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Unexpected from a product experience tool, you might have had a bad encounter with Pendo.
If not, perhaps you’re here to learn more about it and its alternatives.
In any case, this article covers all the points you need to know about before making a decision ⬇️
TL;DR
- Pendo is a mobile app-friendly product analytics tool with a great focus on analytics and insights; it offers guides to onboard users, session replays to track user behavior, and analytics to track material usage.
- However, Pendo’s analytics capabilities run short for two specific goals: providing qualitative data and delivering insights on user journey.
- UserGuiding: Emerging as the number one Pendo alternative, UserGuiding focuses on product adoption to help end-users understand how to accomplish their goals using your product. Besides adoption, it includes multiple onboarding elements, an AI assistant, and better yet, offers a scalable pricing system.
- Appcues: Another Pendo competitor, Appcues, focuses on user engagement; it does a great job, too, as it’s the only platform that offers multi-channel messaging through in-app, email, and push notifications. Another multi-channel ability is surveys, but it’s where Appcues falls short of compared to Pendo.
- Userpilot: Userpilot is similar to Pendo in terms of engagement features, such as session recordings, in-app announcements, and onboarding materials. However, the features this alternative offers are more robust and inclusive. However, Pendo has the upper hand in analytics, for sure.
- Userflow: Compared to Pendo, this alternative offers a more user-friendly interface and it shows especially in the creation process of user onboarding materials. The drag-and-drop builder makes Userflow a great alternative to Pendo if you’re looking for simplicity. Unfortunately, the same cannot be said for its analytics when compared to Pendo.
- Product Fruits: This Pendo competitor has an edge when it comes to self-service since it supports a native knowledge base and allows you to send in-app announcements, unlike Pendo. However, you will notice the lack of reports and advanced analytics with this one if you’re used to Pendo.
- WalkMe: In contrast to Pendo, WalkMe is an alternative that’s ideal for employee training and productivity due to its main use case being employee onboarding. Thus, you should choose WalkMe if these are the pain points you wish to solve for your business.
- Intercom: This Pendo alternative offers top-notch customer support thanks to its features, including an AI agent and knowledge base. While the former feature is ready to use in Pendo (but doesn’t have chatbot abilities), the latter is only available through an integration; thus, you can make your choice if your use case is the same as Intercom’s.
What is Pendo?
Pendo is a product analytics tool with four use cases:
- Product adoption
- User feedback
- Customer experience
- Product analytics
In order to cater to these needs, Pendo has a comprehensive amount of features, including:
- Product Insights: Pendo’s analytics allows you to obtain application and user data, enabling you to understand what users do inside your product.
- Product Roadmap: The roadmap permits you to prioritize your product initiatives and communicate your vision with internal and external parties.
- In-app Guides: Guides accelerate the time-to-value process for your users by helping them understand what they can achieve using your services.
- Session Replay: Showing how users spend time on your platform, session replays dig deeper into user behavior.
- In-app Surveys: In-app surveys facilitate the feedback collection process by using surveys that don’t interrupt the user experience.
Moreover, Pendo is compatible with mobile devices, so, you can reach product analytics and track events for both web and mobile applications.
What are the weaknesses of Pendo?
Pendo can help you with a lot, but it also raises some concerns regarding specific topics, such as:
- Analytics-based Functions: If you’re an early startup or you already have a third-party analytics service, then it’s highly likely that you don’t need Pendo in your tech stack.
- Not-so-working Analytics: For a tool this focused on analytics, there are many bad reviews on the way Pendo works with analytics; thus, you might need to think twice before committing to it. Check out what users said about Pendo in 2024 on G2:
- Feature Creep: While Pendo’s main focus is analytics, it offers several more services to enhance your users’ digital experience, creating feature bloat where side features outpower the core ones.
- Unscalable Pricing: Pendo doesn’t have a transparent pricing system that allows you to scale according to your business growth.
- Hard to Use: Due to a user-unfriendly interface, Pendo doesn’t facilitate the navigation process for users to access the feature sets easily.
7 Best Alternatives to Pendo
Here are our nominees:
#1 Pendo vs. UserGuiding
- G2 Score: 4.7⭐/5 (573 reviews)
UserGuiding is a no-code product adoption platform that focuses on aiding your adoption efforts.
Contrary to Pendo, it has multiple use cases that help boost adoption, from user onboarding to self-service help.
For example, UserGuiding is home to multiple UI elements, such as product tours, onboarding checklists, tooltips, hotspots, and in-app announcement modals, to engage users from the get-go, while Pendo doesn’t include as many elements.
Another example is to aid your self-service support channels: knowledge base and AI assistant.
While Pendo lacks the former feature (and UserGuiding doesn’t), the latter allows you to analyze feedback and create guides only; UserGuiding, on the other hand, enables you to provide instant support to users through its chatbot capabilities in different languages.
