How do you prefer to get on board with a new tool?
A) Interactive Guides
B) Video Walkthroughs
C) Interactive Video Walkthroughs
Yeah, C is a real option.
Some people just love reinventing the wheel…
So, today I’m going to be reviewing Tourial, a product storytelling platform. I will talk about:
- Go over why you might need an alternative to it,
- List the best alternatives and competitors of Tourial,
- Talk about their pros, cons, pricing, and reviews.
If you are familiar with Tourial, you can skip directly to the alternatives part.
Let’s get started with:
Why you need a Tourial Alternative
1- Steep Learning Curve
Even though shooting walkthroughs is easy with Tourial, the user UI is extremely complicated and challenging to get used to.
2- Outdated Approach
Tourial is a tool for software companies that still use outbound marketing – which are close to none. More and more digital products have already switched to either product-led or content-led marketing and Tourial isn’t really effective on that sense.
3- Not Enough Features
Tourial offers only one feature: creating custom product tutorials. Integrating such a product is a waste of time, while there is an ocean of feature-rich products that offer much more.
Top Tourial Alternatives
Since you need much more than virtual product experiences for a complete product training, here are the top six alternatives to Tourial:
- UserGuiding
- Helppier
- Usetiful
- Lou Assist
- Userlane
- Userflow
- Intro.js
- Crumble
I’ll go over each tool, compare it to Tourial, and talk about which cases you should prefer them. So, without further ado, let’s start with our first product:
1- UserGuiding – No-code Interactive User Onboarding
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.
UserGuiding offers a wide range of features, including:
- Interactive Product Tours,
- Tooltips and Hotspots,
- User Onboarding Checklists,
- Resource Centers,
- NPS Surveys,
- Easy Localization,
- Advanced Analytics with User Activity Feed,
- Custom user segments,
- Material Tagging and Easy Targeting,
- No-code customization,
- 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 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.
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 their new feature, “Surveys”, which now allows users to create multiple different types of questions and combine them within a single survey (or launch different surveys for different segments).
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%.
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 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 Pricing
- 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:
“UserGuiding provides an impressive feature set that can do more than it seems. From simple step-basis guided tours to almost seamless splash pages that look product branded.”
👎 Cons:
“Some basic features are still lacking (i.e., ability to change the background color for different tiles in a single step, more typography, select the position of the step on the screen, etc)”
UserGuiding also offers free migration services for your in-app content created using other software to minimize your switching costs.
Schedule a demo with one of our experts or start your free trial now:
Don’t Pay a Fortune for Other Tools!
UserGuiding starts from only $89/month.
Create tours, tooltips, and surveys without coding
2- Helppier
Helppier is a user engagement tool that helps you create in-app messages, tours, and NPS surveys.
Helppier is a less-known startup company that serves as a user engagement and onboarding product. Still, they lack some of the most important tools, such as checklists or resource centers, to be a complete tool.
Their strong suit is customization and their ready-to-use templates. While many companies struggle with coming up with a good theme that suits their needs, Helppier allows its users to choose from various templates, available for different use cases.
Here is an in-depth review of their strongest features:
Templates
Helppier’s template library provides you with 40+ ready-to-use templates to help you save time.
Most of these templates were created by Helppier, while users are also allowed to contribute. There are templates for all materials, such as modals, tooltips, surveys, announcement banners, and so on.
Web Onboarding
Helppier does save you quite a bit of time by providing you with a ton of templates. But, this doesn’t mean that the tool makes everything easy.
Helppier is easy to use only once you get through the learning curve, and get used to the UI since it is much different from usual product tour software.
Still, there is one huge aspect that makes Helppier more valuable than its competitors, and that is the feature below:
Mobile Onboarding
Not many user onboarding tools are able to provide mobile support. Helppier stands out in that sense.
With Helppier, you can create user onboarding screens, send in-app notifications and announcements, and conduct feedback surveys.
Also, the tool is a relatively affordable one compared to the market. Here’s the pricing:
✅ Helppier is relatively affordable for what it provides.
✅ For its pricing, the tool offers a good variety of starter features – and even mobile compatibility.
Helppier Cons
❌ While being affordable, the provided features aren’t advanced themselves and can leave you needing more as you scale.
❌ Helppier’s UI is very complicated, making it difficult to get used to and through the initial setup.
Helppier Pricing
- Free Trial available for 14 days, no credit card information required.
- Standard plan: $49/month for up to 1000 MAU, $99/month for up to 10.000 MAU, 2 months for free if paid annually. This plan doesn’t include priority support, onboarding consultation, or on-premise hosting. It also doesn’t let you select whether you want to pay for guide plays or MAU count. Other than that, all the feaures Helppier provides are available.
- Tailor-made plan: custom-made plan, talk to sales for a price. This plan provides everything that the standard price fails to proivde.
