Top 22 User Onboarding Tools - Free Tools Included [Categorized & Updated]

The difference between good user onboarding and bad user onboarding is worth thousands of dollars.

Good product and feature adoption gets users from A to B and shows them your value.

And it gets you higher conversion rates, customer satisfaction, customer retention rates, and lower churn rates.

In short, user onboarding can change the fate of your business.

I mean, just look at the wide range of examples 👈

But there is also the fact that…

…There is no single way to achieve great user onboarding.

A variety of different tools, from email to checklists, to interactive walkthroughs, to video tutorials, can be deployed to get users to Aha! Moments.

Now, if creating a good user onboarding experience sounds like a hassle, you aren’t wrong.

But you are also not unarmed.

Today we are going through 22 SaaS onboarding tools and customer engagement tools from different user journey categories that can help you with product adoption, user engagement, and a continuous user onboarding process ⬇️

• JavaScript Libraries for Product Tours
• In-Product User Onboarding Tools
• Video Onboarding Tools
• Email Onboarding Tools
• User Behaviour Tools
• Testing Tools
• User Feedback Tools
• Live Chat and Knowledge Centers

Let's dive right in 🌊

JavaScript Library User Onboarding Tools for Product Tours 📚

The biggest part of the user/customer onboarding process happens right inside the product, so you have to focus on this part first.

If you have extra developer time at hand and a limited budget, you can rely on free JavaScript libraries for creating product tours.

To an extent.

A JavaScript library will likely be a limiting experience even for your developers.

Especially when it comes to customization, user behavior analytics, active user segments, and a variety of onboarding elements, third-party user onboarding tools can offer a wider range of capabilities.

But a library can still do the job for you if your expectations aren’t too high.

1- Intro.js - JavaScript Library User Onboarding Tool

Use it to take your user through what they need to do step-by-step.

Intro.js is a javascript library that allows you to take your users through what they need to do to get on board with your website step-by-step.

It mixes highlight animations with tooltips to draw the user’s attention to where they need to be and what they need to be doing.

Users can click through each step as they complete it or understand what they need to know.

Overall results of the library are usually basic but effective.

Of course, a product team with time and resources in their hands can create in-app onboarding experiences that can feature advanced step-by-step guides without needing advanced features...

But you should decide if that is a sacrifice you would be willing to take.

👉 Especially when a third-party product onboarding tool can help create user onboarding flows with personalized onboarding experiences, offer detailed analytics, and help with your overall customer onboarding strategy for a small price and in minutes.

Access to the code is completely free; however, purchasing a license is required for businesses using Intro.js for commercial use.

Plus, on GitHub, there are many open issues in the library’s page, so you might want to check out our Intro.js Alternatives article for other options.

2- Shepherd.js - JavaScript Library User Onboarding Tool

Create, customize, and maintain product tours and assist users.

Shepherd.js is another JavaScript library for creating product tours, and it is one of the most customizable options in the JavaScript libraries category.

It basically does everything that Intro.js does, with only one difference; it’s still alive.

Intro.js has many open issues on GitHub, while Shepherd’s issues are constantly attended to by developers.

If you are selecting an open-source solution in place of a user onboarding tool, you might want to choose the one where you can get help when you are in need.

Think you can afford something a little more “wide range”?

Let’s take a look at user/customer onboarding tools for seamless in-app experiences ⬇️

In-Product User Onboarding Tools 💻

One thing is for sure:

User activation, user segmentation, customer feedback collection, personalized onboarding experiences, and overall, user adoption are easier and more effective using in-product user onboarding tools.

They not only have more powerful features, but they also have better user interfaces and often additional features that can replace other user engagement and user onboarding tools.

So, let’s take a look at the very best SaaS user onboarding tools ⬇️

3- UserGuiding - In-Product User Onboarding Tool

All-in-one no-code tool for in-product user onboarding.

UserGuiding is a third-party user onboarding tool to improve the in-product experience for your users.

UserGuiding can help you in your user onboarding with its many key features, such as:

✅ Interactive guides, product tours, product walkthroughs,

✅ User onboarding checklists,

✅ Hotspots, tooltips, in-app messages,

✅ Resource centers,

✅ In-app surveys and NPS,

And more, accompanied by powerful analytics where you can see user activity and product usage details, higher customization, localization, user segmentation, and targeting.

Plus, no code!

The tool doesn’t require any technical knowledge at all, meaning it could be utilized by all teams in your company.

