Microsoft Clarity vs Linkyy: Full Analytics Suite or Focused Link Tracking?

Microsoft Clarity is one of the most generous free tools on the web. It offers click heatmaps, scroll maps, session recordings, rage click detection, and AI-powered insights — all without charging a cent or capping your traffic.

So why would anyone use a different tool for click tracking?

The answer depends on what question you're trying to answer, where you want your data stored, and how much you care about the distinction between "clicks on a page area" and "clicks on a specific link."

This is an honest comparison. Both tools are good at what they do. They're just built for different purposes.

What Microsoft Clarity Does

Clarity is a full behavioral analytics platform. It launched publicly in 2020 (after being previewed in 2018) and has grown rapidly thanks to being completely free with no real usage caps.

Core Features

Click maps — Color-gradient overlays showing where on the page visitors click. Clarity offers several sub-types: all clicks, dead clicks (clicks with no response), rage clicks (rapid repeated clicks in the same area), error clicks (clicks before JavaScript errors), first clicks, and last clicks. A side panel ranks elements by click count and shows the percentage of total clicks.

Scroll maps — Visualize how far visitors scroll on each page, helping you determine if important content is above or below the fold.

Area maps — Select custom regions on a page to see aggregate click counts and click-through rates within those regions.

Session recordings — Full replay of individual user sessions showing clicks, cursor movement, scrolling, and hesitation. No traffic cap on recording — Clarity records all sessions by default.

Copilot AI insights — Powered by GPT-4o, Clarity's Copilot summarizes session recordings, generates takeaways across grouped sessions, and provides plain-language heatmap insights. You can ask natural language questions about your analytics data.

Google Analytics 4 integration — Connect your GA4 property to pull conversion goals into Clarity and explore sessions tied to specific goals.

Pricing

Clarity is 100% free. No paid tiers, no premium plans, no upgrade prompts. Microsoft states it is "free forever."

There are practical processing limits: heatmaps are capped at 100,000 pageviews per heatmap, and session recordings are capped at 100,000 sessions per project per day. For the vast majority of WordPress sites, these limits are irrelevant.

Data and Privacy

This is where it gets nuanced.

Data storage: All Clarity data is stored on Microsoft Azure servers in the United States. For EU customers, Microsoft's contracting entity is Microsoft Ireland Operations Limited, with Standard Contractual Clauses and the EU-US Data Privacy Framework in place for cross-border transfers. But the data does leave your infrastructure.

Cookies: Clarity sets both first-party and third-party cookies:

The MUID cookie is worth noting — it's a cross-site Microsoft tracking cookie used across Microsoft's entire ecosystem, including for advertising purposes. Under GDPR, this is classified as a non-essential cookie requiring explicit consent.

Consent requirements: Since October 31, 2025, Clarity mandates a valid consent signal for users in the EEA, UK, and Switzerland. Without proper consent, Clarity limits data collection in those regions. You need a cookie consent banner to use Clarity compliantly in Europe.

Data retention: Session recordings are retained for 30 days. After that, Clarity keeps just 1% of recordings (or 10 per day, whichever is higher) for up to 13 months. Aggregated click and heatmap data is retained for 13 months. Data is permanently deleted after the retention period.

Industry restrictions: Clarity is not HIPAA compliant. Microsoft will not sign a BAA. The terms explicitly prohibit use with sensitive content including healthcare, financial services, and government-related information.

What Linkyy Does

Linkyy is a focused tool. Instead of tracking all page behavior, it specifically tracks clicks on links — every <a> tag on every page — and displays the data as click count badges directly on your live site.

Core Features

Automatic link detection — No setup per link. Linkyy identifies every link on every page and begins tracking clicks as soon as the plugin is activated.

Click count badges — Toggle the heatmap overlay from the WordPress admin bar and see a color-coded badge on every tracked link. More clicks = warmer colors. The count is right there on the element, not in a separate dashboard.

Filtering — Narrow the data by date range (7, 30, or 90 days), device type (desktop or mobile), or visitor status (logged in vs. anonymous).

Admin dashboard — Per-page analytics with sortable data tables inside WordPress. CSV and JSON export.

Smart selector matching — If your theme changes or a page builder updates its class names, Linkyy's graduated fallback matcher reconnects stored click data to the correct elements using confidence scoring.

Pricing

Free on WordPress.org for the core dashboard with click tracking, filtering, and sorting. Pro upgrade from $29 (one-time, no subscription) for the visual heatmap overlay and data export.

