Contentsquare vs. Smartlook: which analytics platform delivers real business impact?

What’s more important: counting how many steps you took today, or knowing that those steps are actually improving your health? Analytics works the same way. Collecting quantitative and qualitative data is only worthwhile if it drives outcomes, not just reports.

On the surface, Contentsquare and Smartlook look like similar platforms. Both have heatmaps, replays, mobile and web analytics, and even a free tier for light users. 

But Contentsquare (that’s us 👋) goes further. We use AI to surface what matters, not just what happened. And we tie every insight back to revenue, so you always know which issues to fix first and which opportunities will have the biggest impact.

In this guide, we compare Smartlook and Contentsquare across key use cases, highlight the main differences, and show you exactly why Contentsquare is the best platform to turn digital behavior into growth.

Key takeaways

• Smartlook is a behavior analytics tool with replays, heatmaps, and funnels. There’s a free plan to get started but event-based tracking (and pricing) means insights are limited to what you’ve set up in advance. Revenue tracking only works in funnels, you can’t collect customer feedback in-platform, and there’s no AI to highlight what matters

• Contentsquare is an all-in-one experience intelligence platform for web and mobile. Start free, then scale with advanced Experience Analytics, Product Analytics, Experience Monitoring, and built-in Voice of Customer, all powered by AI that uncovers issues, sizes their revenue impact, and highlights the changes that matter most

• Smartlook is for smaller teams that only want to watch customer activity. Contentsquare is for every digital team that wants to turn customer behavior and feedback into measurable growth. That’s why we’re trusted by +3,700 enterprise brands and +1.3 million websites and apps worldwide

Contentsquare and Smartlook compared

As we mentioned above, there’s not much point comparing barebones product features (most platforms tick the same boxes these days anyway). 

The real question is whether your analytics help you understand the impact behind user behavior and guide you toward fixes that drive growth.

To help you focus on outcomes over shiny objects, here’s a side-by-side look at how Smartlook and Contentsquare compare when it comes to turning digital activity into measurable business results:

What are the main differences between Contentsquare and Smartlook?

As we said above, features alone don’t drive growth. What matters is how those features work in practice: 

• Can you prioritize fixes and optimizations based on provable impact? 

• Can you uncover insights automatically instead of digging for them? 

• Can every team in the business use the same platform to understand what’s happening and act on it?

These are critical questions, so let’s answer them.

Here are the most important differences between Smartlook and Contentsquare, and why they matter for your organization:

1. Autocapture vs event-based pricing

Smartlook makes you decide upfront which events (like clicks or errors) to track. And because Smartlook charges based on the number of events you track, you’re forced to guess which ones matter most. 

If you get it wrong, you either miss the data entirely or end up paying more to capture it.

Contentsquare automatically captures everything from the start with Smart Capture. Every click, scroll, and error is automatically collected across web and apps, no tagging needed. 

This means you can retroactively analyze behavior, ask new questions any time, and never lose insights just because you didn’t predict the right events in advance.

“Other analytics platforms need you to actively tag something first, whereas Contentsquare captures everything, so you just have to segment and filter.” - Jonny Evans, Conversion Rate Optimization Manager at Audi

2. AI-powered intelligence vs. manual analysis

Smartlook gives you the basics, but there’s nothing ‘smart’ about doing the analysis yourself. You can watch replays, generate heatmaps, or build funnels, but you’re still left guessing what the numbers mean for your business and where to focus first.

Contentsquare builds intelligence into every workflow:

• Frustration Score automatically flags sessions where users struggled, so you don’t have to go looking for them

• AI Alerts notify you when a metric shifts, filtering out noise and surfacing anomalies that matter

• Session Replay Summaries and Error Summaries speed up analysis, helping you locate and understand issues and opportunities without having to trawl through data  

• Get scheduled optimization recommendations straight to your inbox

• Sense Chat lets you ask a plain-language question like “Where do my users drop off?” and get the right data and next-steps in seconds

Talk to your data with Sense

Using Contentsquare over Smartlook means saving hours of manual analysis time while guaranteeing that what you’re working on will drive results.

3. Revenue-backed decisions vs. data collection

Whatever industry you’re in, revenue is the ultimate growth metric. If your analytics don’t connect to it, you’re either guessing what matters or relying on vanity metrics to try and prove your value. 

Smartlook has a revenue insights add-on, but it only works in funnels and requires a custom revenue event to be set up in advance. It’s narrow, manual, and doesn’t help you decide which issues or opportunities across your site or app are worth prioritizing.

