour analytics platform. Microsoft gets aggregate behavioural signal at a scale almost nobody else can assemble.

Fairness requires the other half of the same section, equally verbatim: "We will never share your data with third parties." Microsoft's FAQ backs it up: "Clarity doesn't sell data", and "Clarity is GDPR-compliant as a data controller" (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/faq). Data is stored in Azure. You will find competitor comparison pages that characterise this arrangement in much darker language; those are marketing documents from companies that charge for the same category, and Microsoft's own statement is the one on the record.

What Clarity captures is documented rather than mysterious: interaction events (clicks, scrolls, mouse moves, input), diagnostic events, page events and custom events, plus the DOM information needed to replay the page. On page content, Microsoft's data doc states: "For privacy-sensitive fields, this is masked content not the actual text" (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/setup-and-installation/clarity-data). The capture code is open source on GitHub, which is more transparency than most paid session-recording tools offer.

So the price is not the catch. The next four sections are.

Cost #1: your recordings are gone in 30 days

TL;DR "The data is retained for the webmaster's consumption up to 30 days from the time of recording." Favourited recordings and a random sample survive up to 9 months. Nothing else does, and you cannot download an individual recording to keep it.

This is the most consequential fact about Clarity for a Shopify store, and it is close to absent from the pages currently ranking for it. Of the top-ranking results we could fetch on 9 August 2026, the Shopify Community install thread, the GemPages integration guide and Microsoft's own Shopify funnel blog post, none mentions the retention window at all.

Microsoft's FAQ, verbatim: "The data is retained for the webmaster's consumption up to 30 days from the time of recording." The recordings-specific answer adds the exception, and it is a genuine one that deserves equal billing: "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" (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/faq).

Read those two sentences together and the operating rule is simple: anything you might want later, you have to favourite now. Clarity will not decide that for you, and you cannot go back for it. The same FAQ closes the escape hatch: "Currently, you can't delete or download specific recordings." Clarity does have a Data Export API, but it is the wrong shape for this: it returns dashboard insight data as JSON, and only for the last 1, 2 or 3 days (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/setup-and-installation/clarity-data-export-api). There is no route that archives a session replay to your own storage.

Why this bites a merchant specifically. Shopify retail runs on annual cycles. You want to compare this November's product page behaviour against last November's, or work out why the bundle that converted in spring stopped converting in summer. Clarity cannot answer either question, because the earlier evidence no longer exists. In December, the Black Friday sessions that would tell you why checkout stalled are already deleted. Your conversion rate for that week survives in Shopify Analytics. The recordings that would explain it do not.

The workaround is a habit rather than a setting. Once a week, spend fifteen minutes in Recordings, filter to sessions that abandoned, and favourite anything showing a pattern you might need to prove later. Favourites buy you nine months. It is not an archive, but it is the difference between having evidence and remembering that you once saw something.

Cost #2: checkout abandonment is a Shopify Plus feature

TL;DR Every Shopify store gets a Purchases card. Only Shopify Plus stores get Checkout Abandonment broken down by step, because only Plus gets checkout page tracking. On a non-Plus store, Clarity goes dark at the exact point revenue is lost.

Microsoft documents this in two separate places, and neither is hidden, but no third-party page seems to have read them.

From the Shopify install page, as an opening note: "For Shopify Plus accounts, the checkout and post-checkout pages are now tracked in Clarity through Shopify's Pixel" (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/third-party-integrations/shopify). From the e-commerce insights page, stated as a hard feature boundary: "The Purchases feature is only available on Clarity projects of Shopify sites", and "Checkout Abandonment feature is only available on Clarity projects of Shopify Plus sites" (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/insights/e-commerce-insights).

