Air360 vs Microsoft Clarity

If you are weighing Air360 against Microsoft Clarity, here is a straight comparison.

Every claim about Clarity below is sourced to Microsoft’s own documentation and was checked on 25 August 2026. Product details change, so verify anything that matters to your decision against the linked pages before you commit.

TL;DR

Clarity is free, genuinely capable, and operates at enormous scale. If you need session recordings and heatmaps and have no budget, it is a good answer.

Air360 is paid, and what you buy is a different relationship with your data: nobody else uses it, and it does not expire after 30 days.

At a Glance

	Microsoft Clarity	Air360
Cost	Free forever, no traffic limits	Paid, all-in-one pricing
Who uses your data	Microsoft uses it to improve its products and advertising	Nobody but you
Recording retention	30 days. Favourites and a random sample up to 9 months	Full retention, data does not expire
Cookies	First and third-party cookies	No cookies
Data location	See Microsoft Privacy Statement	Processed and stored in the EU, France and Ireland
Personal data	Site owner is responsible for disclosure to visitors	Designed not to capture PII, user-entered text masked by default
Sampling	None	None
Setup	One script	One script, 53kb, no tagging
Support	Community and documentation	Named team and expert guidance

What Clarity Does Well

Clarity is a serious product and it is free, which is a genuinely difficult combination to argue with.

It gives you session recordings, heatmaps, funnels and machine-learning insights at no cost, with no traffic limits and no cap on the number of sites per account. Microsoft states it processes more than 1 petabyte of data from over 100 million users per month. It does not sample, so you are seeing all of your traffic rather than a slice. Setup is one script.

For a startup, a side project, or any team that needs to see what users are doing and has zero budget to spend on it, Clarity is a reasonable choice and we would say so to anyone who asked. The question is not whether it works. It is what it costs you in ways that do not appear on an invoice.

Where the two actually differ

1. Who else uses your visitors’ data

This is the substantive difference, and it is not our characterisation. It is Microsoft’s.

In its guidance on what to disclose to your visitors, Microsoft gives site owners this sample privacy-policy wording:

“We partner with Microsoft Clarity and Microsoft Advertising to capture how you use and interact with our website through behavioral metrics, heatmaps, and session replay to improve and market our products/services. Website usage data is captured using first and third-party cookies and other tracking technologies to determine the popularity of products/services and online activity. Additionally, we use this information for site optimization, fraud/security purposes, and advertising.”

And the shorter version Microsoft suggests for your site footer:

“We improve our products and advertising by using Microsoft Clarity to see how you use our website. By using our site, you agree that we and Microsoft can collect and use this data.”

Microsoft’s FAQ adds that “any third-party cookies used by Clarity are to support operational purposes like advertising”.

None of that is hidden. Microsoft documents it clearly and tells you to pass it on to your visitors. But it is worth reading twice, because it describes the actual arrangement: the tool is free, and the data your visitors generate is part of what makes it worth Microsoft’s while.

With Air360 you pay for the product, and that is the whole transaction. Your data is not used to improve anyone’s advertising, is not shared with a third party, and is not part of a wider network. If you have ever had to explain an analytics vendor to a legal or procurement team, you already know why this matters.

2. How long your data lasts

Clarity retains recordings for 30 days from the time of recording. Favourited recordings and a randomly selected sample are kept up to 9 months.

Thirty days is enough to investigate something you already know about. It is not enough to answer “did this get worse after the redesign in March”, or to compare this quarter’s checkout against last year’s, or to look back at what happened during a launch once you have worked out which question to ask.

Air360 keeps your data. There is no analysis window, no expiry, and retroactivity applies to session replays as well. We went through what every major tool keeps and for how long separately, with each figure sourced. The questions you want to ask six months from now are usually about a period you were not watching closely at the time.

3. Cookie consent, if you operate in Europe

Clarity uses first and third-party cookies. In the EEA, the UK and Switzerland, Microsoft requires explicit user consent before those cookies are placed, and site owners must pass the consent signal to Microsoft through Clarity’s consent API.

