9 Best Userflow Alternatives and Competitors for Easier And Better User Onboarding (Free and Paid)

While you were in the design process of your product, did you and your design team ever think, “But how are the people using this figure this out?

You probably have, and you probably even asked for user feedback from beta testers.

So how would you like it if I said there are tools that eliminate this whole thought process?

Well, since you’re looking for an alternative to Userflow, you already know this because Userflow is just one of the many digital products to help you drastically improve the customer experience of your product or website.

In short, in this article, I will go over the top 5 alternatives of Userflow.

I will:

  • Talk about Userflow and my insights about the tool
  • List the reasons why you might need an alternative
  • Talk about the best alternatives in detail

Firstly, I will talk about what Userflow is and why you might consider an alternative.

If you know all about Userflow, you can skip to the first alternative by clicking here, or go directly to the Comparison Table.

TL;DR

  • Userflow is a digital adoption platform, aiming to help businesses guide their users on-page easily, and get through this process smoothly.
  • The tool offers great features, such as easy-to-create onboarding flows and on-page checklists, but it also lacks some crucial key features a DAP should have, such as hotspots or in-depth analytics.
  • The pricing of Userflow is another considerably important con of the product as the pricing starts from $200/month.
  • UserGuiding is the best alternative to Userflow since it’s easier to use, has more features, and its starting price costs only a third of what Userflow costs.
  • Other alternatives are Chameleon if you need sophisticated design options, Wyzowl if you prefer custom-made videos for onboarding, Intro.js if your budget is very limited but you are tech-savvy, and Pendo if you need better analytics but have a big budget.

UserGuiding also offers free migration services for your in-app content created using other software to minimize your switching costs.

Schedule a demo with one of our experts or start your free trial now:

Don’t Pay a Fortune for Other Tools!

Don’t Pay a Fortune for Other Tools!

UserGuiding starts from only $89/month.
Create tours, tooltips, and surveys without coding

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Why you need a Userflow Alternative

Personally, I found Userflow quite expensive compared to the features that it provides.

And there might be other reasons why you are in search of an alternative. Here are some that I noticed:

1- High Pricing for the Fewer Features

There is not much that you can do using only Userflow. Almost every other tool on the market lets you do what they offer, some being cheaper, and some options offer even more for a lower cost – such as UserGuiding.

Userflow pricing
Userflow’s pricing

2- Complex UI and Difficult to Understand

The UI of Userflow is a little too minimalistic, which makes it almost impossible to focus on what you are doing. The elements on the interface cover too much space, making it difficult to follow what you were doing. Also, the tool doesn’t allow you to see the product tour on the website unless you keep going back and forth between userflow and your website.

Userflow ui
Userflow in action

Top Alternatives and Competitors to Userflow

Now that you know what Userflow is, what it’s used for, and the main challenges you encounter when using it; we can dive straight into the list of competitors.

Here are the top 5 alternatives to Userflow:

  1. UserGuiding
  2. Appcues
  3. Userlane
  4. Gainsight PX
  5. TryChameleon
  6. Wyzowl
  7. Intro.js
  8. Pendo
  9. Shepherd

We’ll go over each tool, how it compares to Userflow, and in which cases they should be preferred. Without further ado, let’s start with our first product:

1- Userflow vs UserGuiding – No-code Interactive User Onboarding

UserGuiding is a no-code digital adoption solution that helps you provide better in-app experiences.

👉 Compared to its alternatives, UserGuiding is much simpler to use since it is a no-code platform. It doesn’t require a single line of code to work.

It works with a Chrome browser extension that lets you create various user onboarding elements directly on your website.

Compared to other tools, UserGuiding’s user onboarding features are much more extensive and significantly more affordable, while its analytics functions are limited.

But, this lack of product analytics can easily be covered with product analytics software (that’s more capable than Pendo) such as Mixpanel or Amplitude, which are easily integrated with UserGuiding.

pendo vs userguiding
A product tour I’ve created with UserGuiding on Youtube, in less than five minutes

UserGuiding offers a wide range of features, including:

  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. Product Tours,
  11. No-code customization,
  12. Advanced integrations.

