Contentsquare vs. Glassbox: which one is right for you?

At first glance, Contentsquare and Glassbox might seem similar—both offer behavior analytics and product insights for enterprise brands. But look beyond the product pages and outdated reviews and you'll find significant differences—especially when you see how recent acquisitions have expanded Contentsquare's offering.

In this guide, we put our objective hats on and break down exactly how Contentsquare stacks up as a Glassbox alternative using insight from some of our customers who’ve switched to us. By the end, you'll have a clear understanding of each platform's strengths and which best aligns with your needs.

TL;DR

While Contentsquare enables Product, Marketing, UX, Data, and Technical teams to get a better understanding of their users' omni-channel digital experiences, Glassbox primarily helps technical users find and fix friction.

• Both Contentsquare and Glassbox are enterprise solutions with advanced data security, privacy, and compliance certifications

• Both Glassbox and Contentsquare autocapture data across websites and apps, no manual tagging required

• Both Contentsquare and Glassbox have AI features to help you save time and find impactful insights without technical knowledge

• Both Contentsquare and Glassbox have comprehensive behavior analytics and error monitoring tools like session replays and customer journeys, but only Contentsquare is an all-in-one solution with VoC and advanced product analytics tools to give you a holistic view of both digital experience and performance

• Glassbox’s tools focus on finding friction and errors, while Contentsquare can also be used to optimize the whole funnel and quantify the business impact of issues and improvements

• In contrast, Contentsquare supports a broader range of business roles by providing deep insights into customer behavior and experience for both technical teams and business teams

• Contentsquare is a much larger company than Glassbox, trusted by 1.3+ million websites and apps, with 18 offices worldwide, over $1.4 billion in funding, 150+ integrations, and a 600-person R&D team—this means you can expect unrivaled local support and cutting-edge patented product features you won’t find elsewhere

For organizations prioritizing comprehensive insights for all teams and regions, Contentsquare is the recommended choice, while Glassbox may suit those with solely technical or departmental requirements.

Contentsquare vs. Glassbox: what are the main differences?

The best way to choose is by starting from your business goals. What are your biggest challenges in the business? Focus on the use cases that will actually let you solve those challenges.

What are the main differences between Contentsquare and Glassbox?

What Contentsquare does that Glassbox doesn’t (and why it matters)

Unlike Glassbox, Contentsquare is the only all-in-one platform with tools and support for optimizing the whole customer lifecycle. Here are the main benefits you’ll get by choosing Contentsquare over Glassbox.

Comprehensive product analytics

Thanks in part to Contentsquare’s 2023 acquisition of Heap, the platform has enhanced product analytics capabilities that go beyond anything Glassbox offers. 

In Contentsquare Product Analytics powered by Heap, you can

• Create different analytics dashboards for any team in your org, from marketing to product to customer success

• Generate any chart using a text prompt (for example, “How much revenue is generated by mobile users?”)

• Connect charts to other tools like relevant session replays and journeys in one click

• Quantify the revenue impact of every insight to make a business case for changes

An acquisition dashboard with the overview tab open in Contentsquare Product Analytics powered by Heap

Voice of Customer (VoC) tools

While Glassbox has VoC analysis tools, you’ll need to integrate with other paid VoC tools like Qualaroo or SurveyMonkey to collect feedback. 

With Contentsquare, you can collect, analyze, and connect feedback to analytics data in one tool to

• Collect feedback anywhere in the customer journey with Surveys

• Concept test designs and prototypes before launch with User Tests

• Generate AI-powered survey summaries and automatically track sentiment

• Quantify the impact of bad feedback on conversions and revenue

• Connect feedback to session replays for deeper insights

Invite users for interviews with Interviews

Unrivaled support and easy-to-use tools for the whole org

With a huge global presence across 18 cities, Contentsquare offers an unmatched level of customer onboarding and ongoing support. You’ll get 

• A dedicated Customer Success Manager with regular check-ins and quarterly business reviews 

• Online and in-person training built around your own use cases

• Live and self-paced certification programs from Contentsquare University

• Access to the member community of 600+ leading brands

The key selling point of Contentsquare was its ease of implementation and impressive client success program. Knowing we’d get dedicated support from Contentsquare while onboarding and upskilling made the decision easy.

