Top 10 Pendo Alternatives for Better User Onboarding and Product Analytics

Adding a platform like Pendo to your tech stack can unlock plenty of opportunities for the growth of your product.

It can help you understand your users and their actions, analyze product usage and feature adoption, and guide users to success.

But, the tool to do all these efficiently is probably not Pendo, at least for your business.

And if you’re searching for a Pendo alternative/competitor, you’ve come to the right place.

TL;DR

• Pendo is a popular tool that brings digital adoption, user engagement, and advanced analytics together.
• Although the tool’s functions are great, the price you have to pay for it, and the time you have to spend on it make people second guess whether the tool is worth it or not.

• People who churn from Pendo revealed that Pendo made them pay 60K for one year with a 6k MAU limit. Whew…

• There are other tools, such as UserGuiding, that deliver a similar value for one-tenth the price they charge.

UserGuiding also offers free migration services for your in-app content created using other software to minimize your switching costs.

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• For user and customer onboarding, UserGuiding can be a more affordable alternative to Pendo, with more variety and capability regarding onboarding content.
• For behavior analytics and product insights, Amplitude significantly outperforms Pendo with a similar pricing and technical investment.
• WalkMe brings a more capable platform that comes with slightly increased pricing, with very similar features to Pendo.
• Appcues offers a more user onboarding-focused platform with simpler analytics features, while Gainsight PX offers a more analytics-focused platform with simpler user onboarding capabilities.
• And if you swing more towards employee training/engagement, Whatfix can bring a line of products that can help you streamline digital experience and adoption.

5 Reasons Why You Might Need a Pendo Alternative/Competitor

With its different features, Pendo can be the solution that many businesses use to level up their product experience.

But for many other businesses, it might just not cut it.

Here are five reasons product people should look for an alternative to Pendo:

1- Fairly Expensive Pricing 💰

It makes sense for a robust platform like Pendo not to be as cheap as you’d like.

But, compared to some other products, its price is not completely justifiable. With 5-figure yearly packages, it might be challenging for small to medium-sized businesses to afford Pendo.

2- Difficult Setup, More Difficult Maintenance 🛠

The integration and maintenance of Pendo is a full-time job for at least one technical person, especially during the initial setup.

More and more businesses complain that the setup of Pendo is a tough one to get right, and you might need to change the structure of your product significantly. Additionally, many users have complained that even the slightest change in your product can result in Pendo errors that take hours to fix.

3- Steep Learning Curve 📚

Pendo has a steep learning curve, and it applies to everybody that has the intention to use it.

The UI isn’t the most self-explanatory, and different people from different teams in your business will have to invest serious time to understand the basic functions.

4- Limited Analytics Capabilities 📉

Pendo’s product analytics are powerful, don’t get me wrong.

But compared to some other product analytics tools that can easily flex on Pendo, the tool’s features can feel a bit limited.

If your focus is all on analytics, you might be better off using a tool that has the same priorities you do.

5- Limited User Onboarding and Guide Capabilities 🚢

The same argument applies here too.

Pendo’s Guides feature allows you to create beautiful guides that can boost product engagement, but compared to platforms that solely focus on user onboarding, it’s limited.

There are numerous different reasons to skip Pendo and numerous alternatives you can pick up instead. Let’s see the best among them:

Top 10 Alternatives and Competitors to Pendo

1. UserGuiding
2. Amplitude
3. WalkMe
4. Appcues
5. Userpilot
6. Intercom Product Tours
7. Gainsight PX
8. Whatfix
9. Intro.js
10. Shepherd

So, you’ve decided to use another tool than Pendo to meet your user onboarding and product analytics needs. Alright, let’s start with the first tool on our list:

1- UserGuiding – Easy to use User Onboarding platform for a better price

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:

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. No-code customization,
11. 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 their new feature, “Surveys”, which now 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

Pendo vs UserGuiding Comparison Table

Starting Price	$8000-12000/year	$69/month
G2 Rating	4.6⭐	4.7⭐
Interactive Walkthroughs & Checklists	✅	✅
Hotspots	❌	✅
In-Product Surveys	✅	✅
In-App Resource Center	✅	✅
Avg. Deployment Time	≈ 1 Week	15 Minutes
Advanced User Analytics	✅	✅
Knowledge Base Integration	❌	✅
Custom Dashboards	✅	❌
Learning Curve	😟 Steep	🙂 Smooth

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

2- Pendo vs Amplitude – A more advanced analytics solution

Amplitude offers one of the most capable product analytics platforms that meet virtually every data need of product and growth teams. When directly compared to Pendo, Amplitude might seem to miss a feature or two, but it makes up for the lack of in-app content creation tools with advanced functions in analytics.

