Stop guessing which one. Put them side by side.

The grid says what these tools are. This says what builders did about it — one decision per person, changeable whenever you change your mind.

# Tool comparison — Google Analytics 4 vs Microsoft Clarity vs Amplitude

Source: Kbaise, a directory of tools that work with Lovable projects.
Pick one and tell me why before writing any integration code.

## Google Analytics 4 (google-analytics-4)
- URL: https://analytics.google.com
- Category: Product analytics
- Cost: free — Free for standard properties at essentially any volume. GA4 360 historically starts around $50,000/yr.
- What it is: Google's event-based analytics platform, free for standard properties, with audiences, attribution modelling, Search Console linking and a daily BigQuery export capped at 1M events. Standard properties allow 50 event-scoped custom dimensions and 30 key events. Cloud-only, with no self-hosted equivalent.
- Why builders pick it: It costs nothing at any traffic level and it is still what advertisers, SEO tools and clients expect to see, so it often ends up running alongside a nicer tool rather than instead of one.
- Trap: Retention maxes at 14 months (default 2) and explorations sample above 10M events per query. EU traffic needs a consent banner plus Consent Mode v2, and several EU regulators have ruled plain GA deployments unlawful without extra safeguards.
- Wiring: npm i @next/third-parties
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/google-analytics-4

## Microsoft Clarity (microsoft-clarity)
- URL: https://clarity.microsoft.com
- Category: Product analytics
- Cost: free — Free forever with no traffic limits and no paid tier.
- What it is: Microsoft's free behavioural analytics tool offering unlimited session recordings, click and scroll heatmaps, rage-click and dead-click detection, and AI summaries of sessions. There are no traffic caps and no paid upgrade path. Cloud-only, with an optional Google Analytics integration.
- Why builders pick it: Unlimited free session replay is unmatched at any price. Watching ten real people fumble your onboarding teaches you more in an hour than a month of staring at funnel charts.
- Trap: It sets the _clck and _clsk cookies, and since 31 October 2025 Clarity requires a valid consent signal for EEA, UK and Swiss visitors, so without a CMP those sessions will not record. Recordings can capture PII unless you mask fields.
- Wiring: npm i @microsoft/clarity
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/microsoft-clarity

## Amplitude (amplitude)
- URL: https://amplitude.com
- Category: Product analytics
- Cost: mixed — Free Starter: 2M events/mo forever, no card required. Plus starts at $0 with the first 2M events free, then usage-based; Growth and Enterprise are sales-quoted.
- What it is: A behavioural analytics platform covering funnels, retention, journeys, cohorts and experimentation. Its 2M events per month is the largest permanently free allowance among the enterprise-grade analytics tools. Cloud-only with no self-hosted build; EU data residency is available on paid plans.
- Why builders pick it: Two million free events per month goes a long way for a pre-revenue product, and the depth of analysis is much closer to Mixpanel than to a simple pageview counter.
- Trap: Free Starter caps charts, cohorts and lookback windows, and the genuinely differentiating pieces (experimentation, Guides, the CDP) sit behind sales-quoted plans with unpublished pricing.
- Wiring: npm i @amplitude/analytics-browser
- Full dossier: /api/public/tools/amplitude

## Quick read

- Free with no card: Google Analytics 4, Microsoft Clarity.

## Rules
1. Prefer the free tier when no budget was stated, and say what the ceiling is.
2. Read the full dossier before integrating.
3. Fetch /api/public/models before writing any AI model ID.

Agents can fetch the same thing: GET /api/public/compare?slugs=google-analytics-4,microsoft-clarity,amplitude