Is Apty the Right Tool for You? – here are 5 better alternatives instead

Apty can be a very promising tool in a significant number of cases, and can actually help you grow your business through boosting digital adoption.

And in another significant number of cases, it might just not do the job.

Every business has different needs, and Apty seems to have a very solid profile of its customers and use cases that might not fit your needs.

But you’re lucky because I’m certain there’s software that’s right just for your needs, whether that is employee training, customer onboarding, or user adoption.

In this in-depth comparison article, I’ll go over the top 5 alternatives to Apty you should definitely try before moving on with another solution.

But first, let’s see what actually Apty does, and doesn’t:

In this comparison article, I will:

  • Dive into why Apty might not be the best tool for you,
  • Talk about the best alternatives to apty,
  • Answer the most frequently asked questions about the software.

TL;DR

  • Apty is a digital adoption software to help companies onboard their employees better.
  • Although the tool’s existing features are pretty good, it lacks lots of necessary features for a DAP software.
  • You might need an alternative to it if you need in-app data analytics or feedback options apart from onboarding flows.
  • The best alternative to Apty is UserGuiding as it excels both in user onboarding and employee onboarding.
    • UserGuiding is also more affordable and more user-friendly.

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!

Don’t Pay a Fortune for Other Tools!

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

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  • Whatfix, Pendo, Intercom and Pendo are also good options to consider if you have a big budget and a spare developer to handle the technical process.

Let’s begin with:

Why you need an Apty Alternative

1- It’s Not What You Need 🤕

Apty has great promise, but it serves a narrow purpose: educating employees on different digital platforms.

So if you’re looking more for employee onboarding or user onboarding flows, you would be disappointed.

If Apty doesn’t fit right in with your needs, give another product in this list a try.

2- Steep Learning Curve and Lengthy Installation 😪

According to many reviews of Apty, the initial learning curve and deployment processes are more difficult to get through than they need to be.

Many customers of Apty think that you need technical experience to fully utilize their software while it is agreed that the installation takes some time.

3- You Also Want to Survey Users 📉

Apty provides you with many features that will help you increase the adoption of your product.

However, it lacks one significant feature that prevents it from being truly an all-around product: in-app surveys which are crucial in understanding the needs and expectations of your users’ product experience

In this regard, an all-around tool with more onboarding capabilities should help you collect feedback and actionable insights in various ways.

4- Complex Navigation 🧭

Having to navigate between an app and various browser extensions as well as a web app can take a lot from the users.  The backend UI is quite clunky, requiring you to toggle between a web app and an installed app

5- Limited Customization  🎨

The widgets are especially the most addressed problems when it comes to customization with Apty. Even though Apty provides you with the much-needed analytics and segmentation, it falls behind in helping you customize content the way you like.


Now that you know what Apty is, what it’s used for, and the main challenges you encounter when using it; let’s dive straight into the alternative digital adoption platforms.

Here are the top 5 alternatives to Apty:

Top Apty Alternatives

  1. UserGuiding
  2. Whatfix
  3. Pendo
  4. Appcues
  5. Intercom
  6. Stonly
  7. Intro.js
  8. Shepherd

Let’s go over each tool and discover how it compares to Apty, hopefully helping you decide why you should choose one over Apty.

1- UserGuiding vs Apty – capable user onboarding, simpler platform

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.

pendo vs userguiding
A product tour I’ve created with UserGuiding on Youtube, in less than five minutes

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. Product Tours,
  11. No-code customization,
  12. 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 leader badge from G2
UserGuiding’s G2 leader badge

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.

userguiding guide on clickup
Here is a demo product tour for Clickup made with UserGuiding

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

userguiding-surveys-feature
UserGuiding’s surveys feature

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%.

userguiding resource centers
UserGuiding’s resource centers make everything easier

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 user details page

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.

UserGuiding Pricing

userguiding pricing details
UserGuiding’s pricing detail
  • 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

👍Pros:

“I love that I can build an onboarding workflow with all various different engagement/training methods like steps, confirmations, checklists and so much more.

👎Cons:

“Sometimes interface and Chrome extension could become confusing but once you get used to, it is not a big deal.”