With Amplitude, you can track product usage on most platforms without losing value, including mobile, desktop, and web platforms. Once set up, Amplitude can be used by every member of every team to measure and track various metrics and KPIs that Pendo might fall short of.

Especially if you have a product with a heavy mobile focus and a need to get the most out of your raw data, Amplitude can be a better choice than Pendo.

Amplitude Pricing

Amplitude doesn’t have the edge over Pendo in terms of pricing. Both products offer similar prices, but based on claims by its users (and my own experience), Amplitude seems to be a bit pricier than Pendo. Plans can go from $10K/year for small startups to $100K/year for larger companies.

Amplitude Reviews

Other Worthy Mentions for Better Analytics

Amplitude isn’t the only platform that can replace Pendo with a 100% analytics focus, so here are a few worthy mentions:

Heap

With its retroactive data storage, Heap can offer more advanced data analytics for your team.

Mixpanel

Mixpanel is one other of Pendo and Amplitude’s competitors, possibly a much more affordable solution than Amplitude and Pendo for product analytics. In the Mixpanel vs. Pendo comparison, it is easy to say that Mixpanel provides all the analytics capabilities a PM would need.

Google Analytics 4

Depending on your business’s and stakeholders’ needs, you might not even need a pricy platform such as Pendo or Amplitude to analyze product usage and behavioral data; Google Analytics might do it for free.

With a little help from your developers and a thorough setup process, GA can be an effective product analytics solution too. Here are some common questions regarding Google Analytics vs Pendo, and their answers:

Is Pendo like Google Analytics?

The core principle of Pendo is similar to Google Analytics, as they’re both analytics platforms. But, they’re highly unlike in the customer life stage their features focus on.

How is Pendo different from Google Analytics?

Although both Pendo and Google Analytics can be used for web analytics, Pendo’s features lean more towards analyzing product/feature usage and customer retention metrics while Google Analytics focuses on website traffic and user acquisition.

3- Pendo vs WalkMe – Similar features with more enterprise capabilities

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

4- Pendo vs Appcues – Less analytics, more onboarding

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:

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

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 different 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 you 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

5- Pendo vs Userpilot – Better onboarding for a better price

Userpilot is a Digital Adoption SaaS product that helps you create in-product experiences for your customers.

With key features such as interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, checklists, resource centers, and NPS, Userpilot gives you the necessary tools to improve user activation and increase feature adoption, all while enabling you to track the performance of what you’ve created with a simple analytics feature.

But the tool also has downsides.

Userpilot can be a challenge for non-technical people, and most users agree that it doesn’t offer the visuality and customization most of its competitors offer.

Here is a breakdown of Userpilot’s strongest features:

Interactive in-app guidance

Userpilot’s main use case is providing interactive-in-app user journeys to get them to the “aha!” moment quicker.

Userpilot does a killer job of increasing user adoption through onboarding flows. By combining a toolkit of product tours, checklists, a resource center, and NPS surveys, the tool covers most of the customers’ needs in a single platform.

Users report that Userpilot’s guidance features are great but with a twist.

The implementation and setup process of Userpilot is far from being simple. If you aren’t the most tech-savvy person on the team, you might need help from someone else to install Userpilot and integrate it with your app.

But you could also ask Userpilot’s support team, as they are fast to respond and happy to help, unlike most support teams of enterprise-level tools.  

Feedback collection and data

Userpilot allows you to create NPS surveys and ask open-ended follow-up questions to collect feedback.

While this could be enough for most, the fact that Userpilot doesn’t provide any other types of surveys could be 

Product Analytics

Userpilot’s analytics is on the higher end of the standards, compared to other digital adoption platforms.

