Top 25 User Onboarding Software And The Right One For You (Categorized for use cases)

What would you do if you were thrown into a city for work without a map, and told to figure it out yourself?

I would go straight until I find an exit and leave. I don’t have the time and energy. I need that map.

And your users need theirs, which is the onboarding process that helps them get familiar with your product. They will evaluate you depending on the quality of the map.

Was it easy to open?

Was it understandable?

Was it well designed?

Was it worded well?

Did it consist of familiar elements?

Is this a good product?

And so on.

So today, I will dig deep into all the best user onboarding experience software to help you choose which one is the best for your needs.

Here is a list of all the tools in this list and the categories:

Interactive user onboarding software: 1- UserGuiding 2- Appcues 3- Pendo 4- Userpilot 5- Userlane 6- Stonly 7- Chameleon 8- Usetiful 9- WalkMe 10- Userflow 11- Whatfix 12- Help Hero 13- Gainsight PX 14- Helppier

Screen-capture onboarding software: 15- Iorad 16- Wyzowl 17- Tango 18- Loom 19- Scribe 20- Spekit 21- Bytes Route Open-source user onboarding libraries: 22- Intro.js 23- Shepherd 24- Pageguide 25- Crumble

14 Best Interactive User Onboarding Software

 Third-party interactive onboarding software help you easily build a gamified user onboarding flow and increase feature adoption with minimum effort.

The fact that these tools do more than interactive product tours AND help you collect actionable data makes them the best options when it comes to customer engagement and onboarding.

And contrary to popular belief, they aren’t more expensive than building an in-house solution.

Here’s proof.

1- UserGuiding

UserGuiding is a no-code product adoption platform that doubles down on customer and user onboarding with powerful in-app elements such as interactive step-by-step walkthroughs.

It also offers features such as NPS surveying, feedback gathering, and checklists.

The number one reason why UserGuiding is a strong Whatfix alternative is it’s easy to manage and use the Analytics feature. UserGuiding keeps track of every guide you create and offer valuable insights about their performance.

With UserGuiding, 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 and little technical setup is required to create guides and implement them to your web product.

You can choose to host your UserGuiding account on a US-based server or an EU-based server that maximizes accessibility.

UserGuiding Features

1. Interactive Product Tours,
2. Tooltips and Hotspots,
3. User Onboarding Checklists,
4. Resource Centers,
5. NPS Surveys,
6. Easy Localization,
7. Advanced Analytics with User Activity Feed,
8. Custom user segments,
9. Material Tagging and Easy Targeting,
10. No-code customization,
11. Advanced integrations.

UserGuiding Pros

✅ 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 24/7 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.

UserGuiding Cons

❌ 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 for employee training as well as user adoption, the features for employee engagement might be a bit simpler than you expect.

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

👍 Liked:

“UserGuiding is a fantastic alternative to more “big-budget” solutions; and the good news is: that it does the same. After one month of searching for a tool and a few weeks of using UserGuiding, I’m honestly still asking myself what it does less (than the 5 times higher-priced competitors)…”

👎 Disliked:

“Sometimes there are inconsistencies in terms of where the guide appears or does not appear. But the support team (Shout out to Gabriel, very helpful!) walked me through why I was seeing these things.”

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:

2- Appcues

Appcues is a pioneer of “no-code” onboarding tools on the market.

They have introduced various onboarding elements for the first time while offering great fundamental solutions to their customers.

With a strong focus on user onboarding to web apps and digital products, Appcues can solve all your digital adoption needs regarding your customers and help you become a product-led business.

Appcues Features

1. Interactive Product Tours,
2. Tooltips and Hotspots,
3. User Onboarding Checklists,
4. Resource Centers,
5. NPS Surveys,
6. Easy Localization,
7. Advanced Analytics with User Activity Feed,
8. Custom user segments,
9. Advanced integrations.

Appcues Pros

✅ Appcues can help you create beautiful and interactive product walkthroughs so that you can provide your customers an engaging onboarding experience, and get them to like your product easily.

✅ Appcues provides exquisite customer support. They are great at coming up with quick and highly personalized solutions to all your problems whenever you have one.

✅ Founded in 2014, Appcues is among the first comers of no-code digital adoption; it has a strong background and customer portfolio.

Appcues Cons

❌ Appcues 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.

❌ No matter how friendly the UI is, Appcues has a steep learning curve that you have to get past – which is only possible if you have enough technical knowledge.

