8 Better Shepherd Alternatives and Competitors For Better Engagement

You are at the right place if you are looking for an alternative to Shepherd!

You can find the most popular alternatives to Shepherd, including free(open source), low cost, and enterprise-ready tools in this article.

We’ve evaluated reviews from around the web, developer forums, Capterra, G2, Reddit, and utilized our experience with the mentioned tools to help you select the best onboarding solution for your business..

We also have prepared a comparison table of Shepherd and its competitors at the end of the article, to help you better compare.

Without further ado, let’s start with why you need an alternative to Shepherd:

Main Issues with Shepherd

Shepherd’s makers are more responsive to issues than the makers of other open-source solutions. Yet its users have been regularly experiencing issues with the library that takes a week on average to get help from the makers. Here are the top 5 issues users keep having with Shepherd according to product’s GitHub page:

1- Shepherd elements doesn’t work as intended

Sometimes a step appears randomly on a page where it is not intended to appear or buttons are attached to the element. Users keep experiencing these problems and even though they are solved in a short time with some help, wouldn’t it be nice to not have them at all?

2- Nothing happens when a button is clicked in Shepherd

This is also a common problem with the product. The user cannot proceed to the next part of the tour because the button that is supposed to take them doesn’t work. This turns into a plain bad user experience that might hurt your business.

3- Shepherd isn’t scrolling

Navigation is also a wide-spread issue in open-source solutions, because the algorithms they use to detect elements are not always competent. There is a possibility that your users might get stuck on a specific part of your page during their onboarding.

4- Shepherd doesn’t support all browsers

This is the most common issue with Shepherd, most browsers are poorly supported. Your audience might use various browsers and your guides must support them all without any problem.

5- Maintaining Shepherd is a difficult task

Maintaining an open-source onboarding solution such as Shepherd is not at all easy. Whether the library will work without any of the problems above is a question of luck. Also, web products are updated and changed regularly, so the guides and the onboarding elements you have set up inside need to be updated aswell. With Shepherd, maintaining and updating guides require a developer to work at least a few hours to get everything up and running.

Top Alternatives to Shepherd

  • Paid Tools
    • UserGuiding
    • WalkMe
    • Appcues
    • Lou Assist
    • Pendo
  • Open Source Alternatives
    • Intro.js
    • Crumble
    • Pageguide

Let’s see what exactly the best alternative to Shpeherd, UserGuiding, can do for you:

1- UserGuiding vs Shepherd

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.

pendo vs userguiding
A product tour I’ve created with UserGuiding on Youtube, in less than five minutes

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. Product Tours,
  11. No-code customization,
  12. 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 leader badge from G2
UserGuiding’s G2 leader badge

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.

userguiding guide on clickup
Here is a demo product tour for Clickup made with UserGuiding

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).

userguiding-surveys-feature
UserGuiding’s surveys feature

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%.

userguiding resource centers
UserGuiding’s resource centers make everything easier

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 user details page

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 vs Shepherd

UserGuiding:

  • Product Tours
  • Feature Highlights
  • Checklists
  • No-code, easy-to-use
  • Segmentation, targeting
  • Self-help Centers
  • Affordable Pricing
  • Dedicated support

Shepherd:

  • has Product Tours
  • No Analytics
  • Open-source, needs developers
  • No Segmentation
  • Free to use
  • No official support

UserGuiding Pricing

userguiding pricing details
UserGuiding’s pricing detail
  • 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 simplicity of the tool and the way it enabled us to quickly add onboarding material in our platform was amazing. We could have easily spent our time and resources in re-inventing the wheel to have our own user onboarding module but we chose to save our time and efforts by going with Userguiding.”

👎 Cons: 

“There is a need for other survey types and customizable surveys other than NPS. It can increase the value of the product so much.”

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

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

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2- WalkMe vs Shepherd

WalkMe seems to be a product experience platform enterprise businesses can’t live without.

walkme vs pendo
WalkMe (Pendo Alternative / Competitor) Overview Dashboard

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 analytics dahboard example
WalkMe’s demo analytics dashboard

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

WalkMe's engagement feature
WalkMe showcases their engagement features

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: 

“Walkme is great at guiding users through simple processes, teaching them along the way. It also has a good popup system for getting the word out to many users.”

👎 Cons: 

“At times out single page application causes issues with needs for refresh and updates to the smart-walkthroughs. This can get a user lost in the workflow and losing the support of the WalkMe.”

3- Appcues vs Shepherd

Appcues, as one of the first user onboarding tools on the market, offers much more comprehensive user onboarding features compared to most onboarding tools.

Appcues dashboard
dashboard from Appcues

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

Appcues interactive onboarding extension
Here is how the Appcues browser extension looks

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

Appcues experiments
Appcues’s experiments feature

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 dashboard
Appcues’s analytics dashboard

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

pricing page of appcues
Appcues’s pricing page
  • 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:

“I like the customization — I can match my site’s styles so the app looks native. Also, once you’ve built and deployed a flow, changes are quick to make.”

👎 Cons: 

“It’s so robust that it’s hard to get momentum going; there’s a lot to learn before you can really build anything worth showing off. I had a few initial issues that eventually required a video call with an Appcues dev team member.”

4- Pendo vs Shepherd

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

Founded by the software entrepreneur Todd Olson, Pendo is based in North Carolina, US.