Userpilot allows you to track multiple aspects of the business, such as daily active users, feedback ratio, satisfaction rate, promoter score, and user engagement.

While Userpilot claims to have the best analytics capabilities among digital adoption platforms, only 83% of users on G2 are satisfied – with the average score being 85%.

What is Userpilot good for?

 ✅Userpilot provides a great set of necessary onboarding features so that you can create the perfect onboarding sequence for your users.

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

✅ Userpilot’s interface is said to be user-friendly enough so that even first-time users can set up and publish their own product engagement sequences.

What is Userpilot bad for?

❌ Userpilot 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.

❌ Userpilot doesn’t offer enough survey types to provide the user with options to get feedback. The only kind of survey you can create with Userpilot are NPS surveys.

❌ But Userpilot doesn’t provide enough integration options either. However, if you only use Amplitude, Google Analytics, Hubspot, and Segment, well, then you won’t be disappointed.

❌ If you value the visuality of your product, then you will be disappointed to hear that Userpilot doesn’t offer the best visual options. The elements are not really customizable, and they don’t offer many templates.

❌ Userpilot 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 growth plan.

Userpilot Pricing

• 14-day free trial (no credit card required)
• Starter Plan: costs $249/month when billed annually for up to 2500 MAU. This plan includes only the core features, and has limitations. For instance, you can only create up to 10 different segments, and can collect only up to 250 survey responses per month. Considering that you already pay for the MAU, having to pay extra for survey replies can become a burden. This plan doesn’t include resource centers, targeting and localization capabilities, and certain integrations.
• Growth Plan: costs $499/month when billed annually for up to 10,000 MAU. While this plan removes some limitations and unlocks all features, you still can’t localize to more than 10 languages or benefit from all support options.
• Enterprise Plan: The enterprise plan removes all limits from all features, and Userpilot gives a custom quote depending on your needs.

Userpilot Reviews

6- Pendo vs Intercom Product Tours – a CS tool that does onboarding

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

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

7- Pendo vs Gainsight PX – More analytics, less onboarding

Gainsight PX is Gainsight’s Product Experience tool which combines advanced analytics tools and user engagement features and creates a really good product experience for all end-users.

Gainsight positions this tool as a “product experience tool that provides human insights for Product Managers”.hea

The tool has integrations to many platforms and also provides you with a way to collect and act on user feedback.

The main features of Gainsight PX are:

• Engagement element creation – such as product tours and surveys,
• Knowledge center articles and bots,
• Product Mapping,
• And in-depth analytics.

Let’s dig through each of those features one by one:

Engagements

Gainsight PX’s engagements feature is quite rich. So rich that it could be a product by itself.

In the “engagements,” you can create:

• Interactive product walkthroughs,
• Slider guides and messages,
• In-app update notifications and banners,
• And 5 different types of surveys.

It is honestly amazing how much depth this single feature has to it.

But I have to warn you, if you are familiar with other digital adoption platforms, it will take a whole new learning curve to get used to Gainsight PX. This is because the UI is quite unusual, and you might have to digest the whole UI for a few days just to get acquainted with it and get going.

Knowledge centers

Knowledge bases have almost completely taken over help centers since they are more user-friendly and easier to access.

Gainsight PX didn’t stay behind the trend, and introduced their own interpretation of knowledge bases, the “knowledge centers”.

Here, you can create your own articles, or integrate your existing knowledge base and start using it on the “knowledge center bots” – which are basically collapsable resource centers.

You can also include your engagements (your product tours) and custom web links within these bots.

And the newest addition to these bots – the recommendation feature – promises to help users with event-based custom resources right when they need it.

Product Mapping

If you use a robot cleaner at your home or office, I’m sure you will quickly see the value of this feature.

Here is how the product mapping feature works:

• First, you map and link all your features and modules,
• Then, you put in a desired route for the users,
• And lastly, Gainsight recommends a path for the end-users, and you have a better system to analyze.

