Chrome DevTools vs. Contentsquare

Chrome DevTools are great for troubleshooting bugs, broken elements on pages, styling issues, responsiveness, identifying performance issues, third-party connections for data privacy, reviewing cookies and local storage, screenshots in different dimensions. Chrome DevTools are for technical users, so you do need to have a decent understanding of some basics like HTML and CSS to get started using them.

Incentivized

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

• The Elements panel is usually our first port of call to inspect and modify HTML and CSS in real-time.
• The Issues panel helps us to identify and resolve problems like cookie issues etc.
• The console panel allows developers to see the log output created by their website in real-time.
• Lighthouse helps us identify any issues with accessibility

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.

• As one delves into DevTools, one encounters a gradually steeper learning curve. You can do a lot very quickly, but to fully utilize DevTools takes time as one explores what it can do.
• With many new updates, tools and items are moved, and a comfortable workflow becomes a frustrating search. This often happens when following only slightly outdated tutorials on a given feature, even in Google's own documentation.
• The experimental flags, settings, and options are scattered about and a little clunky to configure when one has to make changes in multiple places.

Incentivized

• 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.

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.

While Chrome DevTools are very powerful, it's not the easiest thing to use, as there are so many different tools built in. It takes some exploring to discover all the options possible within DevTools, but with a little exploring, the DevTools become a very powerful asset. Accessing the basic HTML and CSS inspection is very easy though, and that's the most common usage for the DevTools.

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.

I'm not entirely sure what to rate the support for DevTools, because I don't have any experience dealing with official customer support for DevTools. I would guess the primary support for DevTools would be in a Chrome forum. Typically if I have a question or issue, I am able to find an answer from doing a quick Google search. It's pretty widely used, so it's not difficult to find answers.

Incentivized

I find them pretty much the same, they have the same tools except Firefox doesn't provide the lighthouse functionality. I do prefer firefox's dark theme and colour palette. But I use Chrome Dev tools because of the Light house functionality that analyzes the page load and scores the website on desktop and mobile experience.

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

• All positive, the tool is free so there's no need to spend money on it. Every return is positive.
• A lot, their tools increases productivity due because it helps developers to create and test websites inside the browser.
• Tools are intuitive so there's no need to invest in education on developers to learn these tools.

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).