User Onboarding: Definition, Best Practices, Common Mistakes, Examples

What is user onboarding?

There are lots of definitions of user onboarding that are flying around the internet.

Our favorite?

User onboarding is customer education. You are educating your customer in how to get value from your product.

• For Adobe, this means empowering businesses with content and design tools.
• For Slack, this means letting teams communicate internally.
• For Trello, this means giving companies a free, easy way to manage projects.
• For Canva, this means offering creatives a way to create graphics without being a designer. 

Counter-intuitively, this isn't the same as teaching users how to use your product. Someone can understand how to use a product, but not get value from it.

It's also not exactly the same as product onboarding, although the two terms are very close.

• User onboarding: showing users how to get value from your product. You're focused on the needs of the users. 
• Product onboarding: showing users how to use your product. You're focused on the macro-systems and tech inside your product that lets you onboard people. 

Mobile app onboarding vs desktop onboarding

User onboarding varies according to which device you're using to onboard them. 

This is largely a function of screen size.

If you onboard a user on desktop, you have enough room on the screen to include a modal, but also retain some of what the user was doing before the onboarding started.

But if your user is on their phone, your onboarding modal will take up literally the whole screen.

This means that you have to be much more careful about onboarding on mobile than you do on desktop. 

On mobile, there's more of a risk of annoying users by diverting them from what they wanted to do towards your onboarding.

So it's doubly important to include elements like an X or a button saying "close," so that users who don't want to go through onboarding can opt out.

Why is user onboarding important?

Tech influencer Nikita Bier recently sparked a controversy when he published this tweet claiming that onboarding is a waste of time:

On his podcast, The Bootstrapped Founder, Arvid Kahl was quick to refute Nikita's perspective, describing the idea to omit a product tour as a "big mistake."

"The people who really need your product, well, they're not necessarily the same group of people who might use a product casually. Power users have very specific needs that are not the same as everybody else's."

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a company that specializes in user onboarding, our perspective is much closer to Arvid's than to Nikita's.

Onboarding is valuable in lots of different contexts, but especially in industries where users aren't especially tech-savvy and need guidance. 

For example, our 2024 report on Product Adoption and User Onboarding Trends found that onboarding was most used by companies in FinTech, HRTech and PropTech – none of which are industries that are particularly tech-heavy.

Let's look at some reasons why user onboarding is valuable.

1. User onboarding can significantly boost retention

The vast majority of SaaS companies have a huge problem with retaining users for even 24 hours. 

That's because it's not always clear how to get value from a new product, and consumers are pickier and more ready to churn than ever before.

Research from Wyzowl suggests that as many as 8 in 10 users have deleted an app because they didn't know how to use it. 

How do you stem the tide of churn? The data suggests that the answer is user onboarding.

Research by Paddle found a correlation between the perceived quality of a user's onboarding experience and their retention rate:

As many as 86% of people say they'd be more likely to remain loyal to a business that produces content to welcome and educate them after they start paying for it. 

2. User onboarding lowers your acquisition costs

Did you know that it costs businesses between 5-25x more to acquire a new customer than it does to retain an existing one? 

This statistic reveals a counter-intuitive truth.

If you want to expand your business, it might be better to try to retain or upsell an existing customer, rather than spend money on outbound marketing campaigns to find new ones.

And, as we argued above, the best way to boost retention is to improve your user onboarding.

Totally the opposite of how most business owners focus on bringing in new customers if they want to grow their company. 

3. User onboarding helps users achieve their goals more quickly

When each user comes to your product, they have a particular goal in mind.

For example, someone coming to Wordpress likely wants to build a website, or manage an existing website.

Let's imagine that it's a new Wordpress user who is setting up a site for the first time.

As Wordpress, you are incentivized to help users reach their product goals as quickly and seamlessly as possibly. 

The technical term for this is reducing Time to Value: the amount of time between sign-up and when a customer experiences value from your product for the first time.

It stands to reason that businesses that use onboarding elements like product tours, tooltips and hotspots to explain how to get value from their product will take their users to value faster than those that don't. 

4. User onboarding helps you gather valuable insights to improve your product

Companies that understand the value of onboarding know that it's a rich source of customer data. For example:

• You can learn a customer's first name during the sign-up phase, and then use it repeatedly to personalize their experience
• You can learn why a user wants to adopt your product during the welcome screen phase when you ask them segmentation questions
• Onboarding software like UserGuiding can show you which product features are being used more, or less, by which customer segments
• By learning where users are dropping off in your onboarding flows, you can learn which parts of your product experience are unintuitive

All of these learnings create lessons that your UX designers can use to improve your overall product experience.

For example, if you know which product features an individual user has come for, you can give them a product tour that addresses those very same features – rather than focusing on features they don't care about. 

5. User onboarding enables sustainable product growth

Put all these factors together, and we can see that user onboarding:

• Boosts retention
• Lowers acquisition costs
• Reduces Time to Value
• And provides rich data to help you improve UX

All these factors correlate with becoming a company that acquires users affordably, retains them for a long time, and offers them an intuitive path to value – and constantly uses data to improve all of those elements.

This translates into an increase in revenue, an increase in profitability, and sustainable product growth.

Types of User Onboarding

Depending on to what extent the user is an active participant in the process, user onboarding can be:

• Passive: in the sense that the user is simply observing onboarding materials that have been created for them, without having to take any action; or
• Active: in the sense that the onboarding only functions if the user participates actively in the process, normally by using parts of the product.

These don't have to be mutually exclusive. Onboarding processes can include a mixture of both active and passive elements.

