There’s nothing like a live view of your customer behavior to understand how users interact with your app, where they struggle, and how you can improve their experience. And truly, in today’s digital landscape, creating a top-of-class user experience is crucial.
We have created a comprehensive overview of two of the most popular user-tracking software: Microsoft Clarity vs. FullStory. Let’s see which one is best suited for your business needs – or if you might actually benefit from an even better alternative.
Over 50% of customers will switch to a competitor after a single unsatisfactory customer experience, so it’s crucial to nail your customer experience.
What is Microsoft Clarity?
Microsoft Clarity is a free, open-source analytics tool that records information about user behavior on your website to help you better understand your website’s users and product experience. While it is not an all-in-one comprehensive analytics platform, Clarity does a good job at focusing on a few key features and doing them well: heat mapping, session replays, and user behavior overview.
What is FullStory?
FullStory is a digital intelligence system used to optimize client experience. While the key features are the same as those of Microsoft Clarity, FullStory also offers more in-depth, qualitative data analytics solutions and is more flexible and customizable than Clarity. However, it is not a free tool.
We’ve compared FullStory vs. Smartlook before, so make sure to check that out if you’re considering Smartlook.
Microsoft Clarity vs. FullStory: Features Comparison
Microsoft Clarity
- Dashboard and metrics: Microsoft Clarity provides an extensive data overview on their dashboard, including session counts, total users, page view details and friction reports (rage and dead clicks, excessive scrolling). However, important metrics like bounce rate or conversion rate are missing.
- Session recordings and replays: Microsoft Clarity records the behavior of every page visitor including mouse movement, scrolling and clicks that can be replayed at any time in the future. The session recordings are valuable to understand bugs and user issues on the website. Clarity is careful not to store sensitive information.
- Clickmaps and heatmaps: The clickmap and heatmap tool shows where users click and linger to better understand what they want and where they might get confused. Clarity offers heatmaps for the desktop, tablet, and mobile versions of websites.
- Filtering options and custom tags: To help you gain valuable insights from the session recordings, clarity offers filtering options to only look at specific events. With custom tags, the search can be customized further.
FullStory
- Customizable dashboard and metrics: FullStory allows you to focus on tracking the events and data that are important to your team with custom metrics and a custom dashboard. When you create a custom metric, FullStory automatically surfaces applicable user sessions to this metric. Just like Clarity, FullStory offers friction reports and even lets you analyze rage clicks in priority order (prioritized by commercial impact)
- Session recordings and replays: Just like Microsoft Clarity, FullStory automatically records the on-page behavior of every visitor. The recordings can be replayed at any time. The sensitive data of your users is completely safe, because FullStory does not capture any actual data during the session recordings and turns your website into wireframes during the session replays.
- Clickmaps and heatmaps: Fullstory shows heatmaps and clickmaps to quickly visualize large amounts of data and show you what your page visitors are looking for and where they might be getting stuck.
- Funnel building: You can map out and analyze your conversion funnels in FullStory and even track them on your dashboard. That way, you can easily identify areas where people are dropping out of the funnel and analyze why by watching the relevant session replays.
Microsoft Clarity vs. FullStory: Use Case Comparison
Microsoft Clarity
- UX design and product management teams
- Suitable for simple projects, smaller businesses and those just starting out with user tracking
FullStory
- UX design and product management teams
- Suitable for larger companies with complex projects, specific requirements and the need for more in-depth data analytics.
Microsoft Clarity vs. FullStory: User Reviews Comparison
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity is rated 4,5 out 5 stars on G2. Positive reviews claim that “Microsoft clarity has helped me to identify key areas where users click on the website and where I can place CTAs” and “Microsoft Clarity is straightforward to use.” Some more critical reviews point out that “the user interface is simple and cannot perform high-end analytics” and “this software lacks the A/B testing tools needed for UX-based testing”.
