Mirage Analytics vs Microsoft Clarity

Plenty of teams picked Clarity thinking it let them sidestep the banner problem. That is no longer true. Microsoft now documents the enforcement of a consent signal requirement for any visit from the European Economic Area, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, with consent mode enabled by default for those regions.

In practice: without a valid consent signal, Clarity stops setting its cookies and limits what it collects — Microsoft states that session recordings and funnel tracking are affected. You therefore need to plug in a CMP, or build your own banner wired to the consent API. That puts you back exactly where GA4 left you: a banner to display, and every visitor who declines missing from your statistics. The average French opt-in rate is 55–60% (Didomi, 21.7 billion consent choices) — so 40–45% of your traffic is traffic Clarity will no longer see.

Mirage takes the problem from the other end: no cookie set, no persistent identifier, so there is nothing to consent to for audience measurement. The criteria in detail: the CNIL consent exemption for analytics tools.

This is the limit people talk about least, and often the one that decides it. Clarity keeps data for 30 days from recording; only the recordings you mark as favourites and a randomly drawn sample are kept for up to 9 months.

So you cannot compare this year's sales season with last year's, measure the effect of a redesign six months on, or document seasonality. For one-off diagnosis, 30 days is plenty. To steer over time, you need a memory longer than the past month.

At Mirage, measurement data is kept for 36 months and session recordings for 3 months. Let us be precise rather than flattering: on the replays you mark as favourites, Clarity goes further than we do with its 9 months. It is on audience history — 36 months against 30 days — that the gap really counts.

To be fair: Clarity costs nothing, imposes no quota and never nags you towards a paid tier. That is rare and worth saying. Microsoft gains no subscription from it — it gains a view of browsing behaviour at very large scale, useful to its ecosystem.

The question is therefore not “what does it cost” but “what am I accepting in exchange”. A consent banner to display, a share of traffic lost, one month of history, and behavioural data processed by a non-European operator. If those four points suit you, Clarity is an excellent choice and you have no reason to switch.