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

Both Glassbox and Contentsquare are great products. However, they were created for different primary purposes. Glassbox is typically used by technical teams for delivering friction-free experiences.

👉 Most users are in technical roles

👉 The most frequent use case is spotting and resolving errors

Technical teams love the Contentsquare platform for these use cases as well. But what about all the other teams that need to understand top-down:

• What makes their customers click?

• What gets them to convert?

• What programs are working well that get users to come back again and again?

That’s where Contentsquare’s platform goes beyond Glassbox. Contentsquare enables users in all roles to get closer to their customers, manage their sites and apps based on their North Star KPIs, understand behaviors and points of friction top-down, collect customer feedback, and prioritize the investments that are most likely to move the needle for the business.

TL;DR

Contentsquare and Glassbox are both effective tools, tailored for distinct needs.

Contentsquare has become the market leader for digital experience intelligence because it solves a much bigger business problem for many more teams, including – but not limited to – technical users.

• Glassbox primarily serves technical teams focused on error resolution and frictionless user experiences.

• 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 thereby facilitates cross-functional collaboration, and enables proactive experience optimization.

• Contentsquare’s superior features, such as enhanced heatmaps and journey mapping, make it a market leader in digital experience intelligence.

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.

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

Both Contentsquare and Glassbox excel at Experience Monitoring use cases supported by key capabilities such as Session Replay, Error Analysis, and Speed Analysis.

Session Replay

Glassbox and Contentsquare both provide state of the art session replay, which recreates individual user journeys across your website or app.

• Both Glassbox and Contentsquare provide session replay capture for 100% of traffic

• Both platforms let you recreate sessions on desktop, mobile, tablet, and apps

• Both platforms 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.

• Both platforms ensure security by enabling only authorized personnel to decrypt data needed for handling customer service issues

• Both platforms let you click to see how common an error is and quantify the revenue impact of any error so you can prioritize fixes

• Both platforms let you share specific replays and events with your team to resolve issues quickly, e.g. via Jira, Slack, or Microsoft Teams.

• Both automatically rank sessions to watch with a Frustration Score so you can save time by focusing on your most insightful session to watch.

Playback experience in Contentsquare

The main differences for session replay come from advanced features and platform interconnectivity:

• Only Contentsquare provides 1-click Impact quantification and evaluation by enabling users to select behavior and issue elements in the session replay even stream to generate a comparison dashboard. With a click on the Quantify capability, users can contrast conversions and revenue for users that experienced the issues vs. those that didn’t to get a true assessment of total impact on the business.

• Glassbox provides a different way to save time on watching session replay, namely by summarizing a user’s session replay into one or multiple paragraphs of text. That’s also great, but more for users that prefer reading text over watching the actual experience.

Error Analysis

Both Glassbox and Contentsquare are extremely strong for website and mobile app error analysis.

• Both platforms have customizable real-time alerts for critical issues

• Both platforms provide error reporting that surfaces any type of technical issues blocking users from completing their goals, e.g. API errors, apps crashes, Javascript errors, console messages, and functional errors.

• Both calculate the potential revenue impact of any error so you can see how much a fix is worth—in Contentsquare it’s called Impact Quantification, in Glassbox, it’s handled in dashboards.

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

But you’ll get some extra features if you choose Contentsquare, for example:

• 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.” without having to pre-define event tracking and without relying on gimmicks such as assuming that all error messages are displayed in red font color.

  • Visualize how users experience these messages, and

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

Speed Analysis

Contentsquare and Glassbox both help identify where the site is too slow so that users are losing interest.

• Both Contentsquare and Glassbox provide speed analysis based on real user monitoring (RUM) to identify performance issues affecting conversion

But you’ll get additional features if you choose Contentsquare:

• Only Contentsquare 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.

The depth and breadth of the capabilities for Digital Experience Monitoring use cases provided by both platforms make it easy to see why technical teams flock to Contentsquare and Glassbox for ensuring smooth operations.

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

Experience optimization is a team sport that includes not just technical teams but also Product, Design, Marketing, Digital/Ecommerce, and Data teams. While session replay is great for technical teams that are troubleshooting issues, everyone else’s use cases require more scalable ways to get to insights beyond just looking at experiences one session replay at a time.

That’s where Contentsquare’s platform goes beyond Glassbox with unique macro-level visualizations and metrics. These capabilities turn session replay into a more effective weapon for insights.

How do we improve marketing acquisition, besides eliminating friction?

With typical bounce rates still in the 40 – 60% range, Marketers face a daunting challenge for hitting their targets on customer acquisition. Usually, the reasons why traffic bounces have nothing to do with errors or struggle. So, how can marketers understand top-down how users are engaging with their content experiences? What gets them to click and why are so many bouncing? What A/B tests are most likely to improve acquisition journeys?

One of the fastest and easiest ways for business users to answer these questions is via heatmaps.

Heatmaps

Heatmaps show you how users interact with your site at a glance. While both platforms provide heatmaps, the robustness, depth, and usability of its heatmaps is one of the biggest advantages of Contentsquare over Glassbox.

