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

Good news: if you’re comparing Contentsquare and Heap you can’t go wrong. 🥳

In fact, Contentsquare acquired Heap in 2023 and integrated its Product Analytics tool into the platform (scheduled to launch in Q4 2024).

That means, whichever platform you choose, you’ll be able to

• Automatically capture the entire digital experience of every user on every platform
• Get full context about every user action with integrated session replay
• Optimize end-to-end digital journeys to improve conversions, revenue, and retention

But, if you opt for Contentsquare over Heap, you get expanded intelligence and tools that serve multiple teams, including

• Advanced AI-powered recommendations to surface high-impact optimizations
• Impact quantification to prioritize updates and optimize ROI
• Visual analytics tools like Zone-Based Heatmaps and Journey Maps for intuitive, shareable insights
• Comprehensive digital experience monitoring to identify and fix technical issues
• Voice of Customer tools to augment performance data with user feedback 
• Merchandising and pricing optimization for improve ecommerce performance
• Competitive benchmarking to compare metrics against industry standards

Keep reading to see exactly how to use Contentsquare and Heap to solve critical business challenges, compare the different tools and features of each platform, and decide which option best serves the needs of your team. 

TL;DR

• Heap is powerful standalone product analytics platform—use it to analyze product usage, optimize marketing acquisition, and improve conversion rates, retention, and revenue
• Contentsquare is the leading all-in-one experience intelligence platform, combining behavior analytics, product analytics, digital experience monitoring, and voice-of-customer tools in one powerful platform—use it to drive business growth across the org
• Heap is popular with product teams and startups looking for a robust analytics solution, while Contentsquare is popular with enterprise companies across ecommerce, finance, and travel, including over 30% of the Fortune Global 100

The main differences between Contentsquare and Heap

Here’s an overview of the main features and tools you’ll get with Contentsquare vs. Heap.

What you can achieve with Heap and Contentsquare

Let’s start with overlapping strengths. Here are the main benefits you’ll get when using either Heap or Contentsquare.

Complete product, web, marketing, and app analytics

Both Heap and Contentsquare are powerful analytics tools that automatically capture every event on your website, ecommerce store, product, or app so you can 

• Improve conversions, retention, and revenue
• Analyze marketing acquisition and know what drives the best ROI
• Shift your team to a collaborative, data-driven approach to decision-making

An acquisition overview dashboard in Heap, part of the Contentsquare platform

Both Heap and Contentsquare make this possible with

• Customizable analytics dashboards for different teams and use cases, like an acquisition dashboard for marketers or a feature adoption dashboard for the product team
• Combined website, app, and offline data to understand journeys across devices and touch points
• AI-generated charts to access any insight without technical knowledge
• Lookback analysis to get retroactive data any time with no need to plan what to track in advance
• 1-click session replays to uncover the ‘why’ behind the numbers

Analyze funnels in Heap and Contentsquare and click to view related session replays

If you go with Contentsquare, you’ll also get additional product analytics tools to understand end-to-end user journeys and maximize business impact, including 

• Zone-Based Heatmaps for visual insights into user behavior
• CS Live to overlay metrics on your live website
• Journey Analysis to understand paths across multiple pages and sessions
• Impact Quantification to prioritize high-value optimizations
• Retention analytics to improve customer loyalty
• User segmentation for targeted analysis and personalization
• Page comparator to evaluate design changes
• Web analytics to measure engagement and marketing impact

There’s another huge benefit to having access to all of Contentsquare’s tools—you can click to generate related insights in different tools.

For example, if you’re viewing a heatmap and notice an element with a strong conversion rate, you’re only a click away from firing up a multi-session conversion chart in the Product Analytics tool to investigate further.  

One benefit of Contentsquare over Heap—click to create analytics charts from visual insights

Autocapture and lookback analysis

Unlike most Heap alternatives (like Mixpanel, GA4, or Amplitude), Contentsquare and Heap automatically collect all digital experience data so you can analyze visitor behavior retroactively.

