Published on: Dec 03, 2023
Last updated: Jul 26, 2024

Mouseflow vs Microsoft Clarity: Product Overview and Alternatives

Mouseflow and Microsoft Clarity are two popular digital analytics software applications for businesses. But which is better?

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Mouseflow vs Microsoft Clarity: Product Overview and Alternatives

As our lives have rapidly digitalized, user experience has become a top priority for companies. For every dollar spent on improving UX, businesses get $100 back. That’s a 9,900% ROI!

If you want to adopt software into your UI/UX strategy, you’ve likely heard of Mouseflow and Microsoft Clarity. Both platforms are prevalent in the space and have helped countless companies better understand their consumer’s journey. In this post, we’ll break down the key features, use cases, pricing, and other essential factors you need to know before deciding. Additionally, we’ll offer an alternative that excels where Mouseflow and Clarity fall short.

What is Mouseflow?

mouseflow

Mouseflow empowers website owners with a robust toolset for gaining deeper insights into user interactions on their websites. With Mouseflow, effortlessly monitor visitors' navigation patterns, pinpointing areas of hesitation, identifying click hotspots, and much more. This valuable information serves as a catalyst for recognizing improvement opportunities and fine-tuning your website to enhance the overall user experience.

What is Microsoft Clarity?

clarity

Microsoft Clarity is a web analytics tool developed by Microsoft that offers insights into user behavior through session replays, heatmaps, and analytics. Like Mouseflow, Clarity enables website owners to observe how users engage with their site by providing visual data representations such as click tracking, scroll depth analysis, and cursor movements. It aims to uncover user interaction patterns, identify improvement areas, and offer data-driven insights to enhance website usability and performance.

Mouseflow vs Microsoft Clarity: features comparison

While Mouseflow and Microsoft Clarity offer many of the same user journey features, there are some crucial differences. Mouseflow is a more comprehensive solution. Clarity, a 100% free tool, has the same core features but primarily focuses on heatmaps.

Mouseflow

  • Session Replay: Mouseflow provides the capability to revisit the actions of specific user segments. This feature allows you to gain insights into user interactions with your website, facilitating the identification of potential issues and areas for enhancement.
  • Conversion Funnels: Utilizing Mouseflow, you can uncover the points on your website where users either convert or abandon their journey. This analysis aids in identifying the most effective steps in your user journey for driving conversions, as well as pinpointing areas that may be causing user attrition.
  • Heatmaps: Mouseflow introduces heatmap analytics, offering a visual representation of user clicks, scrolls, hovers, and more. This visual data representation provides valuable insights into how users engage with the content on your website.
  • Forms: With Mouseflow, you can pinpoint areas where users encounter difficulties with your forms. Identifying these issues empowers you to make necessary adjustments, enhancing the overall user experience of your lead capture forms and subsequently increasing form completions.

Microsoft Clarity

  • Heatmaps: Custom heatmaps are created to identify page elements with high engagement, scroll history, and total clicks. Analyze two heatmaps from the same page for easy A/B testing.
  • Session recordings: Identify pain points like rage clicks by seeing how users navigate pages. Switch back and forth from heat mapping in the session record with one click.
  • Insights: Track analytics to identify issues such as rage clicks, dead clicks, quickbacks, and bugs. Isolate errors to quickly identify why the user ran into a problem.
  • Copilot chat: GPT-enabled chatbot that helps you review data collected from session recordings and Google Analytics.

Mouseflow vs Microsoft Clarity: use case comparison

Both platforms are used by companies worldwide to understand their customers. Here are some use cases from prominent businesses to help you determine if they are a good fit for your UI/UX team.

Mouseflow

  • Sensorem uses Mouseflow to judge the effectiveness of their marketing campaigns and optimize them.
  • Dignity uses Mouseflow to optimize their user journey and boost conversion rates.

Microsoft Clarity

  • Web scraper, Scrapingdog, used session recordings to identify their hero wasn’t helping conversions.
  • Consultwebs, a digital marketing agency for law firms, used A/B testing with Clarity to identify why a client was experiencing high bounce rates on mobile.

