In 2022, every online business is aware of the fact that online product experiences (aka product-led growth) are more important than ever.
So, somewhere during your search for the best user engagement and digital adoption platform search, you came across Chameleon 🦎 (I know, this is a lizard. I couldn’t find the emoji.)
Honestly, Chameleon is an amazing tool in many ways, but it is not perfect.
So here I am today to dig deep into:
- What Chameleon is,
- Why you might need to find a better Chameleon competitor,
- What the top fice Chameleon alternatives are.
If you aren’t familiar with product tour software or Chameleon, keep scrolling to read the product analysis.
But if you already know the tool, you can also go directly to the first alternative
TL;DR
- Chameleon is a digital adoption platform that helps you create interactive walkthroughs for your online products.
- The tool’s existing features are very well designed and not that difficult to use, but it also requires technical knowledge to customize and integrate the tool.
- Chameleon, however, doesn’t serve a full set of necessary advanced features – which makes it hard to justify their above-average pricing.
- The best alternative to Chameleon is UserGuiding because it is more user-friendly, offers more features, and is also more affordable.
- UserGuiding also allows you to customize your onboarding elements like Chameleon through custom CSS, but doesn’t take as long to set up.
- If you need a more comprehensive enterprise solution, you could also consider Pendo or WalkMe, but also be prepared for the enterprise-level pricing.
- Appcues and Whatfix are also considerable choices if you don’t like Chameleon.
What is Chameleon used for?
Chameleon is a digital adoption platform that stands out with how customizable the tool is.
If your product team consists of people with powerful creativity and imagination and are obsessed with achieving the exact onboarding flow, this tool is for you.
As long as you also have a spare CSS developer available.
This tool is hard to use and will take your team’s time to create something you want. But Chameleon will do you a small favor and code your elements for you ( for a price of course).
I believe this presents a problem for a rapidly growing SaaS. I would prefer to have the ability to do iterations myself without assistance to make changes more efficiently.
As for the integrations, Chameleon is a strong player. It currently has 23 different integration options with strong tools such as Google Analytics, Intercom, Slack, and more.
Another key feature of Chameleon that got my attention is the unique element called “launcher”. This feature enables you to embed self-serve product announcements and onboarding menus to your product.
Using this option, you can create fully blended and customized user experiences for upır end users – which exactly what we want for a good-quality user journey. But again, both the fact that the tool is not no-code and its price makes it difficult to love Chameleon unconditionally 🥲.
Chameleon Features
- Interactive product tours,
- Tooltips and hotspots,
- Onboarding checklists,
- Resource centers,
- NPS surveys,
- User specific analytics,
- Segmentation and personalization.
Chameleon Pricing
Chameleon has different parameters for pricing. For instance, the price can go up if you have more monthly active users, but it can also go down if you need fewer launchers and onboarding flows.
- Free trial available for 14 days
- Startup plan: $279/month for 2000 MAU, $753/month for 15.000 MAU, including 3 surveys, 3 launchers, and no A/B testing
- Growth plan: $999/month for 2000 MAU, $1949/month for 15.000 MAU, including unlimited experiences and A/B testing
- Enterprise plan: Custom quote
Chameleon Reviews
👍 Pros:
“If you have a 90-minute block of time to sit down and really dig in using all the tools, you will end up with a very pro-looking email or newsletter. As good as any you’ll see in any inbox.”
👎 Cons:
“The biggest drawback that I’ve seen with chameleon is that we use a lot of CSS selectors to get the proper element and in some circumstances write JS code to get the desired behavior.“
4 Reasons Why You Might Need a Chameleon Alternative
1- Steep Learning Curve 📉
Chameleon is great and has lots of great features. But this means that you will have to spend a lot of time figuring out all the features and how to use them most effectively one by one.
2- The Price Only Gets Higher 💸
The tool is expensive compared to most of its competitors already, and the more support you expect from the Chameleon team, the more expensive it gets. If you are a small or medium-sized business that is still trying to grow, then you had better stay away from this tool.
3- Not Non-Technical Friendly ＜.＞
The biggest strength of Chameleon is how customizable it is, right? But there is no way to use that customizability unless you know how to code. For non-technical people, the tool is not very different from all the expensive other ones.
4- Limited Features 🔎
Chameleon offers quite a bit, but it also lacks some features. For instance, the analytics of Chameleon is often a thing customers complain about. It also doesn’t support in-app resource centers yet, meaning you will have to adopt more tools to compensate for this.
