Contentsquare vs. Amplitude: which is better for your team?

Amplitude and Contentsquare are both top-rated digital analytics platforms that are frequently compared to each other. Which one is better for your use cases? That depends on what you are trying to accomplish, which products from Amplitude and Contentsquare you are comparing, and what other tools you already have in place for A/B testing and as your CDP.

TL;DR

Amplitude and Contentsquare are often compared with each other for their rivaling Product Analytics solutions. In this comparison, the customers that select Contentsquare often do so because of its industry-leading auto capture and digital experience analytics capabilities.

Autocapture in Contentsquare Product Analytics has been refined over 10 years of R&D investment.

• It is available for capturing in-page behavioral events for both websites and mobile apps

• It has proven itself over and over again to provide huge time and cost savings compared to traditional analytics tools which require pre-planning and deploying additional tags whenever teams want to answer new questions

• Unburdens engineering so they can focus on their main scope instead of tagging

• Reduces noise with data governance features that retain auto captured events in the background while surfacing only the events that matter

• Ultimately, provides a more complete data set which enables users to get better answers to questions, more quickly, and retroactively.

Digital Experience Analytics in Contentsquare

• Provides not just basic session replay as many other Product Analytics vendors do, but a complete platform for digital experience analytics, monitoring, and voice of customer

• Enables companies to create content experiences that convert better by understanding how users see their sites and apps, what content elements attract them before they click, and why do they bounce or convert

• Enables friction-free experiences by surfacing frustrations and their root causes, ranging from technical errors to slow speeds and UX problems.

• Helps create happy users by collecting feedback directly via surveys, feedback, usability tests, and interviews using Contentsquare Voice of Customer.

At times, Amplitude customers compare it directly to Contentsquare’s Experience Analytics product and find that there is very little overlap when comparing these two products. That’s why many companies use Amplitude and Contentsquare Experience Analytics together to reap their synergies. In this combination, Amplitude provides analytics for what is happening and Contentsquare Experience Analytics answers why it’s happening.

Beyond these core analytics capabilities, many Amplitude customers value their platform for its native Experimentation and CDP product offerings. Contentsquare does not offer comparable capabilities natively but instead provides over 115 integrations with best-of-breed A/B testing, CDP, and other mar tech solutions. When companies already have their preferred Experimentation and CDP solution in place, the ability to integrate with their existing ecosystem is often valued.

What are the main differences between Contentsquare vs Amplitude?

Instead of jumping into a tool comparison, start from your business goals. What are your biggest business challenges? Choose the platform that’s designed to help you achieve your goals.

Here’s an overview of the main use case differences between Contentsquare vs Amplitude from our perspective

Use cases that both Contentsquare and Amplitude do well

The use case that both Amplitude and Contentsquare support well is to create better products and drive user adoption and growth with the help of data and experimentation.

How do we create better products and drive user adoption and growth?

Both Contentsquare Product Analytics and Amplitude are market leaders for web, app, and product analytics capabilities.

Fundamentally, Amplitude is a product analytics platform used by product and marketing teams to understand user behavior and make data-driven decisions.

Since acquiring Heap in 2023, Contentsquare is now a comparable Amplitude alternative, with full product analytics capabilities plus additional tools for retention analysis and user segmentation.

Both Contentsquare and Amplitude are popular alternatives to product analytics competitors like Mixpanel, and Pendo. Use either to

• Report on sign-ups and product usage

• Measure onboarding and feature engagement

• Stitch user behaviors across sessions and devices

• Track retention and run cohort analysis

• Create custom product analytics dashboards for different teams with templates for common use cases

• Measure the success of SaaS products and ecommerce stores

The biggest difference between Contentsquare Product Analytics and Amplitude is the set-up, i.e. data capture. Contentsquare has refined its auto capture capabilities for websites and mobile apps with over 10 years of R&D investment. Today, it is the most widely used and proven auto capture solution for product analytics in the industry. .

Contentsquare’s auto capture is market-proven to provide huge benefits for gathering a complete picture of in-page interactions so that teams can answer everyday questions without being stuck with manual tagging:

• No need to plan what click events to track in advance—Contentsquare automatically captures all in-page clicks, taps, field interactions, etc..