❌ Appcues is also not affordable. Their starting price is not only above the market average, but they also don’t grant access to all features in the essentials package.

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

👍 Liked:

“Appcues is pretty easy to learn and use and very flexible and powerful. It’s easy to customize for our tool and brand and provides a way to onboard our users in a scalable way without taking up precious developer time.”

👎 Disliked:

“It can be a little tricky to use, especially when we get into more complicated use cases. There are occasional bugs (although they are typically fixed quickly).“

3- Pendo

Pendo is a robust product analytics, and user engagement platform businesses use to build better products.

You can onboard users, introduce new features, survey users, gather feedback, and prepare a product roadmap with Pendo.

Although it is a great product that solves multiple problems at once, Pendo users usually complain that it takes them more than a few days to figure out how they can use the product.

It is definitely an amazing tool to add to your toolkit, but you might still have to find different solutions to provide engagement features, such as resource centers.

Pendo Features

1. Interactive Product Tours,
2. Tooltips and Hotspots,
3. User Onboarding Checklists,
4. NPS Surveys,
5. Easy Localization,
6. Custom user segments,
7. Advanced integrations.

Pendo Pros

✅ The best feature Pendo provides is its in-depth analytics; meanwhile, its user segmentation truly makes a significant change in the way users consume onboarding material.

✅ Pendo puts together different solutions like user experience, user onboarding, and highly sophisticated data collection and analytics under one tool to guarantee customer success and easier customer engagement tracking for digital product teams.

✅ Founded in 2013, Pendo is among the first comers of digital adoption; it has a strong background and customer portfolio.

✅ Though Pendo is quite expensive, it offers a free trial and a freemium, something other platforms of its caliber rarely do.

Pendo Cons

❌ Though Pendo represents itself as a digital adoption solution, its onboarding UX elements are pretty limited to the very basics, leaving out checklists, hotspots, and more.

❌ Being a highly sophisticated tool with a complex UI, it might be hard to set up and use if not used by an experienced user.

❌ Likewise, Pendo’s features tend to be complex and use case-specific, so it might be hard to leverage all features and possibilities without a fully established game plan dedicated to Pendo.

❌ Though Pendo does not publicly share its pricing, it is very well known that Pendo is more expensive than the market average.

❌ Yet another enterprise-level tool, Pendo’s customer service might not be as responsive as smaller products’ customer service teams.

Pendo Pricing

Pendo has a free plan called “Pendo Free“ for up to 1,000 monthly active users, one web and one mobile app.

For bigger plans, Pendo doesn’t have a set pricing.

Instead, you can get a custom plan for your business by contacting their sales team.

However, a former Pendo user claimed that they are a medium-sized business that paid $12,000/year for the standard package of Pendo while another user upped this number to $20,000. Additionally, there is a Pendo customer that claims to pay $2000/year just for the “Guides” feature of the product – which is included in the free plan for up to 1,000 MAU

Pendo’s pricing is feature and usage-based, and it possibly scales with how many users you have like other analytics tools.

Pendo Reviews

👍 Liked:

“As a CSM, I utilize this monthly to check on my clients and how often they’re accessing our website. Also great for seeing what features they’re not even trying.”

👎 Disliked:

“The only downfall to having access to this kind of information is when clients ask for this information to see whether their reps are using it as much as they hoped they would.”

4- Userpilot

Userpilot is a SaaS product that helps you create in-product experiences for your customers.

With features such as interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, checklists, resource centers, and NPS; Userpilot gives you the necessary tools to improve user activation and increase feature adoption.

It also helps you track the performance of what you’ve created with a simple analytics feature.

But, Userpilot can be a challenge for non-technical people, and most users agree that it doesn’t offer the visuality and customization most of its competitors offer.

Userpilot Features

1. Interactive Product Tours,
2. Tooltips and Hotspots,
3. User Onboarding Checklists,
4. Resource Centers,
5. NPS Surveys,
6. Easy Localization,
7. Custom user segments,
8. Advanced integrations.

Userpilot Pros

✅ Userpilot provides a full set of necessary onboarding features so that you can create the perfect onboarding sequence for your users.

✅ Userpilot provides exquisite customer support. They are great at coming up with quick and highly personalized solutions to all your problems whenever you have one.

✅ Userpilot’s interface is very user-friendly so that even first-time users can set up and publish their own product engagement sequences.