Although it seems like an over-the-top feature, there are two obstacles that make this feature difficult to use:

1. It takes hard work and a lot of time to map out your product since it has to be done manually – or through linking pre-created features. If your product/website has more than 3-4 layers, creating a complete map could cost you weeks.
2. It is also difficult to maintain those maps. Since Gainsight doesn’t work based on AI or internal bots, you would have to update the map manually if any little change occurs on your product.

In-Depth Analytics

Gainsight values data and actionability almost more than anything else. And so does Gainsight PX.

The tool collects both account-based and product-based data, and converts this collection into a sea of actionable information.

Without you having to interpret all the numbers that Gainsight PX provides, it shows you what each data means and how close you are to your KPIs.

Gainsight PX’s customer segments feature makes it even easier for everyone using the tool to see what’s relevant to them.

However, that’s pretty much all you can do with the product. The tool has lots of features, but each of those features is very limited, and there are more affordable products that do more than Gainsight PX does.

What is Gainsight good for?

✅ Gainsight is a complete tool for businesses since it brings together data and action.

✅ Gainsight also provides an endless amount of integrations. Even if you don’t find some features good enough, you can always get backup from your other tools, directly into Gainsight.

✅ Gainsight is great with analytics. All three Gainsight tools provide more than enough real-time data about user behavior and product usage, letting you take action quickly and strongly.

✅ Gainsight’s product mapping feature is like a breakthrough for no-code automation.

What is Gainsight bad for?

❌ Gainsight has all the features, but most of those features are only surface-level and not worth the price.

❌ Gainsight requires different accounts for different tools, which means the price will only go higher as you choose to benefit from all tools.

❌ Gainsight is expensive for what it provides. There are better alternatives to all Gainsight products – and fun fact – the sum of those tools is usually more affordable than one single Gainsight tool.

❌ Most users complain that Gainsight has a very steep learning curve. The tool doesn’t have the most intuitive UI, and most features are hidden within other features – making them very hard to find.

Gainsight PX Pricing

Gainsight offers a free trial for their Product Experience (PX) tool. As for the paid plans, users across the internet claim that the pricing of Gainsight PX starts from $500/user/month, which is way above the average digital adoption platform cost.

• Free Trial available (for PX only)
• Product Experience Pack: Custom quote for each company (starting from $500/user/month.)

Gainsight Reviews

8- Pendo vs Whatfix – Simpler analytics, capable employee training

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.

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 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:

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

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

9- Pendo vs Intro.js – Open-source library that will get the work done

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

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 is completely free for those who do not use it for commercial projects.

When the project is commercial, however, a lifetime license is required to be purchased:

• 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.

10- Pendo vs Shepherd – Free Open Source for fewer capabilities

Shepherd is a Javascript library that allows you to onboard your users to a product with product walkthroughs.

It claims to be highly customizable in its design, and easy to create and implement. Yet it requires a high amount of technical background and coding knowledge to maintain.

Shepherd also only has a single feature, which is a product tour. A decent onboarding needs much more elements than that. So if you are looking to create a full onboarding experience for your users, Shepherd might not be a good solution for you.

Shepherd Pricing

Shepherd.js is 100% free of charge!

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the best alternatives to Pendo’s product analytics?

If you want to go all out on product analytics when switching from Pendo, you’ll need Amplitude or Mixpanel, the exact choice depending on your price range. However, if you still want to be able to create some in-product modals and elements, you can switch to Gainsight PX for better analytics and arguably worse onboarding elements.

And what are the best alternatives to Pendo’s product tours feature?

Compared to Pendo’s user onboarding features, UserGuiding and Appcues are much more capable solutions with a wide variety of advanced elements/functions. UserGuiding is much more affordable and easy to use, while Appcues is still a bit technical with higher pricing.

Are there any free/open-source Pendo alternatives?

Although no open-source tools can efficiently replace Pendo, there are a few free (or at least free-to-start) competitors: Google Analytics, UserGuiding, Gainsight PX, and Amplitude.

What is Pendo Free

“Pendo Free” is Pendo’s free-of-charge plan. 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.

What tools have Pendo integrations?

Pendo has more than 40 integrations with tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, WordPress, Calendly, Figma, Drift, Intercom, Slack, Zendesk, and WebHooks.