Top 10 Appcues Alternatives and Competitors (Free and Paid)

Appcues is a solid user onboarding platform, and actually the pioneer of no-code user onboarding.

But that doesn’t mean it’s the right platform for you.

There are various different ways to onboard users, and your budget or technical expertise might have pushed you to look for an alternative to Appcues.

In this article, we’ll go over 7 Appcues alternatives and competitors; we’ve included both free and paid alternatives that could be used for email, in-product, and video onboarding.

We’ll go over each alternative in detail, their use cases, pricing, and differentiation.

Click here to go straight to the first Appcues alternative.

TL;DR

👉 Appcues is one of the first “no-code user onboarding” tools, and it used to be the best digital adoption solution on the market.

👉 In time, Appcues lost track of what no-code is and turned into a hard-to-use tool with a bloated price and steep learning curve, even though they have managed to stay relevant with many key features on par with its contemporaries, like interactive product tours and step-by-step guides.

👉 UserGuiding is the best alternative to Appcues due to its ease of use and range of use cases, from product adoption and customer experiences to employee training.

👉 UserGuiding allows you to do everything that Appcues does for half the price, with better support, and a friendlier product experience.

UserGuiding also offers free migration services for your in-app content created using other software to minimize your switching costs.

Schedule a demo with one of our experts or start your free trial now:

Don’t Pay a Fortune for Other Tools!

UserGuiding starts from only $89/month.
Create tours, tooltips, and surveys without coding

👉 Other alternatives to Appcues include WalkMe, Pendo, Intercom, Intro.js, Shepherd, and Wyzowl.

Why you need an Appcues Alternative

Appcues might be the OG of no-code user onboarding, with capable features…

But it’s not perfect.

Here are a few reasons that an alternative to Appcues might be more suitable for you:

1- Steep Learning Curve – Technical Background Required

The user adoption of Appcues takes a while, and it gets worse for non-technical people.

The setup is too complex for non-tech-savvy users to pull off, so getting started with Appcues is a bumpy road that takes a while.

2- Higher Pricing for the Same Value

There is no denying that Appcues is much more expensive than most of its competitors.

Appcues’ starting price is 2.5 times more expensive for the same MAU and features than its closest competitor, UserGuiding.

And that just might be too much for a digital tool with one or two more advanced features than others.

Also, the MAU is limited to 2500 in both Essentials and Growth packages.

That means you’ll need to pay extra if you have more active users.

3- Feature Bloat

The main reason Appcues is usually considered such a complex product is actually the comprehensiveness of the features and the settings.

This is actually called feature bloat, where a company makes a bunch of features that are too detailed for the average user to master the product.

Best Appcues alternatives offer simple features that get you the results with minimum effort.

In the vertical of user onboarding.

4- Insufficient Customer Support

Appcues doesn’t have the best history when it comes to their customer support.

Or overall positive experiences and customer satisfaction. 

It is a known fact that enterprises and larger companies get priority in Appcues’ support, and small and medium-sized businesses are sometimes required to wait for a response for more than a day.

That is the essential issue with enterprise software.

They are for enterprises. 

Top Alternatives and Competitors to Appcues

1. UserGuiding
2. WalkMe
3. Wyzowl
4. Pendo
5. Intercom Product Tours
6. Userlane
7. Whatfix
8. Stonly
9. Intro.js
10. Shepherd

Without further ado, let’s start with the #1 alternative to Appcues:

#1 UserGuiding – No-code and Affordable Appcues Alternative

UserGuiding is a no-code digital adoption solution that helps you provide better in-app experiences.

👉 Compared to its alternatives, UserGuiding is much simpler to use since it is a no-code platform. It doesn’t require a single line of code to work.

It works with a Chrome browser extension that lets you create various user onboarding elements directly on your website.

Compared to other tools, UserGuiding’s user onboarding features are much more extensive and significantly more affordable, while its analytics functions are limited.

But, this lack of product analytics can easily be covered with product analytics software (that’s more capable than Pendo) such as Mixpanel or Amplitude, which are easily integrated with UserGuiding.

