If you’re hunting for an effective Digital Adoption Platform 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 particular situation.
Userpilot is among the most popular product experience solutions empowering non-technical teams to craft onboarding experiences that enhance product adoption rates, but there are other similar products which may fit your use case more accurately.
What is Userpilot?
Userpilot describes itself as a Product Growth Platform and 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. Userpilot also offers features for collecting user feedback and analysing user behaviour to optimise the user experience. Overall, it aims to increase satisfaction, reduce churn, and drive product adoption through personalised and contextual interactions.
It’s focused on making it easy for non-technical users to create and manage onboarding experiences and guides with a user-friendly interface and intuitive tools. Customisation is possible within Userpilot so companies can tailor their onboarding experiences and guidance to specific user segments and needs.
Product managers are able to track core behaviour analytics to see how users are engaging with their product. Userpilot offers analytics and insights which 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, helping companies retain users and drive product adoption over time. 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, enabling companies to leverage existing data and workflows.
With Userpilot you can classify onboarding tools by different user personas, including small SaaS businesses, mid-market SaaS companies, and enterprise SaaS businesses. It’s a good choice for mid-market companies offering good value-for-money starting at $249 with unlimited feature usage, completely interactive walkthroughs, NPS, micro surveys, resource centre and user analytics.
Why Userpilot Might Not Be the Right Fit
Userpilot is a popular product for good reasons – it has a lot of useful features. But features aren’t always the whole story. Considerations like how easy customer service is to access if you need support or even if you’re considering cancelling your subscription, as well as how well the product integrates with other software can be just as important to consider. You might find you struggle with the following:
- Lack of support for entry-level users: Only users who pay more for Userpilot get phone support for troubleshooting. Entry level customers might find customer support is limited in the event of unforeseen issues. 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 or those in the process of building one, the content customisation and branding tools provided by Userpilot may seem lacking.
- Poor Customer Service: Some reviewers mention poor customer service as one of Userpilots drawbacks. Cancelling the product is renowned to be more difficult than it needs to be, with no option to cancel within the app itself.
- Integration Limitations: Userpilot faces constraints in integrating with prominent platforms such as HubSpot and Salesforce, restricting the flow of critical customer data between these widely-used CRMs. Additionally, it lacks integration with leading analytics tools like Amplitude and Mixpanel, preventing it from receiving data from these sources and limiting its ability to harness valuable customer insights. As a result, significant customer data remains siloed within other tools in your tech stack, inaccessible to Userpilot for optimisation purposes.
6 Userpilot Alternatives
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 Workflow Assistant, Guide, and Guide Pro.
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 and guide health monitoring (which automatically alerts you to any broken or outdated steps), The platform comes with a rich feature-set including things like segmentation, grouping, analytics, multi-language support and the ability to export and share guides. It also offers a guide preview,, multi-language support, AI image creation and form validation.
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, all without the need for engineering resources. Through 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.
Its primary goal is to empower businesses to enhance user adoption, retention, and satisfaction by delivering targeted and contextual guidance within their applications. 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.
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, while 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 seeking to enhance their products through a deep understanding of user behaviour, Pendo provides a robust set of tools for collecting user feedback and empowering data-driven decisions to enhance the overall user experience.
Pendo’s platform encompasses a wide range of features like user behaviour analytics, in-app messaging, user surveys, and product usage tracking. Its profound analytical capabilities enable a comprehensive understanding of user behaviour, while its guided product experiences effectively drive adoption. Essentially, Pendo facilitates both customer software learning and insights into usage patterns, offering a holistic approach to understanding and optimising user interactions.
Pendo stands out for its exceptional analytics capabilities, but it’s also instrumental in fostering product adoption through the utilisation of 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 comprehend 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, thereby informing product improvements.
4. UserGuiding
UserGuiding differentiates itself with its user-friendly interface, focus on non-technical users, robust segmentation and targeting capabilities, integration flexibility, and dedicated customer support. It’s positioned as an accessible and budget-friendly solution and offers a range of features tailored to help companies and customer success managers streamline the onboarding process for new users and enhance product adoption efficiently.
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.
Setting itself apart from other digital adoption platforms, UserGuiding boasts an intuitive visual editor that simplifies the creation of in-app guides, tooltips, and walkthroughs. Designed to accommodate users with diverse technical abilities, its interface empowers users to craft interactive onboarding experiences effortlessly, without the necessity for coding skills.
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.
It’s tiered pricing starts at Basic for $99 a month. This allows just 1 Team Member, a limit of 20 guides, and 2 checklists, plus you have to have UserGuiding branding on all UI patterns. The next level is Professional which starts at $399 a month and includes unlimited guides, hotspots, and checklists. And the highest tier is Corporate, which 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. Its standout features include exceptional in-app guidance and support capabilities, offering personalised assistance directly within the application interface.
Users benefit from 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 include interactive guidance to streamline task completion, seamless onboarding for new users, targeted messaging, surveys, and feedback mechanisms to foster user engagement and communication.
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 that would previously take weeks of developer time, 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. It’s highly versatile and user-friendly and by integrating custom triggering conditions, such as URL-based or time-based criteria, it empowers users to tailor their experiences precisely. This ensures that feature-specific flows are delivered contextually, enhancing user engagement and driving desired actions.
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. Users can create modal dialogs 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, you might consider choosing an alternative.
Userflow has a tiered pricing structure starting at $240 per month if billed annually or $300 per month if billed monthly for their Startup tier. This lets you have 3000 monthly active users. Moving up to Pro 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 product from a competitive marketplace is always challenging. However, before making your final decision, you need to thoroughly evaluate all available options and compare them. 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. One of these contenders might offer a solution that better aligns with your Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) objectives.
