Comparison
Two research-grade saliency platforms that mostly compete at the enterprise heatmap tier. The differentiator isn't the science — it's which surfaces your business decisions actually happen on.
Neurons brings Copenhagen neuroscience heritage to attention prediction: heatmaps and focus metrics validated against years of eye-tracking research, wrapped in enterprise features — brand norms, team workflows, integrations. It's built for brand and agency teams that need attention evidence across many creative types with a research department's credibility behind it.
Dragonfly AI concentrates on where spatial saliency pays hardest: packaging, shelf layouts, retail media, and static design. The workflow is iterative and fast — move the logo, rerun the heatmap, watch the hierarchy change — and its retail-centric client base has shaped tooling that fits those decisions tightly.
Retail and packaging workflows: Dragonfly. Breadth across creative types and norms depth: Neurons. Iteration speed on spatial questions: Dragonfly's rerun loop is hard to beat. Organizational features: Neurons. Both sit in sales-assisted enterprise pricing territory (our guide to Neurons pricing covers what to ask; Dragonfly follows a similar quoted model).
Saliency is a first-moments, spatial instrument. Feed video is a survival-over-time problem: viewers swipe at a specific second, and no heatmap names it. PreTestAds does: AdCortex™, trained on fMRI brain-response data, scores second-by-second engagement against 76 top TikTok performers — Hook Strength, drop-off second, peak frame, full curve — in minutes, from about $2 per test. Full comparisons: vs Neurons · vs Dragonfly AI.
Retail-first organization → Dragonfly. Multi-format brand/agency team → Neurons. And if feed video is where your budget concentrates, treat either as the spatial complement to a temporal engagement score — the swipe, not the gaze, is what your media bill measures.
Drop-off second and hook strength in minutes — first analysis free.
Test Your Ad FreeDragonfly AI if your work centers on packaging, shelf, and retail media — its saliency workflow is built for those spatial decisions. Neurons if you want broader creative coverage with neuro-research norms and team features for brand and agency use.
Both predict early visual attention from models grounded in vision science. Dragonfly leans into retail and packaging use cases; Neurons positions as a wider attention platform with brand norms and workflow depth. The underlying question — where does the eye go first? — is shared.
Neither is designed for that. Drop-off timing is a temporal engagement question — you need a model that scores attention second by second against feed benchmarks, like PreTestAds, which returns the exact drop-off second in minutes for about $2 per test.