There are three main upsides of using UserGuiding for user onboarding instead of Pendo:

Interactive in-app guidance

UserGuiding is the easiest tool to use among digital adoption platforms that offer a full scope of onboarding features, with a 93% satisfaction rate regarding the ease of use on G2.

userguiding's leader badge from G2
UserGuiding’s G2 leader badge

UserGuiding’s guides are not only easy to install, but also quick to create. It is possible to push your guides live in under 15 minutes, and see instant results on how much the customer journey has improved.

With tooltips, modals, hotspots, announcement banners, checklists, and resource centers; UserGuiding offers powerful features for all pricing tiers – meaning that you don’t have go out of budget to have a good quality customer retention strategy.

userguiding guide on clickup
Here is a demo product tour for Clickup made with UserGuiding

By using UserGuiding’s browser extension, you can start building and customizing your interactive guides directly on your web app.

Surveys and NPS

In July 2023, UserGuiding launched a new feature, “Surveys,” which allows users to create multiple different types of questions and combine them within a single survey (or launch different surveys for different segments).

userguiding-surveys-feature
UserGuiding’s surveys feature

With this feature, you can get the most specific user feedback that you need, exactly when you need it. UserGuiding also offers NPS surveys for companies to measure their promoter score, and combines all survey results in the dashboard.

Also, thanks to their user details & activity log feature, you can dig deep into how each user journey comes together, and find what is it that makes the customers’ digital experience special for them.

Resource Centers

UserGuiding’s easy-to-create intuitive resource centers have increased their users’ activation rates over 25%.

userguiding resource centers
UserGuiding’s resource centers make everything easier

Resource centers allow you to create a self-paced learning environment right within your app without covering too much space.

You can trigger guides or surveys within UserGuiding’s resource center, insert external links, direct people to help center articles, or provide quick tips based on their usage – all from a single source

Analytics and Customization

UserGuiding brings analytics to a new level.

UserGuiding’s user details page

UserGuiding’s Analytics dashboard gives you actionable insight on the performance of your onboarding content. UserGuiding allows you to track view and completion data for each guide, tooltip, hotspot, checklist, and resource center – while also giving you information about daily active users, and satisfaction scores.

You can mix and match different survey responses and data on the analytics dashboard, and dig deep into each user’s activity using the user details page and activity log.

What is UserGuiding good for?

✅ The #1 strength of UserGuiding is the value it provides for the price it costs. UserGuiding offers a full set of no-code engagement and adoption elements for as little as $89/month.

✅ Unlike many other competitors, UserGuiding’s interface is very user-friendly so that even first-time users can set up and publish their own product engagement sequences.

✅ UserGuiding is also very customizable. You can play with your engagement elements’ shape, color, positioning, and much more.

✅ UserGuiding provides fast and solution-oriented customer support. This means that customers can get help quickly – no matter which time zone you are in – and solve their problems without friction.

✅ In terms of User Onboarding, UserGuiding provides a full stack of features so that you won’t have to adopt multiple tools for different features.

What is UserGuiding bad for?

❌ Since UserGuiding’s main focus is onboarding, the analytics features it provides might not be enough for some companies. However, the tool provides various integration options with most analytics tools.

❌ Although you can use UserGuiding on mobile web browsers, it doesn’t work on mobile apps. If you need a solution to work on web and mobile, UserGuiding isn’t the one for you.

UserGuiding Pricing

userguiding pricing details
UserGuiding’s pricing detail
  • 14-day free trial (no credit card required)
  • Basic Plan: $89/month when billed annually for up to 2500 MAU. UserGuiding doesn’t limit the number of features available to the customers, and you can benefit from all features – with limitations on active campaigns. For instance, you can create as many surveys as you like, but set only one active at a time with the Basic plan.
  • Professional Plan: $389/month when billed annually for up to 20.000 MAU with unlimited user guides. You get unlimited product engagement features, and you can have. 3 live surveys at a time with the professional plan. This plan also provides you with a dedicated customer success manager.
  • Custom Quotation, Available for Larger Companies, removes all limitations and provides you the smoothest UserGuiding experience.

 UserGuiding also provides add-ons, so if there is a specific feature that you need while you are on the basic plan, you can have it as an add-on without having to upgrade your package.