Let's explore this distinction in more detail. 

Passive Onboarding

Passive onboarding is normally associated with having users watch onboarding videos.

These videos commonly include:

• A friendly welcome
• A quick overview of what the product does
• Some suggestions for next steps

Sometimes, companies create videos that walk users through how to use their product, step by step. 

Such videos are a bit closer to active onboarding, but they're still ultimately passive, since the user is under no obligation to take action in order to watch the next video.

The advantage of passive onboarding is that it's stress-free and low-commitment for the user.

There is certainly some value in that: 97% of people think that video can be an effective tool to educate new customers. 

The disadvantage is that it's not as educational as actually going through the motions of trying the product for yourself. 

Active Onboarding

Active onboarding can be facilitated by tech, or by an account manager on your team.

In the traditional, in-person model of onboarding, your account manager will walk your new users through how to get value out of the product.

This is similar to a sales demo, but less focused on selling and more focused on answering any questions the user has, so as to set them up for success.

These types of onboarding calls are often 1-to-1, but they can also sometimes involve an entire team or department. It really depends on how many people at your customer's company are going to use your product.

Calls with account managers are a type of active onboarding, because they require your customer to schedule a call and actively ask questions and engage.

More recently, companies have been discovering that it's cheaper and more scalable to have their onboarding tech deliver an active onboarding experience to their customers.

Onboarding like this is typically referred to as an interactive walkthrough, because it walks your customer through how to use your product, step by step. 

For example, you might deliver your customer a checklist that contains all the key tasks they need to activate:

And then walk them through each task with a mixture of tooltips and hotspots.

The next step in the walkthrough should only appear once the user has finished the previous step.

This ensures that the user remains an active participant in the process. 

Let's dive deeper into the individual parts of an automated onboarding walkthrough and discuss:

What are the Elements of User Onboarding?

Welcome messages

Your user onboarding should begin with a welcome message like this:

Just as it's important to get the first impression right when you meet someone for the first time in real life, it's also important that your product makes a good first impression digitally. 

A good welcome message should:

• Contain a smiley photo of someone on your team, ideally someone in a customer-facing role
• Greet the user by their first name – something you should have learned during the sign-up flow
• Briefly reiterate what your product does and why it's valuable
• Contain an X button or some other way that users can close it, if desired

Welcome surveys

The welcome survey comes right after the initial welcome message.

This is your chance to ask your new user a few simple questions to work out why they came to your product, so that you can customize the rest of their product onboarding experience accordingly.

Look how Shopify does it:

By asking users where they want to sell, they can ensure that they customize the user experience so that this user can learn about the marketing channels that make the most sense to their business. 

Common questions you can ask your users at this stage include:

• What is your role?
• Which product features are you most interested in?
• What are your goals from using our product?

Feel free to take these and adapt them to your particular use case.

Onboarding emails

Another common way to onboard new users is to send them onboarding emails.

Watch this video to discover how Wes Bush from ProductLed recommends that you do that:

To summarize:

• Send a welcome email to welcome your new users to your product and the community around it.
• Send case study emails to show how current customers are getting value out of your product. This leverages social proof and might also give your new customer some inspiration for how they can use your product.
• Send expiry warning emails towards the end of your trial period to warn customers about what they're losing by not subscribing.

Onboarding checklists and progress bars

Directly after the welcome survey, it's common to give your new user a checklist that contains some tasks they need to work through.

This is what our onboarding checklist looks like here at UserGuiding:

Note that:

• The last item in the checklist is to create your first guide. This is intentional. Creating a guide is what leads our users to activate. So by putting that activation milestone in our checklist, we increase the odds of a user activating.
• There's a progress marker telling the user they're 25% of the way done with the checklist.

Both the checklist and the progress bar harness a psychological phenomenon called the Zeigarnik effect.

This posits that people are more likely to remember incomplete tasks than complete ones.

So by presenting users with a checklist and telling them how much they still have left to complete, you can increase the chances of them finishing all of the checklist items. 

Onboarding tooltips

Tooltips are perhaps one of the most versatile onboarding elements.

They consist of a small text box, often with an arrow or a line that connects the text to the feature it's describing.

Here's how Zendesk uses a tooltip to highlight that agents can answer messages from everywhere:

Conversational tools

An important part of onboarding is giving users ways to contact your team if (read: when) they get stuck.

Classically, this includes ways to reach you by:

• Email
• Phone
• Online chat

In some instances, users can also benefit from talking to a chatbot, which you've had crawl your help docs so that it can answer simple questions.

Intercom's chatbots are particularly well-regarded within the industry:

Self-service resources

Increasingly, businesses are moving away from connecting users to support agents and more towards empowering users to answer their own questions. 

There are a number of different self-service resources that you can provide to this end.

For example, a knowledge base is a repository of all your help resources, often structured by individual questions or topic areas, that lives on a designated page of your website:

And a resource center is a widget that lives in your app that customers can use to pull up resources from the knowledge base, right in the context in which they need those resources:

The value of self-service support resources over support agents is:

• You don't have to pay as many support agents
• You empower users to answer their own questions
• Self-service support is often faster than waiting in a queue to speak with an agent

Templated content

From a user's perspective, it's not especially engaging to sign up for a new product and then be greeted by an empty state, like this:

Feels more like a ghost town than a thriving community, right?

And how is the user supposed to know what to do from here, or how your platform will look once they've added some of their content or data?

The onboarding element that solves this problem is called templated content.

Here, you give your users a template that shows how your platform could potentially look once they start using it properly.

