Contentsquare vs. Matomo: why you need both

The information on this page is correct as at 13/01/2026 to the best of Contentsquare's understanding.

Privacy or performance? With analytics, you shouldn't have to choose. While Matomo excels at GDPR-compliant data collection, it only shows you what users do—not why they do it, or how to improve their experience.

For those kinds of insights, you need Contentsquare. Our platform adds the critical layer of behavioral insights you need to understand user behavior and drive growth, all while maintaining the privacy standards that attracted you to Matomo in the first place.

Keep reading to see where Matomo and Contentsquare overlap, what you’re missing if you rely on Matomo alone, and why ideally you should use both. 

Key takeaways

• Matomo is a privacy-first alternative to Google Analytics that puts you in control of your data, while maintaining strict GDPR compliance. Matomo gives you

• Complete data ownership: host everything on your servers and maintain full control

• Essential analytics metrics: track traffic, conversions, and campaigns without compromising privacy

• Marketing insights: understand which channels drive results

• Cost flexibility: choose between free self-hosted or affordable cloud options

• Contentsquare is the all-in-one experience intelligence platform that turns behavioral analytics insights into business growth. Contentsquare reveals

• Hidden revenue blockers: instantly see how UX issues and errors impact your bottom line

• Conversion opportunities: identify exactly where and why users abandon journeys

• Content performance: measure how every element contributes to engagement and sales

• Customer voice: connect feedback directly to behavior for deeper understanding

• AI-powered insights: automatically get actionable recommendations that drive measurable results

• Both platforms have their strenghts—but ultimately, they’re better together. While Matomo shows you what's happening, Contentsquare reveals why—and what to do about it. That's why +180 leading brands use both platforms to drive growth while maintaining privacy compliance

What are the main differences between Contentsquare vs. Matomo?

Forget feature checklists—when you compare Contentsquare vs. Matomo, you'll find they serve different but complementary purposes. 

While Matomo handles your core analytics needs, Contentsquare reveals the insights that actually drive growth.

Here's exactly what each platform brings to your analytics strategy.

What Contentsquare and Matomo both do well

Both Contentsquare and Matomo excel at enabling privacy compliance, tracking website and app traffic, and improving marketing acquisition. Here’s how. 

Privacy-first analytics

Matomo’s biggest selling point against market leader GA4 is privacy. While GA4’s data collection and sharing practices raise privacy concerns, Matomo delivers

• Built-in privacy compliance to respect GDPR, HIPAA, CCPA, LGPD, and PECR

• Free, self-hosted option (called ‘On-Premise’) for complete data sovereignty

• Cookieless tracking, avoiding the need for pop-up consent banners

Similarly, Contentsquare’s privacy features provide comprehensive data protection, with

• Cookieless tracking options

• CNIL certification for consent-free tracking (this means you can use Exemption Mode in France to use Contentsquare cookies without having to obtain visitor consent)

• Default keystroke masking across all features

• Granular privacy controls, including the ability to delete individual data 

Whether you use either or both platforms, Matomo and Contentsquare ensure you can analyze full customer journeys without compromising GDPR compliance or requiring additional user consent.

Website and app analytics

Understanding your website's fundamental traffic metrics—which pages users visit, what they click on, and where they drop off—is essential for digital growth. 

Both Contentsquare and Matomo excel at analyzing website and app performance, but they do so in very different ways.

Matomo provides the privacy-focused analytics fundamentals you expect, including

• Pageview monitoring and visitor tracking

• Traffic sources and session duration metrics

• Conversion rate analysis and basic behavior tracking

With Contentsquare’s Web Analytics, you can combine web analytics with more granular insights to

• Track multi-session journeys: understand how users navigate across sessions and devices for a complete view of their experience

• Detect friction points: identify areas where users hesitate, rage click, or struggle, uncovering critical blockers to engagement and conversions

• Measure feature and content performance: see which elements are driving interaction and revenue, and which require optimization

• Quantify business impact: link user behaviors to revenue and prioritize improvements that matter most

• Autocapture every interaction: automatically collect all clicks, scrolls, and hovers—without manual tagging or setup

Track website and product usage with Contentsquare Product Analytics

Marketing analytics

Effective marketing starts with understanding which channels and campaigns drive results. Both Matomo and Contentsquare help you achieve this.