Top Alternatives and Competitors of Chameleon
- UserGuiding
- Pendo
- Whatfix
- Appcues
- WalkMe
So, you’ve decided on using another tool than Chameleon to enhance your user onboarding experiences and meet the product analytics needs. Alright, let’s start with the first tool on our list:
1- UserGuiding vs Chameleon – easier and more extensive user onboarding
UserGuiding is a no-code product adoption platform that doubles down on customer and user onboarding with powerful in-app elements.
The three very significant facts that make this tool preferable are its simplicity, invaluable customer support, and innovative approach to the product.
Customer support is always there for you, collecting and sending feedback to the product team so that they can act on it to improve.
The tool is also extremely simple. No technical knowledge is required to create guides and implement them to your web product.
But if you still want to enhance the already great customization options, you can always use custom CSS to level up the design of your elements in UserGuiding.
UserGuiding’s prices are also affordable for startups and SMEs.
Unlike many other user onboarding tools, UserGuiding also allows you to create an in-app resource center that you can integrate with your existing help centers and knowledge bases, guides, checklists, and links.
This feature smooths out the onboarding process as it provides an easy and accessible window for the end user to benefit whenever they have trouble.
The best feature of UserGuiding is that it provides multiple benefits for all tiers, such as EU or USA server hosting option, bulk action selection, easy localization, material tagging for easy access, advanced no-code segmentation, and a lot more coming very soon.
UserGuiding Features
- 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.
UserGuiding Pricing
- 14-day free trial (no credit card required)
- Basic Plan: $89/month when billed annually for up to 2500 MAU
- Professional Plan: $389/month when billed annually for up to 20000 MAU with unlimited guides
- Custom Quotation Available for Larger Companies
UserGuiding Reviews
👍 Pros:
“The Predefined templates and texts that we could already publish without changing a thing. Undying help from the Support team and how they give insights into what works best and share best practices.”
👎 Cons:
“Having to monitor ourselves if something is breaking. (Wish we could add alerts or notifications if a certain guide breaks after it’s live. This possibly is in the roadmap).”
 |  | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting Price: | $89/Month | $279/Month |
| G2 Rating: | 4.7 ⭐️ | 4.4 ⭐️ |
| Interactive Walkthroughs | ✅ | ✅ |
| Tooltips | ✅ | ✅ |
| Hotspots | ✅ | ✅ |
| Onboarding Checklists | ✅ | ✅ |
| Announcement Modals/Banners | ✅ | ✅ |
| NPS Surveys | ✅ | ✅ |
| In-Product Surveys | ✅ | ✅ |
| In-App Resource Center | ✅ | Coming soon |
| Avg. Deployment Time | 15 Minutes | 1-2 hours (Without Customization) |
| User Segmentation | ✅ | ✅ |
| User Analytics | ✅ | ✅ |
| Multi-Language Support | ✅ | ✅ |
| User Tracking | ✅ | ❌ |
| Knowledge Base Integration | ✅ | ✅ |
| Learning Curve | 🙂 Smooth | 🙁 Steep |
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- Chameleon vs Pendo – more advanced analytics solution
Pendo is not only a user onboarding software, but also an overall customer experience platform.
Using Pendo, you can improve your overall user experience with various onboarding elements and adjust your product for growth.
You can create funnels, for instance, to oversee which users using particular features also use another specific feature. They offer many analytics widgets, e.g., the Product Adoption Chart widget, helping you compare the overall clicks in your products vs. clicks a particular feature gets.
User onboarding, in-app training, user surveys, and analytics; Pendo has all that Chameleon lacks.
But in terms of onboarding, Chameleon does a better job.
Pendo Features
- Interactive Product Tours,
- Tooltips and Hotspots,
- User Onboarding Checklists,
- NPS Surveys,
- Easy Localization,
- Custom user segments,
- Advanced integrations.
Pendo Pricing
Pendo’s pricing is feature and usage-based, and it possibly scales with how many users you have, like other analytics platforms.
Pendo has a free plan called “Pendo Free“. Pendo free allows up to 1,000 monthly active users for one web and one mobile app. For bigger plans, Pendo doesn’t have set pricing.
However, various Pendo users revealed the details of Pendo’s pricing. One user claimed that they are a medium-sized business that pays $12,000/year for the standard package of Pendo, while another user upped this number to $20,000. Additionally, a Pendo customer claims to pay $2000/year just for the “Guides” feature of the product; so, you get the picture.
Pendo Reviews
👍 Pros:
“Been using Pendo for 2 years. It’s a great tool specifically for guides and capturing user feedback. There are some limitations to what you can do with guides but all in all, it’s easy and pretty flexible.”
