Top 5 Simpo Alternatives and Competitors (Free & Paid)

Simpo is a capable user onboarding and training product used by some goliaths, such as Walmart and Monday.com.

Or we can say that "it used to be."

However, whether it be their pricing, lack of good support, or the buggy product, you might be looking for an alternative.

Or it might even be due to their services not being available because Simpo was acquired by Walkme earlier this year, and now, they are completely shutting the tool down.

If so, you're in the right place; in this article, I'll go over 5 alternatives to Simpo, some of which are as much capable as Simpo and some of which are much more affordable (and maybe both).

Let's start by taking a look at what Simpo does, and its problems:

Click here to go straight to the first alternative, or click here to view the Simpo Alternatives Comparison Table at the end of the article.

What is Simpo?

Simpo was a user onboarding and education product that can be used by sales, marketing, customer support, and customer service teams to offer users a self-serve experience.

With Simpo, you can create in-app announcements, NPS and Feedback surveys, product walkthroughs, and knowledge base articles.

All of this can be highly valuable in improving the first time experience of your users and overall user engagement. Its medium-high range and capable features make it a preferable platform for medium to large-sized businesses and enterprises.

However, there are various complaints by former users of the product, that made them switch to Simpo's alternatives, which I will dig into in a bit.

Simpo Pricing:

Simpo had 3 pricing levels:

• They offer a 14-day free trial,
• The Starter Package starts from $250/month, with no clear MAU limit,
• The Pro Package is $250/month, again, with no clear MAU limit,
• The Enterprise plan doesn't have a set pricing, and you need to contact their sales dept. for pricing.

Simpo Reviews:

👍 Pros:

"The idea of Simpo is great. Integrating onboarding, knowledge base articles, checklists, etc. into one product was very appealing."

👎 Cons:

"It doesn't work. Simpo doesn't support modern single-page applications. Their customer service is unresponsive and generally unknowledgeable about how their product works."

Why you need a Simpo Alternative

Simpo was good, but not perfect.

Since you're reading this article, I can say that you too had an issue with Simpo, its services, or its functionalities.

Let me list the most common problems users encounter with Simpo:

Higher Pricing for the Same Value

Compared to one of its closest competitors, UserGuiding, Simpo charged 2.5 times more for their starting plan.

This makes the product undesirable for small-medium businesses, who want to step into the user onboarding game with little steps.

Steep Learning Curve

Simpo, as the name would suggest, can be considered a simple product for some. But the reviews by many of its users hint otherwise.

You sure can find your way around Simpo, but you'll first need to leap over a steep learning curve which will take you at least a few hours to overcome.

Poor Onboarding Experience

When I was using Simpo, the onboarding experience of their own product just felt incomplete.

There were a lot of features of Simpo that I wanted to explore right away, since I am a seasoned digital product user that doesn't need much introduction.

However, I was needed to complete a few steps (which felt completely unnecessary) before I could even start creating a product walkthrough. You'd wish a product that defended simple onboarding processes would have a better onboarding experience.

Poor Customer Support

I didn't have to contact the customer support (as much as I wanted to for their limiting onboarding), but there's a pattern here.

Most users have had a rough experience with Simpo's customer experience representatives.

Often Buggy and Non-intuitive

As I've said, you can't get through the onboarding process by choice, you have to complete a few steps. And the remaining experience is pretty non-intuitive.

Also, users often have complained about the bugs in Simpo's platform, which could adversely affect your end-users' experience should it alter your educational material.

Simpo Shut Down

Simpo users received an email from Simpo in August, saying that "Simpo.io is shutting down." If you don't want to be a passenger on a sinking ship, you would want to choose an alternative to Simpo instead.

Top Alternatives to Simpo

• UserGuiding
• WalkMe
• Intercom Product Tours
• Intro.js
• Shepherd

So, let's start going over the top alternatives to Simpo 1-by-1, exploring each product, their use cases, strengths, weaknesses, and pricing.

Starting with the closest competitor of Simpo:

#1 Simpo vs UserGuiding - All-in-one user onboarding

UserGuiding is an all-in-one, no-code digital adoption platform software that you can use to easily create interactive user onboarding and education flows.

With UserGuiding, you can:

• Create interactive product tours and user guides,
• Send in-app messages, publish tooltips and hotspots,
• Conduct NPS surveys,
• Create self-serve resource centers IN your product,
• Analyze the performance of your content,
• Segment and target custom user groups to maximize personalization.

With an unmatched support experience and a truly no-code product, UserGuiding offers a simple and capable solution that is much more affordable than Simpo and other paid competitors.

