5 Best Alternatives and Competitors to Userpilot That Will Get Your ROI Quicker

Userpilot is a popular user onboarding and digital adoption platform. The tool has lots of good reviews and many satisfied customers.

But even most of the satisfied customers agree on one point:

Userpilot has a steep learning curve, and it is highly-priced.

If you share the same feelings about Userpilot, today I will help you find a better alternative to it.

I will:

• Briefly describe each of the 7 tools and our experience with them,
• Show you how they compare to Userpilot,
• Highlight tool and Userpilot reviews for each one from platforms such as Capterra, G2, Product Hunt,
• Suggest specific use cases for each of the Userpilot competitors.

Let’s begin with:

If you want to skip directly to the alternatives, click here.

Or click here to go straight to the Userpilot Alternatives Comparison Table.

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

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Create tours, tooltips, and surveys without coding

What Is Userpilot?

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

With key 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, all while enabling you to track the performance of what you’ve created with a simple analytics feature.

But the tool also has downsides.

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.

Here is a breakdown of Userpilot’s strongest features:

Userpilot Interactive in-app guidance

Userpilot’s main use case is providing interactive-in-app user journeys to get them to the “aha!” moment quicker.

Userpilot does a killer job of increasing user adoption through onboarding flows. By combining a toolkit of product tours, checklists, a resource center, and NPS surveys, the tool covers most of the customers’ needs in a single platform.

Users report that Userpilot’s guidance features are great but with a twist.

The implementation and setup process of Userpilot is far from being simple. If you aren’t the most tech-savvy person on the team, you might need help from someone else to install Userpilot and integrate it with your app.

But you could also ask Userpilot’s support team, as they are fast to respond and happy to help, unlike most support teams of enterprise-level tools.  

Userpilot Feedback collection and data

Userpilot allows you to create NPS surveys and ask open-ended follow-up questions to collect feedback.

While this could be enough for most, the fact that Userpilot doesn’t provide any other types of surveys could be 

User Pilot Product Analytics

Userpilot’s analytics is on the higher end of the standards, compared to other digital adoption platforms.

Userpilot allows you to track multiple aspects of the business, such as daily active users, feedback ratio, satisfaction rate, promoter score, and user engagement.

While Userpilot claims to have the best analytics capabilities among digital adoption platforms, only 83% of users on G2 are satisfied – with the average score being 85%.

What is Userpilot good for?

 ✅Userpilot provides a great 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 said to be user-friendly enough so that even first-time users can set up and publish their own product engagement sequences.

What is Userpilot bad for?

❌ 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.

❌ Userpilot doesn’t offer enough survey types to provide the user with options to get feedback. The only kind of survey you can create with Userpilot are NPS surveys.

❌ 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 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 is best for:

– Userpilot is best for people who need a user onboarding solution, have a big budget, and are ready to pay for the growth plan to have full access

Userpilot Pricing

• 14-day free trial (no credit card required)
• Starter Plan: costs $249/month when billed annually for up to 2500 MAU. This plan includes only the core features, and has limitations. For instance, you can only create up to 10 different segments, and can collect only up to 250 survey responses per month. Considering that you already pay for the MAU, having to pay extra for survey replies can become a burden. This plan doesn’t include resource centers, targeting and localization capabilities, and certain integrations.
  
• Growth Plan: costs $499/month when billed annually for up to 10,000 MAU. While this plan removes some limitations and unlocks all features, you still can’t localize to more than 10 languages or benefit from all support options.
  
• Enterprise Plan: The enterprise plan removes all limits from all features, and Userpilot gives a custom quote depending on your needs..

Userpilot Reviews

Users on G2 love Userpilot’s customer support, and state that the support team all the problems they encountered. On the other side, most of the users agree that the set-up and overall UX/UI of Userpilot. is difficult to get past, and it has a steep learning curve.

