If you’re looking for a digital adoption platform that offers interactive guidance and support within software applications, Userlane might be high on your shortlist. It can streamline user onboarding, enhance engagement, and improve productivity through personalised walkthroughs, tooltips, and checklists.
But there are more than 50 other DAPs on the market too and it’s important to weigh up which option is right for you. Different platforms offer varying features, capabilities, pricing structures, and levels of support. Only by evaluating the competitors and alternatives to Userlane can you pick a DAP that aligns with your own specific use case.
What is Userlane?
Userlane is a digital adoption platform that provides interactive guidance and on-screen support to help users navigate through software applications. It offers step-by-step guidance, interactive walkthroughs (known as ‘lanes’), and tooltips within the application interface to assist users in learning how to use different features and functionalities effectively.
Userlane was founded in 2015 and, since then, it has been steadily growing its presence in the DAP market. While Userlane may not have the same level of market recognition or longevity as some of its competitors, it has been gaining traction by offering innovative solutions for user onboarding, training, and support within software applications.
One of the key features of Userlane is its ability to create personalised user experiences based on user roles, preferences, and actions. It allows businesses to customise the guidance and support provided to users, ensuring that they receive relevant assistance at the right time.
Userlane aims to streamline user onboarding, reduce training time, and improve user productivity by providing contextual guidance and support within the application itself. It helps users overcome any barriers to adoption with walkthroughs and tooltips and accelerates the learning process.
Additionally, Userlane offers analytics and reporting tools to help businesses track user engagement, identify areas for improvement, and optimise the user experience. It provides insights into things like user behaviour, usage patterns, and performance metrics, enabling companies to make data-driven decisions to enhance their software applications.
Overall, Userlane is designed to empower businesses to maximise the value of their software applications by ensuring that users can easily navigate and utilise all features and functionalities, ultimately driving user satisfaction and adoption.
Why Userlane Might Not Be the Right Fit
While Userlane is a strong DAP and suits many customers, there are valid reasons why you might want to consider an alternative..
- Lack of features: There aren’t that many integration options with Userlane. And some of the UI patterns, like hotspots and tooltips, aren’t as functional as some reviewers would like. While Userlane offers a straightforward UI and responsive customer service, as well as engaging step-by-step walkthroughs, it lacks advanced features like resource centres, knowledge bases, or advanced interactive training.
- Complexity in customisation: Some reviewers have reported difficulties in customising Userlane’s guidance and support features to suit their specific needs and preferences, particularly in highly complex or specialised software environments.
- Poor analytics: Insufficient user segmentation and analytics within Userlane can present challenges, especially if you aim to enhance the end-user experience and track real-time active users. While detailed analytics might not be necessary for employee training purposes, the absence of robust segmentation and user profiles could hinder the delivery of fully personalised product experiences. This limitation may lead to a misinterpretation of customer sentiment and expectations, ultimately impacting customer satisfaction and potentially truncating the customer journey prematurely.
- Price justification: Some users feel that the pricing of Userlane does not necessarily align with the value provided, especially when compared to other similarly priced alternatives that offer more advanced features or a wider range of functionalities.
5 Userlane Alternatives
1. Omniplex Guide
Omniplex Guide is the innovative disruptor in the DAP market. It delivers on-demand, interactive and in-situ guidance, which helps to speed up training and digital transformation.
The DAP is part of Omniplex Learning’s portfolio of products and services. With over 30 years of experience, Omniplex Learning has empowered numerous organisations to design, create, and deliver impactful digital learning solutions. This depth of knowledge now underpins Omniplex Guide, which creates engaging learning experiences through always-present support, helping businesses get the most out of their systems and technology investments.
The Omniplex Guide Suite offers three distinct products: Guide Workflow Assistant, Guide, and Guide Pro.
Guide Pro stands out as the ideal alternative to Userlane. It enhances the learning experience with advanced interactive in-app guidance, facilitating learning within the workflow. Its features empower users with enhanced workflow capabilities, creating a dynamic learning environment.
Other notable features include easy guide creation, embedded content, user management, guide health monitoring (which automatically alerts you to any broken or outdated steps), and form validation.
With pricing plans tailored to suit the needs of any organisation, you can easily sign up for a free and instant product tour to experience the benefits firsthand.
2. Appcues
Appcues equips businesses with tools to craft in-app user onboarding flows, feature announcements, product tours, and surveys, all without the need for engineering resources. Through a straightforward visual editor, companies can design and deploy these experiences seamlessly, enabling effective user engagement and education directly within their product interfaces.
Appcues focuses mainly on in-app user onboarding, feature adoption and user engagement. Where it excels is in offering a wide range of UI patterns – modals, hotspots, slide-outs, pins, banners and tooltips can all be used to build product tours and launch from a checklist.
In contrast to Userlane, Appcues has targeting abilities to personalise user experiences based on user behaviour and attributes. Userlane may offer more limited user segmentation and analytics capabilities, which potentially makes it harder to deliver highly personalised experiences and track user engagement effectively.
Compared to Userlane, Appcues primarily specialises in creating in-app experiences such as user onboarding flows, feature announcements, and product tours. It provides a visual editor for designing these experiences without coding. Userlane, on the other hand, offers interactive guidance and support within software applications through step-by-step walkthroughs, tooltips, and checklists. It emphasises personalised guidance tailored to individual user actions and preferences.
Appcues and Userlane also differ in their ease of set-up. Userlane typically requires integration with the software application and may involve more initial setup and configuration to activate its guidance features effectively. Whereas Appcues focuses on empowering non-technical teams to create and implement in-app experiences using its visual editor, making it accessible to a wide range of users within an organisation.