UserGuiding vs Apty



Starting Price$4000-8000/year$89/month
G2 Rating4.8⭐4.7
Interactive Walkthroughs
Hotspots
Onboarding Checklists
In-Product Surveys
In-App Resource Center
Avg. Deployment Time≈ 1 Week15 Minutes
In-Depth Customization
Learning Curve😟 Steep🙂 Smooth

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

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

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2- Whatfix vs Apty – Affordable choice for enterprise

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.

Whatfix website interface
Whatfix helps you onboard users,

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 vs Pendo
Variety of user training elements in Whatfix (Pendo Alternative / Competitor)

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:

product analytics features list - whatfix
Whatfix’s product analytics features

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

Pricing page of Whatfix
Whatfix’s pricing page

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.

Whatfix Reviews

👍Pros:

“The price is a little high. It is lack of analytical features. Some features is not easy to configure.”

👎Cons:

“Whatfix is a very good software and it is easy to use and help guide the customer step by step to resolve their concerns.”

3- Pendo vs Apty – More than just onboarding

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.

pendo marketing dashboard
Sample Dashboard Created with Pendo

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.

pendo product analytics
A Peek into Pendo’s Behavior Analytics

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.

pendo user onboarding
Creating/Tracking Pendo Guides

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's 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

👍Pros:

“We compared it to Adobe Web Analytics and found both to be useful, in different ways. The ability to create and execute surveys within a page is the best part of the software.”

👎Cons:

“I wish it was a bit easier to navigate the analytics of the guides. It is also tough to keep the guides active and working properly when you are releasing new features in your product, which skews the analytics if one guide step does not show and stops the guide.”

4- Appcues vs Apty

Appcues, as one of the first user onboarding tools on the market, offers much more comprehensive user onboarding features compared to most onboarding tools.

Appcues dashboard
dashboard from Appcues

The tool is beautifully designed for non-technical people to create and track in-app elements they use for their onboarding flows. With various features and in-depth customization complemented with ready-to-use templates, the tool has everything you need to create power users.

Appcues provides:

  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. Advanced integrations.

Although the pricing of Appcues matches the price of Pendo’s “only product tours” plans, if you have to choose between the two for user onboarding features, Appcues wins by a landslide.

Here are the main features and reasons why:

Interactive Onboarding

Appcues interactive onboarding extension
Here is how the Appcues browser extension looks

Although Appcues is not the easiest tool to set-up, or the most affordable one, it is definitely a strong tool in terms of technical capabilities. Depending on your pricing package, Appcues gives you the liberty of coding and editing your guides to your ideal.

Once you get used to the UI and functionalities of Appcues, the tool becomes relatively easier to use, and maintaining your guides won’t be an issue. Of course, this is only applicable if you get past the steep learning curve with your technical capabilities or with the help of someone knowledgeable.

Experiments and A/B testing

Appcues experiments
Appcues’s experiments feature

You can choose to experiments with new flows or UI elements using Appcues’s new feature, experiments.

Using Appcues, you can create multiple kinds of UI elements and show them to some. of your end-users while others don’t see it and compare the results. This way you can see which of your ideas reach the users more easily, and act accordingly.

Analytics & Data

Appcues's analytics dashboard
Appcues’s analytics dashboard

Appcues’s analytics isn’t much different from it’s close competitors, such as UserGuiding or Pendo. You can see al the data of your guides, surveys, checklists, and so on. What makes Appcues’s analytics strong are the “journeys” and “experiments” features, which allow you to play with custom parameters and dive deep into details.

What is Appcues good for?

✅ Appcues can help you create beautiful and interactive product walkthroughs to provide your customers with 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 firstcomers of no-code digital adoption; it has a strong background and customer portfolio.

What is Appcues bad 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 must 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

pricing page of appcues
Appcues’s pricing page
  • 14-day free trial (no credit card required)
  • Essentials Plan: $249/month when billed annually for up to 2500 MAU. This plan has lots of limitations, such as not being able to get localization features or any kind of account security possibilities. And if you are looking for custom CSS customization, you will have to make a huge price jump and pay for the Growth plan.
  • Growth Plan: $879/month when billed annually for up to 2500 MAU. This plan removes most of the barriers, while some limitations persist. You still don’t get a dedicated customer success manager or security options, and you still don’t get localization support. Also, you cannot sign-up for the Growth plan without signing an annual contract, which can be a big burden for a lot. of companies.
  • Custom Quotation Available for Enterprises

Appcues Reviews

👍Pros:

“Appcues has been a great resource to our organization in engaging and teaching our customers! It has helped to grow our product adoption metrics and the new improvements make it easy for us to create campaigns on the fly!”