It is a very popular solution with thousands of customers, including big names such as Verizon, Zendesk, and Salesforce.

pendo marketing dashboard
Sample Dashboard Created with Pendo

The platform has two core functions that users can benefit from: behavior analytics and user onboarding.

Behavior Analytics

Pendo’s product analytics features can help businesses track user behavior, and product insights across the web and mobile devices.

Once integrated, you can see every user activity, which allows you to create different reports that can later be combined in custom dashboards that fuel your business decisions and help you find actionable insights.

Data-focused product managers use Pendo to understand what users are doing inside their product, what functions/features are being more utilized, how product changes affect business metrics, and more.

pendo product analytics
A Peek into Pendo’s Behavior Analytics

User/Employee Onboarding and Guidance

Additionally, Pendo has a “Guides” feature, using which you can create different in-app elements to pop up on the user interface to boost user experience and guide and engage with your users.

You can create interactive product tours, tooltips, announcement modals, and resource centers using Pendo; to set up a customer journey that sets users up for success.

Once combined with the analytics part of Pendo, in-app guides, and other elements can help your teams onboard users and employees with higher engagement.

pendo user onboarding
Creating/Tracking Pendo Guides

Additionally, Pendo provides its users with a variety of in-app feedback collection elements that are extremely valuable when used correctly.

What is Pendo 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.

What is Pendo bad 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's pricing

Pendo has a free plan called “Pendo Free“. 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.

Also, Pendo recently released a fixed-pricing plan called the “starter plan,” which costs $7000/year but includes only a very limited set of features and no customer support.

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

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

However, there are various Pendo users that revealed the details of Pendo’s pricing. One user claimed that they are a medium-sized business that pays $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; so, you get the picture.

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

Pendo Reviews

👍 Pros:

“We got pendo to get insights into product usage and the ease of tagging features and pages. Its been invaluable in our product team to identify usage trends and get data to help make data-driven product decisions in our roadmap.”

👎 Cons:

“I wish guide surveys offered more flexibility and features. Anything more than a couple simple questions it seems we are best served linking out to an external site.”

5- Lou Assist vs Shepherd

Lou Assist (Lou) is a SaaS product that aims to help its customers create engaging in-product experiences. 

Lou assist dashboard
Lou’s main dashboard

When it comes to creating product tours, checklists, and hotspots, Lou is as good as many other products that are out there.

Here are Lou’s main features:

In-app Experiences

Lou in app experiences
Lou’s features

Lou can help you use the above-mentioned elements in a couple of steps. What puts Lou one step ahead of many of its competitors is that creating any of these elements doesn’t require any technical knowledge. 

Their no-code tool enables almost anyone to provide a satisfying customer experience.

Customization

Lou Customization
Lou Assist’s customization options

.

However, while the tool is cheaper compared to many of its competitors, its features and services are limited.

Lou Pricing

Lou Pricing
Lou Assist Pricing
  • Free version (available with limited features)
  • Startup Plan: $79 (billed annually or $99 monthly)
  • Growth Plan: $199 (billed annually or $239 monthly)
  • Enterprise Plan: $299 (billed annually)

Lou Assist reviews

👍 Pros:

“Personnalisation is not deep enough, I encounter many many many bugs when editing a modale. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t and it is very frustrating. Language is not supported so I have to make different modales for all my international users.”

👎 Cons:

“Love the fact that Lou has a diverse set of options to build that perfect experience while onboarding a new user or simply building tours for better product adoption. The Lou builder is highly user-friendly and easy to use, plus it works well on almost any URL I’m trying to build on.”

6- Intro.js vs Shepherd

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

intro.js product tour
Intro.js’s product tour.

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's pricing plan details
Intro.js’s pricing

7- Crumble vs Shepherd

If you are looking for a free open source tool that is simpler than any other and your product doesn’t need a big introduction, Crumble might be the wiser choice.

shepherd vs crumble
Shepherd Alternative / Competitor Crumble

It only has a single feature, bubble tooltips that you can use to show your users around. It can be selected if an extremely simple onboarding will satisfy your audience.

8- Pageguide vs Shepherd

The name of Pageguide.js gives you everything you need to know about the product: a JavaScript library that you can create page guides with.

pageguide.js vs whatfix
-From Pageguide.js’ GitHub page

How is this better than Shepherd?

It depends.

Do your website or product only consist of a few stand-alone pages or single-page features?

If so, pageguide.js is your jam.

It helps you create simple product tours, and you don’t have to pay anything at all; except for a few days of developer time.

Top Shepherd Alternatives Comparison Table

shepherd alternatives comparison table
A Comparison Table of Shepher.js Alternatives

Frequently Asked Questions


Who should use Shepherd?

As Shepherd is an open-source tool for product tours, it is only suitable for developers and for product managers with coding knowledge.


How much does Shepherd cost?

Shepherd is completely free to download on GitHub.


What are the top alternatives to Shepherd?

The top 5 alternatives to Shepherd are UserGuiding, Appcues, WalkMe, Intro.js, and Crumble.

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Hilal Çökeli

Hilal Çökeli

I’m UserGuiding’s growth-obsessed product marketer. I like to research and write about product, onboarding, and inbound marketing. If you feel like we could exchange ideas, feel free to reach out via LinkedIn or email! P.S. If I don’t respond, please know that I’m on a road trip with my camera and motorbike.