Clarity feature	Available to	Microsoft's wording
Session recordings and heatmaps	Any Shopify plan	Free on every project, no traffic limit
Purchases card and filter	Any Shopify plan	“Only available on Clarity projects of Shopify sites”
Checkout Abandonment card, broken down by step	Shopify Plus only	“Only available on Clarity projects of Shopify Plus sites”
Checkout and post-checkout page tracking	Shopify Plus only	“For Shopify Plus accounts, the checkout and post-checkout pages are now tracked”
Product filters (name, price, brand, rating)	Any plan with Product JSON-LD	“Only available for sites that use Product Json LD”

Sources: learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/insights/e-commerce-insights (dated 1 December 2025) and learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/third-party-integrations/shopify (dated 23 July 2025).

What Plus stores get is genuinely detailed. Microsoft splits Shopify checkout into four steps, "Contact information", "Shipping method", "Payment" and "Other", and reports abandonment against each one, with a click through to recordings of the sessions that dropped there. That is a proper diagnostic. If payment is where 40% of your abandonments happen, you can watch forty of them.

What everyone else gets is the Purchases card: the percentage of sessions that ended in a purchase, plus a filter to isolate them. Useful, but that is an outcome, not a diagnosis. You can see a session did not buy. You cannot see which checkout step it died on, because Clarity was not watching those pages.

So on a non-Plus store the coverage map runs from landing through collection, product page and cart, then stops the moment the shopper clicks Checkout. Clarity will show you hesitation on the product page and rage clicks on a broken variant selector. It will not show you the shipping-cost reaction on step two of checkout, which is where a large share of Shopify abandonment happens.

The right response is not to skip Clarity, it is to know which instrument covers which stretch. Shopify's own checkout analytics reports funnel drop-off on every plan, so use Clarity before checkout and Shopify's reporting after. Our breakdown of where ecommerce funnels actually leak walks the same stages.

One more prerequisite so nobody is surprised: "Product Information is only available for sites that use Product Json LD." Most modern Shopify themes emit it, but if yours does not, the product name, price, brand and rating filters simply will not appear.

Cost #3: five of the seven cookies are Microsoft's, not yours

TL;DR Clarity sets seven cookies. Two are first-party. Five are third-party Microsoft cookies, and one of those, MUID, is documented as being used "for advertising, site analytics, and other operational purposes". Consent enforcement for the EEA, UK and Switzerland began 31 October 2025.

This is the section that most needs to be quoted rather than characterised, so the whole table below is Microsoft's own wording, copied from its cookie documentation.

Cookie	Party	Microsoft's stated purpose
_clck	First-party	Persists the Clarity User ID and preferences, unique to that site is attributed to the same user ID.
_clsk	First-party	Connects multiple page views by a user into a single Clarity session recording.
CLID	Third-party	Identifies the first-time Clarity saw this user on any site using Clarity.
ANONCHK	Third-party	Indicates whether MUID is transferred to ANID, a cookie used for advertising. Clarity doesn't use ANID and so this is always set to 0.
MR	Third-party	Indicates whether to refresh MUID.
MUID	Third-party	Identifies unique web browsers visiting Microsoft sites. These cookies are used for advertising, site analytics, and other operational purposes.
SM	Third-party	Used in synchronizing the MUID across Microsoft domains.

Source: learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/setup-and-installation/clarity-cookies. Third-party rows highlighted. Microsoft also notes: "If a user has disabled cookies on the browser, Clarity doesn't set cookies."

Two things follow from that table, and they pull in opposite directions.

The first: Clarity is not a purely first-party analytics install. Microsoft's framing is unambiguous: "Clarity's typical usage requires that non-essential cookies are set on your visitor's browser", and five of those cookies belong to Microsoft domains rather than yours. MUID in particular is described as identifying "unique web browsers visiting Microsoft sites", used "for advertising, site analytics, and other operational purposes". If your cookie policy currently says you set analytics cookies only, that sentence is worth re-reading against it.