UserGuiding offers a wide range of features, including:

1. Interactive Product Tours,
2. Tooltips and Hotspots,
3. User Onboarding Checklists,
4. Resource Centers,
5. NPS Surveys,
6. Easy Localization,
7. Advanced Analytics with User Activity Feed,
8. Custom user segments,
9. Material Tagging and Easy Targeting,
10. No-code customization,
11. Advanced integrations.

There are three main upsides of using UserGuiding for user onboarding instead of Pendo:

Interactive in-app guidance

UserGuiding is the easiest tool to use among digital adoption platforms that offer a full scope of onboarding features, with a 93% satisfaction rate regarding the ease of use on G2.

UserGuiding’s guides are not only easy to install, but also quick to create. It is possible to push your guides live in under 15 minutes, and see instant results on how much the customer journey has improved.

With tooltips, modals, hotspots, announcement banners, checklists, and resource centers; UserGuiding offers powerful features for all pricing tiers – meaning that you don’t have go out of budget to have a good quality customer retention strategy.

By using UserGuiding’s browser extension, you can start building and customizing your interactive guides directly on your web app.

Surveys and NPS

In July 2023, UserGuiding launched their new feature, “Surveys”, which now allows users to create multiple different types of questions and combine them within a single survey (or launch different surveys for different segments).

With this feature, you can get the most specific user feedback that you need, exactly when you need it. UserGuiding also offers NPS surveys for companies to measure their promoter score, and combines all survey results in the dashboard.

Also, thanks to their user details & activity log feature, you can dig deep into how each user journey comes together, and find what is it that makes the customers’ digital experience special for them.

Resource Centers

UserGuiding’s easy-to-create intuitive resource centers have increased their users’ activation rates over 25%.

Resource centers allow you to create a self-paced learning environment right within your app without covering too much space.

You can trigger guides or surveys within UserGuiding’s resource center, insert external links, direct people to help center articles, or provide quick tips based on their usage – all from a single source

Analytics and Customization

UserGuiding brings analytics to a new level.

UserGuiding’s Analytics dashboard gives you actionable insight on the performance of your onboarding content. UserGuiding allows you to track view and completion data for each guide, tooltip, hotspot, checklist, and resource center – while also giving you information about daily active users, and satisfaction scores.

You can mix and match different survey responses and data on the analytics dashboard, and dig deep into each user’s activity using the user details page and activity log.

What is UserGuiding good for?

✅ The #1 strength of UserGuiding is the value it provides for the price it costs. UserGuiding offers a full set of no-code engagement and adoption elements for as little as $89/month.

✅ Unlike many other competitors, UserGuiding’s interface is very user-friendly so that even first-time users can set up and publish their own product engagement sequences.

✅ UserGuiding is also very customizable. You can play with your engagement elements’ shape, color, positioning, and much more.

✅ UserGuiding provides fast and solution-oriented customer support. This means that customers can get help quickly – no matter which time zone you are in – and solve their problems without friction.

✅ In terms of User Onboarding, UserGuiding provides a full stack of features so that you won’t have to adopt multiple tools for different features.

What is UserGuiding bad for?

❌ Since UserGuiding’s main focus is onboarding, the analytics features it provides might not be enough for some companies. However, the tool provides various integration options with most analytics tools.

❌ Although you can use UserGuiding on mobile web browsers, it doesn’t work on mobile apps. If you need a solution to work on web and mobile, UserGuiding isn’t the one for you.

• 14-day free trial (no credit card required)
• Basic Plan: $89/month when billed annually for up to 2500 MAU. UserGuiding doesn’t limit the number of features available to the customers, and you can benefit from all features – with limitations on active campaigns. For instance, you can create as many surveys as you like, but set only one active at a time with the Basic plan.
• Professional Plan: $389/month when billed annually for up to 20.000 MAU with unlimited user guides. You get unlimited product engagement features, and you can have. 3 live surveys at a time with the professional plan. This plan also provides you with a dedicated customer success manager.
  .
• Custom Quotation, Available for Larger Companies, removes all limitations and provides you the smoothest UserGuiding experience.

 UserGuiding also provides add-ons, so if there is a specific feature that you need while you are on the basic plan, you can have it as an add-on without having to upgrade your package.