UserGuiding Reviews

👍 Pros:

“UserGuiding has great UX – very simple to use. In a few hours after signing up, you can start getting positive results.”

👎 Cons:

“They don’t have a live chat option on their website, but their team replies swiftly via email and works to resolve your issues as rapidly as possible.”

UserGuiding vs Userflow

   Studio1 is now Userflow | Userflow
Starting Price$89/month$200/month
G2 Rating4.7⭐4.8⭐
Interactive Walkthroughs
Onboarding Checklists
In-Product Surveys
In-App Resource Center
Avg. Deployment Time15 Minutes1-2 hours
User Segmentation
User Analytics
Learning Curve😄 Smoother🙂 Smooth
Simple, Affordable, and Powerful User Onboarding & Survey Software.

Simple, Affordable, and Powerful User Onboarding & Survey Software.

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2- Userflow vs Appcues – Better Onboarding For Similar Pricing

Appcues, as one of the first user onboarding tools on the market, offers much more comprehensive user onboarding features compared to most onboarding tools.

Appcues dashboard
dashboard from Appcues

The tool is beautifully designed for non-technical people to create and track in-app elements they use for their onboarding flows. With various features and in-depth customization complemented with ready-to-use templates, the tool has everything you need to create power users.

Appcues provides:

  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.

Although the pricing of Appcues matches the price of Pendo’s “only product tours” plans, if you have to choose between the two for user onboarding features, Appcues wins by a landslide.

Here are the main features and reasons why:

Interactive Onboarding

Appcues interactive onboarding extension
Here is how the Appcues browser extension looks

Although Appcues is not the easiest tool to set-up, or the most affordable one, it is definitely a strong tool in terms of technical capabilities. Depending on your pricing package, Appcues gives you the liberty of coding and editing your guides to your ideal.

Once you get used to the UI and functionalities of Appcues, the tool becomes relatively easier to use, and maintaining your guides won’t be an issue. Of course, this is only applicable if you get past the steep learning curve with your technical capabilities or with the help of someone knowledgeable.

Experiments and A/B testing

Appcues experiments
Appcues’s experiments feature

You can choose to experiments with new flows or UI elements using Appcues’s new feature, experiments.

Using Appcues, you can create multiple kinds of UI elements and show them to some. of your end-users while others don’t see it and compare the results. This way you can see which of your ideas reach the users more easily, and act accordingly.

Analytics & Data

Appcues's analytics dashboard
Appcues’s analytics dashboard

Appcues’s analytics isn’t much different from it’s close competitors, such as UserGuiding or Pendo. You can see al the data of your guides, surveys, checklists, and so on. What makes Appcues’s analytics strong are the “journeys” and “experiments” features, which allow you to play with custom parameters and dive deep into details.

What is Appcues good for?

✅ Appcues can help you create beautiful and interactive product walkthroughs to provide your customers with 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 firstcomers of no-code digital adoption; it has a strong background and customer portfolio.

What is Appcues bad for?

❌ 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 must 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

pricing page of appcues
Appcues’s pricing page
  • 14-day free trial (no credit card required)
  • Essentials Plan: $249/month when billed annually for up to 2500 MAU. This plan has lots of limitations, such as not being able to get localization features or any kind of account security possibilities. And if you are looking for custom CSS customization, you will have to make a huge price jump and pay for the Growth plan.
  • Growth Plan: $879/month when billed annually for up to 2500 MAU. This plan removes most of the barriers, while some limitations persist. You still don’t get a dedicated customer success manager or security options, and you still don’t get localization support. Also, you cannot sign-up for the Growth plan without signing an annual contract, which can be a big burden for a lot. of companies.
  • Custom Quotation Available for Enterprises

Appcues Reviews

👍 Pros:

“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.”

👎 Cons:

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- Userflow vs Userlane – Less Functionality For a Better Price

Userlane is also one of the solid digital adoption platforms that are suitable for creating employee and user onboarding experiences.

Userlane's sample dahsboard
WalkMe Alternative / Competitor Userlane

With a focus on employee training, Userlane provides interactive UX elements that guide users through any web software.

