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Stonly and WalkMe. Both tools have amazing capabilities, and both of them offer in-app guides.
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 Stonly or WalkMe is a better product adoption platform so that you can provide the best customer experience.
In this article, I will:
- Introduce Stonly and talk about the tool's cons and pros,
- Introduce WalkMe and talk about the tool's cons and pros,
- Compare those tools 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 Stonly?
Stonly is a self-serve support and user education platform that offers engaging and (not so) interactive guides for software products.
With Stonly, you can create Help Centers and Knowledge Bases that are much more engaging compared to the traditional ones.
Stonly onboarding offers step-by-step instructional guides that you can add images inside to illustrate your topic better, and the content of these step guides can be optimized based on end-user segments and preferences.
Of course, you can use these guides to create product tours, that show your users how different UI elements and core functions of your product work.
Although it doesn’t actually have the most interactive content, it can be a good choice for small to medium-sized businesses that would prefer free/affordable products.
But the rest of the users should be aware of the expensive plans and hidden costs within the product.
Pros 🤩 Stonly is good for:
✅ Stonly is relatively more affordable and has a free plan, which is something that most of its competitors don't have.
✅ Stonly makes it easy to create product walkthroughs. Once you pass the integration step, the ease of use increases quickly.
Cons 😮💨 Stonly isn't good for:
❌ If you want to integrate Stonly into your UI elements, and of course, implement Stonly’s knowledge base and help center into your platform, you’ll definitely need a bunch of developer hours to get it done.
❌ It looks like most of the interactivity, in Stonly's case, is pressing the “Next” button on the guide steps after reading a bunch of text and looking at a screenshot.
❌ Your customization options are very limited with Stonly. After a while, a lot of the guides look very similar to each other, and since you’re limited to a single element, you can mix things up as you can in other user onboarding products like UserGuiding.
Stonly Pricing
Stonly has 3 pricing tiers at the moment, and a 14-day free trial:
- Starter Plan: $99/month with 2500 monthly guide views, 30 guides, and access to core features.
- Business Plan: $199/month with 4000 monthly guide views, $399 with 15000 monthly guide views, unlimited guides, and additional VIP features.
- Custom Enterprise Plans: Additional Enterprise features with increased usage limits, but you need to contact Stonly's sales team for a custom quote.
What is WalkMe?
WalkMe is a digital adoption platform that offers solutions for different product experiences, but its main deal is user flows.
With WalkMe, customers can create product tours for their users or create interactive guides for their employees for inbound use. Besides these app training options, WalkMe offers different solutions. However, these solutions are, in fact, just fancy names for different use cases for their app guides.
A critical matter of fact is that WalkMe is way more focused on employee training than its customer onboarding solutions.
Of course, it is still a powerful tool with key features like:
- Product tours, user guides, and walkthroughs,
- Analytics,
- User segmentation and survey implementation,
- Knowledge base
Plus, famous enterprises like Microsoft, IBM, and Adobe use WalkMe. Good referrals if you were to ask me.
Pros 🤩 WalkMe is 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
Pros 😮💨 WalkMe isn't good 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
Unfortunately, WalkMe hasn't ever shared any details about their pricing publicly. However, we know that they work on annual contracts that go way beyond $10,000, and some claim that the average deal is $9000/month.
And also, customers have been reporting that WalkMe is tripling their prices without any discounts to old users.
To get exact pricing for your business, you have to get a demo from the WalkMe team.
How about having the best of both? 😎
Way too many products have secret costs that they don't reveal until you get a demo 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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