There are two kinds of online businesses:
- The ones who buy their onboarding process,
- The ones who build their onboarding process
Intro.js is an optimal solution for those who prefer the second option.
But as with any other digital tool or open-source, it is not perfect.
In this article, I will:
- Delve into the reasons why you might need an alternative digital adoption platform,
- See the best intro.js alternatives and competitor digital adoption solutions so that you can create the best interactive step-by-step guides (and more).
Let’s begin with:
Why You Need An Intro.js Alternative
1- It has loads of bugs 🐛
Users complain that “Intro.js shows up at the wrong place,” “Intro.js is not scrolling correctly,” or “buttons in Intro.js don’t work.”
You should expect that sometimes Intro.js has trouble finding the targeted element, causing the user onboarding process to be difficult to complete.
2- The tool is not actually free 💸
Once you have a product ready to be launched and your company is almost in business, Intro.js is no more free.
If you have a commercial app/site/product, you must acquire a commercial license.
3- Maintaining Intro.js is a difficult task 🧨
Maintaining an open-source solution is always a difficult task.
And it is not any easier with Intro.js.
You can encounter the errors above at any point and have a hard time solving them with no support since Intro.js is not an actual digital adoption platform with a customer support team.
You might have made changes to your UI and it can be a time-devouring process to update the guides.
4- The tool doesn’t provide all the necessary onboarding elements 💻
In order to provide a frictionless customer onboarding experience, you need additional user onboarding tools and elements.
The elements that Intro.js focuses on are step-by-step guides and feature introductions, but great onboarding needs much more than that; checklists, analytics, surveys, hotspots, in-app notifications, and more.
Top Alternatives and Competitors to Intro.js
- UserGuiding
- Shepherd
- React Joyride
- Bootstrap Tour
- Crumble
- WalkMe
- Appcues
Without further ado, let’s start with the first alternative:
1- Intro.js vs UserGuiding – better onboarding without coding
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.
UserGuiding offers a wide range of features, including:
- Interactive Product Tours,
- Tooltips and Hotspots,
- User Onboarding Checklists,
- Resource Centers,
- NPS Surveys,
- Easy Localization,
- Advanced Analytics with User Activity Feed,
- Custom user segments,
- Material Tagging and Easy Targeting,
- Product Tours,
- No-code customization,
- 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 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.
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).
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%.
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 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
- 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:
“The tool is helpful and easy to use! No code is required to implement the features. Would recommend!”
Cons:
“UserGuiding lacks in in-depth analytics and there are some more integrations we need.”
UserGuiding vs Intro.js
 |  | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting Price | $89/Month | Free For Non-Commercial Use |
| Interactive Product Tours | ✅ | ✅ |
| User Guides | ✅ | ✅ |
| Feature highlights | ✅ | ❌ |
| Onboarding Checklists | ✅ | ❌ |
| In-app resource centers | ✅ | ❌ |
| NPS surveys | ✅ | ❌ |
| Customer Feedback Gathering | ✅ | ❌ |
| Customer Segmentation/Targeting | ✅ | ❌ |
| Detailed Analytics | ✅ | ❌ |
| Ease Of Use | 🤩 | 😥 |
Simple, Affordable, and Powerful User Onboarding & Survey Software.
2- Intro.js vs Shepherd
Shepherd is a Javascript library that allows you to onboard your users to a product with product walkthroughs.
Similar to Intro.js, Shepherd is an open-source library helping you create interactive product tours. But unlike Intro.js, it is totally free of charge.
Shepherd claims its design is highly customizable and easy to create and implement. It is correct that shepherd allows more flexibility than Intro.js in terms of customization.
Yet it requires a high amount of technical background and coding knowledge to maintain.
If you have a spare developer available and you think that Shepherd’s visual components fit your website and product better, it could be better for you.
3- Intro.js vs React Joyride
React Joyride is one of the many React applications that helps you create excellent tours for better user onboarding and digital adoption.
You can customize React Joyride product to some extent. For instance, you can change the selector labels and button colors, add a skip option or remove the skip button altogether.
But that’s about all the customization you can do.
Intro.js has a React wrapper if you prefer Intro.js and the benefits that come with the source, but if you need a different alternative that is based on React, React Joyride will be much easier to use.
And here is a list of other React Libraries to compare.
But unlike Intro.js, you can’t create announcement modals using this tool.
4- Intro.js vs Bootstrap Tour
Bootstrap tour is an open-source and completely free library that you, or your developers can use to develop a product tour for your business.
This one is probably the most similar open-source to Intro.js. If you don’t want to pay the license fee that Intro.js comes with, then Bootsrap Tour will be your savior.