This means you get

• Lookback analytics data whenever you need it—for example, if you discover an unexpected spike in sign-ups, you can immediately investigate the source
• No need to loop in the engineering team whenever there’s an update—marketers and product managers can explore data independently without waiting
• Flexibility to ask new questions of historical data—uncover insights from past campaigns or feature launches
• Reduced risk of missing critical data—never worry about forgetting to track a specific event

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

Autocapture event data in Heap and Contentsquare to simplify your analytics setup

Qualitative context from session replays

Both Heap and Contentsquare can display session replays—recreations of real user browsing activity from individual users. 

With Heap, the primary use case for session replays is to add qualitative insights to analytics data. 

For example, if you’re viewing a conversion funnel and see a high drop off rate on the checkout page, you can click straight to session replays of users in that segment to see what’s causing the issue—are they scrolling past the form fields? Are they encountering errors? Is the page loading slowly? This qualitative context helps you understand the ‘why’ behind the numbers.

Click to view relevant session replays to troubleshoot funnel dropoff in heap

You can do the same with session replays in Contentsquare, but with the added benefit of

• Automatically ranking sessions by Frustration Score so you can save time by focusing on the most important sessions to watch
• Enabling 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.
• 1-click revenue impact quantification of any error so you can prioritize fixes based on business impact
• Share specific replays and events with your team to resolve issues quickly, for example via Jira, Slack, or Microsoft Teams

Find session replays that replicate high-priority issues with AI Frustration Scoring in Contentsquare

What’s more, if you go with Contentsquare, you’ll also get more ways to color in your quantitative analytics data with

• Feedback Collection—capture in-the-moment voice-of-customer insights as people use your product or site, without interrupting the user journey
• AI-powered Surveys—collect targeted feedback and sentiment and analyze results with AI

Improve customer experience by collect VoC data with Contentsquare

Chat with your data

Collecting every event on your product or website is only useful if you can use it to find what you need when you need it. 

Thankfully both Heap and Contentsquare have a super powerful feature that generates any analytics chart or data point using a plain language prompt—AI CoPilot.

🤖Here’s how it works:

• From any Heap dashboard, simply type what you want to know in plain English, like “How many users viewed the blog last week?” or “Which referrer had the most signups?” 
• AI CoPilot will run the analysis for you, generate a chart or insight, and share how it got to the result
• You can ask follow-up questions or select from pre-populated suggestions for further analysis
• Plus, each chart will have an automatically generated relevant chart names and description, making it simple to share insights with colleagues

Chat with your analytics data using Contentsquare’s AI CoPilot

What Contentsquare does that Heap doesn’t

While Heap is a powerful, self-serve product analytics solution, Contentsquare is an all-in-one experience intelligence platform that combines the best of Heap with additional behavior analytics, voice-of-customer, and digital experience monitoring tools. 

Here are the 3 main benefits you get from Contentsquare that you won’t find in Heap:

All-in-one platform, connected tools

While Heap excels in Product Analytics, Contentsquare goes beyond its scope by integrating 3 crucial analytics categories into a single, unified solution:

• Digital Experience Analytics (DXA)—see which behaviors drive engagement and revenue
• Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM)—uncover obstacles and prioritize fixes
• Voice of Customer (VoC)—collect feedback, analyze it with AI, and integrate insights with qualitative data points

Use Contentsquare to get a complete understanding of your customer experience across sessions

As an alternative to Heap, Contentsquare’s integrated platform improves collaboration, efficiency and impact across teams, becoming a single source of truth for customer experience and digital performance.

But it’s not just about having access to different tools that makes Contentsquare powerful—it’s by combining them together to enhance insights and save time. 

Here are a couple of ways that might work in your company: 

• CS Live + Impact Quantification—identify which CTAs bring the most clicks, then quantify how much revenue they’re driving
• Error Monitoring + Session Replays—automatically detect errors, then view relevant session replays to see exactly what users experienced before, during, and after the error occurred
• Funnel Analysis + Journey Analysis—identify drop-offs in your funnel, then see alternative paths users are taking to optimize goal conversion
• Retention Analytics + Voice of Customer—identify patterns in user retention, then gather feedback from specific user segments to improve loyalty

Intuitive, visual insights even your CEO will understand

Not everyone loves line graphs and bar charts. Sometimes, you need a way to make data grab attention—especially when you’re trying to win over a stubborn stakeholder (we all have one).

