Air360 vs Microsoft Clarity

TL;DR : Why Choose Air360?

When it comes to analytics tools, choosing the right one can make all the difference for your business. Let’s break down why Air360 stands out as the smarter choice compared to Microsoft Clarity.

• Complete data ownership: With Air360, your visitor data remains yours and only yours. No third-party data transmission using Air360, while Clarity monetizes your visitor data through ads or AI training.
• Cookieless tracking & minimizing data processing: Air360 ensures compliance with privacy laws – including minimization - while delivering powerful insights. At Air360, customers are customers, not our products. Our customers pay for a service that ensures their interests, which is our top priority.

What is Microsoft Clarity?

Recently, Microsoft Clarity has hit the market with their free analytics tool.

Microsoft Clarity offers session recordings, heatmaps, and behavioral insights—all for free. However, the hidden cost lies in data ownership and data sharing. By installing Clarity on your website, you share your visitor data with Microsoft to enrich Microsoft’s advertising network and search engines results.The data collected is used by Microsoft to optimize its ad targeting, potentially influencing the ads shown to your visitors elsewhere.

Microsoft agrees that this data collected via Clarity, is used to improve their ad network and AI models, meaning user interactions on your website could be leveraged to enhance Microsoft’s advertising capabilities. Clarity tracks and transmits visitor behavior data to Microsoft who reserves rights to use your visitors and customers' data for Microsoft’s own purpose.

Even if the data is anonymized, behavioral data can still be valuable for different purposes than only analytics. Potentially, these data could be used by Microsoft to the benefit of your competitors.

In any event, you need to deeply assess whether the way Microsoft uses or shares your user data complies with GDPR/data privacy laws requirements including users consent and agreed purposes.

Is Microsoft Clarity really free?

As the saying goes, there's no free lunch.

Beyond the concerns we mentioned above, when a tool like Clarity is marketed as "free", there are hidden costs that come with its adoption. While there may not be an upfront monetary expense, tools like this often demand significant investments of time and effort to operate effectively—resources that are not free when factored into your business operations.

This pattern isn’t new; nearly 15 years ago, Google Analytics (GA) entered the market under a similar premise. On paper, GA was free, but many companies quickly realized they needed entire teams dedicated to configuring, managing, and interpreting the platform to make it work for their specific needs.

Similarly, while Clarity might appear user-friendly at first glance, digging deeper reveals that achieving meaningful insights requires substantial manual effort. Indeed, comparing the tolls implies that you calculate the time sent by employees tweaking settings or trying to extract actionable data.

Then appears the real cost. The irony lies in how history could repeat itself: what seems like a gift ends up being more expensive than anticipated. Instead, its design caters to the provider’s goals — collecting valuable data about your users for their benefit.

As the saying goes, "If you’re not paying for the product, you are the product.". Clarity gives you a free tool, but at what cost?

6 key differences why users choose Air360 over Clarity

So now you know what Microsoft Clarity is and why it is presented as a free tool. If you're getting concerned about your website data, you can start to consider privacy-first analytics like Air360. Here's 6 key differences where Air360 shines compared to Clarity.

1. A true privacy-first Analytics

At Air360, we believe that analytics should serve clients’ business — not a third-party ad network. That’s why we have built our platform with privacy at its core. Unlike Microsoft Clarity, Air360 most recent release is completely cookieless, ensuring that user tracking does not compromise personal privacy (and tracking more users!).

More importantly, the data collected (which is automatically pseudonymized) is never sold, shared, or transmitted to any third party.

2. A team with You

Another key difference between Air360 and Microsoft Clarity is the level of support and expertise you receive.

Air360 is not just a tool, it’s a complete solution backed by a team of experts dedicated to helping you unlock real business value. When you use Clarity, you’re on your own, left to figure out what the data means and how to act on it. It also implies significant costs as mentioned above.

In addition, the question be : what is the actual cost of not knowing? The opportunity cost of missing key insights—like the reasons for churn, funnel leaks, or conversion drop-offs—can be massive. Without the right guidance, businesses might waste valuable time and resources chasing the wrong problems.

At Air360, we take a different approach. Our customers get more than just data—they get strategic insights and expert guidance to turn those insights into meaningful action. The goal is indeed to understand the data and to improve the website. With Air360 you have a team working with you to ensure you maximize your growth potential. This is one of our secret recipe to keep happy and long-term customers over the years.

3. Feature gaps that will hinder growth

From a feature perspective, Clarity offers some appealing functionalities, such as session replays and basic heatmaps, which can seem attractive to beginners or organizations without much budget.

However, these features barely scratch the surface of what’s required to drive real improvements in conversion rates. For instance, one glaring omission is funnel analysis—a critical component for understanding where users drop off during key processes like purchases or sign-ups. Without this capability, businesses are left guessing why certain pages fail to convert.