Userpilot Cons

❌ Userpilot 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 Userpilot doesn’t provide enough integration options either. However, if you only use Amplitude, Google Analytics, Hubspot, and Segment, well, then you won’t be disappointed.

❌ If you value the visuality of your product, then you will be disappointed to hear that Userpilot doesn’t offer the best visual options. The elements are not really customizable, and they don’t offer many templates.

❌ Userpilot is also not affordable. Their starting price is not only above the market average, but they also don’t grant access to all features in the growth plan.

Userpilot Pricing

Userpilot has three separate pricing plans:

• 14-day free trial (no credit card required)
• Traction Plan: $249/month when billed annually for up to 2500 MAU
• Growth Plan: $599/month when billed annually for up to 20,000 MAU
• Enterprise Plan: Starting from $1,000/month when billed annually.

Userpilot Reviews

👍 Liked:

“It is excellent for rolling out and demonstrating new features. The settings for determining when a user sees the experiences and how often is very helpful.”

👎 Disliked:

“It took a long time for us to get to a production ready state with Userpilot, because we often encountered bugs that blocked our work.”

5- Userlane

Along with its User Onboarding and Product Adoption features, Userlane also offers automated Employee Training.

You can use Userlane to onboard vendors, customers, users, and employees to your products.

Userlane is not one of those complex user onboarding software that requires technical knowledge. Its implementation is not difficult at all, and its price is optimal for recently established businesses with low budgets.

Especially if you are looking for an employee training tool, you can cut costs and speed up the training processes with automation using Userlane.

If you require a detailed tool for just user onboarding, however, you might need a few alternatives to Userlane since it doesn’t provide all the key features that you expect from a customer engagement tool.

Userlane Features

1. Interactive Product Tours,
2. Resource Centers,
3. NPS Surveys,
4. Easy Localization,
5. Custom user segments,
6. No-code customization,
7. Simple integrations.

Userlane Pros

✅ 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.

Userlane Cons

❌ 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 prices for each customer as they believe“that custom pricing is the best way to effectively serve such a diverse customer base“. You can contact Userlane to learn the cost of your customized plan.

Userlane Reviews

👍 Liked:

“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.“

👎 Disliked:

” 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- Stonly

Stonly is a self-serve support and user education platform that offers engaging and (not so) interactive guides for software products.

With Stonly, you can create Help Centers and Knowledge Bases that are much more engaging than traditional ones.

Stonly onboarding offers step-by-step instructional guides that you can add images inside to illustrate your topic better, and the content of these step guides can be optimized based on end-user segments and preferences.

Of course, you can use these guides to create product tours that show your users how different UI elements and core functions of your product work.

Although it doesn’t actually have the most interactive content, it can be a good choice for small to medium-sized businesses that would prefer free/affordable products.

But the rest of the users should be aware of the expensive plans and hidden costs within the product.

Stonly Features

1.  Step-by-step product tours,
2. Resource centers,
3. Basic analytics,
4. User segmentation,
5. Feedback widget.

Stonly Pros

✅ Stonly is relatively more affordable and has a free plan, which is something that most of its competitors don’t have.

✅ Stonly makes it easy to create product walkthroughs. Once you pass the integration step, the ease of use increases quickly.

Stonly Cons

❌ If you want to integrate Stonly into your UI elements, and of course, implement Stonly’s knowledge base and help center into your platform, you’ll definitely need a bunch of developer hours to get it done.

❌ It looks like most of the interactivity, in Stonly’s case, is pressing the “Next” button on the guide steps after reading a bunch of text and looking at a screenshot.

❌ Your customization options are very limited with Stonly. After a while, a lot of the guides look very similar to each other, and since you’re limited to a single element, you can mix things up as you can in other user onboarding products like UserGuiding.

Stonly Pricing

Stonly has 3 pricing tiers at the moment, and a 14-day free trial:

• Starter Plan: $99/month with 2500 monthly guide views, 30 guides, and access to core features.
• Business Plan: $199/month with 4000 monthly guide views, $399 with 15000 monthly guide views, unlimited guides, and additional VIP features.
• Custom Enterprise Plans: Additional Enterprise features with increased usage limits, but you need to contact Stonly’s sales team for a custom quote.

Stonly Reviews

👍 Liked:

“The customer service of the company is very responsive. I like the UI of the platform and its solution.”

👎 Disliked:

“I don’t think Stonly is the best tool for its purpose, especially if you need something easy and fast to set up”

7- Chameleon

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.

