Category: Glossary

Choosing the right product growth tool can feel overwhelming, especially when you’re comparing two strong contenders like Userpilot and Userflow.

Both platforms promise to help you improve user activation, streamline onboarding, and increase in-app engagement. But which one is the better fit for your needs?

In this article, I’ll break down Userpilot vs Userflow, comparing their features, strengths, and pricing.

What is Userpilot?

Userpilot is a product growth platform tailored for mid-market and enterprise companies. It enables SaaS teams to improve onboarding, collect user feedback, and gather actionable insights from analytics.

With Userpilot, you’ll be able to track both product usage and user behavior to get a holistic view of how customers use your product. This will guide future development, improve the user experience, and inform your growth efforts.

What is Userflow?

Userflow is a user onboarding solution centered around building in-app flows quickly and seamlessly. It helps product teams onboard new users, create guides/onboarding checklists, and gather product feedback.

It features a drag-and-drop builder and no-code functionality, reducing dependency on engineers and empowering non-technical teams to create in-app experiences.

Userpilot vs Userflow at a glance

Tool	Standout Features 👏🏻	G2 Review ⭐️	Demo/Trial 🔑	Price Plans 💸
Userpilot	Advanced analytics, multiple UI patterns, AI-based localization	4.6	Both	Starter ($249/month annually), Growth ($799/month annually), Enterprise (custom pricing)
Userflow	AI assistant, drag-and-drop flow builder, flow targeting	4.8	Both	Startup ($240/month annually), Pro ($680/month annually), Enterprise (custom pricing)

In-depth comparison of Userpilot and Userflow

How do Userpilot and Userflow stack up against common use cases like onboarding customers, analyzing user behavior data, optimizing the customer experience, and collecting user feedback? Let’s find out.

Userpilot vs Userflow for user onboarding

Onboarding customers is a key step that impacts activation and retention, so getting it right is essential. But let’s be real – doing it well isn’t easy without the right tool to guide the process and keep things seamless.

Userpilot for user onboarding

Onboarding is one of Userpilot’s core use cases, so it has plenty of features that you can utilize. Here is a breakdown of its key features:

• No-code builder: Creating flows with Userpilot is as simple as installing the Chrome extension, selecting the UI patterns you’d like to use, and then editing the content/settings to suit your use case. You can also use templates to create modals, slideouts, tooltips, and driven actions.

• Native tooltips: Userpilot lets you create native tooltips that show up when users hover over an element or click on an information badge. Since these native tooltips attach to the element itself, they aren’t page-dependent and will show up on any screen where that element is visible.

• User segmentation: Userpilot lets you segment users based on the device they’re using, where they’re located, their engagement data, or which NPS rating they selected on the latest survey. You can then trigger the right onboarding flow to the right customer segment.

• Flow localization: If you have a diverse audience, Userpiot enables you to translate your copy in more than 100 languages. It’s AI-based localization feature takes just a few seconds to do its magic.

Userflow for user onboarding

Userflow positions itself as a user onboarding tool, so most of its features are targeted towards that use case. Here are the Userflow features and functionalities that you can use to onboard new users to your product:

• Flows: In-app flows are the primary user onboarding feature that Userflow offers. You’ll be able to add steps like speech bubbles, tooltips, modals, or hidden steps used as triggers. You can also select whether a step is mandatory for flow completion and change the size or theme if needed.

• Targeting: You can create personalized and contextual onboarding flows with Userflow due to its auto-start settings. You can add trigger conditions like what page users are on, which segment they’re in, when they signed up, which elements they’ve clicked, and which flows they’ve seen.

• Checklists: Userflows lets you create checklists with an unlimited number of tasks, trigger them if certain targeting conditions are met, configure whether tasks need to be completed in a specific order, and prevent users from dismissing the checklist if needed.

Userpilot vs Userflow for product analytics

Let’s see how both these tools stack up against analyzing product and user behavior data.

Userpilot for product analytics

Userpilot offers a comprehensive suite of analytics features to help you understand user behavior, increase product adoption, and optimize experiences.

• Autocapture: With Userpilot’s autocapture, you can track user interactions without manual event setup. This means you automatically collect valuable data on clicks, page views, and feature engagement – saving time and ensuring no critical insights are missed.

• Session replays: Session replays give you a clear view of how users interact with your product, helping you spot friction points and optimize their journey. Plus, advanced security ensures personal information remains masked for privacy protection.

• Custom dashboards: Userpilot’s custom dashboards allow you to visualize key product metrics in a way that suits your team’s needs. You can track engagement, adoption, and retention metrics, all in one place.

• Analytics reports: Userpilot provides a range of advanced analytics reports to help you dive deeper into user behavior. These reports include funnel, trend, cohort retention, and path analyses.

Userflow for product analytics

Userflow also provides analytics features, though its focus is more on onboarding and flow performance. Here’s how you can use Userflow for product analytics:

• Flow analytics: Track how users progress through onboarding flows, where they drop off, and which steps need improvement. Userflow provides data on completion rates, time spent on each step, and engagement levels.

• Event tracking: Userflow lets you track user interactions within flows and collect insights on which elements users engage with the most. However, it requires integrations with external analytics tools for deeper event tracking.

• User segmentation: Userflow allows you to segment users based on flow completion, in-app behavior, and targeting conditions. This helps personalize onboarding and engagement strategies.

Userpilot vs Userflow for customer experience

Both Userpilot and Userflow offer powerful features, but they cater to different needs. Let’s compare how they stack up in enhancing the user experience.

Userpilot for customer experience

Here’s how you can use Userpilot to track and analyze customer experience insights:

• Trends and funnels: Trends help you track user behavior over time, identifying patterns in engagement, feature adoption, and drop-offs. On the other hand, Funnels show how customers move through key user journeys, highlighting where they convert or abandon a process.

• Satisfaction benchmarking: Userpilot has a built-in NPS dashboard that tracks customer loyalty over time. In addition to the NPS dashboard, you can also use Userpilot’s survey templates to run CSAT or CES surveys and gather additional quantitative and qualitative insights on the customer experience.

• Self-service support: Userpilot lets you build in-app resource centers, which can include feedback widgets to collect feedback passively, checklists to walk users through specific processes, or integrations with knowledge bases to leverage existing documentation.

• In-app flows: Userpilot’s no-code flow builder helps you create product tours that can help you optimize the customer experience by educating customers and reducing their time-to-value (TTV).

Userflow for customer experience

While Userflow’s lack of product analytics capabilities limits the customer experience insights it can offer, the software does let you add questions.

• Question blocks: Userflow lets you add question blocks to steps in the flow builder. Text-based questions are ideal for collecting qualitative feedback on the customer experience while scale or star ratings can be used to create CSAT or CES surveys within your no-code flows.

• Segmentation: Userflow lets you filter or target users by what language they speak, how much they spend on your product, how long ago they signed up, which features they’ve interacted with, and which segment they’re in so you can offer a personalized customer experience.

Userpilot vs Userflow for user feedback

I’ve already given a quick overview of both tools’ feedback features, but let’s dive deeper to see how they compare in functionality and impact.

Userpilot for user feedback

Userpilot has a no-code survey builder, 14 templates to choose from, and advanced analytics for extracting insights.

Here are the Userpilot features you can use to collect customer feedback and analyze it:

• Survey builder: Userpilot’s builder lets you edit survey content, update the widget’s style/placement, and set page-specific or event-specific triggers to ensure that users see the survey at the most contextual moment — all without writing a single line of code. You can also translate surveys into your audience’s native language.

• Survey templates: There are 14 survey templates to choose from with a wide array of different use cases. You can collect qualitative responses on how to improve the user/product experience or quantitative data for customer satisfaction benchmarking.

• Advanced survey analytics: This feature shows you what the most common responses were, what percentage of users selected a specific option, and displays open-ended feedback about your product or specific features.

• NPS response tracking: Userpilot makes it easy to organize qualitative insights from NPS responses. You can categorize recurring themes, such as usability issues, missing features, and more, to uncover key patterns and improve the customer experience.

Userflow for user feedback

Userflow’s feedback collection features come in two types: question blocks and NPS surveys. The feedback users provide can also be used to fine-tune their attributes and target them with relevant in-app flows.

• Question blocks: Whenever you create a new step for your in-app flows, Userflow gives you the option of inserting a question block in it. These could consist of text input fields (for qualitative feedback) or scalar rating systems (for quantitative feedback).
• NPS surveys: Userflow’s NPS surveys can be used to collect feedback from specific segments using trigger conditions. Do note that you’ll be limited to asking a maximum of two questions in NPS surveys unless you upgrade to Userflow’s Pro plan which starts at $680/month.

👉🏻 Note: Because Userflow has no unified analytics dashboard, you’ll need to go into the settings of each individual NPS survey to see data like total views, response rate, and the aggregate score from all respondents.

• Answer triggers: Userflow lets you bind answers to user attributes so you can trigger different flows based on someone’s NPS, CSAT, or CES rating. In addition to triggering flows using these attributes, you can also go to the “Users” tab and filter users by their responses.

Userpilot vs. Userflow: Pricing breakdown

Both Userpilot and Userflow offer a free trial and a demo with their sales teams.

Userpilot offers three paid plans, which are:

• Starter ($249/month annually) – For small teams, supports up to 2,000 MAUs with basic in-app engagement and analytics.
• Growth ($799/month annually) – Adds product analytics, in-app surveys, session replay, and advanced targeting.
• Enterprise (custom pricing) – Includes security, advanced integrations, priority support, and custom contracts.

Userflow also offers a similar pricing structure:

• Startup ($240/month annually) – For startups, supports 3,000 MAUs with basic onboarding tools and limited surveys.
• Pro ($680/month annually) – Adds unlimited surveys, advanced integrations, localization, and priority support.
• Enterprise (custom pricing) – Includes SSO, custom contracts, and security compliance.

Userpilot vs. Userflow: What they do well and where they fall short

To further simplify this selection process, let’s break down the strengths and limitations of each tool. Understanding the distinct advantages and potential drawbacks of Userpilot and Userflow will provide you with a detailed roadmap for making a well-informed decision!

Userpilot

✅ Userpilot is an all-in-one solution with features as advanced as standalone tools. It provides a full suite for onboarding, engagement, analytics, support, and feedback, offering excellent value for money.

✅ Userpilot supports Web, native Android, and iOS apps.

✅ Userpilot connects with popular tools like Amplitude, Mixpanel, Segment, HubSpot, Google Analytics, and more, enabling you to sync data across your tech stack.

✅ Userpilot prioritizes data security and privacy, making it a reliable choice for businesses handling sensitive user information. It is SOC 2 Type II, GDPR, and HIPAA compliant, ensuring that customer data is protected according to the highest industry standards.

❌ Userpilot’s pricing may be on the steeper end for startups and small companies. Such companies should consider more affordable onboarding platforms like UserGuiding or Product Fruits.

❌ With a diverse feature set, there is always a learning curve. But this is greatly lessened with Userpilot’s responsive support team and various resources provided.

Userflow

✅ In-app AI assistant supports multilingual responses, though extra messages cost an additional fee.

✅ Connects with popular analytics and CRM tools like Amplitude, Mixpanel, Salesforce, and HubSpot.

✅ Intuitive drag-and-drop interface allows quick creation and customization of onboarding flows.

❌ Userflow does not support native mobile apps.

❌ Userflow offers very basic analytics functionality and you would need to invest in a standalone analytics tool to analyze user behavior.

❌ Userflow has restrictive pricing. Its basic plan limits NPS surveys to two questions and charges extra for teams with more than three users.

Userpilot vs Userflow: Why Userpilot is a better choice

Since Userpilot has been on the market longer, has an experienced team, and positions itself as a full-suite product growth platform, it has certain advanced capabilities that Userflow lacks. Here are a few advantages that Userpilot has over Userflow:

• Advanced analytics: Userflow’s main weakness is one of Userpilot’s biggest strengths. Userpilot has custom analytics dashboards, autocapture, session replay, a/b testing, survey analytics, resource center analytics, multiple analytics reports, and more.
• Starter plan: Userpilot’s Starter plan has more features than Userflow’s Startup plan despite the two costing about the same per month.
• UI patterns: While Userflow offers limited UI patterns, Userpilot offers six different patterns that you can use to create memorable onboarding experiences. These include modals, hotspots, tooltips, banners, spotlights, and driven actions.

It’s no wonder that Userpilot is loved by its users. More than 500 users have given it 5-stars on G2. Here’s what one of Userpilot’s customers have to say about Userpilot:

I’d definitely recommend Userpilot. It allows us the flexibility to move fast, experiment, and really understand what users need. It’s helped us speed up processes and create a smoother user experience.
– Danielle Frantz, Product Designer at Smoobu

Drive product growth with Userpilot

Hopefully, this post helped you decide whether Userpilot or Userflow is more appropriate for your company. As you can see, both have upsides and downsides.

However, Userpilot provides a better value for money and is a better choice for a mid-market SaaS and enterprise companies.

If you’re interested in finding more, book a demo with our team!

Let’s be honest: Comparing Appcues vs Userpilot is a bit unfair.

Both products have more or less the same prices, and Userpilot brings way more features…

But, we know having more features isn’t everything. So, is Appcues more solid and valuable than Userpilot when it comes to user onboarding and product growth?

To answer that, let’s explore:

• The key differences between Appcues and Userpilot in onboarding, in-app support, and analytics.
• When you should choose Userpilot over Appcues (and vice versa).
• Which tool is the most cost-effective.

What are the differences between Appcues and Userpilot?

At first glance, Appcues and Userpilot might seem like similar tools—both are designed to onboard users and improve user engagement.

However, the deeper you go, the more their differences stand out.

Userpilot is the more feature-rich option, especially when it comes to analytics and customization.

Meanwhile, Appcues is more limited in scope.

Here’s how they differ:

• User onboarding. Userpilot enables product teams to customize onboarding flows with advanced targeting, flow conditions, and granular design settings. In contrast, Appcues is less intuitive and lacks the same level of customization. For instance, Appcues doesn’t let you trigger flows based on detailed user properties, like specific behaviors or page views.
• User and product analytics. With Userpilot, you get actionable insights through comprehensive reports, flow analytics, and even session recordings. Appcues, on the other hand, offers very basic analytics that are difficult to use and less actionable.

When should you choose Userpilot over Appcues?

While both Appcues and Userpilot aim to improve user onboarding and engagement, there are clear scenarios where the latter is the better choice:

• Powerful customization: Userpilot allows you to tailor onboarding flows based on user properties, behavioral events, content engagement, and even page views. Its customization options also extend to perfectly matching your brand’s native design (Appcues, by comparison, lacks all these features).
• Actionable insights from users: Userpilot features like session recordings let you watch real-time user interactions, while performance metrics highlight what’s working and where users are dropping off. Appcues’ analytics, on the other hand, are too basic and don’t provide the same depth of analysis.
• Cost-effective solution: Userpilot is in the same price range as Appcues, but offers more features. Its pricing model is transparent, with clear tiers that cater to businesses of all sizes. In contrast, Appcues’ pricing can feel inflated for what it offers.

When should you choose Appcues over Userpilot?

The only feature that makes Appcues worth it over Userpilot is the mobile onboarding flow.

If you require a tool specifically for mobile onboarding, Appcues has a head start. Although Userpilot is rolling out mobile onboarding features soon (VERY soon, actually), Appcues already does, making it a better option for mobile-first products at the moment.

That’s really the only scenario where Appcues has a significant edge over Userpilot. For most other use cases, Userpilot provides better functionality, analytics, and overall value.

How does Userpilot stack up against Appcues for user onboarding?

If you’re looking for powerful, flexible, and intuitive onboarding tools, Userpilot is the clear winner. Appcues may work for teams with basic needs, but it doesn’t scale well and lacks many of the advanced features Userpilot offers.

Let’s compare:

Userpilot for user onboarding

Userpilot offers a comprehensive set of tools that make onboarding more intuitive and impactful:

• Wide range of UI elements: With Userpilot, you can create slideouts, modals, tooltips, banners, and checklists to guide users through your product.