Top Alternatives and Competitors to Userpilot

1. UserGuiding,
2. Appcues,
3. Pendo,
4. Intercom Product Tours,
5. Intro.js

1- UserGuiding – Easy to use DAP platform for a better price

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

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

Anyone from any team can set it up and get started with UserGuiding and see results in as short as a month. Plus, the browser extension makes it even easier to operate.

Let’s dive deeper into UserGuiding’s strongest features:

Interactive in-app guidance

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

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

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

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

Surveys and NPS

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

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

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

Resource Centers

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

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

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

Analytics and Customization

UserGuiding brings analytics to a new level.

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

You can mix and match different survey responses and data on the analytics dashboard, and dig deep into each user’s activity using the users detail 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 for employee training as well as user adoption, the features for employee engagement might be a bit simpler than you expect.

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 is Best for:

UserGuiding is best for teams that are looking for an easy-to-use user onboarding solution in order to quickly minimize churn and boost growth without breaking the bank.

UserGuiding Pricing

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

Users love how easy it is to use UserGuiding. They state that UserGuiding’s customer support can’t be topped, and the range of features they get for the pricing is just amazing. The only complaint about UserGuiding is the fact that UserGuiding’s analytics could be better, and their roadmap states that there are great updates coming about that issue in a short time.

UserGuiding vs Userpilot

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

2- Appcues – Pioneer in no-code user onboarding (once)

Founded in 2013, Appcues is a digital adoption platform and also a pioneer of the industry.

Compared to Userpilot and other alternatives, Appcues is much more advanced in its range of features and more capable. With Appcues, you can create checklists, interactive user guides and walkthroughs, and Appcues NPS surveys, as well as tooltips to improve your in-app UX.

However, compared to its competitors, Appcues has 2 significant downsides:

1. Appcues, according to user reviews, is not non-technical friendly, meaning you will need a developer to set the product up properly.
2. And Appcues has the same starting price as Userpilot, which makes it over-priced when compared to more affordable products such as UserGuiding.

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 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 is best for:

Just like Userpilot, Appcues is best for people who need a user onboarding solution, have a big budget, but for Appcues you actually need more technical knowledge to get the most out of the tool.

Appcues Pricing

• 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

While most users like how detailed the technical aspects of Appcues are, they also complain about frequently recurring bugs. Although Appcues claims to be a no-code tool, these aspects make it very difficult to maintain without a developers that has lots of free time.

3- Pendo – Best of analytics, not for small companies

Pendo is a robust product analytics, and user engagement platform that 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.

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.

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 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 is best for:

Pendo is best for teams who value data more than the look and feel of the onboarding materials, as Pendo excels in data collection and management, but falls short on the actual UI of their features.

Pendo 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

Facts: Pendo has a steep learning curve. Pendo’s analytics are great, but since the tool doesn’t focus on analytics only, the users expect to get more value out of the features. – more specifically – the engagement features. They complain that the guides aren’t the most intuitive.

4- Intercom Product Tours – All-in-one CS tool with onboarding capabilities

Intercom is known as one of the most popular customer messaging platforms, although the tool has many other features that are also helpful.

In April 2019, they launched their “Product Tours” feature that allows you to create step-by-step interactive onboarding guides. Intercom’s Product Tours helps you manage adoption and onboard new visitors by building product walkthroughs and tours within your product.

Using the add-on, you can:

• Create step-by-step product walkthroughs,
• Tooltips and hotspots,
• Announcement banners,
• And create basic user segments.

However, I need to point out that Intercom Product Tours isn’t the most powerful and most developed tool on the market. It has limits in terms of functionality when it comes to product adoption and user onboarding.

Even though it is not Intercom’s main focus, there is a lack of UI elements in product tours. They do not give you many onboarding features, which means that you can’t use checklists, modals, or any other key UI elements for user onboarding.

Also, some features such as end-user surveying or advanced analytics, are priced separately, causing the price of Intercom to become unreasonable.

What is Intercom good for?

✅ Intercom is a good choice for people who need an all-in-one tool to analyze, engage, and guide users.

✅ The tool’s starter plan is fairly priced, and it is a good choice for newly established businesses with fewer users.