👍 Cons:
“Agree with everyone else commenting that the set up is painful… So is the overall management. If you make changes to your site frequently, you will have to change tags to match your updates, keep in mind that is pretty much standard with most applications like this.”
3- Chameleon vs Appcues – less analytics, more onboarding
Appcues is the inventor of many UI elements that we actively use in onboarding today, checklists, etc. So they’re trusted among bigger-sized companies.
Appcues has a history, but they’re seemingly suffering from feature bloat, making even the simplest features complex.
Before its foundation, high technical knowledge was a requirement for building an ordinary onboarding guide. This tool has broken the rules by offering a no-code onboarding product to the world.
And it is doing a good job.
If you can afford and implement it, though.
Appcues Features
- Interactive Product Tours,
- Tooltips and Hotspots,
- User Onboarding Checklists,
- Resource Centers,
- NPS Surveys,
- Easy Localization,
- Advanced Analytics with User Activity Feed,
- Custom user segments,
- Advanced integrations.
Appcues Pricing
- The Essentials Package of Appcues starts at $249/month when billed annually with 2500 MAU.
- The Growth Package of Appcues starts at $879/month when billed annually, again at 2500 MAU.
- The Enterprise Package of Appcues doesn’t have public pricing, so you need to get a custom quotation.
Appcues Reviews
👍 Pros:
“Appcues makes our work much easier and helps us connect in a better way with our users. I highly recommend working with Appcues.”
👍 Cons:
“This has led to some frustrating moments or awkward presentations where I’ve struggled to get the app to behave. Overall, this hasn’t been a large blocker to seeing success with the app.”
4- Chameleon vs Whatfix – simpler analytics, capable employee training
Whatfix is an in-app guidance tool used to onboard new users and to increase the retention of the existing ones.
Whatfix is functionally more similar to WalkMe than Appcues.
The product offers in-app guidance and performance support. The target segment of this tool is mostly enterprise companies.
You can create goal-based walkthroughs, it allows you to guide your users with a step-by-step onboarding experience without any coding effort.
Whatfix specializes in segmentation and personalization, so if that is what you are looking for, Whatfix can be your to-go choice.
Whatfix Features
- Interactive guides,
- Tooltips and Announcement banners,
- NPS surveys (Beta),
- Resource centers,
- Checklists,
- Segmentation,
- Analytics.
Whatfix Pricing
Whatfix doesn’t provide us with a fixed price, they offer each customer a customized plan. The pricing can vary according to the size of your product, the number of your monthly users, etc.
According to reviews, plans for smaller businesses can go as low as $1000/year with access to all features, and it won’t get to five figures unless you’re a large corporation with many users/employees.
Whatfix Reviews
👍 Pros:
“Best value I found when researching for a product like this. Also the service can not be beat.”
👍 Cons:
“Setting up analytics is a little difficult and an added step to check.”
5- Chameleon vs WalkMe – similar features with more enterprise capabilities
WalkMe is a product that has been on the market for over 10 years.
If you are an enterprise with a high budget for a perfect onboarding process, WalkMe might be the change you are searching for.
The tool has over ten years of experience in being a good digital adoption platform. It guarantees to enhance user experience through in-app guidance.
Most of the key features of WalkMe are similar to Whatfix, but as for perfection and pricing, WalkMe takes the lead.
However, if you are a small startup yet, it would be better if you stood away from WalkMe. It requires quite a bit of technical knowledge, and might not be affordable for your business.
And again, WalkMe is definitely not a code-free tool, and it will late a lot of time and effort to get the tool up and running.
WalkMe Features
- Interactive Product Tours,
- Resource Centers,
- NPS Surveys,
- Easy Localization,
- Advanced Analytics,
- Custom user segments,
- Advanced integrations.
WalkMe Pricing
WalkMe doesn’t have public pricing, but most of its users agree on pricing plans that vastly change in the 5-figure range. The average pricing for the small teams seems to be around $10,000/year, but since WalkMe is an enterprise solution that specializes as a DAP for large organizations, you might have to multiply the alleged numbers.
WalkMe Reviews
👍 Pros:
“It’s a great tool for new users in understanding not only Salesforce but company customization in salesforce.”
👍 Cons:
“Sometimes things that were built will randomly stop working. This is typical with most software but can be annoying.”
Chameleon Alternatives Comparison Table
Frequently Asked Questions
What are the best alternatives to Chameleon’?
The best alternatives to Chameleon are UserGuiding, Appcues, WalkMe, Pendo, and Whatfix.
What tools have Chameleon integrations?
Chameleon has integrations with over 20 tools, including Slack, Google Analytics, and Intercom.