In some cases, users can also modify existing templates to start using your product more quickly than if they would have to create everything from scratch. 

Push notifications

Are you onboarding your users on a mobile phone?

In that case, your onboarding process won't be complete without sending them push notifications. 

Push notifications can be used to:

• Welcome new users
• Send one-time passwords so that users can log in or verify their new account
• Remind new users that their trial is about to expire
• Boost engagement by making the community part of your app more visible
• Prompt users to use a primary product feature so they can complete activation

‍Just make sure you ask your user for permission to send them a push notification before you pull the trigger! You don't want to get into any trouble.

Triggers

So you've created a bunch of onboarding elements, but how do you know when they will show up?

That's where onboarding triggers come in.

Triggers can be related to:

• User behavior, such as clicking, hovering, or exiting a page
• Session time, such as how long a user has been on a page or how long something has been loading

They can also be hard-built into a page, like this CTA button from Calendly:

To summarize:

• Welcome messages are used to greet new users and make them feel comfortable
• Welcome surveys are used to get access to segmentation data
• Onboarding emails are used to welcome users and show them success stories
• Onboarding checklists are used to nudge new users towards activation
• Tooltips are versatile, and can be used to highlight any one feature
• It's wise to allow users to contact you by phone, email, and online chat
• It's even wiser to let them solve their own problems using self-serve support like a knowledge base and a resource center
• Templated content prevents users from experiencing the friction of an empty state when they first sign up
• Push notifications are a versatile and essential part of mobile onboarding
• Triggers determine when your onboarding elements are shown to users

Now that you know all that, let's move on and discuss some best practices.

6. Best User Onboarding Best Practices that Maximize Retention

1. Know that user onboarding starts with the first interaction

Remember our definition of onboarding as educating users on how to get value from your product?

Well, product education is something that should be present over the entire customer lifecycle: from the moment someone first hears about you to the moment they churn.

So just because we associate onboarding with in-app onboarding flows and in-app product experiences, it doesn't mean that onboarding is constrained to what happens after a user signs up for your product.

On the contrary: onboarding begins with the very first interaction a potential customer has with your brand.

This could be:

• On social media
• An ad
• An email on someone else's newsletter
• When they first Google your brand after hearing about you from a friend

So think about those interactions – about what sort of impression you want to leave and what you want people to learn about your product in those moments.

Look at this example from Mailchimp:

They spell out the value of part of their product in this ad incredibly clearly. 

2. Work towards the Aha Moment and activation

Two commonly misunderstood terms in the world of onboarding are the Aha Moment and activation.

• Aha Moment: when a user realizes on an emotional level that your product could potentially be valuable for them.
• Activation: when a user actually experiences value from your product for the first time, often by using the feature that's most important to their use case

The Aha Moment always precedes activation. 

These are both incredibly important milestones in a user's onboarding journey. Hitting both is strongly correlated with retention.

So it follows that you should:

• Figure out what constitutes the Aha Moment and activation for each user segment, and
• Intentionally lead users towards both milestones in your onboarding

You can figure out what these milestones are by:

• Conducting customer development interviews with users
• Listening to what your salespeople say are the most common reasons users come to your product
• Observing user behavior and seeing which product milestones correlate the most highly with retention
• Developing a hypothesis as to what these milestones are, and testing if reaching those milestones more consistently boosts retention

Once you know what the Aha Moment is, you can refer to it on your landing pages, in your marketing copy, in social media posts, in your sign-up flow and at the start of your welcome flow.

For example, Clearbit does this nicely at the top of their homepage:

As for activation, it's normally the last step of the onboarding checklist you give your new users.

That way, users who complete the onboarding checklist will activate, by default.

Look how Coinbase does this:

The platform clearly lays out the steps required to fund an account, with buying crypto for the first time being a sure sign that a user has activated.

3. Make the experience as personalized as possible

One of the biggest mistakes we see companies making in their onboarding is when they create generic product tours that try to be all things to all people.

A product tour is generic when it gives exactly the experience to every single user, regardless of that user's needs.

‍Why is this a bad thing? Let's use Asana as an example.

If you're an employee using Asana, you might not care too much about how to create Asana boards and populate them with tasks. You just care about executing your own tasks.

But if you're a project manager, creating new boards and tasks is literally your job. 

So giving the same product tour to both these users makes no sense at all.

To customize your onboarding to each user, do the following:

• Ask segmentation questions in your welcome survey, and use something like UserGuiding to automatically assign users to a segment based on their answers
• Customize which type of Aha Moment and activation point you lead users to
• Customize language according to the user's location
• Only show tooltips that highlight features that a user's segment is interested in
• Customize the onboarding flow by the device the customer is using, for example by ensuring that you replace hover elements from desktop with the ability to tap on an element on mobile
• Give users a product tour that matches their level of knowledge about your industry. They can always take a more advanced tour later once they've learned more

Here's a really simple example of personalization from Revolut:

Revolut realizes that large corporations, freelancers and employees use their product in completely different ways.

So they get users to choose at the beginning of the process which segment they belong to, and then customize the rest of the journey accordingly.

4. Adopt the perspective of “less is more” 

There's a strange psychological phenomenon called the paradox of choice.

This states that we get overwhelmed by too many choices, to the point that we are likely to freeze up and not make any choice at all.

It's a counter-intuitive idea, because you would think that humans like the freedom of being able to choose. But the science says that this is true only up to a point. 

How can you leverage this in your onboarding?