👎Cons:

“I would like a more indepth analytical Insights displayed within the Appcues UI itself. Currently we get a high-level view within Appcues and for a more detailed view, we require to download a .csv or excel file which is a bit cumbersome. Additionally, Appcues isn’t optimized for localization and that is something we would love to have as we are in the global market space.”

5- Intercom vs Apty

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

Intercom product tours website
Intercom’s take on the product tours

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.

Intercom product tour preview
Intercom Product Tours at work

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

Intercom's dashboard
Intercoms first interface

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.

How to create a product tour
Intercom’s own product tour wasn’t as fast as one would expect it to be, but it was engaging.

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.

Intercom messenger installing
No code, no tours.

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

Intercom pricing
This is how Intercom calculates custom quotes

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

👍Pros:

“Intercom is easy to start using to start helping customers and to provide an amazing experience, as well as track basic and initially important information.”

👎Cons:

“I haven’t used the reporting as much as I would like, but I’ve heard feedback it’s not the most robust in terms of identifying and CX issues. Could use more customization.”

6- Apty vs. Stonly

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

Knowledge base alternative stonly
Stonly Knowledge Base

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.

stonly alternative
Stonly’s Dashboard

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

stonly launcher and resource center
Stonly allows you to generate launchers with 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 pricing
Stonly’s pricing page

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.

Stonly Reviews

👍 Pros:

“I love the variety of guide options Stonly supports (like product tours, NPS surveys, checklists, knowledge bases, etc).”

👎 Cons:

“There’s not a lot of visual customization, and the design is a bit clunky. Setup is difficult”

7- Apty vs. Intro.js

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

intro.js product tour
Intro.js’s product tour.

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's pricing plan details
Intro.js’s pricing

8- Shepherd vs. Apty

Shepherd.js is another product tour JavaScript library that you can use to guide your users using a simple tour.

shepherd vs stonly
From Apty Alternative / Competitor Shepherd’s Homepage

Compared to Pageguide.js, Shepherd is more customizable and has a few additional cool features that can drastically improve the UX.

If you’re looking for better-looking, a bit more capable, but still free product tours that you can use to onboard users to single-page applications, Shepherd.js should be your go-to.


Frequently Asked Questions


What type of company is Apty?

Apty is a software company that provides enterprises with a digital adoption platform. With Apty’s product and services, businesses can create onboarding flows and in-app tutorials for employees, s, customers, and users; to improve retention and product adoption.


What is a digital adoption platform?

A digital adoption platform is software that helps business and product owners create in-app elements to guide and educate users, which eventually instills adoption in the user base. These platforms are mainly used to improve the adoption of digital tools among employees or customers, and can have different functions such as video-making or product tour creation features.


Is Apty the best DAP on the market?

Apty can be the perfect DAP fit for many businesses, but for many, it is far from the best product. For example, if you have a higher focus on employee training and enterprise use cases you should select WalkMe while if you are looking to meet your customer’s needs, UserGuiding is your go-to software.


What is a good Apty alternative for onboarding customers?

Apty is not the greatest product to onboard and educates users, and there are some great alternatives such as UserGuiding using which you can create interactive in-app elements without any coding, at an affordable price.


Which Apty alternatives can be used to improve digital adoption during change management?

Apty has a strong focus on change management and employee onboarding, but a strong focus doesn’t always mean the best product. In fact, depending on your price range, exact needs, and technical capabilities, Whatfix or WalkMe are two other solutions with a similar focus to Apty.

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Hilal Çökeli

Hilal Çökeli

I’m UserGuiding’s growth-obsessed product marketer. I like to research and write about product, onboarding, and inbound marketing. If you feel like we could exchange ideas, feel free to reach out via LinkedIn or email! P.S. If I don’t respond, please know that I’m on a road trip with my camera and motorbike.