Chameleon Features

1. Interactive product tours,
2. Tooltips and hotspots,
3. Onboarding checklists,
4. Resource centers,
5. NPS surveys,
6. User specific analytics,
7. Segmentation and personalization.

Chameleon Pros

✅ Chameleon is known for their customizability and range of custom CSS options. If you want your product walkthroughs to blend right in, Chameleon won’t make you upset.

✅ Chameleon’s Launcher feature – a unique onboarding checklist – is a very engaging element and drives the tool apart from competitors.

✅ If you work with lots of other tools, you will be happy to hear that Chameleon has lots of integration options so that you can keep all your data in one space instead of scrolling through every page.

Chameleon Cons

❌ The product walkthroughs of Chameleon are great, but apart from that, Chameleon doesn’t provide a full set of necessary onboarding elements. If you’re looking for an all-in-one tool, Chameleon isn’t the one.

❌ Unless you know how to use CSS or anything similar, you won’t be able to use Chameleon to its fullest since the tool isn’t non-technical friendly.

❌ Chameleon’s pricing is above the market average even though they don’t offer many distinct or advanced features.

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

👍 Liked:

“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.”

👎 Disliked:

“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.“

8- 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 reduce the weight of 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.

While the tool is cheaper compared to most of its competitors, its features and services are limited accordingly.

Usetiful Features

1.  Interactive product tours
2. Tooltips and hotspots,
3. Onboarding checklists,
4. NPS surveys,
5. Basic analytics.

Usetiful Pros

✅ 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.

Usetiful Cons

❌ 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 (only 1 tour and up to 2000 assists)
• 14-day free trial (credit card required)
• Plus Plan: €29/month for up to 5000 assists
• Premium Plan: €99/month for up to 20.000 assists
• Enterprise Plan: Contact required

Usetiful Reviews

👍 Liked:

‘’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.’’

👎 Disliked:

‘’Missing some more complex functionalities such as in-depth reports, feature adoption, customer surveys & feedback, extra design features and templates’’

9- WalkMe

WalkMe is a digital adoption platform that offers solutions for different product experiences, but its main deal is user flows.

With WalkMe, customers can create product tours for their users or create interactive guides for their employees for inbound use. Besides these app training options, WalkMe offers different solutions. However, these solutions are, in fact, just fancy names for different use cases for their app guides.

A critical matter of fact is that WalkMe is way more focused on employee training than its customer onboarding solutions.

Of course, it is still a powerful tool with key features like:

• Product tours, user guides, and walkthroughs,
• Analytics,
• User segmentation and survey implementation,
• Knowledge base

Plus, famous enterprises like Microsoft, IBM, and Adobe use WalkMe. Good referrals if you were to ask me.

WalkMe Features

1. Interactive Product Tours,
2. Resource Centers,
3. NPS Surveys,
4. Easy Localization,
5. Advanced Analytics,
6. Custom user segments,
7. Advanced integrations.

WalkMe Pros

✅ WalkMe is one of the pioneers in digital adoption and user onboarding

✅ Although technical knowledge might be required, WalkMe offers a lot of customization options

✅ WalkMe is perfectly scalable for enterprises, especially if the use case is employee onboarding rather than customer education

WalkMe Cons

❌ Among the WalkMe features, even core features might be too sophisticated for inexperienced users

❌ WalkMe’s feature amount/feature usage ratio is often low if there is no dedicated user or employee onboarding team

❌ WalkMe requires a technical skillset and occasionally coding knowledge; this makes setting up and using WalkMe harder than average

❌Not so accessible pricing, WalkMe is not the best option for small or medium-sized businesses or enterprises with an immature budget structure

❌ WalkMe is enterprise software designed for enterprises, so feature updates following customer feedback might not be possible; likewise, customer service might be less accessible

WalkMe Pricing

Unfortunately, WalkMe hasn’t ever shared any details about their pricing publicly. However, we know that they work on annual contracts that go way beyond $10,000, and some claim that the average deal is $9000/month.

And also, customers have been reporting that WalkMe is tripling their prices without any discounts to old users.

To get exact pricing for your business, you have to get a demo from the WalkMe team.

WalkMe Reviews

👍 Liked:

“In theory, the idea of the product is wonderful. And they are responsive and stay on top of your project. The product is feature-rich and for what they do, they do it well.”

👎 Disliked:

“This company is as bad as AOL or Time Warner: they will not let you out of your multi-year contract no matter how unhappy you are with the product.”