• No need to loop engineering in every time there’s a change—unburden engineering to focus on their own scope

• Flexibility to ask new questions of historical data— retroactive data means anyone can go back and troubleshoot or analyze any data point at any time

• Reduced risk of missing critical data needed for answering questions —never worry about forgetting to track a specific event. A more complete data set means better and faster answers to questions.

• Lower total cost of ownership – Save on the tremendous amount of effort and cost that is spent on traditional analytics for manual tagging.

• Lower fees – Save on the extra fees that some analytics tools that are priced on the number of captured events charge when you increase the number of events you tag.

This approach saves time, money, reduces technical debt, and ensures you always have the data you need to make informed decisions. And it works right out of the box.

Manual tracking vs. autocapture

How do we facilitate experimentation?

Experimentation gives your team a low-risk way of finding what works best, backed by data.

Amplitude provides a native experimentation tool called Amplitude Experiment. You can use it to

• Launch product feature and web tests and target any segment

• Track A/B test success based on metrics you already track in Amplitude (like completed sign-ups or average order value)

• See how long it will take to reach your chosen goal using the duration estimator

• Measure success based on various algorithms and confidence levels

Contentsquare does not provide a native A/B testing tool, but it does integrate with all leading testing platforms, including AB Tasty, Optimizely, and VWO.

You can use Contentsquare to improve A/B tests in 3 ways:

• Use Contentsquare’s AI-powered insights to identify new opportunities for experimentation

• See exactly what impacts conversions and revenue during the tests using side-by-side Zoning Analysis

• Understand exactly why variants won (and lost) to iterate more effectively on future tests and design changes

Visualize the outcome of A/B test variants with side-by-side Zone-Based Heatmaps in Contentsquare

What Contentsquare does better than Amplitude (and why it matters)

If you’re scrolling through the two vendor’s homepages, Contentsquare and Amplitude could look pretty similar—collect data, put it in charts, use it to drive growth, rinse and repeat. But there are plenty of use cases where Contentsquare provides tools that are not a focus for Amplitude’s product suite.

Here are the main things to know.

How do we improve marketing acquisition?

For marketers working on acquisition challenges, both Amplitude and Contentsquare provide metrics on campaign traffic and conversion. Amplitude enables users to bucket UTMs and referrers into channels to organize acquisition traffic, use multi-touch attribution to evaluate which acquisition strategies shine, and track return on ad spend metrics with Google and Meta integrations or warehouse data.

Meanwhile, Contentsquare’s Product Analytics capabilities aren’t limited to analyzing product or ecommerce metrics either —they also let you gain deep insight into your customer acquisition channels, e.g. traffic and conversion metrics by campaign..

A marketing acquisition overview dashboard in Contentsquare

With the addition of Contentsquare Experience Analytics, your firepower for increasing Marketing ROI goes up dramatically.

Visual analytics

With Contentsquare Experience Analytics added to your eco-system, you also get comprehensive visual analytics for improving Marketing ROI:

• Zone-Based Heatmaps show exactly which elements are driving conversions and revenue, e.g. on campaign landing pages —use them to make a case for changes, demonstrate the success of an experiment, and compare side-by-side segment behavior

• Live Zoning overlays metrics directly onto your website—use the CS Live Chrome extension to visualize how people interact within your website pages in real-time

• Sunburst Journey Maps visualize customer journeys in a way that is more helpful for discovery of unexpected behaviors. It displays a top-down view of all user flow through the entire website or app at one glance. Similar pages are grouped into page types to reduce the noise It even lets you compare journeys side by side to understand differences in journeys for marketing acquired users that complete their journeys vs. those that bail along the way.

By combining visual analytics and traditional charts, Contentsquare gives you ways to understand why marketing acquired traffic is bouncing and what content A/B tests are most likely to improve results. That use case of informing the best A/B tests to run for reducing bounces and increasing conversions is one of the biggest value-drivers for companies using Contentsquare Digital Experience Analytics for improving marketing acquisition.

Google Audiences integration into Contentsquare Experience Analytics

A fact of life is that many of your investments in digital marketing will be through Google’s advertising products. That’s where an integration with Google products makes it easier to improve your ROI on Google ad campaigns.