UserGuiding Reviews:

UserGuiding vs Appcues Comparison Table

Starting Price	$249/month	$89/month
G2 Rating	4.7⭐	4.7⭐
Interactive Walkthroughs	✅	✅
Onboarding Checklists	✅	✅
In-Product Surveys	❌	✅
In-App Resource Center	❌	✅
Avg. Deployment Time	2-3 Hours	15 Minutes
User Analytics	✅	✅
Knowledge Base Integration	❌	✅
Learning Curve	😟 Steep	🙂 Smooth

Should you go with Appcues or UserGuiding? Try for yourself, or let us help you choose:

Simple, Affordable, and Powerful User Onboarding & Survey Software.

Appcues Alternatives #2 WalkMe – Powerful Features for Enterprise Digital Adoption

WalkMe seems to be a product experience platform enterprise businesses can’t live without.

And they might be right.

Compared to Pendo, WalkMe is an enterprise-focused and expensive digital adoption platform for user analytics and product experience.

Although both products have very similar key features, the way these features (such as product tours, analytics, and event tracking) are set up in each product differs a ton.

Here are WalkMe’s two strongest features:

Analytics and Insights

WalkMe excells in enterprise level DAP oriented data management.

If you’re more interested in using a DAP for instilling the adoption of digital products through organizations and teams, WalkMe should be your go-to. The setup takes more time, and it’s not as easily operated as Pendo, but it gets the job done for those who need to get other people to get the job done.

WalkMe Training

If you need a tool for customer onboarding, WalkMe isn’t the one for you. If you need a solution for employee onboarding, tracking, and management, then WalkMe can offer you quite a variety fo features that will maximize the employee’s productivity and get them quickly up to speed.

What is WalkMe good for?

✅ WalkMe is one of the pioneers in digital adoption and user onboarding

✅ WalkMe users get to enjoy an extensive set of high-value features and different onboarding UX patterns like tooltips, checklists, and progress tracking options with progress bars

✅ Although technical knowledge might be required, WalkMe offers a lot of customization options

✅ WalkMe is perfectly scalable for enterprises, especially if the use case is employee onboarding rather than customer education

What is WalkMe bad for?

❌ Among the WalkMe features, even core features might be too sophisticated for inexperienced users

❌ WalkMe’s feature amount/feature usage ratio is often low if there is no dedicated user or employee onboarding team

❌ WalkMe requires a technical skillset and occasionally coding knowledge; this makes setting up and using WalkMe harder than average

❌ Not so accessible pricing, WalkMe is not the best option for small or medium-sized businesses or enterprises with an immature budget structure

❌ WalkMe is enterprise software designed for enterprises, so feature updates following customer feedback might not be possible; likewise, customer service might be less accessible

WalkMe Pricing

WalkMe doesn’t have public pricing, but most of its users agree on pricing plans that vastly change in the 5-figure range. The average pricing for the small teams seems to be around $10,000/year, but since WalkMe is an enterprise solution that specializes as a DAP for large organizations, you might have to multiply the alleged numbers.

WalkMe Reviews:

Appcues vs WalkMe

When you compare Appcues and WalkMe, you’ll notice that they focus on different markets.

WalkMe aims at the big enterprises, with a sales-oriented customer journey and higher starting prices (yes, it goes higher than Appcues). The tool is obviously comprehensive and complex at the same time, so it requires a bunch of developer hours to set up right.

Appcues on the other hand is focused on medium/large companies, with above-average but fixed pricing and a self-serve free-trial option. Even though Appcues has its complexities too, compared to WalkMe, it can be called simple.

Both Appcues and WalkMe customers have complained about insufficient support and ease of use.

Appcues Alternatives #3 Pendo – Basic User Onboarding and Feedback Surveys

Pendo is a robust product analytics, and user engagement platform businesses use to build better products.

Founded by the software entrepreneur Todd Olson, Pendo is based in North Carolina, US.

It is a very popular solution with thousands of customers, including big names such as Verizon, Zendesk, and Salesforce.

The platform has two core functions that users can benefit from: behavior analytics and user onboarding.

Behavior Analytics

Pendo’s product analytics features can help businesses track user behavior, and product insights across the web and mobile devices.

Once integrated, you can see every user activity, which allows you to create different reports that can later be combined in custom dashboards that fuel your business decisions and help you find actionable insights.