10- Userflow

Userflow is a no-code onboarding tool that allows you to create an interactive onboarding experience for your users, employees, and customers.

Using the tool, you can create:

• Interactive walkthroughs
• Checklists
• Tooltips and hotspots
• And NPS surveys.

There are a lot of good sides that make Userflow better than its competitors, like the fact that it allows you to track each end-user’s activity separately, or the possibility of adapting the tool to complex UIs.

But just like every other tool on the internet, it’s not perfect.

Here are the details:

Userflow Features

1. Interactive Product Tours,
2. Tooltips and Hotspots,
3. User Onboarding Checklists,
4. Resource Centers,
5. NPS Surveys,
6. Easy Localization,
7. Custom user segments,
8. Advanced integrations.

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: $200/month when billed annually, includes unlimited flows, 1 checklist, and 3.000 MAU
• Pro plan: $600/month when billed annually, includes unlimited flows, surveys and NPS, and 10.000 MAU
• Enterprise plan: customized pricing, requires contact with sales

Userflow Reviews

👍 Liked:

“We tried both Chameleon and User Pilot before User Flows and User Flows was the only one to deliver on functionality promises. ”

👎 Disliked:

“Had to reach out to support for quite a few tips. The support page wasn’t very well comprehensive and lacked an easy UI to search and find what I was looking for.”

11- Whatfix

Whatfix is another widely-used third-party user onboarding tool to assist users in-app with product tours, tooltips, and feature highlights.

Whatfix improves product adoption with in-app help tools and the onboarding features we have mentioned.

Usually preferred by bigger companies, Whatfix falls behind in providing these enterprise users with one thing they need, systematic quality analytics.

So, the tool is expensive for small companies and not efficient enough for enterprises. There could still be some companies that are looking exactly for what Whatfix provides, though.

Whatfix Features

1. Interactive guides,
2. Tooltips and Announcement banners,
3. NPS surveys (Beta),
4. Resource centers,
5. Checklists,
6. Segmentation,
7. Analytics.

Whatfix Pros

✅ Whatfix can help you create beautiful and interactive product walkthroughs so that you can provide your customers an engaging onboarding experience, and get them to like your product easily.

✅ Whatfix provides exquisite customer support. They are great at coming up with quick and highly personalized solutions to all your problems whenever you have one.

Whatfix Cons

❌ Whatfix 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 Whatfix doesn’t provide enough integration options either. Only if you only use Amplitude, Google Analytics, Salesforce, and Slack, well, then you won’t be disappointed.

❌ No matter how friendly the UI is, Whatfix has a steep learning curve that you must get past – which is only possible if you have enough technical knowledge.

❌ Whatfix is also not affordable. Even though they don’t share their pricing plan or provide a free trial, users on the internet say that Whatfix charges them much more than other similar tools.

Whatfix Pricing

To get a price to Whatfix, you need to contact them, as they don’t provide us with fixed pricing. Yet it is known that they charge above the market average, while users on the internet claim that their starting price is $1200/year.

Whatfix Reviews

👍 Liked:

“Their team really helped us during a project we were doing, and I think they would be great for any company looking for help. This is a must to onboard customers and drive retention.”

👎 Disliked:

“The only negative I have to say is that whatfix is not catered well for bigger web apps which present the users with multiple options to complete the task they set out to do.”

12- Help Hero

Help Hero is a user onboarding and product adoption tool that helps you train users and announce product updates.

Help Hero is a 2-year-old startup that is too new to be a fully developed tool, and too expensive for a tool that offers so little.

If you have any experience with any kind of user engagement tool that helps you create interactive product walkthroughs, you would know that many of those offer much more than just interactive onboarding.

Not Help Hero, though.

Help Hero Features

1. Interactive product tours,
2. Onboarding checklists,
3. Basic analytics.

Help Hero Pros

✅ Help Hero is Easy to use since there isn’t much to discover about the tool.

Help Hero Cons

❌ It has very little analytics capabilities compared to other onboarding tools on the same pricing tier.

❌ Unfortunately, Help Hero has no customization options, making it difficult to make the onboarding process seamless.

❌ Help Hero doesn’t have enough features to be a fully-cooked onboarding tool.