Last but not least, UserGuiding is a user-friendly platform that requires no code and works with a Chrome extension, while Pendo requires a technical team to get started and continue.
See how UserGuiding compares to Pendo for yourself 👈
Let’s see how Pendo and UserGuiding compare in terms of product features and capabilities side-by-side:
| Pendo | UserGuiding | |
|---|---|---|
|
In-App Guidance |
Create interactive guides, tooltips, and onboarding modules. |
Create product tours, hotspots, tooltips, and onboarding checklists. |
|
Knowledge Base |
No native knowledge base capabilities. However, there are integration options for the in-app resource center. |
Combine your educational materials into a standalone knowledge base and connect it to your in-app resource center for easy access within your product. |
|
User Feedback |
Send NPS surveys via both in-app and email channels. Feedback collection and user research capabilities require an upgrade to Pendo Listen. |
Gather user feedback and insights through in-app surveys, including NPS surveys, CSAT surveys, onboarding surveys, feature request surveys, support tickets, and more. |
|
In-App Announcements |
No pop-up, slideout, or banner capabilities. However, there are announcement modules within the resource center. |
Communicate your updates and feature releases through in-app announcement modals, such as slideouts, banners, and pop-ups. |
|
AI Agent |
Utilize internal AI capabilities for feedback analysis (Pendo Listen), and guide creation. No AI agent/support chatbot capabilities for end-users. |
Provide instant support in your users’ language and automate onboarding with real-time guidance offered by AI. |
|
Segmentation |
Segment your users based on product usage, guide interactions, or user/ account data and attributions. |
Segment your users based on user actions/ attributions to personalize their product experience. |
|
Product Analytics |
Monitor user interactions and create detailed reports for funnels, paths, retention, and workflows. |
Observe user flow and engagement metrics in the analytics dashboard to spot friction areas. |
|
Event Tracking/Goal Tracking |
Track user events, create detailed dashboards, and record user sessions. |
Set up and track goals for UserGuiding materials and user attributes. No native event-tracking features. |
|
Product Updates/Roadmap |
Use product roadmaps to plan, prioritize, and communicate tasks and feature releases. |
Announce and categorize your releases in a standalone Product Updates page. |
But that’s not it; seeing how these solutions differ in some other crucial areas besides features might also help you choose the one to adopt:
| Pendo | UserGuiding | |
|---|---|---|
|
Integrations |
Connect your product, knowledge base, feedback, support, and data tools. Available integrations include: Salesforce, HubSpot, Intercom, Gainsight, Optimizely, Zendesk, Qualtrics, and more. |
Connect your CRM and analytics tools to sync data and boost user onboarding. Available integrations include: Amplitude, Webhooks, Salesforce, Intercom, Mixpanel, Segment, Slack, Google Analytics, Woopra, and HubSpot. |
|
Pricing |
No transparent pricing. |
Starting from $69/mo (billed yearly) for 1000 MAU. |
|
Technical Requirements |
Steep learning curve and heavy reliance on technical teams for setup and maintenance. |
Little to no learning curve. |
|
Compliance & Security |
SoC2 Type 2, GDPR, CCPA, TX-RAMP, and HIPAA compliant. |
SoC2 Type2, GDPR, ISO 27001, LGPD compliant. Check all the other security & compliance documentation here. |
|
Device Supported |
Web applications, mobile applications, and iFrames. |
Web applications. No native mobile app support. |
|
Support |
Live support with limited work hours and a self-serve knowledge base. |
Access helps easily through 24/7 live support or a self-serve knowledge base. |
These differences also play a part in user reviews, too.
Based on G2’s quarterly report, you can see clearly that UserGuiding is preferred to Pendo in the following topics and receives more positive comments:
UserGuiding Pricing
UserGuiding has three pricing plans available:
- Basic: $69/monthly; billed annually.
- Professional: Custom pricing.
- Corporate: Custom pricing.
UserGuiding offers an adjustable pricing system based on the Monthly Active Users (MAUs) you have, and the minimum number of active users is 1,000.
The biggest difference between the first and second plans is the unlimited usage of some essential features, such as guides, hotspots, checklists, and resource centers; the second differentiator is the number of seats growing from 1 to 5.
The last plan is the most inclusive and offers several unlimited items, including seats, customization themes, and the number of domains.
#2 Pendo vs. Appcues
- G2 Score: 4.6⭐/5 (331 reviews)
Appcues is a tool offering product adoption and user onboarding services.
These services are divided into five categories: user onboarding, feature adoption, user feedback, self-serve support, and trial conversion.
Appcues includes the following features:
- Flows and checklists
- NPS surveys
- Segmentation
- Event tracking
- Product analytics
- Banners and pop-ups
Appcues Wins at…
- Multi-channel User Engagement: Appcues has several user interface elements to increase engagement, including banners, pop-ups, and push notifications, whereas Pendo offers only announcement modules for resource centers.