The second is the counterweight, which Microsoft documents just as plainly and which critical write-ups tend to omit: ANONCHK "Indicates whether MUID is transferred to ANID, a cookie used for advertising. Clarity doesn't use ANID and so this is always set to 0." The advertising handoff that these cookies might imply is explicitly switched off. Microsoft's FAQ adds that Clarity's features "rely on first-party cookies" and that "Any third-party cookies used by Clarity are to support operational purposes like advertising", so Clarity keeps working as browsers restrict third-party cookies.

Now the operational part, the bit that will generate a support ticket. Verbatim: "Starting October 31, 2025, Clarity begins enforcing consent signal requirements for page visits originating from the European Economic Area (EEA), United Kingdom (UK), and Switzerland (CH). A valid consent signal is required to ensure full functionality of Clarity features for users in these regions."

Enforcement means your consent banner has to actively tell Clarity what the shopper chose, through Clarity's consent API or a supported consent management platform. If it does not, Microsoft describes a failure mode subtle enough to be mistaken for a bug: "If cookie consent is not provided, Clarity cannot track a continuous user journey. For instance, if a user visits page A and then page B during the same visit, Clarity treats these as two separate sessions." Session counts inflate, recordings fragment, and the funnel quietly stops meaning what you think it means. Clarity decides who needs consent by IP geolocation, and support for Google Consent Mode is still listed as "coming soon". Selling only into North America? None of this affects you today, though Microsoft advises implementing the signal anyway since "enforcement may extend to other regions in the future".

Cost #4: you cannot delete one shopper's data

TL;DR "You need to delete the entire project to delete user's data." There is no per-user erasure, no per-recording delete, and deleting a project is irreversible.

Three quotes, all from the same FAQ, and together they describe a real problem for any store selling into a jurisdiction with a right to erasure.

On per-user deletion: "You need to delete the entire project to delete user's data." On partial deletion: "You can't delete data without deleting the project." On recovery: "Clarity can't restore deleted projects. You need to create a new project and add the new tracking code to your webpage" (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/faq).

So if a customer exercises a data subject request and you need their session data out of Clarity, the only mechanism Microsoft provides is to destroy the whole project: every other shopper's data, every heatmap, every favourited recording, and your tracking continuity. Then you start again with a new tracking code.

Two things soften this without removing it. The 30-day window means the data ages out quickly on its own, which is a form of minimisation. And Clarity masks privacy-sensitive field content by default rather than capturing typed text. But "it expires soon" is not "it has been erased on request", and that is a question for your own counsel. I am reporting what Microsoft documents, not advising you on compliance.

How to install Clarity on Shopify properly

TL;DR Use the App Store listing, not a theme.liquid paste. The step people miss is the Clarity JS toggle in app settings, without which no data arrives. If you already have the snippet in your theme, the app migrates it for you.

Several guides still teach a manual paste of the Clarity script into theme.liquid. That was correct once. Microsoft's own documentation now describes the app route as the default (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/third-party-integrations/shopify, dated 23 July 2025).

If you have never used Clarity on this store

1. Install the app. In the Shopify App Store, search for and select "Microsoft Clarity: AI Insights", then Install.
2. Review the permissions. Microsoft's step 2: "On the pop-up window, review the data access permissions and select Install." Read them rather than clicking through. This is a script that will observe your shoppers.
3. Open app settings. Microsoft's step 3: "If this is your first time installing Clarity, activate the Clarity JS to get started. Select Go to app settings and a new tab opens."
4. Turn on the toggle. This is the step that costs people a week. Verbatim: "On the new tab, ensure that the Clarity JS is toggled on, and select Save." Installing the app alone does not start collection.
5. Refresh, then wait. "The dashboard should refresh automatically. If it doesn't update the view, select Refresh." Then: "Allow a few hours for your dashboard to populate with data."

If your dashboard is empty the next morning, check the toggle before anything else. An empty Clarity dashboard is far more often an unsaved toggle than a broken install.

