Table of Contents
- WalkMe – The unicorn company for digital adoption
- UserGuiding – Better user onboarding without any coding
- Pendo – Understand and guide your users
- Appcues – First of “no-code” onboarding software
- Introjs – Open-source and free WalkMe alternative
- WalkMe Alternatives Comparison Chart
- Frequently Asked Questions
If you want to employ a user onboarding tool and looking for a solution rather than WalkMe, we prepared a list of tools that can be very good alternatives to WalkMe that includes low-cost and free (open-source) products.
We gathered data from lots of user reviews on websites such as Capterra, G2Crowd and we objectively analyzed their positive and negative aspects in terms of use cases and their pricing.
Our article will help you understand the differences between WalkMe and its 4 popular alternatives. Plus, you can find comments of some users in this article and we made a comparison chart for you to analyze before deciding to use WalkMe or its competitors.
The alternatives we are going to evaluate:
- UserGuiding
- Pendo
- Appcues
- Intro.js (Open source)
First, let’s dive into the pros and cons of WalkMe:
WalkMe – The unicorn company for digital adoption
WalkMe is a cloud-based platform that helps product managers and customer success managers to manage in-app experiences and create product tours.
It is one of the oldest pioneering onboarding products in the market. For years, it has been serving companies to create product walkthroughs with step-by-step onboarding guides.
The reality behind why WalkMe has held for a very long time is that it is a really good option for large companies who want to work with a trustworthy name. It is trusted by giant and recognizable brands in their areas, such as Cisco, RBC Royal Bank, Microsoft, and Paypal. Therefore, it reassures enterprises about digital adoption.
Above all else, it may not be the best option that can fit well with what you need because WalkMe is not very understandable, also its implementation is very hard, and considerable technical knowledge is required. Plus, you need to be prepared to sacrifice a really big budget to employ this tool.
WalkMe Pricing
WalkMe currently does not provide us with a fixed price. They offer customized plans for each of their customers according to their product. But according to the market, these customizations end up being higher prices than their competitors.
WalkMe Reviews
Pros:
WalkMe is a pretty simple and creative tool to use to target your audience. It has benefited us in making it much easier to target our audience to download and use our services! We have received great customer support, which has helped us every bit of the way. WalkMe is definitely worth every cent with all of the feature-reach functionality you receive!
Cons:
Getting implemented was a bit tricky for us. It took longer than expected probably because our business and our process, in general, are a bit more difficult for others to grasp. You do need to have patience because you do need to build everything from scratch but once you are up and running that is when the fun begins. At least that was the case for us.
UserGuiding – Better user onboarding without any coding
Just as WalkMe, UserGuiding is a user onboarding tool that provides product managers and customer success managers to create interactive guides, product tours, and customer checklists and track the analytics for each step.
UserGuiding is very new in the market. It was founded almost 15 months ago by two young entrepreneurs in San Francisco. Even though it is recent, it has been growing fast and it turns from an unfamed name to a very preferable brand for big companies such as Red Ventures, Mobile Action, İs Investment, Insider and Foriba.
The two most important points at which UserGuiding differentiates from its competitors are its unprecedented customer support and openness to innovation. The customer support team helps you under all circumstances and whenever you need help. Customers’ any request and feedbacks are considered carefully by the product development team and the roadmap is set based on user feedback and requests.
UserGuiding will be very appropriate for you if you do not have much technical knowledge and do not want to spend time to implement onboarding guides to your product. Because no coding required to use every feature of UserGuiding, and it is very simple to use. Last but not least, prices are very attainable. It is one of the most popular low-cost Walkme alternatives.
UserGuiding Pricing
UserGuiding currently has 2 plans: Startup and Growth. Startup package starts from $125/month when billed annually and it is $149/month when billed monthly.
When billed annually, the Growth package is $249/month and it increases to $299/month if billed monthly.
UserGuiding Reviews
Pros:
Very simple to use, a total plug and play product. No technical knowledge is needed.
Cons:
It works quite smooth with web apps but it requires some development with desktop apps.
Pendo – Understand and guide your users
Pendo can do a lot of things. It will be an effective solution in terms of product experience and many SaaS companies have realized it. So, Pendo is quite popular in the SaaS environment.
The foremost offering of Pendo is its Product Cloud. The principal aim is to gather up user onboarding, product analytics, and user feedback together in one platform.
When it comes to product analytics and user segmentation Pendo will be a great solution. Plus, some big names such as Zendesk, bmc, and Sprinklr choose Pendo to understand and guide their users.
However, there are limited onboarding elements and there is not a great variety of styling options. So, it restricts you to create a smooth onboarding experience. Sometimes, it also can be confusing to use it since Pendo has many different features for different use cases. Also, it is not a cheap option.
Pendo Pricing
Pendo currently does not provide us with a specific price. It offers custom prices for their customers according to their products.
Pendo Reviews
Pros:
I love Pendo. I love it so much, I asked Capterra to add it to their software list just so I could review it (and no, I don’t work there). We’ve used Pendo for the last 10 months and it couldn’t be going better. We are a SaaS company and Pendo is giving our Product, Analytics, Customer Success and Onboarding Teams insights that were not previously possible. We leverage Pendo for user engagement, onboarding (tooltips, guides, popups etc.) and analytics. It is a smooth platform with great support and it works great. I couldn’t recommend it more.
Cons:
It’s not necessarily a knock on Pendo so much as it is a knock on the quality of the development of your own site that Pendo sits on top of. If you have some questionable code, you may have a tricky time getting the rules and feature tagging completed exactly as you’d like. It helps if you have a knowledge of HTML and CSS to get around any of these pitfalls, otherwise, you’ll have to work with your Dev teams to get your internal code issues sorted out so that Pendo can work properly.
Appcues – First of “no-code” onboarding software
Appcues is a breakthrough in onboarding history. Before it came out, high technical knowledge was required for creating a simple onboarding guide. This tool broke taboos by putting a no-code onboarding product in the market.
They also presented several revelationary onboarding elements to the world that we willingly use today like checklists and tooltips. Appcues has also been trusted by enterprises recently.
I would like to point out that, it is not as easy-to-use as you might expect. It can be time-consuming for companies which have not people who can devote a long time for creating onboarding flows and product tours. Lastly, you may need to spend a considerable amount of money on Appcues. It is not very cheap.
Appcues Pricing
Appcues pricings starts at $249/month with the Essentials package. For the Growth package, they charge $879/month.
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).
Introjs – Open-source and free WalkMe alternative
Intro.js is a javascript based free product tour creation library. It allows you to create step-by-step onboarding guides. You can find all the features and necessary information you need on their website and copy of this library in GitHub.
As you may guess you need to have a remarkable level of technical knowledge for free implementation.
It can be a very effective Walkme alternative for those who do not want to pay but have time and knowledge of coding.
WalkMe Alternatives Comparison Chart
We designed a chart that describes the main differences between Walkme and four alternatives.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who should use WalkMe?
Product managers and customer success managers should use WalkMe to improve their user onboarding.
How much does WalkMe cost?
WalkMe currently doesn’t have a fixed price, they create customized plans with custom prices for each customer.
Are there any alternatives to WalkMe?
Yes. Top 4 WalkMe alternatives are UserGuiding, Pendo, Appcues, and introjs.com.