With a no-code tool such as UserGuiding, you can save precious developer time to later spend on improving and stabilizing your product.

And you can have anyone from any team - the sales team, customer success team, or even the marketing team - working on onboarding tasks and in-app guides.

Here’s what it looks like inside of UserGuiding ⬇️

You can see all the features on the sidebar; to show you how easy it is to use the product, I will create a short “feature introduction” for LinkedIn.

When you edit the guide, it will take you to the page you want the guide in and let you create and edit on the spot.

You can create a complete user onboarding flow without any coding; here’s one created in under 5 minutes ⬇️

Its many features, affordable pricing, and simplicity make UserGuiding the perfect all-in-one user onboarding software.

Give the 14-day free trial a try ⬇️

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Video Onboarding Tools

Although I’d strongly suggest otherwise, an interactive experience might NOT be what you want.

You might want your users to sit back and listen to you explaining the how-tos and details of the product, or any content that you think would help them in their journey with your product.

Naturally, there are user onboarding tools that help you do just that.

Let’s see:

4- eWebinar - Video User Onboarding Tool

Use it to host video presentations, webinars, and training without actually being there.

Hosting live webinars is challenging because your attendees have to fit and adjust to your schedule and time zone, which can lead to low attendance and/or showing up to a webinar with no attendees.

eWebinar is an alternative for hosting video presentations, training, and—true to its name—webinars, without having to host the same session live over and over again.

Record a session once, upload it as a video and invite attendees to watch when they’re available.

One of eWebinar’s unique features is its live chat which allows attendees to interact and ask questions in the chatbox on the right side of their screen.

You can answer them in real-time, or by email afterward if you’re not around.

Check it out:

eWebinar is free for 14 days.

Paid plans include:

• $49/ month for 1 published webinar,
• $99/month for 2 to 5 published webinars;
• $199/month for 6 to 15 published webinars or,
• $250/month for 25 published webinars + $10/month for any additional webinars. 

5- Movavi - Video User Onboarding Tool

Use it to create and edit video content that efficiently greets and educates new users.

Video content is a powerful way to welcome new users and convey complex ideas quickly and easily.

To succeed, you need to understand your product inside and out and put yourself in new users’ shoes during onboarding. Videos are more engaging than lengthy text, making them an effective solution for first-time users.

However, as a novice, creating an eye-catching video can be daunting.

Fortunately, Movavi Video Editor offers a user-friendly interface that even beginners can use to create professional-looking videos.

With key features that range from artistic functions and color filters to pre-built-template and AI-advanced functions, you can customize and put your own personal touch on your videos just the way you want.

Movavi Video Editor offers a free trial period to help you test out the software before committing to a purchase.

The software provides various pricing plans, with the yearly subscription plan starting at $49.95. You can also pay a little bit more for a lifetime license at $69.95.

6- Wistia - Video User Onboarding Tool

Use it to create engaging video tutorials to inform users.

Video tutorials are a great way to engage users and show them how to complete complex tasks within a product or application.

But creating good videos can be challenging and expensive.

Wistia is here to take some of the pain out of creating good videos.

Within the Wistia platform, you can create, record, edit and distribute videos, which can be customized with brand identity, calls to action, or anything else that might facilitate your user onboarding process.

The platform also offers good analytics, so you can see where in your video your user’s attention starts to flag, and so where you need to cut, or just make things more interesting.

Wistia also offers a lot of interesting video marketing tools, if you want to make video work for you in more ways than one.

You can try Wistia for free, starting with just three videos. It is then $99 per month for up to ten videos, and plans are bespoke after that.

Of course, getting your hands on a decent camera is down to you.

7- Vimeo - Video User Onboarding Tool

Use it to create and distribute videos for various purposes, in this case: user onboarding.

Vimeo, like Wistia, is another video marketing tool that can be beneficial for user onboarding.

Easily record, create, edit, embed, and distribute videos in high quality.

The tool allows you to analyze your videos too, and offers many resources to help you make the most out of Vimeo.

Its high speed and mobile optimization make it a great channel to distribute your videos to your users.

And...

You can create videos about your product and its uses and embed them where they are needed.

You can start using Vimeo Basic for free, but the upload is limited and the most affordable plan that allows you to upload 5GB/week costs around $7.

Email Onboarding Tools 📨

Now that we know what you can use to attend to new users in-product...

...Let’s now talk about how you can interact with them when they are off-product.

