The 8 best experience analytics platforms

Choosing the right digital experience analytics (DXA) platform is crucial for understanding and engaging with your customers—but not all platforms are created equal. With so many options available, each promising different capabilities, it’s important to choose one that aligns with your business goals and addresses user needs.

In this chapter, we take a closer look at the leading platforms available and assess their strengths, limitations, and practical applications. We also show you why Contentsquare stands out as the most comprehensive and actionable solution on the market—and how you can start using it today to increase user engagement, drive conversions, and optimize business performance. You’ll learn:

• How each platform addresses core customer needs and business goals

• How to optimize the digital experience with advanced analytics and integrations

• How to integrate digital experience platforms (DXP) into your current technology stack

1. Contentsquare

Contentsquare (that’s us! 👋) is the go-to, all-in-one experience analytics platform that combines qualitative and quantitative tools to reveal exactly how users interact with your website, mobile app, and other digital touchpoints.

By revealing where—and why—users take certain actions, Contentsquare helps you make smarter, data-driven decisions that delight your users, put you ahead of competitors, and support continuous innovation and development.

With Contentsquare’s experience analytics platform, you get

• Journey Analysis: visualize and optimize the end-to-end user journey, identifying drop-offs, looping behaviors, and high-converting paths

• Heatmaps: collect user behavior data on where customers click, hover, and scroll, revealing where they get distracted—and what grabs their attention 

• Session Replay: watch individual user journeys and see why users struggle, like confusing navigation or error messages that lead to abandonment

• Page Comparison: identify website anomalies and track the performance of different pages across various user segments or KPIs over time

• Form Analysis: see which form fields cause drop-offs, optimize your field order for smoother progression, and improve error handling to increase completion rates

• User testing: validate creative concepts, test usability updates, and gather direct feedback from real users to ensure your changes align with customer needs

⭐ Contentsquare is the right experience analytics platform for mid-sized businesses or enterprises that want to understand the entire user journey, from start to finish, and then leverage those insights to continuously improve the customer experience and internal workflows.

🔥 Pro tip: use Contentsquare's customizable dashboards to organize your entire digital optimization strategy in one centralized place. Use our dashboards to

• Create tailored, KPI-specific views for each team—marketing, product, UX—so everyone can focus on their priorities while staying aligned on shared objectives

• Leverage real-time updates and alerts to monitor performance trends and respond quickly to user pain points

• Present clear, actionable insights to stakeholders using customizable visualizations, making it easy to secure buy-in and trust

Contentsquare’s experience analytics dashboards are customizable and shareable, making them the single source of truth for every team

2. Google Analytics

Google Analytics (GA4) is a popular foundational web analytics tool that gives you top-level insights into quantitative data, like website traffic, pageviews, and conversion rates. 

Its latest iteration, GA4, expands the platform’s capabilities even further, with event-based tracking, cross-platform analysis, and behavioral analysis—although this does require significant technical set-up and customization.

With GA’s experience analytics capabilities, you get

• Traffic analytics: monitor website and app visits, referral sources, user demographics, and geographic data for a snapshot of your audience

• Campaign performance measurement: see how marketing strategies drive traffic, engagement, and conversions, helping you strategically allocate resources

• Goal and event tracking: measure actions like downloads, purchases, or form submissions to evaluate user engagement

⭐ Google Analytics is a good choice if you need a high-level overview of your digital performance and want to monitor traffic trends and campaign success, without delving into detailed user interactions or behavioral insights.

🔥 Pro tip: integrate Google Analytics with Contentsquare to get deeper experience insights. Use GA4 to monitor traffic trends and campaign numbers while leveraging Contentsquare’s behavioral analysis to understand the why behind user actions. Together, these platforms provide a complete view of high-level metrics and in-depth user behavior, helping you make more impactful, user-centric decisions.

3. Fullstory

Fullstory is a behavioral analytics platform designed to help businesses improve the digital customer experience by identifying and resolving user pain points. It caters primarily to developer and data teams, offering tools for performance monitoring, debugging, and understanding user behavior at a granular level. 

With Fullstory’s experience analytics capabilities, you get

• Error analysis: detect and review API failures, app crashes, and JavaScript errors while using impact quantification tools to measure their revenue impact

• AI summaries: simplify session reviews with AI-generated text summaries, saving time and quickly highlighting key user pain points

• Speed analysis: track how site speed impacts user engagement and identify areas where slow performance affects conversions

⭐ Fullstory is a good choice if you need technical insights into user behavior but don’t require a broader analytics solution for proactive optimization or cross-functional collaboration.

😎 Expert insight: both Contentsquare and Fullstory have speed analysis capabilities, based on real user monitoring (RUM)—which measures site performance based on actual user interactions. However, only Contentsquare offers additional synthetic monitoring capabilities that let you proactively test key pages and user flows to identify performance issues before they impact users.

Contentsquare's Speed Analysis includes additional synthetic user monitoring capabilities, so you can identify performance issues before they affect the customer experience

4. Amplitude

Amplitude is a product analytics platform designed to help teams track events, experiment with features, and analyze user engagement patterns.

Its manual tagging approach provides flexibility for deep data collection and user behavior analysis—but this requires significant engineering resources and ongoing maintenance to continuously capture the full scope of user interactions.

With Amplitude’s experience analytics capabilities, you get

• A/B testing: run A/B tests to validate product ideas, measure feature performance, and refine the user experience

• Custom event tracking: set up tailored event tags to track specific user interactions and collect granular product data

• Native CDP capabilities: create unified user profiles with Amplitude’s built-in Customer Data Platform (CDP) for advanced audience segmentation and personalization

⭐ Amplitude is a good choice if your team needs detailed control over event tracking and tagging.