• Focus only on the features that matter most to a given segment
• Include only one CTA button on each modal within your onboarding flow
• Don't give users more than 3-4 possible options to choose from with each segmentation question in your welcome survey
• Limit your onboarding checklist to 3-5 items that should take a maximum of half an hour to complete, like Jasper did in this example:

5. Leverage social proof and testimonials

Humans are a social species, and so nothing elicits trust quite as much as knowing that someone else values the thing that you're about to use.

Especially if that someone else is:

• Someone famous, like Jeff Bezos
• Someone in your industry
• Someone with a high degree of seniority, like a head of marketing

You can use this to your advantage by peppering your onboarding with quotes and testimonials from people who have got value from it.

Some good places for social proof are:

• Landing pages
• Your welcome screen
• Onboarding videos

Here's how Lucid added social proof to their signup page:

6. Speak to users' fear of loss 

All of us have an aversion to losing what we already have.

The negative feelings associated with losing something we already have are actually much stronger than the positive feelings associated with achieving something new.

This is depicted nicely in the following graph:

You can tap into loss aversion in your onboarding by emphasizing what users would lose, as opposed to what they would gain.

For example, you could ask users to complete their profile with personal information so that they don't lose out on personalized recommendations.

This is more persuasive than simply speaking to the benefits of filling out their profile. 

Look how Klook leverages loss aversion in this example:

The user is filled with a sense that they might be missing out on various attractions in Singapore.

To recap our list of onboarding best practices:

• Remember that onboarding begins from the very first interaction a user has with your brand
• Work out what the Aha Moment and activation are for each user segment, and nudge users towards those milestones using onboarding
• Segment users with the welcome survey, and customize their entire product experience based on their preferences
• Don't overload users with product information. Give them as little guidance as they need in order to get value
• Sprinkle social proof across all your onboarding materials
• Use your copy to emphasize what users will lose by not taking action, rather than what they will gain

Now that you know what to do in your user onboarding, let's talk about what NOT to do!

What to avoid in your user onboarding

Don't force users to confirm their email address

Do you require your users to confirm their email address before they can use your product?

Many SaaS apps do this, ostensibly for security purposes.

But have you considered that you might be losing out on a double-digit percentage of users?

That's what Snappa learned by sending this email:

Astonishingly, as many as 27% of all sign-ups never confirmed their email address!

It follows that omitting this email confirmation step entirely is a good idea to boost the number of users who onboard successfully. 

Remove sign-up friction

Picture the scene:

You're excited to use a new platform your friends have been raving about.

You open the home page, click "Start Now," and then you see a form that looks something like this:

You feel frustrated.

All you wanted to do was log in and use this shiny new product! And now some idiot puts this massive form in your way! 

To avoid this fate, here are a few things you can do to reduce sign-up friction in your app:

• Keep the number of fields to a minimum
• If you can ask any questions during the welcome screen flow instead of the signup flow, do that
• Allow users to sign up in one click using Google or Facebook
• Never ask for the same piece of information (eg email address) more than once
• Don't require a certain number of characters in a password
• Avoid two-factor authentication (2FA)
• Don't require users to add a card so that they can go through your sign-up process and use your free trial

Important caveat, before we go any further:

There are some industries where a certain amount of sign-up friction is necessary. Perhaps you have a legal app that's taking details from users about an upcoming legal case, for example.

In situations like this, the more detail, the better. And, yes, detail creates user friction. But in most situations, leaning towards reducing sign-up friction will serve you well.

Don’t send too many nagging onboarding emails

We previously mentioned the value of sending onboarding emails, including welcome emails, case study emails and expiry warning emails.

But it's possible to overdo this.

I won't name any names, but I recently signed up for a trial for an app. The trial was 2 weeks long, and I swear I received an expiry warning email every second day for the entire trial period, telling me about all the benefits I was missing out on.

It proved to be more annoying than it was helpful.

So it's a balance: you want to send onboarding emails to a sufficient degree to nudge users towards value, but not so many that you alienate them.

Don’t assume that the user knows everything

It's easy to fall into the trap of assuming that your users know as much about your industry as you do, and what's obvious to you is just as obvious to them.

But this is not always the case.

Very often, users seek out experts and products precisely because they lack the skills and abilities that those other people provide.

So don't be afraid to really spell out exactly what your product does, step by step.

This also applies to UX design.

Of course you know where your main features are in your UI! You designed the product, after all!

‍But that doesn't mean that it's obvious to your users. 

This is precisely why we advocate taking users by the hand and walking them through your product, step by step, while they learn the ropes.

Don’t assume that you know everything

I remember reading years ago on Steve Blank's blog that as many as half of entrepreneurs fail because they fall in love with their own product vision, rather than creating something that people actually want to use.

And there are similar ego traps in onboarding, as well. For example:

• You might assume that you know exactly which features of your product people are going to find the most valuable
• You might assume that you know which features each segment will be drawn to
• You might assume that you know which factors to segment your audience by
• You might assume that your onboarding system is so unique that no third-party tool could possibly support it, and the only people who could ever build it are your in-house developers

All of these statements are classic examples of entrepreneurial hubris.

It's difficult being an entrepreneur. You have to believe in your vision enough to be able to advocate for it, but not so rigidly that you're not open to feedback, rejection or being wrong.

There's a lot to be said for developing humility and learning to pivot as you go, rather than assuming you'll understand everything perfectly the first time.

If you want to develop entrepreneurial humility, I strongly recommend Y Combinator's Youtube channel. They have tons of videos created by leaders who learned these lessons the hard way – often by losing millions of dollars.