Additionally, Clarity lacks transparency around the datasets it analyzes, making it difficult to know exactly what information you’re basing decisions on. U ser journey mapping is another crucial function conspicuously absent from the toolkit. Understanding how visitors navigate through your website helps identify friction points and opportunities for optimization. By failing to provide these essential features, Clarity leaves users struggling to piece together fragmented insights rather than empowering them with comprehensive data. It’s functional for those just starting out or who don’t prioritize data-driven decision-making, but calling it “better than nothing” feels like damning it with faint praise.

4. Data quality: Why accuracy matters

Microsoft Clarity provides a partial view of what’s happening on your website. The result? You get surface-level insights more than a deeper understanding needed to truly optimize your site’s conversion rate.

Air360, on the other hand, is purpose-built to spot conversion rate issues. Air360 goes far beyond basic session recordings and heatmaps—we provide full user journey analysis, in-depth behavioral tracking, and advanced funnel analysis to help you pinpoint exactly where and why users drop off.

How much time does it take to engage with a specific CTA on that product page? How does a specific A/B test impacts this CTA and your bottom-line? Are people hesitating? How does the language, device or segment impact this CTA? These are critical questions that Clarity won't help you with. We consider these to be critical to make important business decisions.

Air360 has a powerful, yet simple way to segment your users in order to get meaningful analysis. Creating custom user segments is also a big part in correct analysis, blended data is rarely actionable. Not segmenting your new and returning visitors or visitors from different countries will lead to unactionable insights at best. Air360 can also leverage your existing datalayer to take segmentation and analysis further.

5. An AI that works for Microsoft, not for you: No alerting.

One of the most glaring deficiencies in tools like Clarity is the lack of proactive alerting mechanisms.

For businesses relying on their digital funnels to drive conversions, the inability to detect and respond to issues in real-time can be very damageable. Consider this scenario: a critical step in your booking or checkout process breaks for users on a specific browser or device—a common occurrence given the complexity of modern web technologies.

Without automated alerts notifying you of such disruptions, days, weeks, or even months could pass before anyone notices. During that time, countless potential customers encounter errors, abandon their attempts, and are likely to turn competitors out of frustration.

This isn’t just speculation; it’s a pattern we’ve seen repeatedly across industries. Imagine attempting to book a flight online only to encounter an error midway through the process. After several failed attempts, you might decide to try another airline instead. In doing so, you not only take your immediate purchase elsewhere but also potentially become a lifelong customer of the competitor who provided a seamless experience.

What’s the true cost of losing such a customer? If each lost sale averages hundreds or thousands of dollars—and if similar incidents occur frequently due to undetected funnel issues—the cumulative losses can easily reach five or six figures over time.

Contrary to Clarity Air360 includes proactive alerts, simple to implement and use, with potentially big impacts on risk control.

6. Getting you ready for the cookieless future

Air360 invested in a fully cookieless solution that will ensure you get the actual and full picture of what is happening on your website and getting you ready for the cookieless future. While cookieless, Air360 also provides all the features you need to monitor that your website is delivering the best possible experience to your customers.

On the other hand, Clarity relies on cookies, which will give you a partial picture of your visitors.Clarity gives you the possibility to switch a cookieless mode, however, this mode won't give anything remotely useful in terms of insights. Clearly, Microsoft encourages you to rely on cookies, so they can benefit from cookies.

Microsoft needs visitors' data and for this, it needs cookies which will result in a very partial picture of your visitors. By choosing Air360, you choose to invest in a future ready solution that serves your own goals.

Conclusion

Tools like Clarity, despite appearing free and user-friendly, carry hidden costs and limitations that hinder their effectiveness for improving conversion rates. Microsoft apparently focus on collecting data for its own benefit than may create a misalignment with your own goals.

The allure of “free” tools like Clarity can be tempting, especially for startups or small teams operating under tight budgets. Yet, beneath the surface lie significant limitations and costs that overshadow initial convenience. From the sunk costs associated with time-intensive setup and maintenance to the glaring gaps in functionality, Clarity falls short of providing the actionable insights necessary for meaningful growth.

More concerning still is the realization that the tool prioritizes the provider’s agenda over the user’s success. As history has shown us time and again, tools built on such foundations rarely deliver long-term value to their users. Before committing to platforms like Clarity, businesses must carefully weigh the hidden expenses, evaluate whether the features align with their goals, and consider whether they want to invest in tools that serve themselves—or their bottom line.

While Microsoft Clarity may seem appealing due to its free offering, businesses should be aware of the hidden trade-off: their visitor data becomes part of Microsoft’s ecosystem. In contrast, Air360 provides a secure, privacy-first analytics solution where businesses retain full control over their data.

If you value user trust and want to ensure compliance with privacy regulations, Air360 is the clear choice.

With Air360, you get data that is designed to work for you and designed to comply with your goal i.e. To further enhance your website's performance. The insights you gain are focused on improving your conversions, optimizing your user experience, and ultimately driving your business forward.