Although the customization and the features are limited, Userlane has all the core elements of the average user onboarding experience:

User Onboarding Guides

Userlane product tour sample
Userlane’s sample product tour

Userlane offers interactive product guides that you can customize as you like. The targeting and segmentation for those guides are sufficient for most but if you have complicated segments or lots of different language requirements, Userlane might not be the one for you.

Setting up Userlane guides. is easy. You simply download the browser extension, edit and adjust your tooltips and modals, and you are ready to go.

Checklists and Knowledge Base

Userlane checklist on launcher
Userlane knowledge base

While most user onboarding tools offer separate user onboarding checklists and knowledge bases, USerlane brings those two elements together on one launcher.

Just like any other tool, you can use these features to launch product tours. The downside of USerlane’s launcher is the fact that you can’t insert surveys and sort in it.

Data & Analytics

Userlane allows you to track how your users are doing with the onboarding material, but it doesn’t provide any advanced analytics capabilities.

You can try the other tools on the list, like UserGuiding, if you’re looking for something more advanced than basic.

What is Userlane good for?

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

✅ The same goes with the integration, it is relatively easier than most competitors.

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

What is Userlane bad for?

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

❌ Userlane isn’t the best when it comes to analytics features. If you would like to get the best out of your customers, you will have to use integrations.

❌ But Userlane doesn’t provide enough integration options either. However, if you only use Zendesk, Google Analytics, Hubspot, and Salesforce, well, then you won’t be disappointed.

Userlane Pricing

Userlane pricing page
Userlane’s pricing page, it was quite difficult to find 🙂

Userlane offers custom pricing based on your needs and the size of your company, so you’ll need to get a demo to get a quote and give the product a try.

Userlane Reviews

👍 Pros:

We are especially enthusiastic about the focus on supporting start-ups in their founding phase. We are benefiting from the idea to help young companies that have not the resources and opportunities to fully support their new customers yet.os.

👎 Cons:

” The implementation was at the first time challenging us a bit but not more than the first use of any other tool. After a while, you get used to it and learn how to get the best overview of all functions and possibilities.”


4- Userflow vs Gainsight PX – Enterprise-Level Analytics and CS

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.

Let’s dig through each of those features one by one:

Engagements

Gainsight PX’s engagements feature is quite rich. So rich that it could be a product by itself.

In the “engagements,” you can create:

  • Interactive product walkthroughs,
  • Slider guides and messages,
  • In-app update notifications and banners,
  • And 5 different types of surveys.
The engagements feature is like a tool itself!

It is honestly amazing how much depth this single feature has to it.

But I have to warn you, if you are familiar with other digital adoption platforms, it will take a whole new learning curve to get used to Gainsight PX. This is because the UI is quite unusual, and you might have to digest the whole UI for a few days just to get acquainted with it and get going.

Knowledge centers

Knowledge bases have almost completely taken over help centers since they are more user-friendly and easier to access.

Gainsight PX didn’t stay behind the trend, and introduced their own interpretation of knowledge bases, the “knowledge centers”.

Being able to create in-app knowledge bases will save you time and money.

Here, you can create your own articles, or integrate your existing knowledge base and start using it on the “knowledge center bots” – which are basically collapsable resource centers.

You can also include your engagements (your product tours) and custom web links within these bots.

And the newest addition to these bots – the recommendation feature – promises to help users with event-based custom resources right when they need it.

Product Mapping

If you use a robot cleaner at your home or office, I’m sure you will quickly see the value of this feature.

Here is how the product mapping feature works:

  • First, you map and link all your features and modules,
  • Then, you put in a desired route for the users,
  • And lastly, Gainsight recommends a path for the end-users, and you have a better system to analyze.
The product mapping feature takes a long time to set-up, but is very powerful.

Although it seems like an over-the-top feature, there are two obstacles that make this feature difficult to use:

  1. It takes hard work and a lot of time to map out your product since it has to be done manually – or through linking pre-created features. If your product/website has more than 3-4 layers, creating a complete map could cost you weeks.
  2. It is also difficult to maintain those maps. Since Gainsight doesn’t work based on AI or internal bots, you would have to update the map manually if any little change occurs on your product.

In-Depth Analytics

Gainsight values data and actionability almost more than anything else. And so does Gainsight PX.