Helppier Reviews
👍 Pros:
“The ease of use, and the canva integration. I love how you can customize the tour within your app, especially with the canva integration that allows you to get deeper into the design of your tour. Genius idea!”
👎 Cons:
“Very buggy. It crashes a lot. Requires more configuration than dropping their code because it’s slowing the site down.”
3- Usetiful
Usetiful is a SaaS product that helps you create interactive product adoption tours.
Usetiful will help you create no-code product tours, checklists, hotspots, and feature update alerts. This way, you can have many features with one tool, and easily increase your product adoption and feature adoption rates, as well as reducing the weight off the support team’s shoulders.
Also, the Marketplace page on their website makes it easy to find relevant tools (free and paid) to even further improve your business without hours of research.
Let’s take a deeper look into the tool’s strongest features:
Product Tours
Usetiful uses a more traditional approach to product tours. You can create basic tooltips that point to the element you want to show, but don’t really let you interact with the element itself. That’s why Usetiful’s guided tours are step-by-step, but not interactive.
You can embed videos and images into the product tours as well. As for the customization options, they would let most users down as there is very limited options for customization.
Checklists
Just like any other in-app guidance tool, Usetiful also offers checklists where you can trigger guides. While the progress bar is an important feature for better engagement that most companies miss, the lack of proper customization options show itself with this feature as well.
Surveys
Usetiful also allows you to create the most basic (and average-looking) in-app surveys. You can use the survey results and written feedback to enhance your onboarding and increase engagement rates.
While the tool is cheaper compared to most of its competitors, its features and services are limited accordingly.
Let’s take a look at Usetiful’s strengths and weaknesses right after we see the pricing and reviews.
What is Usetiful good for?
✅ For what it provides, Usetiful offers a user-friendly onboarding and walkthrough creation experience.
✅ Usetiful is very easy to set up and use, even for non-technical people.
What is Usetiful bad for?
❌ Usetiful’s survey implementation feature is very restrictive and difficult to use, giving users a hard time getting feedback from end-users.
❌ Although the given segmentation options are good themselves, Usetiful’s segmentation feature is limited and very incapable.
❌ Usetiful doesn’t provide lots of templates or suggestions, leaving you all the hard work of creating all flows from scratch.
Usetiful Pricing
- Free version available with only 1 tour and up to 2000 assists, which is basically the number of monthly active users.
- There is a 14-day free trial for all the paid plans but the signup requires credit card information.
- Plus Plan costs €29/month for up to 5000 assists and gives you access to the checklists, but doesn’t give you the flexibility of having a dedicated customer support manager or employee onboarding features.
- Premium Plan costs €69/month for up to 10,000 assists, and €299/month for up to 35,000 assists. This plan has better features along with a capacity of 7 team members, but still doesn’t include integrations.
- Enterprise Plan requires contact with the sales team and finally unlocks integrations.
Usetiful Reviews
👍 Pros:
‘’Usetiful is easy to set up and customize (we had to change its style to support RTL languages) and even non-techy people managed to add online tours to the web app we’re building for our nonprofit.’’
👎 Cons:
‘’Missing some more complex functionalities such as in-depth reports, feature adoption, customer surveys & feedback, extra design features and templates’’
4- Lou Assist
Lou Assist (Lou) is a SaaS product that aims to help its customers create engaging in-product experiences.
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 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
.
However, while the tool is cheaper compared to many of its competitors, its features and services are limited.
What is Userlane good for?
✅ What makes Lou the most desireable is the pricing. Compared to the user onboarding market, Lou’s pricing stands on the lower end.
✅ Lou can be viewed on mobile devices. Even major user onbaording platforms don’t offer this feature and if you have a high user base on mobile, than Lou can be a great choice.
What is Userlane bad for?
❌ Lou’s features are only surface level. If you are a sclaing company or anything higher than a sew startup, you will need in depth analytics, more detailed surveys, and customization options. Lou doesn’t provide those.
❌ If you are new to user onboarding, then Lou can’t help you much about getting started since the number of templates and guides about onboarding is limited on the platform.
Lou 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.”
5- Userlane
Userlane is also one of the solid digital adoption platforms that are suitable for creating employee and user onboarding experiences.
With a focus on employee training, Userlane provides interactive UX elements that guide users through any web software.
Although the customization and the features are limited, Userlane has all the core elements of the average user onboarding experience:
User Onboarding Guides
Userlane offers interactive product guides that you can customize as you like. The targeting and segmentation for those guides are sufficient for most but if you have complicated segments or lots of different language requirements, Userlane might not be the one for you.
Setting up Userlane guides. is easy. You simply download the browser extension, edit and adjust your tooltips and modals, and you are ready to go.
Checklists and Knowledge Base
While most user onboarding tools offer separate user onboarding checklists and knowledge bases, USerlane brings those two elements together on one launcher.