Contentsquare turns interactions into outcomes and ties every insight back to valuable KPIs:

• Use Impact Quantification to calculate the revenue or conversion impact of every drop-off, frustration, or error and instantly see which optimizations to prioritize

• Use Journeys to find the user paths that lead to high-value outcomes, so you can double down on what works and remove friction where it hurts most

• Use Heatmaps to see which elements drive conversions and which ones quietly lose money (pro tip: try side-by-side heatmaps to quickly visualize the performance of A/B tests)

See how your content affects attention, conversions, and revenue with Heatmaps

We know how valuable these features are for our customers. 

In fact, Forrester found that brands using Contentsquare achieved 602% ROI, with $6.6M in recovered income and additional profit, and a minimum of 2,914 hours saved over 3 years from internal productivity gains. Not bad for a platform you can get started with for free.

“We needed something to move us away from gut feeling and provide real evidence-based data at a very granular level, which has proven really powerful.” - Adam Cheal, CRO Specialist at easyjet

4. Cross-team value vs. data silos

Growth is easier when every team works from the same data. Scattered insights slow you down, forcing teams to piece things together instead of focusing on progress.

Smartlook is mostly used by developers, UX, and CRO teams. They can debug crashes, watch replays, and check funnels, but the value stops there.

Contentsquare delivers value to every digital team:

• Marketing use the User Lifecycle Extension to evaluate campaigns and combine customer journey data with Lifetime Value (LTV)

• UX and design teams use Journeys to refine flows based on real user behavior

• Product managers use Product Analytics to dig into feature adoption and user flows and prioritize the roadmap

• Customer Experience (CX) teams use VoC to track satisfaction, pain points, and loyalty over time

• Business leaders use Headlines to monitor key KPIs

• Dev teams monitor errors and speed issues with Experience Monitoring and prioritize fixes based on revenue impact

Contentsquare aligns every digital team around a single source of truth

With Contentsquare, every digital team aligns around what’s happening and what to focus on next so everyone can fix issues faster, double down on what works, and keep revenue growing without wasted admin.

“Our goal with Contentsquare is to enable every team to understand what’s happening on the website from our users’ point of view…Contentsquare is the source of truth for every team.” - Emmanuel Göthe, Digital Performance Manager, Americas at Diptyque

5. Holistic insights vs missing pieces

Numbers alone don’t explain why customers struggle. Without real feedback, you’re only ever seeing part of the story.

Smartlook claims to combine qualitative and quantitative data, but watching replays isn’t enough. Once you’ve seen how your users behave, you still don’t necessarily know why they behave the way they do, or what to change to boost satisfaction, sales, and LTV.

Contentsquare gives you the full picture. Use our VoC tools to

• Launch AI-powered, customizable surveys in seconds with Sense

• Measure customer loyalty and happiness with NPS® surveys to track how users feel over time

• Identify opportunities by watching session replay of users that left low (or high) scores, or invite them to follow-up interviews with one click

• Generate AI-driven feedback reports with sentiment analyses and aggregated insights

Collect, monitor, summarize, and action feedback with Voice of Customer  With Contentsquare, you get everything in one platform: quantitative data that shows what users do, and qualitative insights that reveal why. 

Instead of stitching together multiple tools, you cut tech bloat, save time, and give every team a single place to find answers, prioritize by impact, and move fast.

📢 Speaking of feedback, take a look at what some of our own customers have to say about us.

6. Enterprise-grade scale & support vs. starter tool

Smartlook might be okay for small teams, but it’s limited once you start to scale. As a small team themselves (around 90) with two offices in the Czech Republic, support hours don’t always work if you’re outside Europe.

Contentsquare is built for all stages of growth. We support startups with a free forever plan and scale all the way up to enterprise, trusted by over 30% of the Fortune Global 100. We support you with a dedicated Customer Success Manager, regular check-ins, and business reviews to keep you on track. You also get access to a +600 member brand community, expert training and certification programs, and our global customer experience conference, CX Circle.  

Our team of +1,800 is spread across 16 global offices, so you always have support close to home.

Just a handful of our +1,800 team at a product launch event in Times Square 👋 

We’re not just here to give you software: we make sure you get value fast and keep finding new ways to grow.

Contentsquare vs. Smartlook: which is the best platform for growth?

Smartlook has some useful tools for visualizing customer behavior. But knowing what’s happening is not enough to give you an edge anymore. You need to understand the why behind actions, what they’re worth, and guarantee which changes will have the biggest impact.

Contentsquare gives you everything you need in one platform. We turn digital behavior into measurable growth with AI that surfaces insights automatically, revenue-backed prioritization that shows you what to fix first, and a connected platform every team can use. That’s why we’re trusted by 3,700 enterprise brands and 1.3+ million websites and apps worldwide.

Ready to see how we’ll turn your customers’ behavior into business growth? Take a product tour or request a demo today.  Net Promoter, Net Promoter System, Net Promoter Score, NPS, and the NPS-related emoticons are registered trademarks of Bain & Company, Inc., Fred Reichheld, and Satmetrix Systems, Inc

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