• Advanced flow conditions: Userpilot can trigger flows based on user properties, behavioral events, engagement with content, page views, and more.
• Customization to match native design: You can fully customize your onboarding elements to seamlessly fit your brand’s look and feel.
• Flow A/B testing: Userpilot lets you test different variations of your onboarding flows to see what resonates best with your users. Includes head-to-head testing, controlled experiments, and multivariate testing.
• Staging environment: Test and refine your onboarding flows in a staging environment with just the flip of a switch—no complicated setup needed.
• AI-powered features: Refine text content in your flows and use AI-driven localization to deliver experiences to global audiences.

• Advanced checklist settings: Unlike Appcues, Userpilot offers more flexible checklist options, making it easier for users to create actionable guides.

Appcues for user onboarding

Appcues offers user onboarding features as well, but with significant limitations:

• Limited UI elements: Appcues doesn’t support certain patterns like spotlights, reducing your ability to highlight key features effectively.
• Manual localization: Localization in Appcues requires manual translation and is only available on the enterprise plan, which limits accessibility for smaller teams.
• Non-intuitive flow management: Appcues struggles to support mid-market and enterprise teams with a large number of flows. There are no folders to organize or manage flows, making it chaotic to scale.
• Poor visual customization: Lacks the features to customize your checklists and modals to match your brand’s design.
• Limited targeting options: Appcues lacks the ability to trigger flows based on user IDs, companies, or specific user activities. This limits how personalized and contextually relevant your onboarding can be.
• Paid staging environment: Unlike Userpilot’s free and simple staging option, Appcues requires additional costs for a staging environment and has a more complicated setup process.
• Bugs and performance issues: There are some frustrating bugs. For example, the CSS selector can fail to recognize elements correctly, making it difficult to build a flow.

How does Userpilot stack up against Appcues for in-app support?

If you want to provide users with intuitive, comprehensive, and visually seamless in-app support, Userpilot is the way to go. Appcues’ Launchpad might work for teams with very basic needs, but it doesn’t offer the depth or flexibility required for a truly self-serve experience.

Let’s break it down.

Userpilot for in-app support

Userpilot’s in-app support features are designed to give users exactly what they need when they need it.

Here’s what stands out:

• Versatile resource center: Userpilot lets you include multiple formats in your resource center—articles, videos, onboarding flows, external links, and more. This means your users can access help in the way that works best for them.
• News announcements: Besides standard onboarding elements like modals and slideouts, Userpilot supports non-intrusive product announcements to keep users in the loop about updates or new features.
• Group materials: You can organize your resource center by grouping related content, making it easier for users to find what they’re looking for.
• Search functionality: Userpilot’s resource center includes a search bar, so users can quickly find specific topics or solutions.
• Customizable design: Just like with its onboarding tools, Userpilot allows you to customize your resource center to match your product’s native design.
• Localization: With AI-driven localization, you can ensure that your in-app support is accessible to global users without manual translation.

Appcues for in-app support

Appcues’ in-app support feature, called “Launchpad,” is functional but far less robust than Userpilot’s offering.

Here are some of its limits:

• Limited content options: Launchpad supports only flows and links, which makes it less versatile for teams that want to include videos, articles, or other types of resources.
• No news announcements: Unlike Userpilot, Appcues doesn’t support announcements for new features or updates.
• No AI localization: Localization must be done manually in Appcues, and it’s only available on the enterprise plan.
• Lack of customization: While Appcues does allow for basic design tweaks, it doesn’t offer advanced customization options like Userpilot does. For example, you can’t use custom CSS to match your knowledge base with the native design of your app.

How does Userpilot stack up against Appcues for user analytics?

Userpilot is clearly the best option when it comes to user analytics. It offers standalone surveys, detailed profiles, and robust segmentation, all without requiring developer support.

Meanwhile, Appcues’ analytics feel like an afterthought, making it less suitable for teams that rely on data to drive decisions.

Let’s see exactly how they differ:

Userpilot for user analytics

In a nutshell, Userpilot gives you the tools to understand user behavior deeply and turn insights into action.

Here’s what you get:

• Standalone surveys: You can deploy surveys like NPS, CSAT, and CES independently at any point in the user journey. These are invaluable for collecting user feedback without tying it to a specific onboarding flow.
• User and account profiles: Userpilot creates detailed profiles with user activity, survey responses, and event lists all in one place.
• Segmentation: Userpilot helps you track activity trends, key events, and user behavior for specific segments. This is perfect for identifying patterns and improving retention strategies.
• Auto-capture with a no-code visual labeler: Userpilot automatically tracks user activities without requiring you to set up manual events. You can even apply the visual labeler to historical data, ensuring you’re always ready to analyze behavior without coding anything.

Appcues for user analytics

Appcues offers some analytics, but it’s limited in scope and functionality:

• No standalone survey feature: Surveys can only be added as part of an onboarding flow, and you’re restricted to having just one NPS survey live at a time.
• Doesn’t include user or account profiles: Unlike Userpilot, Appcues doesn’t provide detailed profiles, which makes it harder to analyze specific users or accounts.
• No segment analytics: Appcues doesn’t support tracking activity trends or event occurrences for specific user segments, leaving you with a less nuanced view of user behavior.
• Manual event tracking: Appcues requires manual tracking for client-side events and doesn’t support server-side events. For example, you could track if a user clicks “Subscribe” but not whether they completed the payment process.

How does Userpilot stack up against Appcues for product analytics?

If product analytics are important to your team, Userpilot is hands-down the better option. Its robust features, no-code builder, and actionable insights make it a more effective tool for optimizing the user experience.

On the other hand, Appcues’ analytics are basic at best and don’t offer the depth or usability that Userpilot does.

Here’s a detailed comparison:

Userpilot for product analytics

Userpilot provides a complete suite of product analytics features to help you understand and improve your product experience:

• Flow, checklist, and resource center analytics: Track how users interact with every aspect of your product, from onboarding flows to help resources. You can see completion rates, user activation rates, engagement levels, and drop-offs.
• Drag-and-drop dashboards: Userpilot makes it easy to create custom dashboards or use pre-built templates to visualize key metrics like feature usage without developer support.
• Advanced reports: With tools like funnels, paths, retention cohorts, and trends, you can get a deep understanding of user behavior and identify opportunities for improvement.

• Session recordings: You can filter recordings based on conditions like user properties or events, and even mark bugs, add notes, or share sessions with your team.

• Integrations with popular analytics platforms: Userpilot works seamlessly with other analytics tools like Google Analytics, Amplitude, and Mixpanel. Plus, it offers two-way integrations with Salesforce and HubSpot.

In short, Userpilot’s no-code approach ensures you can set up and analyze all sorts of metrics without needing a developer.

Appcues for product analytics

Appcues offers almost no analytics features, and the ones it offers are very limited compared to Userpilot.

Here’s all you get:

• Basic flow analytics: Appcues provides simple flow analytics to measure basic metrics such as completion rates but doesn’t go beyond the basics.
• Journey analytics (beta): This feature allows you to map out touchpoints like pages, flows, and events on a whiteboard. However, it’s difficult to use, doesn’t provide actionable insights, and lacks drop-off tracking or user path analysis.

• Lack of advanced tools: Appcues doesn’t offer retention reports, funnels, or paths, which makes it less suitable for understanding complex user journeys.

Which one is more cost-effective?

When it comes to pricing, Userpilot offers transparent, affordable pricing plans with robust features included at every level.

Appcues, on the other hand, has vague pricing information that requires you to request a quote.

Let’s explore their pricing plans:

Pricing of Userpilot

Userpilot’s pricing structure is straightforward and designed to scale with your business:

• Starter plan: $249/month (billed annually). This includes up to 2,000 monthly active users (MAUs), user segmentation, in-app engagements, analytics, and NPS surveys.
• Growth plan: Starting at $799/month (billed annually), this plan includes custom MAUs, advanced analytics, retroactive event autocapture, session recordings, and localization features.
• Enterprise plan: Custom pricing tailored to your organization’s needs, with enterprise-grade features like premium integrations, data warehouse sync, SAML SSO, and priority support.

Pricing of Appcues

Appcues takes a less transparent approach to pricing, requiring you to contact sales for a detailed quote.

• There’s no clear breakdown of features by plan on their website, making it harder to compare options.
• Features like localization and “advanced” analytics, are only available for Enterprise plans (and they don’t mention it).

Now, as for what the pricing page can show, Appcues offers tiered pricing based on Monthly Tracked Users (MTUs). Each plan offers the following:

• Start plan: At $250/month for 1 app. Includes in-app, email, and mobile push messaging, 5,000 messages per month, user data and segmentation, no-code event tracking, and email support.
• Grow plan: At $1,000/month for 1 app. It includes everything in the Start plan, plus premium in-app experiences, 10,000 messages per month, more flows, workflows, segments, events, premium integrations, and customer success support.
• Scale plan: It includes everything in the Grow plan, plus flexible pricing that works at scale, custom entitlements and limits, favorable multi-product pricing, advanced security & SLAs, and a dedicated implementation & success manager.

So… Userpilot or Appcues?

When comparing Userpilot vs Appcues, it’s easy to see the value our product can offer. However, it doesn’t mean that Appcues is a terrible product you shouldn’t consider.

For most teams, Userpilot offers more value and flexibility. It’s the go-to choice if you want a product adoption platform that delivers powerful onboarding tools, actionable analytics, and cost-effective pricing. Appcues might work for mobile app onboarding, and who knows, maybe you like its UI more than ours!

Want to see how Userpilot can help you create flows without coding? Book a demo to start improving your product experience and boost growth!

Comparing and deciding between Userpilot vs Pendo is no small task—both products are equally robust.

But once you dig deeper, you’ll find some important differences that will shape your buying decision (and hence your product growth).

And despite our obvious bias. Yes, there are clear instances where Pendo can be a better fit for you.

So let’s objectively look at the following:

• The key differences in onboarding, advanced analytics, and surveys between Userpilot and Pendo.
• When to choose Userpilot over Pendo (and vice versa).
• Why cost-effectiveness could be the tipping point in this decision.

What are the differences between Userpilot and Pendo?

At first glance, Userpilot and Pendo seem like similar tools—they’re both in the same category of user onboarding, product analytics, and in-app experiences.

But as I mentioned, the differences become clear when you dig a little deeper. Here’s how they compare across these areas:

• Onboarding functionalities. Userpilot is the simpler, more intuitive choice for non-technical teams since you can build in-app flows without coding. While Pendo is less flexible and doesn’t offer things like action-based guidance or standalone checklists.
• Event tracking for behavior analytics. Both tools offer auto-capture for events, but Userpilot’s setup is far less complicated because it doesn’t require coding. On the other hand, Pendo users often need to manually name events, add scripts, or go through extra steps for proper instrumentation.
• Product analytics. Pendo and Userpilot cover more or less the same analytics features (such as trends, funnels, user retention, user profiles, etc.). But, Userpilot makes analytics easier and more actionable. For example, Userpilot’s user profiles show everything from survey responses to event lists, all in one place. While, with Pendo, you can only view event trends and internal users linked to an account.
• Surveys. While both tools offer in-app surveys, Userpilot surveys are a standalone feature with customizable templates. Pendo, on the other hand, focuses heavily on feature requests and product planning instead of CSAT or CES surveys.
• Pricing. Userpilot is far more cost-effective than Pendo. For teams looking to get the most bang for their buck, Userpilot offers similar (or better) features at a lower price point. On the other hand, Pendo has a habit of changing the pricing and even forcing customers to upgrade to a 5x more expensive plan.

When should you consider Userpilot over Pendo?

Userpilot and Pendo might seem neck-and-neck in some areas, but there are clear scenarios where Userpilot shines.

If you’re still on the fence, here are a few reasons why Userpilot might be a better fit for your team:

• Intuitive onboarding features and simple setup. Userpilot is made for non-technical teams who want to get up and running fast. Its no-code builder means you don’t have to depend on developers to create onboarding flows, checklists, or in-app guidance. Pendo, on the other hand, has complex setups and can be frustrating for non-technical users.
• Actionable insights and credible analytics. With Pendo, you might face report issues with data accuracy or limited functionality (e.g. being unable to trigger events or flows dynamically). Meanwhile, Userpilot analytics are more actionable and accurate. For example, there’s advanced error handling, so any outdated or invalid segments won’t interfere with your analysis.
• More cost-effective. When you compare feature sets, Userpilot delivers everything Pendo does—and sometimes more—at a lower price. For teams watching their budget, this difference can add up quickly.

Even if you’re already using Pendo, Userpilot makes migrating from Pendo painless by offering dedicated support to handle the transition. We even buy out your existing Pendo contract (terms apply), so you don’t have to worry about being stuck with overlapping costs.

A great example of this is Shelterluv, who switched from Pendo to Userpilot to implement improvements in its onboarding processes and reduce its support workload as a result.

When should you consider Pendo over Userpilot?

While Userpilot excels in many areas, there are some scenarios where Pendo is a better fit.

If your team has specific needs beyond user onboarding and analytics, here’s when Pendo could make sense:

• Product planning and roadmaps. Pendo is leaning heavily into product planning with tools like Pendo Feedback and Pendo Listen. So if your team needs to collect feature requests, prioritize feedback, and align it with your product roadmap, Pendo might offer an edge.
• Employee onboarding on third-party apps. Pendo is also a viable choice for employee onboarding, especially when training staff on third-party apps. If this is a big part of your use case, Pendo would be the choice here since Userpilot primarily focuses on customer-facing onboarding experiences.

How does Userpilot stack up against Pendo for user onboarding?

When it comes to onboarding, the verdict is pretty straightforward: Userpilot wins in terms of ease and versatility.

And while Pendo has made some updates to close the gap, Userpilot still delivers a smoother, more intuitive experience.

Let’s break it down:

Userpilot for user onboarding

Userpilot makes building onboarding experiences ridiculously easy. You’ve got a variety of tools to work with—checklists, modals, slideouts, banners, tooltips, and more.

And, basically, you can create any in-app experience without writing a single line of code.

Here’s what you get:

• Codeless flow builder: With multiple UI patterns such as interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, checklists, modals, slideouts, banners, and even spotlights.
• AI-assistant: Which helps you refine the text in your onboarding messages, as well as selecting the right page settings depending on the structure of your URLs (this is to prevent future troubleshooting when executing multi-page flows).
• Conditional triggers: Set up flows based on user behavior, events, or page-specific actions. For example, you can trigger a checklist only for new users on a specific page.
• Staging environments: Test your onboarding flows in a staging environment before pushing them live. This feature is a game-changer for ensuring everything runs smoothly.
• Detailed flow analytics: You’ll get insights on completion rates, user activation rates, most completed steps, and even a list of users who completed or dropped off.

And it doesn’t stop there. Userpilot connects onboarding data with all the features. For example, you can trigger surveys when a user completes a checklist or provide contextual help based on where they are in your product.

Pendo for user onboarding

Pendo has been catching up with its onboarding features, but there are still gaps.

For example:

• No staging environment by default. Testing flows can be tricky without developer support (whereas Userpilot has this available with a click).
• No goal-based triggers. While you can track goals, you can’t use them to trigger onboarding flows, which is a bummer for customer success or product teams trying to guide users through specific milestones.
• Limited resource center: Pendo’s resource center doesn’t have a search feature, making it hard for users to find what they need. There’s also no way to group related content like videos, checklists, or articles for easier navigation.
• No standalone checklists: Checklists are a big part of guided onboarding, and Pendo lacks this feature natively, making it harder to break down tasks for users step by step.

That said, Pendo does offer mobile onboarding (something Userpilot is rolling out very soon). If you’re primarily focused on onboarding users on mobile apps, this could be a factor in Pendo’s favor. However, for desktop and web onboarding, Userpilot still comes out on top.

How does Userpilot stack up against Pendo for product analytics?

When it comes to product analytics, both Userpilot and Pendo bring a lot to the table. However, their approaches and feature depth set them apart.

Userpilot focuses on delivering actionable insights in a straightforward way, while Pendo offers more complex setups with some notable limitations—making Userpilot better for acting on data.

Let’s break it down.

Userpilot for product analytics

Unlike Pendo (or other tools like Google Analytics for that matter), Userpilot’s product analytics are designed to be simple, powerful, and easy to implement.