• Both Glassbox and Contentsquare provide traditional scroll and click maps popular with analysts

• Both attribute clicks to zones, i.e. called Zone-based Heatmaps in Contentsquare and Interaction maps in Glassbox

• Both provide basic metrics for these zones, i.e. clicks and Focus Time

• Both provide form analysis metrics, e.g. in Contentsquare, drop-rate, refill rate, and blank rate, whereas Glassbox calls it Field Ignored, Field Re-Entries, Field Exits.

But that’s where the similarities stop and Contentsquare’s heatmap capabilities go a million miles beyond these elemental metrics by tying behavior to impact, i.e. downstream conversion and revenue so that teams can prioritize their A/B tests and content investments based on business outcomes.

Some of the heatmap metrics available in Contentsquare

Contentsquare’s heatmap feature has been a core capability of its platform for the past decade and has been continuously refined over time. It is one of the most frequently used features of the Contentsquare platform and heavily market tested. This explains why it is much more robust than heatmaps from other vendors.

• Only Contentsquare provides conversion and revenue metrics for heatmaps so that they inform business teams not just on behavior but on the outcomes. Without impact metrics, heatmaps would be meaningless.

• Only Contentsquare provides live heatmaps—i.e. use the Contentsquare CS Live Chrome extension or Glassbox Visible to browse your site and overlay metrics with a click

• Only Contentsquare offers side-by-side heatmap views for analyzing visitor behavior across segments like A/B test variants or different traffic sources

• Contentsquare’s Zone-based heatmaps provide many more business metrics than Glassbox’s Interaction Maps

  • Metrics for attributing conversion and revenue to content interactions

  • Since customers engage with lots of content that persuades them to click – or doesn’t, Contentsquare provide metrics for attributing conversions to content that contributed to engaging customers, e.g. Conversion Rate per Hover

  • Understanding and optimizing content engagement, e.g. attractiveness rate, hesitation time, time before first click, etc

  • Show points of friction, e.g. with the click recurrence heatmap metric

  • Increase lifetime value, e.g. multi-session purchase rates and retention rates, etc.

  • Merchandising metrics, e.g. specific merchandise exposures when pages show a personalized assortment, vs. item conversions, cart-adds, sales, etc.

• Contentsquare enables users to choose whether to run a heatmap for a single URL or various groups of related URLs, while different users can choose different groupings as needed for their roles.

• Since pages change over time and pages can be in different states, e.g. menu open vs. closed, Contentsquare enables selecting and comparing historic snapshots of page states so that the people responsible for managing the site can compare “A vs. B”

When choosing between Glassbox and Contentsquare, we recommend taking a good look at your tean’s business goals and diving into heatmaps for Contentsquare as the differences are extreme. While technical teams may rarely use heatmaps, they are one of the top used features by business teams for accomplishing their objectives .

How do we create better products, experiences, and A/B tests, besides fixing errors?

Product teams are always strapped for resources which is why they are so dependent on data to decide which of their roadmap items to prioritize vs. improve vs. drop. Their goals with analytics are not just to catch obstacles and errors, but also to understand their users at each milestone of the journey, what drives adoption, what gets users to become loyal repeat users? What do they miss that should be easier to use or find? What helps them connect the dots between your website vs. mobile app?

As such, comparing Contentsquare’s and Glassbox’s capabilities for Journey Analysis and Product Analytics are key criteria when deciding between the platforms.

Customer journey mapping

Customer journey maps illustrate all the pathways users take when browsing your site. Both Contentsquare and Glassbox have comprehensive journey-mapping tools:

• Both platforms let you filter journeys and click through to relevant session replays for more context

• Both platforms have exit/dropoff analysis analytics to surface the most common reasons people leave

Customer journey maps in Contentsquare

But Contentsquare offers more advanced journey analysis features that make it easier to discover unexpected customer journeys:

• Only Contentsquare visualizes journeys in a sunburst chart for discovery of unexpected journeys —inner rings represent start pages, outer rings are exits, and colors represent page types (like product detail pages or category pages.) This visualization uniquely enables business teams to discover journeys top-down and to “see the forest for the trees.”

• Only Contentsquare provides side-by-side journey comparison—use this for example to compare journeys of those that succeed vs. fail to complete conversions at a glance. You’ll immediately spot differences and can dig deeper with a click to understand why it’s happening.

• Only Contentsquare’s provides different views (i.e. mappings) of the site to different page categories for different user roles so everyone sees journeys in a meaningful way. For example the VP might look at journeys across major site sections to see the big picture, while the ecommerce or content team for a particular section needs to visualize journeys at a granular page level so that they can understand the why behind the what. f

Product analytics

Product analytics reveal your product, website, or app performance through easy-to-understand charts and metrics. Both Contentsquare and Glassbox offer product analytics that integrate with their behavior analytics tools:

• Both platforms let you create multiple, customizable product analytics dashboards for different teams and use cases, like an acquisition dashboard for marketers or a feature adoption dashboard for the product team

• Both come with dashboard templates to access critical data immediately without setup delays

• Both let you monitor mobile app analytics for Android and iOS apps

• Both answer questions by letting users chat with an AI Copilot in plain language.