Microsoft is clear about what happens when consent is not given: “analytics such as page views and basic interactions are still collected, but sessions are fragmented, and certain features such as full session replays and user journey continuity are unavailable.” A visitor moving from page A to page B is recorded as two separate sessions.

That is a real constraint, not a criticism. It is what the regulation requires, and it is worth knowing before you choose, because it decides how much of your behavioural data survives when visitors decline.

Air360 does not use cookies. We are deliberately not going to turn that into a claim about your consent obligations, because it would not be an honest one. Article 5(3) of the ePrivacy Directive is technology-neutral: it governs what a tool stores on or reads from a visitor’s device, and CNIL lists local storage alongside cookies as a tracer. Whether any analytics tool needs consent on your site is a question for your own privacy team, not one a vendor should answer for you in a comparison table.

4. Where your data lives

Air360 processes and stores customer data in the EU, on OVHcloud and AWS infrastructure in France and Ireland. We sign a Data Processing Agreement with every customer, support GDPR, UK GDPR and CCPA/CPRA obligations, and provide the tooling to answer data subject requests, including deleting a specific user and all of their sessions in a single click.

The product is also designed not to capture personally identifiable information in the first place, and user-entered text in session replay is masked by default rather than as a setting somebody has to remember to switch on.

For most teams this never becomes a conversation. For anyone whose procurement or legal function asks where the data physically sits and who else can reach it, it tends to be the first question and occasionally the only one. Air360 also offers a Business Associate Agreement for HIPAA-regulated workloads if that applies to you.

5. Whether anyone helps you

Clarity gives you the tool, extensive documentation and a community. That is a fair trade for free, and for teams who know what they are doing it is enough.

Air360 customers get a named team. Behavioural analytics is a discipline as much as a product, and the gap between having the data and knowing which three things to fix first is where most tools quietly fail. If your team already has that expertise in-house, this is worth less to you. If it does not, it is often worth more than the software.

Getting ready for a cookieless web

Air360’s current release does not use cookies, and is designed not to capture personally identifiable information in the first place, with user-entered text masked in session replay by default. That was a deliberate investment, made on the assumption that third-party cookies keep getting harder and any measurement leaning on them becomes progressively less representative over time. It is an engineering choice about durability, not a shortcut around consent.

Clarity’s approach is different, and reasonable for what it is. It is a Microsoft product, integrated with Microsoft Advertising, and cookies are part of how that works. Microsoft states that Chromium’s third-party cookie changes will not affect Clarity’s functionality.

Which of those you want depends less on the technology than on what you want your analytics to be for.

Questions to ask before you choose

Do you have a budget for this at all? If the answer is genuinely no, use Clarity. It is better than not measuring, and it is better than most paid tools at the price of zero.

How far back do you need to look? If 30 days covers your questions, Clarity’s retention is not a constraint. If you compare across quarters or investigate after the fact, it is a hard limit.

What share of your European visitors accept cookies? Whatever that number is, it is roughly the share of your behavioural data a cookie-based tool will see in full.

Would you be comfortable showing your privacy team Microsoft’s suggested disclosure wording? If yes, this is a non-issue. If the conversation would be difficult, that is worth knowing before you install rather than after.

Does anyone on your team have time to interpret the data? Tools do not produce decisions. People do, and they need either expertise or someone providing it.

When each one makes sense

Choose Clarity if you have no budget, your questions fit inside a 30-day window, cookie consent is not a significant constraint for your audience, and you are comfortable with the data arrangement Microsoft documents.

Choose Air360 if your data needs to stay yours, if you compare periods rather than only investigating the last month, quarter against the same quarter last year or this year against last, if your procurement or legal function will ask where the data sits and who else can reach it, or if you want a team working on it with you rather than a tool and a documentation site.

Both are legitimate answers. They are just answers to different questions.

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Sources for all Microsoft Clarity claims, checked 25 August 2026: Clarity FAQ, Sample wording for Clarity Site and Privacy Policy Disclosure, Microsoft Privacy Statement. Microsoft may change its product and terms at any time.