Inline Manual is an overpriced tool that doesn’t have a full set of onboarding features.
Thus, you can find the most popular alternatives to Inline Manual, including free (open source), low-cost, and enterprise-ready tools in this article.
I’ve evaluated reviews from around the web, developer forums, Capterra, G2, and Reddit, and utilized my experience with the mentioned tools to help you select the best onboarding solution for your business.
I also have prepared a comparison table of Inline Manual and its competitors at the end of the article, to help you better compare.
Let’s begin with getting to know today’s tool:
TL;DR
- Inline Manual is just another onboarding tool that is very expensive for no reason.
- The tool provides a reasonable amount of key features for a digital adoption platform, but some of those features are not comprehensive enough, such as the analytics feature.
- UserGuiding is the best alternative to Inline Manual since it provides:
- Interactive product walkthroughs,
- Tooltips and hotspots to guide users,
- Checklists and Resource centers for self-serve support,
- User analytics and user tracking,
- Lots of integrations with various types of tools,
- NPS surveys and feedback collection,
- Maximum security with EU server compatibility and GDPR compliance.
- UserGuiding does all that for as low as $89/month for 2500 MAU.
- Other alternatives to Inline Manual are WalkMe, Appcues, Pendo, Intro.js, and Crumble.
What does Inline Manual do?
Inline Manual is a user onboarding and adoption tool that tries to help your company in every User Experience way possible.
With interactive product walkthroughs, tooltips, hotspots, feedback-gathering tools, and widgets, Inline Manual can almost be considered a sufficient digital adoption platform – in terms of features.
The tool doesn’t provide every necessary onboarding feature in-app, such as onboarding emails, but it does provide lots of integration options to make up for this – but only in the enterprise pricing plan.
However, while trying to improve your product’s UX itself, Inline Manual doesn’t provide you with the best UX possible. Most of its customers that reviewed the tool on G2 complained that the tool is difficult to understand, and it has an unusual UX for a digital platform.
Inline Manual Pricing
- Standard Pro Plan: from $158/month with 250 MAU to $662/month with 40,000 MAU
- Enterprise Plan: Custom quotation available.
Inline Manual Reviews
👍Pros:
“Staff was very helpful in setting up and there were a lot of features that were helpful. The pop-outs and things were easy to customize and exposed the HTML so it could be edited directly. super handy!”
👎Cons:
“The interface both in the back end of the tool and front end editor was a bit unorganized and non-traditional. Lots of settings were found in places that weren’t quite logical but can generally be found after some digging. We did experience some issues with minor bugs but the staff was very responsive.”
Why Do You Need An Alternative To Inline Manuals?
1- 💰It is very expensive
Unless you have around 35,000-40,000 MAU, Inline Manual’s pricing falls above average when compared to the other tools on this list (considering the value they provide.) Normally, similar products charge the same starting price for 2500-5000 MAU while also providing better features.
2- 🧩 The tool itself has bad UX
It is a known fact that reinventing the wheel isn’t always the best idea. Inline Manual proves this statement right. Some features and buttons within the tool aren’t where you would expect it to be, making it very difficult to figure out and get used to the tool.
3- 📉 Insufficient analytics
Even though the tool does provide some sort of user analytics, it is not sufficient for all needs. Since it doesn’t provide 3rd party integrations with tools for non-enterprise plan users either, the tool falls short of providing insights about users.
4- ⛰ Steep learning curve
Inline Manual isn’t completely no-code, and you need to have some sort of technical knowledge to integrate, customize, and maintain the tool. Since their customer support isn’t the best either, it can be said that you’re very likely to have a hard time getting the hang of the tool.
Top Alternatives to Inline Manual
- UserGuiding
- WalkMe
- Appcues
- Pendo
- Intro.js
- Crumble
I will briefly explain each of the tools and their functions, go through their pricing information, and finally, I will provide you with the most highlighted reviews of the tools from Capterra and G2.
1- Inline Manual vs. UserGuiding – easier and more affordable user onboarding
The fore-running Inline Manual competitor is the code-free customer engagement and onboarding tool UserGuiding.
Using the product, you can create interactive onboarding guides and product manuals, highlight features, conduct NPS surveys, and easily gather feedback.
It also offers an analytics tool to help you see how your guides are doing. If you need better data, UserGuiding also provides integrations with 3rd party analytics tools such as Google Analytics.
Also, customer segmentation and product customization with UserGuiding is much easier since it doesn’t require a single line of coding, unlike Inline Manual.
With its affordable price and useful features, UserGuiding should be your first product to consider when looking for an alternative to Inline Manual.
UserGuiding Pricing
- 14-day free trial (no credit card required)
- Basic Plan: $89/month when billed annually for up to 2500 MAU
- Professional Plan: $389/month when billed annually for up to 20000 MAU with unlimited guides
- Custom Quotation Available for Larger Companies
UserGuiding Reviews
👍Pros:
“Before UserGuiding, we’ve tried a few other user onboarding software to increase our free trial conversion. Others had problems with multi-page onboarding flows and iframes. UserGuiding team helped me implement it quickly and I had everything working in only a few days. Great support team!”
👎Cons:
“Sometimes interface and Chrome extension could become confusing, but once you get used to, it is not a big deal. As mentioned above, UserGuiding lacks in-depth analytics.”