If you already pasted the Clarity snippet into your theme

Do not rip it out first. Microsoft's note, verbatim: "If Clarity was installed by editing your theme.liquid file and adding your tracking code, the new Shopify App automatically migrates you without any code changes." Installing the app handles the transition.

If you had an existing Clarity project from before the app and you want to keep its history, there is a separate flow: "If you previously installed Clarity prior to the app, you need to connect your existing project. Select Connect Project and an email is sent to the project admin." You follow the link in that email and sign in to complete the connection. Worth knowing in advance, because on a store that has changed hands or agencies, the project admin may not be you.

Three things to do in the first week

• Check your theme for a duplicate script. After migration, a leftover manual snippet is the usual cause of doubled sessions. Anything you pasted into theme.liquid is theme code you maintain, and it will not survive a theme swap cleanly. The app will.
• Wire your consent banner if you have any EEA, UK or Swiss traffic, before you start trusting the numbers.
• Start favouriting. Given the 30-day window, build the habit in week one rather than discovering it in month three.

What Clarity will not do, and what to pair it with

TL;DR Clarity shows you what happened. It has no experimentation feature, so it cannot tell you whether a change you made actually earned more money. That is a different instrument.

Clarity is a diagnostic tool and an unusually generous one. What it does not have, anywhere in its feature list or its documentation, is a way to test a fix. There is no split-testing feature, and I looked for one before writing this sentence. That is a scope decision rather than a shortcoming: replay tools observe, testing tools decide.

The gap matters because of what happens after a good Clarity session. You watch twenty recordings, notice shoppers hammering a variant swatch that does not respond on mobile, and fix it. Then you compare last week's conversion rate against this week's and conclude the fix worked. It might have. It might also be that last week was a paid-traffic week and this one was not. Clarity gave you a real observation and no way to attribute the outcome, and a before-and-after on unequal weeks is not evidence.

The pairing that works is boring: use Clarity to find the friction, then run a split test on the change so the result is attributable. Shopify has native A/B testing, and there are Shopify-specific testing apps across a range of prices. Our comparison of the Shopify A/B testing apps worth considering covers what each one actually splits, and the Shopify CRO playbook covers where observation and testing sit relative to each other.

StorePilot, which is ours and which I should say plainly is pre-launch and not yet installable, is being built for that second half: watching behaviour, working out which friction is worth acting on, and running the test that confirms whether the fix earned anything. Nothing on this page depends on that. Clarity is free, it is good, and it is available right now. Install it.

The honest takeaway: Microsoft Clarity's price really is zero, and the four things it costs you instead are retention, checkout coverage below Plus, third-party cookies, and all-or-nothing deletion. All four are documented by Microsoft, none of them is a reason not to install it, and all four are reasons to know what you are looking at.

Questions merchants keep asking

Is Microsoft Clarity free?

Yes, completely, and there is no paid tier to upgrade to. Microsoft's pricing page is headed "It's free, forever" and reads: "Enjoy all the features of Clarity at absolutely zero cost. You'll never run into traffic limits or be forced to upgrade to a paid version" (clarity.microsoft.com/pricing, read 9 August 2026). The documentation agrees: "Clarity is a free service forever" (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/faq). This is not a freemium ladder with a hidden ceiling. The costs are real but they are not billed in dollars.

Why is Microsoft Clarity free?

Microsoft answers this itself, on the pricing page, under a heading literally called "Why is it free?": "Clarity is built by Microsoft, one of the largest technology companies in the world. Microsoft processes a massive amount of anonymous data around user behavior to gain insights and improve machine learning models that power many of our products and services." Microsoft goes on to say Clarity is one of the ways it gathers that data, and that this is why the tool is free. The same section states: "We will never share your data with third parties" (clarity.microsoft.com/pricing, read 9 August 2026). So the exchange is stated openly: your shoppers' anonymised behaviour feeds Microsoft's models, and Microsoft does not resell it.

How long does Microsoft Clarity keep my data?