Don’t leave the user alone with interactive guides and AI

Automated product walkthroughs are amazing.

They show users the best way to get value out of your product, in a way that's completely tailored to the needs of individual users, without you ever having to speak to the users directly!

Clearly, we're advocates of this technology – we are an onboarding app, after all 🙂

But…

Just because you don't HAVE to speak to customers doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it!

From your customer's perspective, there's a lot to be said for knowing that:

• They have a dedicated account manager who's there at the drop of a hat
• They can write messages to your support team when they get stuck 
• Your team is staffed by real people who genuinely care and want to ensure they have the best product experience

AI chatbots are a good way for customers to get answers to simple questions, but they can't give users that gooey feeling of "this business really cares about me."At least… not yet!To recap the things you should avoid in your onboarding:

• Don't force users to confirm their email address just so they can use your product
• Remove sign-up friction by keeping the sign-up flow as short and sweet as possible
• Don't harass your users by sending them onboarding emails every day
• Don't assume that your users know as much about your product and industry as you do
• Don't assume that you know exactly what your users want from your product
• Don't neglect in-person support options like phone or online chat completely

Examples of great user onboarding

Straico

Straico is a generative AI platform that gathers multiple AI models in one place, eliminating the need to switch between platforms. 

Their onboarding begins with a welcome screen that leads into a product tour that highlights key features:

Along the way, they throw in numerous modals to boost engagement. Here's one explaining how to get more coins:

If users get stuck, they can consult the in-app help widget, which looks like this:

And Straico are constantly asking users for feedback so that they can improve their onboarding processes. One way that they do this is through in-app surveys. Here's an example question:

What makes this a great user onboarding example:

• Welcome screen that nails the value proposition
• Light humour and gamification in the modal about coins
• The in-app help widget has a progress tracker feature that shows how much of a particular help document users have already read
• Easy to fill out, multiple-choice survey that doesn't require much thought

HeyGen

HeyGen is an AI video platform that lets you turn text into videos. This means that you can effectively create an AI avatar to act as your company spokesperson. 

Rather than throwing you into the deep end with an empty state, the HeyGen onboarding experience starts with some demo content so that you can see what their AI videos look like (pictured here on the right):

Their UI prompts you to pick an avatar, which is both playful and also tied to the company's value proposition. Ultimately, this avatar will be the public face of your company. 

The UI clearly explains how avatars can either be public, or generated by you on the basis of a real person:

If you get lost, HeyGen's onboarding checklist is visually appealing and easy to follow:

What makes this a great user onboarding example:

• Replacing an empty state with templated content
• Having lots of avatar options to choose from gives a personalized feel
• Unusual onboarding checklist that's structured horizontally, rather than vertically
• Note also how the "Getting started" menu is easily accessible at any time in the left navigation

Opinew

Opinew is a Shopify app that lets you import reviews from third-party platforms like Amazon and eBay and display them on your storefront. 

Opinew's onboarding is innovative in that they have separate guides for separate parts of their platform, rather than one longer, more generic product tour.

Here's the welcome screen at the start of the Aliexpress import part of their product, for example:

Note how the UI gives users multiple options for importing the reviews for AliExpress, so users can customize the process to their own preferences.

Here's a gif showcasing the import process for Amazon reviews:

Watch carefully as the guide walks the user through each step of the process, highlighting the part of the UI that the user needs to focus on at every stage.

Even soliciting reviews by email has its own dedicated guide:

What makes this a great user onboarding example:

• Each feature has its own guide
• Multiple button options allow for personalization
• Informative welcome screen
• Note in the soliciting reviews by email example how a checklist brings everything together and summarizes what the user needs to do

Best User Onboarding Tools

It's possible to build your own onboarding architecture in-house.

The advantage of this is that it gives you 100% control over the process, the feel of the UX and the timeline to build everything.

But this comes at a big cost: developer hours. As you know, developers are not exactly cheap. And the more hours they spend on your onboarding, the less time they have for your core product.

So as well as the cost of your developers, there's the opportunity cost of NOT building your product to factor in as well.

For this reason, we recommend using one or more of the following industry-leading tools to create your onboarding.

In-app user onboarding tools

UserGuiding: the in-product onboarding tool

UserGuiding is an intuitive, no-code digital adoption solution designed to enhance in-app user experiences and accelerate product adoption.

It operates through a Chrome extension that allows you to create various user onboarding elements directly within your product interface, all without writing any code.

Tailored to user onboarding

UserGuiding offers a range of features that make it easy to create seamless user onboarding flows. For example, you can add resource centers, in-app surveys, and product update sections directly within your app. 

This ensures that your customers have access to helpful self-service support materials and can stay up-to-date with product changes without ever leaving the platform. Additionally, you can gather customer feedback about specific product features through in-app messages, helping to improve your product and user experience.

You can also create tooltips, hotspots and checklists to guide users through their onboarding experience with a walkthrough.  

Easy implementation

UserGuiding is incredibly user-friendly and quick to set up.

Simply install the Chrome extension and add a small snippet of code to your website. After that, even non-technical users can create onboarding guides in minutes, with no need for developer assistance.

Here’s a review from a G2 user that proves just how easy UserGuiding is to implement: 

Behavioral Analytics

UserGuiding provides comprehensive analytics that offer deep insights into user in-app behavior.

For example, you can set specific actions as goals and track how users or segments of users interact with them. With these insights, you can filter results by user type, segment, or even by company, allowing for highly granular tracking. 

For example, you could ask: "How many French users who onboarded before November 2024 finished the product tour?"