Here’s what you can use to collect data:

• Auto-capture for events: Userpilot automatically tracks interactions like clicks, hovers, and text input on your app—no manual setup required.
• Back-end events: You can also track server-side actions (like subscription completions) alongside front-end events for a complete view of user behavior.
• Custom events: Group-related events (like subscription clicks and payments) to analyze multi-step processes.
• Visual labeling: Easily tag elements on your app’s interface for tracking it without writing a single line of code.

As for analyzing data, here are the tools you have available:

• Custom dashboards: You can build a dashboard like Lego with the most important metrics for your business.
• Comprehensive reports: Includes reports for visualizing trends, funnels, retention cohorts, and user paths. These make it easy to see what’s working and where users might drop off.
• Session recordings: Filter session replays by user properties or events to see exactly how users interact with your product. You can even mark bugs, add notes, and share recordings across your team for better collaboration.

Userpilot’s analytics don’t just show you the data; they help you act on it. Whether it’s tweaking an onboarding flow or triggering surveys based on user behavior—everything is connected and actionable.

Pendo for product analytics

Pendo’s analytics have improved over the years, but it’s still less flexible compared to Userpilot. Here’s what you get:

• Limited auto-capture: Pendo can track page loads and feature clicks automatically, but it doesn’t support grouped custom events. For example, you can’t track a subscription journey that includes multiple steps (like a front-end click and a back-end confirmation).
• Rigid event tracking: Pendo automatically assigns names to tracked events, and once an event is deleted, you can’t reuse the same name. This makes managing events unnecessarily tricky.
• No group events: You can’t also track events in groups (like the subscription + payment, for example).
• Basic session recordings: Pendo offers session replays, but the functionality is pretty bare-bones. You can’t mark bugs, add notes, or filter recordings by specific events or user properties.

Pendo’s analytics are geared more toward high-level trends than actionable details. If you need deep dives into user behavior or seamless event tracking, the limitations can be frustrating.

How does Userpilot stack up against Pendo for user analytics?

Understanding your users is key to improving their experience, and both Userpilot and Pendo offer tools to help.

But when it comes to showing detailed and actionable data, Userpilot does more with less.

Let’s compare how these platforms handle user analytics.

Userpilot for user analytics

Userpilot gives you a detailed and holistic view of your users, helping you analyze behaviors, segment audiences, and act on insights.

Here’s what makes it stand out:

• Comprehensive user and account profiles: Userpilot shows detailed user and account profiles that include user behaviors, survey responses, event lists, and more. This means you can see everything related to a user or account in one place.
• NPS and other surveys: Userpilot’s survey features (NPS, CSAT, CES, etc.) are standalone, meaning you can deploy them anytime during the user journey to gather meaningful feedback.
• Advanced segmentation: With Userpilot, you can create segments based on activity trends, top events, and user properties. The platform even lets you click on specific users to view their session recordings, offering deep insights into individual interactions.

What sets Userpilot apart is how it ties analytics to actions. For example, you can use insights from your segments or profiles to trigger contextual onboarding flows, send surveys, or even adjust your in-app messaging—all without jumping through hoops.

Pendo for user analytics

Pendo also provides user analytics features, but it doesn’t match the depth or flexibility of Userpilot.

Here are some limitations you should consider:

• Limited visitor and account profiles: Compared to Userpilot, Pendo’s profiles are just fine. They show activity trends and some details. But you can’t see top events, survey results, or linked session recordings, which limits how actionable the insights are.
• No standalone surveys: While Pendo has tools like Feedback and Listen, these are focused on product roadmaps and feature requests, not user research. There’s no way to launch an NPS or CSAT survey independently like Userpilot.
• Segmentation with limits: Pendo lets you segment users based on certain criteria and shows details like where those segments are being used (dashboards, reports, etc.). However, it lacks data visualization, making it harder to see trends like changes in product activity for a specific segment over time.

Pendo’s user analytics can handle basic use cases, but it often feels more tailored to feature planning than understanding user behaviors in detail.

Which one is more cost-effective?

Pricing can often be the deciding factor when choosing between two tools, and in this case, Userpilot delivers more bang for your buck.

While Pendo is packed with features, it’s significantly more expensive, especially for teams looking to scale.

Let’s compare:

Pricing of Userpilot

Userpilot provides transparent pricing with three main tiers:

• Starter: At $249 per month (billed annually), this plan includes up to 2,000 Monthly Active Users (MAUs), in-app user engagement, user segmentation and tracking, usage data analysis, and NPS surveys.
• Growth: Starting at $799 per month (billed annually). It includes all Starter features plus custom MAUs, product analytics, retroactive events autocapture, session replay, in-app surveys, a resource center, and content throttling and localization.
• Enterprise: Offers everything in Growth, along with premium third-party integrations, bulk data export and import, data warehouse sync, SAML SSO and activity logs, priority support, security audit and compliance (SOC 2 Type 2 and GDPR), and custom contracts and SLAs. Pricing is customized based on specific needs.

Pricing of Pendo

Pendo’s custom pricing is less transparent and varies based on factors like MAUs and feature requirements. Their plans include:

• Base: Designed for companies starting their product experience journey, it includes custom MAUs, product analytics, in-app guides, and one integration.
• Core: Offers everything in Base plus session replays.
• Pulse: Includes all Core features, with the addition of Net Promoter Score (NPS) and product discovery tools.
• Ultimate: Comprises all Pulse features along with the Pro edition of in-app guides, journey orchestration, and data synchronization.

Features like session replays, content localization, or AI-writing assistance are available as add-ons. And with the cost of their plans ranging between $25,800 to $132,400, it’s hard to understand the idea behind add-ons if all pricing is custom anyway.

So… Userpilot or Pendo?

This comparison of Userpilot vs Pendo shows that our product is more flexible. However, it doesn’t mean Pendo is objectively “worse”—it’s actually pretty darn good at what it does.

But for most product teams, Userpilot delivers a better balance of features, usability, and value. It’s the go-to choice if you’re focused on user onboarding, actionable analytics, and feedback collection. However, if you need tools geared toward product planning, employee onboarding, or mobile support (and the high price isn’t a problem for you), Pendo is a better fit.

Want to see how Userpilot can do all this without coding? Book a demo today and experience its features for free.

Pendo vs Userpilot? Which one is the best user onboarding tool?

If you’re not sure which of them offers more value and better functionality, stick around.

In this article, we’ll go in-depth and have a look at the most important features each platform offers.

Overview of Pendo vs Userpilot

• Overall, Userpilot is far superior to Pendo when it comes to Engagement for Onboarding. Pendo doesn’t allow you to trigger content based on events. For example: You cannot create a flow for people who have finished a checklist.
• Pendo is known for Product Analytics but is behind Userpilot’s advanced analytics features in a few ways:
  • You cannot group your report in Pendo. Meanwhile, Userpilot allows you to break your report down in different ways: Plan, Country, Device, Email, Language, etc
  • Filters on Userpilot are much more powerful: You can filter any report by Web Sessions, Device Type, Plan, Last Seen, etc. to better understand user behavior.
  • In terms of Retention: Again, Userpilot has a lot more filters. Example: You can check the retention on a specific page for people who signed up after Jan 30, for example.
  • Pendo doesn’t have out-of-the-box System Dashboards that give an instant overview of the product without configuring anything. Userpilot has 3 System Dashboards: New User Activation, Core Feature Engagement, and User Retention to help you monitor key product metrics.
• Segmenting users and accounts is similar to Userpilot. However, targeting Flows, Checklists, and Surveys lacks granularity as you can’t trigger them based on specific events.
• In Pendo, you cannot create any other types of surveys other than NPS. Additionally, Userpilot’s NPS is superior. With Pendo, you cannot
  • Trigger the NPS based on events
  • Change the style of the NPS (modify text color, font, background color, etc)
  • Cannot trigger NPS on a specific page
  • Cannot customize it to collect a % of responses in a day (useful to collect responses over a period of time)
  • Trigger NPS after a user spends X seconds on page 6.
  • Localize it automatically in multiple languages
• Pendo is more expensive than most solutions on the market and the subscription cost rises rapidly as your MAUs grow. Even if you’re on the Starter plan, you could be paying $35,000 annually once you reach 10,000 MAUs — which makes it harder to scale.
• If you’re looking for a new product growth tool or considering transitioning from Pendo, Userpilot offers extensive functionality that can meet your needs. Book a Userpilot demo today and see how it can enhance your product growth strategy!

Pendo vs Userpilot for user onboarding

Overall, Userpilot is far superior to Pendo when it comes to Engagement for Onboarding. Pendo doesn’t allow you to trigger content based on events. For example: You cannot create a flow for people who have finished a checklist.

Userpilot’s editor (WYSIWYG) is much better. There are a lot more options such as changing text size, text color, adding background color, editing the level of backdrop needed, etc. Userpilot has more templates than Pendo and they are neatly categorized into Modal, Slideouts, Tooltips, and Spotlights You can get the help of AI to write descriptions while building Flows in Userpilot.

For example, Pendo doesn’t allow you to trigger the guide on selected paths. Pendo doesn’t have Spotlights that help you highlight a text or a button. You cannot create standalone checklists on Pendo. Checklists are a part of Resource Center but they don’t look intuitive and don’t have rich features of Userpilot.

With Userpilot, you can add a specific action for each step in the checklist, customize the styling, and trigger it for specific users, accounts, and pages. The checklist can be finished manually by the user or automatically when they finish all tasks Pendo doesn’t have automatic Localization to translate the Onboarding Tours into multiple languages.

You can also read our case study of Cuvama – an ex-Pendo customer who is now using Userpilot. Cuvama transitioned to Userpilot and was soon a fan of its easy configuration and user-friendly interface. They used Userpilot for onboarding new users, announcing updates/features, providing support through a resource center, and analyzing customer behavior data.

Because Userpilot is easier to configure and to work with, I’m getting much more value than with Pendo.
– Leyre Iniguez, Customer Experience Lead

Pendo for user onboarding

Pendo is a product adoption platform that has the usual onboarding features that are commonly included with similar solutions. However, those using Pendo Free will need to note that they’ll need to find a new onboarding solution once they cross 500 MAUs or upgrade to the paid version.

There are a few ways you can use Pendo to improve your new user onboarding flows:

• Guide Layouts: Pendo has layout templates for lightboxes, banners, and tooltips that you can use to build onboarding flows for new users.
• Flow Triggers: Pendo’s guide activation options let you trigger an onboarding flow when new users land on a particular URL, use a specific device type, interact with a tagged element, or match the target segment.
• Localization Settings: Localization settings can stop an onboarding flow from triggering if it hasn’t been translated into the user’s chosen language. Because Pendo has no AI-powered localization features, you’ll need to upload language CSVs manually for this to work.
• Onboarding Module: You can add the onboarding module to your in-app resource center in two clicks then change the color, text style, and progress icon to align it with your product’s brand palette.

Userpilot for user onboarding

User onboarding is a crucial part of the customer journey as it speeds up the adoption process and increases retention rates. Onboarding is one of Userpilot’s core use cases along with product growth analytics and user feedback, so it has plenty of features that you can utilize.

Here are some Userpilot features you can use when onboarding new users:

• No-code builder: Creating flows with Userpilot is as simple as installing the Chrome extension, selecting the UI patterns you’d like to use, and then editing the content/settings to suit your use case. You can also use templates to create modals, slideouts, tooltips, and driven actions.

• Native tooltips: Userpilot lets you create native tooltips that show up when users hover over an element or click on an information badge. Since these native tooltips attach to the element itself, they aren’t page-dependent and will show up on any screen where that element is visible.

  

• Advanced flow settings: With advanced condition settings, you can decide when, where, and who you’ll be triggering your onboarding flows. This helps you create contextual and personalized onboarding experiences that drive engagement and adoption.

  

• Staging environment: You can easily test all your content – flows, surveys, and everything else – in a staging environment. This way, you can ensure everything clicks before it reaches your users.

  

• Onboarding engagement analytics: You can easily assess the impact of your onboarding flows, guidance, etc. by analyzing the engagement rate of tooltips, interactive walkthroughs, checklists, etc. In addition, you can also build reports (funnels, paths, etc.) or dashboards to track your core onboarding metrics i.e. activation, stickiness, drop-offs, etc.

  

Pendo vs Userpilot for product analytics

Product analytics is an essential part that helps you understand your onboarding and product development efforts. Both Pendo and Userpilot offer robust analytics features, but their approaches and capabilities differ.

Pendo is known for Product Analytics but is behind Userpilot’s advanced analytics features in a few ways:

• You cannot group your report in Pendo. Meanwhile, Userpilot allows you to break your report down in different ways: Plan, Country, Device, Email, Language, etc
• Filters on Userpilot are much more powerful: You can filter any report by Web Sessions, Device Type, Plan, Last Seen, etc. to better understand user behavior.
• In terms of Retention: Again, Userpilot has a lot more filters. Example: You can check the retention on a specific page for people who signed up after Jan 30, for example.
• Pendo doesn’t have out-of-the-box System Dashboards that give an instant overview of the product without configuring anything. Userpilot has 3 System Dashboards: New User Activation, Core Feature Engagement, and User Retention to help you monitor key product metrics.

Pendo for product analytics

Pendo has no shortage of product analytics capabilities as both native features and third-party integrations. You’ll even be able to access the most important metrics like MAUs and feature use from the home dashboard itself.

Here’s a closer look at Pendo’s analytics features:

• Native Analytics: Because Pendo is a product adoption platform, most of its adoption and engagement analytics are native to the solution. This means you’ll be able to track the number of views, clicks, and interactions that specific in-app guides or product areas get.
• Paths: The Paths section of your Pendo account shows you which paths users take when coming from a specific page or which path they took to get to a particular page. You’ll also be able to sort this data by segment, and date, or see the paths taken by individual visitor IDs.
• Retention: Pendo’s retention analytics dashboard lets you see cohort retention data from month to month. You’ll also be able to toggle between visitors versus accounts, switch between weekly or monthly views, and measure retention for specific segments.

• Funnels: Pendo’s funnel analytics can tell you how many unique visitors have seen your funnels, how many attempts have been made to get through the funnel, and the average time it takes to complete the funnel. You’ll also be able to see completion rates and sort by date or segment.

• Analytics Widgets: Pendo’s home dashboard lets you choose which widgets you’d like to add or remove. You’ll be able to select from various analytics widgets that track product goals, feature adoption, guide views, time-on-app, and other core metrics.
• Third-Party Integrations: Pendo has integrations with tools like Salesforce, Intercom, Segment, Slack, and more. Linking your Pendo account with these third-party solutions will make syncing and sharing data seamless (but do note that Pendo doesn’t update analytics in real time).

Note: Pendo’s HubSpot integration is a one-way integration, which means you won’t be able to sync data both ways between the two tools. You’ll need to upgrade to the Growth plan or higher to use Pendo integrations.

Userpilot for product analytics

Product analytics lets you collect and analyze data about how users interact with your product so you can extract actionable insights. Userpilot lets you look at granular product analytics, such as which features have the highest adoption rates, and big-picture insights like trend reports. Here are Userpilot’s top product analytics features:

• Feature tagging: Userpilot’s click-to-track feature tagger lets you view how many times a feature has been used and by how many users to measure its adoption. Users on the Starter plan can add up to 10 feature tags while those on the Growth or Enterprise tier can create unlimited tags.

  

• Event-tracking: Alongside no-code feature tags for feature engagement tracking, you can also track other events unique to your product using event-tracking. You can also create a group of events to track a specific process i.e. onboarding, subscription, etc.