Now, you might love emails or you might hate them but one thing is certain when it comes to email:

Everyone has one.

So, you will naturally have your users’ emails as they sign up with your product, and if you reach out the right way, you can encourage them to take the actions you’d like.

While we're at it, here are the best practices of email onboarding.👈

You can always use Gmail or Outlook to engage with your users, but I would not recommend that since there are a handful of you while you might end up having to reach thousands of customers within a week.

Let’s see what onboarding tools can help you simplify and automate email onboarding:

8- Intercom - Email User Onboarding Tool

Use it to communicate with any user in any stage of the Customer Journey.

Intercom is a huge brand in the customer communications field.

You can set custom messages that will be sent to custom audiences that could be triggered by custom events.

You can customize your communication campaigns until they become just the right one for your business’ needs.

In user onboarding, which is another campaign, using Intercom can make life a lot easier.

👉 You first set a goal.

Turning users into paid users, upgrading their plan, achieving success via your product, you name it.

👉 Then you can scheme a journey for them that leads to this goal and create a campaign that directs them toward the goal through this journey.

👉 After that, the whole process will be automated and the campaign will start as soon as a new user signs up if you’ve set everything up correctly.

The product also offers various customer support and engagement tools, such as automated live chat, where you can help users in need 24/7.

Although Intercom's pricing starts from $39/month, in order to get the real value of the product you need to get at least the Grow package which costs $99/month.

9- Drip - Email User Onboarding Tool

Use it for automating personalized communication through multiple channels.

Drip is more than just another email marketing tool.

It is a tool that allows for smart segmentation of customers, customization of messages, and automation of communication. Drip is more like an email tool with a fully-fledged CRM built-in.

With Drip you can easily tag and segment users based on a variety of customizable criteria. You can then drip feed content and alerts to users based on their actions. You can encourage engagement with gamification tools, and track the success of individual communications funnels with advanced analytics.

Those same analytics allow you to analyze conversion and track success.

This is the kind of functionality that you might expect with an enterprise system, but Drip is highly affordable for what it offers. Expect to pay $29 per month for 1,000 users, $154 per month for 10,000 users, and $1,199 for 100,000 users.

User Behaviour Tools 🧠

The perfect onboarding is not the one that you throw everything that you see valuable at your user. It is the one where the journey of your real user is a pain-point-free and clear way to the “Aha!” moment.

Pay extra attention to “real user”, because when designing your product and onboarding you most likely acted according to the users that you have speculated. This is not an adverse method, however, if you keep doing it after you have a minimum viable product; it will become a problem.

You should keep optimizing your onboarding based on the behaviour of real users, which brings us to user behaviour tools:

10- Mixpanel - User Behavior Onboarding Tool

Use it to track user interaction, conduct A/B tests, and gather feedback.

Mixpanel is every product manager’s dream.

It gives insights into your real users’ interactions with your web or mobile product. It is one of the most convenient and comprehensive product analytics tools out there.

You can analyze user actions, their responses to your changes, create cohorts based on user behavior, target segments, and much more.

It is possible to start using Mixpanel for free with the Starter package and access core analytics features for 1000 users, and the Growth package costs $89/month with 25000 users and longer data history.

11- Hotjar - User Behavior Onboarding Tool

Use it to understand how users are responding to certain elements and visuals.

Hotjar is another amazing tool for understanding what your users think, and how well they are using your application.

Hotjar uses heatmaps, recordings, analytics, and feedback tools to create a complete picture of how your users are experiencing your product. This can be vital for identifying pain points, and also fine-tuning your idea of what exactly the value moment is for your users.

Heatmap functionality is particularly useful if you want to focus in on specific page elements and visuals. You can see exactly what people are focussing in on. If you are confused, ask the user what is happening with the built-in feedback tool.

The well-designed dashboard is a great way to keep track of insights and produce informative reports.

There are free plans available that allow you to collect data on up to 2,000 page views per day. You can escalate up to 10,000 page views per day for just $29 per month, and then there are premium packages for higher-traffic sites.

12- FullStory - User Behavior Onboarding Tool

Use it to identify your users’ onboarding pain points and address them.

FullStory is all about letting you see and understand how your users are using your product, so that you can make it better, starting with optimizing your user onboarding experience.

With FullStory, you can capture the details of almost any user session on your site. Intuitive analytics allow you to see user flows and identify drop off points. You can then replay sessions to see the user’s actual experience in real-time. This is a very powerful tool for identifying user pain points, which you may never have considered, and address them.