Data-focused product managers use Pendo to understand what users are doing inside their product, what functions/features are being more utilized, how product changes affect business metrics, and more.

User/Employee Onboarding and Guidance

Additionally, Pendo has a “Guides” feature, using which you can create different in-app elements to pop up on the user interface to boost user experience and guide and engage with your users.

You can create interactive product tours, tooltips, announcement modals, and resource centers using Pendo; to set up a customer journey that sets users up for success.

Once combined with the analytics part of Pendo, in-app guides, and other elements can help your teams onboard users and employees with higher engagement.

Additionally, Pendo provides its users with a variety of in-app feedback collection elements that are extremely valuable when used correctly.

What is Pendo good for?

✅ The best feature Pendo provides is its in-depth analytics; meanwhile, its user segmentation truly makes a significant change in the way users consume onboarding material.

✅ Pendo puts together different solutions like user experience, user onboarding, and highly sophisticated data collection and analytics under one tool to guarantee customer success and easier customer engagement tracking for digital product teams.

✅ Founded in 2013, Pendo is among the first comers of digital adoption; it has a strong background and customer portfolio.

✅ Though Pendo is quite expensive, it offers a free trial and a freemium, something other platforms of its caliber rarely do.

What is Pendo bad for?

❌ Though Pendo represents itself as a digital adoption solution, its onboarding UX elements are pretty limited to the very basics, leaving out checklists, hotspots, and more.

❌ Being a highly sophisticated tool with a complex UI, it might be hard to set up and use if not used by an experienced user.

❌ Likewise, Pendo’s features tend to be complex and use case-specific, so it might be hard to leverage all features and possibilities without a fully established game plan dedicated to Pendo.

❌ Though Pendo does not publicly share its pricing, it is very well known that Pendo is more expensive than the market average.

❌ Yet another enterprise-level tool, Pendo’s customer service might not be as responsive as smaller products’ customer service teams.

Pendo Pricing

Pendo has a free plan called “Pendo Free“. Pendo free allows up to 1,000 monthly active users for one web and one mobile app. Although Pendo claims it can be used to test the waters and see the software’s value, I’ll have to say you can only see if the platform works with your product or not with only a thousand users.

Also, Pendo recently released a fixed-pricing plan called the “starter plan,” which costs $7000/year but includes only a very limited set of features and no customer support.

For bigger plans, Pendo doesn’t have set pricing.

Instead, you can get a custom plan for your business by contacting their sales team.

However, there are various Pendo users that revealed the details of Pendo’s pricing. One user claimed that they are a medium-sized business that pays $12,000/year for the standard package of Pendo, while another user upped this number to $20,000. Additionally, there is a Pendo customer that claims to pay $2000/year just for the “Guides” feature of the product; so, you get the picture.

Pendo’s pricing is feature and usage-based, and it possibly scales with how many users you have, like other analytics tools.

Pendo Reviews

Appcues vs Pendo

When it comes to comparing Pendo to Appcues, the biggest difference is obviously their areas of focus as products.

Appcues primarily focuses on web onboarding, providing capable features for onboarding users and helping them succeed.

Pendo on the other hand is much more capable in analytics and provides solutions for both mobile and web products. With Pendo, you can gain a deep understanding of your users’ journeys and act on the insights you receive, but with limited onboarding and UX elements.

If you don’t already have an in-depth analytics solution, and a basic user onboarding is more than enough for you, Pendo should be your go-to.

If you are in it for the user onboarding part, however, Appcues, or alternatives to Appcues such as UserGuiding should be at the top of your preferences.

Appcues Alternatives #4 Intercom – Email Onboarding and Basic Product Tours

Intercom is known as one of the most popular customer messaging platforms, although the tool has many other features that are also helpful.

In April 2019, they launched their “Product Tours” feature that allows you to create step-by-step interactive onboarding guides. Intercom’s Product Tours helps you manage adoption and onboard new visitors by building product walkthroughs and tours within your product.

Using the add-on, you can:

• Create step-by-step product walkthroughs,
• Tooltips and hotspots,
• Announcement banners,
• And create basic user segments.

However, I need to point out that Intercom Product Tours isn’t the most powerful and most developed tool on the market. It has limits in terms of functionality when it comes to product adoption and user onboarding.