  

• Trends and funnels: Userpilot’s trends and funnels report lets you extract actionable insights from big data. You’ll be able to see which stage of an onboarding/conversion funnel most users drop out on and create trend reports with detailed breakdowns by user or period.Example of a trend report in Userpilot
• Retention tables: This lets you gauge product performance – how effective it is at retaining users using cohort tables and retention curves.
• Paths: You can generate and access path reports directly within the reporting builder in Userpilot, alongside funnels, trends, and retention reports. With Paths, you can have an overview of how users navigate your product features – offering invaluable insights into their interactions with your products.
• User & Company profiles: Here you can view data related to a certain user/company to gain insights into their behavior and improve the overall user tracking experience. This helps you understand how they engage with your product or platform, better identification of areas of improvement, and tailor their offerings more effectively. User profile with top event data that provides insights into what feature they regularly engage with
• Analytics dashboards (Product Usage, New Users Activation, Core Feature Engagement, User Retention, etc.): These dashboards enable you to keep track of your key product performance and user behavior metrics at a glance, without any technical setup required.

  

• Analytics integrations: Userpilot integrates with some of the most popular analytics tools like Amplitude, Mixpanel, Segment, Google Analytics, and more. This makes it possible to sync product analytics both ways between the tools in your tech stack (two-way integration is only available for Hubspot at the time of writing, more to come).

  

Pendo vs Userpilot for user segmentation

Segmenting users and accounts is similar to Userpilot. However, targeting Flows, Checklists, and Surveys lacks granularity as you can’t trigger them based on specific events.

Pendo for user segmentation

Pendo’s analytics-heavy focus has led to extensive segmentation capabilities within the solution.

Here are a few segmentation rules you can use when configuring in-app guides, filtering analytics, or collecting feedback from users:

• Guide Targeting: Pendo lets you use segmentation rules as triggers for in-app guides. These rules include the type of device a user is on, what their chosen language is, which URL they’re currently on, whether or not they’ve interacted with an element, and which segment they’re in.
• Survey Segmentation: You can use Pendo segmentation rules to segment users based on their responses to recent polls. You could then target that segment with personalized in-app flows (e.g. showing upsell popups to customers who left positive poll responses).
• Segmented Feedback: If you get the separate Pendo Feedback product (charged on a per-seat basis) then you’ll be able to filter feedback based on which segment respondents are in, how much they spend on your product, and other user tags on their account.

Userpilot for user segmentation

User segmentation is essential for creating a personalized and contextual onboarding experience. Userpilot can segment users based on demographics, product usage data, NPS scores, and more. You can then trigger flows or filter analytics based on segments.

Here’s an overview of Userpilot’s customer segmentation capabilities:

• Segment conditions: Userpilot lets you form segments by adding different conditions like user data, company data, features and events, etc. You can then use these segments as analytics filters or flow triggers later on.

• Analytics filters: Userpilot’s product analytics and user insights dashboards can be filtered to only display data from specific segments (or companies). This will help you extract insights from certain cohorts and compare how adoption or activation varies from one segment to the next.

• Flow triggers: Userpilot’s audience settings let you trigger flows for specific segments or target users that meet certain conditions. You can combine this with page-specific or event-occurrence triggers to show relevant flows to the right users at the most contextual moments.

• External data: Userpilot integrates with tools like Amplitude, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Segment using a one-way integration. This means you can use the data inside Userpilot to build advanced segmentation and trigger contextual experiences. For more advanced use cases, the two-way integration with Hubspot lets you send and receive data, unlocking a full set of use cases.

  

Pendo vs Userpilot for user feedback

In Pendo, you cannot create any other types of surveys other than NPS. Additionally, Userpilot’s NPS is superior. With Pendo, you cannot

• Trigger the NPS based on events
• Change the style of the NPS (modify text color, font, background color, etc)
• Cannot trigger NPS on a specific page
• Cannot customize it to collect a % of responses in a day (useful to collect responses over a period of time)
• Trigger NPS after a user spends X seconds on page 6.
• Localize it automatically in multiple languages

Pendo for user feedback

User feedback is crucial to growth as it can guide both product development and marketing initiatives. Pendo’s native analytics mostly focus on product analytics and behavioral data but it does have some features that focus on gathering user feedback.

Here are Pendo’s main user feedback features:

• Polls: Pendo lets you create multiple-choice polls with analytics for the number of responses, overall response rate, and which options got the most votes. You’ll also be able to view poll responses from your home dashboard by adding the poll widget.

• NPS Surveys: Creating NPS surveys with Pendo is fairly easy as you’re able to target specific segments, ask a follow-up question, and select the delivery method (either in-app only or combined with email). You can also integrate Pendo with Slack to set up response forwarding.
• Feedback Module: You can add a feedback module to your in-app resource center in two clicks. This gives users a chance to share their thoughts on the available resources, overall product experience, or specific issues they’ve been facing.

Userpilot for user feedback

User feedback is an essential part of listening to the Voice of the Customer (VoC) and making product development or marketing decisions that best suit your customer base. Userpilot has a no-code survey builder, 14 templates to choose from, and advanced analytics for extracting insights.

Here are the Userpilot features you can use to collect customer feedback and analyze it:

• Survey builder: Userpilot’s survey builder lets you edit the content, update the widget’s style/placement, and set page-specific or event-specific triggers to ensure that users see the survey at the most contextual moment — all without writing a single line of code. You can also translate surveys into your audience’s native language.
• Survey templates: There are 14 survey templates to choose from with a wide array of different use cases. You can collect qualitative responses on how to improve the user/product experience or quantitative data for customer satisfaction benchmarking such as CSAT and CES scores.
• Staging environment: You can easily test your survey in a staging environment before releasing it to your users. This allows you to ensure that the survey logic, such as skip patterns, branching, and validation rules, works as intended.

  

• Advanced analytics: Userpilot’s advanced survey analytics will show you what the most common responses were, what percentage of users selected a specific option, and display open-ended feedback about your product or specific features.

  

• NPS dashboard: Userpilot’s NPS dashboard compiles response data from all NPS surveys so you don’t have to manually go into each survey and check its analytics. You’ll be able to view key metrics like response rates, total views, and NPS history and sort all the data by different segments.

  

• NPS response tags: Userpilot comes with NPS response tags that you can use to categorize qualitative NPS answers for analyzing purposes. You can use these tags to identify common issues among passives and detractors or find satisfaction drivers among promoters.

  

Userpilot vs Pendo: Which tool fits your budget?

Pendo is more expensive than most solutions on the market and the subscription cost rises rapidly as your MAUs grow. Even if you’re on the Starter plan, you could be paying $35,000 annually once you reach 10,000 MAUs — which makes it harder to scale.

Here’s the detailed pricing breakdown for both tools:

Pricing of Pendo

Pendo offers valuable product experience solutions, pricing transparency seems to be a recurring point of concern. Based on user reviews, Pendo uses a tiered pricing model based on features and number of monthly active users (MAUs). Costs for Pendo can potentially range from $25,800 to $132,400 annually.

Here’s an overview of Pendo pricing plans:

• Free: Limited functionality for up to 500 monthly active users (MAUs). Includes basic product analytics, in-app guides, NPS surveys, and roadmaps.
• Base: Targets companies starting with product experience management. It includes custom MAU limits, product analytics, in-app guides, and one integration.
• Core: The core solution for driving business results. It includes everything in Base, plus session replay functionality.
• Pulse: Focuses on optimizing product investments. It includes everything in Core, plus NPS surveys and product discovery functionalities.
• Ultimate: Most comprehensive plan. It includes everything in Pulse, plus advanced in-app guides (Pro edition) and data sync capabilities.

Pricing of Userpilot

Userpilot’s transparent pricing ranges from $249/month on the entry-level end to an Enterprise tier for larger companies.

Furthermore, Userpilot’s entry-level plan includes access to all UI patterns and should include everything that most mid-market SaaS businesses need to get started.

Userpilot has three paid plans to choose from:

• Starter: The entry-level Starter plan starts at $249/month and includes features like segmentation, product analytics, reporting, user engagement, NPS feedback, and customization.
• Growth: The Growth plan starts at $749/month and includes features like resource centers, advanced event-based triggers, unlimited feature tagging, AI-powered content localization, EU hosting options, and a dedicated customer success manager.
• Enterprise: The Enterprise plan uses custom pricing and includes all the features from Starter + Growth plus custom roles/permissions, access to premium integrations, priority support, custom contract, SLA, SAML SSO, activity logs, security audit, and compliance (SOC 2/GDPR).

Pendo vs Userpilot: Which tool should you choose?

To sum up, Userpilot is a no-code digital adoption platform that has a few clear advantages over Pendo, such as:

• In-App Engagement: Userpilot has UI elements that are more customizable, the capacity to include videos/GIFs, Calendly embeds, an advanced resource center, and a user-friendly flow builder — along with standalone onboarding checklists with their own analytics.
• Product Experimentation: Userpilot has a plethora of product experimentation and A/B testing features, while Pendo locks even the most basic guide experimentation capabilities behind its Portfolio plan.
• Real-Time Analytics: Userpilot updates analytics dashboards in real-time while Pendo only refreshes data once per hour (and can even take an additional 15 minutes to finish updating the data during high-volume periods).

Conclusion

If you’re looking for a new product growth tool or considering transitioning from Pendo, Userpilot offers extensive functionality that can meet your needs.
Book a Userpilot demo today and see how it can enhance your product growth strategy!

Searching for Pendo competitors?

Looking for your company’s first product growth platform or considering a switch?

Whatever brings you here, we’ve got your back!

Our in-depth guide covers the 10 best Pendo competitors available in the market. We examine their features, discuss their strengths and limitations, and compare prices.

A quick overview of Pendo’s features and use cases

Pendo is a digital adoption platform (DAP) that is popular among enterprise-level SaaS organizations. Best known for its granular analytics capabilities, Pendo also offers features for collecting user feedback and creating onboarding experiences.

Here’s a detailed breakdown of its features:

• Pendo Guides are UI patterns that you can use to communicate with users inside the product and drive engagement for more effective onboarding.
• Pendo enables you to collect customer feedback via Polls or its standalone module, Pendo Feedback. The latter is designed to help product and customer success teams collect feature requests. With Pendo, you get a dedicated NPS survey dashboard for easy customer sentiment analysis.
• Pendo offers advanced analytics features that allow you to track product usage data and analyze in-app user behavior in great detail. The features include user funnel and path analysis, retention analysis, and custom reports. All these come with powerful filters, you can sort by web sessions, device type, plan, last seen, etc.
• Pendo Roadmaps allows teams to collaborate seamlessly on product initiatives, manage backlogs, track progress, and monitor the business impact of backlog items.
• Pendo AI features include AI-generated and personalized in-app guides, AI-powered qualitative feedback analysis, workflow suggestions to optimize the user journey, and an AI chatbot for on-demand customer support.
• Pendo’s Session Replay feature lets you monitor how users behave inside your app. You get unlimited replay capture to track and analyze qualitative data.

Reasons to look for Pendo competitors

Here are some areas Pendo falls short:

Product analytics features are lacking

The product analytics features that Pendo offers have been a gold standard for a long time. However, many other analytics tools, notably Userpilot, have managed to catch up with it and even outperform Pendo.

For example, Pendo lacks real-time data updates, which limits its usefulness. As user analytics data is displayed with a 1-hour delay, you’re not able to act on the events as they happen. For instance, you aren’t able to instantly trigger a survey or an in-app guide in response to in-app user behavior.

Expensive and complex pricing

Pendo’s pricing strategy is not exactly straightforward, and it’s not a cheap product. All paid plans have custom pricing, and you need to get in touch with their team to get a quote.

Pendo does offer a free plan, but its usage limits are capped to the point where it works only for small businesses. This plan also doesn’t include certain features. For example, experiments are only available in the highest plan, Ultimate.

If you’re on the Base plan, you’ll have to pay extra for features like Pendo Feedback and Session Replay, as they’re not included in the pricing. Moreover, all paid plans include only one third-party integration, meaning you have to pay to connect Pendo with more tools in your tech stack.

Limited UI patterns for user onboarding

Pendo offers only 4 UI patterns for building onboarding flows. These are Lightbox (pop-up window), Banner, Tooltip, and Polls.

The offering doesn’t look too impressive in comparison with other digital adoption platforms.

While Pendo’s Visual Designer Studio limits teams’ dependence on developers and was a massive step forward when first introduced, it offers fairly limited customization options.

To make the in-app guides look and feel like an integral part of the UI, Pendo users still need to write a bit of code.

Also, you don’t get the option to create standalone checklists to nudge users to activation events. You can only implement checklists as part of the in-app resource center.

Steep learning curve for non-technical teams

As a fairly complex product, Pendo comes with a steep learning curve.

G2 reviewers regularly mention that the product is hard to set up and its UI isn’t very intuitive, which makes it super easy to get lost if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.

10 Top Pendo alternatives for SaaS companies

Now that we know what Pendo is, its main features, and some weaknesses, let’s look at some Pendo competitors that you may consider for your SaaS product.

1. Userpilot – the best overall Pendo competitor

Userpilot is a comprehensive product growth platform and the closest Pendo alternative in terms of features and use cases.

Just like Pendo, Userpilot offers a robust analytics layer and different visualizations, such as cohort tables, paths, trends, funnels, and dashboards. Also, Userpilot is the only other platform apart from Pendo that offers auto-capture (recording user actions such as clicks, form submissions, and text inputs by default, without manual tagging).

However, Userpilot’s autocapture functionality is much more intuitive and actionable than Pendo. The former stores labeled and raw events separately, while the latter bundles them together after 36 hours, making it difficult to sort.

Also, with Pendo, the Discoverability of important automatically captured features is poor. For instance, you can’t search by specificity, such as “clicked on __” or “page.” However, Userpilot lets you easily filter events by interaction types, CSS selectors, and pages.

Additionally, Userpilot offers event-based triggering, meaning you can trigger in-app flows and guides based on real-time user behavior and actions.

For instance, you can trigger a survey after a user engages with a new feature. It can help you understand how users feel about the said feature and whether it meets their needs.

That’s a major advantage over Pendo, which doesn’t support event-based triggers.

Plus, with Userpilot, you get the user profiles feature, which can be used to perform a very granular level analysis of each user (or account), including the flows and surveys they’ve engaged with. You can also see details about the events that occurred the most with a user and the number of sessions. These details are particularly useful for account-based marketing.

When it comes to UI patterns, Userpilot offers more variety than Pendo. You can choose from modals, hotspots, driven actions, banners, and tooltips to design in-app experiences. With the intuitive WYSIWYG editor, these elements become more customizable too. You can change the font size and color, add a background color, and even edit the level of backdrop needed.

You even get pre-built templates for each pattern, meaning you can avoid designing them from scratch. While Pendo also offers templates, there isn’t much variety. For instance, you get only one template for tooltips.

Userpilot also lets you create flawless onboarding checklists to guide users through key activation steps. Unlike Pendo, you have the option to create independent checklists or make them a part of any in-app flow. Plus, you get more customization options, such as modifying tasks, adding progress bars, and crossing over completed tasks.

When it comes to building an in-app resource center, Userpilot’s offerings are similar to those of Pendo’s. You can add product updates, in-app guides, and video tutorials. It’s also possible to create targeted modules for different user segments.

Userpilot even lets you link directly to your existing knowledge base. With Pendo, it’s only possible via integrations. Another area where the former stands out is the ability to localize the resource center using auto-translation or manual uploads.

Collecting user feedback is also a breeze on Userpilot with 30+ in-app survey templates. You can choose from CES, CSAT, and NPS surveys and even use branching logic to modify the flow of questions based on user responses. Userpilot also enables you to analyze qualitative responses, segment users based on their answers, and trigger personalized in-app flows.

In contrast, Pendo’s survey features are limited to basic templates that come as a part of in-app guides. The platform does compensate for this with other feedback features, such as roadmaps.

In terms of NPS survey features, Pendo and Userpilot are fairly similar. Both the survey templates and dashboard are an industry standard. However, Userpilot offers tags, which are labels you can create and optionally apply to individual NPS survey responses to filter and share responses and perform trend analysis.

Despite these impressive features, Userpilot does have a few limitations. It doesn’t support mobile apps for now, and it’s not suitable for employee-focused training options. Pendo works for both web and mobile apps.

Here’s a quick overview of how Pendo and Userpilot compare:

It’s no surprise that numerous businesses prefer to use Userpilot over Pendo due to its bunch of advantages.

Userpilot pricing

In the Pendo vs. Userpilot comparison, Userpilot offers more competitive pricing.