When you do start pushing out solutions, FullStory can also track the users that engage with them, so you can test how well they work and finetune before rolling them out to your full customer base.

You can start using FullStory on a free basis, which allows you to view up to 1,000 sessions per month. After that, you’ll need to speak to FullStory for a bespoke pricing plan that fits your needs.

13- UserTesting - User Behavior Onboarding Tool

Use it to learn exactly how your users engage with your product.

When it comes to understanding what users want, what their pain points are, and what does and does not work for them, there is no substitute for talking to real users, and more importantly, observing real users in action. UserTesting enables you to do just that.

You can use UserTesting to film users engaging with your product, seeing exactly what they are doing on the screen, and listening to them as they talk through their issues and challenges. It expands the number of people with whom you can test, and you can test remotely, with participants working on their own devices.

This is ideal not only for watching back user testing sessions, but for creating compelling advocacy material to convince management of important features and changes. Nothing says as much as watching a user struggle.

Pricing is bespoke, so you will need to talk to UserTesting directly for a quote, but they have packages for individuals who need to do a modest amount of testing, and for big business.

Remember, you only need to conduct five usability tests to identify 90 percent of usability issues.

Testing Tools 🧪

Although analyzing individual user behavior and acting on them is a great way to optimize your user onboarding, you might want to scale things up a bit.

The following tools are fueled to test your creations with larger audiences, and help you optimize them, which for the next product is right in the name:

14- Optimizely - Testing User Onboarding Tool

Use it to find out which possible approaches work best with your customers.

Optimizely is a great product for testing options and experimenting with the best ways to engage and communicate with customers.

There is no coding, just create your content and send out your experiments, using the system to control how many people see each experiment and to crunch the data.

Optimizely can help you improve the quality of your onboarding process, and get the overall experience right for users, faster. You can choose between an easy-to-use web version, or the full-stack version for developers, or combine the two.

Plans are done on a bespoke basis, so pricing is a bit of a mystery. But don’t expect this powerful tool to be cheap.

15- Helio.app - Testing User Onboarding Tool

Use it to test your new product with users when you don’t have a customer base.

The insights you can glean when you test your product with real users are amazing but sometimes, when you are developing a new product, you simply don’t have the customer base to test it with. This is where Helio.app comes in.

They have 300,000 testers from around the world ready to test your product.

You can specify the demographics and device types that you are looking for, and then let your application loose in the wild. You can get feedback within hours rather than weeks.

Anyone who has tried to organize this kind of cold user testing will know exactly how difficult this can be.

The tool comes with a lot of intuitive features for creating, optimizing, and customizing tests so that you get the best possible feedback. You can also use the same functionality to test the product with your own pool of potential customers.

You can sign up to Helio.app for free to see what you can do with their product, and you only start paying when you want to send tests out. For a basic test, you can expect to pay $199, and twice that if you want to target based on demographics.

User Feedback Tools 🗣️

You can viciously use a combination of various user behavior and analytics tools to try and get inside the mind of your users.

Or you could just, uh, ask them?

It's not like all of your users don't want to communicate with you; with the right attitude and incentive, you can get your users to share their feedback during and after the user onboarding.

Here are some tools that make this process simpler for you:

16- Google Forms - Feedback User Onboarding Tool

Use it to gather feedback for free.

Google Forms is a common and efficient way of collecting user feedback.

You can create a simple questionnaire in minutes and roll it out to your audience, without spending a dime.

However, the percentage of people who accept to share feedback via filling a Google Form is going to be lower than you expect it.

Yet, it is something for the starters.

17- Feedier - Surveys and Feedback User Onboarding Tool

Use it to ask your users what they really think.

Sometimes the only way to find out what customers think is to ask them directly, and Feedier is a great survey software to enable you to do just that, in a way that disrupts the overall user experience as little as possible.

In fact, some of Feedier’s fun interactive forms users may even enjoy completing.

Feedier enables you to build and embed simple or complex surveys into your website or application, all without any coding. You can also communicate with your audiences through a variety of communication platforms, including email, SMS, widget, and print.

Feedier also has an effective analytics platform behind it which allows for powerful number-crunching and response segmentation.

You can try Feedier for free and get access to a limited survey suite to experiment, but most users will need a minimum of the Explorer package, which costs $30 per month, but includes the full suite of survey options and analytics.

18- Wootric - Micro Surveys User Onboarding Tool

Use it to ask your customers what they think with quick, punchy questions.

