What Is Pendo Resource Center? In-depth review & 3 alternatives

Pendo is a popular user onboarding tool that companies rely on since it brings together the three most important aspects of a good quality user engagement flow:

1. Inıtıal guidance,
2. Analytics,
3. And further help.

Today I will be digging deep into the third part, the "further help" options that Pendo helps you provide.

In other words, today I'm reviewing Pendo's Resource Center feature.

And I am here to share the details of my research on these topics. So in this article, I will:

• Explain what Pendo Resource Center is and which features it includes,
• Analyze whether the feature really is worth it,
• And dig deep into the top three alternatives to Pendo Resource Center.

Let's start with our main guest:

What Is Pendo Resource Center?

Pendo is an in-app guidance and customer engagement platform, and Pendo Resource Center is one of its most underrated features.

Using Pendo's Resource Center, you can provide further help for the confused end-users. By doing so, you won't have to bombard them with a new walkthrough on each step, and let them help themselves when they have a question.

So what should a resource center be like?

➡️ For starters, it should be easily accessible while also not covering too much space on the interface. That's why most tools that do offer a resource center usually make it collapsable (and so did Pendo.)

➡️ It should also be customizable so that it blends in with the target product. This is usually one of the trickiest parts of using a third-party tool - not being able to make it seem native.

➡️ The best resource centers come with a search bar and relatively tagged help articles (or even interactive guides.)

Checking all the necessary boxes that I mentioned above, Pendo's resource center is as simple as it can be, with a little twist: You can also incorporate feedback collection or announcement features in their resource center.

Let's see what the best features of the Pendo Resource center are one by one:

What Features Are Included In Pendo Resource Center?

Engagement Guides

As I mentioned, the best resource centers aren't only minimized help centers. Using Pendo's resource center, you can help end-users trigger user guidance tours so that all users, including the slow learners, can access all the necessary guides.

Knowledge Base Integration

Unless the tool allows you to create a knowledge base from scratch (which is rare), this is standard practice for third-party tools. The downside of Pendo Resource Centers is that there are only a limited amount of knowledge bases available to integrate, which are:

• Zendesk
• Wordpress (WP Engine hosted sites only)
• HelpDocs
• Helpscout
• Swiftype
• Algolia

Feedback And Announcements

 Pendo also allows you to redirect customers to feedback pages within the resource centers and show announcements among other modules you have.

Pendo Resource Center Pricing

Pendo doesn't have a fixed price. In fact, it has lots and lots of different pricing plans, but only one of them has fixed pricing (which also depends on what you want to include).

• Pendo Free: This is Pendo's freemium model, which allows you to freely use the product without charge for up to 500 MAU, but this plan doesn't have the resource center feature. ❌
• Pendo Starter: This is Pendo's relatively new fixed-price plan which costs $7000/year and only covers a few features such as NPS and guides, but it doesn't include resource centers and doesn't even provide customer support. ❌
• Pendo For Startups: This plan is Pendo's simplified plan for early-stage companies and startups. You can benefit from it only if you qualify for it, and if you do, the price is said to start from $1000/month, but even this plan doesn't have the resource center feature. ❌
• Pendo Enterprise Plans: The regular Pendo plans all include the resource center ✅ As for how much it costs, various Pendo users revealed the details of Pendo’s pricing. One user said that they pay $20,000 for their medium-sized company.

Is Pendo Resource Center Worth It?

That's up to you to decide. I'll only share my observations on why it might not be, and I bet you'll agree.

1- Not the most affordable 💰

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- Very limited amount of features 🛑

It is good to have a resource center feature in a comprehensive tool like Pendo, but this doesn't mean that it is the best that you can get. Among the analytics and engagement features, the resource center is the most primitive one with limited capabilities.

3- 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.

Top Alternatives To Pendo Resource Center

1. UserGuiding
2. Gainsight PX
3. Usetiful

1- UserGuiding vs Pendo - Better capabilities for a lower price

UserGuiding is a no-code product adoption platform that doubles down on customer and user onboarding with powerful in-app elements.

Compared to Pendo, 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 a product analytics software (that’s more capable than Pendo) such as Mixpanel or Amplitude, which are easily integrated with UserGuiding.

Also, UserGuiding has a much more sophisticated Resource Center feature than Pendo which is included in all pricing plans.

Doing so can help you get more bang for your buck, with a combination of the best software to replace the two core functions of Pendo.

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:

“UserGuiding has roughly cut our user training processes in half, for both employees and customers. We’re able to easily create guides and checklists without the need for developers..”

👎 Cons:

“It was a bit hard for us to start with because of our custom targeting needs, but the support team helped us along the way.”

Pendo vs. UserGuiding

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2- Pendo vs. Gainsight PX - More extensive resource Centers

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

Using Gainsight PX's "Knowledge Centers" feature, 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.

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 PX Reviews

👍 Pros:

“Surprisingly, it also allowed us to utilize it for in product engagement, walkthroughs, etc, as well as feedback surveys. As such, we managed to use it to replace three other platforms at once (Surveys, Analytics, In app walktroughs). “

👎 Cons:

“I REALLY dislike that the inferred data is inaccurate. I have clients logging in from New York, but it shows that their company is in California. We are working with Gainsight PX support on this, but no resolution yet.“

3- Pendo vs Usetiful - An alternative perspective to resource centers

Usetiful is a SaaS product that helps you create interactive product adoption tours.

Usetiful will help you create no-code product tours, checklists, hotspots, and feature update alerts. This way, you can have many features with one tool, and easily increase your product adoption and feature adoption rates, as well as reducing the weight off the support team’s shoulders.

This tool doesn't have a direct resource center feature, but their checklists are pretty stretchy and can be adjusted to act as a resource center - if you are in desperate need for a cheap resource center.

While the tool is cheaper compared to most of its competitors, its features and services are limited accordingly.

Usetiful Pricing

• Free version available (only 1 tour and up to 2000 assists)
• 14-day free trial (credit card required)
• Plus Plan: €29/month for up to 5000 assists
• Premium Plan: €99/month for up to 20.000 assists
• Enterprise Plan: Contact required

Usetiful Reviews

👍 Pros:

‘’Usetiful is easy to set up and customize (we had to change its style to support RTL languages) and even non-techy people managed to add online tours to the web app we’re building for our nonprofit.’’

👎 Cons:

‘’Missing some more complex functionalities such as in-depth reports, feature adoption, customer surveys & feedback, extra design features and templates’’