The tool collects both account-based and product-based data, and converts this collection into a sea of actionable information.

Well… It looks easier to use than Google Analytics.

Without you having to interpret all the numbers that Gainsight PX provides, it shows you what each data means and how close you are to your KPIs.

Gainsight PX’s customer segments feature makes it even easier for everyone using the tool to see what’s relevant to them.

However, that’s pretty much all you can do with the product. The tool has lots of features, but each of those features is very limited, and there are more affordable products that do more than Gainsight PX does.

What is Gainsight good for?

✅ 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.

What is Gainsight bad for?

❌ 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 PX pricing page
Gainsight’s pricing page for the PX tool

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

👍 Pros:

“A great tool to extract info from customers that will lead to data-driven decisions.”

👎 Cons:

“It does have some limitations when it comes to implementation and compatibility”


5- Userflow vs Chameleon – Enterprise-Level Product Adoption

Chameleon is an advanced version of the product adoption tools that most know.

chameleon dashboard - userflow alternative
Userflow Alternative / Competitor Chameleon’s dashboard

Chameleon is one of the best options if:

  • You have a spare developer
  • You have a huge budget

Customizability is the main reason Chameleon is known for. You can code your own unique customizations into it if the presets don’t feel enough. And also, you can ask them to code the customizations for you – for a good price, though.

Another reason why Chameleon is a good option is the wide range of features that it serves. You can do everything that Userflow does, plus A/B testing, micro surveys, and various launchers.

But, just like every other beautiful thing, Chameleon comes with a high price. Here’s what I mean:

What is Chameleon good for?

✅ 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. 

What is Chameleon bad for?

❌ 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

  • 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: $599/month for 2000 MAU, $999/month for 15.000 MAU, including unlimited experiences and A/B testing

Chameleon Reviews

👍 Pros:

“We tried everything and Chameleon was the only one that has the most features, power, and flexibility to do anything our designers and marketing team envisioned. ”

👎 Cons:

“The Chameleon editor interface doesn’t always work well, especially with dynamic data on the page. Our operations team has to get a little creative with how they use the tools in order to accomplish our goals.”


6- Userflow vs Wyzowl – Video Onboarding Made Easy

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

Wyzowl website - userflow alternative
Userflow Alternative / Competitor Wyzowl’s website

By far, I’ve only talkies about interactive guides, checklists, etc.

That’s not the only way to onboard users, though. If you feel like what you need is a bit different from product walkthroughs or checklists, Wyzowl might be a wise choice.

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.

7- Userflow vs Intro.js – Free Userflow Alternative Source

Intro.js is an open-source JavaScript library, helping you to create interactive flows with their product walkthrough software.

intro.js - userflow alternative
Userflow Alternative / Competitor Intro.js’s Website

Intro.js is not a third-party tool that hands you the end product. It’s a library that you can use to speed up the coding process, plus, it’s free, as long as you don’t use it for commercial purposes.

You would have to have more time and technical knowledge to prefer using Intro.js rather than a 3rd party tool. Also, the customization options are limited.

If you want to use it for commercial purposes, you will have to purchase a license. Depending on the package you purchase, they even provide you with commercial support.

Intro.js Pricing

For non-commercial products:

  • Completely free for non-commercial use,

For commercial products:

  • Starter license without any official support for $9.99,
  • Business license with a month of official support and code review for $49.99,
  • Premium license with a year of official support, code review, and unlimited projects for $299.99

Intro.js Reviews

👍 Pros:

“I really like the Intro.js plugin because documentation is straightforward and easy to understand. This can work on almost any webpage using jQuery as an included library.”

👎 Cons:

“The library is definitely open source and free software, but at the same time if I want to use it for commercial use it seems I need to pay a license fee. Why is this required if the code is open source?”


8- Userflow vs Pendo – User Onboarding and Experience Mapping

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

Founded by the software entrepreneur Todd Olson, Pendo is based in North Carolina, US.

It is a very popular solution with thousands of customers, including big names such as Verizon, Zendesk, and Salesforce.

pendo marketing dashboard
Sample Dashboard Created with Pendo

The platform has two core functions that users can benefit from: behavior analytics and user onboarding.

