Pendo vs Gainsight 2024 Comparison – Which tool is a better fit for you?

Gainsight and Pendo. Both tools have amazing analytics capabilities, and both of them offer in-app guides.

Also, both of them aren't the most affordable solutions on the market...

And they are almost equally good as well as equally bad.

So, which one of these tools is the best option for your company?

Which one can offer you exactly what you want, and wich could be only a waste of time?

Today, I am sharing the results of my research about whether Pendo or Gainsight is a better product adoption platform so that you can provide the best customer experience.

In this article, I will:

• Introduce Pendo and talk about the tools cons and pros,
• Introduce Gainsight and talk about the tools cons and pros,
• Compare those tool side-by-side for you to have a better overview.

And also, if you want to skip all those, you can benefit from this quick table:

Side-By-Side Comparison Table

What is Pendo?

Pendo is a robust product analytics and user engagement platform that businesses use to build better products.

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.

It is definitely an amazing tool to add to your toolkit, but you might still have to find different solutions to provide engagement features, such as resource centers.

Pros 🤩 Pendo is good for:

✅ The best feature Pendo provides is its in-depth analytics; meanwhile, its user segmentation truly makes a significant change in the way users consume onboarding material.

✅ Pendo puts together different solutions like user experience, user onboarding, and highly sophisticated data collection and analytics under one tool to guarantee customer success and easier customer engagement tracking for digital product teams.

✅ Founded in 2013, Pendo is among the first comers of digital adoption; it has a strong background and customer portfolio.

✅ Though Pendo is quite expensive, it offers a free trial and a freemium, something other platforms of its caliber rarely do.

Cons 😮‍💨 Pendo isn't good for:

❌ Though Pendo represents itself as a digital adoption solution, its onboarding UX elements are pretty limited to the very basics, leaving out checklists, hotspots, and more.

❌ Being a highly sophisticated tool with a complex UI, it might be hard to set up and use if not used by an experienced user.

❌ Likewise, Pendo’s features tend to be complex and use case-specific, so it might be hard to leverage all features and possibilities without a fully established game plan dedicated to Pendo.

❌ Though Pendo does not publicly share its pricing, it is very well known that Pendo is more expensive than the market average.

❌ Yet another enterprise-level tool, Pendo’s customer service might not be as responsive as smaller products’ customer service teams.

Pendo Pricing

Pendo has a free plan called “Pendo Free“ for up to 1,000 monthly active users, one web and one mobile app.

For bigger plans, Pendo doesn’t have a set pricing.

Instead, you can get a custom plan for your business by contacting their sales team.

However, a former Pendo user claimed that they are a medium-sized business that paid $12,000/year for the standard package of Pendo while another user upped this number to $20,000. Additionally, there is a Pendo customer that claims to pay $2000/year just for the “Guides” feature of the product - which is included in the free plan for up to 1,000 MAU

Pendo’s pricing is feature and usage-based, and it possibly scales with how many users you have, like other analytics tools.

What is Gainsight?

Gainsight is a comprehensive platform for improving each aspect of your UX and managing your growth.

Gainsight is not a tool itself, it is a company that provides various applications for different use cases. The three tools that Gainsight provides are:

1. Gainsight CS for customer success, which provides analytics and surveying features,
2. Gainsight PX for product experience, which provides onboarding and engagement features,
3. Gainsight inSides for customer communities which provides communication and data features.

 Most customers that use Gainsight like the diverse range of possibilities it provides, but ac you can guess, this comes with a steep learning curve and an above-average pricing.

Pros 🤩 Gainsight is 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.

Cons 😮‍💨 Gainsight isn't good 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 Pricing

Gainsight doesn’t provide a fixed pricing plan and only offers a free trial for the PX tool. For the other tools and getting a custom quote for PX, you need to schedule a demo and get a custom quote.

According to actual users on the internet, the pricing of Gainsight starts from $2,500/month/user and only goes even higher, making the tool inaccessible for small and medium-sized companies.

How about having the best of both? 😎

Way too many products hide their pricing like it's a big secret nowadays, and honestly, even before.

What difference does doing that make, I couldn't tell.

🤨🤨🤨

But I know a different user onboarding tool that can make a huge difference in your onboarding flows - and budget.

UserGuiding is an (absolutely) no-code digital adoption tool that's easy to use, geared up for effective onboarding for both customers and employees, and budget-friendly.

Some of UserGuiding's features are:

✅ Interactive guides and product tours,

✅ Tooltips, checklists, hotspots, and other onboarding elements, 

✅ Powerful analytics,

✅ User segmentation and targeting,

✅ Resource centers, 

✅ NPS survey, and more!

Don't want to pay thousands of dollars for a product you cannot use effectively? You know where to go.

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Pendo vs Gainsight