5. Adobe Analytics

Adobe Analytics is a multi-channel web analytics platform that helps you track user interactions, refine digital marketing strategies, and evaluate campaign performance across your website, email, and mobile app.

As one of the earliest web analytics solutions, it’s evolved into an enterprise platform with advanced data management and analysis capabilities. However, its customer behavior insights are limited compared to newer experience analytics platforms.

With Adobe’s experience analytics capabilities, you get

• Marketing attribution modeling: use advanced attribution models to see which digital channels drive the most user engagement and conversions

• A/B testing: integrate Adobe Target to test content variations, optimize user experiences, and validate design decisions

• Custom user segments: create and analyze specific audience groups based on behavior, demographics, or interaction history to fine-tune your marketing strategy

⭐ Adobe is a good choice if your organization already uses other Adobe Experience Cloud products and needs additional, enterprise-grade customization capabilities.

🔥 Pro tip: use the Adobe-Contentsquare integration to get deeper insights into your Adobe user segments.

This integration lets you 

• Filter heatmaps or replay sessions from your Adobe user segments, giving you a clearer view of how specific audience groups interact with your site

• Identify improvement opportunities for content and user journeys by analyzing behaviors and preferences within each segment

• Apply these insights to refine campaigns and personalization strategies within Adobe’s platform, creating more impactful, data-driven experiences

Import Adobe-defined segments into Contentsquare to uncover deeper insights into audience behavior, preferences, and pain points

6. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a product analytics platform that specializes in analyzing large-scale campaigns and micro-transactions. Its predictive tools help teams uncover patterns in complex user behaviors, making it particularly valuable for products with high-volume user interactions like gaming apps or ecommerce platforms.

With Mixpanel’s experience analytics capabilities, you get

• Behavioral querying: create complex queries to analyze specific user actions, like seeing how many users signed up, then completed a tutorial, and finally made a purchase within a week

• Predictive modeling: use machine learning models to forecast user actions, like churn risk or likelihood to convert, allowing for more proactive decision-making

• Cohort analysis: group users based on shared attributes to understand retention trends, engagement metrics, and the impact of new features over time

⭐ Mixpanel is a good choice if your team needs to analyze complex user behaviors and predict future actions to guide product development decisions.

😎 Expert insight: if you’re already using Mixpanel, integrating it with Contentsquare gives you a more powerful way to understand the 'why' behind your user data. 

For example, access Contentsquare’s Session Replay tool directly from your Mixpanel dashboard to see how users interact with your site during key events, like drop-offs or rage clicks.

The session replays can also be linked to specific Mixpanel user profiles, allowing you to analyze behavioral patterns and event data side by side for a fuller view of the user journey.

Session replays show you how individual users experience and interact with your website

7. Optimizely

Optimizely is a digital experience platform focused on testing and experimentation. Its unified platform helps teams validate new features, measure the impact of changes on customer interactions, and deploy updates with confidence. The platform also includes specialized tools for ecommerce optimization, making it particularly valuable for online retail businesses.

With Optimizely’s experience analytics capabilities, you get

• Omni-channel experimentation: deploy and track experiments across desktop, mobile, and tablet to ensure consistent user experiences throughout the customer journey

• Dynamic customization: create personalized digital experiences for different user segments by automatically adjusting content, offers, and journeys based on real-time user signals and historical interaction patterns

• AI-informed ecommerce optimization: incorporate AI to improve the online retail experience through personalized product recommendations, tailored promotions, and streamlined checkout processes

⭐ Optimizely is a good choice if your team requires advanced experimentation capabilities and specialized ecommerce optimization tools to enhance the digital customer experience.

🔍 Real-world use case: how Zoopla refined its personalization strategy 

Zoopla, a leading property platform, needed to personalize its user journeys to improve engagement and streamline the complex home-buying process. However, bottlenecks slowed down Zoopla’s analytics and experimentation processes, making it difficult for teams to act quickly on insights.

Using Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis, Zoopla identified key user segments and mapped the digital journey, identifying high-impact personalization opportunities. They then integrated these insights with Optimizely to run targeted A/B tests and deploy automated in-app guidance to address user frustrations in real time.

As a result, Zoopla built a seamless personalization strategy that boosted customer engagement, improved retention, and freed up resources for innovation.

Contentsquare’s Journey Analysis gives you a detailed look into how users progress through your website or mobile app

8. Pendo

Pendo is a product experience platform that combines basic analytics with in-app guidance features to drive user onboarding and feature adoption. While it includes some data autocapture capabilities, many key interactions still require additional manual tagging. Additionally, Pendo's customer segmentation options are limited compared to other platforms, which makes in-depth behavioral analysis challenging.

With Pendo’s experience analytics capabilities, you get

• Product walkthrough creation: design guided tutorials and onboarding flows directly within your product to help new users understand key features

• Targeted announcements: deliver contextual in-app messages and tooltips to highlight new features or gather feedback at specific moments in the user journey

• Feature prioritization tools: combine basic usage data with user feedback to inform product roadmap decisions and development priorities

⭐ Pendo is a good choice if your team is heavily focused on improving user onboarding and feature adoption, especially for SaaS products. 

Optimize your experience analytics with Contentsquare

Experience analytics is most powerful when it combines the ‘what’ and ‘why’ of user behavior—and that's exactly what Contentsquare’s comprehensive platform delivers. By offering a complete suite of tools to uncover user insights, surface pain points, and drive impactful optimizations, Contentsquare helps teams create meaningful digital experiences that improve customer satisfaction and business outcomes.

FAQs about experience analytics platforms