Contentsquare vs. Smartlook (aka Splunk DXA): which is best for experience analytics?

The information on this page is correct as at 19/06/2026 to the best of Contentsquare's understanding.

If you’re trying to compare Smartlook Analytics to Contentsquare, we have news for you: Smartlook is now part of Cisco. You can no longer sign up for Smartlook as a standalone tool, it’s a premium add-on solution known as Splunk Digital Experience Analytics, itself one part of Splunk, a Cisco company. 

If you’re confused, don’t worry, you can still compare the-platform-formerly-known-as-Smartlook to Contentsquare Experience Analytics to see which one is the best fit for behavior insights, and what role the wider Splunk and Contentsquare platforms should play in your decision. 

Fun fact: Contentsquare already integrates with Splunk AppDynamics, so you don’t need their DXA add-on to combine experience analytics with advanced application monitoring.

So keep reading to compare Smartlook and Contentsquare across key use cases, and see exactly why Contentsquare is the best platform to turn digital behavior into growth.

Key takeaways

• Smartlook was a standalone behavior analytics tool with replays, heatmaps, and funnels. It’s now one part of the Splunk known as DXA (or Splunk Digital Experience Analytics), a subsidiary of Cisco

• Contentsquare is for every digital team that wants to turn customer behavior and feedback into measurable growth. That’s why we’re trusted by +3,000 enterprise and mid-market brands and +1.3 million websites and apps worldwide

• Unlike Smartlook, Splunk Digital Experience Analytics does not have a free plan and new customers must sign up for premium enterprise licensing. It’s no longer a smart choice for small teams or startups who just wanted simple, cheap, behavior analytics tools

• Contentsquare fills the gap Smartlook’s End-of-Life notice creates: our popular Experience Analytics platform has a generous free plan (up to 200k sessions/month) and includes Heatmaps, Session Replay, and Journeys, with complete autocaptured web and app data and unlimited seats as standard

• When you're ready, you can expand into Contentsquare’s all-in-one experience intelligence platform and bring in  Product Analytics, Experience Monitoring, Conversation Intelligence, and built-in Voice of Customer, all powered by AI that uncovers issues, sizes their revenue impact, and highlights the changes that matter most

• If you’re already using Splunk AppDynamics for its advanced application monitoring features, similar to Datadog and Dynatrace, you can integrate with Contentsquare to prioritize issues and speed up fixes.

Contentsquare and Smartlook (aka Splunk DXA) 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 (aka Splunk DXA)?

Like 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 questions to ask when figuring out the differences between Smartlook (aka Splunk Digital Experience Analytics) and Contentsquare, and why they matter for your organization:

1. Can you trust your data?

Splunk Digital Experience Analytics has impressive automatic interaction tracking, but requires more manual work, like using an element picker to isolate events.

However, its main limitation is that it completely leaves out feedback.

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.

And the wider platform brings in Voice of Customer and Conversation Intelligence to capture and analyze customer feedback, support chats, emails, and voice conversations, so every signal of intent or frustration sits alongside the behavioral data, ready for you to act on.

2. Can every team self-serve insights?

Splunk Digital Experience Analytics upgrades Smartlook’s complete lack of AI, but since the platform leaves out a lot of features (like no heatmaps or acquisition analysis), it still doesn't give every team data to work from.

Contentsquare builds intelligence into every workflow:

• Sense Analyst runs deep, multi-step analyses automatically and walks you through the next steps

• Our MCP Server brings Contentsquare insights into your AI tool of choice (for example, Microsoft Copilot, ChatGPT, Claude, or Dust)

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

• Sense 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, so you can locate and understand issues and opportunities without having to trawl through recordings and logs

• Get scheduled optimization recommendations straight to your inbox

• Sense Mapping Assistant automatically groups similar pages for analysis, so reporting scales with your site structure

• 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. Do you know which insights are worth acting on?

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. 

Splunk DXA is engineered for code validation, not conversion-rate optimization, and it relies on static Average Order Value (AOV) estimates to calculate impact. This means you can’t prioritize based on the actual cost of friction to the business.

Contentsquare turns interactions into outcomes by linking every insight back to 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 zoning Heatmaps

We know how valuable these features are for our customers. 

In fact, Forrester found that brands using Contentsquare achieved 602% ROI, with $3.2M in recovered income and additional profit, and a minimum of 963 hours saved over 3 years from internal productivity gains. Not bad for a platform you can get started with for free.

Turn customer conversations into LTV with Conversation Intelligence

4. Does every team have a single source of truth?

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.

Like Smartlook, Splunk DXA 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 for surveys and interviews, and Conversation Intelligence to understand why customers reach out and drive loyalty

• Business leaders use Sense Analyst 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.

5. Do you know the ‘why’ behind user behavior?

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

Splunk DXA 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 and Conversation Intelligence 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

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

• Analyze customer chat, email, and voice interactions to discover why customers reach out, how your team handles conversations, and what to improve

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. Will your platform grow with you?

Smartlook used to be okay for small teams, but Splunk Digital Experience Analytics is now a limited experience platform with an enterprise pricepoint.

Contentsquare is built for all stages of growth. We support startups with a generous free forever plan (up to 200k monthly sessions) and scale all the way up to enterprise.

That’s why we’re trusted by 3,000 enterprise and mid-market brands and 1.3+ million websites.

We support every customer, and offer 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.

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 was a small piece of the customer experience puzzle. The fact that Cisco has folded it into its enterprise observability suite (instead of investing in it as a standalone product) confirms what enterprise teams already knew: behavior analytics on its own doesn't drive growth. 

You need to connect customer behavior to revenue, feedback, and technical performance to drive results.

Contentsquare gives you everything you need in one platform. We turn digital behavior into measurable growth with Sense AI that surfaces insights automatically, revenue-backed prioritization that shows you what to fix first, and a connected platform every team gets value from. That’s why we’re trusted by 3,000 enterprise and mid-market 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.  

FAQs about Contentsquare vs. Smartlook

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