Additionally, if you want to understand why some users haven't completed a specific guide or feature, you can easily follow up with a qualitative in-app survey to get more detail.

Pricing

UserGuiding offers flexible pricing based on your Monthly Active Users (MAUs). For example, with 1,000 MAUs, the Basic Plan is priced at $69 per month (billed annually), and the Professional Plan costs $199 per month.

Grab a free UserGuiding trial today and see for yourself!

Appcues

Founded in 2013, Appcues is one of the most well-established user onboarding platforms on the market.

Appcues empowers non-technical product managers to easily create key onboarding elements with minimal coding required. Some of its standout features include:

• Guides
• Interactive Product Tours
• Tooltips
• Hotspots
• Checklists

What truly sets Appcues apart, however, is its robust analytics capabilities.

The Event Explorer feature allows you to track user events and build custom dashboards based on specific segments. This makes it easy to see how different groups are engaging with your product. However, it’s important to note that Appcues’ analytics are more geared towards individual user tracking rather than company-level insights.

Appcues is also unusual in that it offers no-code mobile onboarding, as well as desktop onboarding. Not many competitors do this, so if you're looking to create onboarding for a mobile app, Appcues could be the right fit for you.

One area where Appcues falls short is the lack of resource centers and a product updates page — features that can be key for some product teams.

As far as pricing goes, Appcues uses a sliding scale based on your Monthly Active Users (MAUs). Pricing starts at $279 per month (billed annually), with custom pricing available for enterprises with more complex needs.

Userpilot

Userpilot is a user onboarding and product analytics tool tailored for mid-market SaaS companies looking to enhance user engagement and optimize their product experiences.

Userpilot has long been known for its powerful user onboarding capabilities, including hotspots, tooltips, and modals. While the tool requires a developer to install the initial code snippet, once that’s done, most of the user interface elements can be easily customized without any coding knowledge, which is a huge benefit for teams with limited development resources.

That said, more advanced customizations, particularly for complex UI changes, may still require some CSS expertise.

In recent years, Userpilot has significantly enhanced its product analytics features, addressing a gap that previously set it apart from competitors. Userpilot now gives you valuable insights into which features are being used the most and which user segments are engaging with them. It also tracks where users drop off in the feature flow, offering a deeper understanding of where friction occurs in the onboarding journey.

Additionally, if you want to understand why certain user segments favor specific features, you can use Userpilot’s in-app survey feature to gather direct feedback from your customers, helping you uncover insights that drive product improvements.

Although Userpilot offers a wide range of useful features, it’s important to note that it’s not designed for employee engagement, so if that’s your use case, it may not be the best fit. Furthermore, some users find the platform less intuitive compared to other solutions, such as UserGuiding. The steeper learning curve is a common point of feedback in reviews.

Another limitation is that Userpilot lacks a dedicated product updates page and in-app announcements. While modals can be used as a workaround for announcements, it doesn’t offer a built-in announcement feature that’s as seamless as some competitors.

Userpilot offers a pricing plan starting at $249 per month (billed annually), which covers up to 2,000 Monthly Active Users (MAUs).

DIY Javascript tools

Intro.js

Intro.js is an open-source JavaScript library designed for creating simple yet effective product tours. It offers a clean, easy-to-use solution for creating customized onboarding experiences. You can design tours for your entire product or for specific features, with complete control over their appearance and behavior.

While it doesn’t come with a host of extra features, it does what it promises very well. The tours are highly customizable and secure, making them a popular choice for teams who want a no-frills, reliable way to introduce users to their product.

Notable brands like Nestle, Amazon, and SAP use Intro.js, which speaks to its reliability and effectiveness.

While Intro.js is a fantastic solution for teams on a budget, it does have some limitations. The tool requires a developer to implement and maintain, which means even though the library itself is affordable, you’ll still need resources for setup and ongoing customization.

For smaller teams, this can become a hidden cost — not just in terms of development time, but also the opportunity cost of diverting resources from your core product to focus on user onboarding.

Info.js is free for open-source, personal, and non-commercial use. For commercial use, prices range from $9.99 for a single-site license to $299.99 for unlimited sites and premium support.

Shepherd.js

Shepherd.js is an open-source JavaScript library that offers an affordable yet powerful solution for creating product tours. It's perfect for teams that need a robust onboarding tool but don't have the budget for premium platforms like Appcues or Userpilot.

Shepherd.js allows you to create highly customizable product tours, giving you full control over the user experience. You can define steps, add text, buttons, and style the tours to align with your brand’s aesthetic.

As an open-source library, Shepherd.js is designed to be lightweight and easy to integrate into your existing application. Developers appreciate the flexibility to modify and extend the code to meet their specific needs, making this an ideal choice for teams that prefer to build tailored solutions in-house.

Being open-source, Shepherd.js benefits from a thriving community of contributors. This means you can tap into community-driven plugins, extensions, and troubleshooting resources. However, it's important to note that while community support can be helpful, it's not the same as the dedicated, hands-on support that comes with premium solutions. If you need official support, you would have to inquire about a custom enterprise plan.

Shepherd.js is completely free for use under its open-source license, making it an excellent choice for teams looking for a cost-effective product tour solution. However, for official support or advanced features, you may need to explore custom pricing options.

Knowledge base tool: Document360

Document 360 is one of the best knowledge base solutions for enterprise companies. Trusted by major organizations like Microsoft and Harvard University, it offers a clean, minimalistic interface that makes building and managing knowledge bases a seamless experience.