The lowest plan, Starter, is available from $249/month, and it offers higher usage limits and access to more features. For larger organizations, there are two more plans, Growth and Enterprise.

2. Appcues – digital adoption platform alternative for mobile apps

If you’re looking for a Pendo competitor that works on both mobile and web apps, Appcues could be one.

When it comes to in-app engagement features, Appcues offers more functionalities than Pendo.

Apart from the UI patterns Pendo offers (which are tooltips, modals, hotspots, and banners), Appcues also allows its users to create slideouts.

In terms of user feedback, Appcues doesn’t offer much and only supports NPS surveys.

Appcues analytics are no match for Pendo either. You can use it to track events, set custom goals, and monitor how your flows perform, but you can’t create product analytics reports and visualizations such as paths or funnels. There are also segmentation and experimentation features, but that’s it.

You can make up for it by leveraging integrations with 3rd party tools, but that’s a bit of an extra hassle.

Appcues pricing

Appcues offers more competitive pricing than Pendo. There are three plans:

• Essentials – starting from $249/month
• Growth – starting from $879/month
• Enterprise – custom pricing

Before committing to any of the plans, check their usage caps, as they seem a tad limiting. All plans come with a 14-day free trial.

3. Chameleon – cheaper alternative with better user segmentation

Chameleon’s unique selling point is the high level of customization that you can apply to the in-app experiences. The catch is that such customization does require coding.

What’s more, Chameleon offers a decent number of UI patterns. There are hotspots, beacons, and labels, which you can sequence into Tours. You also get modals, banners, embedded cards, and tooltips. The good thing is that these patterns are included in all plans.

There is also a newly-released Helpbar, which is basically a search bar that allows users to find resources. There are also launchers, which are in-app widgets that you can leverage for in-app support. The launcher is the only way to trigger checklists.

Where Chameleon really stands out is user segmentation. Basically, you can use any kind of data from all available sources, such as Heap or Mixpanel, to create segments for more accurate analysis and targeting.

While Chameleon’s user behavior analytics are fairly basic, it does track data in real-time, which means you can respond to events as they happen.

Chameleon pricing

There are 3 Chameleon pricing plans available along with the Helpbar plan (which is free):

• Startup – from $279/month
• Growth – from $1,500/month
• Enterprise – custom pricing

Please note, however, that the pricing is based on usage. If you exceed the number of MTUs, you will be charged extra, even if you’re on a lower plan.

4. UserGuiding – affordable Pendo competitor for startups

UserGuiding is the most affordable adoption platform which makes it an excellent Pendo alternative for early-stage companies.

You get all standard features, such as no-code product tours, in-app resource centers, and onboarding checklists. Also, you can create different types of microsurveys to collect user feedback.

However, its analytics capabilities are limited to tracking the performance of in-app content, so forget about funnels, trend analysis, custom events, feature tagging, or heatmaps.

UserGuiding pricing

For what you’re getting, UserGuiding is not expensive at all. It offers 3 pricing plans:

• Basic – from $69/month
• Professional – from $199/month
• Corporate – Custom pricing

All plans include a 14-day free trial. Pricing is based on the number of MAUs, though.

5. Whatfix – best Pendo competitor for employee onboarding

Whatfix is another DAP in the roundup. Unlike Userpilot, Appcues, and Chameleon, it’s more suitable for employee onboarding, so if that’s what you’re after, it’s a worthy Pendo competitor.

You can easily create in-app onboarding experiences without any coding as long as you’re not too fussed about customization. To give it a native look, you will need to use CSS, though.

In terms of UI patterns, both Pendo and Whatfix offer limited variety compared to other digital adoption platforms. You can create standalone checklists, though, and there’s a resource center and knowledge repository functionality as well.

User feedback features are restricted to NPS surveys only. Like Pendo, Whatfix offers advanced analytics features like funnels, trends, user journey tracking, and cohort analysis on all plans. However, the latter lacks session replays and AI-based insights.

Whatfix pricing

Whatfix’s pricing structure is fairly complex. There are plans for Web, Desktop, Mobile, and Enterprise solutions; within them, you can find Standard and Premium plans.

Unfortunately, no pricing information is available on the website, but users report paying over $2k/month.

6. WalkMe – product experience platform for employees and customers

WalkMe is an enterprise-level product experience platform.

If you’re after a tool to support a digital transformation project, WalkMe is a solid Pendo alternative.

What’s more, WalkMe is also SCORM and xAPI compliant, so you can expand its functionality by integrating it with your learning management system.

The analytics features are pretty robust, too. They allow you to track user in-app behavior in real-time—every click, page view, key press, form submission, or element selection. You can also watch user interactions with the product with Session Playbacks.

The main downside of WalkMe, when compared with Pendo, is that it is more complex to set up and use. It requires a fair bit of coding.

If you’re looking for a DAP with robust user engagement and native analytics features, WalkMe can be a good fit only if your team members have a fair bit of technical knowledge. Pendo would be better suited for non-technical users.

WalkMe pricing

WalkMe offers no information about the pricing of its two plans, WalkMe for employee experience and WalkMe for customer experience. However, the plans are believed to be in the same pricing range as Pendo’s, with customers paying $9,000-$50,000 a year.

7. Userlane – user onboarding software for non-tech teams

Userlane is a no-code product adoption solution that offers all the features you need to design in-app onboarding experiences for your customers and employees alike.

Besides creating targeted interactive in-app flows called ‘lanes’, you can also record tutorials and share them with your users.

Overall, its features may not be as advanced as Pendo’s, but it comes with an easier and more intuitive UI and it’s easier to set up.

Userlane pricing

This platform offers only custom pricing plans tailored to the needs of different organizations based on the number of users, features, and support packages.

8. Gainsight PX – best Pendo competitor for customer success teams

Gainsight PX offers all the standard features you’d expect from a product experience platform. These include interactive walkthroughs, checklists, banners, in-app notifications, and knowledge centers.

In-app feedback capabilities include CES, CSAT, NPS, and other microsurveys.

What sets Gainsight PX apart are its advanced user analytics features. Besides monitoring feature usage and funnel conversions, you can also map user paths and track customer health scores. That makes it particularly suitable for customer success teams looking to improve retention and reduce churn.

Like Pendo, Gainsight PX uses AI to generate actionable insights from user behavior data. However, according to its users, one of Gainsight’s downsides is its learning curve. It’s a fairly complex product, and its UI is not always intuitive.

Gainsight PX pricing

Gainsight pricing is not publicly available, so you have to request a custom quote. Users report paying $500+ a month.

9. Mixpanel – best Pendo competitor for product analytics

Mixpanel is not a product growth tool but a dedicated product analytics platform.

While it doesn’t offer any feedback or engagement features, its analytics are superior to those of Pendo. Hence, it’s a better alternative if you’re looking for a tool for granular product insights.

Mixpanel’s analytics features include user segmentation, flows, custom events and dashboards, and funnel and retention analysis, which you can also find in Pendo.

In addition, Mixpanel offers impact analysis and real-time reporting.

What’s more, you can analyze the data in more detail with breakdowns. For example, in funnel analysis, you can compare the conversion rates of different products sharing the same funnel or different user segments, which is not possible in Pendo.

Mixpanel pricing

Mixpanel offers transparent pricing based on 3 plans:

• Free
• Growth – from $24/month
• Enterprise – custom pricing

Of course, if you go down the Mixpanel path, you need to factor in the cost of an engagement tool.

10. Google Analytics – Free Pendo analytics alternative software

Google Analytics doesn’t require introductions, right? Well, not quite. Many people associate it with web analytics without realizing that GA4 allows you to track events inside digital products.

What features does GA offer?

For starters, you can track user activity and events in real-time without writing a single line of code. In contrast to GA, Pendo logs user activity data with a 1-hour delay.

You also have the option to set up and analyze conversion funnels, generate audience, acquisition, and behavior reports, and set custom goals. While Pendo has many of these features, like funnel analysis and goal tracking, GA offers these for free.

Like Pendo, GA lets you set up custom dashboards to track analytics reports, charts, and metrics that matter the most to you. With GA, you can also choose between standard and real-time widgets, depending on the data and events you want to track.

Google Analytics pricing

Google Analytics is the only tool in the article that is almost completely free to use.

Why almost? There’s a paid plan through Analytics 360 that gives you access to advanced features like attribution modeling and costs $50,000 a month as reported by some users.

Conclusion

If you’re looking for Pendo competitors, you’ll be spoilt for choice. While some platforms offer more extensive UI patterns and user engagement features, others stand out due to user segmentation capabilities.

Then, there are platforms with basic engagement and analytics features that offer good value for money. It’s up to you to select the right Pendo alternative based on your team’s goals and needs.

If you’re looking for an all-around Pendo alternative that excels in both user engagement and analytics, Userpilot is a smart choice. Book a demo today to see how Userpilot can help you streamline user onboarding, drive product adoption, create personalized user journeys, and more.

Summary of in-app onboarding

• In-app onboarding is the process of teaching users how to use an app to achieve their goals.
• Mobile users tend to have less patience, so their onboarding needs to be shorter and less complex.
• In-app onboarding is necessary to let users experience value. Once they activate, they’re more likely to stay with your product and convert to paying customers.
• Progressive onboarding introduces more complex features gradually as users get more confident using the app.
• Function-oriented onboarding focuses on teaching users how to complete tasks, while benefits-oriented onboarding shows how the product can improve users’ lives.
• The key elements of in-app onboarding include a sign-up page, welcome screen, interactive walkthrough, feature guidance, and self-serve support.
• Keeping the sign-up process simple helps users start engaging with the product in less time. This reduces the risk of them dropping off.
• Contextual onboarding offers guidance at the time when users need it. This increases their chances of activating features and reduces the risk of overwhelming them with unnecessary information.
• Checklists are an effective way to take users through the initial stage of onboarding.
• Using in-app UX patterns like tooltips or modals is a powerful way to help users discover new features.
• Mobile app onboarding shouldn’t take more than 60 seconds, so personalize it for users and include the absolute minimum of steps. Use a progress bar to tell users how many steps are left.
• Use the empty state screens for product guidance or to set them off on the way to activation.
• Test your in-app onboarding flows with A/B tests to choose the most effective ones.
• Want to see how to design web app onboarding flows with Userpilot? Book the demo!

What is in-app onboarding?

It is the process of educating users about a product so that they know how to use it to solve their problems and satisfy their needs and wants.

The objective of in-app onboarding is to help users experience product value. Later on, in the customer journey, in-app onboarding helps users discover more advanced features, informs them about product changes, and keeps them engaged.

Web vs mobile app onboarding

Both web and mobile app onboarding have the same purpose: introducing new users to the application and helping them become competent users. They rely on the same principles like personalization, friction elimination, and monitoring progress.

However, the two have their unique limitations and characteristics, which affect the onboarding process.

For example, mobile onboarding needs to be shorter and more engaging to compete with other distractions that mobile phones offer.

In this article, we explore best practices for both kinds of onboarding.

Why is web and mobile app onboarding important?

There are a number of reasons why web and mobile onboarding is essential for app success.

As mentioned, one of its key purposes is user activation. This is essential because it has a knock-on effect on free trial conversion rates and customer retention.

In simple terms, if users don’t know how to use the product or don’t experience its value firsthand, they won’t hang around. And that means they won’t be converting to paying customers. Not yours, anyway.

What are the three types of user onboarding in-app?

There are different ways to organize in-app onboarding:

• Progressive onboarding
• Function-oriented onboarding
• Benefits-oriented onboarding

In progressive onboarding, users discover new features gradually as they are using the product. This starts with the basic features that are essential for users to get going and becomes more complex as they get more confident.

Function-oriented onboarding, also known as instructional-based onboarding, shows users how to accomplish their goals using the key functions. This approach is most common in mobile app onboarding.

The benefits-oriented onboarding process focuses on highlighting the benefits of using the product rather than its features. The goal is to show users how the product can change their lives for the better.

What are the core features of an onboarding process?

Onboarding processes, both web and mobile ones, rely on a number of key features.

• Signup page – the first step in which users create their accounts and provide essential information.
• Welcome/ onboarding screen – that’s what users see when they log into the product for the very first time. It can contain a survey, an onboarding checklist, or a CTA prompting users to start.
• Interactive walkthrough – a step-by-step guide that prompts users to engage with the most relevant features.
• Feature promotion – can be achieved with in-app messages, like tooltips or modals.
• Self-serve support – resources that users can access on-demand, teaching them how to use the product and solve the issues they come across.

What makes a good app onboarding?

A good app onboarding process should be simple and easy to follow so that non-tech-savvy users can learn how to use the product.

What’s more, solid app onboarding should be customized to the needs of users to help them experience value ASAP.

Web app onboarding best practices to create a positive user experience

How can you optimize the web app onboarding to deliver a delightful user experience and drive product adoption? Here are a few best practices that you can try out.

Keep the sign-up process simple and short

The signup flow needs to be as simple and short as possible.

Why?

Because you want your users to start using the product as quickly as possible and every bit of friction delays this moment.

That’s why make sure to ask only for information that’s absolutely essential to create the account. Consider enabling Single Sign-On (SSO) so that users can sign up using their existing accounts and delay email confirmation until later.

Create contextual onboarding for new users

Contextual onboarding offers users guidance at the exact time when they need it.

By providing such relevant information, you increase their chances of success and avoid overwhelming them with details that they couldn’t care less about.

Use onboarding checklists to drive app users toward activation

Onboarding checklists are super effective at driving user activation.

For starters, they are clear, organized, and easy to navigate. What’s more, human beings find it really difficult to resist ticking items off their lists. And the closer we are to the end, the stronger the urge to see it through.

To make your checklist compelling, keep them short – 4 to 5 actions will do. Provide a progress bar so that your users can see how far they’ve gone, and give them a head start by including actions they’ve already completed, like creating the account.

Highlight important features to existing users to boost user retention

Once your users activate the product and get comfortable using it, keep them engaged by introducing new features that are relevant to their use cases.

This is easy to do with in-app messages like modals, banners, or tooltips.

So first, segment your users based on their JTBDs and track their product usage to know which features they haven’t used yet. Then use in-app messaging to introduce those features to them.

 

Mobile app onboarding best practices to implement

The web app onboarding best practices apply to mobile app onboarding as well. However, there are a few more things to pay attention to here because of the unique characteristics of mobile devices and how we use them.

Generally speaking, mobile users are less patient and expect access to all necessary information within 60 seconds.

Collect data early on to personalize the onboarding process

To make sure that the user onboarding process is as short as possible, it needs to be personalized.

To achieve this, start onboarding with a survey to collect the information you need to segment your users. Next, use the information to trigger bespoke onboarding flows for each of them.

Beware, however, of asking unnecessary questions as these can put off users. This has to do with extra friction but also concerns users as to how their data is going to be used.

Ensure mobile onboarding flows have minimum steps

As you personalize the onboarding flow, include only the absolute minimum of steps. Focus only on those that are essential for users to start using the app.

It doesn’t mean you should skip the more advanced features altogether. You can always introduce them later when users activate.

The same applies to permissions. Don’t ask for access to the camera or users’ location unless it is essential for the adequate functioning of the app.

Show users’ progress along mobile app onboarding screens

A progress bar removes the uncertainty as to what else users have to do and how long it’s going to take.

By setting clear expectations with a progress bar, you make the process more bearable and reduce the chances that users drop off.

Common mistakes to avoid when creating an app onboarding experience

What are the factors that can ruin the user onboarding experience and cause users to drop off? There are a few common culprits.

Don’t overwhelm users with excessive information

Providing users with too much information can bite you back in three ways.

First, it causes sensory overload. Users are simply not able to process all of it, which causes fatigue and affects the quality of the experience.

What’s even worse, receiving information that doesn’t apply to the situation or customer use case may make them wonder whether they’ve chosen the right tool. And they may look somewhere else if that’s the case.

Finally, it makes the flows longer, which tests users’ patience – and attention spans.

Avoid leaving the empty states ‘blank’

Blank empty states can also be overwhelming for users but in a very different way.

In a way, they are the opposite of information overload. They simply don’t provide users with the information that they need to start using the product.