Dashboards in Contentsquare

There are, however, a couple of crucial differences:

• Only Contentsquare provides autocapture capabilities combined with a rich set of data governance features.

  • As with Glassbox, data teams can capture everything but in Contentsquare, data teams can also choose what to surface vs. keep in the “heap” to pull out later, retroactively, should the additional data be needed.

  • Contentsquare’s data governance capability opens up the full data set for its automated insights (e.g. Illuminate) to analyze, while at the same time reducing the noise for business users so that they can see the forest for the trees.

  • Only Contentsquare provides Visual Labeling, so that users can provide and update friendly names for auto captured events so that the display names will be consistent and meaningful for everyone in the Product team.

• Only Contentsquare provides retention analysis tools to focus on reducing churn

• Only Contentsquare provides an Identity API that enables customers to retroactively stitch sessions by the same users across devices once they log in and authenticate

• Only Contentsquare provides an Engagement Matrix that correlates feature frequency of usage vs. frequency of completing journeys.

Chat with your analytics data using Contentsquare’s AI CoPilot

Contentsquare is much more deeply focused on enabling product teams to create better products beyond friction-free experiences. This explains why Contentsquare, powered by Heap, is an established market leader for Product Analytics.

How do we listen better by collecting feedback more automatically?

Quantitative and qualitative data are better together and neither can be missing to complete the picture. While both Glassbox and Contentsquare both help make sense of Voice of Customer data via native solutions and also integrations with third party VoC tools, only Contentsquare enables collecting feedback via user tests and interviews.

Voice of Customer

Voice of Customer (VoC) feedback uncovers customer thoughts as they browse. It helps you resolve issues faster by connecting with tools like session replays and error monitoring.

Both Glassbox and Contentsquare provide native feedback collection capabilities in addition to the ability to integrate with third party feedback management tools such as Qualtrics, Medallia, Mopinion, GetFeedback, etc..

• Both Glassbox and Contentsquare enable Surveys e.g. to collect Net Promoter Score (NPS) data, and Feedback buttons—to collect feedback anytime with contextual screenshot capture

• Both Glassbox and Contentsquare let you target feedback prompts based on the context of a user’s session. F

• Both Glassbox and Contentsquare excel at going from the individual users that provided feedback to the rest of your audience that suffered the same issues but did not complain so that you can quantity the true magnitude of issues and prioritize what to fix. In Glassbox, this is labeled Voice of the Silent, In Contentsquare it is Impact Quantification.

Contentsquare gives you more ways to collect and analyze VoC feedback

However, Contentsquare’s Voice of Customer goes beyond Glassbox in multiple ways.

👉 Only Contentsquare provides AI-powered automation to generate surveys and summarize survey results

👉 Only Contentsquare’s Voice of Customer provides AI automated labeling of common topics in feedback and auto labels the sentiment of the users. AI analysis—transform qualitative data into actionable metrics with AI survey responses and sentiment analysis

How do we choose a partner that can support us locally where we are located?

When enterprises choose a vendor they are looking for a partner, not just a tool provider. Having a partner with offices in the same country where your offices are located can be a big plus for a tight working relationship.

• Both Glassbox and Contentsquare have customers in many locations of the world

• With over 18 offices worldwide, Contentsquare has a much larger global footprint, however, which enables Contentsquare to support many more companies and teams where they are located.

• Only Contentsquare has hundreds of employees and its top management located in the USA to be as close as possible to the needs of the US market.

The verdict: is Contentsquare vs. Glassbox better for your team?

Choose Contentsquare over Glassbox if your goals include

• Cross-functional collaboration: break down silos and empower teams across your organization

• Tech and non-tech users: work with both intuitive visualizations for everyone and deep granular insights for technical users. Generate analytics reports with natural language interfaces

• ROI-driven strategies across the whole funnel: understand journeys at the top of the funnel and across web and apps while also finding and fixing areas of friction at the bottom of the funnel

• Ecommerce teams: leverage automated insights to boost sales

• Product managers: answer questions not just about obstacles to journey completion but also about what programs and features are working really well so that teams can double down on them. Data governance capabilities that enable data teams to provide meaningful friendly names for data while retaining control of what gets surfaced vs. kept in the background to reduce noise.

• CX, UX, and Tech teams: streamline bug detection, gather customer feedback, and accelerate reporting with AI-powered alerts, summaries, and actionable recommendations

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

• Multinational teams: get support spread over 18 countries in English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Japanese

However, Glassbox might be a better choice than Contentsquare if

• Your technical team is already familiar with Glassbox and your company does not have any use case for any other teams or for improving experiences proactively beyond finding and fixing areas of friction

• You want to summarize session replays in text form rather than seeing behaviors live

In summary, Contentsquare offers a more comprehensive, technologically advanced, and user-friendly solution with superior AI capabilities, extensive integrations, comprehensive support, and a larger global presence.

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

Contentsquare vs Glassbox FAQs

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.