Apache Kafka vs. Contentsquare

Apache Kafka is well-suited for most data-streaming use cases. Amazon Kinesis and Azure EventHubs, unless you have a specific use case where using those cloud PaAS for your data lakes, once set up well, Apache Kafka will take care of everything else in the background. Azure EventHubs, is good for cross-cloud use cases, and Amazon Kinesis - I have no real-world experience. But I believe it is the same.

ContentSquare [(Clicktale)] is best suited to deep dive understanding of how web users truly consume your web pages. For example, when a traditional analytics software informs you on exit rates, ContentSquare [(Clicktale)] helps you to understand if users left without interacting with their last page or if they in fact spent time reading, scrolling, clicking it.

Incentivized

• Really easy to configure. I've used other message brokers such as RabbitMQ and compared to them, Kafka's configurations are very easy to understand and tweak.
• Very scalable: easily configured to run on multiple nodes allowing for ease of parallelism (assuming your queues/topics don't have to be consumed in the exact same order the messages were delivered)
• Not exactly a feature, but I trust Kafka will be around for at least another decade because active development has continued to be strong and there's a lot of financial backing from Confluent and LinkedIn, and probably many other companies who are using it (which, anecdotally, is many).

Incentivized

• Heat Maps - we used and liked CrazyEgg in the past, and it was a cheaper tool that was easy to use. ClickTale gives us additional capabilities with better data about scroll reach, mouse movements, clicks and a summary report that shows what parts of our pages are getting attention. A product manager asked us yesterday for insights on how his product page was performing, and we were easily able to send him the reports in the heat map section.
• Visitor recordings - We get good data on our website using analytics tools like GA, HubSpot and ClickTale, but it is very helpful to watch actual visitor recordings for certain visitor segments. If we add a new page or new feature to our website and notice a trend, we can easily drill down and watch visitors and see how they are interacting with the page.
• Conversion funnels - We do a lot of our analysis in Google Analytics and you can set up conversion funnels in GA if you know how to do it. The problem is you can't segment the data and the aggregated data is not as helpful. ClickTale makes it very simple to do conversion funnels, and you can segment them with just a few clicks.

• Sometimes it becomes difficult to monitor our Kafka deployments. We've been able to overcome it largely using AWS MSK, a managed service for Apache Kafka, but a separate monitoring dashboard would have been great.
• Simplify the process for local deployment of Kafka and provide a user interface to get visibility into the different topics and the messages being processed.
• Learning curve around creation of broker and topics could be simplified

• It's a bit difficult to navigate form heatmaps of one page on my sites to those of another.
• It would be useful to have data on what percentage of clicks for each link are bounces. If this is available already, it is not very easy to find.
• I have slight doubts about the accuracy of ClickTale's data based on some industry related articles I've read (i.e. http://redant.com.au/tool-reviews/clicktale-review-technology/). For the most part I feel like the data I'm getting is accurate, because it roughly corresponds to what I'm able to see on Google Analytics. It would be nice to see ClickTale address some of these issues.

Kafka is quickly becoming core product of the organization, indeed it is replacing older messaging systems. No better alternatives found yet

Incentivized

At my former company I was able to upgrade our initial subscription level from bronze to gold without any problems after the first year. Unfortunately, the company I am presently with doesn't have a Clicktale subscription. I would have absolutely no hesitation in strongly recommending Clicktale to my current company if I ever get even a remote chance to do so. Clicktale is used in some of the statistics I use on my resume in an effort to quantify my results as a certified usability analyst. Clicktale has made a significant difference in my value to any team I work with.

Apache Kafka is highly recommended to develop loosely coupled, real-time processing applications. Also, Apache Kafka provides property based configuration. Producer, Consumer and broker contain their own separate property file

Incentivized

I had some issues interacting with viewing recordings of a specific page by many users but my impression was that this was going to be fixed.

Support for Apache Kafka (if willing to pay) is available from Confluent that includes the same time that created Kafka at Linkedin so they know this software in and out. Moreover, Apache Kafka is well known and best practices documents and deployment scenarios are easily available for download. For example, from eBay, Linkedin, Uber, and NYTimes.

Incentivized

I used other messaging/queue solutions that are a lot more basic than Confluent Kafka, as well as another solution that is no longer in the market called Xively, which was bought and "buried" by Google. In comparison, these solutions offer way fewer functionalities and respond to other needs.

Incentivized

ClickTale is now a step ahead of the competition since it delivers insights based on pre-defined business KPIs and customer journeys that we have set up. We can also segment our traffic and easily sift through the many recordings finding the ones that match our lookup criteria. This paired with a good and reliable PII masking helps us with insight collection and drive business decisions which other solutions don't have. The new non-Flash interface is clean and simple to use and has all the functionalities centralized.

Incentivized

• Positive: Get a quick and reliable pub/sub model implemented - data across components flows easily.
• Positive: it's scalable so we can develop small and scale for real-world scenarios
• Negative: it's easy to get into a confusing situation if you are not experienced yet or something strange has happened (rare, but it does). Troubleshooting such situations can take time and effort.

Incentivized

• Rarely was actionable insight taken from the ClickTale tool that resulted in a better user experience on our website. We made small changes on different aspects of our webpages that typically did not show an improvement over the previous versions.
• The dedicated time and resources in the ClickTale tool did not justify the investment. The heat maps can be helpful but they are based on mouse clicks (Google Analytics can help with that). Watching recordings can get time consuming and don't always provide enough data for an actionable takeaway.
• If you take the approach of identifying a potential problem on your website first, then using the ClickTale tool to dig deeper in the issue, you might find the tool helpful. However, make sure you gather enough data on the potential issue before making changes to your site (and monitor the changes afterward).