Microsoft Clarity vs Lucky Orange: Which Free Plan Wins?

Both Microsoft Clarity and Lucky Orange offer free plans for behavior analytics. But "free" means very different things: Clarity gives you unlimited everything, while Lucky Orange caps you at 100 sessions per month. Here's a detailed comparison to help you choose — or decide if you need both.

Free plan comparison at a glance

The session limit problem

The most important difference between these free plans is the session cap. Clarity records every session on your site, regardless of traffic volume. Lucky Orange's free plan records only 100 sessions per month.

What does 100 sessions mean in practice?

• A small blog with 500 monthly visitors: ~20% of sessions recorded
• A business site with 2,000 monthly visitors: ~5% of sessions recorded
• An ecommerce store with 10,000 monthly visitors: ~1% of sessions recorded

With only 100 sessions, you're working with a tiny sample. You might miss the exact session where a user struggled, and your heatmap data will be sparse and potentially misleading. Clarity's unlimited recording means you see everything — every rage click, every dead click, every scroll pattern.

Heatmaps: quality depends on volume

Both tools offer click and scroll heatmaps, and both produce visually similar outputs. But heatmap quality depends entirely on data volume.

Clarity generates heatmaps from all recorded sessions — potentially thousands of data points per page. This produces accurate, statistically meaningful heat patterns. You can trust that a "hot" area genuinely gets lots of clicks.

Lucky Orange's free plan generates heatmaps from at most 100 sessions (spread across all pages). If you have 50 pages on your site, each page might have data from just 2-3 sessions. That's not enough to draw any conclusions.

Heatmap types

• Clarity — Click heatmaps, scroll heatmaps, area heatmaps (zones of engagement)
• Lucky Orange — Click heatmaps, scroll heatmaps, move heatmaps (mouse movement tracking)

Lucky Orange's mouse movement heatmaps are unique — Clarity doesn't track cursor movement. Move heatmaps can show where users look (since cursor position loosely correlates with eye position on desktop). However, this feature is less useful on mobile where there's no cursor.

Session recordings: similar quality, different scale

Both tools produce high-quality session recordings that replay user interactions faithfully. You can see clicks, scrolls, form inputs, page navigations, and idle time.

Key differences in the recording experience:

Clarity's recordings

• Unlimited volume — every session recorded
• Frustration signal labels on each recording (rage click, dead click, etc.)
• Filtering by URL, device, country, OS, browser, duration
• Skip idle time during playback
• Copilot AI summaries for quick triage

Lucky Orange's recordings

• 100/month on free plan (unlimited on paid plans starting at $32/mo)
• Tagging and notes system for organizing sessions
• Ability to watch live sessions in real-time
• Co-browsing capability (paid plans)

Lucky Orange's live view feature is genuinely useful — you can see visitors on your site right now and watch what they're doing in real-time. This is great for customer support or watching a product launch unfold. Clarity doesn't offer anything equivalent.

Lucky Orange's unique features

Lucky Orange includes several features that Clarity doesn't have, which makes it more of an all-in-one tool:

Live chat

Lucky Orange includes a basic live chat widget you can add to your site. When a visitor starts chatting, you can see their session recording in real-time alongside the conversation. This context makes support interactions much more productive — you can see exactly what the user is looking at and what they've tried.

On the free plan, live chat is limited but functional. If you need a basic chat tool and don't want to pay for Intercom or Drift, this is a nice bonus.

Surveys

Lucky Orange lets you create on-site surveys to collect qualitative feedback. You can trigger surveys based on exit intent, time on page, or specific page visits. The free plan includes basic survey functionality.

Clarity has no survey feature. If you want to combine behavior analytics with direct user feedback, Lucky Orange consolidates both into one tool.

Form analytics

Lucky Orange provides dedicated form analytics showing which fields users struggle with, which fields cause abandonment, and average time spent per field. This is available on paid plans and gives you structured data about form performance without watching individual recordings.

Clarity's unique advantages

Unlimited everything

Clarity's biggest advantage is that everything is free and unlimited — sessions, heatmaps, projects, team members. There are no artificial caps that push you toward a paid plan because there is no paid plan. Microsoft funds Clarity as part of their broader analytics ecosystem.

Copilot AI

Clarity includes Copilot, an AI assistant that generates session summaries and answers natural language questions about your data. Lucky Orange doesn't have an equivalent AI feature on any plan.

Google Analytics integration

Clarity connects directly with Google Analytics, adding session playback links to your GA reports. Lucky Orange integrates with Google Analytics too, but Clarity's integration is deeper since both are built with Google's ecosystem in mind.

Auto-masking

Clarity automatically detects and masks sensitive user data (emails, phone numbers, credit card fields) in recordings. Lucky Orange offers masking too, but Clarity's approach is more aggressive by default, which is better for GDPR compliance out of the box.

Paid plan pricing

If you outgrow the free plans, the cost structures differ significantly:

Clarity will always be free. Lucky Orange's pricing is reasonable compared to enterprise tools like FullStory, but costs add up as your traffic grows. At 100,000 monthly sessions, you're paying $600+/month for Lucky Orange while Clarity remains $0.

Which free plan should you choose?

Choose Clarity if:

• You want unlimited session recordings and heatmaps
• You don't need live chat or surveys
• You want AI-powered insights via Copilot
• You track multiple websites
• Privacy compliance is a priority
• You want a tool you'll never have to pay for

Choose Lucky Orange if:

• You need a built-in live chat widget
• You want on-site surveys for qualitative feedback
• You value real-time live view of visitors
• Your site gets fewer than 100 sessions per month (the free plan is sufficient)
• You want form analytics without watching recordings

Using both together

There's nothing stopping you from running Clarity and Lucky Orange simultaneously. Use Clarity for comprehensive recordings and heatmaps (unlimited data), and Lucky Orange for its unique features (live chat, surveys, live view).

The performance impact of running both scripts is minimal — both are lightweight and load asynchronously. Just make sure you're not using both tools' heatmap features simultaneously, as that's redundant. Rely on Clarity for heatmaps (since it has more data) and Lucky Orange for chat and surveys.

For automated analysis of your Clarity data, tools like ClarityInsights can complement this setup by delivering weekly AI reports with specific recommendations — something neither Clarity nor Lucky Orange provides natively.