Userpilot vs. Intercom 2024 Comparison – Which tool better suits your needs?

Userpilot is a great product with a strong base and many mid-market customers. But does being one of the first in the market mean being the best?

And then, there is Intercom.

Intercom is an easy-to-use product that provides live chat and surveying features, but… it can’t help you with onboarding as much as Userpilot does.

So which one is better for you?

Which one of these tools is the one that is the better fit for your needs and goals?

To help you find an answer to those questions, I will:

• Introduce Userpilot and talk about the tool's cons and pros,
• Introduce Intercom and talk about the tool's cons and pros,
• Compare those tools side-by-side for you to have a better overview.

And also, if you want to skip all those, you can benefit from this quick table:

TL;DR - Side-By-Side Comparison Table

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What is Userpilot?

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

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

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

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

Pros 🤩 Userpilot is good for:

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

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

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

Cons 😮‍💨 Userpilot isn’t good 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.

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

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

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

Userpilot Pricing

Userpilot has three separate pricing plans:

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

What is Intercom?

Intercom is a widely known and capable customer service tool providing many features and leveraged customer satisfaction.

The tool also has a G2 rating of 4.4 and is trusted by giant companies such as Amazon, Facebook, Shopify, and Microsoft.

While the tool is known mostly as a chat software, there is more than that to Intercom. It is a full package for almost any customer support team with features such as:

• Business Messenger,
• Customizable Bots and Automation,
• Product Tours,
• And Help Center Articles.

Pros 🤩 Intercom is 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.

Cons 😮‍💨 Intercom isn't good 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 is 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 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.

• Starter Plan: $74/month for small businesses
  • Product Tours Add-On: $199/month
  • WhatsApp Add-On: $9/user
  • Surveys Add-On: $49/month
• Support Plan: Custom quotation upon request
• Engage Plan: Custom quotation upon request
• Convert Plan: Custom quotation upon request

How about having the best of both? 😎

Way too many products have secret costs that they don't reveal until you get a demo like it's a big secret nowadays, and honestly, even before.

What difference does doing that make? I couldn't tell.

🤨🤨🤨

But I know a different user onboarding tool that can make a huge difference in your onboarding flows - and budget.

UserGuiding is an (absolutely) no-code digital adoption tool that's easy to use, geared up for effective onboarding for both customers and employees, and budget-friendly.

Some of UserGuiding's features are:

✅ Interactive guides and product tours,

✅ Tooltips, checklists, hotspots, and other onboarding elements, 

✅ Powerful analytics,

✅ User segmentation and targeting,

✅ Resource centers, 

✅ NPS surveys, microsurveys, and more!

Don't want to pay thousands of dollars for a product you cannot use effectively? You know where to go.

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Userpilot vs Intercom

Onboarding Features

Userpilot’s main focus is providing amazing onboarding features, thus, compared to Intercom, Userpilot is a better solution.

In order to compete with a digital adoption platform in terms of onboarding, Intercom has a long way to go.

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The winner is Userpilot 🤩

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Analytics Features

Although Userpilot does provide in-app analytics, since it is not the tool’s main focus, you might need an integration to handle the analytics.

Intercom isn’t an analytics tool either, but still, the range of options and the ease of use of the analytics feature is much easier compared to Userpilot.

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The winner is Intercom 🤩

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Surveying Features

Userpilot provides NPS surveys and simple feedback surveys. If you need a bigger variety, you should go with Intercom.

Intercom is a complete user engagement platform, so it is not a surprise that their surveying and user feedback options are more comprehensive and higher-rated on G2, compared to Userpilot.

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The winner is Intercom 🤩

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Pricing

Userpilot’s pricing starts from $249/month – which is above the market average.

For the starting price, Intercom provides more than Userpilot and has a better price, but beware that this pice will go up exponentially.

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The winner is Intercom 🤩

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Ease Of Use

Userpilot is not the easiest-to-use tool on the market, but compared to Intercom, it is much more easier to set up and figure out how to use. Beware that Userpilot does require technical knowledge at some point.

Intercom is one of the easiest to use among its competitors. You can use Intercom without any technical knowledge at all, but overall, Userpilot is an easier tool to use than Intercom since Intercom has more layers and functionalities.

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The winner is Userpilot 🤩

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Customer Support

Userpilot clearly cares about their customers and this is why they provide fast and personalized customer support – as per what actual users have said about them.

Intercom’s customer support to enterprise customers is said to be exquisite. However, for all other businesses, it can take up to a whole day to get a response from their support team.

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The winner is Intercom 🤩

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