✅ Intercom’s live chat feature and chatbots are definitely top-tier and useful for businesses that need to provide support to users as quickly as possible.

What is Intercom bad for?

❌ Although Intercom is fairly priced for starter-level companies, the pricing becomes unbearable very quickly. Most companies complain about how Intercom finds ways to charge users more and more each passing day.

❌ Intercom’s live chat feature simply rocks, but the onboarding feature is limited to tooltips only, which is not enough to create a fully cooked onboarding sequence.

❌ Intercom helps you provide better support to your customers, but their own customer support is horrible since they usually respond late and can’t come up with quick solutions.

❌ Intercom isn’t a data tool, and the analytics and data they provide are very limited. Therefore, you will have to adopt a second tool for analytics—such as Google Analytics—to handle the data part for you.

Intercom features

Apart from Intercom’s customer success-related features, Intercom provides:

1. Interactive user onboarding,
2. Onboarding checklists,
3. Surveys (as a separate add-on),
4. Advanced analytics,
5. And advanced integrations.

Intercom is best for:

Intercom is best for people who can stand the inattentive customer support of Intercom – or are seasoned users and don’t need it anymore.

Intercom Pricing

According to user comments on Reddit and HelpCrunch, Intercom’s pricing can range between $74/month (only for newly established companies with under 5 employees) and $999/month. Also, some features are billed separately, and cost an additional monthly fee.

For instance, if you have 5-9 employees, the starting price jumps up to $89/month.

If you want to use Intercom with Product Tours add-on:

• 14-day Free Trial requires credit card information.
• Start Plan: $74/month for Intercom subscription (2 seats) plus $199/month for Product Tours add-on = $273/month Total
• Support Package: Custom quote on request

Intercom Reviews

While Intercom’s main user base consists of people who use it as a CS tool, lots of them started to discover its onboarding capabilities. But unfortunately, since those product tours are still on a very early stage, they are buggy and not the most intuitive.

5- Intro.js – Open-source library that will get the work done

Intro.js is an open-source library for user onboarding that is used by big brands such as Nestle, Amazon, SAP, and more.

You can create product tours and feature introductions using the library.

The good thing about using an open source is that it is affordable, even free, if it is not for commercial use.

The bad thing is… actually, there are two bad things:

1. The product requires a developer to function at all times, making it not such a viable option for businesses that need to keep updating their products.
2. The onboarding elements are very limited, so any user onboarding designed with Intro.js will not be likely to satisfy every need of a user.

Intro.js features

1. User onboarding guides (product tours)

Intro.js is best for Best for:

Intro.js is good for beginner businesses with a few people, a tight budget, and lots of coding knowledge.

Intro.js Pricing

Intro.js is completely free for those who do not use it for commercial projects.

When the project is commercial, however, a lifetime license is required to be purchased:

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

Intro.js Reviews

• Intro.js isn’t listed on product comparison and evaluation platforms; therefore, doesn’t have any public reviews.

Top Userpilot Alternatives/Competitors – Comparison Table

Powerful In-App Onboarding without Coding

Save hours of developer time every week, starting from $89/month:

Conclusion – Which one is the one for YOU?

Frequently Asked Questions

Who should use Userpilot?

Product teams, growth managers, customer success teams, and product managers can use Userpilot and its alternatives, such as UserGuiding, to effectively onboard new users and improve product adoption or user adoption.

How much does Userpilot cost?

Userpilot’s Growth plan starts at $249/month with 2500 MAU while its Enterprise Plan is $599/month, with 20,000 MAU.

What are the top alternatives to Userpilot?

The top 6 Userpilot alternatives are UserGuiding, Appcues, Intro.js, Intercom, and Pendo.

How does the Userpilot Chrome Extension work?

The Userpilot Chrome extension is overall similar to the UserGuiding Chrome extension. Once you download the Chrome Extension for Userpilot, you can create customizable product tours and other interactive elements, and publish them by going back to the dashboard.