Just like any other tool, you can use these features to launch product tours. The downside of USerlane’s launcher is the fact that you can’t insert surveys and sort in it.
Data & Analytics
Userlane allows you to track how your users are doing with the onboarding material, but it doesn’t provide any advanced analytics capabilities.
You can try the other tools on the list, like UserGuiding, if you’re looking for something more advanced than basic.
What is Userlane good for?
✅ Userlane is very user-friendly so that even first-time users can set up and publish their own product engagement sequences.
✅ The same goes with the integration, it is relatively easier than most competitors.
✅ Userlane provides good customer support. They are great at coming up with quick and highly personalized solutions to all your problems whenever you have one.
What is Userlane bad for?
❌ If you value the visuality of your product, then you will be disappointed to hear that Userlane doesn’t offer the best customization options. The elements are not really customizable, and they don’t offer many templates.
❌ Userlane 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.
❌ But Userlane doesn’t provide enough integration options either. However, if you only use Zendesk, Google Analytics, Hubspot, and Salesforce, well, then you won’t be disappointed.
Userlane Pricing
Userlane offers custom pricing based on your needs and the size of your company, so you’ll need to get a demo to get a quote and give the product a try.
Userlane Reviews
👍 Pros:
“We are especially enthusiastic about the focus on supporting start-ups in their founding phase. We are benefiting from the idea to help young companies that have not the resources and opportunities to fully support their new customers yet.os.“
👎 Cons:
” The implementation was at the first time challenging us a bit but not more than the first use of any other tool. After a while, you get used to it and learn how to get the best overview of all functions and possibilities.”
6- Userflow
Userflow is a no-code onboarding service that allows you to provide your users, employees, and clients an interactive onboarding process.
Using the tool, you can create:
- Interactive walkthroughs
- Checklists
- Tooltips and hotspots
- And NPS surveys.
Userflow is known for its detailed analytics options. If you don’t want to adopt a seperate tool for analytics, and have a big budget to afford Userflow, it can be the tool you are looking for.
Userflow Pros
✅ Userflow is loved by the majority of their users, and the company is definitely easy to do business with.
Userflow has a great set of features allowing you to create complete and smooth onboarding flows for your users.
✅ Userflow’s smart segmentation and personalization feature is very useful and a great addition to the customer experience.
Userflow Cons
❌ For what it provides, Userflow is expensive and could be hard to afford for small businesses. Also, most features aren’t included in the starter package, so to fully benefit from the tool, you have to pay even more.
❌ The onboarding creator of Userflow is quite unique, which is not always a good thing. the tool can be difficult to figure out for users that are migrating from other tools.
❌ Userflow’s in-app analytics are difficult to use. The feature is almost perfect, but it is complicated and requires extra effort to figure out.
Userflow Pricing
- Free 14 day trial (no credit card required)
- Startup plan: $240/month when billed annually, includes unlimited flows, 1 checklist, and 3.000 MAU
- Pro plan: $680/month when billed annually, includes unlimited flows, surveys and NPS, and 10.000 MAU
- Enterprise plan: customized pricing, requires contact with sales
Userflow Reviews
👍 Pros:
“I like the simple way Userflow gives us to contact or guide users through complex processes and they can follow the steps to complete all the process by their own.”
👎 Cons:
“It’s kind limited due to the number of users you can track (if you’re a startup, but good for general use) and some features are very limited but it has potential.”
7- Intro.js
Intro.js is an open-source library for user onboarding that is used by big brands such as Nestle, Amazon, SAP, and more.
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:
- 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.
- 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
8- Crumble
Crumble is a jquery product tour plugin that relies on the grumble.js library.
It helps you make speech bubbles on your website to describe the product’s functionality and educate consumers.
Crumble could be quite useful for simple products or single-page websites because it doesn’t give much but also doesn’t demand much.
It is fully free to use, and it takes less time to produce than open-source alternatives.
Crumble Pricing
Crumble is free to use.
Conclusion
Tourial might be original, but this doesn’t change the fact that the value doesn’t match the price.
Don’t put all your cards on a possibility, the possibility that Tourial can get better.
There already are tools that are better, simpler, and affordable.
UserGuiding also offers free migration services for your in-app content created using other software to minimize your switching costs.
Schedule a demo with one of our experts or start your free trial now:
Don’t Pay a Fortune for Other Tools!
UserGuiding starts from only $89/month.
Create tours, tooltips, and surveys without coding
Frequently Asked Questions
Who should use Tourial?
Outbound marketing teams and software advisors can use Tourial to create interactive product demo videos.
How much does Tourial cost?
Tourial gives each customer custom quotations according to their needs.
What are the top alternatives to Tourial?
The best alternatives to Tourial are UserGuiding, Userlane, Iorad, Walnut, Wyzowl, and Crumble.
