Pendo might be one of the most established products in the Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) market, but its dominance doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right product for each use case.
Even though Pendo is one of the market leaders for those wanting an effective DAP to layer on top of their existing software, alternative products might be better suited to your requirements.
Let’s dive in and find out more about the best Pendo alternatives for your DAP needs.
What is Pendo?
Pendo was founded in 2013 as one of the first, and most comprehensive, products in the DAP arena. With its wide range of features and track record of reliability and consistency, it is one of the most popular DAPs. It’s used by software companies who want to optimise their products using behavioural intel. Pendo offers tools to help gather feedback from users and lets you make data-driven decisions to improve the user experience.
Pendo features include:
- User behaviour analytics,
- In-app messaging,
- User surveys, and
- Product usage tracking.
The deep analysis that Pendo offers helps you understand user behaviour. This, in turn, shows how you can help drive adoption. In other words, it helps customers learn your software as well as show you how they’re using it at the same time. This means you can develop updates and features based on what customers actually want and need.
Famous for the quality of its analytics, Pendo also helps drive product adoption by using User Interface (UI) patterns to communicate with users inside the product, enhancing engagement for more effective onboarding. However, some critics comment that their UI patterns are too limiting.
User-level insights allow you to track and analyse the behaviour of individual users within your application or website. This granular level of insight enables product teams to understand user journeys, identify pain points, and personalise experiences based on individual user behaviour.
Pendo features tools for collecting qualitative feedback from users including surveys, polls, and NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys. This feedback can provide valuable insights into user preferences, needs and frustrations.
Why Pendo Might Not Be the Right Fit
Even market leaders have limitations and weaknesses, and Pendo is no exception.
Downsides include a lack of real-life data updates, limited UI patterns for onboarding, a steep learning curve and high prices. Pendo can be expensive for smaller businesses and start-ups, particularly if they don’t have a large user base. Pendo is very much designed for enterprise-size companies.
Here are some of the reasons why Pendo might not be the right fit for your company.
- Unnecessary features: Pendo describes itself as a “complete solution” but with very high pricing, you may end up spending a lot of money and not using all the features you’re paying for. The overwhelming amount of features might also make it more difficult for your teams to adopt Pendo and use it effectively.
- Steep learning curve: It’s well-known that Pendo is difficult to learn to use for employees. It could take a lot of time and training to bring users up to speed on all the features, especially if your teams aren’t familiar with similar analytics tools or methodologies.
- Too much feedback: While customer feedback is valuable, Pendo users may find the volume of feedback provided overwhelming. Too much feedback, or contradictory feedback, can swamp and confuse product teams, making it challenging to prioritise and act upon. Too much of a good thing can be overkill if you don’t need it.
- High pricing: Pendo pricing depends on the number of users, the level of support required, and additional features needed. They offer tiered pricing plans tailored for startups, small to medium businesses, and enterprise-level organisations, but are renowned for being one of the most expensive DAPs on the market.
5 Pendo Alternatives
Since Pendo’s launch 11 years ago, the market has widened considerably and there are now competitive alternatives with similar offerings and better services. Here are our top five Pendo alternatives that might suit your business better.
1. Omniplex Guide
Omniplex Guide is a newer entrant to the DAP market and is the latest addition to Omniplex Learning’s portfolio of products and services.
Omniplex Learning has over 30 years of experience empowering organisations to design, create, and deliver impactful digital learning solutions. Their unique expertise now underpins Omniplex Guide, a Digital Adoption solution that helps businesses get the most out of their systems and technology investments.
The Omniplex Guide Suite offers three distinct products:
Guide Pro provides the best alternative to Pendo. It elevates the learning experience by providing advanced interactive in-app guidance, facilitating learning within the flow of work. Its array of features empowers users with enhanced workflow capabilities, fostering a dynamic learning environment.
Top features:
- Simple guide creation,
- Embedded content,
- User management and segmentation,
- Guide health, which automatically alerts you to any steps in the guide that may be broken or need updating, and
- Form validation.
Pricing: There are pricing plans to meet the needs of every organisation and you can sign up for a free and instant product tour to explore the tool for yourself.
2. Appcues
Appcues and Pendo both aim to improve user engagement and adoption within digital products, but they differ slightly in their functionalities and they each target different aspects of the user experience.
Pros:
- Focuses on in-app user onboarding,
- Prioritises feature adoption and user engagement.
- More UI Patterns than Pendo, including modals, hotspots, slide-outs, pins, banners and tooltips
- Provides a visual editor for creating in-app experiences without coding
Cons:
- Appcues had weaker analytics options.
Appcues analytics can’t match up to Pendo’s strength in analytics, but it does offer more UI patterns than Pendo does. Modals, hotspots, slide-outs, pins, banners and tooltips can all be used to build product tours or launch from a checklist. Appcues also supports in-app surveys including NPS (Net Promoter Score) to understand how your customers feel about your product.
