If you’re hunting for an effective Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) to help you increase user engagement and onboarding, you’ve probably come across Userpilot. It’s a well-known player in the DAP field, but just because it’s well-known doesn’t mean that it’s the right product for your business.
Userpilot is among the most popular product experience solutions for non-technical teams. It helps to craft onboarding experiences that enhance product adoption rates, but there are other similar products which may be more suitable for you.
Let’s dive in and find out more about the best Userpilot alternatives.
What is Userpilot?
Userpilot describes itself as a Product Growth Platform that ‘assists SaaS businesses in enhancing self-service support’.
It provides tools for creating interactive user guides, onboarding flows, and tooltips to help users navigate through software interfaces more effectively. Overall, Userpilot aims to increase satisfaction, reduce churn, and drive product adoption through personalised and contextual interactions.
Some of Userpilot’s top features include:
- Collecting user feedback
- Analysing user behaviour to optimise the user experience
- User-friendly interface
- Intuitive controls
- Customisation
- Creating interactive user guides
- Making onboarding flows
- Adding tooltips to existing software and programs
- Interactive walkthroughs
- Net Promoter Scores (NPS)
- Micro surveys
- Resource centre
- User analytics
Product managers can track core behaviour analytics to see how users engage with their product. Userpilot offers analytics and insights that help identify pain points, make onboarding more effective and increase user engagement.
Userpilot isn’t just focused on onboarding, it offers features for ongoing user engagement, such as in-app messaging, surveys, and feature announcements. This, in turn, helps companies retain users and drive product adoption over time.
With Userpilot you can classify onboarding tools by different user personas, including small SaaS businesses, mid-market SaaS companies, and enterprise SaaS businesses. It also integrates well with a wide range of third-party tools and platforms, including customer relationship management (CRM) systems, customer support software, and analytics platforms.
Userpilot Pricing: It’s good value for mid-market companies starting at $249 with unlimited feature usage.
Why Userpilot Might Not Be the Right Fit
Userpilot is a popular product for good reasons, such as a huge suite of features, but features aren’t always the whole story. Things like customer service, integration prospects, and customisation are all huge points to consider. Here’s why Userpilot might not be the right fit for your organisation.
- Lack of support for entry-level users: Only users who pay a premium for Userpilot get phone support for troubleshooting. Entry-level customers might find customer support is limited. Phone support, a dedicated success manager and an implementation expert are only available if customers upgrade to the higher-priced product.
- Limited Content Customisation: Userpilot offers fundamental content customisation features for crafting in-app content. However, for companies with a strong brand presence, the content customisation and branding tools provided by Userpilot may seem lacking.
- Poor Customer Service: Some reviewers mention poor customer service as one of Userpilot’s drawbacks. Cancelling the product is known to be more difficult than it needs to be, with no option to cancel within the app itself.
- Integration Limitations: Userpilot faces constraints integrating with prominent platforms such as HubSpot and Salesforce. This leads to a restriction in the flow of critical customer data between these widely used CRMs. Additionally, it lacks integration with leading analytics tools like Amplitude and Mixpanel. As a result, significant customer data remains siloed within other tools in your tech stack, inaccessible to Userpilot for optimisation purposes.
6 Userpilot Alternatives
So, now that we know all about Userpilot including its features and downsides, let’s find out more about some user-friendly alternatives that might be more suitable for your needs.
1. Omniplex Guide
Omniplex Guide is the innovative new kid on the block for DAPs, and as part of Omniplex Learning’s portfolio of products and services, it is backed by a wealth of expertise.
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 is now applied to a forward-thinking DAP that helps businesses get the most out of their systems and technology investments.
The Omniplex Guide Suite offers three distinct products:
Guide Pro stands out as the ideal alternative to Userpilot. It enhances the learning experience with advanced interactive in-app guidance, facilitating learning within the flow of work.
Notable features include:
- Easy guide creation,
- Embedded content,
- User management,
- Guide health monitoring, which automatically alerts you to any broken or outdated steps
- Segmentation,
- Grouping,
- Analytics,
- Multi-language support,
- The ability to export and share guides.
- Guide preview,
- AI image creation and
- Form validation.
Omniplex Guide Pricing: Omniplex Guide offers pricing plans to suit a wide range of organisations. Sign up for a free, instant product tour to experience the tool firsthand.
2. Appcues
Appcues is a well-known DAP and provides a suite of tools tailored for crafting in-app user onboarding flows, feature announcements, product tours, and surveys.
Using a user-friendly visual editor, businesses can design and implement these experiences directly within the product, effectively engaging and educating users. The tool includes robust analytics features to monitor user engagement and behaviour within the app.
What stands out with Appcues is its comprehensive platform dedicated to optimising in-app experiences and driving user engagement. It prioritises usability, personalisation, and analytics, allowing users to create impressive in-app experiences within minutes without developer assistance.
Pricing: Appcues offers a full-featured free trial and three pricing tiers based on monthly active users for your product or products.
- The Essentials plan starts at $249 per month for up to 2,500 monthly active users.
- The Growth plan is $879 per month for the same user limit.
- Additionally, a free 14-day trial grants complete access to all Appcues features.
3. Pendo
Pendo is a leading product in the Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) landscape. Renowned for its comprehensive suite of features and proven track record of reliability, it remains one of the top choices among DAP solutions.