When you want to know what your users think about a certain feature of your product, it can be difficult to email them later.

They may have completely forgotten in the moment experience of whatever you are asking them about. Better to get a response from them in the moment: how was that for you?

This is exactly what Wootric lets you do, by creating micro surveys that can be deployed to users while they are within the product but they are easy to answer with a click or two; so they do not disrupt the overall user experience.

This can help you track how customers are feeling during the user onboarding process, and also ask important questions that let you personalize the experience for them, and deliver a better experience overall.

Pricing starts at $89 per month for a single project and channel. For $224 per month, you get all the bells and whistles with multiple projects, multiple channels, and even multiple languages.

Live Chat and Knowledge Centers 💬

When do you think a user needs the most help?

Who do you think would ask more questions: a new user or a seasoned customer?

I hope answering the questions above was no problem at all for you, they are a bit obvious. A new user doesn't know about the product, what it does, how it does it, can it do that, can it do this... So many questions.

They need to access you and your expertise directly, so adopting a tool for communicating with clients in-product, a live-chat solution could get that over with.

If you can't, however, satisfy every user's every need quickly; you can try automating the process.

A chatbot or a knowledge center are solutions that require way less human input. Let's see what these tools can help you with:

19- Jivochat - Live Chat User Onboarding Tool

Use it to chat with your users everywhere.

Although you can use Jivochat as a marketing tool, I will today focus on its live-chat and help functions.

Let your new users know from the start that you will always be there for them when they click on that live chat icon.

Whenever they need assistance, help them complete their tasks and they will not forget how friendly you are.

Jivochat's basic plan is free up to 5 agents, and the pro package starts from $7.20/month per agent.

20- Freshdesk - Support User Onboarding Tool

Use it to support customers where they are, within the application.

Freshdesk is another powerful tool for managing in-app chat support, throughout the onboarding process and beyond.

You can manage all your tickets that come in across all your platforms in one place: that is email, chatbot, live chat, social media, and even phone.

The software allows you to keep track of all conversations, prioritize tickets, tag topics, and automatically assign them to the most appropriate member of your team.

The platform also provides a powerful analytics suite, so you can easily see where your customers are having problems and need more proactive support, and where you support team is struggling to meet customer needs, so that you can prioritize investment.

Freshdesk offers a free account that works well for small businesses that do not need the full suite or integration or analytics tools. They offer more sophisticated packages starting from $15 per agent per month, up to $99 per agent per month.

21- Zendesk - Support User Onboarding Tool

Use it to centralize, streamline, and improve how you support users in need of help.

Your support team can’t be switched on all the time. And users might not want to wait hours to get a hello from a team member, they just want the information they need.

This is why having an accessible and navigable knowledge base is essential when onboarding users.

Zendesk integrates this knowledge center with a customer support ticketing system that allows support agents to manage queries from a variety of platforms, including social media. It integrates with pretty much everything, and the dashboard is highly customizable so you can make it bespoke for your business.

Basic plans start at $5 per agent per month with limited features, so you might be tempted to upgrade to their $89 per agent per month plan. There is also bespoke pricing for bigger businesses.

22- Helpshelf - Support Resources User Onboarding Tool

Use it to keep all your learning aids in one accessible place.

Helpshelf is a great way to keep all your support resources in one place, and make it easy to access for users so that help is always at hand.

You can gather all of your resources together within Helpshelf, from Vimeo, YouTube, Intercom, document repositories, and many other places. You can tag resources for when and where users are likely to need them, and then Helpshelf will serve up the best help resources for the user, wherever they are in the application.

This can help significantly reduce the number of support calls made, and can help those users who have the confidence to do things on their own take control of their experience and glide through.

Helpshelf starts at $25 per month for one site, with three source integrations, and 1500 monthly users. For 5 sites expect to pay $55 per month, and for up to 12 sites $99 per month.

Final Words

Be it user onboarding, customer onboarding, or employee onboarding process, getting the user onboarding right can be hard.

It requires deep insight into your users and their needs, also a user-centric design that gets the user where they need to be as quickly and efficiently as possible.

But you do not need to start with a blank slate.

There are lots of great user onboarding tools out there that can help you design and deliver a quality user onboarding experience.

If you're looking for an onboarding tool that will let you build elements like product tours, in-app surveys, a knowledge base and in-app announcements without code, for a lower price, we hope you'll take a look at UserGuiding.

Click here to sign up for a free trial today.

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