Appcues provides:
- A visual editor for creating in-app experiences without coding,
- Behavioural targeting to segment users,
- Analytics to track engagement, and
- A/B testing to optimise experience.
It’s often used by product managers, UX designers, and growth marketers who are primarily focused on improving user onboarding, feature adoption, and engagement within web applications.
Pendo, on the other hand, appeals more to product teams, product managers, and data analysts who require comprehensive product analytics, user feedback, and guidance features to optimise user experiences and drive product adoption.
Pricing: Appcues pricing packages start at $249/month and a free trial is available.
3. Mixpanel
Strictly speaking, Mixpanel isn’t a DAP and does not offer onboarding functionality. Instead, it focuses solely on product analytics and user behaviour tracking.
Mixpanel offers a range of tools and features to track, measure and understand how users interact with your digital product and help you improve user engagement.
Detailed analytics include:
- Event tracking,
- User segmentation,
- Funnel analysis,
- Retention analysis and
- A/B testing.
If your business doesn’t need self-help features and in-app guidance but still wants the analytics, Mixpanel has a lower price point than Pendo so may be a preferred option.
Broadly speaking, Mixpanel may be preferred by organisations that prioritise detailed event-based analytics and optimisation of user journeys. It’s mainly used by product managers, data analysts and marketers who are focused on analysing user behaviour and optimising user experience.
Similarly to Pendo, Mixpanel also offers Mobile App Analytics, Digital Analytics and Product Analytics. Some reviewers say it is easier to set up and better at meeting requirements than Pendo.
Mixpanel Pricing: Mixpanel has three pricing options – Free, Growth and Enterprise. Growth pricing starts at $20 a month.
4. WalkMe
WalkMe focuses predominantly on providing interactive walkthroughs, in-app guidance, tooltips and task automation to help users navigate software effectively. Both Pendo and WalkMe offer basic user analytics, but WalkMe has fewer capabilities for communicating with customers in-app.
Where WalkMe excels is with in-app guidance and support. Its features include:
- Personalised in-app guidance,
- Trigger contextual tooltips and links, and
- Create onboarding checklists and product tours.
- Resource centre with on-demand resources which your users can access and
- An AI-powered chatbot to assistant
For companies wanting to support a digital transformation project, WalkMe can be a good alternative to Pendo. It’s ideal for product managers, UX designers and customer service teams who want to prioritise improving the user experience.
Same as Pendo, WalkMe also offers a DAP, Mobile App Analytics, Mobile App Optimisation and Session Replay. According to G2 reviewers, WalkMe is slower to reach ROI but offers better support than Pendo.
Walkme Pricing: The pricing structure for WalkMe is not widely available but you can contact them for a custom quote. Pricing is typically aimed at enterprise-level customers.
5. WhatFix
Whatfix is great for training, support, and customer success teams aiming to streamline user onboarding, enhance product training, and improve user engagement.
Benefits:
- No-code editor
- Self-help user support
- In-app guidance
- Great analytics suite
Keeping pace with Pendo’s analytics tools, Whatfix Analytics is a codeless event tracking and product analytics software tool that lets teams understand product usage, identify friction areas, map user flows, build user cohorts, and visual journeys and track custom events.
Whatfix stands out in the digital adoption space thanks to its:
- Intuitive authoring,
- Personalisation,
- Seamless integration,
- Scalability and
- Flexibility.
WhatFix uses a user-friendly interface for creating interactive guides and walkthroughs without requiring extensive technical knowledge. This ease of authoring accelerates the creation of onboarding materials and support content, bolstering efficiency in your business.
This DAP also excels at providing personalised guidance tailored to individual user roles, tasks, and contexts within the application. This targeted approach ensures that users receive relevant assistance precisely when they need it.
Whatfix Pricing: WhatFix pricing is subscription based and worked out through a custom quote, but it’s aimed at Enterprise level organisations.
Which DAP is right for you?
When you’re choosing a DAP, going with the market leader, Pendo, might seem like a no-brainer. However, market dominance doesn’t necessarily mean that the product is right for your own situation. You need to consider your individual business needs, budget and pain points. Newcomers to the market, like Omniplex Guide, can offer a fresh perspective and innovation, and are well worth considering.
Think critically about things like the features included, ease of use, customisation options, integrations and scalability. This will help you to make the right choice for your organisation. If possible, take advantage of any free trials or demo periods offered by platforms. Use this opportunity to test out the features, functionality, and overall fit for your organisation before making a final decision.
Careful consideration before purchase will make sure you spend your budget on the right DAP for your needs – whether that is Pendo or one of the robust alternatives like Omniplex Guide.
