Appcues vs. Pendo 2024 Comparison – Which tool suits your needs better?

Pendo is a great product adoption tool with strong analytics and surveying capabilities. But when it comes to product tours and user engagement, well…

That is where Appcues comes in.

Appcues is an amazing product adoption platform software that provides well-designed and engaging walkthroughs, but… it can’t help you with analytics as much as Pendo does.

So which one is better for you?

Which one of these tools is the one that is the better fit for your needs and goals?

To help you find an answer to those questions, I will:

• Introduce Pendo and talk about the tool’s cons and pros,
• Introduce Appcues and talk about the tool’s cons and pros,
• Compare those tools side-by-side for you to have a better overview.

And also, if you want to skip all of those, you can benefit from this quick table:

TL;DR – Side-By-Side Comparison Table

Starting Price	$1000/month	$249/month
G2 Rating	4.4⭐	4.6⭐
Interactive Walkthroughs	✅	✅
Tooltips	✅	✅
Hotspots	❌	❌
Onboarding Checklists	✅	✅
Announcement Modals/Banners	✅	✅
NPS Surveys	✅	✅
In-Product Surveys	✅	✅
In-App Resource Center	✅	❌
Avg. Deployment Time	≈ 1 Week	≈ 2-3 Hours
User Segmentation	✅	✅
User Analytics	✅	✅
Multi-Language Support	✅	✅
User Tracking	✅	✅
Knowledge Base Integration	❌	❌
Product Analytics	✅	✅
Custom Dashboards	✅	❌
Learning Curve	😟 Steeper	😐 Steep

What is Appcues?

Appcues is a pioneer of “no-code” onboarding tools on the market.

They have introduced various onboarding elements for the first time while offering great fundamental solutions to their customers.

With a strong focus on user onboarding to web apps and digital products, Appcues can solve all your digital adoption needs regarding your customers and help you become a product-led business.

Pros 🤩 Appcues is good for:

✅ Appcues 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.

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

✅ Founded in 2014, Appcues is among the first comers of no-code digital adoption; it has a strong background and customer portfolio.

Cons 😮‍💨 Appcues isn’t good for:

❌ Appcues 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.

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

❌ Appcues is also not affordable. Their starting price is not only above the market average, but they also don’t grant access to all features in the essentials package.

Appcues Pricing

• The Essentials Package of Appcues starts at $249/month when billed annually with 2500 MAU.
• The Growth Package of Appcues starts at $879/month when billed annually, again at 2500 MAU.
• The Enterprise Package of Appcues doesn’t have public pricing, so you need to get a custom quotation.

What is Pendo?

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

You can onboard users, introduce new features, survey users, gather feedback, and prepare a product roadmap with Pendo.

Although it is a great product that solves multiple problems at once, Pendo users usually complain that it takes them more than a few days to figure out how they can use the product.

It is definitely an amazing tool to add to your toolkit, but you might still have to find different solutions to provide engagement features such as resource centers.

Pros 🤩 Pendo is 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.

Cons 😮‍💨 Pendo isn’t good 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“ for up to 1,000 monthly active users, one web and one mobile app.

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

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

However, a former Pendo user claimed that they are a medium-sized business that paid $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 – which is included in the free plan for up to 1,000 MAU

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

Appcues vs Pendo

	Features
Appcues’s main focus is profiding amazing onboarding features, thus, compared to Pendo, Appcues is a better solution.	Onboarding ⬅️🤩	Pendo mainly focuses on data and feedback collection, so it doesn’t have a complete set of onboarding features.
Although Appcues does provide in-app analytics, since it is not the tool’s main focus, you might need an integration to handle the analytics.	Analytics 🤩➡️	As a digital adoption tool, Pendo rocks it when it comes to analytics. If you can afford the bigger plans, Pendo definitely gets this one.
Appcues provides NPS surveys and simple feedback surveys. If you need a bigger variety, you should go with Pendo.	Surveying 🤩➡️	Pendo provides a variety of surveys that can be customized for each need. However, Gainsight provides more comprehensive stack of surveying types and automations.

	Pricing
Appcues’s pricing starts from $249/month  – which is above the market average – but it is still more affordable than any of Pendo’s plans.	⬅️🤩	Although Pendo does have a freemium price, it is very limited and insufficient. The actual pricing starts from $1000/month, without most features.

	Ease Of Use
Appcues is not the easiest-to-use tool on the market, but compared to Pendo, it is a tad more easier to set up and figure out how to use.	⬅️🤩	Pendo is a mostly no-code tool, but it still takes lots of technical knowledge to integrate the tool and customize it to your liking. The tool itself has a steep learning curve, and will take an employee dedicated to Pendo only.

	Customer Support
Appcues clearly cares about their customers and this is why they provide fast and personalized customer support – as per what actual users have said about them.	⬅️🤩	Pendo’s customer support to enterprise customers is said to be exquisite. However, for all other businesses, it can take up to a whole day to get a response from their support team.