Galytics vs Microsoft Clarity

Microsoft Clarity is free, has no traffic limits, and records sessions well. If price is the only axis you care about, stop reading and use Clarity. It is a good product.

The question worth asking is what free costs you, and it is not nothing. Everything below comes from Microsoft's own documentation, linked at the bottom, so you can check all of it yourself.

In the EU, Clarity needs a consent banner

Clarity works with cookies. Microsoft's FAQ is direct about what that means where consent law applies:

To comply with local regulations explicit user consent is required before placing cookies on their devices.

And about what happens if a visitor declines:

sessions are fragmented, and certain features such as full session replays and user journey continuity are unavailable.

So the replays only exist for the share of visitors who accept your banner. That is usually the least representative slice of your audience, and the friction of the banner itself changes the behaviour you are trying to observe.

Galytics sets no cookies and stores no personal data, so there is no banner and no consent gate. Every visitor is measured, and every session can be replayed.

Your data lives in Microsoft's cloud, not the EU

Your data is stored in the Microsoft Azure cloud service.

Microsoft does not commit to an EU region for Clarity data. If your reason for leaving Google Analytics was where the data ends up, Clarity does not solve that problem, it moves it.

Galytics is hosted in the EU. That is the whole answer.

Retention is Microsoft's decision, not yours

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.

Thirty days for most recordings, nine months for a sample you did not choose. You cannot change either number.

Opting out runs through the advertising industry

Clarity's own opt-out route is the Digital Advertising Alliance's:

We utilize the system built by the Digital Advertising Alliance to enable opt-out experiences for customers.

Clarity is also wired into Microsoft Advertising, where it can be enabled and disabled from a UET tag. A free analytics product from a company whose revenue is advertising is worth reading carefully before you install it on a site you chose specifically to keep clean.

Clarity does not replace your analytics

Clarity is a behaviour tool. It does replays and heatmaps. It is not where you go to answer how much traffic you got last month, which campaign brought it, or whether your conversion rate moved. So Clarity is never the only script on the page. It is a second one, next to whatever you already use for traffic.

Galytics is both, in one script.

Side by side

When Clarity is the better call

If your budget is zero, you already run a consent banner for other reasons, and EU data residency is not something you have promised anyone, Clarity is a lot of product for no money and we would rather tell you that than pretend otherwise.

Galytics is the better call when you would rather not run a banner, when the data staying in the EU is something you have committed to, and when you would rather ship one script than two.

Sources

Every quote above is from Microsoft's public documentation, checked in August 2026:

• Clarity FAQ, for cookies and consent, storage in Azure, retention, and the Digital Advertising Alliance opt-out
• Clarity data privacy

If any of this has changed since, tell us and we will correct the page.