Particularly favoured by software companies looking to enhance their products using behavioural insights, Pendo provides a robust set of tools for collecting user feedback and empowering data-driven decisions.
Pendo’s platform encompasses a wide range of features including:
- User behaviour analytics,
- In-app messaging,
- User surveys and
- Product usage tracking.
Pendo stands out for its exceptional analytics capabilities, but it’s also instrumental in fostering product adoption. This is done through User Interface (UI) patterns for in-product communication. However, some critics argue that these UI patterns may be overly restrictive.
At the user level, Pendo offers insights that allow for the tracking and analysis of individual user behaviour within applications or websites. This level of granularity empowers product teams to understand user journeys, pinpoint pain points, and tailor experiences.
Pendo also provides tools for gathering qualitative feedback from users through surveys, polls, and Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys. This feedback gives valuable insights into user preferences, needs, and pain points, informing product improvements.
Pendo Pricing: A basic plan which includes 20 guides starts at $89 per month, while a professional plan costs $249. Enterprise options are available but you have to contact them directly.
4. UserGuiding
UserGuiding positions itself as an accessible and budget-friendly solution that offers a range of features tailored to help companies streamline the onboarding process for new users and enhance product adoption.
Features include:
- A user-friendly interface,
- Focus on non-technical users,
- Robust segmentation and targeting capabilities,
- Integration flexibility, and
- Dedicated customer support.
UserGuiding’s competitive pricing is particularly attractive to smaller businesses, while its user-friendly interface appeals to beginners in the field.
With UserGuiding, creating interactive product walkthroughs is hassle-free, eliminating the need for developer assistance. Its platform allows for the addition of various onboarding elements, such as modals, tooltips, hotspots, and checklists, enhancing product adoption and user engagement.
Many DAPs target developers or technical teams, but UserGuiding caters primarily to non-technical users such as product managers, marketers, and customer success teams. Its emphasis on user-friendly tools and interfaces makes it particularly well-suited for businesses looking to empower non-technical staff to create and manage onboarding experiences independently.
UserGuiding Pricing:
- Basic starts at $99 a month. This allows just one Team Member, a limit of 20 guides, and two checklists, plus you have to have UserGuiding branding on all UI patterns.
- Professional starts at $399 a month and includes unlimited guides, hotspots, and checklists.
- Corporate starts at $699 a month and offers access to everything plus personalised coaching.
5. WalkMe
WalkMe specialises in streamlined workflows and the ability to analyse, automate, and optimise experiences, to eliminate digital friction.
Standout features include:
- Exceptional in-app guidance and support capabilities,
- Personalised assistance directly within the application interface.
- Tailored in-app guidance,
- Contextual tooltips,
- Customisable onboarding checklists,
- Product tours, and
- Access to the WalkMe resource centre, which provides on-demand materials and features an AI-powered chatbot for user assistance.
For organisations undergoing digital transformation, WalkMe presents an appealing alternative to established players like Pendo. It caters to the priorities of product managers, UX designers, and customer service teams seeking to enhance the user experience.
Unlike some competing Digital Adoption Platforms, WalkMe places significant emphasis on improving user onboarding experiences. Its key features are designed to engage users, enabling them to retain knowledge and adopt new software quickly and efficiently.
Walkme Pricing: Typically aimed at Enterprise Level customers, WalkMe offers custom pricing quotes on request.
6. Userflow
Userflow distinguishes itself with the idea that your whole team can build customised in-app tours, checklists and surveys, without code. The product claims that user flows can now be built by anyone in just minutes with Userflow’s intuitive Flow Builder.
Userflow is focused around ‘flows’ – a drag-and-drop builder equipped with features like speech bubbles, tooltips, and modals for creating no-code flows.
You can also integrate custom triggering conditions, such as URL-based or time-based criteria, which empower users to tailor their experiences precisely. This ensures that feature-specific flows are delivered contextually, enhancing user engagement and driving desired actions.
Key features include:
- Speech bubbles are useful for providing contextual information or guidance within the user interface. Users can easily add speech bubbles to highlight important points or provide instructions.
- Tooltips can be employed to clarify functionality or offer tips on using specific features, and modals are effective for displaying important messages or capturing user input without navigating away from the current page.
- Modal dialogues can be created for various purposes such as collecting feedback, presenting announcements, or confirming actions.
It’s important to note that Userflow doesn’t have any native analytics capabilities, so if this is an important part of a DAP for your specific situation, consider choosing an alternative.
Useflow Pricing: Userflow has a tiered pricing structure.
- The Startup tier starts at $240 per month if billed annually or $300 per month if billed monthly. This lets you have 3000 monthly active users.
- The Pro tier is nearly three times more expensive – $680 per month, billed annually or $850 billed monthly. This gives you up to 10,000 monthly active users.
- Enterprise level clients can request a custom quote.
Which DAP is right for you?
Selecting a DAP from a competitive marketplace is always challenging. However, before making your final decision, you need to thoroughly evaluate all available options to figure out which DAP is right for you.
Although UsePilot stands out as a robust and prominent player in the field, that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the right choice for you. It’s definitely worthwhile to explore alternatives such as Omniplex Guide, Appcues, Pendo, Userguiding, WalkMe or Userflow.
It’s also worth remembering that the majority of these solutions, including Omniplex Guide, offer free trials. Sign up to a few and see which one works best for your situation.