FullStory
FullStory also has 4,5 out of 5 stars on G2, though with significantly more reviews: There are 356 FullStory reviews while Microsoft Clarity has only 31. Positive reviews mention that “FullStory is my favorite tool in our box” and “FullStory is an incredible UX analysis tool that provides great customer insights”.
Microsoft Clarity vs. FullStory: Pricing Comparison
Microsoft Clarity
Microsoft Clarity is an open-source software that is completely free to use forever. This makes Clarity especially interesting for companies who are just starting out and want to see what heat mapping and session replays can do for the improvement of their user experience.
FullStory
FullStory does not publicly disclose its pricing, so you’ll have to get in touch with them for a quote.
Microsoft Clarity vs. FullStory: Deployment Comparison
Microsoft Clarity
There are two ways to install Microsoft Clarity:
- Manually by pasting the tracking code into the <head> section of your custom-coded app or website
- On a third-party platform like Shopify, WordPress, data integration managers like Google Tag Manager and more
Both of them are relatively quick and easy. In case of problems with the installations, you can contact the Microsoft support team and should get help quickly.
FullStory
The different ways to install FullStory are:
- Manual installation by pasting a code snippet into the <head> section: The usual way for custom-coded apps or websites
- Installation via a tag or data integration manager (Google Tag Manager, Segment)
- Installation via NPM for single-page apps using Angular, React, Vue, or others
- Install on a third-party platform like Shopify, Squarespace, etc.
Just like Microsoft Clarity, FullStory is quick and simple to install and offers comprehensive guides on the different options.
Microsoft Clarity vs. FullStory: Integrations Comparison
Microsoft Clarity
By integrating Microsoft Clarity with other software, you’ll create a well-rounded tech stack with all the features you can’t get from Clarity alone. Softwares that complement Microsoft Clarity and are easily integrated are:
- Google Analytics
- AB Tasty
- Kameleoon
- Optimizely
- … and more.
FullStory
FullStory supports integrations with powerful software to seamlessly merge with your tech stack, such as Microsoft Teams, Zapier, Google Analytics, Jira, Salesforce, and many more.
Even if the platforms you are already using aren’t on the list, FullStory can usually be customized to integrate them.
Alternative to Microsoft Clarity and FullStory: Fullview
More in-depth analytics than Microsoft Clarity and more customer-specific options for cobrowsing and troubleshooting than FullStory: Fullview is a powerful alternative to both software that you might want to consider as well. Here’s why:
- Best-in-class session replays with an intuitive interface, user identification, and multi-tab-support
- Powerful filtering and segmentation capabilities to make real sense of session recordings
- Warnings clearly show in which sessions signs of user frustration, errors, or bugs have occurred
- Console logs for easy troubleshooting and cobrowsing to understand and help your customers face-to-face
- Cobrowsing and in-app screen control with zero-downloads needed to guide users in your app and solve problems faster.
- GDPR compliant with options to store data safely on EU and US servers
- Affordable pricing plans starting at $79/ month for 10,000 replays - A free plan and free trials for the pro plans are available
Fullview is suitable for businesses of all sizes, easily managing large and complex projects as well as beginner projects with smaller budgets. If both FullStory and Microsoft Clarity seem to be lacking key features for your business, Fullview might be just what your tech stack needs.
Wrapping things up
The facts: You can’t create a great user experience without knowing exactly how your users interact with your app.
For starters, Microsoft Clarity is a helpful, if basic, analytics and session replay tool. What it’s lacking in flexibility and depth, FullStory can offer at a significantly higher price.
And if you really want to get to eye level with your users by analyzing their general behavior in session replays as well as helping them hands-on with cobrowsing and console logs, Fullview might be worth consideration.
Sources used:
- https://www.g2.com/products/fullstory/reviews
- https://www.g2.com/products/microsoft-microsoft-clarity/reviews
- https://clarity.microsoft.com/
- https://clarity.microsoft.com/pricing
- https://www.fullstory.com
- https://www.fullstory.com/plans/
- https://www.zendesk.com/blog/customer-service-statistics/
Sources last checked on date: 03-Nov-2023
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