A simple CTA or a checklist is enough to get them going, so there’s no reason not to include them.

Not testing and improving the user onboarding flow

No matter how much thought you put into designing the onboarding process, you won’t know how well it works until you test it with real users.

You can assess its effectiveness by tracking user progress. When you see your users drop off or slow down at a particular stage, tweak that part of the flow and run an A/B test to see if it brings better results than the original.

The best app onboarding flow examples from SaaS companies

Now that we know the dos and don’ts of designing in-app onboarding flows for web and mobile apps, let’s check out a few examples of how companies have successfully implemented them.

Sked Social provides a step-by-step guide to first-time users

Sked Social is a social media management platform. When the company started using Userpilot for user onboarding, it managed to triple its trial-to-paid conversion rate.

What’s its secret?

Checklists!

Let’s see how it all works.

First, users need to add a social media account. They either have the option to do it themselves or with one-to-one support from the customer success team.

Once you set up your first account, you’re taken to the main dashboard where the onboarding checklist pops out.

When you click on each item from the list, you’re taken to the relevant section.

And when you finish all tasks from the checklist, a modal with a congratulatory message appears.

What’s great about the onboarding flow?

✅ Use of a checklist

✅ A short and simple sequence of tasks

✅ Progress bar

Canva offers a personalized web app experience

Canva is a popular graphic design tool. It offers its users thousands of templates for creating bespoke visuals like logos, featured images, and posters.

Canva’s success could be attributed to the personalized user experiences it offers its users.

When you first log in, the app asks what you will use Canva for. The 6 options to choose from include personal, educational, and business use.

When you choose one, Canva customizes the dashboard for you to include the most popular kinds of visuals associated with your use case. For example, for personal use, it gives you shortcuts to Instagram posts, logos, posters, invitations, or social media posts.

If the list doesn’t include what you’re looking for, you can use the search engine instead.

Once you choose a design, you’re taken to the design page, where you can pick and customize a template with your bespoke content. To help you with that, Canva uses contextual tooltips.

What do we like about the onboarding flow?

✅ Shortness and simplicity

✅ Use of anticipatory design and user data to personalize their experience

✅ Use of contextual in-app messages to aid feature discovery

Grammarly creates a minimal mobile onboarding flow

Grammarly is a super-popular writing assistant tool used by individuals and organizations across the globe. Its freemium plan provides powerful error correction functionality, and that’s the focus of its onboarding flow.

To start with, you have to set it up by adding and enabling Grammarly Keyboard.

When this is done, a demo document appears on the onboarding screen. It describes the different kinds of errors Grammarly detects and how it marks them. To illustrate this even better, the text contains examples of all the different kinds of errors.

At the bottom, there’s a modal with suggested corrections for users to apply. In this way, users learn the color coding that Grammarly uses and practice fixing errors.

Once users correct them all, another modal with a congratulatory note appears.

What’s great about Grammarly onboarding?

✅ It’s short

✅ It uses both explicit explanations and real-life examples

✅ Provides demo content and a chance to practice using the tool

Slack onboards mobile users seamlessly

Slack is a messaging app that has taken the B2B startup scene by storm.

Once you install the app on your device, it prompts you to provide just two pieces of information. The name of your team and the project you’re working on.

Based on that, it creates the workspace and channel for you.

At this stage, the app is ready to use. However, if left alone at this stage, some users wouldn’t necessarily know how to start using the app.

That’s why Slack provides suggestions for actions you could do next, like sending a message or adding a teammate.

Slack mobile app onboarding is effective because it:

✅ Asks for the absolute minimum of information to set up the workspace

✅ Consists of minimum steps

✅ Prevents users from getting stuck by populating the empty state with suggestions on what to do next

✅ Includes a progress bar

The top tools for creating the best app onboarding experiences

What tools do you need to create personalized in-app onboarding experiences for your users? Let’s check out a couple of options that you have.

Userpilot – recommended for web applications

Userpilot is a product adoption platform that enables you to create fully customized user onboarding flows without writing a single line of code.

Its key features include:

• UI patterns for in-app messaging: Choose between tooltips, modals, banners, slideouts, hotspots, and other UI patterns to create tailored user flows, product tours, and walkthroughs. You can use these to either create in-app experiences for existing users or onboard new users.

• A/B testing: Userpilot’s A/B testing feature lets you run experiments to improve adoption rates. You can split-test flows, surveys, or experiences, iterate on the best-performing variants, and optimize based on user behavior analytics.

• Feature tagging and heatmaps: Track feature engagement and other event data by tagging individual features or a combination of features. You can track different interaction types and display the engagement data using heatmaps.

• Analytics dashboard: Track all your adoption-related metrics in one simple dashboard. Identify your active users, see which features they engage with the most, and more. You can also sort through the data by period if needed.

• Adoption funnel analysis: See how users progress through each step of the adoption funnel. Funnel analysis also helps you discover drop-off points and optimize stages that hamper conversions.

• Path analysis. Choose a starting point in your product and see where users proceed next. Userpilot’s path analysis feature helps you analyze the efficiency of different user paths and discover the best path for users.

• Feedback surveys: Choose from different survey templates (including NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys) and customize them to match your brand image. You can also trigger these surveys contextually or create different surveys for different user segments.

Appcues – recommended for mobile applications

Appcues is a digital adoption platform like Userpilot. It works on web apps but it really shines when used for mobile app onboarding.

Here’s the breakdown of its key features:

• Segmentation
• In-app onboarding flows based on tooltips, modals, slideouts, hotspots, and checklists
• Flow analytics
• Flow A/B testing
• Launchpad for self-access in-app guidance
• In-app surveys
• Event and goal tracking

Conclusion

The quality of in-app onboarding processes can make or break your product.

If you design simple and relevant flows tailored to the needs of your users, your adoption and retention will grow, and your product will thrive. Make it too long, too complex, or too irrelevant, and your new signups will drop off like flies.

If you want to see how to use Userpilot to create personalized onboarding experiences for your users, book the demo!

What is user onboarding?

User onboarding is the process of educating new users on how to best realize the product value and achieve their goals successfully.

We can divide user onboarding into three stages:

1. Primary onboarding: The phase from signup to activation, also called minimum viable onboarding, whose goal is for users to realize value or experience an “aha” moment as quickly as possible and start using key features.
2. Secondary onboarding: The process of driving user stickiness, where you take users from using the core features to making the most out of your product.
3. Tertiary onboarding: The stage where you retain happy customers, drive expansion revenue through upselling, and turn power users into advocates.

User onboarding stages

Why is user onboarding important?

Here, we’ll highlight the main advantages of user onboarding based on our experience working with SaaS companies.

Improving the activation rate

“User onboarding has a direct impact on user activation. When you think about it, this is one of the very first touchpoints your users have with your product. If they don’t have a good time here, they’ll likely leave, never to return.” Yi Lin Pei, Director of Product Marketing at teach:able

Our data also shows that building effective onboarding flows helps improve activation rates. Here are some results our clients have achieved:

• The Room increased new user activation by 75% with an onboarding flow consisting of a driven action.
• Attention Insight improved user activation by 47% with an onboarding flow consisting of interactive walkthroughs.
• Kontentino increased new user activation by 10% with an onboarding flow consisting of an interactive walkthrough and checklist.

Increasing trial-to-paid conversion rate

“If your users don’t activate, they won’t experience value from your product and will churn within the first few weeks of signing up. This will directly affect your trial-to-paid conversion rate.” Yi Lin Pei, Director of Product Marketing at teach:able

But when you create great onboarding, you increase conversions—case in point: Sked Social tripled conversions after they added one of the most popular onboarding elements—a checklist.

Achieving higher MRR

User activation rate also has the highest correlation with MRR growth—data shows that 25% increase in user activation results in a 34% increase in MRR, so if you improve onboarding and get users to activate, you also improve one of the most important business metrics.

User activation impact on SaaS revenue

For example, our client Kommunicate.io used Userpilot to improve onboarding and increased product adoption by 4% and the feature usage by 3%.

While these percentages may seem small, they significantly contribute to MRR growth. In the words of Parth Shrivastava, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Kommunicate.io:

“It’s a substantial increase for us as well – even if it’s just a 5% increase – it then translates into a 2-3% increase in revenue, which has a substantial impact on our MRR.”

Reducing support costs

Effective onboarding minimizes the need for customer support and lets them focus on more complex tasks. In fact, our client RecruitNow saved whopping 1,000+ customer training hours a year by improving their onboarding process and localizing their support resources.

In the words of Bouwe Metz, Senior Customer Manager at RecruitNow:

“Userpilot helps us reduce a lot of 1:1 onboarding calls. We never had such a high rate of trained people getting live on the first day.”

What are the essential elements of a successful user onboarding strategy?

Now, you’ve heard us mention checklists, interactive walkthroughs, etc. It’s time to talk about the key elements of a successful user onboarding process:

• Sign-up forms
• Welcome screens
• Onboarding checklists
• Interactive walkthroughs
• Tooltips
• Banners
• Onboarding surveys
• Celebration modals
• Self-service resource centers

Let’s explore them in more detail. Plus, we’ll share some data from our SaaS onboarding report for which we analyzed onboarding flows of over 100 tools.

Sign-up forms

The sign-up form is often the first interaction a user has with your product, which sets the tone for the entire onboarding process.

Nearly 79% of the tools we tested have a friction-based sign-up flow, with two main friction points:

• Requiring email confirmation before letting users access the tool.
• Requiring a credit card in the sign-up flow.

How do you reduce friction here? Keep it simple and ask only for essential information to encourage users to complete the form and minimize drop-offs.

For example, we only ask for a work email, first and last name, and password. You can always request additional details later in the onboarding journey.

Userpilot sign up page

Did you notice the SSO (single sign-on) option? It is another way of reducing friction by allowing users to sign up and log in using their Google Accounts, which 54% of analyzed companies implemented.

Welcome screens

Welcome screens are the first thing users see when they log into the product, so they are a great opportunity to give users a warm welcome. Based on our data, 66% of companies use them as part of their user onboarding.

Welcome message created with Userpilot

Apart from the welcome message, you can also use the welcome screen to launch a microsurvey to collect more details about your users so you can personalize their onboarding experience—this is something that 45% of the companies we analyzed do.

What kind of information should you collect?

It depends on the product, but it’s a good idea to find out about their company role and their JTBDs. Again, resist the temptation to ask about anything that isn’t absolutely essential not to discourage your users and slow their activation.

Welcome survey creation in Userpilot

Onboarding checklists

Don’t you just love ticking items off your to-do list? That small dopamine hit we get from completing tasks makes user onboarding checklists a great way to encourage users to complete key actions.

Effective checklists are usually simple and include a small number of easily achievable tasks. They often give users a headstart by adding a task they’ve already completed, like creating an account, and include elements of gamification, like progress bars and badges.

Onboarding checklist creation in Userpilot

According to our data, 44% of companies use checklists, but only 30% use progress bars.

Interactive walkthroughs

Interactive walkthroughs guide users to perform key actions step by step, where the next step shows only after users have successfully completed the previous one.

 

Attention Insight interactive walkthrough created with Userpilot

Only 29% of companies use interactive walkthroughs, while a surprising 36% don’t have any in-app guidance, so this is a huge opportunity to stand out.

Tooltips

A tooltip is a text box that contains information about a feature and usually prompts engagement with a call to action (CTA). They are not as disruptive as some of the other UI patterns and provide contextual guidance to drive feature adoption.

You can use tooltips for user onboarding either as a part of interactive walkthroughs or on their own. For example, you can trigger them to drive user engagement with a particular feature. Teams also use them to announce new features and drive upsells.

Dashboard tooltip in Userpilot

Banners

Banners are small in-app notification bars that appear either at the bottom or top of the screen.

They are a great way to share urgent information and important announcements in a non-intrusive way. That’s as long as you add that cross in the corner that allows users to dismiss them easily.

It’s also a good practice to keep your banner copy short and stick to a couple of CTA buttons only.

Editing a banner in Userpilot

Onboarding surveys

Onboarding surveys are simple questionnaires used to collect customer feedback and requests. Product teams use them to collect both quantitative data, like , CSAT and PMF scores, or qualitative insights.

There are two main reasons to include surveys in your onboarding process.

First, you want to make sure that your customers are getting the best experience possible. If your product doesn’t live up to users’ expectations, feedback insights allow you to rectify any issues.

New users’ feedback is also incredibly valuable because they bring a fresh perspective on the product. They may be able to point out things that you weren’t aware of before or suggest ways to improve your product.

Onboarding survey question in Userpilot

Celebration modals

Celebration modals are UI elements that appear when the user reaches an important activation milestone.

They often include elements of gamification and use emotional design principles to reward users for their efforts. They also inject a bit of fun into the onboarding process, and most importantly keep users engaged and motivated.

Kontentino celebratory modal created with Userpilot

Self-service resource centers

According to research, 88% of US respondents stated that they expect companies to have a self-service support portal.

Self-service resource centers allow users to access the help they need without leaving the app and more importantly, without contacting human agents. They are available 24/7 and apart from text, they can include visuals and videos to make them more engaging.

Resource center created with Userpilot

Best practices for creating a good user onboarding experience

What do excellent user onboarding experiences have in common? Let’s look at a few user onboarding best practices:

Segment users to personalize their onboarding experience

For users to reach activation quickly and easily, we need to personalize the onboarding journey to their needs. This is to avoid unnecessary steps and not overload users with either irrelevant or excessive information.

How do you achieve this? The answer is user segmentation.

With Userpilot, you can segment users based on:

• User data (browser language, device type, last seen, number of web sessions, plan, role, etc.)
• Company data (number of people, country, industry, plan, stage, etc.)
• Events (users who have performed a specific action), etc.

Trial users segment in Userpilot

Also, Userpilot allows you to segment users based on their welcome survey responses. For example, you could ask users about their roles or goals and provide different onboarding flows based on the answers.

Replace product tours with interactive walkthroughs

We are a big proponent of using interactive walkthroughs over product tours that are more linear and just point out the elements and steps you need to take. How many times have you just kept clicking ‘Next’ without even reading?

On the other hand, interactive walkthroughs let you actively engage with the tool, which makes learning more engaging and effective.

And they work—Attention Insight improved user activation by 47% after implementing interactive walkthroughs created with Userpilot!

Attention Insight interactive walkthrough created with Userpilot

Use multiple UI onboarding patterns

All the different UI onboarding patterns have their unique strengths and limitations, which make them suitable for some tasks more than others.

If you’re announcing a small improvement, a banner or a tooltip might be the best tool for the job. For big announcements, like a completely new feature that’s going to make your rivals quake in their boots, go big and choose a modal.

Ideally, use a range of different UI patterns at different stages and in different places, so that users don’t miss the update. If you see that engagement is down, adapt to the situation and use different patterns.

UI patterns in Userpilot

A/B test different in-app onboarding experiences

A/B testing is an easy way to test which in-app experiences drive the best results. For example, let’s say you want to test if an onboarding flow will drive users to reach a specific goal.

A/B testing tools like Userpilot allow you to set up your flow, define the goal (e.g., for users to invite teammates), and analyze the results of the hypothesis.

A/B testing results in Userpilot

Help users discover relevant features with contextual tooltips

To drive feature discovery and adoption, use contextual tooltips.

Let’s imagine that your users are not engaging with a feature that you think could improve their experience. Or you’ve just released new functionality that your users have requested.

With a tooltip, you can attract your user’s attention to the feature without interfering with their experience. Even better, you can trigger them at the moment when your users might need the feature the most. Such contextuality is the key to their effectiveness.

Creating a tooltip in Userpilot

Offer in-app help to assist new users

In-app help is all the contextual tips and guidance that your users get while interacting with the product.

They help new users get familiar with the product functionality and UI and receive answers to the questions they might have. When users face barriers or get stuck, in-app help assists them in moving in the right direction.

In this way, they make the experience of using a new product less overwhelming and help them get the best value out of it. You can provide in-app help in various forms. This could be a help button that takes them to the support chat or the resource center.

Resource center editor in Userpilot

When designing and developing your in-app help, make them engaging. Don’t rely on text only. Add images and gifs to help users connect the dots.