Behavior Analytics

Pendo’s product analytics features can help businesses track user behavior, and product insights across the web and mobile devices.

Once integrated, you can see every user activity, which allows you to create different reports that can later be combined in custom dashboards that fuel your business decisions and help you find actionable insights.

Data-focused product managers use Pendo to understand what users are doing inside their product, what functions/features are being more utilized, how product changes affect business metrics, and more.

pendo product analytics
A Peek into Pendo’s Behavior Analytics

User/Employee Onboarding and Guidance

Additionally, Pendo has a “Guides” feature, using which you can create different in-app elements to pop up on the user interface to boost user experience and guide and engage with your users.

You can create interactive product tours, tooltips, announcement modals, and resource centers using Pendo; to set up a customer journey that sets users up for success.

Once combined with the analytics part of Pendo, in-app guides, and other elements can help your teams onboard users and employees with higher engagement.

pendo user onboarding
Creating/Tracking Pendo Guides

Additionally, Pendo provides its users with a variety of in-app feedback collection elements that are extremely valuable when used correctly.

What is Pendo good for?

✅ 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.

What is Pendo bad for?

❌ 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's pricing

Pendo has a free plan called “Pendo Free“. Pendo free allows up to 1,000 monthly active users for one web and one mobile app. Although Pendo claims it can be used to test the waters and see the software’s value, I’ll have to say you can only see if the platform works with your product or not with only a thousand users.

Also, Pendo recently released a fixed-pricing plan called the “starter plan,” which costs $7000/year but includes only a very limited set of features and no customer support.

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

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

However, there are various Pendo users that revealed the details of Pendo’s pricing. One user claimed that they are a medium-sized business that pays $12,000/year for the standard package of Pendo, while another user upped this number to $20,000. Additionally, there is a Pendo customer that claims to pay $2000/year just for the “Guides” feature of the product; so, you get the picture.

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

Pendo Reviews

👍 Pros:

“Like all in-app messaging / insight services, the ability to easily deploy messaging and understand user behavior is super valuable. Overall a purpose-built solution like Pendo is way more capable than building an in-house alternative.”

👎 Cons:

“A truly awful/confusing UI. It takes 2-3x as long to do anything in this app due to unnecessarily cumbersome interfaces. Secondly, all the custom targeting components are a bit cumbersome for non-developers like myself. Everything is more complicated than it needs to be.”


9- Userflow vs Shepherd – Free Open Source for fewer capabilities

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

shepherd - userflow alternative
Userflow Alternative / Competitor Shepherd’s website

It claims to be highly customizable in its design, and easy to create and implement. Yet it requires a high amount of technical background and coding knowledge to maintain.

Shepherd also only has a single feature, which is a product tour. A decent onboarding needs much more elements than that. So if you are looking to create a full onboarding experience for your users, Shepherd might not be a good solution for you.

Shepherd Pricing

Shepherd.js is 100% free of charge!

Conclusion

Simply put, you should go with:

  • UserGuiding if you want to have many features, customizability, and segmentation for an affordable price.
  • Chameleon if you value the customization more than the price.
  • Wyzowl if you want to try a different method of onboarding.
  • Intro.js if you have a spare developer and a small budget.
  • Pendo if your product has a lot of data to collect, a more complicated UI and if you want to do more than just onboarding.

Frequently Asked Questions


Who should use Userflow?

Product owners, growth managers, customer success, and product managers can use Userflow and its alternatives such as UserGuiding to effectively onboard new users.


How much does Userflow cost?

The startup plan costs $200/Month with 3000 MAU, while the Pro plan costs $600/Month up to 10.000 MAU. Contact the sales team to get a price for the enterprise plan.


What are the top alternatives to Userflow?

The best alternatives to Userflow are UserGuiding, Intro.js, Chameleon, Shepherd, and Wyzowl.


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Hilal Çökeli

Hilal Çökeli

I’m UserGuiding’s growth-obsessed product marketer. I like to research and write about product, onboarding, and inbound marketing. If you feel like we could exchange ideas, feel free to reach out via LinkedIn or email! P.S. If I don’t respond, please know that I’m on a road trip with my camera and motorbike.