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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 product experience platform with a great focus on product analytics.
- UserGuiding is a great alternative if you’re looking for a tool to boost product adoption with great onboarding capabilities.
- However, if you need a strong analytics tool, then Mixpanel is a good choice.
- In contrast to Pendo, WalkMe is ideal for employee training and productivity.
- Whatfix can be a good alternative if you’re looking for a tool with similar functionality of Pendo (without the strong analytics part).
- If you need a tool to improve user experience, then, Appcues is also a good alternative, delivering interactive in-app guidance.
What is Pendo?
Pendo is a product experience platform that aims to improve the software experience.
This platform informs users about your product’s offerings, aiming to help them understand how they can fully benefit from it.
It uses various channels to streamline the adoption process for users, including:
- In-app guides
- Session replay
- AI
- Feedback
- Roadmap
These channels also create two-way communication, enabling you to dig deeper into user behavior and feedback.
With Pendo, you can make use of:
- 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.
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.
- 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.
Top 5 Pendo Alternatives for Product Adoption
1- UserGuiding
- G2 Score: 4.7 ⭐/5 out of 332 reviews
- Pricing: Basic Plan starts at $69/month, Professional Plan starts at $199/month
UserGuiding is a no-code product adoption platform that focuses on aiding your adoption efforts.
Providing a robust set of tools, UserGuiding plays an important role in tailoring your product and messaging to your customer’s specific needs.
UserGuiding is a strong platform that helps your users get familiar with your product via:
- User Onboarding: By guiding your users to your core values, you can positively impact their learning process, eliminating user confusion and ensuring high retention.
- In-product Messaging: You can target a specific segment of your users in order to have more effective campaigns throughout the user journey.
- Self-service Help: Enabling users to help themselves through always-accessible resources helps them continue their experience without interruption.
- Customer Feedback: Constant customer feedback lets you see your product in your users’ eyes, helping you enhance your product and UX based on responses.
- Feature Adoption: Sharing what your product team has planned, such as features and updates, with your users elevates your adoption game.
Pendo shares some use cases with UserGuiding, including user onboarding and experience, as both tools cater to a similar audience.
These tools differ in their main functionality: Pendo serves as an analytics tool, for UserGuiding its adoption.
Pendo comes with broad product analytics capabilities, which can help you learn what users love the most, what they avoid, and what they don’t need—all through data that displays user paths.
UserGuiding, on the other hand, focuses on boosting adoption through several channels with actionable insights retrieved from the analytics dashboard. This enables you to optimize your sequence based on the performance of user onboarding content.
Thus, when comparing UserGuiding with Pendo, you’ll notice:
- Usability: Pendo’s interface isn’t as user-friendly and intuitive as UserGuiding, which is known for its onboarding capabilities. What’s more, the former is difficult to implement and maintain in contrast to the latter.
- Features: Pendo has several features to back up its analytics focus; however, its many functions create feature fatigue for users, making it overly complicated to use. UserGuiding, on the other hand, has core features that prioritize usability and support the product vision.
- Cost: Pendo doesn’t reveal its pricing structure, yet it’s known to be on the higher end of the spectrum. Contrastingly, UserGuiding offers its services as a cost-friendly tool.
- Perks: Pendo supports mobile applications, but due to limitations, it lacks robust customization options. In addition to visual customization, UserGuiding also includes a product updates page to enhance feature adoption.
2- Mixpanel
- G2 Score: 4.6 ⭐/5 out of 1120 reviews
- Pricing: Free Plan for up to 20 million events, Growth Plan starts at $28/month
Mixpanel is an alternative to Pendo in terms of business data analytics.
This platform helps you understand the impact of your product via a dashboard that displays the bigger picture for you with a set of features, including:
- Real-time Analytics: Thanks to real-time analytics, Mixpanel provides you with a consistent appearance of data that enables you to make time-sensitive decisions.
- Customer Behaviour: Tracking user interactions allows you to uncover the current customer behavior paths and the factors that influence them.
- Product Optimization: You’ll be able to make proper adjustments to your product after collecting insights on product efficiency.
Mixpanel also has user adoption capabilities in order to ensure that users perceive the value your product, paving the way for product stickiness.
When comparing Pendo with Mixpanel, you’ll notice:
- Usability: When compared to Mixpanel, Pendo has a more intuitive user interface since the former is home to more complex features with a steeper learning curve.
