Appcues Alternatives and Competitors

Are you looking for a user onboarding tool lately and trying to find an option rather than Appcues?

Search no more.

We have listed the most popular Appcues alternatives, including low-cost and free (open-source) options.

We have collected information from lots of user reviews on websites such as Reddit, Capterra, G2Crowd and we impartially evaluated their pros and cons from the point of use cases and how costly they are. 

This article is going to be helpful for you to understand the similarities and dissimilarities between Appcues and its 6 other in-demand alternatives.

Furthermore, we append criticisms of some customers of those products and we created a comparison table for you to easily figure out the differences before choosing to use Appcues or its competitors.

Top Alternatives to Appcues

• UserGuiding
• WalkMe
• Whatfix
• Pendo
• Intro.js
• Crumble

First, let’s dive into the pros and cons of Appcues:

What does Appcues do?

Appcues have brought an innovative approach to onboarding.

Before its foundation, high technical knowledge was a requirement for building an ordinary onboarding guide. This tool has broken the rules by offering a no-code onboarding product to the world.

They also presented various new onboarding elements to the world that everyone loves today, such as user onboarding checklists and tooltips. Appcues has also been employed by big enterprises.

But, even though it’s a “no-code” software, Appcues is not as easy-to-use as you might expect.

It can be timesink for companies which have not workers who can spend a long time creating onboarding flows and product tours. You may also need to devote a considerable amount of budget to Appcues as it charges above the market average.

Appcues Pricing:

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

Appcues Reviews:

Pros: I’m especially fond of how easy the AppCues interface is to use. It makes executing upon in-app messaging programs (via slide-outs and modals) a breeze, and adding training elements (hover-overs and tool-tips) can be done in a snap.

Cons: Occasionally the app will “stick” and metrics will be slow to populate – but that’s probably due to user impatience more than anything else.

UserGuiding

Similar to Appcues, UserGuiding is a user onboarding tool that provides product managers and customer success managers to create interactive guides, product tours, and customer checklists and track the analytics for each step.

UserGuiding is pretty new to the user onboarding market. It is a San Francisco based startup established in 2017.

Although it is fresh, it has been growing rapidly and is transforming from an unrecognized tool into a very preferable brand for enterprises such as Red Ventures, Mobile Action, Young Capital and Foriba.

The three very significant facts that make this tool preferable are its simplicity, invaluable customer support, and innovative approach to the product.

Customer support is always there for you, collecting and sending feedback to the product team so that they can act on it to improve.

The tool is also extremely simple. No technical knowledge is required to create guides and implement them to your web product.

Their prices are also affordable for low-budget companies.

UserGuiding vs Appcues

UserGuiding Pricing

UserGuiding currently has 2 plans: Startup and Growth. The startup package starts from $99/month.

With increase MAU and more features, the Growth package is $299/month billed monthly.

UserGuiding Reviews:

Pros: Beautiful & useful dashboard, easy to use when on board, guides are more accurate than before also new features seem to be reliable.

Cons: We need more integrations and detailed reports for dashboard also if possible MAU should be higher than current.

WalkMe

WalkMe is a product that has been on the market for over 10 years, and that still offers solutions to its customers’ onboarding needs.

Since WalkMe has been around for long with a great reputation serving enterprises, it is still very popular among businesses. Iconic companies like Cisco, RBC Royal Bank, Microsoft, and Paypal are some of its enterprise customers, which grants them credibility.

But of course, there are downsides to the tool. Although the tool offers a wide variety of onboarding elements, its usage and implementation are not as easy as you might think. Technical knowledge to some degree is required to use the tool.

It also charges way over the market average so if you don’t possess a great budget, you should move on.

WalkMe Pricing:

WalkMe currently offers custom prices for plans they customize for each client, however, their prices are higher than the industry average.

WalkMe Reviews:

Pros: Walkme is great at guiding users through simple processes, teaching them along the way. It also has a good popup system for getting the word out to many users.

Cons: I have had bad experiences with the support, and now expect issues to take a lot longer to resolve than they should. Changes “Improvements” to the system have not always been purely positive, removing some basic functionality that was previously there and very useful.

Whatfix

Whatfix is functionally more similar to WalkMe than Appcues.

The product offers in-app guidance and performance support. The target segment of this tool is mostly enterprise companies.

You can create goal-based walkthroughs, it allows you to guide your users with step-by-step onboarding experience without any coding effort.

The product can automatically create segments for better targeting. It is very responsive to users’ specific needs. It can be integrated with a wide variety of other tools which allows you to work more efficiently.

Even so, it requires technical know-how because Whatfix is on-premise. However, It still makes a decent Appcues alternative.

Whatfix Pricing:

Whatfix also creates customized plans with custom prices, therefore a fixed price doesn’t exist.

Whatfix Reviews:

Pros: What I like about Whatfix is the ease of use and can make a walkthrough in just a few minutes and out to the user to use. More complex integrations required me to contact Whatfix support (Sneha is the greatest!!!) and they have been able to guide me through any issues I have run into.

Cons: If I have to come up with any Cons about Whatfix I would say the Integrations table is getting harder to manage. The reason for this is that my software is very versatile and users use our software differently and I have to create custom Walk Through’s for each. It has taken me a while to manage the Integration portion but Whatfix has been very patient and helpful every step of the way.

Pendo

Using Pendo, you can improve your overall user experience with various onboarding elements and adjust your product for growth.

User onboarding, in-app training, user surveys; Pendo has it all.

Yet it still might not be a viable solution because its users complain that it takes a long time to initially figure out what Pendo does and how it is used. It unfortunately is not a simple product in which product managers or customer success managers without technical backgrounds can create something.

Pendo Pricing

Pendo offers custom plans for each customer, so to get a price for your business you’ll need to contact Pendo.

Pendo Reviews

Pros:

“Pendo is a very effective qualitative and quantitative tool which enriches with many features like switching or swapping functionalities of the views is awesome.”

Cons:

“Sometimes it seems to me that it is complicated, in some sections, for example, in the labeling, it usually gives small errors and also slowness, in addition, its user interface is not usually fluid or stable since they changed it before it was much better. more stable and now is lousy.”

Intro.js – Open source Appcues Alternative

Intro.js is an open source user onboarding solution that is used by companies such as Amazon and Nestle use.

The library allows you to create product tours and feature highlights and has a limited available customization options. Also, since it is an open source library, it requires a high amount of coding knowledge and technical background.

Intro.js might be a good option for you if you have a spare developer, but you must know that for a decent onboarding with wide variety of elements, you’ll need something else.

Intro.js Pricing

Intro.js is completely free until you use it for a commercial product, which then requires a license. The licenses and their prices are:

• Starter pack without any official support for $9.99,
• Business pack with a month of official support and code review for $29.99,
• Premium package with a year of official support, code review, and unlimited projects for $99.99.

Intro.js Reviews

Pros:

“I really like the Intro.js plugin because documentation is straightforward and easy to understand. This can work on almost any webpage using jQuery as an included library.”

Cons:

“The library is definitely open source and free software, but at the same time if I want to use it for commercial use it seems I need to pay a license fee. Why is this required if the code is open source?”

Crumble – Opensource & Free Appcues Alternative

Crumble is an open-source onboarding solution that requires a basic coding knowledge to use. The onboarding elements are limited to just bubbles but, what do you expect from a free product?

You can download crumble from the public repository on GitHub.

Top Appcues Alternatives – Comparison Table

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 6 Appcues alternatives are UserGuiding, Walkme, Whatfix, Pendo, Intro.js and Crumble.