Gareth Cottiss

Senior Ecommerce Merchandising Manager

Unlike Glassbox, Contentsquare’s all-in-one platform is designed to deliver value across the org without a steep learning curve, giving you

• Intuitive, visual tools and dashboards for marketing, CX, technical, analytics, ecommerce, UX, and product teams

• 150+ integrations and APIs to connect with your whole tech stack

Business value > vanity metrics

While both Glassbox and Contentsquare let you find and fix errors, only Contentsquare helps you proactively increase revenue and conversions, by

• Using the Impact Quantification tool to instantly quantify the business impact of issues and surface high-priority opportunities

• Filtering any insight by revenue impact, for example visualize the value of clicks on Zone-Based Heatmaps

• Measuring how your company performs against competitors in the Benchmarks tool

Understanding the revenue and conversion impact of trends isn’t just for the C-suite—it empowers every team to make a business case for optimizations. 

Contentsquare vs. Glassbox tools and feature comparison

Now you know the main differences between the two platforms, here's a tool-by-tool comparison of Contentsquare and Glassbox. 

Heatmaps

Heatmaps are visual representations of how users interact with your website. Contentsquare and Glassbox both offer similar heatmap features:

• They both show real-time live heatmaps using Chrome extensions—Contentsquare CS Live and Glassbox Extension

• Both Contentsquare’s Zone-Based Heatmaps and Glassbox’s heatmaps show activity zones instead of single points on interaction

• Both have side-by-side heatmap views for analyzing visitor behavior across segments

But there are some key differences: 

• Glassbox heatmaps only display surface-level basic metrics like number of clicks, while Contentsquare also enables you to visualize the impact of clicks with metrics like revenue

• In Contentsquare, you can click through from heatmaps into product analytics insights to investigate the wider trends behind click and scroll behavior

Session replays

Session replays recreate how individual users browse your website across multiple pages. Again, you’ll find both tools have a lot in common here:

• Both platforms automatically tag problematic sessions for you to focus on—Glassbox calls it Struggle Score, in Contentsquare it’s Frustration Score

• Both platforms break down pageviews, events, and errors so you can identify any issues that occurred during the session

• Both platforms let you share specific replays and events with your team to resolve issues quickly

The biggest differences are in the way session replay data is filtered and connected:

• Contentsquare’s session replays are connected to its other tools, including Journeys, Heatmaps, Impact Quantification, and Form Analysis—click straight through for further analysis

• Glassbox has a feature called GIA (Glassbox Insights Assistant) to find replays based on text prompts like “sessions with rage clicks”—you can achieve the same thing in Contentsquare using filters, or by chatting with ​​AI CoPilot in the Product Analytics tool

• Glassbox has a funnel builder inside the session replay tool that lets you drag and drop events into a funnel for later analysis—you can analyze funnels in Contentsquare using the Product Analytics tool instead.

Customer journey mapping

Customer journey maps show you how users progress through your site from entry to exit. Both Contentsquare and Glassbox have dedicated journey-mapping tools:

• Contentsquare has a Journey Analysis tool and Glassbox has a Customer Journey Analytics tool

• Both tools let you filter journeys and click through to relevant session replays

Customer journey maps in Contentsquare

However, Contentsquare has more features that make it easier to analyze and troubleshoot journeys without getting lost in a maze of squiggly lines:

• Only Contentsquare visualizes journeys in a sunburst chart—inner rings represent start pages and outer rings are exits

• Only Contentsquare lets you compare journeys side-by-side—use this to quickly see how different traffic sources or A/B tests perform

• Only Contentsquare lets you run one-click exit analysis to see exactly the issues that led to bounces

Product analytics

Product analytics show you exactly how your product, website, or app is performing. 

While both Contentsquare and Glassbox offer product analytics that integrate with their behavior analytics tools, Glassbox’s offering is quite limited:

• Glassbox has dedicated mobile app analytics tool—you can do the same in Contentsquare by creating a mobile app dashboard in Heap, part of the Contentsquare group

• Glassbox only lets you monitor limited top-level data, like pageviews, errors, and speed

Mobile app analytics dashboards in Contentsquare

With Contentsquare, you can monitor every product metric in a single platform and

• Create multiple product analytics dashboards for different teams, like an acquisition dashboard for marketing or a retention dashboard for the product team

• Click to generate relevant analytics reports from other Contentsquare tools, like session replays or funnels—and vice versa

• Generate insights and charts by chatting with Sense AI in plain language

Voice of Customer

Collecting voice of customer data captures the sentiment of your most important business asset: your customers. 