Best-for-price, indeed.

UserGuiding Pricing

UserGuiding's pricing plans grows as you get more and more active users. When billed yearly:

• 14-day free trial (no credit card required)
• Basic Plan: Starting from $69/month.
• Professional Plan: Starting from $199/month with unlimited guides.
• Corporate Plan: Custom quote.

UserGuiding Reviews:

👍 Pros:

"UserGuiding has great UX - very simple to use. Also, the team is supportive. They do their best to support us on our busy days, even on weekends."

👎 Cons:

"It doesn't allow some of the features of the more expensive products. However it absolutely delivers on what it promises."

UserGuiding vs Simpo

‍

#2 WalkMe - Capable Platform for Employee and User Training

WalkMe is a employee and user digital adoption solution focused at large companies and enterprise businesses, with customers like Microsoft, Adobe, and PayPal.

WalkMe is one of the firsts to do it.

They offer strong analytics, capable user onboarding and orientation features with innovative features such as session playbacks and event tracking.

This much capability comes at a price -literally-, since they're aimed at larger companies, their pricing becomes larger aswell.

Also, the product can be considered far from being a no-code tool, since it will require maybe even a group of developers to completely integrate WalkMe with your processes.

So I strongly advise businesses with low budget and even lower developer time to steer towards the other alternatives.

WalkMe Pricing:

WalkMe doesn't have a set pricing at the moment and you'll have to get a demo to learn about their offers.

However, WalkMe's pricing allegedly starts from $9000/month and can go even higher, depending on your business.

WalkMe Reviews:

👍 Pros:

"Flexibility to create walk-throughs and customer facing assets to support new feature releases, share important communications and understand what features users are interacting with in our product."

👎 Cons:

"Support team is extremely slow to respond with resolutions for critical bugs. When I try to contact my client success manager for help, I'm told that if she responds I'll be billed for professional services hours. I often feel stuck and helpless when encountering major issues, such as session playbacks not being available, due to lack of response, support tickets being assigned and re-assigned from team to team."

#3 Intercom - Customer Support and Basic User Onboarding

Everyone's favorite customer service product, Intercom, now offers the Product Tours add-on that adds user onboarding to its use cases.

You know Intercom, right?

It's mainly portrayed as a customer support solution where we all get those soul-sucking tickets from, but there's more to it now.

With Intercom's newest add-on, Product Tours, you can create simple product tours -cue the name- to show users around your product.

The new feature is very easy to use, and the product tours created with it look and feel good overall.

In my opinion, though, it can't really make Intercom a user onboarding solution. You see, user onboarding is not the same as user training, and you need more tools such as tooltips, hotspots, checklists, etc., to make it a complete user onboarding experience.

So Intercom's Product Tours can be used if you don't mind having a half-user onboarding process that's unified with your customer service, but if you want the next level onboarding experience, choose another alternative.

Intercom Pricing

If you want to use Intercom with Product Tours add-on:

• 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

Intercom Reviews

👍 Pros:

"Ease of use and the information available. No app can be better than Intercom to engage with your users. It gives you a complete dashboard to help you understand your user's usage pattern and also helps in creating a very elaborate help center as well."

👎 Cons:

"I feel like Intercom had a more significant learning curve for me when I was a new user. The quicker I can pick up and use the tool from all angles, the more I would use it!"

#4 Intro.js - Open-source & Low Cost Product Tours

Intro.js is one of the most popular open-source user onboarding solutions used by literally thousands of businesses all across the world.

The reason for this popularity is: accessibility and capability.

Compared to other open-source libraries for product tours, Intro.js is easier to use for developers, which makes it take less time than developing product tours in-house.

But compared to 3rd-party products such as UserGuiding, you're again left with basic product tours that take a few weeks to fully integrate -which is a lifetime compared to UserGuiding's minutes-. You can't expect that complete user onboarding experience, but you can expect functional product introductions for crazy good pricing.

Intro.js Pricing

As long as you're not using Intro.js for a commercial product, you don't have to pay for anything. However, once you use it for commercial purposes, you'll have to buy a one-time license:

• 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.

Intro.js Reviews

👍 Pros:

"I really like the Intro.js plugin because documentation is straightforward and easy to understand. Very good onboarding tool for basic use cases."

👎 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?”

#5 Shepherd.js - Free (Open-source) Product Tours

Shepherd.js is a close competitor of Intro.js that is a solid FREE alternative to Simpo.

Shepherd.js is also an open-source library, that is very similar to Intro.js in functionality.

Basic product tours and feature introductions, that takes a while to develop but are completely free.

Simpo Alternatives Comparison Table