Pendo Alternatives and Competitors

Are you looking for an alternative to Pendo because you don’t feel like it fits right with your business?

You are at the right spot!

Top Alternatives to Pendo

• UserGuiding
• Appcues
• WalkMe
• Inline Manual
• Gainsight
• Whatfix
• Bootstrap Tour
• Intro.js

We will go over these 8 tools in this article, discuss their pricing, and examine the reviews they have on G2, CapTerra, and Trustradius.

Also, we have prepared a comparison chart of Pendo and its competitors which you can find below.

We hope this article makes your choice when selecting a user onboarding tool for your business easier.

What does Pendo do?

Pendo is a 3rd-party user onboarding tool that focuses on improving the customer experience for better growth.

It provides its users with features such as user onboarding, in-app training, feature adoption, and user surveying.

Those who have used Pendo for their onboarding have regularly said that it takes a long process to figure out the platform.

Pendo users also complained about the lack of simplicity, and the product clearly takes more than a product manager or a customer success manager to be fully benefitted.

Pendo Pricing

You need to contact Pendo to get a custom plan and a price for your business, as they do not have a pre-set pricing.

Pendo Reviews

Pros: We love all the data we have gained about our users and have a much stronger understanding of what they do within our applications.

Cons: It isn’t intuitive out of the box. Again, with a little training, it isn’t hard to navigate, but it’s a bit intimidating to come in and get stuff done.

UserGuiding

UserGuiding also is a user onboarding software that aims to heal your onboarding overall, and possibly is the most affordable and the easiest Pendo alternative out there.

Compared to its competitors, UserGuiding is a genuine “no-code” tool that everyone can figure out in minutes.

It also charges less than other products on the market. UserGuiding offers a wide variety of onboarding elements to use, which are:

• Interactive Product Tours,
• User Guides,
• Onboarding Checklists,
• Analytics,
• Segmentation/Targeting
• Feature Highlights,
• NPS Surveys,
• In-App Messages,
• Customer Feedback Gathering
• COVID-Meter

UserGuiding vs Pendo

UserGuiding Pricing

UserGuiding’s pricing starts from $99/month with the Basic plan, and the Professional plan is $399/month.

Also, UserGuiding offers a bootstrap plan for small startups, you can click here to apply to the plan.

UserGuiding Reviews

Pros: It is pretty clear that having a clear and effective onboarding process is vital for engagement and retention of those new users. Userguiding is helping us make sure we guide and assist our users in how to get the most value from our software.

Cons: They don’t offer free chat on their website but the team responds quickly via email and try to solve your problems as soon as possible.

Appcues

One of the firsts to step into the no-code user onboarding tools zone is Appcues, with a credible background and a long line of customers all around the world.

The tool helps you improve every part of your users’ journeys inside of your product, with various onboarding elements.

However, Appcues charge more than its alternatives and requires technical knowledge to some extent for fully benefitting from it.

Appcues Pricing

Appcues charges $249/month minimum with the Essentials plan, and the expanded Growth plan costs $879/month.

Appcues Reviews

Pros: An amazing solution for creating in-app campaigns and announcements.

Cons: Frequent bugs when building flows requiring a refresh. Lots of cool stuff you can do but it often requires time from developers to implement properly. Anyone running ad blockers won’t see Appcues flows at all. There seems to be a significant delay between steps, both when previewing flows and when seeing them as an end user.

WalkMe

WalkMe has been around for more than 10 years, offering SaaS enterprises a way to onboard their users effectively.

However, since the tool is largely focused on Enterprise businesses, which has the budget and the spare staff, it is a tool that can be tricky to use and integrate, and not really affordable.

WalkMe Pricing

WalkMe does not have a set price, they offer a custom plan for their customers according to the size of their businesses.

WalkMe Reviews

Pros: This can be very powerful software if set up properly. We were able to do advanced tutorials, though it took professional services to set it up for us. We found it the most powerful in the market from a feature standpoint.

Cons: The platform isn’t the most stable. We experienced multiple bugs across their walkthrough feature and NPS feature

Inline Manual

With product walkthroughs, hotspots, tooltips, and feedback gathering Inline Manual is a solid alternative to Pendo.

It also has many integrations to popular analytics and customer success tools which makes the tool an efficient solution.

However, complaints on the simplicity of the tool and the layout are common with Inline Manual, so it might not be the perfect fit for you.

Inline Manual Pricing

Inline Manual starts from $158/month with 250 MAU, then increases accordingly with your MAU.

Inline Manual Reviews

Pros: Staff was very helpful in set 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.

Gainsight PX

Gainsight PX is a part of Gainsight, a platform that you can use to manage your users’ journeys and your growth.

The tool helps you create product tours and collect user feedback effectively.

However, the features are not as diverse as the other alternatives to Pendo and this doesn’t allow you to improve user onboarding every aspect.

Gainsight PX Pricing

The pricing of Gainsight PX is unknown at the moment. You must contact Gainsight with the details of your business to get an offer.

Gainsight PX Reviews

Pros: The in-app engagements module helps us communicate with users via in-app. You can use one of their pre-made templates or customize your own branding, theme and messaging.

Cons: APIs for key functions have yet to be made public, which has slowed us down a bit. For example, I want to know instantly when a new survey has been submitted but instead I’ve had to manually download CSV files of results.

Whatfix

Whatfix is another third-party user onboarding tool that acts as an alternative to Pendo. They mainly provide you with in-app guides and onboarding elements to improve your user experience.

Having served many enterprise customers and left most of them satisfied, Whatfix has some downsides too. It might be hard to figure out the tool at first, the analytics are inferior compared to its competitors and they charge above the market average.

Whatfix Pricing

Whatfix offers customized plans for each customers and custom prices based on the business size and MAU. Their offers are generally above the market average.

Whatfix Reviews

Pros:

“The ability customize the conditions under which specific workflows are triggered is awesome.”

Cons:

“It’s difficult to integrate the some of the scripted code in the admin integration sections without the help of a Whatfix support team member.”

Bootstrap Tour

Let’s say that you are looking for an alternative to Pendo because you just can’t afford a third-party tool.

Than Bootstrap Tour is an ideal solution for your business since it is an open-source library for creating product tours. Yet, keep in mind that the customization is limited, and to create a product tour you have to work with a developer, stealing precious time from the product team that could be spent on improving the product itself.

Also, the variety of onboarding elements is limited too, so you will have to say goodbye to all the fancy features that come with third-party tools.

Intro.js

Intro.js is another popular open-source library for product walkthroughs and feature highlights.

It is a great solution for businesses that has an extra developer to spare and prefer building their onboarding themselves.

However, you can and must spend the time it takes to create an onboarding process with Intro.js in developing your product.

Intro.js has limited features and limited ready-themes, so if you seek to improve and customize your user onboarding in-depth, it is not a great solution.

Intro.js Pricing

Intro.js is a free to use product, however; if you aim to use it in a commercial product, you are required to buy a license that starts from $9.99 with restricted use and no official support.

However, the Business pack for $29.99 comes with official support and code review.

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?

Pendo Alternatives Comparison Chart

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Frequently Asked Questions

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Who should use Pendo?

Product managers and customer success managers should use Pendo to improve their user onboarding.

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How much does Pendo cost?

Pendo offers custom plans to each customer based on the size of their business, and their starting price is unknown.

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What are the top alternatives to Pendo?

The top 8 Pendo alternatives are UserGuiding, Appcues, Walkme, Inline Manual, Gainsight PX, Whatfix, Bootstrap Tour, and Intro.js.