Appcues provides a full-featured free trial and offers three pricing tiers based on monthly active users. Their Essentials plan costs $249 per month for up to 2,500 monthly active users, while the Growth plan is $879 per month for the same user limit. Additionally, they offer a 14-day free trial with complete access to all features. Appcues also provides customised onboarding, professional services, and dedicated customer support, available at additional charges alongside its pricing model.
3. UserGuiding
UserGuiding is an affordable and user-friendly user onboarding software tailored to assist companies and customer success managers in efficiently guiding new customers and boosting product adoption. Its intuitive interface and emphasis on non-technical users make it particularly appealing to beginners.
Its flexibility in integration enables seamless incorporation into existing workflows. Additionally, dedicated customer support further enhances the user experience. The lower pricing makes it a viable option for smaller businesses, while its ease of use caters to entry-level users.
UserGuiding also facilitates the creation of interactive product walkthroughs without code, eliminating the need for developer assistance. It provides various onboarding elements such as modals, tooltips, hotspots, and checklists to enhance user adoption and engagement.
One of UserGuiding’s main differences when compared with Userlane is its intuitive platform for non-technical teams to create and implement onboarding experiences using its visual editor. This makes it accessible to a wide range of users within an organisation. In contrast, Userlane typically requires integration with the software application and may be more complicated to set up and configure.
UserGuiding offers robust analytics and targeting to personalise user experiences based on user behaviour and attributes, allowing businesses to track user engagement effectively. However, it may offer more limited user segmentation and analytics capabilities than some competitors
4. WalkMe
WalkMe stands out in the DAP crowd by offering improved workflow and the capability to analyse, automate, and optimise experiences, to eliminate digital friction. Its exceptional in-app guidance and support capabilities provide personalised assistance directly within the application interface. Users benefit from tailored in-app guidance, contextual tooltips, links, customisable onboarding checklists, and product tours. Additionally, the WalkMe resource centre offers on-demand materials, and an AI-powered chatbot provides user assistance.
For organisations undergoing digital transformation, WalkMe presents an appealing option, competing effectively against the established alternatives. It caters to the priorities of product managers, UX designers, and customer service teams seeking to prioritise and enhance the user experience.
WalkMe offers a broader range of features than Userlane. It offers functionality beyond onboarding, including digital adoption, automation, analytics, and insights. In contrast, Userlane’s emphasis is on simplifying the onboarding process and providing personalised guidance tailored to individual user actions and preferences.
When it comes to implementation, WalkMe differs from Userlane by offering a more comprehensive implementation approach, including support for various integration methods such as code-based integration, browser extensions, or embedded code snippets. This flexibility allows for easier deployment across different software environments.
Effectively deploying Userlane’s guidance features typically involves integrating them with the software application, which may require more initial setup.
WalkMe provides strong analytics and targeting capabilities to personalise user experiences based on user behaviour and attributes, allowing businesses to track user engagement and optimise the user experience more effectively.
There are also differences in the levels of complexity – Userlane focuses on providing straightforward and user-friendly guidance features, making it suitable for non-technical users and simpler use cases whereas WalkMe offers more advanced customisation options and capabilities, making it suitable for handling complex workflows and specialised software environments. This would probably require more technical expertise for implementation and management.
Pricing for WalkMe is typically aimed at Enterprise Level customers and custom quotes are available on request.
5. WhatFix
Whatfix provides in-app guidance, task automation, and self-help solutions to streamline user onboarding and enhance user engagement within software applications. It offers interactive tutorials, tooltips, and analytics to personalise user experiences and optimise the overall user journey.
WhatFix stands out in the digital adoption space due to several areas where it excels, such as intuitive authoring, personalisation, seamless integration and scalability, and flexibility. It’s particularly popular with training, support and customer success teams aiming to streamline user onboarding, enhance product training and improve user engagement within applications.
While both Userlane and Whatfix aim to improve user onboarding and engagement within software applications, they differ in their focus, features, implementation approach, and customisation capabilities. Whatfix offers a broader range of features than Userlane including in-app guidance, task automation, self-help widgets, and interactive tutorials. It aims to provide contextual support and assistance to users throughout their entire journey within the application. In contrast, Userlane’s focus is on simplifying the onboarding process.
Whatfix boasts seamless integration with various enterprise software applications, including CRM systems and HR platforms. It’s designed to scale alongside organisations, accommodating growth and evolution. Whether deploying to a small team or across an enterprise, Whatfix offers flexibility to adapt to diverse user needs and requirements. This is very different from Userlane which typically needs more configuration to use its guidance features effectively.
Whatfix is more complex when it comes to customisation which can be viewed as a benefit or drawback depending on your unique situation. It offers more options and capabilities but this makes it less straightforward and user-friendly than Userlane, which offers solutions for simpler use cases.
The pricing for Whatfix is subscription based and worked out through a custom quote. 41.4% of the WhatFix reviews on G2 are from Enterprise level organisations so it’s fair to assume the price tag will reflect this.
Which DAP is right for you?
Choosing the right DAP is an important decision. Your choice can significantly impact user adoption, engagement, and overall success in implementing digital tools and software applications so it’s important to think carefully about the alternatives to Userlane that have made it onto your shortlist. You may decide that Userlane is the right platform for you, or you may discover that one of the other competitors – AppCues, UserGuiding, WalkMe, WhatFix or the innovative newcomer Omniplex Guide – is far better suited to your own Digital Adoption Platform requirements.
