Contentsquare vs Fullstory: which is right for you?

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

• Most users are in technical roles or analysts
• The most frequent use case is spotting and resolving obstacles to conversion

Technical and data 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 is working well that gets them to convert?
• What is working well that gets users to come back again and again?

That’s where Contentsquare’s platform goes beyond Fullstory. 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 Fullstory 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.

• Fullstory primarily serves technical teams and data teams focused on surfacing areas of  frustration to create 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 more expansive heatmaps, top-down journey mapping, and automated engagement analysis, 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 Fullstory may suit those with solely technical or departmental requirements.

What are the main differences between Contentsquare and Fullstory?

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. 

Contentsquare vs. Fullstory tools and feature comparison

Fullstory and Contentsquare capabilities are best compared in the context of the use cases that they help solve for. Let’s go through them one by one. 

Use cases that both Contentsquare and Fullstory do well

The use case that both Fullstory and Contentsquare support equally well is to uncover obstacles that prevent customers from achieving their journeys.

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

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

Session Replay

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

• Both 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.

Playback experience in Contentsquare vs. Fullstory session replays

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

• Only Contentsquare automatically ranks sessions to watch with a Frustration Score so you can save time by focusing on your most insightful session to watch.  When clicking through from funnel reports, replays start at the exact step in the user journey so that teams don’t waste time watching entire sessions.
• Meanwhile Fullstory provides a different way to save time when sharing replays with the team, namely by letting AI summarize behaviors into a textual write up, 

Error Analysis

Both Fullstory 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 can 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 Fullstory, it’s the conversion report
• Both platforms make it easy to file tickets via Jira or rally teams to action via Slack and Microsoft Teams.

Error tracking in Contentsquare (top) vs. Fullstory (bottom)

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.”  
  • 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.
• Only Contentsquare enables 1-click impact quantification of behaviors and errors directly from session re play. 
  • Spot any issue or error? Simply select the issue or behaviors leading up to it and quantify with one click to see how many others experience the same problems
  • Contentsquare automatically compares the segment of customers that experience the issue vs. those that don’t experience it at that point to calculate the true impact of the problem
  • This is what enables teams to go from one to many and prioritize the issues that will actually move the needle for the business and for customers.

Speed Analysis

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

• Both Contentsquare and Fullstory 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 Fullstory for ensuring smooth operations.

What Contentsquare does better than Fullstory (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 Fullstory with unique macro-level visualizations and metrics. These capabilities turn session replay into a more effective weapon for insights for everyone on the team. 

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 Fullstory. 

• Both Fullstory and Contentsquare provide traditional scroll and click maps popular with analysts
• Both provide conversion maps with Conversion rates
• Both let you filter and segment heatmaps freely 
• Both let you shortcut from heatmaps to session replays to see sample behavior with elements

But that’s where the similarities stop and Contentsquare’s capabilities go a million miles beyond these elemental basics in order to answer the everyday questions that business users have for content engagement and optimization. 

Revenue and conversion rate heatmap comparisons in Contentsquare

A Fullstory scroll map 🥱

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 live heatmaps—i.e. use the Contentsquare CS Live Chrome extension or Fullstory 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 as Fullstory’s heatmaps and conversion maps
  • Metrics for attributing revenue to content interactions, e.g. revenue per click
  • 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
  • Reducing form abandonment, e.g. drop-off rate, refill-rate, etc.
  • Increase lifetime value, e.g. multi-session purchase rates and retention rates, etc.
  • Reducing friction, e.g. click recurrence that points to areas of struggle
  • Merchandising metrics, e.g. specific merchandise exposures when pages show a personalized assortment, vs. item conversions, cart-adds, sales, etc.
• Contentsquare makes it easier 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 Fullstory 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 Fullstory’s capabilities for Journey Discovery 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 Fullstory 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

How journey maps look in Contentsquare vs. Fullstory

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. 

Product analytics

Product analytics reveal your product, website, or app performance through easy-to-understand charts and metrics. Both Contentsquare and Fullstory 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 platforms have retention analysis tools to focus on reducing churn

Analytics dashboards in Contentsquare vs. Fullstory

There are, however, a couple of crucial differences:

• Only Contentsquare, powered by Heap, lets you generate insights and charts by chatting with an AI Copilot in plain language. 
• 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

While both Fullstory and Contentsquare are deeply focused on enabling product teams to create better products, these are some of the differences in the platforms that explain 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 Fullstory and Contentsquare help make sense of Voice of Customer data via integrations with third party VoC solutions, only Contentsquare enables collecting feedback natively.  

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.

Fullstory integrates with third party VoC tools but doesn’t provide a native VoC tool —you’ll need to integrate with other paid tools like Qualtrics or InMoment to collect and investigate feedback responses. 

With Contentsquare’s all-in-one platform, you have the option to integrate or use built-in VoC tools, including

• Surveys—AI-powered for any use-case like exit-intent surveys and Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys
• Feedback buttons—collect effortless feedback anytime with contextual screenshot capture
• AI analysis—transform qualitative data into actionable metrics with AI survey responses and sentiment analysis

Contentsquare gives you more ways to collect and analyze VoC feedback

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 Fullstory and Contentsquare have customers in many locations of the world
• Both have offices and hundreds of employees and top management located in the United States
• 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.

The verdict: is Contentsquare or Fullstory better for your team? 

Choose Contentsquare over Fullstory 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. 
• 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, Fullstory might be a better choice than Contentsquare if

• Your technical team is already familiar with Fullstory 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 to include that output when sharing them with the rest of the team

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 Fullstory FAQs

What is Fullstory?

Fullstory is a behavioral analytics platform founded in Atlanta in 2014 by Scott Voigt, Bruce Johnson, and Joel Webber. The company has since raised around $200 million in funding and employs a team of 400+ remotely and in offices in Atlanta, London, Sydney, and Singapore. 

What is Contentsquare?

Contentsquare is an all-in-one experience intelligence platform founded in Paris in 2012 by Jonathan Cherki. Since then, the company has raised over $1.4 billion in funding and acquired companies like Pricing Assistant and Clicktale (2019), Hotjar (2022), and Heap Analytics (2023). Today, Contentsquare has a team of 1,500+ across 18 global offices.

Is Contentsquare better than Fullstory?

Contentsquare is the superior choice over Fullstory if your business goals include:

• Fostering collaboration between technical and business teams for improved synergy.
• Equipping technical teams with in-depth insights to enhance user experiences, while providing marketing teams with user-friendly visualizations for content optimization.
• Implementing ROI-focused strategies throughout the customer journey by identifying and addressing friction points and opportunities for raising the bar on conversion.
• Proactively increasing sales for eCommerce teams by enabling everyone to understand customer wants and needs beyond just resolving points of friction.
• Enabling product managers to improve product success based on data about friction and obstacles to journey completion, as well as to proactively manage their roadmap based on data about what is working well so they can double down on that..
• Assisting CX, UX, and tech teams in streamlining areas of confusion and hesitation, gathering customer feedback, and accelerating reporting with AI-powered alerts and actionable insights.
• Providing local support for multinational teams across 18 countries in English, French, Spanish, Italian, German, and Japanese.

What are the biggest Fullstory competitors?

Fullstory’s competitors include:

• Contentsquare
• Glassbox
• Quantum Metric
• Google Analytics (GA4)

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