Microsoft Clarity vs Google Analytics

For most sites, Clarity can't replace GA4. Clarity shows how people behave on a page; GA4 shows how many came, from which campaign, and what they bought. Clarity filters by campaign, but it has no attribution reports, records no revenue amounts (only a purchase rate on Shopify), and its documented ad link is to Microsoft Ads.

So use both if you need both answers. Clarity has a Google Analytics integration for exactly that.

Notice the recordings and revenue rows: each tool has the one the other lacks.

Notice that no column says yes all the way down. The usual pairing is GA4 for the numbers and Clarity for the reasons behind them. GA4 shows which landing page loses paid visitors. Clarity's recordings, filtered to that page and that campaign, show what those visitors did there.

Clarity's Google Analytics integration pulls your GA data into a GA dashboard inside Clarity, one GA property per Clarity project. For GA4, the link runs one way. Clarity doesn't support GA4 segments, and it sends no playback link into GA4, because GA4 can't take that many distinct values (Microsoft).

Our read: for most sites the question isn't Clarity or GA4. It's whether the reasons behind your numbers are worth a second script, and a second set of cookies in your banner.

Since 31 October 2025, Clarity has enforced a consent signal for visits from the EEA, the UK and Switzerland. Consent Mode is on by default for those visitors, and consent counts as denied until your site passes a signal, through a consent platform, Clarity's consent API or Google Consent Mode. A signal counts for up to 9 months (Microsoft).

Without consent, the tag still loads and collects what it can without cookies. Here's what Microsoft says changes (Microsoft):

Notice the pattern. Without consent, every visit looks like a single page seen by a new visitor, and every funnel shows a full drop-off.

Which cookies. On your domain, _clck keeps the Clarity user ID and _clsk joins page views into one recording. On Microsoft's domains, it's CLID, MUID, ANONCHK, MR and SM. Microsoft says MUID identifies browsers across Microsoft sites for advertising, analytics and operations (Microsoft).

The loader we fetched also names _uetvid and _uetmsclkid, cookies of Microsoft's advertising tag, sets a 365-day expiry, and syncs MUID once a visitor grants ad storage (loader). When ad storage is granted, Clarity shares data with Microsoft Ads (Microsoft).

How GA4 differs. GA4 sets _ga and _ga_<property>, and Google's policy requires consent for them in the same countries (Google). In basic consent mode, GA4 sends nothing until the visitor agrees. In advanced mode it sends cookieless pings (Google), and it models the missing visitors only on sites with at least 1,000 declined events and 1,000 consenting users a day (Google). So for European visitors who decline, Clarity keeps broken-up sessions and GA4 keeps little or nothing.

Clarity also honours Global Privacy Control (FAQ). Nora sets no cookies and stores nothing in the browser; we measured that.

We installed each tool alone on a test page and opened it in Chrome four ways: as a person who moves the mouse and scrolls, and as three kinds of bot. One announces it's automated. One hides that. One clicks without moving the mouse, the way AI agents click. No data reached Microsoft or Google: apart from fetching each script, our lab answered every request itself.

Notice the bot rows. Clarity's script sent data for all four visitors, and so did GA4's. Clarity's bot detection then decides what reaches your counts, and Microsoft doesn't say how it works. A recording of our disguised browser would show a page where nothing moved, but nothing in the request itself marked it as automated.

Nora labelled the headless browser a bot and the agent-style click an AI agent. It counted the disguised browser that never touched the page as a person, as every tool did.

Weight. Clarity loads in two files: a small loader, then clarity.js. Together they came to 27 KB compressed. GA4's tag, at 154 KB, was about 6 times as heavy, and Nora's script was 2.7 KB. Clarity weighs more than a page counter because it records the page and the visitor's movements.

Requests. Our person stayed a few seconds, and Clarity made 3 requests to GA4's 2. Clarity uploads what it records in batches while the visitor stays, so a longer visit sends more.

Cookies. A made-up Clarity project loads nothing, so the lab used Microsoft's public demo project. Because our lab answers every request itself, Clarity's servers never replied, and Clarity wrote no cookies. So the table shows the cookies Microsoft documents, marked "documented". GA4 left its two cookies for 400 days, Chrome's limit. Nora left nothing.

Ad blockers. EasyPrivacy blocks everything on clarity.ms, the script and its uploads, and it blocks GA4's tag. Nora isn't on it.

Clarity counts sessions, GA4 counts users and sessions, and Google Ads counts clicks. On the same site, the three rarely match. Five things explain most of the gap.

• Consent. A European visitor who declines still shows up in Clarity, as one session per page. GA4 in basic consent mode records nothing for them. If many of your visitors are European, Clarity's sessions run high and its pages per session run low.
• Session rules and clocks. Clarity ends a session after 30 minutes without activity, and it reports days in UTC (Microsoft). Unless your GA4 property is set to UTC, each day's totals shift.
• Bots. Clarity removes bot sessions and shows how many. GA4 removes known bots and never shows how many. They don't remove the same ones. On the first site running Nora, 3.3% of the page views its script saw over nine days in October 2026 were bots or AI agents.
• Pages and filters. A page missing one of the two tags, or an IP address you've blocked in Clarity, changes one count and not the other (Microsoft).
• Paid clicks. Google Ads counts the click. GA4 and Clarity count a visit only if the page loads, the script runs, no blocker stops it and, in Europe, the visitor allows it. A bot that clicks an ad and never runs scripts is in Ads and in neither tool. PPC managers ask about this a lot; one r/googleads thread is about 25 to 30% of paid clicks going missing. Clarity helps with one part: filter recordings to the campaign and watch whether the paid sessions behave like people.