Even though it is not Intercom’s main focus, there is a lack of UI elements in product tours. They do not give you many onboarding features, which means that you can’t use checklists, modals, or any other key UI elements for user onboarding.

Also, some features such as end-user surveying or advanced analytics are priced separately, causing the price of Intercom to become unreasonable.

But I have to point out that the features that Intercom does provide are very user-friendly and easy to use. If you are currently using Intercom’s messaging widget already, it is really easy to implement and use Product Tours and start decreasing churn rates.

Briefly, Intercom Product Tours is very simple and easy to use, but it lacks efficiency and is particularly pricey to early-stage startups.

Creating a product tour on Intercom is an easy process. It’s simple, and Intercom provides all the help that you might need – in case this is your first time creating a product tour.

Also, if you are already familiar with creating product tours with another tool, it is going to be easy to adapt to Intercom since the process is quite similar.

Let’s go over the steps of how to create a product tour on Intercom:

1- Get to the product tours page

To open product tours page, click on “Outbound” on the left-side slider within Intercom. Then, click on “Product Tours” from the menu that opens.

2- Click on the “New product tour” button

This will be a blue button on the top-right of your screen.

When you click on it, you will get 2 options to choose from:

1. Start from scratch,
2. Or choose a template.

If you choose to go with a template, the next screen asks me to select a template (although there is only 1 choice.)

I decided to create one from scratch since that is what the walkthrough asked me to do.

3- Install Intercom to your website and start editing

It is not possible to edit intercom product tours without code installation. If you just want to try the product without all the hassle, I’m sorry to say that you won’t get the chance.

If you have the code installed, a new window displays your website and the product tours editor.

You can edit and place the elements in the editor, and preview your product tour before publishing it.

To your walkthrough modals and tooltips, you can add:

• ✅ Texts,
• ✅ Images,
• ✅ Gifs,
• ✅ Videos with/without audio,
• ✅ Buttons,
• ✅ And directions about how to proceed to the next step.

And that’s it.

As simple as it is, it is also limited to this.

Intercom product tours definitely delivers what it promises, but it only promises walkthrough steps. Nothing else.

Intercom Product Tours Pricing

According to user comments on Reddit and HelpCrunch, Intercom’s pricing can range between $74/month (only for newly established companies with under 5 employees) and $999/month. Also, some features are billed separately, and cost an additional monthly fee.

For instance, if you have 5-9 employees, the starting price jumps up to $89/month.

If you want to use Intercom with Product Tours add-on:

• 14-day Free Trial requires credit card information.
• Start Plan: $74/month for Intercom subscription (2 seats) plus $199/month for Product Tours add-on = $273/month Total
• Support Package: Custom quote on request

Intercom Reviews

Intercom vs Appcues

Intercom, when compared to Appcues, is a completely different product focused on customer service that has a single simple feature to replace the might of Appcues’ all different features.

If you’re looking for a complete user onboarding experience, you need to choose a user onboarding software like Appcues and UserGuiding.

However, if you’re looking to gather every data and task in Intercom, the Product Tours add-on might be worth checking out.

Appcues Alternatives #5 Userlane – Starter Level Engagement Elements

Userlane is also one of the solid digital adoption platforms that are suitable for creating employee and user onboarding experiences.

With a focus on employee training, Userlane provides interactive UX elements that guide users through any web software.

Although the customization and the features are limited, Userlane has all the core elements of the average user onboarding experience:

User Onboarding Guides

Userlane offers interactive product guides that you can customize as you like. The targeting and segmentation for those guides are sufficient for most but if you have complicated segments or lots of different language requirements, Userlane might not be the one for you.

Setting up Userlane guides. is easy. You simply download the browser extension, edit and adjust your tooltips and modals, and you are ready to go.

Checklists and Knowledge Base

While most user onboarding tools offer separate user onboarding checklists and knowledge bases, USerlane brings those two elements together on one launcher.

Just like any other tool, you can use these features to launch product tours. The downside of USerlane’s launcher is the fact that you can’t insert surveys and sort in it.

Data & Analytics

Userlane allows you to track how your users are doing with the onboarding material, but it doesn’t provide any advanced analytics capabilities.

You can try the other tools on the list, like UserGuiding, if you’re looking for something more advanced than basic.