Help Hero Pricing

• 14-day free trial
• Up to 1000 MAU: $55/month (2 months for free if paid annually)
• Up to 2500 MAU: $115/month (2 months for free if paid annually)
• Up to 5000 MAU: $179/month (2 months for free if paid annually)
• Up to 10.000 MAU: $249/month (2 months for free if paid annually)
• Up to 20.000 MAU: $299/month (2 months for free if paid annually)
• More than 20.000 MAU: Custom plan.

Help Hero Reviews

👍 Liked:

“It’s easy to use and could be customized for all scenarios that we had during setup. Support is also excellent.”

👎 Disliked:

“The stats on what your users are doing are quite limited and ultimately we’re testing out a far more expensive tool to see whether it’s worth it for us.”

13- Gainsight PX

Gainsight PX is Gainsight’s Product Experience tool which combines advanced analytics tools and user engagement features and creates a really good product experience for all end-users.

Gainsight positions this tool as a “product experience tool that provides human insights for Product Managers”.hea

The tool has integrations to many platforms and also provides you with a way to collect and act on user feedback.

The main features of Gainsight PX are:

• Engagement element creation – such as product tours and surveys,
• Knowledge center articles and bots,
• Product Mapping,
• And in-depth analytics.

Gainsight PX Features

1. Interactive product walkthroughs,
2. Slider guides and messages,
3. In-app update notifications and banners,
4. Surveys,
5. Knowledge centers,
6. Advanced analytics,
7. Segmentation and personalization.

Gainsight PX Pros

✅ Gainsight is a complete tool for businesses since it brings together data and action.

✅ Gainsight also provides an endless amount of integrations. Even if you don’t find some features good enough, you can always get backup from your other tools, directly into Gainsight.

✅ Gainsight is great with analytics. All three Gainsight tools provide more than enough real-time data about user behavior and product usage, letting you take action quickly and strongly.

✅ Gainsight’s product mapping feature is like a breakthrough for no-code automation.

Gainsight PX Cons

❌ Gainsight has all the features, but most of those features are only surface-level and not worth the price.

❌ Gainsight requires different accounts for different tools, which means the price will only go higher as you choose to benefit from all tools.

❌ Gainsight is expensive for what it provides. There are better alternatives to all Gainsight products – and fun fact – the sum of those tools is usually more affordable than one single Gainsight tool.

❌ Most users complain that Gainsight has a very steep learning curve. The tool doesn’t have the most intuitive UI, and most features are hidden within other features – making them very hard to find.

Gainsight PX Pricing

Gainsight offers a free trial for their Product Experience (PX) tool. As for the paid plans, users across the internet claim that the pricing of Gainsight PX starts from $500/user/month, which is way above the average digital adoption platform cost.

• Free Trial available (for PX only)
• Product Experience Pack: Custom quote for each company (starting from $500/user/month.)

Gainsight PX Reviews

👍 Liked:

“Surprisingly, it also allowed us to utilize it for in product engagement, walkthroughs, etc, as well as feedback surveys. As such, we managed to use it to replace three other platforms at once (Surveys, Analytics, In app walktroughs). “

👎 Disliked:

“I REALLY dislike that the inferred data is inaccurate. I have clients logging in from New York, but it shows that their company is in California. We are working with Gainsight PX support on this, but no resolution yet.“

14- 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.

Helppier Features

1. Interactive product tours,
2. Announcement banners,
3. Tooltips and Hotspots,
4. Resource centers,
5. Basic analytics,
6. Customization,
7. Segmentation and personalization.

Helppier Pros

✅ Helppier is relatively affordable for what it provides.

✅ For its pricing, the tool offers a good variety of starter features.

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: $39/month for up to 1000 MAU, $99/month for up to 10.000 MAU, 2 months for free if paid annually.
• Tailor-made plan: custom-made plan, talk to sales for a price.

Helppier Reviews

👍 Liked:

“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!”

👎 Disliked:

“Very buggy. It crashes a lot. Requires more configuration than dropping their code because it’s slowing the site down.”

7 Screen-capture User Onboarding Tools

 These onboarding tools include documentation software and video capture tools together. While they are not as efficient as product tours, they could come in handy in different scenarios.

15- Iorad

Iorad is a tutorial creation tool that helps users create guides with screenshots and voiceovers.

Iorad is a tool that allows you to create step-by-step tutorials while you go over the process yourself.

With Iorad, you can record both video and audio on your screen. You can also add descriptions and headings to each step, an introduction, and an appendix if needed. Moreover, Iorad lets you highlight or blur spaces on the screen to be more precise while creating the tutorial.

