It is commonly thought that isothermal titration calorimetry (ITC) is a typical thermodynamic technique that is not really suited to extract kinetic information. It is, therefore, commonplace to oppose ITC to surface plasmon resonance (SPR). However, this is at best an oversimplification, as ITC is based upon kinetic measurements.

The raw signal measured in any ITC experiment is a heat power is essentially the rate of heat production and not the heat itself evolved in a reaction. This rate of heat production is directly related to the kinetics of the reaction taking place in the measurement cell, which is the reason why a microcalorimeter is potentially much more than merely a heat-meter.