UserGuiding vs. Inline Manual
 |  | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting Price | $89/month | $158/month |
| G2 Rating | 4.7⭐ | 4.6⭐ |
| On-Screen Slide Modals | ✅ | ✅ |
| In-App Resource Centers | ✅ | ❌ |
| Knowledge Base Integration | ✅ | Only Available For Pro Plans |
| Announcement Modals/Banners | ✅ | ✅ |
| Interactive Walkthroughs | ✅ | ✅ |
| Tooltips | ✅ | ✅ |
| Hotspots | ✅ | ✅ |
| Onboarding Checklists | ✅ | ✅ |
| In-Product Surveys | ✅ | ✅ |
| Avg. Deployment Time | 15 Minutes | 2-3 Hours |
| User Segmentation | ✅ | ✅ |
| User Analytics | ✅ | ✅ |
| Learning Curve | 🙂 Smooth | 😟 Steep |
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
2- Inline Manual vs. WalkMe – enterprise-oriented key features
WalkMe is a well-known cloud-based onboarding tool used by many big enterprise applications as a user adoption solution.
Used by giants such as Microsoft and PayPal, WalkMe has been offering step-by-step digital walkthroughs for over a decade.
Also offering features such as employee training and self-service support, WalkMe is a decent Inline Manual alternative even though it requires a lot of of technical knowledge to integrate.
While WalkMe is definitely a solid tool that you can trust, know that it will cost you one developer to build and maintain the WalkMe features, and lots of money directly for the tool.
WalkMe Pricing
Although WalkMe offers custom packages with customized prices for each customer, their prices are known to be of the highest in the industry.
WalkMe Reviews
👍Pros:
“How innovative and smart it is, it makes our relationship with our customers so much easier and fluid, so many great tools, and functionalities, it has very to no little limitations on what you can do.”
👎Cons:
“I dislike how picky and problematic it can be to setup. Depending on your web page’s set up, it can be a simple point and click to build, or require you to learn jquery to build every single step.”
3- Inline Manual vs. Appcues – better onboarding with comprehensive features
Appcues is an all-in-one user onboarding toolkit that coined “no-code user onboarding”
Appcues is the first code-free onboarding platform that has ever been created, and through all these years, they have not stopped perfecting their craft and growing – even though their tool got farther and farther away from being “no-code.”
With various comprehensive features to choose from for perfecting your onboarding process, Appcues is generally a bit more complex than its competitors. So technical knowledge is required to create a flawless product adoption cycle with this tool.
Appcues Pricing
Appcues has 3 pricing plans:
- The Essentials Package starts at $249/month when billed annually with 2500 MAU.
- The Growth Package starts at $879/month when billed annually, again at 2500 MAU.
- The Enterprise Package doesn’t have a set pricing, you need to get a custom quotation.
Appcues Reviews
👍Pros:
“Easy to get started and easy to edit along the way. You’re not stuck with anything you create and can continually integrate based on user interactions with your product.”
👎Cons:
“One pain point that I have experienced is in the way Appcues interacts with our site. On many pages, users open and close windows without actually navigating away from a specific URL.”
4- Inline Manual vs. Pendo – better analytics in enterprise quality
Pendo is a product experience platform that helps companies along the product journey with the tools it includes.
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.
Also, mind that “product tutorials for users” isn’t Pendo’s main strength since the tool’s primary focus is providing insightful customer data. It is definitely an amazing tool to add to your toolkit, but you might still have to find different solutions to provide in-app onboarding features such as resource centers.
Pendo Pricing
Although Pendo doesn’t provide fixed plans or pricing details, customers on the internet claim that Pendo charges $60k/year for 6k MAU.
Pendo Reviews
👍Pros:
“The tagging method is easy and intuitive. Paths and funnels are useful to analyze”
👎Cons:
“It can be kind of difficult to find what you want to do. Starting out, the difference between features, pages, guides, etc. can be confusing because they have the same page layout to search.”
5- Inline Manual vs. Intro.js – an open-source alternative that offers official support
Intro.js is an open-source library for those who would want to use product tours and feature highlights for onboarding users to their products.
Intro.js is trusted by some companies that we’ve certainly heard of such as Amazon and Nestle.
Although it is a widely-used library, it will not solve all your problems; and will require a significant amount of developer time to solve the problems it can. It is very limited feature-wise and there aren’t many options for customization.
Intro.js Pricing
You can download Intro.js and start using right away, however, if you intend to use Intro.js in a commercial product you are required to buy one of the licenses below:
- Starter pack without any official support for $9.99,
- Business pack with a month of official support and code review for $49.99,
- Premium package with a year of official support, code review, and unlimited projects for $299.99.
Intro.js Reviews
👍Pros:
“I really like the Intro.js plugin because documentation is straightforward and easy to understand. This can work in 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?”
6- Inline Manual vs. Crumble – free open-source for technical people
If you have a good technical background and experience in open-source tools, and your expectations from an onboarding tool are not that big, Crumble is the tool to use.
Crumble is a free jquery plugin that helps you create product tours using little bubbles all over your product.
The tool is free to download on public repository on GitHub. If you trust your coding skills and only need little bubbles for minor reasons, Crumble will be a much better alternative than Inline Manual.
Top Inline Manual Alternatives – Comparison Chart
Frequently Asked Questions
Who should use Inline Manual?
Product managers and customer success managers should use Inline Manual to improve their user onboarding.
How much does Inline Manual cost?
For companies below 250 monthly active users, Inline Manual costs $158/month. The essential price increases as the number of monthly active users increase as well.
What are the top alternatives to Inline Manual?
The top 6 Inline Manual alternatives are UserGuiding, WalkMe, Appcues, Pendo, Intro.js, and Crumble.
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