Iorad is a great tool if you need it for personal use only, or else, the prices are too high for a tool that has one purpose only.

Iorad Pricing

For personal use:

• Iorad is free for personal use.

For business use:

• Starter plan: $200/month with an additional $15 for one additional creator.
• Pro plan: $500/month with an additional $20 for each additional creator.
• Company plan: $3200/month with an additional $40 for each additional creator.
• Enterprise plan: custom quote for personalized needs.

For educational purposes:

• Educators plan: $10/month for teachers and professors.
• Institution plan: up to 80% off for school districts and universities.

For non-profit organizations:

• Non-profit plan: up to 50% off for non-profit organizations

Iorad Reviews

👍 Liked:

“I use Iorad in the help article for our clients and for internal training. The clients love it, and it is used as an example to the quality of the self-hep part of the software.”

👎 Disliked:

“There are some actions that the software has some trouble picking up, like scrolling. Sometimes, too, the static image Iorad picks up shows a button mid-way through its hover state instead of at its final one.”

16- Wyzowl

Wyzowl is a video creation company that helps businesses onboard their users with videos and demonstrations.

After all, 86% of people prefer to be onboarded by video.

Wyzowl is a custom video-making company -maybe even one of the best- that creates videos according to your needs, whether it’s an animated video, a demonstrative video, or an introduction.

Wyzowl Pricing

Price is given according to the length and type of video, which means it’s a custom price for everyone. Though, users say that it’s not the cheapest.

17- Tango

Tango is a training and documentation tool that lets you capture workflows as you go on your screen.

If that’s all you need, simple documentation, this tool could actually be what you need.

Tango makes it easy to create simple how-to guides or create a visual how-to playbook.

But if you need a fully cooked onboarding for your users, clients, or customers, then Tango will only make things more difficult as it lacks the key features that a complete onboarding software must have, such as actual interactivity, customization options, analytics, and gamification.

Tango Pricing

• Free plan: Free for up to 25 users and 25 workflows per user (625 total)
• Pro plan: $16/month on annual payment with unlimited workflows
• Enterprise plan: Custom quote per user.

Tango Reviews

👍 Liked:

“I love that I can go through my applications easily and have Tango create an automatic step-by-step guide for me that I can send to clients or users.”

👎 Disliked:

“Currently, I wish it was supported on more than just Chrome. Most of the applications I use are on the web so chrome works but there are a couple of applications that can’t take advantage of Tango.”

18- Loom

Loom is a video recording tool that allows you to record yourself, along with your screen.

Loom is a product that allows you to create animated how-to videos so that your users can get all the steps needed to complete their tasks without any hassle.

It has lots of features, such as tracking user behavior and creating custom scripts. In addition, it integrates with other tools, such as Visio or Powerpoint.

The downside of this tool is that you need to pay a one-time fee for each team member, which makes it very expensive for larger groups.

Loom Pricing

• Starter pack: free of charge
• Business pack: $8/month per creator if paid annually.
• Enterprise pack: contact the sales team.

Loom Reviews

👍 Liked:

“The thing that I like best about Loom is how easy it is to get configured and use. It takes only a couple of minutes to get a feel for the controls and how to generate a video screen recording.”

👎 Disliked:

“Sometime crash during loom making. And need extensions for the other browsers.”

19- Scribe

Scribe, also known as Scribehow is a cloud-based tool that allows you to create tutorials in minutes by tracking your actions, just like Tango.

But what makes Scribe stand out from other similar tools?

The answer is simple. The tool is so easy to use that anyone can do it, saving time and effort from practice (and it also has an automatic transcription feature.)

If you don’t know how to use a specific feature, there’s always someone who will help you.

Still, this doesn’t explain why you would want to pay such an amount of money every month for a tool that has only one feature.

Scribe Pricing

• Basic Plan: Free, includes individual projects only
• Pro Plan: $29/month per user, includes branded guides
• Enterprise Plan: Custom quotation with knowledge base integration

Scribe Reviews

👍 Liked:

“I love how Scribe simplifies the process of transferring knowledge to new employees who are unfamiliar with certain programs.”

👎 Disliked:

“I noticed that when recording specific steps, the software does not pick up on every link I click or page I open.”

20- Spekit

Spekit is a Digital Enablement platform that drives adoption and increases employee experience.