However, as it is close in characteristics to Intro.js, it also seems that the tool doesn’t receive regular updates, and it has been a long time since the last one.
There are sadly more than 150+ open issues on Github, from which you can conclude that if you experience a problem with the product, you are all alone.
If you trust your technical abilities and if you are in the early stages of your product, Bootstrap tour could be a starting step, although I wouldn’t recommend it in the long run.
5- Intro.js vs Crumble
Crumble is also an open-source free platform that is much more basic than the other open-source tools mentioned on the list.
Crumble gives you bubbles to place into your product and display to your users, which makes it easier for users to engage with a screen. The design makes it seem more relatable and more human-like.
It is highly useful for those who seek a simple onboarding experience with tooltips only. Crumble doesn’t support other elements than product walkthroughs either, and doesn’t track analytical data about the usage of those tools.
Crumble is also free and surprisingly, it requires less time than any other open-source on this list.
Still not as little as a third-party tool, though.
6- Intro.js vs WalkMe
WalkMe seems to be a product experience platform enterprise businesses can’t live without.
And they might be right.
Compared to Pendo, WalkMe is an enterprise-focused and expensive digital adoption platform for user analytics and product experience.
Although both products have very similar key features, the way these features (such as product tours, analytics, and event tracking) are set up in each product differs a ton.
Here are WalkMe’s two strongest features:
Analytics and Insights
WalkMe excells in enterprise level DAP oriented data management.
If you’re more interested in using a DAP for instilling the adoption of digital products through organizations and teams, WalkMe should be your go-to. The setup takes more time, and it’s not as easily operated as Pendo, but it gets the job done for those who need to get other people to get the job done.
WalkMe Training
If you need a tool for customer onboarding, WalkMe isn’t the one for you. If you need a solution for employee onboarding, tracking, and management, then WalkMe can offer you quite a variety fo features that will maximize the employee’s productivity and get them quickly up to speed.
What is WalkMe good for?
✅ WalkMe is one of the pioneers in digital adoption and user onboarding
✅ WalkMe users get to enjoy an extensive set of high-value features and different onboarding UX patterns like tooltips, checklists, and progress tracking options with progress bars
✅ Although technical knowledge might be required, WalkMe offers a lot of customization options
✅ WalkMe is perfectly scalable for enterprises, especially if the use case is employee onboarding rather than customer education
What is WalkMe bad for?
❌ Among the WalkMe features, even core features might be too sophisticated for inexperienced users
❌ WalkMe’s feature amount/feature usage ratio is often low if there is no dedicated user or employee onboarding team
❌ WalkMe requires a technical skillset and occasionally coding knowledge; this makes setting up and using WalkMe harder than average
❌ Not so accessible pricing, WalkMe is not the best option for small or medium-sized businesses or enterprises with an immature budget structure
❌ WalkMe is enterprise software designed for enterprises, so feature updates following customer feedback might not be possible; likewise, customer service might be less accessible
WalkMe Pricing
WalkMe doesn’t have public pricing, but most of its users agree on pricing plans that vastly change in the 5-figure range. The average pricing for the small teams seems to be around $10,000/year, but since WalkMe is an enterprise solution that specializes as a DAP for large organizations, you might have to multiply the alleged numbers.
WalkMe Reviews
Pros:
“It has very useful tools and features — new features are released regularly, consistently improving the software.”
Cons:
“WalkMe is a relatively expensive platform for the amount of effort it takes to build workflows (mobile functionality is an add-on). There needs to be quite a bit of time investment in order to learn the platform efficiently. 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.”
7- Intro.js vs Appcues
Appcues, as one of the first user onboarding tools on the market, offers much more comprehensive user onboarding features compared to most onboarding tools.
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:
- Interactive Product Tours,
- Tooltips and Hotspots,
- User Onboarding Checklists,
- Resource Centers,
- NPS Surveys,
- Easy Localization,
- Advanced Analytics with User Activity Feed,
- Custom user segments,
- 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
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
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 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
- 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:
“Their targeting and reporting is also superb. We’re able to show flows to certain users based on URL paths and other actions they’ve taken within our app. We can also see some great reports of users who have completed our flows and metrics on where they stopped if they did not complete a flow.”
Cons:
“The way ‘appcues’ are organized in the management console can be a little more user-friendly.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Who should use Intro.js?
As Intro.js is an open-source tool for product tours and feature highlights, it is only suitable for developers and for product managers with coding knowledge.
How much does Intro.js cost?
Although Intro.js is a free library, implementing it to a commercial product requires a license; which starts from $9.99 with no support and $29.99 with support.
What are the top alternatives to Intro.js?
The top alternatives to intro.js are UserGuiding, Shepherd, React Joyride, Bootstrap, and Crumble.