Matomo lets you track marketing campaign performance with

• Conversion tracking across defined goals

• Multi-touch attribution to see how users progress toward conversion

• Traffic source and UTM analysis to understand where visitors come from

• Campaign performance metrics tied to visitor behavior

Contentsquare, however, goes beyond attribution and tracking by providing deep, behavioral insights into how visitors interact with your site based on marketing channel performance, including

• Customer journey analysis: see how users from specific campaigns navigate your site, comparing journeys between paid and organic traffic

• Conversion funnel tracking: identify exactly where drop-offs occur and how they vary by traffic source or audience segment

• Session replays and heatmaps: understand how marketing-acquired users engage with key pages, down to every click and hover

• Impact quantification: attribute revenue impacts directly to content and landing page performance for each campaign

• AI-powered recommendations: prioritize key opportunities to improve marketing ROI by fine-tuning underperforming landing pages and creative 

• User Lifecycle Extension: analyze how different acquisition sources influence retention, conversion paths, and lifetime value across sessions and devices

Contentsquare Journey Analysis: the most intuitive (and colorful) way to visualize customer journeys, made easier with AII 

Where Contentsquare goes beyond Matomo’s capabilities

Monitoring website and app traffic is just one (small) piece of the digital experience puzzle. Users often abandon websites and apps due to poor design, confusing navigation, or irrelevant content—issues that won't show up in analytics charts but will cost you revenue.

Here’s how Contentsquare complements Matomo by providing insights across the entire customer journey, from initial visit to conversion, and connecting everything back to your growth goals.

Autocapture analytics

While Matomo focuses on basic web analytics, it wasn't built to be a product analytics solution. It requires extensive manual tagging to track in-page interactions and can't capture cross-device customer journeys. 

Contentsquare has the best automatic data capture on the market (we call it Smart Capture). We automatically collect every interaction across websites and apps, no technical setup needed. 

From the moment you implement, you'll get

• Complete (and automatic) data collection: automatically capture all clicks, scrolls, and other interactions across your site or app

• Zero manual tagging: no need for extra developer resources or custom event tracking setup

• Retroactive analysis: access historical data and analyze new page elements instantly

Cross-device journey tracking: follow users seamlessly across sessions and devicesWith Contentsquare, teams can focus on improving experiences rather than configuring analytics.

Visual experience analytics that drive results

Analytics shouldn't require a data science degree. While Matomo offers basic heatmaps and session recordings as premium add-ons, Contentsquare turns complex behavioral data into visual insights anyone can understand—and these insights are included in our generous free forever plan (200,000 monthly sessions).

“What’s great about Contentsquare is that the insights are visual and extremely easy to digest. It’s particularly helpful to be able to give the creative or leadership team a clear picture of pain points and successes—it helps secure immediate buy-in and significantly reduces time to action, meaning we don’t miss out on potential sales.” - Lisa Skowrup, Senior Manager - Site Experience, The North Face

With Contentsquare, you get

• Advanced heatmaps with engagement zones: compare behavior patterns across segments and validate A/B tests with side-by-side analysis of which elements drive engagement and revenue

• Live insights as you browse: use our Chrome extension to see real-time metrics and user interactions directly on your website 

• Journey analysis: compare successful and unsuccessful user paths in an intuitive sunburst view to understand what drives conversions

• Session replays: watch user sessions with automatic friction detection to quickly identify and quantify experience issues

See exactly what’s driving revenue with Contentsquare zoning heatmaps

Unlike Matomo's basic visual tools, our advanced analytics include AI-powered insights and automatic impact quantification so you can generate visualizations with plain language prompts and always tie insights back to revenue and conversion impact.

This means you'll spend less time analyzing data and more time implementing changes that actually drive growth.

Experience monitoring

Matomo provides basic error tracking—namely tracking 404 pages (as an optional feature) and server errors through log analytics.

Contentsquare has comprehensive experience monitoring that connect technical issues directly to business impact, including

• Error analysis: automatically detect and quantify the revenue impact of JavaScript errors, API failures, and custom error types to prioritize fixes based on business impact

• Speed analysis: monitor page performance in real-time and see how loading times affect conversion rates across different segments and devices

• Frustration detection: AI-powered scoring identifies user struggle points like rage clicks and repeated interactions, helping teams proactively address UX issues

• Real-time alerts: get instant notifications when critical errors or performance issues start impacting conversion rates

• Technical session replay: jump directly to relevant session recordings to see exactly what users experienced before, during, and after encountering errors

See how performance issues affect user behavior and revenue with Contentsquare Experience Monitoring

While neither platform replaces the need for dedicated APM tools like Dynatrace or Datadog, Contentsquare bridges the gap between technical monitoring and business outcomes, helping you prioritize fixes that will have the greatest impact on revenue and user satisfaction.

💡Monitoring frustration pays off

According to our latest Digital Experience Benchmark report, user frustration appears in 40% of sessions and can reduce the value of a visit by 15%. But companies that actively monitor for frustration remove 4.5x more friction points than those who don't.

Voice of Customer (VoC) tools

Numbers tell you what happens—but not why it happens. 

Matomo shows you conversion rates and bounce rates, but it can't tell you what your users actually think. That's where Contentsquare's Voice of Customer (VoC) tools come in. 

Contentsquare turns user feedback into revenue with

• Smart surveys that actually get answers: launch AI-generated surveys in seconds, with +40 proven templates that boost response rates

• Feedback that finds patterns: automatically analyze sentiment and spot trends across thousands of responses with AI-powered reports

• Context you can see: instantly jump from feedback to session replays to understand exactly what frustrated your users

• Always-on insights: capture continuous feedback with unobtrusive buttons, then watch how sentiment changes as you improve your site

Spot feedback trends automatically with Contentsquare AI-powered survey analysis

By combining VoC with behavioral analytics, you'll understand not just that someone left your site, but exactly what frustrated them—and how many others had the same experience. 