Notice the last column. Every view misses something, Nora's included.

Clarity removes bot sessions from its counts by default and shows how many it removed (Microsoft); the export API returns the same count (API). Microsoft's FAQ says advanced bots can avoid detection (FAQ).

AI Bot Activity, launched on 22 January 2026, reads server logs from your CDN and shows which AI crawlers fetch your pages (Microsoft). It started with Fastly, Amazon CloudFront and Cloudflare. Since May 2026 it also works with Akamai, Azure Front Door and Cloudflare's free, Pro and Business plans, and it flags crawlers that ignore robots.txt (Microsoft). In August 2026 it gained a ratio of AI scraping to the visits AI platforms send back (Microsoft).

Because it reads logs, it sees crawlers that never run a script. Microsoft doesn't say it can tell an AI agent driving a real browser from a person, and in our lab Clarity's script sent the agent-style click like any visitor. Your CDN may charge for the logs (FAQ).

AI assistants as a source. Clarity's AIPlatform and PaidAIPlatform channels, from August 2025, group visits from ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Copilot and Perplexity by referrer, when people use them on their own sites. AI answers inside search engines aren't included, and older data wasn't reclassified (Microsoft). GA4's AI Assistant channel, from 13 May 2026, also works by referrer and leaves out Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode (Google).

Nora keeps every page view and labels it, with the test that caught it: a signature check, the name it gives, how it behaves, machine signs.

Our read: Clarity's count of removed bot sessions tells you more than GA4 does. Without the method behind it, though, you can't check it.

Notice that every price is $0, and that each tool counts something different: Clarity sessions, GA4 events, Nora visitors.

Clarity has no paid plan. Microsoft's FAQ promises no traffic limits and no sampling (FAQ), and that holds for counting. Recordings and heatmaps have limits of their own:

• Recordings a day. Up to 100,000 per project; above that, Clarity samples which ones it keeps (Microsoft).
• Heatmaps. Each one is drawn from up to 100,000 page views (Microsoft).
• History. Recordings are kept 30 days. Click data, heatmaps and labelled or favourite sessions are kept 9 months (Microsoft). Some older copies of that page say 13 months; the English page, updated in June 2026, says 9.
• Exports. The export API allows 10 requests per project per day, for the last 1 to 3 days, up to 1,000 rows (Microsoft).
• Deleting. You can't delete one visitor's data; you delete the whole project (FAQ).
• Age. Clarity must not be used on sites or apps aimed at under-18s (Microsoft).

GA4 is free too, with no monthly event cap; GA4 360 is sold through Google's sales team. GA4's retention setting applies to explorations, and its standard reports keep aggregated data (Google), so you can compare this year with last. With Clarity's 9 months, you can't. Nora is free up to 1 million visitors a month.

Our read: if you report year on year, Clarity's 9-month history is the limit you'll hit first.

Where GA4 is ahead

• Revenue. Clarity shows a purchase rate on Shopify and checkout abandonment on Shopify Plus, without amounts (Microsoft). GA4 records purchases, refunds and revenue (Google).
• Attribution and Google Ads. GA4 credits conversions across channels (Google) and links to Google Ads for conversions and audiences (Google).
• Event details. Clarity's event call takes a name only; extra data goes into session tags (Microsoft). GA4 takes up to 25 parameters per event.
• Raw data. GA4 exports every event to BigQuery for free, up to 1 million a day (Google). Clarity's API covers 3 days.
• Search queries. GA4 has two Search Console reports (Google). Clarity uses Search Console only to verify your domain for its AI citations report (Microsoft).

Where Clarity is ahead

• Recordings and heatmaps, with rage clicks, dead clicks and scroll depth (FAQ).
• Smart events found without code, for nine common actions such as purchase, add to cart and form submit (FAQ).
• Funnels built from page visits and smart events (Microsoft).
• Bot counts. It shows how many bot sessions it removed, and AI crawler activity from your CDN logs.
• Open code. The capture script is open source under the MIT licence (GitHub).

Features from each maker's pages on 13 October 2026.

We read reviews and threads from the past two years. The same few things come up again and again. Here they are, in our words, with links to where people said them.

1. Add Clarity's tag to every page GA4 is on, directly or through Shopify, WordPress, Wix or Tag Manager (FAQ).
2. Pass consent if you have European visitors. Mark Clarity's cookies as non-essential in your banner, and send the signal through your consent platform or Google Consent Mode (consent).
3. Connect Google Analytics in Clarity's settings to see GA data inside Clarity (integration).
4. Leave bot detection on, and check the removed-bots count now and then.
5. Check masking. Clarity masks sensitive content by default (setup); look at your forms before you unmask anything.
6. Connect your CDN if you want AI crawler activity (AI Bot Activity).
7. Keep GA4 for Google Ads, revenue and year-on-year reports.

Nora counts visits and labels them. It's free up to 1 million visitors a month, sets no cookies, weighs 2.7 KB, and labels every page view person, AI agent or bot, with the test that caught it. You also get live visitors, pages, sources (AI assistants among them), countries, goal pages, a weekly email and CSV export.

Nora doesn't replace Clarity. It has no heatmaps, no funnels and no session recordings, and it will never record sessions. If you want to see what people do on a page, keep Clarity. If you buy Google Ads and rely on its conversions, keep GA4. Nora is hosted in the US, can't import GA history, and launches on 1 November 2026, so it has no track record yet.

Nora Lab, the research team at Nora Analytics, ran every test on this page the same way for each tool. Here is exactly how, so you can judge the results yourself.

The full method, with what each visitor stands for, is on How we test. Every result from the lab run is public as JSON.