That’s where Contentsquare’s visual analytics tools improve on what Heap offers, turning complex data into eye-catching, instantly understandable insights. You get

• Zone-Based Heatmaps—see where users are clicking, scrolling, and hovering and overlay revenue and conversion impact of behavior at a glance.

• CS Live—think of it like X-ray vision for your website. This Chrome extension overlays key metrics directly on your live pages, letting you see performance data in real-time as you browse.
• Sunburst Journey Maps—visualize customer journeys in an  intuitive sunburst layout to understand what drives conversions and where you’re losing business

Visualize click, revenue, and conversion metrics on your live website with Contentsquare

Each visual tool is also deeply integrated with Contentsquare’s analytics engine so when you spot something interesting, you’re just a click away from diving deeper into the data, running advanced analyses, or sharing insights with your team.

“Instead of abstract data and numbers in columns, [Contentsquare shows us] what people are doing on our website. We can see their experience. It’s visual.” – Jan-Willem Wilmsen, Digital Specialist at E.ON

Advanced intelligence made easy

Chatting with your data in Heap is the quickest way to get actionable insights without technical knowledge. 

Contentsquare incorporates this practical intelligence across the platform, also allowing you to

• Quantify the business impact of every insight and prioritize what to fix or improve—see exactly how much revenue is lost to bugs, or gained by design changes
• Reduce time to insight with automated data analysis—no need to waste time sifting through data, your biggest wins are served straight to you
• Gain a competitive advantage—see how you compare against competitors with Benchmarks and optimize ecommerce pricing with the Merchandising tool

Save time focusing in high-impact optimizations with Contentsquare’s AI-powered insights

By leveraging advanced AI across its platform, Contentsquare empowers teams to quickly uncover high-impact insights, prioritize optimizations based on revenue potential, and stay ahead of the competition—all without requiring extensive technical expertise.

Is Contentsquare or Heap better for your team? 

While Heap and Contentsquare share some core product analytics functionality, they cater to different organizational needs. Here’s how to choose between them:

Choose Contentsquare if you need

• A comprehensive experience intelligence platform that brings together cross-functional tools that serve product, marketing, UX, and technical teams
• Advanced AI-powered insights to quickly identify and prioritize high-impact optimizations
• Visual analytics tools like Zone-Based Heatmaps and Journey Analysis for intuitive, shareable insights
• Robust error tracking and performance monitoring capabilities
• Enterprise-grade features including advanced security, privacy controls, and dedicated support

However, Heap might be a better fit if

• Your main goal is to track product usage and optimize conversion funnels and don’t need a full suite of experience intelligence tools
• You’re a smaller team or startup looking for a cost-effective, self-serve analytics solution and aren’t ready to explore other Heap competitors

Ultimately, you need to see inside each platform yourself to get a feel for which will deliver the most value to your team. 

Get it done today by requesting a Heap demo and taking the 6-minute Contentsquare product tour to see how both platforms turn your data into growth-driving insights.

Take a product tour

Get to grips with Contentsquare fundamentals with this 6 minute product tour.

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FAQs about Contentsquare vs Heap

What is Heap?

Heap Analytics is a freemium digital insights platform that autocaptures web and app events to optimize digital journeys, improve conversions, retention, and customer delight. Heap was founded in 2013 in Silicon Valley by Matin Movassate and Ravi Parikh. Today, Heap is used on over 10,000 websites and has been part of the Contentsquare platform since 2023. 

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’s the difference between Contentsquare and Heap?

Contentsquare acquired Heap in 2023, integrating Heap’s Product Analytics into its all-in-one experience intelligence platform. 

Both platforms offer automatic event capture, integrated session replay, and customer journey analytics. However, Contentsquare brings together Heap’s functionality with AI-powered Digital Experience Monitoring (DEM), Voice of Customer (VoC), and Digital Experience Analytics (DEA) to connect siloed teams across the org with impact-driving insights.