The tool helps new employees have a smooth and consistent learning experience. Here’s how:

• You can create buttons called ”Speks” to act as individual resource centers and integrate them with almost any product.
• You can also create a sidebar resource center to collect all the guides.
• You can easily share and create Speks in Slack, Google Chrome, Salesforce, or anywhere you need, without coding, using the chrome extension.

Spekit Pricing

• Spekit Basics: $10/user/month
• Spekit Premium: $15/user/month

Spekit Reviews

👍 Liked:

“I like the versatility of this product. We were originally implementing this product for a Salesforce instance but had to change paths and the product still works great in the new software.”

👎 Disliked:

“Sometimes when you hover, I get stuck looking at the spek and need to refresh the page for it to go away. That can be annoying when that platform is running slowly to begin with and you’re trying to navigate purposefully.”

21- Bytes Route

Bytes Route is a product tour creation tool for sales teams to create app training demos easily.

Even though it places itself as a customer onboarding tool, it’s far from complete.

That’s because the tool has only one feature: creating onboarding product tours.

More precisely, the tool captures your clicks and lets you add descriptions to your steps.

Bytes Route Pricing

• Free Plan available for one seat and three guides
• Startup Plan: $19/month/team, two months for free if paid annually
• Growth Plan: $59/month/team, two months for free if paid annually

Bytes Route Reviews

👍 Liked:

“I like the fact that Bytes Routes is easy to set up and use. You can create your first tour and have it running in a matter of minutes.”

👎 Disliked:

“Bytes Route could still use some features that the competitors have, like audio and/or images to add in the tour steps.”

4 Open-Source User Onboarding Libraries

 If you have a spare developer or want to build your own product experience flow, these tools can give you a headstart – while limiting your data and customization capabilities.

22- Intro.js

Used by many iconic companies such as Amazon and Nestle, Intro.js is an open-source library that helps you onboard users with product tours and feature highlights.

Although the product is popular and widely preferred, it has many flaws too. First off, the onboarding elements are limited to two features, and there aren’t many options regarding customizations.

Also, since it is an open-source library, it will need to be used by your development team, who could be improving your actual product.

23- Shepherd

Shepherd is a Javascript library that allows you to onboard your users to a product with product walkthroughs.

Similar to Intro.js, Shepherd is an open-source library helping you create interactive product tours. But unlike Intro.js, it is totally free of charge.

Shepherd claims its design is highly customizable and easy to create and implement. It is correct that Shepherd allows more flexibility than Intro.js in terms of customization.

Yet it requires a high amount of technical background and coding knowledge to maintain.

If you have a spare developer available and you think that Shepherd’s visual components fit your website and product better, it could be better for you.

24- Pageguide

Pageguide is an interactive guide for web page elements using jQuery and CSS3, developed by Tracelytics, a popular team in GitHub.

It offers developers the ability to rather easily create product tours (compared to creating from scratch.)

It is a solid library that is used by many product owners for educating users. However, it has disadvantages.

25- Crumble

Crumble is also an open-source free platform that is much more basic than the other open-source tools mentioned on the list.

Crumble gives you bubbles to place into your product and display to your users, which makes it easier for users to engage with a screen. The design makes it seem more relatable and more human-like.

It is highly useful for those who seek a simple onboarding experience with tooltips only. Crumble doesn’t support other elements than product walkthroughs either and doesn’t track analytical data about the usage of those tools.

Crumble is also free, and surprisingly, it requires less time than any other open source on this list.

Which User Onboarding Software Is Best For You?

➡️ If you need an interactive onboarding tool, UserGuiding is the best option since it provides the most amount and best-advanced selection of products, for pricing as low as an apple charger.

➡️ If you need a screen-capture tool, Iorad is the easiest to use and the user-friendliest among all choices.

➡️ If you’re looking for an open source, Intro.js is the best as it also provides support to some extent.

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Frequently Asked Questions

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What is user onboarding software?

User Onboarding Software are tools that help you create engaging onboarding flows to get your users from the start, to the “Aha!” moment – where they become loyal promoting users. Third-party user onboarding software helps you build product tours and other onboarding UX elements to make the customer journey easier.

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How do I onboard a user?

To successfully onboard a user, you should successfully introduce your product and the features without overwhelming them, send them a warm welcome email, provide easy access to support and resources, and track user adoption in order to improve the process.

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How do you automate user onboarding process?

By getting help from a third-party user onboarding software, you can easily automate the onboarding process by segmenting your users and creating a personalized onboarding experience for each segment.

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