With Document 360, you can easily set up a public self-service knowledge base for your customers or a private knowledge base for internal team use. The software is entirely cloud-based, allowing you to access your knowledge base from anywhere, including mobile devices, as long as you have an internet connection.

The platform is designed to be easy to use, featuring a markdown editor, real-time search capabilities, and file management tools. It also supports version control, content management, and robust categorization, making it simple to organize and maintain large volumes of content. Additionally, it includes community forums and allows you to collect user feedback to improve your knowledge base continuously.

Pricing for Document 360 starts at $99 per month, which includes 2 team accounts and 50GB of storage. For larger teams, the pricing scales up to $499 per month, which gets you up to 10 team accounts and additional features suitable for enterprises.

Product walkthrough tool: Tango

Tango is a simple tool designed for creating walkthroughs by automatically capturing workflows on your screen. It’s particularly useful for generating step-by-step visual instructions quickly, allowing users to create basic playbooks or guides without much effort. 

Many businesses appreciate how Tango simplifies the process of documenting tasks, with one user noting, "I love that I can go through my applications easily and have Tango create an automatic guide for me that I can send to clients or users."

While Tango excels at basic walkthroughs, it doesn't offer the advanced features or interactivity needed for a more comprehensive onboarding experience. Without customization options or the ability to modify the screenshots, users are left with a rigid, generic end product. 

Tango offers a free plan for up to 25 users and 25 workflows per user, which might be a good fit for smaller businesses who need something free to kickstart their onboarding journey. There's also a Pro plan available at $16 per month, which offers unlimited workflows, and an enterprise plan with custom pricing.

Product updates tool: AnnounceKit

AnnounceKit is a product updates tool with a diverse range of features aimed at mid market companies. 

The platform's core feature is a widget that keeps users updates on the latest product changes through in-app notifications, ensuring new features and improvements don’t go unnoticed. This feature is quite sophisticated, even allowing for segmented announcements, so that you can target specific user segments with personalized messages that cater to their unique needs and preferences.

Additionally, AnnounceKit provides a public roadmap and feature request collection, empowering users to submit feature ideas and get a transparent view of the product's future development. This creates a collaborative environment where users can see how their feedback directly influences the product’s evolution. All this can be done without users having to leave the app. 

AnnounceKit offers various plans ranging from $89 per month at the low end to $339 per month at the high end. There are also various paid add-ons available, so if you want to add NPS surveys as an extra feature, that will set you back an additional $42 per month, for example. 

User behavior analytics tool: Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a behavioral analytics tool that's currently used by 30% of the Fortune 100. It allows you to monitor individual users across websites, mobile apps, and social media, providing a comprehensive view of how users interact with your entire digital ecosystem. 

Mixpanel's event-based tracking, with its focus on actions like button clicks, scrolling, and navigation offers a more detailed understanding of user behavior than traditional page view tracking. Additionally, Mixpanel enables you to engage with users by sending targeted in-app messages based on their actions, enhancing user retention and fostering deeper engagement.

Mixpanel is limited in its attribution capabilities, as it doesn't provide insights into where your traffic is coming from, unlike Google Analytics. Mixpanel also has a steeper learning curve compared to other similar tools, and you really feel this as your usage expands.

It also doesn't scale especially well from a financial point of view. As your user base grows, so will your costs, and certain premium features like in-app messaging are only available on paid plans. 

Mixpanel operates on a freemium model. There's a free plan that allows you to track up to 1,000 users per month. Paid plans start at $89 per month for 25k MAUs, and there is also an enterprise plan available with custom pricing.

Note that Mixpanel integrates directly with UserGuiding. You can read about the integration here.

User feedback tools: Typeform

Typeform is a popular platform for building online surveys and forms, known for its visually appealing and interactive user interface. It offers a unique, conversational approach to collecting user feedback, making the process engaging for respondents and increasing response rates. 

As well as feedback forms, you can use Typeform to create lead generation forms, quizzes and event registrations forms, making this a versatile tool. Additionally, all of Typeform's forms can be created as standalone forms or seamlessly embedded into an existing website or page via a widget. 

The real-time dashboard and reporting features provide immediate insights into responses, while survey customization options and conditional logic allow you to tailor surveys to specific user segments. 

Typeform offers a free plan with simple features. The Basic Plan starts at $35 per month, providing access to additional features such as custom branding and more responses per month. Advanced features, integrations, and analytics are available in higher-tier plans – which come with a hefty increase in pricing.

User Onboarding Statistics and Benchmarks

Here are some statistics and benchmarks that showcase the value of onboarding:

Companies that increase retention by 5% have the potential to increase profits by up to 95%. (Source)

That's a reason to invest in onboarding, if I ever heard one!

Quite the opposite of the usual business wisdom that the only way to increase profits is to drive new sales. 

89% of customers will consider switching providers if their chosen tool's onboarding process is too complicated. (Source)

Definitely an argument in favor of getting your onboarding right!

You can simplify your onboarding by reducing the length and breadth of your product tour. Focus only on the features that matter to the user segment you're targeting.

Test your onboarding (just as you would test a product feature) to make sure that real users can understand it. 

40% of users prefer self-service over human contact. (Source)

This is a good one to have at your disposal if management insists on focusing on human support agents.

Agents are both more expensive for your company AND customers increasingly prefer self-service.

Going with a knowledge base and a resource center is the future! You heard it here first 🙂

Product tours are the most popular type of onboarding, with 81% of users saying they enjoy them. (Source)

This is followed by 54% for walkthroughs, 50% for help docs and 43% for checklists.

