The honest answer first
If your visitors and your team share a language and you want heatmaps and replays at no cost, Clarity may be all you need. Keep it. Clarity is generally known for being free, with heatmaps, session recordings and signals such as rage clicks; check Microsoft’s site for what it offers today.
AnyReplay earns its place in a narrower situation: your support or product team has to understand what a customer saw and did on a page written in Japanese, Turkish or German, and nobody on the team reads it. That is the problem it was built for.
Who does what
| Microsoft Clarity | AnyReplay | |
|---|---|---|
| Heatmaps of all your traffic, free | Its strength | Heatmaps of the sessions your plan records |
| Watching a session in a language you do not read | Check their docs | Translated on demand, in the player, into your language |
| React Native and Flutter apps | Check their docs | Recorded as structure and text, translatable like web sessions |
| Where recordings are stored | Microsoft’s cloud; check their docs | Servers in Germany, recordings in EU object storage |
| Turning AI off for your organisation | Check their docs | One switch; nothing is sent to an AI provider afterwards |
| Price | Generally known to be free | A free plan, then paid plans |
Running both
The two record independently and do not know about each other, so you can install both. A common split:
- Clarity on the whole site, for heatmaps and broad patterns.
- AnyReplay where the sessions are worth reading closely — the signed-in product, the checkout, the markets your team does not speak — with sampleRate if you do not need every visit.
- If you identify signed-in users in both, with AnyReplay’s
identifyand Clarity’s own identify call, you can look the same customer up in each.
Two recorders are two costs on the page. Ours is measured on the performance page: 36.3 KB gzipped, loaded async. Under GDPR each needs your visitors’ consent where consent is required; AnyReplay’s requireConsent waits for it.
What “the translation layer” means
AnyReplay records a page as structure and text, not as video. When a reviewer asks, the visible text of the recording is translated and the replay shows the same page in the reviewer’s language — buttons, error messages and all — next to the original. Strings already translated for your organisation are reused, so the hundredth session of the same checkout costs almost nothing. See session translation.
Form values stay masked on the visitor’s device, so they are never translated or sent anywhere.
When adding AnyReplay is not worth it
- Your team reads every language your customers write in.
- You need heatmaps of every visit and nothing else.
- Your budget for this is zero.
Microsoft Clarity is a trademark of Microsoft. AnyReplay is not affiliated with or endorsed by Microsoft. What we say about Clarity is general and may be out of date; check Microsoft’s site. A feature-by-feature comparison is here.