Better yet, embed videos. These could be short mini-tutorials or slightly more extensive demos. You can record such videos yourself or generate them with AI tools like Synthesia.

Prompt contextual upsells to turn first-time users into advocates

Controversial as it may sound, upselling serves both the company and the customers.

For your business, this means greater customer loyalty and retention and higher MRR. For users, it’s a chance to get access to functionality that will help them achieve their goals more easily. That’s often at a discounted price.

Contextual prompts are one of the easiest and most effective ways to drive upsells.

That’s because they give users a chance to upgrade to a better plan at the exact moment they experience the need. For example, an upsell modal can pop up at the moment when users have exhausted their free allowance.

Upsell modal created with Userpilot

Analyze user behavior to improve your onboarding process

Collecting customer behavior data can help you make more informed decisions when designing your user onboarding processes.

Userpilot allows you to automatically capture key user interactions like clicks, text inputs, and form submissions, which you can then visualize on trends, funnels, paths, and retention analytics reports.

Trend report in Userpilot

For example, you can track the user journey to see how your users are moving from one activation point to the other. If they drop off or slow down in a particular place, they may be encountering friction, so that’s where you should focus.

Collect feedback to gain deeper understanding of users

Collecting user feedback helps you not only improve the user onboarding experience but the product as a whole.

When collecting feedback, make sure to diversify it. For example, don’t focus just on the quantitative scores but ask follow-up questions to collect qualitative insights as well.

Userpilot serves as a customer feedback tool by letting you choose between various survey templates or creating your own survey, customizing and localizing it, and extracting insights.

Survey templates in Userpilot

Collecting the feedback is just a start though. Everything depends on what you do with the feedback. Make sure to act on the feedback and close the feedback loop. It doesn’t mean realizing every customer’s wish, but analyzing it and acknowledging their input.

User onboarding examples

We’ve now discussed the best onboarding practices, so why don’t we look at a few successful user onboarding case studies to see what they implemented?

Sked Social tripled their conversions

Here is how our client Sked Social, a social media management tool, onboards its users. Firstly, you are presented with a pop-up modal, which allows you to choose between booking a one-on-one call to walk you through the first task of adding your account and following the onboarding sequence.

Sked Social welcome screen created with Userpilot

Once you’ve connected your first social account, an onboarding checklist opens up in the main dashboard. Notice how it includes a progress bar, checks off the first task you already completed, and includes only four tasks not to overwhelm users.

Sked Social checklist created with Userpilot

Clicking on a checklist task directs you to the relevant page, e.g., the upload page with a slideout that asks you to create your first post.

Sked Social modal for the second task created with Userpilot

Once you’ve completed all the tasks from the checklist, you are shown a celebratory modal. This approach worked like a charm—users who completed the checklist were three times more likely to become a paying customer!

Sked Social celebratory modal created with Userpilot

The Room increased new user activation by 75%

The Room helps connect workers with employers across the globe, but their users weren’t uploading CVs after signing up, which is their key activation point.

With Userpilot, they built a user onboarding flow with a “driven action,” which is a UI pattern that pushes users to learn by doing. The flow kept triggering for any user that hasn’t uploaded their CV.

The Room driven action created with Userpilot

This simple action helped The Room increase CV uploads by 75% after only 10 days.

Groupize gamified their user onboarding process

Groupize, an events management platform, used Userpilot to develop G.G., an innovative gamified onboarding assistant, that got them a nomination for the Skift Idea Awards 2022. G.G. stands for Groupize Guide, which is like a professional event planner you can ask for advice anytime.

Groupize welcome screen created with Userpilot

She offers help through onboarding tours, step-by-step checklists, etc.

Groupize Publish event modal created with Userpilot

Another cool thing users can do is trigger guided tours of each individual page from the resource center.

Groupize resource center created with Userpilot

Not only did they got nominated for an award, but they saw a significant difference in the number of support tickets, saving their CS team’s time to focus on more complex issues.

Essential user onboarding metrics to track your onboarding success

Do you want to know how you stack up against industry peers? 👀 If yes, you’re in for a treat because we gathered first-party data on key user onboarding metrics from 547 SaaS companies across 7 industries.

We’ll go over them quickly, but if you want to learn more, you can read the full product metrics report.

User activation rate

User activation rate is the percentage of users who performed a key action that signifies they have gained value from the product.

To calculate it, divide the number of activated users by the number of new sign-ups over a given period. Then, multiply the result by 100 to get a percentage.

The average user activation rate is 37.5%. Check out how you stack up here:

User activation averages based on our Product Metrics report

Onboarding checklist completion rate

This metric measures how many users complete all tasks from your onboarding checklist in percentages. To calculate onboarding checklist completion rate, divide the number of new users who finished the checklist by the number of users who started it and multiply the result by 100.

Based on our data, the overall average is 19.2%.

Onboarding checklist completion rate averages based on our Product Metrics report

Time to value

Time to value measures how quickly users gain value from your product. To calculate it, you need to define what gaining value means (for example, creating a first project) and measure the time it takes users between a sign-up and the event you have chosen.

Overall average TTV is 1 day, 12 hours, and 23 minutes.

Time to value averages based on our Product Metrics report

Core feature adoption rate

This is a percentage of users who actively use the key features. To calculate it, divide the number of feature monthly active users by the number of log-ins and multiply the result by 100.

The average core feature adoption rate is 24.5%.

Feature adoption rate averages based on our Product Metrics report

1-month retention rate

The 1-month retention rate measures the percentage of users who continue to use your product after one month. Calculate it by dividing the number of users who return to your product after one month by the number of users who signed up a month ago and multiplying the result by 100.

The average 1-month retention rate is 46.9%.

One month retention rate averages based on our Product Metrics report

Best user onboarding tools for SaaS companies

To deliver an outstanding user onboarding experience, you need a decent tool or two. Let’s have a look at some best onboarding tools that are currently available on the market.

Userpilot – the complete user onboarding software for product teams

Userpilot is a 3-in-1 product growth tool that lets you engage users, gather feedback, and track how they behave.

Here is how it can help you improve onboarding:

• Company and user segmentation – you can use a range of criteria like demographics, user behavior, or survey results to group your users and personalize onboarding for each of them.

User behavioral segmentation in Userpilot

• Multiple user onboarding UI patterns – without coding, you can create highly customized tooltips, modals, slideouts, driven actions, banners, hotspots, resource centers, and checklists. Each of them can be used individually or combined into a personalized onboarding experience.

UI patterns in Userpilot

• Analytics – you can automatically track user clicks, text inputs, and form submissions, view session recordings (coming soon!), create analytics reports, track key metrics in dashboards, and do A/B testing.

Auto-captured events in Userpilot

• Feedback – you can create in-app surveys, trigger them for specific segments, choose from various templates and customize them to your liking, localize them, and analyze results.

Survey templates in Userpilot

Here’s what Leyre Iniguez, a Customer Experience Lead at Cuvama likes about Userpilot:

Leyre Iniguez testimonial for Userpilot

Pendo – for employee and user onboarding needs

Pendo is another digital adoption platform that is best known for its analytics.

Unlike Userpilot, you can use it also for employee onboarding.

Image source: G2

Pendo’s key features include:

• Product tours – called guides in Pendo, are mostly linear and tooltip-based.
• UI patterns – include Lightbox, Banner, Tooltips, Polls, and Walkthroughs. You can create them using templates and a WYSIWYG editor, however, to fully customize them you need to know how to code and there is only manual localization.
• Checklists – these are only available through the resource center.
• Resource center – basic resource center to which you cannot add surveys. There are only basic checklists within it and you can’t customize its look.
• In-depth analytics – allow you to analyze user behavior and product engagement in great detail. However, you can’t visualize reports in different ways.

Here is why Leyre, Cuvama’s Customer Experience Lead, switched from Pendo to Userpilot:

Leyre Iniguez quote about switching from Pendo to Userpilot

Appcues – for creating mobile user onboarding experiences

Appcues is a no-code user onboarding tool that allows product and customer success managers to drive product engagement.

Image source: G2

The key features include:

• UI patterns – you can create modals, slideouts, tooltips, and hotspots with their code-free editor, but the customization options are very limited.
• Product tours – with Appcues flows, you can easily build linear tours that take users through different aspects of the product step-by-step.
• Checklists – although they have limited customization options, you can still use them effectively to guide users toward activation. However, features such as checklists are only available in the more expensive plans starting at $800/mo+.
• User segmentation – to group users based on their properties as well as flows, events, and interactions.

See why Arjoon, The Room’s Senior Product Manager, switched from Appcues to Userpilot:

Arjoon Talukdar quote about switching from Appcues to Userpilot

Conclusion

And that’s a wrap! 😅

Now you have two options:

1. Keep doing things the way you always have.
2. Book a free demo so we can discuss your specific needs and how you can apply the tips from this article.

In-app guidance enables new users to quickly get comfortable with your product and allows existing users to find new features and get more value from your product.

In this post, we discuss:

• Different types of in-app guidance prompts that help users navigate your app
• Examples for each type and how to best leverage them
• best tools for onboarding users and introducing new features

Let’s get right to it.

What is in-app guidance?

An in-app guidance prompt offers contextual support to new and existing users in your app with short messages and walkthroughs that drive user engagement and product adoption.

With in-app guidance, you can help users discover your products and services, adopt your processes, or learn how to use a new feature.

Benefits of in-app guidance

In-app guidance helps onboard new users in your app and allows existing users to find new features and get more value from your product.

It helps drive new user activation and boost user engagement and adoption for advanced users.

Moreover, in-app guidance streamlines the learning process, improves digital adoption levels, reduces the need for training sessions, and empowers users to take action with a learning-by-doing approach.

Challenges of in-app guidance

In-app guidance can significantly enhance user experience but it also presents several challenges.

One major issue is intrusiveness; overlays and tooltips can disrupt users’ workflows, leading to annoyance, especially if they repeatedly reappear after being dismissed.

Additionally, overwhelming information can deter users; presenting too much content at once may create frustration and confusion, driving them away from the platform.

Finally, user resistance is a concern, as some individuals may prefer to explore a new application independently and find mandatory tutorials patronizing.

Balancing these challenges is crucial for effective in-app guidance that truly supports users.

8 Types of in-app guidance in SaaS

In-app guidance appears in many forms. These all serve a different purpose so can guide each user as per their needs.

1. Product tours

A product tour shows a sequence of messages to demonstrate various features so new users know where to find them. It is a popular form of user onboarding.

But do end users need to see all the features at once? And how much will they remember after a tour like that?

Once the product tour is over, end users are essentially left with no contextual help or in-app support messages. And that’s where the problem lies.

Product tours have several issues that impact the user experience:

• They are boring – who likes clicking on all the ‘next’ buttons, and seeing all the irrelevant features? This works horribly for user engagement and user adoption.
• They ‘frontload’ information – instead of ‘teaching by doing’, they show all the features you may not even need until much later in your user journey. This goes against the “just-in-time” user behavior psychology.
• They only touch the surface – showing you “what”, but not “why” and “how”.
• They don’t encourage user adoption – introducing too many features might overwhelm users and potentially discourage them from using your product.
• They don’t provide contextual guidance – they aren’t well-adapted to new user needs.
• They are not personalized to the user’s needs – they are a “one-size-fits-all” and aren’t interactive – the next step doesn’t change based on what you did in the previous step.

More from experts 👇🏻:

2. Interactive walkthroughs

If product tours are so ineffective, what’s the alternative? Let’s see why interactive walkthroughs are more effective.

An interactive walkthrough is similar to a product tour but with one key difference.

Product tours are passive, interactive walkthroughs aren’t.

They require user input after showing each step and don’t progress until the user takes the action, making them a more effective UI pattern in the user onboarding process.

With only a quarter of SaaS companies currently using interactive in-app guidance, this presents a great opportunity to one-up your competitors, improve your onboarding process, and provide training without developing comprehensive training webinars.

Moreover, you don’t need a special software platform to start building them. You can use almost any digital adoption platform.

Since people learn better if they learn by doing, interactive walkthroughs have a lot of advantages over linear product guides:

• Interactive walkthroughs are far more engaging because the user needs to act. They have to click certain buttons or enter text to proceed. They can’t see step 4 before they complete steps 1, 2, and 3.
• App walkthroughs provide value upfront – they drive users to perform actions that show them the value of your product (the key activation points) – and experience the Aha! Moment.
• Product walkthroughs increase user engagement by actively involving each person in learning new features.

3. Tooltips

A tooltip is an in-app guidance feature that offers a single prompt. It helps users gain a better understanding of a specific feature of your product.

You add docked prompts to a specific element on your UI that is not self-explanatory pushing for deeper feature adoption.

Here are some use cases for tooltips:

• Offer in-app guidance for the later stages of the customer journey to increase the adoption of more advanced product features.
• Power product launches by adding prompts to new features so users who missed your announcement email still discover it.
• Drive new users to adopt features that you have launched in the past.

4. Banners

A banner is a small bar that often appears on the top of your website, usually used to communicate updates, promote a new feature, or announce limited-time offers.

If your website/app/tool/product isn’t stuck in a static state, then you’ll need to alert and announce updates to your users regularly. How do you do that?

Notification banners are less intrusive and don’t hurt users’ experience. They take up about 5% of the entire page, and it’s not overwhelming for the users. As notification bars are non-disruptive, users don’t feel the urge to dismiss the bar and tend to engage with the product/app more.

Here are some use cases that demonstrate how notification banners can effectively communicate important information and enhance user engagement on your website:

• Important news announcements – Communicate significant updates directly within the app, ensuring users receive critical information that may affect their experience or usage.
• New feature announcements – Inform users about newly released features, encouraging them to explore and adopt these enhancements to improve their overall experience.
• Discount or special offers – Promote limited-time offers or discounts to encourage immediate user action, often enhanced with countdown timers to create a sense of urgency.
• System maintenance and downtime announcements – Notify users about upcoming maintenance or downtime, ensuring they are aware of any service interruptions and can plan accordingly.

5. Modals

A modal is a large, rectangular UI element created by SaaS companies to grab users’ attention.

A modal window appears not as a separate page, but rather as an overlay on the parent page where users were before the modal pops up.

Due to the size of a modal, as well as the fact that modals often contain images, they are ideal for interrupting the user flow.

This makes them useful in urgent situations that require user interaction, such as when a customer needs to renew their subscription but also means that overusing modals rapidly becomes annoying for users.

Similar to other design elements, UX modals have their pros and cons that should be carefully considered before implementing them. Whether you decide to incorporate them in your UX design or not depends on how much value you believe they will bring to your SaaS product.

Pros of using modals:

• Modal windows bring good friction to the workflow. They help to draw the user’s attention towards an important task i.e. alert users whether a data deletion was intentional and not a user error.
• Since modals are used to convey important information, they ultimately add to a positive customer experience and can help you achieve your desired goal, e.g., improving activation.
• Modals correctly used don’t clutter the user interface. They deliver crucial information in a concise, visually attractive way.

Cons of using modals:

• Good friction is friction after all and some users might find disruption caused by modals to be annoying.
• Modals can further add to the customer’s frustration if there’s no way to dismiss the dialog box.
• Excessive usage of modal windows just slows users down from what they’re trying to achieve from your product. The last thing you want is to lose them to a competitor because of this.

6. Slideouts

Slideouts are a less aggressive version of modals. They are very similar in terms of looks, but slideouts only take up a small part of the screen.

They are ideal for:

• Sharing tips, tutorials, or best practices related to using the application effectively, helping users maximize their experience and improve their proficiency.
• Informing users about important account-related updates, such as subscription renewals, billing information changes, or security alerts.
• Presenting special promotions, discounts, or limited-time offers to capture user attention and encourage immediate engagement.

7. Onboarding checklists

Onboarding checklists are especially effective in new user onboarding – they push new users to explore certain features in a specific order – leading them to complete a set of actions.

You can also use them to offer in-app guidance to more advanced users and encourage them to adopt advanced features of your app, thus driving product adoption.

Nobody said you could have only one checklist – you could build one for every area of your product, and trigger them at different times, depending on when your users are ready.

Moreover, you can personalize your checklists based on user JTBDS:

How do you build checklists for in-app guidance?