- Pricing: Pendo doesn’t reveal any pricing information on its website; however, it’s known that Pendo’s plans are even more expensive than Appcues’ plans.
Pendo Wins at…
- User Feedback: Pendo’s NPS surveys have an edge over Appcues’ due to the ability to send them through two different channels: in-app and email.
- Analytics: While Appcues has an analytics section for flows and checklists, Pendo provides a more detailed look at not only performance metrics but also product usage metrics.
Appcues Pricing
Appcues has three pricing plans available – Start, Grow, and Enterprise plans.
These plans alter based on the Monthly Tracked Users (MTU); for 1,000 MTUs, which is the minimum amount of users, here is how the pricing plans look:
- Start: $250/month; paid annually.
- Grow: $1000/month; paid annually.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing.
The Start plan limiting some features’ usage and excluding some features from the get-go, such as the number of messages being 5K and no checklists and resource centers, might require you to purchase the next plan, which starts from $1000 a month.
#3 Pendo vs. Userpilot
- G2 Score: 4.6⭐/5 (689 reviews)
Userpilot is a product growth platform.
It covers three use cases: user onboarding, feature adoption, and user feedback.
Here are the features Userpilot has:
- Flows, hotspots, tooltips, and checklists
- In-app surveys
- Modals, slideouts, and banners
- Segmentation
- Session replay
Userpilot Wins at…
- Session Recordings: Session recordings are a must if you wish to capture user actions on your website, and Userpilot provides you with this ability better.
- In-App Announcements: Userpilot has modals, banners, and slideouts for feature announcements; however, Pendo does not have such capabilities, only announcement modals to use within the resource center.
- Pricing: As Userpilot follows a transparent pricing policy and Pendo does not, the former is the clear winner, with prices starting from $249.
Pendo Wins at…
- Product Roadmaps: While all Userpilot offers is a small news section within the resource center for announcements, Pendo includes product roadmaps to maintain communication with end users.
- AI Agent: If you’re looking for a tool with AI support to back up some operations, such as feedback analysis and guide creation, Pendo can help you with that – Userpilot, on the other hand, cannot.
Userpilot Pricing
Userpilot has three plans available: Starter, Growth, and Enterprise.
Here is how the plans break down:
- Starter: $249/month; paid annually.
- Growth: $799/month; paid annually.
- Enterprise: Custom quote.
The latter plan involves a custom number of Monthly Active Users (MAUs) and no seat limitations, with unlimited usage of features like segmentation and localization.
On the other hand, the former plan offers services for up to 2,000 MAUs and 3 seats while not including many features that the middle and last plans do, such as resource centers, surveys, funnels, and session replays – making it necessary to upgrade if you wish to benefit from the platform to the fullest.
#4 Pendo vs. Userflow
- G2 Score: 4.8⭐/5 (104 reviews)
Userflow is a user onboarding tool.
It aims to create engaged customers from the new users who land on your platform for the first time.
To do so, it has the following features:
- Product tours and guides
- Question flows
- Modals and banners
- AI agent
- Segmentation
- Event Tracking
Userflow Wins at…
- Onboarding Flow Builder: Using Userflow’s drag-and-drop flow builder makes it easy to create onboarding materials, while Pendo doesn’t offer the same experience to users due to its complexity.
- In-App Announcements: While Pendo limits you to announce through the resource center only, Userflow offers in-app announcement modals and banners.
- Design: Unlike Pendo, Userflow has a user-friendly design with less crowded elements that are easy on the eye.
- Pricing: While Pendo’s pricing remains unknown, a large percentage of users assume it’s higher than Userflow’s pricing plans, starting from $240.
Pendo Wins at…
- Analytics: Userflow’s basic material interaction metrics tracking system cannot compete with Pendo’s detailed reports for each user onboarding element it provides – if that’s an area you find valuable.
- Product Roadmaps: Pendo has your back when you need product roadmaps to maintain communication between each release; unfortunately, the same cannot be said for Userflow.
Userflow Pricing
Userflow has three pricing plans, Startup, Pro, and Enterprise respectively.
Here is how the pricing plans break down:
- Startup: $240/month; paid annually.
- Pro: $680/month; paid annually.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing.
Userflow benefits from an expendable Monthly Active Users system in which your pricing grows as your users do; thus, in the first plan, you start with 3,000 MAUs as a default, and you can increase the number of users you have from there.
The middle plan can accommodate up to 10,000 users and provides features not included in the first plan, such as localization, no-code event tracking, and unlimited surveys.
#5 Pendo vs. Product Fruits
- G2 Score: 4.7⭐/5 (123 reviews)
Product Fruits is a platform for user engagement and onboarding.
It covers 3 use cases: user onboarding, user feedback, and in-app communication.