As documented In Google Analytics 4 (GA4) help pages, “Audiences [in GA4] are groups of users […] who have generated similar behavioral data or who share demographic or other descriptive data (e.g., same age group, same gender, were acquired by the same campaign). You can share audiences with the advertising products you use, like Google Ads, so you can market to specific groups of users.”

Wouldn’t it be helpful if you could import those same Google Advertising Audience definitions into Contentsquare to gain immersive visual insights into the behavior of these audiences when they browse your site? What content attracts them vs. doesn’t? What is their intent? What are their experiences?

That’s exactly what you can do with the integration between Contentsquare Experience Analytics and GA4.

• Seamlessly bring your GA4 Audiences into Contentsquare to enhance your analysis and insights.

• Filter any heatmap or search for replays by selecting the imported GA4 Audiences

• Find improvement opportunities for journeys and content based on the audience’s wants and needs as demonstrated by their behaviors and struggles

• Apply those lessons learned back to your ad campaigns in the Google Marketing Platform

Perfect synergetic use case that provide syou with a faster path to Marketing ROI. A win win!

How do we surface obstacles and prioritize what to fix based on revenue impact?

No company can afford to lose customers and users because of frustrations on their sites and apps. That’s where session replay helps for stepping into the shoes of users and seeing what they are experiencing.

While Amplitude has recently added session replay to its product offering, there is a lot more that seasoned Digital Experience Analytics and Monitoring tools such as Contentsquare provide for identifying points of friction, their root causes, and business impact.

Technical error analytics and resolution

Using Contentsquare you can also

• Combine Error Monitoring + Session Replays for websites and mobile apps —automatically detect errors, then view relevant session replays to see exactly what users experienced before, during, and after the error occurred, e.g. JS errors, API errors, app crashes, console logged errors, and custom defined errors such as form validations.

• Save time with Frustration Scoring + Session Replays – by ranking which sessions to replay that are most likely to be insightful

• Enable Advanced Support teams to resolve escalated issues by replaying the exact sessions related to customer service tickets, understanding root causes of issues down to errors, granular network details, request/response headers, and bodies.

• Ensure security by enabling only authorized personnel to decrypt customer data needed for handling the customer’s service tickets

• Enable engineers to see the full waterfall of network details behind every replay so they can understand what leads up to bugs and fix them quickly/

• Get customizable real-time error alerts and dashboards that rally your team around critical issues

• Make it easy to file tickets via Jira or rally teams to action via Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Save time focusing in high-impact optimizations with Contentsquare’s AI-powered insights such as Frustration Score

Error tracking in Contentsquare

Perhaps the two most popular capabilities in Contentsquare for technical teams tasked with ensuring friction-free experiences are text search and 1-click impact quantification.

• Only Contentsquare provides retroactive text search which enables teams to

  • Surface and quantify all occurrences where site users encountered unexpected error messages of any kind, e.g. “Oops, something went wrong.”

  • Visualize how users experience these messages,

  • To learn things that technical teams didn’t already know from their APM tools such as Dynatrace, Datadog, etc.,

• Only Contentsquare enables 1-click impact quantification of behaviors and errors directly from session replay.

  • Spot any issue or error? Simply select the issue or behaviors leading up to it and quantify with one click to see how many others experience the same problems

  • Contentsquare automatically compares the segment of customers that experience the issue vs. those that don’t experience it at that point to calculate the true impact of the problem

  • This is what enables teams to go from one to many and prioritize the issues that will actually move the needle for the business and for customers.

Example of error capture and impact quantification in Contentsquare

Speed Analysis

There is more than just errors, though, that causes users to abandon. Slow speeds will be enough to turn off users. So, Contentsquare helps you identify where the site is too slow so that users are losing interest.

• Contentsquare provides speed analysis based on real user monitoring (RUM) to identify performance issues affecting conversion. Most importantly, this lets you quantify the conversion impact of slow speeds.

• Contentsquare also provides additional Speed Analysis tools based on Synthetic Monitoring, i.e. lab testing. Teams use these to

  • Speed test new product releases before launching them to avoid costly blunders.

  • Automatically speed test production experiences to get alerted if performance degrades.

  • Get automated tips for what is hurting performance and how to speed it up.

Example of quantifying the business impact of poor performance

UX Problems

Oftentimes, websites and apps work exactly as designed, but too many users are confused and frustrated anyways. Catching these issues requires data that goes beyond link click data captured by typical product analytics tools. For example, in Contentsquare you will also be able to visualize

• Clicks on unclickable content where users think something should be clickable

• Recurring or rage clicks, a telltale sign that something is not quite right.

