Clicktag: a free Microsoft Clarity alternative for traffic stats

Microsoft Clarity is built for watching how individual visitors move a mouse, scroll and click on a page. If you want a Microsoft Clarity alternative that focuses on traffic numbers, referrer sources, conversion goals and search queries without recording people's screens or setting cookies, Clicktag is free and runs on a single 4 KB script. You can open the demo, which runs on sample data, to see how the reports look.

What Microsoft Clarity does well

Microsoft Clarity is a behavior tool. The official Clarity FAQ says it is free forever, with no paid tier and no limit on the number of projects per account.

Its two core features are:

• Session recordings that replay how a visitor moved through a page.
• Heatmaps covering click, scroll, area, conversion and attention maps.

If your main question is where on a page users get stuck or which button they ignore, Clarity answers that visually.

Where Clarity runs into limits

When you only want to check daily visitor counts, marketing channels and conversion rates, Clarity's recording setup brings trade-offs you might not want on your site.

• Unclear session cap: One answer in the Clarity FAQ says there are no traffic limits or sampling, while another says "Clarity records up to 100,000 sessions per project per day." Each heatmap is capped at 100,000 page views.
• Short data retention: Recordings are kept for up to 30 days from the time of recording. Heatmap data is available for up to 9 months.
• First-party cookies: By default, Clarity sets _clck to store a user ID and _clsk to stitch page views into a single session recording, as listed in Clarity's cookie documentation. If a browser has cookies disabled, it sets none.
• Do Not Track ignored: Clarity supports Global Privacy Control (GPC), but the FAQ notes that "Clarity doesn't currently respond to browser DNT signals".
• No single-user deletion: Deleting a specific user's data requires deleting the entire project.

When you want traffic, sources, goals and AI analytics

If you don't need video replays and instead want to know how many people visited, where they came from and whether they signed up, Clicktag is built for those numbers. It is a cookieless analytics tool that never stores IP addresses, drops Do Not Track requests, and counts daily visitors with a salted SHA-256 hash whose salt is deleted shortly after each UTC day ends.

Clicktag counts visitors, traffic sources, goals and funnels without setting cookies or recording screens.

Here is what you get instead of heatmaps and replays:

• Traffic and sources: Visitors, pageviews, entry pages, median time on page (for durations of 5 seconds or more), countries, devices, browsers, operating systems, plus UTM source, medium and campaign.
• Goal tracking and funnel analytics: Up to 50 goals per site, including 2-to-6-step funnels completed on the same UTC day. Goals are computed from existing data, so adding a new goal fills in past conversions right away.
• Search Console analytics: Connect Google Search Console to backfill up to 16 months of clicks, impressions, CTR, position and search queries, refreshed every 6 hours for the trailing 10 days.
• AI traffic analytics: See visits from ChatGPT (utm_source=chatgpt.com), Perplexity, Claude, Gemini and Copilot as separate sources, and compare their conversion rates against google.com.
• AI crawler analytics: For a site proxied through Cloudflare (any plan, including Free), connect a read-only Cloudflare token (Zone Read and Analytics Read) to see verified and unverified hits from GPTBot, OAI-SearchBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot, with no code on the site.

Clicktag vs Microsoft Clarity

Prices and limits checked on October 29, 2026, on each vendor's official pricing or help pages.

How to install Clicktag

Installing Clicktag takes one async script tag (latest.js, about 4 KB compressed) with no npm package.

1. Sign in at clicktag.app with your Google account and add your site.
2. Go to Site settings > Installation and copy your script tag, which includes data-hostname and data-verify attributes.
3. Paste the tag into your homepage HTML so the server sends it, or verify ownership with a DNS TXT record or a file in /.well-known/.
4. Open the Live tab to see hits appear within about a second.

If you want to track button clicks, file downloads or form submissions, call window.tt_event(name, metadata, callback) in the browser or send a JSON POST to /events from your server.

Clicktag or Microsoft Clarity: which to pick

Pick Clicktag for the numbers: where visitors come from, which pages they read, how many reach a goal or finish a funnel, plus Search Console data and API monitoring, without cookies.

Clarity is built for watching session recordings and click heatmaps, which Clicktag doesn't record. Both are free, so you can keep Clicktag running for traffic, Search Console, goals and API monitoring and turn Clarity on during a page redesign.

FAQ

Is Clicktag really free like Microsoft Clarity?

Yes, Clicktag is free with every feature included and no credit card required. You sign in with a Google account and can track up to 50 websites per account.

Does Clicktag record screens or heatmaps?

No. Clicktag does not offer session recordings, heatmaps, bounce rate, A/B testing or individual visitor profiles. It focuses on aggregate traffic stats, sources, custom events, goals, funnels and API analytics.

How does Clicktag count returning visitors without cookies?

For daily visitors, Clicktag uses a daily salted SHA-256 hash and deletes the salt shortly after the UTC day ends, so visits aren't linked across days. For weekly retention cohorts (up to 12 follow-up weeks), it runs a once-a-day return check through the browser's HTTP cache without setting cookies; private windows and cleared caches count as new browsers.

Can I import my history from Microsoft Clarity or Google Analytics?

No, Clicktag does not support imports from Clarity, Google Analytics or CSV uploads. You can import historical data from Simple Analytics, and connecting Google Search Console backfills up to 16 months of search query data.

What event limits does Clicktag have?

Clicktag does not track outbound links, file downloads or clicks automatically, so you send custom events with window.tt_event or a backend POST to /events. Event names are cut at 256 characters and metadata at 4,096 characters; metadata is stored on the event but cannot be grouped or filtered in reports, so put values you want to compare into the event name itself.