Glassbox does not offer native VoC tools—you’ll have to integrate with another paid tool like SurveyMonkey or Qualtrics to collect feedback.

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

• Surveys: trigger AI-powered on-page surveys to ask users anything, like why they’re leaving or Net Promoter®Score, and let AI-powered survey summaries and sentiment analysis quantify qualitative feedback and save you time on analysis

• Interviews: dive deeper into any topics in live conversations with your users to uncover pain points, hesitations, and emotions you might have missed in written feedback

• User Tests: test designs and prototypes with your target market and get candid feedback, without the need for a moderator

Glassbox has a feature they call Voice of the Silent that uses machine learning to extrapolate user experience by customer actions. We admit it’s a catchy name, but you can achieve the same thing using Contentsquare’s Impact Quantification and Error Analysis tools and you’ll still need to collect real user feedback to make it work. 

Performance monitoring and error tracking

Finding technical bugs—both before rollouts and ongoingly—is the quickest way to improve UX and grow conversions. 

Both Contentsquare and Glassdoor have robust experience monitoring tools with lots of overlap:

• Contentsquare’s Error Analysis tool in Experience Monitoring automatically finds, logs, and prioritizes all site errors, with one-click links to related session replays

• Contentsquare’s Speed Analysis tool does the same for site speed issues

• Glassbox has a Struggle Analysis tool that brings together different errors (like speed, Ajax errors, and rage clicks) into one dashboard, with links to affected session replays and journeys for further analysis

• Both platforms offer real-time alerts for critical issues and integrations with tools like Jira to streamline the bug-fixing workflow

• Both platforms have real user monitoring (RUM) and synthetic monitoring to proactively identify user performance issues

• Contentsquare's Impact Quantification feature calculates the potential revenue impact of each issue, helping teams prioritize fixes based on business value

Integrations

Integrating your digital experience platform with the rest of your tech stack will help you break down data silos, gain richer context for your insights, and drive more impactful optimizations across channels.

Contentsquare has 150+ pre-built integrations, including

• A/B testing tools, like AB Tasty, Optimizely, and Monetate

• Analytics tools, like Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, and Mixpanel

• VoC tools, like Qualtrics, GetFeedback, and Medallia

• Application performance management tools, like New Relic, Datadog, and Dynatrace

• Collaboration tools, like Jira, Slack, and Microsoft Teams

• Chat tools, like Zendesk, Intercom, and Salesforce LiveAgent

Contentsquare also has 3 APIs to send and pull in data and metrics to and from almost any tool. 

Glassbox only has around 25 integrations, but its open API allows connections with most third-party tools. 

The verdict: is Contentsquare or Glassbox better for your team? 

Contentsquare is the best choice for

• Unrivaled support: benefit from a dedicated CSM, tailored training & certification program, and a 600+ member community of top global brands

• Whole org adoption: unify and leverage insights across the org

• Tech and non-tech users: interact with visual, intuitive data and generate reports using plain language

• Revenue-focused teams: backup any optimization recommendation with revenue and conversion impact metrics

• Ecommerce teams: automatically surface insights to increase conversions and revenue

• Product managers: create retention dashboards and use data to prioritize product backlog

• CX, UX and QA teams: find bugs, collect VoC feedback, speed up reporting with AI alerts, summaries and next steps

• Enterprise organizations: scale whole funnel insights across multiple brands, websites, and apps with robust governance and cutting-edge features (100+ patents)

However, Glassbox might be a better choice than Contentsquare if

• You’re working as part of technical team and are mostly focused on finding and fixing points of friction

• You’re primarily interested in one or two features and don't need advanced analytics or revenue impact insights

Ultimately, Contentsquare is a more comprehensive, user-friendly, and business-impact-focused solution compared to Glassbox's more limited, technically-oriented approach. 

But the only way to know for certain what’s best for your team is to see it for yourself. Take a product tour and see how Contentsquare's AI-powered insights will help you make data-driven decisions to boost revenue and transform your digital strategy.

Contentsquare vs Glassbox FAQs

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