Stonly vs. UserGuiding 2024 Comparison - Which tool is more beneficial?

What is Stonly?

• Capterra: 4.4 ⭐ (11 reviews)
• G2: 4.8 ⭐ (127 reviews)
• TrustRadius: 6.3 ⭐ (6 reviews)

Stonly is a platform that essentially handles knowledge management to enhance customer service.

It provides you with resources to create interactive guides that users can follow for instant guidance, leaving no room for a help ticket.

Through self-serve support and user education, the platform aims to hit two birds with one stone: reducing the number of support tickets and improving customer success.

Known for its help centers and knowledge bases, this tool is modular and versatile, thanks to its guide capabilities that enhance the customer experience journey, such as:

• embeddable in your help articles, your website, and inside your application,
• reusable in all stages of the customer journey,
• and no-code implementation for creation and publishing.

Stonly Best Use Cases

1- Self-Serve Support

‎Stonly's main use is offering self-serve support for users to easily access the information they're looking for.

By including an interactive help center and AI answers, it promises to provide your users with an assistive approach that requires no agent when your users need a quick answer.

With interactive guides that serve as help content and chatbots that take over agents' workloads, Stonly offers a step-by-step path that leads customers to reach all the answers, meeting customers' needs.

Stonly also enables you to attach these guides to the content you think would fit the best with the help of its widget, banners, hotspots, and tooltips—ensuring that users don't spend time searching for it.

2- Support Agent Knowledge

‎While Stonly's first use case concerns users, the second one concerns the agents who support users.

The platform dedicates itself to streamlining the customer service workflows to help agents manage cases faster than ever.

Using AI and automation as primary tools, it provides you with an appropriate environment that can accelerate agents' ticket-handling time and deliver the same high-quality support.

Also, you can onboard your newly recruited agents in less time using guides and enable them to reach information without switching tabs or searching for it by integrating your agent knowledge base into your help desk.

Pricing

Stonly offers a 14-day free trial, but it doesn't reveal its pricing; thus, you should contact its sales team for more information.

What is UserGuiding?

• Capterra: 4.7 ⭐ (51 reviews)
• G2: 4.7 ⭐ (391 reviews)
• TrustRadius: 9.4 ⭐ (4 reviews)

As a product adoption platform, UserGuiding provides you with essential UI elements and tools that can:

• increase feature usage,
• improve product-wide adoption,
• facilitate feature releases.

One of the ease points these elements share is that they can be utilized by non-technical teams, lightening the workload of in-house development teams.

This platform enables you to highlight your product value, whether by promoting your new feature or reintroducing unused features inside your application.

For your user onboarding needs, it also serves as a guide to your new users—showing your key features and abilities through an interactive product tour and providing users with an onboarding checklist to eliminate confusion.

UserGuiding Best Use Cases

1- Feature Adoption

Feature adoption is a use case that UserGuiding prioritizes.

To enable product-wide adoption, this platform presents you with UI elements that emphasize your new and existing features.

For instance, you can send announcement modals to your users inside your application to inform them after a new feature launch and publish an entry in your changelog to improve transparency and maintain effective communication.

For product improvements and existing feature promotion, this platform enables you to segment your disengaged users and target them with specific features based on pain points.

2- User Onboarding

‎Having a seamless user onboarding process ready for your users is a big factor that affects product stickiness.

Showing users how they can derive meaning from your product using interactive tours and onboarding checklists helps them reach their aha! moment faster and increases the likelihood of adopting your solution.

While creating these elements, automation and personalization will become your friends, as UserGuiding enables you to design the sequence with several customization options.

Pricing

UserGuiding has three pricing plans that offer adjustable MAU (Monthly Active User) ranges to scale with your business.

While the first two plans offer a 14-day free trial, the last one is a custom quote.

Here is how the pricing looks for 1,000 MAUs when billed yearly:

• Basic Plan: $69/month.
• Professional Plan: $199/month.
• Corporate Plan: Custom quote.

Stonly vs UserGuiding

It's time to compare Stonly and UserGuiding based on the attributes below:

• user-friendliness,
• features,
• pricing,
• strong points and shortfalls.

Usability

While both Stonly and UserGuiding promise a short set-up time, the aftermath includes some differences.

The first difference is that Stonly has a higher learning curve due to the fact that it doesn't have a user-friendly design. Unlike UserGuiding, it doesn't offer an intuitive experience for its users.

Another difference is that Stonly has few integrations, which might affect your performance since the tool doesn't offer a complete set of onboarding features.

Features

In terms of features, Stonly and UserGuiding are tools with different aims. While Stonly improves customer service, UserGuiding enhances in-app experiences for adoption.

Thus, these tools have only a few specific features in common, mostly onboarding materials like guides, checklists, and hotspots.

Other than your onboarding and customer service needs, Stonly cannot provide you with many abilities, as it has limited capability of supporting your product adoption or customer feedback efforts.

For example, it allows you to create only Net Promoter Score surveys when it comes to collecting feedback.

It also provides you with a product updates feature to announce your features but only through the resource center, not on a stand-alone page.

As UserGuiding is home to all the features mentioned with no such limits, it has more diverse features for onboarding and adoption—paving the way for meeting user needs and creating power users.

Pricing

While Stonly doesn't reveal its pricing plans, UserGuiding offers a scalable approach: adjustable MAU ranges.

Thanks to this approach, you can select your MAU range and extend your plan as you grow.

Plus, UserGuiding starts from $69 per month, making it a cost-effective option.

Strong Points and Shortfalls

Stonly's strong point is related to customer service, as it mainly serves as a knowledge base tool: AI answers. Utilizing AI answers helps reduce the number of support tickets and shorten the response time.

It falls short when you design your onboarding process (or create a product tour for quick help), as it offers inefficient customization options and is below the industry average.

Also, Stonly has a limit on the material configuration options, along with the lack of A/B testing.

For UserGuiding, the shortfall is where Stonly rises: AI assistant. Despite having multiple robust features that help you automate your flows, it doesn't have an AI assistant.

UserGuiding's strong point falls under two categories: user analytics and customization.

While the former element enables you to obtain valuable insight regarding your content with multiple rates, the latter aspect has a feature to ensure that your content fits your theme and even offers different looks to different user segments.

Conclusion

Even though Stonly and UserGuiding share many onboarding materials, their main use cases differ significantly.

While Stonly focuses on customer service, UserGuiding's priority is product adoption, which creates multiple differences in their capabilities.

So, if you need a tool to improve your customer support process and deliver a better experience, Stonly can help.

However, if you're looking for a more complete tool with a diverse set of features that enhance in-app experiences regardless of the area, you should choose UserGuiding as your solution.