• Clicks leading to errors

• Multiple repeated form field interactions suggesting struggle and too much effort

• Automated form analysis with metrics such as drop-rates, refill-rates, blank rates

• Voice of Customer tool integrations for replaying sessions of users that rated experiences poorly to understand what led up to their frustrations

• Side by side journey analysis, e.g. to compare journeys where users rated their experience 5-stars vs. just 1 star.

• And much more

The depth and breadth of the capabilities for Experience Monitoring in Contentsquare makes it easy to see why technical teams flock to the solution for ensuring smooth operations, no matter whether they may use it alongside Amplitude Analytics or Contentsquare Product Analytics.

How do we create happier customers by collecting feedback and listening better?

Voice of Customer (VoC) feedback gives you direct access to what’s going on in the minds of your most important business asset—your customers.

VoC tools empower teams across the organization to make data-driven decisions:

• Marketers can refine campaigns based on customer sentiment

• Product teams can prioritize features that resonate with users

• Customer support can address common pain points

• Executives can gauge overall satisfaction and loyalty

All this leads to improved customer experiences and increased business growth.

Amplitude doesn’t provide a native VoC tool—you’ll need to integrate with other paid tools like Survicate or Sprig to collect feedback responses and connect them to your quantitative data.

With Contentsquare, you have the option to integrate or use built-in VoC tools, including

• Surveys—AI-powered for any use-case like exit-intent surveys and Net Promoter Score® (NPS) surveys

• Feedback buttons—collect effortless feedback anytime with contextual screenshot capture

• Intelligent analysis—transform qualitative data into actionable metrics with AI survey results and sentiment analysis

With Contentsquare, the focus is on the ability to make sense of feedback at scale with the help of

• Session replay: 1-click to replay experiences leading up to feedback

• Segmentation, e.g. for Journey Analysis and Heatmaps: Compare behaviors of users that rated experiences highly vs. poorly

• Root cause analysis: Combine Voice of Customer with Contentsquare Experience Analytics to reveal why users are running into frustrations, e.g. whether it is due to slow speeds, technical errors, UX confusion, or all of the above

• 1-click Impact Quantification from replay: Zoom out from any one feedback to all users to quantify how many other users ran into the same frustrations even if they didn’t leave feedback, and what was the impact on conversion and revenue.

Contentsquare gives you more ways to collect and analyze VoC feedback, powered by Hotjar

Is Contentsquare vs Amplitude better for your team?

What’s your primary reason for using a platform like Contentsquare, Amplitude or alternatives?

If it’s product measurement and understanding journeys across sessions and devices, you can achieve your goals with either platform. But Contentsquare Product Analytics has proven itself over 10 years to be providing huge cost and time savings thanks to its autocapture architecture.

If it’s whole-business growth, Contentsquare is the only all-in-one platform that combines product and comprehensive experience analytics, monitoring, and Voice of Customer feedback to tackle growth from all angles.

Ready to see which solution fits your team best? Take the 6-minute Contentsquare product tour to discover how we turn your data into growth-driving insights.

FAQs about Contentsquare vs. Amplitude

What is Amplitude?

Amplitude is a product analytics and event-tracking platform founded in San Francisco in 2012 by Spencer Skates and Curtis Liu. Today, Amplitude has around 3,000 customers, supported by 700+ employees spread across offices in the US, Europe, and Asia.

What is Contentsquare?

Contentsquare is the leading all-in-one experience intelligence platform founded in Paris in 2012 by Jonathan Cherki. The company has raised over $1.4 billion in funding and acquired tools like Pricing Assistant and Clicktale (2019), Hotjar (2021), and Heap Analytics (2023). Today, Contentsquare has a team of 1,800+ across 16 global offices.

What are the top Amplitude competitors?

The top Amplitude competitors include

• Contentsquare

• Heap

• Google Analytics

• Mixpanel

• Glassbox

Net Promoter®, NPS®, NPS Prism®, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld. Net Promoter ScoreSM and Net Promoter SystemSM are service marks of Bain & Company, Inc., NICE Systems, Inc., and Fred Reichheld.