What is Userlane good for?

✅ Userlane is very user-friendly so that even first-time users can set up and publish their own product engagement sequences.

✅ The same goes with the integration, it is relatively easier than most competitors.

✅ Userlane provides good customer support. They are great at coming up with quick and highly personalized solutions to all your problems whenever you have one.

What is Userlane bad for?

❌ If you value the visuality of your product, then you will be disappointed to hear that Userlane doesn’t offer the best customization options. The elements are not really customizable, and they don’t offer many templates.

❌ Userlane isn’t the best when it comes to analytics features. If you would like to get the best out of your customers, you will have to use integrations.

❌ But Userlane doesn’t provide enough integration options either. However, if you only use Zendesk, Google Analytics, Hubspot, and Salesforce, well, then you won’t be disappointed.

Userlane Pricing

Userlane offers custom pricing based on your needs and the size of your company, so you’ll need to get a demo to get a quote and give the product a try.

Appcues Alternatives #6 Whatfix – Enterprise Level Engagement Materials

Whatfix, similar to WalkMe, can be the solution you’re looking for if you’re more interested in organization-wide digital adoption rather than product analytics.

Its analytics side lacks a ton compared to Pendo, but Whatfix can be a powerful solution for employee onboarding and training. It has a variety of options for creating on-screen guidance for end-users.

Whatfix’s analytics features are focused on tracking the on-screen content you create with it and the effects of this content on core product metrics.

With a more affordable pricing range, Whatfix can be a better DAP solution for small-medium-sized companies than Pendo, maybe even WalkMe.

While Whatfix offers a wide variety of features, they categorize it under 2 different aspects:

Digital Adoption

Whatfix focuses on enterprise-level customers, that’s why they specialize in providing highly detailed and personalized experiences. Whatfix allows you to create in-app elements such as checklists, onboarding flows, hotspots, and so on.

While Whatfix does offer a great range of features, I have to warn you that its elements are not the most pretty and pleasing to look at. So if you want your onboarding elements to look good on the screen, Whatfix probably shouldn’t be your first choice.

Product Analytics

Whatfix doesn’t disclose what kind of features you can use within their product analytics plan, but here are the details that are listed on their pricing page:

What is Whatfix good for?

✅ Whatfix can help you create beautiful and interactive product walkthroughs so that you can provide your customers an engaging onboarding experience, and get them to like your product easily.

✅ Whatfix provides exquisite customer support. They are great at coming up with quick and highly personalized solutions to all your problems whenever you have one.

What is Whatfix bad for?

❌ Whatfix isn’t the best when it comes to analytics features. If you would like to get the best out of your customers, you will have to use integrations.

❌ But Whatfix doesn’t provide enough integration options either. Only if you only use Amplitude, Google Analytics, Salesforce, and Slack, well, then you won’t be disappointed.

❌ No matter how friendly the UI is, Whatfix has a steep learning curve that you must get past – which is only possible if you have enough technical knowledge.

❌ Whatfix is also not affordable. Even though they don’t share their pricing plan or provide a free trial, users on the internet say that Whatfix charges them much more than other similar tools.

Whatfix Pricing

Whatfix also doesn’t have public pricing that you can go through, but according to its users, it’s not as bad as Pendo.

According to reviews, plans for enterprise businesses can go as high as $1000/month with access to all features, and it won’t get to five figures unless you’re a really large corporation with a ton of users/employees.

Appcues Alternatives #7 Stonly – Knowledge Bases and Resource Centers

Stonly is a self-serve support and user education platform that offers engaging and (not so) interactive guides for software products.

The customer service software especially started generating more attention after the series A investment of $22M it received in January 2022.

Stonly offers a fairly basic solution to educate users and take some weight off the shoulders of the customer support team on a small budget, but it might not be giving you the best bang for your buck.

Stonly helps you create help centers and knowledge bases that are much more engaging compared to the traditional ones that are just chunks of writing piled up on a website.

Onboarding Flows

Stonly onboarding offers step-by-step instructional guides that you can add images inside to illustrate your topic better, and the content of these step guides can be optimized based on end-user segments and preferences.

These step interactive guides can also be triggered through tooltips and hotspots for a more hands-on experience.