- Features: Focusing on product analytics, Pendo provides you with insights into user behavior and journeys. In addition to these user insights, Mixpanel brings in funnel analysis, cohort analysis, and retention analytics.
- Cost: Pendo doesn’t reveal its pricing structure, but Mixpanel does - and it starts at $28 per month, making it affordable for every analytic-lover.
- Perks: One of Mixpanel’s perks is visualization and customization as it offers deep and customizable analytics capabilities, while Pendo’s perk is mobile application support.
3- WalkMe
- G2 Score: 4.5 ⭐/5 out of 440 reviews
- Pricing: -
WalkMe is a digital adoption solution that provides personalized guidance that helps your users see value in your product faster.
To streamline this adoption process, this platform comes with some tools, such as:
- Interactive Walkthroughs: Step-by-step instructions within the applications help your employees on task execution and customers with lessening user frustration.
- In-app Messaging: Interrupting no workflow, in-app announcements ensure that your audience gets your message loud and clear.
- Tooltips: With the help of tooltips, you can offer additional information on particular features of your app in a non-intrusive way.
What makes this platform unique from the competition is that it’s mostly used for employee training to maximize productivity.
Thus, when comparing WalkMe to Pendo, you’ll notice differences in:
- Usability: Both Pendo and WalkMe offer extensive functionality, making it harder for users to navigate without difficulty.
- Features: These tools differ in terms of main focus since Pendo concentrates on understanding and analyzing user data; meanwhile, WalkMe provides detailed, interactive in-app guidance and training.
- Cost: Neither of these tools has transparent pricing; however, they’re both known to be at the high end of the spectrum.
- Perks: WalkMe’s perk includes it being a robust tool for employee training and productivity, while Pendo’s is strong product analytics.
4- Whatfix
- G2 Score: 4.6 ⭐/5 out of 344 reviews
- Pricing: -
Digital adoption platform, Whatfix helps you get your user experience game on by offering several tools for engagement.
These tools include but are not limited to:
- Onboarding Tours: Onboarding tours introduce your features to your users (both customers and employees), helping them become adept more quickly.
- Change Management: Whatfix can help you streamline the business transformation process for users by highlighting application changes.
- Omnichannel Help and Support: With self-service help widgets, you can create a loop where users find the answers they’re looking for on their own without leaving the application.
Just like WalkMe, Whatfix can be employed for both customers and employees as it also includes employee onboarding features that will simplify new employees to get used to the platform and their tasks.
Comparing Whatfix with Pendo, you’ll notice:
- Usability: Pendo and Whatfix are similar in terms of functionality and user interface, making navigation more difficult for users and employees with a moderate learning curve.
- Features: Pendo’s strength lies in product analytics, while Whatfix’s is in-app guidance; thus, Pendo has customizable reports and dashboards, and Whatfix is known for contextual tips and onboarding flows.
- Cost: Neither of these tools reveals their pricing structure. Thus, your pricing package depends on your specific needs and scale.
- Perks: Whatfix shines when it comes to self-serve help, but it’s Pendo that is favored for its product performance analytics.
5- Appcues
- G2 Score: 4.6 ⭐/5 out of 311 reviews
- Pricing: Essentials Plan starts at $249/month, Growth Plan starts at $879/month
Appcues is a tool to improve the product experience for your users.
Enabling you to boost activation, this platform has strong features for tailored onboarding, including:
- Onboarding Flows: Through onboarding flows, new users understand how they can benefit from your product and how they can easily put it into use.
- Surveys: You can collect feedback from users through surveys in the application to gather valuable insight on user satisfaction, feature requests, and pain points.
- In-App Messaging: You can keep your users updated by sending in-app targeted messages about new features, updates, or important information.
Even though Appcues is similar to Pendo in more than one way, upon comparing both tools, you’ll notice:
- Usability: Appcues has a clean and intuitive interface, making it easy to implement, unlike Pendo.
- Features: While Pendo’s strong suit is product analytics, Appcues excels in providing in-app guidance. Thus, Pendo has strong features for backing up analytics (like engagement metrics), and Appcues has strong features for onboarding (like flows).
- Cost: While Pendo doesn’t reveal its pricing structure, Appcues is an expensive alternative, starting from $249.
- Perks: Appcues offers in-app guidance with engagement tools to improve user experience; meanwhile, Pendo has a great set of tools to enhance your analytics game.
In Conclusion…
Here is a table that summarizes the article:
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