AI-driven insights

Matomo’s AI features focus on AI traffic tracking from sources like ChatGPT and Claude. 

Contentsquare uses AI to actively analyze every interaction to surface insights, prioritize issues, and guide action across the entire digital journey.

Contentsquare's AI capabilities include

• Sense Chat: get instant answers about your digital performance through natural language queries, complete with explanations and chart generation

• Smart alerts: receive real-time alerts and AI-prioritized recommendations whenever significant metric changes or emerging issues impact your revenue or goals

• VoC analysis: generate and analyze surveys instantly with AI that automatically categorizes responses and measures customer sentiment at scale

• Intelligent friction detection: automatically calculate frustration scores and rank UX issues by business impact before they affect your bottom line

• Sense Analyst: run multi-step analyses automatically and get step-by-step optimization recommendations based on real-time data 

• MCP Server: bring your Contentsquare data right into your LLM of choice

• Mapping Assistant: automatic data capture and page mapping, no manual tagging required

• AI summaries: condense session replays, errors, and feedback into clear, shareable insights to focus on what matters

• Conversation Intelligence: turn customer chats into insights to improve satisfaction, reduce churn, and optimize support

Our AI-driven approach means you’ll spend less time analyzing data and more time implementing improvements that drive growth. 

Contentsquare AI gives you quicker, more impactful insights without complex setup

Why leading companies use Contentsquare and Matomo together

While privacy-first analytics platforms like Matomo tell you what's happening on your site, they can't reveal why users behave the way they do—or how to improve their experience.

That's why more than 180 leading brands (including Cartier, iRobot, and Hugo Boss) combine Matomo's privacy-first analytics with Contentsquare's behavioral intelligence. Together, these platforms bridge the gap between knowing your metrics and understanding your users.

Here's how brands combine both platforms to drive growth.

1. Surface hidden revenue opportunities

Instead of only seeing that users are abandoning a checkout page, you can

• Watch exactly how visitors interact with form fields before leaving

• Identify which elements cause the most frustration or confusion

• Quantify the revenue impact of each abandonment point

• Get AI-powered recommendations for improving conversion rates

2. Optimize marketing spend with behavior-driven insights

Rather than just tracking traffic sources, you can

• Compare how users from different channels actually engage with content

• See which landing page elements drive engagement and which create friction

• Measure how content performance varies by traffic source

• Adjust campaigns based on detailed behavioral patterns

3. Proactively improve digital experiences 

Instead of reacting to customer complaints as they come in, you can

• Automatically detect user struggles before they impact revenue

• Identify technical issues and quantify their business impact

• Monitor real user performance across devices and segments

• Prioritize fixes based on revenue opportunity

4. Make data accessible to everyone

“We encourage people across content, marketing, and product to use Contentsquare as much as possible… This maintains our data-driven and iterative approach: we learn as we go and release iteratively, but we always have a broader plan and never settle for a ‘poor experience’!” Tim Braga, Senior Product Director, Conversion and SEO, A Place For Mom

Rather than waiting for support from analysts, all teams can

• Get instant visual insights through an intuitive interface

• Share session replays and heatmaps with stakeholders

• Access AI-powered recommendations without technical expertise

• Make faster, data-driven decisions across departments

The impact of combining Contentsquare with traditional analytics is clear: according to Forrester's Total Economic Impact study, companies using Contentsquare see a 602% ROI and recover $3.2 million in revenue by reducing friction in the customer journey. Is Contentsquare or Matomo better for your team?

Ultimately, the question isn't which platform is better—it's about how you can leverage the strengths of both platforms for maximum impact.

If you've read this far, you'll know that Matomo excels at

• Privacy-compliant web analytics

• Basic traffic and conversion tracking

• Core marketing attribution

• Cost-effective analytics fundamentals

But this leaves critical business questions unanswered, like

• Why do users abandon certain journeys?

• Which content elements drive the most engagement?

• How do technical issues impact revenue?

• What frustrates users during their experience?

• Which optimizations should we prioritize to drive results?

The optimal solution: combine Matomo and Contentsquare to

• Maintain data privacy while gaining deep behavioral insights

• Use AI to automatically surface friction, anomalies, and opportunities

• Connect technical metrics to user behavior and business outcomes

• Proactively improve experiences instead of reacting to reports

• Find and fix user friction faster, without manual analysis or tagging

• Break down silos between technical and business teams

• Drive measurable growth through better experiences

• Make data-driven decisions accessible to every digital team

Ready to compare Contentsquare vs. Matomo for yourself? Take the Contentsquare product tour to discover how we turn your data into growth-driving insights.

FAQs about Contentsquare vs. Matomo