Thirty days for the bulk of it. Microsoft's FAQ: "The data is retained for the webmaster's consumption up to 30 days from the time of recording." There is one exception in Clarity's favour, and it is worth knowing: "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" (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/faq, updated 30 June 2026). Practically: if you want a session in six months, favourite it now.

Does Microsoft Clarity track Shopify checkout?

Partly, and the boundary depends on your Shopify plan. Microsoft's install note says: "For Shopify Plus accounts, the checkout and post-checkout pages are now tracked in Clarity through Shopify's Pixel." The e-commerce insights doc states the feature split outright: "The Purchases feature is only available on Clarity projects of Shopify sites" but "Checkout Abandonment feature is only available on Clarity projects of Shopify Plus sites" (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/insights/e-commerce-insights). Every Shopify store gets a purchase rate. Only Plus stores get the step-by-step breakdown of where checkout was abandoned.

How do I install Microsoft Clarity on Shopify?

Install "Microsoft Clarity: AI Insights" from the Shopify App Store, review the data access permissions and select Install, then open app settings, make sure the Clarity JS toggle is on and Save. That toggle is the step people skip, and without it no data arrives. Microsoft then says to "allow a few hours for your dashboard to populate with data" (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/third-party-integrations/shopify). Already pasted the snippet into theme.liquid? Do not remove it by hand: "the new Shopify App automatically migrates you without any code changes."

How many cookies does Microsoft Clarity set, and are they third-party?

Seven. Two are first-party (_clck, _clsk) and five are third-party Microsoft cookies (CLID, ANONCHK, MR, MUID, SM). Microsoft describes MUID as follows: "Identifies unique web browsers visiting Microsoft sites. These cookies are used for advertising, site analytics, and other operational purposes." In fairness, Microsoft also documents a limit on that: ANONCHK "Indicates whether MUID is transferred to ANID, a cookie used for advertising. Clarity doesn't use ANID and so this is always set to 0" (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/setup-and-installation/clarity-cookies, dated 27 August 2025).

Is Microsoft Clarity GDPR compliant?

Microsoft states: "Clarity is GDPR-compliant as a data controller" and "Clarity doesn't sell data" (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/faq). Two operational details still land on you. Consent: "Starting October 31, 2025, Clarity begins enforcing consent signal requirements for page visits originating from the European Economic Area (EEA), United Kingdom (UK), and Switzerland (CH)", and you must pass that signal via the Clarity consent API or a supported platform. Erasure: "You need to delete the entire project to delete user's data." Take your own legal advice on what that means for your store.

Can I delete one shopper's data from Clarity?

No. Microsoft's FAQ says it twice: "You need to delete the entire project to delete user's data" and "You can't delete data without deleting the project." Deleting a project is irreversible: "Clarity can't restore deleted projects. You need to create a new project and add the new tracking code to your webpage." You also "can't delete or download specific recordings" (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/faq). If you sell into the EU or UK and receive an erasure request, the only Clarity-side action available is to wipe everything.

Does Microsoft Clarity slow down my Shopify store?

Microsoft's own answer is no: "Visitors to your site notice no change in site speed or performance. The Clarity JavaScript is asynchronous. It doesn't affect how quickly a website loads" (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/faq). That is the vendor's claim, and the async loading behind it is real, but it is still a third-party script running in your shoppers' browsers. Measure your own Core Web Vitals before and after install rather than taking anyone's word for it, ours included.

Is Microsoft Clarity an A/B testing tool?

No. Microsoft describes it as "a user behavior analytics tool that helps you understand how users interact with your website" with "Session Recordings", "Heatmaps" and "ML Insights" as the supported features (learn.microsoft.com/en-us/clarity/faq). Nothing in the pricing page's feature list or the docs describes an experimentation feature. Clarity tells you where shoppers struggle. Deciding whether a fix actually earned more revenue is a separate job that needs a split test.