Mouseflow vs Microsoft Clarity: user reviews comparison

Now that we’ve reviewed how Mouseflow and Clarity help companies, let’s hear from the UI/UX professionals getting their hands dirty using these tools. While both these tools are established platforms, Mouseflow is far more popular, with about ten times the reviews on G2.

Mouseflow user

Mouseflow has a 4.6/5-star rating on G2 based on 500+ reviews. Let’s hear from some of the UI/UX designers who swear by the software:

  • “Setting up the tool is also very easy and support is fast.”
  • “The number of features really stands out. The recordings are invaluable. And we constantly look at the heatmaps, clicks and scroll patterns to make decisions on our UX and content.”

Not all the feedback is positive. Here’s what disappointed customers had to say:

  • “Some commands in the recording panel dont always work. I previoulsy tried open replay and I prefered the interface there. The funnel function is a great idea even if I havent learned how to use it yet.”
  • “I dislike the interface. It seems old-fashioned and not aesthetically pleasing. A more common flat design with vibrant colors, better call to action buttons would be nice. A good example is hotjar for that.”

Microsoft Clarity user reviews and rating

Clarity has a 4.5/5-star review on G2 based on only 32 reviews. Here’s what the happy customers had to say:

  • “Great platform for finding user journey.”
  • “Improve customer behavior with the best heatmap tool.”
  • “A must-have for unlocking deeper insights.”

On the other hand, some customers have voiced their concerns:

  • “Helpful for guidance, not enough for conclusions.”
  • “Sometimes we can watch the session, but we can’t watch it after a month.”

Mouseflow vs Microsoft Clarity: pricing comparison

Both these software tools are excellent options for businesses with limited budgets. However, Mouseflow offers additional features for a monthly fee. We break down the pricing below.

Mouseflow

Mouseflow provides a range of pricing options to cater to different needs. They offer a free package that includes access to one website, storage for one month, and 500 user session recordings per month. For more comprehensive features, their paid plans begin at $31 per month. These paid packages include coverage for one website, data retention for three months, and the capacity for 5,000 user session recordings per month.

Microsoft Clarity

All of Clarity’s features are available for free. Microsoft offers the software without charging customers because anonymous user behavior data is incredibly valuable to them. They can use the information to “gain insights and improve machine learning models that power many of our products and services.”

Alternative to Mouseflow & Microsoft Clarity: Fullview

While Mouseflow and Microsoft Clarity are incredible tools to understand the user journey, they are limited. Fullview offers a more complete picture for product and UI/UX teams with additional features. Here’s why Fullview is a better alternative:

  • Data security: Fullview, located in the EU, stores all data on EU servers (with the option for US servers on request), ensuring 100% GDPR compliance.
  • No sampling: Fullview doesn't sample; it automatically records all user sessions in your web app.
  • Automated behavior detection: Detects console warnings, errors, and signs of user frustration like rage clicks, marked on the video progress bar for quick navigation to those sections.
  • Cobrowsing: Unlike Mouseflow and Clarity, Fullview allows support agents and developers to initiate cobrowsing calls with users live in their product, take control of users' screens, and resolve support tickets or bugs efficiently.
  • Console logs: Provides console logs for all session replays and cobrowsing calls, simplifying bug diagnosis and troubleshooting.
  • Cost-effective: Starting at $49/seat for cobrowsing and $79/month for 10,000+ replays, Fullview offers one of the most affordable session replay tools. It also has a forever free plan that includes four cobrowsing sessions and 1000 replay recordings a month.
  • Access to past sessions: Access both live and historical sessions using Fullview.
  • Filtering and segmentation: Offers powerful filtering and segmentation features to quickly identify exciting sessions or pin certain filters for easy dashboard access.
  • No downloads: Fullview requires no downloads and can be implemented in just a few minutes.

Conclusion

Mouseflow and Microsoft Clarity are great tools that give insights into customer behavior. However, they have limitations and don’t help you directly solve problems. If you only want heatmapping, either free version will meet your needs. But if you want a comprehensive tool that will help you learn from users and help them solve issues with features like cobrowsing, session replays, and console logs Fullview is your best bet.

Sources used

Sources last checked 23-Nov-2023

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