Data and Privacy

Data storage: Everything stays in your WordPress database, on your server, in whatever jurisdiction you chose for hosting. No data is transmitted externally. (For more on why self-hosted data matters, see our self-hosted heatmap guide.)

Cookies: None. Linkyy does not set any cookies. No consent banner is needed for link tracking. If your site has its own consent flow, you can enable manual mode and call Linkyy.init() to defer tracking until after consent.

Consent requirements: Because Linkyy doesn't set cookies and doesn't collect personal data (no IP addresses, no user fingerprinting), it operates in a favorable position under GDPR. No consent banner is needed for the click tracking itself, though you should verify with a legal advisor for your specific situation.

Data retention: Permanent, or until you configure a retention period to clean up old data. You control it entirely.

Industry restrictions: None. It's your data, your server, your plugin.

Head-to-Head Comparison

When to Use Microsoft Clarity

Clarity is the right choice when you want broad behavioral analytics:

• Session recordings — Watch how individual visitors navigate your site, where they hesitate, where they get confused. This is invaluable for UX debugging and can't be replicated by a self-hosted WordPress plugin due to the data volume involved.
• Scroll depth analysis — See what percentage of visitors reach the bottom of your pages.
• Rage and dead click detection — Find broken UI elements and frustrating interactions automatically.
• General click heatmaps — Understand which areas of a page attract attention, even beyond links.
• Zero-budget analytics — If you need the maximum amount of behavioral data for free and you're comfortable with SaaS data storage, Clarity is unmatched.

Clarity answers the question: "What are visitors doing on my pages?"

When to Use Linkyy

Linkyy is the right choice when you need link-specific answers:

• Which links on this page get clicked? — Not "which area" but "which actual link element" with an exact count.
• Per-link click counts visible on your live site — No switching to an external dashboard. Toggle the overlay and see the numbers right on the elements.
• Privacy-first, self-hosted data — No cookies, no external servers, no consent banner required for the tracking itself.
• Permanent data retention — Your data doesn't expire after 30 days or 13 months.
• Regulated industries — If you work in healthcare, finance, or government, Clarity's terms prohibit usage. Linkyy has no such restriction because the data never leaves your server.
• One-time cost, no ongoing fees — Pay once, use forever.

Linkyy answers the question: "Which links on this page do people click, and how often?"

You Can Use Both

This is the practical recommendation for many WordPress sites: use both tools, because they answer different questions.

Microsoft Clarity tells you what visitors do on the page — where they scroll, where they hesitate, where they rage-click. It shows you the journey. Session recordings are particularly valuable for identifying UX problems that you'd never notice by looking at aggregate data.

Linkyy tells you which links visitors actually interact with — with specific counts, device breakdowns, and a visual overlay you can glance at on any page. It shows you the decisions.

Together, they cover most of what Hotjar offers at $32+/month:

• Clarity handles session recordings and scroll maps (free)
• Linkyy handles link-specific click tracking with on-page visualization (from $29 one-time)

The total cost is a fraction of one month of Hotjar, and your link click data stays on your own server.

A Practical Setup

1. Install Clarity for session recordings, scroll maps, and general behavior analysis
2. Install Linkyy for link-specific click counts with the visual heatmap overlay
3. Use Clarity when you need to understand how a visitor experienced a page
4. Use Linkyy when you need to know which links earn clicks and which get ignored
5. Use both when redesigning a page — Clarity shows you the behavioral context, Linkyy shows you the link performance

The Bottom Line

Microsoft Clarity is a generous, capable analytics tool. For general behavior analysis — especially session recordings — it's hard to beat at any price, let alone free.

But if your specific question is "which links on my page do people click, and how does that differ by device?" — and you want the answer displayed right on your live page, stored in your own database, with no cookies and no external data processing — that's the problem Linkyy was built to solve.

They're complementary tools. Use the one that fits your question, or use both. For a broader comparison of behavior analytics options, see our guide to Hotjar alternatives for WordPress.

Getting Started

Linkyy is free on WordPress.org for core click tracking with the admin dashboard. Upgrade to Pro (from $29, one-time) for the visual heatmap overlay and data export. No subscription, no external accounts, and a 14-day money-back guarantee.

Microsoft Clarity is free at clarity.microsoft.com. Install the WordPress plugin, sign in with a Microsoft account, and recordings start automatically.