Seam vs Microsoft Clarity

At a glance

All figures observed on the Shopify App Store and Microsoft documentation on 15 August 2026. Ratings and features move, so check the date before relying on this.

The difference that actually decides it

These tools do not overlap. They are not two answers to one question, they are answers to two questions that happen to both be called analytics.

Clarity is qualitative and visitor-level. It watches your storefront and records what people did on it, then lets you replay a session or look at a heatmap of where they clicked. It is the tool for "why did this checkout fail" and "is anyone finding that button".

Seam is quantitative and store-level. It reads orders, customers, products and traffic through the Shopify Admin API and writes one paragraph about what moved. It never sees your storefront and cannot tell you what any individual did.

The practical test: if your question starts with "why did this person", you want Clarity. If it starts with "what happened yesterday", you want a daily summary. Most stores have both questions.

Where Clarity is genuinely stronger

This is not a section written for balance. Clarity does several things Seam does not do at all.

Session recordings and heatmaps. Seam offers nothing in this category, not a lesser version of it. If you want to watch a real customer struggle with your variant picker, there is no version of Seam that will ever do that.

It is free with no asterisk. Microsoft states in its own FAQ that Clarity is free forever, that there is no sampling, that there are no traffic limits, and that there is no limit on the number of projects. Very few analytics products can say all four of those, and a paid tool that competed with a free one on the same ground would have a hard argument to make.

It is made by Microsoft, which matters for procurement, data processing agreements and the odds of the product still existing in three years.

What Clarity does not report on

Clarity is behavioural rather than financial, and Microsoft own documentation is clear about this if you read the metric definitions.

Its "Purchases" metric is the percentage of sessions resulting in a purchase, which is a conversion rate rather than an amount. "Most Viewed Products" ranks by view count, not by sales or revenue. Checkout abandonment is broken out by stage, but only for Shopify Plus stores.

There is no revenue total, no average order value, no lifetime value and no sales rollup anywhere in Clarity feature documentation. On the Shopify listing, the app requests order history access scoped to the last 60 days.

So Clarity will tell you that 2.1% of sessions converted and that people rage-clicked a size chart. It will not tell you that revenue was up on last Tuesday because one product did unusual volume.

Retention is the practical limit

The constraint most Clarity users hit is not price, it is time. Microsoft documents that session recordings are retained for 30 days from the time of recording. Click and heatmap data is available for up to 9 months. Recordings you mark as favourite, plus a randomly selected sample, are kept for up to 9 months.

That is generous for a free product and it means Clarity is a tool for investigating the recent past. If you want to know what a session looked like in March, in August it is gone unless someone favourited it.

What merchants raise in critical reviews

Of 1,873 Shopify App Store reviews on 15 August 2026, 132 are one or two stars, about 7%. That is a large enough absolute number to describe recurring themes honestly, while noting that 83% of all reviews are five star.

The themes that recur across 2025 and 2026 dated reviews: the app being slow or laggy inside the Shopify admin specifically, recordings sometimes not appearing, support emails going unanswered, and data export not working. One two-star review from 14 April 2026 reads: "I've repeatedly emailed microsoft to help me set up the brand agent. I get zero response."

These are complaints from a minority of reviewers and should be read as such rather than as a description of the product.

What we could not verify

Two things we went looking for and could not find documented anywhere public, so we are not going to assert them.

What happens on uninstall. Neither the Shopify listing nor Microsoft documentation states whether anything remains in your theme after removing the app, or whether stored data is deleted at that point as opposed to expiring on the normal retention schedule.

Why Clarity is free. Microsoft states that it does not sell data and that Microsoft has access to it. It does not explain how the product is funded. It would be easy to write a paragraph speculating about advertising, and it would be speculation.

Choose Clarity if, choose Seam if

Choose Clarity if you want to see what people actually do on your storefront, you are debugging a specific page or checkout step, or you want heatmaps. It is free, so the only cost of being wrong is the install.

Choose Seam if you want to know what changed in your store without opening anything, and you care about orders, revenue, products and attribution rather than clicks and scroll depth.

Choose both if you are a normal store, which most are. They collect different data through different mechanisms and answer different questions, and neither replaces the other. If you can only install one and you have no specific problem to debug, install the free one first.

Common questions

Is Microsoft Clarity really free?

Yes. Microsoft states in its own FAQ that Clarity is free forever, with no sampling, no traffic limits and no cap on the number of projects. There are no paid tiers on the Shopify listing as of 15 August 2026.

Does Microsoft Clarity show revenue or sales data?

No. Its ecommerce metrics are behavioural percentages: purchases as a share of sessions, checkout abandonment by stage, and products ranked by views. There is no revenue total, average order value or sales reporting in its documented feature set.

How long does Clarity keep session recordings?

Thirty days from the time of recording, per Microsoft documentation. Heatmap and click data is available for up to 9 months, and recordings you favourite or that are randomly sampled are kept up to 9 months.

Can I use Seam and Microsoft Clarity together?

Yes, and most stores should. They collect different data through different mechanisms: Clarity runs on your storefront and records behaviour, Seam reads store records through the Shopify Admin API. Neither substitutes for the other.

Related

• Seam vs Mida
• What Shopify's built-in reports can't tell you
• Which Shopify numbers actually matter?