Appcues Alternatives and Competitors

Are you looking for a user onboardingWhat is user onboarding? User onboarding is the crucial process that starts from the first login of a new user and ends up in their aha moment, and usually beyond…. 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 is the inventor of many UI elements that we actively use in onboarding today, checklists, etc. So they’re trusted among bigger-sized companies. But they’re seemingly suffering from feature bloat, making even the simplest features complex.

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 is usually preferred by the enterprises

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. So if you are a patient-user, this won’t be a problem for you.

Even though it’s a “no-code” software, Appcues is not as easy-to-use as you might expect. If you have a small team with limited time, Appcues might not be for you because it still requires some time to be invested in the platform before you can effectively create onboarding flows. For the startups and SME’s Appcues might be on the expensive side of the onboarding tools.

If you are looking for an enterprise solution and have a budget, there is nothing wrong with going with the Appcues.

UserGuiding

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.

UserGuiding’s prices are also affordable for startups and SME’s.

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, you can create onboarding flows and walkthrough easily with a single line of code. Guides are kept getting improvements and new features are added constantly.

Cons: So you expect me to leave this space blank eh? I could do that but unfortunately, we have flaws that need to mentioned here. UG lacks in-depth analytics and missing out on integrations with the other third party software but we are constantly working on this issue to provide you with more integrations.

WalkMe

WalkMe is a product that has been on the market for over 10 years.

Since WalkMe has been around for a long time with a great reputation serving enterprises, the company is well known in the user onboarding market. They work with powerhouses such as Cisco, RBC Royal Bank, Microsoft, and Paypal.

WalkMe Pricing:

WalkMe is pricey (allegedly their pricing packages can range from $9-50k) and requires a lot of technical knowledge especially for the installation of the product since it’s an on-premise solution. But they became a pioneer in product walkthroughs, offering great walkthroughs (rules-based, etc), and have in-depth analytics and trusted among large enterprises.

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

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 users.

Cons: 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. Some users have been complaining about the bad experiences they had with the customer support because issues are taking longer to be solved then what they should. The tool lacks some UI elements such as progress bars and checklists.

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.

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. 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.

Cons: Creating the onboarding content can be done without coding yet you still required to know CSS knowledge for customization. On top of that installation is going to be much harder because Whatfix is an on-premise tool. In order to start gathering data, you are going to need some google analytics integration and their integration process is bit complex.

They lack customer support for instance, they take a lot of time to respond for customer tickets.

Pendo

Using Pendo, you can improve your overall user experience with various onboarding elements and adjust your product for growth. You can create funnels for instance to oversee which users using particular features also use another specific feature. They offer many analytics widgets, e.g., Product AdoptionWhat is product adoption? Product adoption is the process where an individual learns of a new product and becomes a user of it, learning what it does, how it does… Chart widget, helping you compare the overall clicks in your products vs. clicks a particular feature gets.

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

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.” You don’t really need to use other analytics tools, because Pendo offers great analytics for product usage and adoption. They also have great surveys to gather customer insights. It is like an all in one tool. NPSWhat is NPS? NPS is the abbreviation of Net Promoter Score, which is a measurement of your customers’ satisfaction with your product on a scale of -100 to 100.  It… and surveys are another great features of Pendo

Cons:

Pendo is really unpredictable regarding pricing. Also requires broad technical knowledge, especially when it comes to customization since their default options are a bit limited. They lack some of the most popular onboarding UI elements like checklists and progress bars.

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. It is one of the most popular open-source tools on GitHub with over 19k stars.

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 a 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. Very good onboarding tool for basic use cases requires no technical background thanks to its user-friendliness

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?”

The library allows you to create product tours and feature highlights but it has limited available customization options. Most of the customization you can do is just based on the texts. Segmentation and targeting are also insufficient. It is a good tool if you are not looking for complex use cases. If you will be set with just 2-3 product tours then Intro.js will be enough but if you are looking to do 10 product tours then intro.js will not meet your demands. Keep in mind that this tool requires a lot maintaining make sure to keep a spare engineer if you want to use this tool at its best.

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.