Quite a large difference in the numbers there, so this might be helpful if you have limited time and only want to create one type of onboarding experience for your users that provides them with the most value possible. 

86% of people are more likely to stay loyal to a business that invests in onboarding content that welcomes and educates them. (Source)

If you're struggling with retention, this is a data point in favor of investing in onboarding as a solution to that.

And investing in a welcome screen, in particular. Don't underestimate how important that first impression is. 

54% of users appreciate it when companies use videos as part of the onboarding process. (Source)

This is an argument in favor of creating onboarding videos.

They're passive, so not exactly the same interactive experience as a walkthrough, as we said earlier.

But people love to watch videos. Youtube is one of the most popular platforms for a reason. 

So there's something to be said for this type of passive engagement.

User Onboarding Metrics and KPIs

Checklist Completion Rate

Your checklist completion rate is the percentage of your users who complete the tasks listed in your onboarding checklist. These tasks very often correlate with activation, so having a user complete the whole checklist is a very good sign. 

A high checklist completion rate suggests that users are successfully navigating through the onboarding process, while a low rate may indicate areas where users are dropping off or struggling to understand what’s expected of them.

Core Feature Adoption Rate

Your core feature adoption rate is the percentage of new users who engage with the key features of your product after onboarding. These features are typically the ones that drive the product’s value proposition. 

A high adoption rate indicates that users are quickly finding and using the most important parts of the product, while a low adoption rate may suggest that users aren’t seeing enough value in these features, or that the onboarding experience isn’t effectively highlighting them.

Month 1 Retention Rate

Your month 1 retention rate measures the percentage of users who continue to engage with your product at least once within the first month after their initial sign-up. 

A high month 1 retention rate is an indicator that users find value in the product early on, suggesting successful onboarding and early engagement. A low rate may signal issues with the product's initial experience, or a failure to demonstrate value quickly enough to retain users.

Average NPS (Net Promoter Score)

The average Net Promoter Score is a metric that gauges user satisfaction and loyalty by asking users how likely they are to recommend the product to others on a scale of 0 to 10. The score is calculated by subtracting the percentage of detractors (users who score 0-6) from the percentage of promoters (users who score 9-10).

A high average NPS suggests that users are highly satisfied and likely to recommend the product, while a low NPS indicates dissatisfaction and may point to areas of the product or onboarding experience that need improvement.

Stickiness 

Stickiness is a euphemistic way of describing how likely users are to stick around once they've started using a particular product or feature. 

A common metric used to track stickiness is the ratio of DAUs to monthly active users (MAUs). This is sometimes called the DAU:MAU ratio, and it's typically calculated over a given 30-day period.

A higher ratio means users are coming back regularly (high stickiness), which is a strong indicator of user retention and the product’s ability to keep users engaged over time.

Churn Rate

Churn rate is the percentage of users who stop using a product or service over a specific period. It's an onboarding metric that is often used in subscription-based or SaaS businesses, which thrive on the ability to retain users month over month. 

A high churn rate is a huge sign of dissatisfaction and disengagement. It often means that you've got some aspect of your product-market fit wrong, and you might need to go back to the drawing board to improve your product. 

In the context of onboarding, a high churn rate can also indicate a poor onboarding process, or a complete absence of onboarding. As we discussed earlier, users who don't understand how to use a product will churn, sooner rather than later.

Activation rate

Your activation rate is the percentage of new users who activate, meaning that they've reached the point at which they are experiencing value from your product. 

A high activation rate suggests successful onboarding, while a low rate may indicate friction or gaps in the onboarding process.

User Onboarding Glossary

Aha Moment

The Aha Moment is the specific point in the user journey when a user realizes the core value or benefit of the product. 

For example, if a project manager is browsing Trello's website, they might suddenly get a feeling of "eureka" when they realize that they can use the software to manage projects for free.

The faster a user reaches the Aha Moment, the better the chances a business has to retain them for the long-term.

Note: the Aha Moment is not the same as activation. The Aha Moment is an emotional realization that a product could hypothetically be valuable, whereas activation is when someone uses a product for the first time and gets value from it.

Product Adoption

Product adoption refers to the process by which users become regular, engaged users of a product. It involves users moving from initial awareness and trial to regular use and integration into their routines or workflows. 

Product adoption can be measured by tracking metrics like frequency of use, feature adoption, and depth of engagement after the initial onboarding phase.

Time to Value

Time to Value (TTV) is the amount of time it takes for a new user to experience value from a product. 

Value is measured subjectively, according to what that particular user finds valuable. In most cases, users are deemed to have experienced value once they have activated. 

The quicker users see value, the more likely they are to continue using the product and become long-term, engaged users. A long or unclear TTV can lead to user frustration and increased churn, as users may abandon the product before they fully experience its benefits.

User Experience (UX)

User Experience (UX) encompasses all aspects of a user's interaction with a product or service, including usability, design, accessibility, and the overall satisfaction derived from using it. 

In the context of onboarding, UX refers to how intuitive, efficient, and enjoyable the process is for users from sign-up to regular use. The better the UX, the more likely the user is to be retained. 

Conclusion

We hope you've found this in-depth exploration of user onboarding valuable, and that it gives you a framework to follow for the next year or so as you build out your onboarding.

As you can see, onboarding is a complex subject. So can you imagine how time-consuming it would be to integrate all of this knowledge into your business and do all your onboarding in-house?

Fortunately, there's a faster way. You can use UserGuiding to build product tours, guides, hotspots, tooltips, in-app surveys and more, without having to mess around with code.

Click here to get started with a free trial today and check it out for yourself!