Let me list some of the features Product Fruits has for these cases:
- Product tours, walkthroughs, tooltips, and checklists
- Knowledge base
- Surveys
- Pop-ups, banners, and newsfeeds
- AI agent
- Segmentation
Product Fruits Wins at…
- Knowledge Base: Product Fruitsh can support a knowledge base; however, Pendo lacks this feature by native means—it only allows integrations.
- In-App Announcements: Pendo only includes announcement modals within resource centers, while Product Fruits is home to several more elements: pop-ups, newsfeeds, and banners.
- Pricing: Although its pricing is little known, Pendo is deduced to be at the high end of the spectrum, unlike Product Fruits, which starts from $79 per month.
Pendo Wins at…
- Analytics: As Product Fruits only allows simple interaction metrics to be tracked, Pendo emerges as the clear winner of this category thanks to its ability to monitor user interactions and create reports for each trackable material.
- Event Tracking: If you believe in the power of tracking user events and recording user sessions, then moving forward with Pendo is a good choice since Product Fruits won’t give you that.
Product Fruits Pricing
Product Fruits has three pricing plans to choose from:
- Core: $79/month; paid annually.
- Boost: $139/month; paid annually.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing.
Product Fruits doesn’t increase your pricing based on the number of seats, tours, or tooltips (these two are unlimited even in the first plan); rather, your pricing changes based on the Monthly Active Users (MAUs) you have.
The minimum number to start for the first two plans above is 1,500, and the difference between them is the ability to use NPS & surveys, custom events, and AI flow creation, which belong to the middle plan.
#6 Pendo vs. WalkMe
- G2 Score: 4.5⭐/5 (477 reviews)
WalkMe is an employee experience platform.
Different from the names in this list, this tool focuses on employees, not users; thus, its main use case is employee onboarding.
WalkMe has the following features:
- Product tours and hotspots
- NPS and surveys
- AI agent
- Segmentation
- Product analytics
- Event tracking
WalkMe Wins at…
- Employee-Facing Onboarding: If you’re looking for a tool for your employees rather than customers, WalkMe should be your choice since it’s built for it. Pendo, on the other hand, isn’t as suitable as this alternative to meet your employee-facing needs.
Pendo Wins at…
- Analytics: WalkMe is a great contender in analytics since it’s one of its strengths; however, Pendo provides more control over user analytics and reports.
- Technical Requirements: WalkMe is a product that requires an expert with technical knowledge to get started due to its customizable nature; even though Pendo isn’t as easy to use as the other alternatives, either – it still manages to win this section compared to WalkMe.
WalkMe Pricing
WalkMe doesn’t reveal its pricing structure; thus, you need to get a custom quote that fits your needs.
#7 Pendo vs. Intercom
- G2 Score: 4.5⭐/5 (3,338 reviews)
Intercom is a customer service platform, unlike the other alternatives on this list.
It covers three use cases: user feedback, customer support, and product experience.
It has the following features in its toolkit:
- Product tours, tooltips, and checklists
- Knowledge base
- Surveys
- Banners
- AI agent
- Segmentation
- Goal tracking
Intercom Wins at…
- Customer Support: A tool created to help out the support teams with features like banners for announcements and AI agent for customer service can help you a lot more than Pendo does.
- Knowledge Base: Unlike Pendo, Intercom enables you to create a knowledge base for your users to provide self-service support 24/7.
- AI Agent: Compared to Intercom’s AI agent, Pendo’s AI agent has limited capabilities on only feedback analysis and guide creation, while Intercom’s AI agent can back up your support services thanks to its chatbot abilities.
Pendo Wins at…
- Analytics: As Intercom doesn’t provide any metrics related to product and analytics is one of Pendo’s strong suits, the latter is the champion in this category.
- Product Roadmap: While Intercom lacks a product roadmap feature, Pendo allows you to plan your next releases and communicate them through its platform.
Intercom Pricing
Intercom has three pricing plans and one add-on plan:
- Essential: $29/month per seat; paid annually.
- Advanced: $85/month per seat; paid annually.
- Expert: $132/month per seat; paid annually.
- Proactive Support Plus: Starting from $99/month; add-on to the first three plans.
The bridge between Intercom’s plans is big in terms of capabilities; while the first plan includes only simple customer support features (such as shared inbox, ticketing system, and Fin AI agent), the second plan offers more inclusive features that a customer support tool needs: private help center, multilingual help center, and unlimited articles.
The third plan offers even better features to support your teams and customers, including real-time dashboards, advanced workflow automation, and multiple help centers.
What’s missing from each of these plans are all onboarding elements, which come in only as an add-on. Features like product tours, surveys, checklists, and push notifications can only be purchased with a plan from above, and the pricing is rather vague (except for the fact that it starts from $99) as it will be determined based on your needs.
In Conclusion…
Here is a table that summarizes the article:
