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.

I will:

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.

user review comparison of UserGuiding vs Userpilot
UserGuiding vs Userpilot Comparison from G2

TL;DR

  • Userpilot is a UK-based digital adoption platform; it provides onboarding key features such as interactive guides, checklists, resource centers, and analytics.
  • The tool is good for what it promises as long as you have the required technical knowledge to handle it since Userpilot’s implementation is far from being simple.
  • Userpilot also costs much more than many other alternatives, and for what it provides, the pricing tiers might not be fair (especially compared to tools that provide more powerful features than Userpilot and charge way less.)
  • The best alternative to Userpilot is UserGuiding since it provides a big range of features that are easier to use, better analytics with user activity feeds, and much fairer pricing plans.
  • Other alternatives to Userpilot include Appcues, Intercom, Intro.js, Wyzowl, and Shepherd.

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:

Try a much more efficient onboarding tool without paying much more!

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

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Why do you need a Userpilot alternative?

1- Insufficient Analytics

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.

2- Surveying Limitations

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 is NPS surveys.

3- Limited visual Customizations

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 customizable, and they don’t offer many templates.

4- Steep Pricing

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.

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.

userguiding-dashboard
UserGuiding is rated the most user-friendly DAP on G2

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 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 to 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 their new feature, “Surveys”, which now allows users to create multiple 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 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 into 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 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, 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

👍 Pros:

“As a product manager, this tool is a great way to build out different onboarding flows and test them with my team long before I push something live.”

👎 Cons:

“The analytics part is probably enough for most teams. We needed a little more control over data, which led us to use another product for it.”

UserGuiding vs Userpilot

UserGuiding is more liked by customers than Userpilot
UserGuiding and Userpilot comparison table
Simple, Affordable, and Powerful User Onboarding & Survey Software.

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

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

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 makes our work much easier and helps us connect in a better way with our users. I highly recommend working with Appcues.”

👎 Cons:

“This has led to some frustrating moments or awkward presentations where I’ve struggled to get the app to behave. Overall, this hasn’t been a large blocker to seeing success with the app.”

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

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
These are Pendo’s “affordable” plans 🙂

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 who 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 who 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:

“I’m acutely aware of all its shortcomings of which there are many. Namely, 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 me. Everything is more complicated than it needs to be.”

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.

Intercom product tours website
Intercom’s take on the product tours

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.

Intercom product tour preview
Intercom Product Tours at work

But I have to point out that the features that Intercom does provide are very user-friendly and easy to use. If you are currently using Intercom’s messaging widget already, it is really easy to implement and use Product Tours and start decreasing churn rates.

Briefly, Intercom Product Tours is very simple and easy to use, but it lacks efficiency and is particularly pricey to early-stage startups.

Creating a product tour on Intercom is an easy process. It’s simple, and Intercom provides all the help that you might need – in case this is your first time creating a product tour.

Also, if you are already familiar with creating product tours with another tool, it is going to be easy to adapt to Intercom since the process is quite similar.

Let’s go over the steps of how to create a product tour on Intercom:

1- Get to the product tours page

To open the product tours page, click on “Outbound” on the left-side slider within Intercom. Then, click on “Product Tours” from the menu that opens.

Intercom's dashboard
Intercoms first interface

2- Click on the “New product tour” button

This will be a blue button on the top-right of your screen.

When you click on it, you will get 2 options to choose from:

  1. Start from scratch,
  2. Or choose a template.

If you choose to go with a template, the next screen asks me to select a template (although there is only 1 choice.)

I decided to create one from scratch since that is what the walkthrough asked me to do.

How to create a product tour
Intercom’s own product tour wasn’t as fast as one would expect it to be, but it was engaging.

3- Install Intercom to your website and start editing

It is not possible to edit intercom product tours without code installation. If you just want to try the product without all the hassle, I’m sorry to say that you won’t get the chance.

Intercom messenger installing
No code, no tours.

If you have the code installed, a new window displays your website and the product tours editor.

You can edit and place the elements in the editor, and preview your product tour before publishing it.

To your walkthrough modals and tooltips, you can add:

  • ✅ Texts,
  • ✅ Images,
  • ✅ Gifs,
  • ✅ Videos with/without audio,
  • ✅ Buttons,
  • ✅ And directions about how to proceed to the next step.

And that’s it.

As simple as it is, it is also limited to this.

Intercom product tours definitely delivers what it promises, but it only promises walkthrough steps. Nothing else.

Intercom Pricing

intercom's pricing page
Intercom’s pricing details

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

👍 Pros:

“I liked how easy Intercom was to install, without needing Engineering help beyond the time it took to insert the widget.”

👎 Cons:

`Missing more in-depth analytics and editing an existing tour could be easier.”

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.

intro.js product tour
Intro.js’s product tour.

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's pricing plan details
Intro.js’s 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

userpilot alternatives comparison table
Userpilot vs competitors comparison table

Powerful In-App Onboarding without Coding

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

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Conclusion – Which one is the one for YOU?

As you see, there are numerous alternatives to Userpilot, and the one you’ll choose really is based on your business’ needs:

  • If you want a better experience than Userpilot for a better price, try UserGuiding.
  • If you are a technical person and looking for a better experience with similar pricing, try Appcues.
  • If you’re eager to sacrifice a complete user onboarding with a good cost for keeping everything in one place, try Intercom’s Product Tours.
  • If you have a low budget but an ample amount of spare developer time at hand, try Intro.js.

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.


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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.