Of course, you can use these guides to create product tours, that show your users how different UI elements and core functions of your product work.

Stonly Knowledge Bases and Resource centers

Along with onboarding flows and knowledge bases, Stonly also allows you to create basic launchers with resource centers in them. From those launchers, you can trigger guides, access knowledge base articles, or get support information.

Because Stonly doesn’t offer surveys or such, this is about everything that their launcher can do.

Also, Stonly doesn’t provide analytics capabilities. Therefore, you will have a difficult time understanding how your users behave and navigate within your product.

Although it doesn’t actually have the most interactive content, it can be a good choice for small to medium-sized businesses that would prefer free/affordable products.

But if you have quite a few users, then you should be ready for questionably high pricing plans, since Stonly only has a starter plan, and an expensive plan.

What is Stonly good for?

✅ Stonly is relatively more affordable and has a free plan, which is something that most of its competitors don’t have.

✅ Stonly makes it easy to create product walkthroughs. Once you pass the integration step, the ease of use increases quickly.

What is Stonly bad for?

❌ If you want to integrate Stonly into your UI elements, and, of course, implement Stonly’s knowledge base and help center into your platform, you’ll definitely need a bunch of developer hours to get it done.

❌ It looks like most of the interactivity, in Stonly’s case, is pressing the “Next” button on the guide steps after reading a bunch of text and looking at a screenshot.

❌ Your customization options are very limited with Stonly. After a while, a lot of the guides look very similar to each other, and since you’re limited to a single element, you can mix things up as you can in other user onboarding products like UserGuiding.

Stonly Pricing:

Stonly’s pricing model has 3 pricing tiers at the moment, and a 14-day free trial:

• Free plan forever without charge for up to 1000 MAU and 5 guides. On this plan, you don’t have access to multiple knowledge bases or guides, and you can’t localize your content.
• Business Plan: $199/month with 4000 monthly guide views, $399 with 15000 monthly guide views with unlimited active guides. On this plan, you get access to language localization, 3 knowledge bases, only 4 integration options, and SEO customization. You don’t get any additional support experience as this plan lists the support as “self-serve”.
• Custom Enterprise Plans: Additional Enterprise features with increased usage limits, but you need to contact Stonly’s sales team for a custom quote.

Appcues Alternatives #8 Wyzowl – Explainer Videos and Video Walkthroughs

Wyzowl can help you approach user onboarding in a different way, with the power of animated videos.

So you’re asking, how can videos be better than in-app interactive user onboarding experiences?

It’s simple:

Usually, a product needs doing instead of showing, for a user to learn what it does and how it does it.

But in the cases of “showing instead of doing”, Wyzowl can aid you.

If you’re looking to create an onboarding video to effectively onboard users, or just to top your existing user onboarding content with a visual feast; Wyzowl can create customized animated videos for you.

Appcues Alternatives #9 Intro.js – Open-source & Low Cost Product Tours

Intro.js is an open-source library for user onboarding that is used by big brands such as Nestle, Amazon, SAP, and more.

You can create product tours and feature introductions using the library.

The good thing about using an open source is that it is affordable, even free, if it is not for commercial use.

The bad thing is… actually, there are two bad things:

1. The product requires a developer to function at all times, making it not such a viable option for businesses that need to keep updating their products.
2. The onboarding elements are very limited, so any user onboarding designed with Intro.js will not be likely to satisfy every need of a user.

Intro.js Pricing

Intro.js Reviews

Appcues Alternatives #10 Shepherd.js – Free & Open-source Product Tours

Just like Intro.js, Shepherd is an open-source product tour and feature highlight library that is, unlike Intro.js, completely free for everyone.

Compared to Intro.js, Shepherd is much more customizable with additional coding, so it requires more technical knowledge but offers much more native product tours.

It’s a perfect fit for small companies and bootstrap startups that are looking to get a simple product tour without paying anything.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who should use Appcues?

Product managers and customer success managers should use Appcues to improve their user onboarding.

How much does Appcues cost?

Appcues Essentials Plan starts at $249/month while its Growth Plan is $879/month.

What are the top alternatives to Appcues?

The top 7 Appcues alternatives are UserGuiding, Walkme, Pendo, Intercom, Intro.js, Wyzowl, and Shepherd.