Building checklists using a no-code digital adoption platform is super-easy and takes minutes:

• Create a checklist widget (use your in-app guidance settings to decide if it’s supposed to open automatically, or be triggered by the user manually).
• Add tasks for users to complete and link the respective interactive walkthroughs to them OR direct users to a specific page.
• Decide if you want the item to be ticked off once the user engages with a specific feature, OR when they complete a specific goal.

8. Self-help resource centers

Resource center is a self-service in-app guidance hub that offers instant answers without real-time human involvement.

It often appears as a pop-up that features videos, guides, tutorials, and more. Users can look up articles simply by searching for a relevant topic. You can also add a “Contact customer support” button just in case.

If you’re using an app guidance tool such as Userpilot, you can also personalize resources for each segment to enhance user experience.

Resource centers are proven to massively reduce the number of customer support tickets. In our case studies, Osano managed to shave off 25% of their support tickets – while Growth Mentor reduced support ticket volume by a whopping 87% after implementing our resource center.

How do you build a resource center?

Building a resource center is simple with an in-app guidance platform. Many tools allow you to drag and drop content into a pre-built widget. Then, you can fully customize the help widget to match the style of your app’s native UI.

Use cases for in-app guidance

Let’s go over the most popular use cases:

During user onboarding

User onboarding is a critical phase where first impressions are formed. In-app guidance can streamline this process by offering interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, and contextual messages that help new users understand how to navigate the application and utilize its features.

This approach not only reduces the learning curve but also fosters a sense of confidence as users become familiar with the product.

Here are some ways to implement the different types of in-app guidance discussed above:

• Use modals to create engaging welcome screens and collect customer data.
• Create checklists that guide users through essential tasks they need to complete to get to the Aha moment.
• Create short interactive walkthroughs that introduce new users to key features of your app. You can trigger them from an onboarding checklist.
• Provide contextual help by adding tooltips next to complex features or buttons.
• Offer a hub where users can search for articles, videos, and tutorials related to their questions or issues.

During new feature announcements + adoption

When new features are introduced, it’s crucial to ensure that users are aware of them and understand how to use them effectively.

Here are some ways how to do it right:

• Use interactive walkthroughs to get users to perform specific actions related to the new feature before progressing.
• Add tooltips next to new features or buttons, explaining their purpose and how to use them effectively.
• Use modals for new feature announcements.
• Offer a resource center where users can find articles, videos, and tutorials about newly introduced features at any time.

For continuous customer education

Customer education is an ongoing process that helps users maximize their experience with your application.

In-app guidance can deliver regular tips, best practices, and tutorials that keep users informed about advanced features or lesser-known functionalities.

• Create checklists that encourage users to try out advanced functionalities as they become more familiar with the application.
• Create a knowledge base with different modules such as educational videos, FAQ sections, and documentation to enhance customer education.
• Send out relevant webinar invites with a modal or a slideout.

To remove friction points

Reducing friction helps increase product adoption and improve free-to-paid conversion rates.

It also enhances customer experience and boosts customer satisfaction, which are priceless for reducing churn and building brand loyalty.

You can analyze user behavior to identify common friction points. Once you identify them, use the following in-app guidance elements to remove them:

• Add tooltips next to buttons or features that users frequently misinterpret or overlook, providing clarifying information.
• Use notification banners to alert users about changes that may affect their workflow, such as system updates or new processes.
• Use slideouts to share quick tips about features that often confuse users.
• Use banners with NPS surveys to collect user feedback regarding specific pain points.

Effective in-app guidance examples

It’s all well and good talking about how great in-app guidance can be, but let’s observe some real-world examples.

Groupize gamifies user onboarding with in-app guidance

Groupize is a modern meetings management platform that unifies travel, spend, and compliance. The company utilized Userpilot to create a gamified onboarding so new users would be eager to learn their app.

Groupize’s onboarding agent, G.G.

The same character helps new users progress through the onboarding, guiding them through the product features. Groupize used clever copy and interactive dialogue to make this in-app onboarding stand out.

Talana uses a combination of in-app guidance elements to facilitate onboarding

Talana is a company offering human resources solutions. It offers 8 products that help companies recruit staff, manage payroll and benefits, improve communications, and build workplace communities.

Talana is a complex product that requires extensive onboarding.

Talana uses a checklist and interactive walkthrough to guide users through their product.

They also communicate with their users using Userpilot’s engagement features. This includes triggering banners, modals, and tooltips.

Userpilot has also enabled Talana to improve its self-service support via its resource center. This gives users easy access to articles and guides.

Platformly uses step by step guidance in their onboarding

Platformly is a marketing automation tool. Their wide range of features can be overwhelming for new users, so Platformly adds in-app guidance with Userpilot.

Platformly’s in-app onboarding

As well as providing users with a checklist and utilizing the empty states, Platformly offers an interactive walkthrough to help users get started.

Platformly’s interactive tooltips

Rather than simply showing users how to build a dashboard, it walks them through it step-by-step. These interactive walkthroughs exist for all of Platformly’s main features, accessible at any time.

This led to completion rates of over 40%, which is exceptional for a complex SaaS product.

Tools for creating in-app guidance

This section discusses tools for user onboarding, not for employee onboarding such as building Salesforce in-app guidance prompts for training purposes.

Here are the best in-app guidance tools according to users from G2 and Capterra.

Userpilot: Best no-code builder for onboarding

Userpilot is an easy-to-use product growth tool that offers all the UI patterns needed to guide users through your app (product tours, walkthroughs, tooltips, checklists, resource centers) without limitations. Moreover, pricing starts at only $249 per month.

Try Userpilot Today

 

Here are some features worth noting:

• Build interactive in-app flows and personalize them based on images, colors, text, and more. Add multiple UI elements and tooltips in one flow for an immersive walkthrough.
• Create personalized onboarding checklists for your users. Customize the design and track key performance metrics such as completion rates for each checklist.
• Build resource centers with several customization options and monitor resource center analytics to track user interests and behavior patterns.
• Create in-app surveys to collect user feedback, understand user needs and sentiments, and make necessary improvements to your app right away.
• A/B test different in-app guidance elements to see which one results in higher engagement.
• Access a range of robust analytics for your in-app flows, checklists, resource centers, and even event tracking. The analytics dashboards also let you access all your favorite reports in one place.

Appcues: Easy-to-use in-app guidance builder

Appcues is often praised as the easiest-to-use platform for onboarding users.

You can create flows in Appcues really fast, but the lack of a resource center and limited analytics mean it’s not the best value for money (and it limits you to only a basic resource center with Appcues design and 5 user segments in its basic $249 plan!)

Some users have also noted issues with setting up flows and surveys:

Intercom

Intercom is a popular customer support tool but it also offers product tours for in-app guidance. It comes with support for linear product tours (so no branched walkthroughs). Its limited analytics mean you won’t be able to understand your user behavior with Intercom.

Userflow: Fastest flow builder

Userflow allows you to build in-app guides on its dashboard but unlike Userpilot and Appcues, it doesn’t have a Chrome Extension letting you build on top of your product.

Whatfix: For building in-app guides for employee productivity

Whatfix is a no-code digital adoption platform and product analytics tool that’s used to create in-app experiences to drive adoption for customer-facing teams, product managers, and IT support teams.

Whatfix lets you create interactive product tours for both users and employees. This reduces the time to value (TTV), whether it’s for customers using your product or employees learning how to use a solution in the internal tool stack.

It also lets you create checklists as widgets that target specific segments and group tasks under headers. Whatfix’s gallery of direct integrations with tools like Salesforce, Amplitude, SurveyMonkey, and more helps you centralize all onboarding data.

However, Whatfix has several drawbacks, including its high cost, an overwhelming number of features that may not be necessary for all users, and a lack of focus on end-user experiences compared to more specialized alternatives like Userpilot or Appcues.

Some users have also experienced issues with bugs:

Conclusion: How to create in-app guidance?

Before we part ways, here’s a summary of in-app guidance best practices:

• Always have a goal in mind – approach onboarding users with a certain outcome in mind. For example, you might want your users to add a team member, or to drive adoption of a new feature.
• Make it interactive – walk your users step by step, show them what they need to achieve their immediate goals, and avoid front-loading information (e.g. with lengthy step-by-step tours!)
• Offer in-app guidance to advanced users too – aka continuous Onboarding – (e.g. a tooltip informing them about a new feature) not just flows for new users.
• Keep it short and sweet, so that users don’t get bored, and you’re good to go.

Want to drive users to adopt your product faster? Book a free demo with Userpilot today!

*sigh*… We’ll always have to fix bottlenecks.

You might’ve cracked your head to design and implement the perfect user journey that will lead most users to success.

Yet, most users won’t go through it, they’ll follow their own journey. And in the process, they’ll face bottlenecks—points in the journey where the user’s progress is slowed, interrupted, or simply blocked.

These bottlenecks are often not obvious and you won’t find them without exploring product analytics. For instance:

• A user who fails to use a core feature successfully due to a visual bug.
• UI that’s time-consuming, tedious, and prone to errors.
• An onboarding flow that, instead of making the feature easier to learn, makes it overwhelming and causes cognitive overload on users (making them likely to skip it).

So now, let’s explore the process to identify and process bottlenecks, and how we apply them at Userpilot:

How to identify and eliminate bottlenecks in the user journey

Harsh truth: The SaaS user journey is extremely complicated. It lasts months, and every user will have a different path regardless of how streamlined or personalized your product experience is.

You can’t just dive into the behavioral data and hope to find a bottleneck without first knowing what a bottleneck looks like.

Instead, you must be more strategic. Here’s how:

1. Map out the customer journeys that are valuable for you

Again, the SaaS user journey is too complicated. You can’t just map out every possible journey with your product.

But if you want to find important bottlenecks, you should map out the important touchpoints of the journey that have an actual business impact. This way, it will be possible for you to define what a bottleneck is before you start looking for it.

There are many ways to approach this, but my favorite is how Duolingo created a Markov model around their main business KPI (DAUs) to grow it. In the same way, you can start from your business KPI and then break it down into sensitive metrics and touchpoints you can map.

Plus, you don’t have to create a Markov model to find bottlenecks. You can just measure a set of sensitive metrics to identify bottlenecks and improve your main KPI (even if they’re not mutually exclusive like Duolingo’s model).

For example, if your main KPI is product adoption, some sensitive metrics can include:

• Feature adoption rate
• New user retention rate
• Activation rate
• Time-to-value
• Product stickiness
• Usage frequency

And once you measure these metrics, you can start mapping out the touchpoints that affect those metrics, and track them with some analytics tools. For instance, you can use funnel analysis to map the actions a user must take to achieve the activation milestone, and spot steps with high drop-offs.

Or for product stickiness, you can use path analysis to break down the journey of active users compared to less active users.

2. Check for ‘signals’ that can indicate existing bottlenecks

As I mentioned, a bottleneck is any experience in the product that prevents users from making any progress.

These friction points can manifest through different “signals” in the data depending on how you mapped out the user journey in the last step.

Some common examples include:

High drop-offs during funnel stages

If you’re analyzing a funnel like onboarding and find high drop-off rates in one step, there’s probably a bottleneck stopping the users from moving to the next stage.

Bear in mind: It can be something as simple as a button that doesn’t work, or a deep usability issue with one of your core features that requires deep investigation.

Unexplained customer churn

Sudden or persistent increases in churn can be a signal of unresolved user frustrations due to a significant bottleneck.

For more detail, you can further segment churned users to trace down where the spike is coming from. If it’s coming from new users or previously active users, then the potential bottlenecks could be very different.

Low adoption with core features

If the percentage of users who adopt core features is dropping, they’re probably failing to find the value of your product—causing a bottleneck in the adoption process.

The causes for this could be serious, such as a product-market fit problem. But it can also happen due to usability issues or even unreported bugs.

High volume of customer support tickets or complaints

Users naturally resort to customer support to address pressing problems. Think of:

• App-breaking bugs.
• Getting technical help to perform a task that can’t be done with the product (e.g., integrations).
• Data management issues.

Although they won’t help you find subtle bottlenecks related to usability, you can categorize your support tickets to identify recurring problems that are actively affecting the journey—and fix them.

3. Investigate and come up with data-driven hypotheses

Once you’ve spotted a signal, the next step is to come up with multiple hypotheses and investigate them in detail.

As a starting point, you can start making up hypotheses based on:

• User experience: Is the UI of the core features unnecessarily bloated? Is it causing any confusion for new users?
• Product functionality: Is the feature failing to fulfill a desired task? Is there a missing setting in the product?
• Market behavior: Did a competitor release a big update that fulfills the JTBDs better? Did they implement an AI feature to fulfill these JTBDs?

But to come up with substantial hypotheses that have weight, you should also investigate using frameworks such as The 5 Whys, heuristic evaluations, or fault-tree analysis to spot the potential root cause of your bottlenecks.

For example, if you have to analyze a decline in activation rates:

1. Activation rate declined by 16%. Why?
2. Users drop off after the “import existing projects” step. Why?
3. They get stuck when they need to format their data. Why?
4. The onboarding instructions don’t clearly explain the required format. Why?
5. It assumes users are familiar with .CSV imports from other tools. It needs a clear in-app instruction.

4. Validate and prioritize bottlenecks based on their business impact

After digging into the data and observing how users interact with your product, you’ll start gathering evidence to support or discard your hypotheses.

But the final filter of your hypotheses must be: “Is this true?”

To confirm that a bottleneck is real, you can conduct some targeted research and use analytics tools that can test the validity of a hypothesis.

For example, we love session replays for analyzing product-related hypotheses.

One thing you can do is not only watch users who present a bottleneck signal but additionally, compare their sessions with users who successfully engage with a feature—allowing you to find the real source of the bottleneck.

Also, there’s more you can play with, think of:

• Customer interviews.
• Usability tests.
• Heatmaps.
• A/B testing.
• Retroactive analysis.

Once you get the evidence, you should measure the impact of the bottlenecks on your main KPI. The KPI must be specific, like “If we don’t fix the post-onboarding churn, DAUs will drop by 48% in the next four months.”

Finally, create a list of validated bottlenecks. Make sure they’re ranked based on their business impact to prioritize the most impactful ones.

5. Brainstorm and implement solutions for bottlenecks

With all your bottlenecks organized and prioritized, the next natural step is to define solutions for each of them.

For example:

• If there’s a high drop-off from a new feature because customers can’t use it correctly, implement an interactive walkthrough to make the whole process easier and clearer.
• When users don’t upgrade their plans because they don’t understand the value of premium features, offer them free, limited access to the pro features so they can experience them.
• If new users fail to activate key features because they skip the product tour, replace it with an onboarding checklist to make activation easier to achieve.

After the brainstorming, what’s left is to implement the solutions. Remember to start from the highest priority to the lowest, and make sure their deployment is aligned with your current roadmap.

6. Test your solutions to validate their effectiveness

Now, you can’t call the job done just by implementing random solutions. Except for bugs or punctual usability issues, you must also validate their effectiveness and make sure the issue is fixed.

To do this, trace back to the problem you were trying to solve earlier and tie it to your success metric. So if there was a bottleneck in feature adoption, has product adoption improved after implementing the solution? If so, how much was the improvement?

For instance, if the issue is product experience, I highly recommend running A/B testing or multivariate experiments. These will help you validate a solution based on the statistical significance of the data and flag the bottleneck as “solved.”

You can resort to in-app surveys or interviews to collect feedback and confirm that your solution was beneficial for users.

How do we conduct bottleneck analysis in Userpilot?

Although the entire process is pretty thorough and specific, it can look different from company to company, depending on how you apply it.

For instance, Lisa Ballantyne (Userpilot’s UX researcher) follows pretty much the same framework I just explained to fix bottlenecks in the user journey (with minor differences).

She would:

1. Make observations and perform heuristic evaluations to spot signals.
2. Come up with a hypothesis of a potential bottleneck
3. Perform deeper analysis to validate that the bottleneck exists.
4. Measure its impact and give it the right priority.
5. Implement a solution and make sure it works.

An example of this is how she addressed a UI issue with the custom dashboard feature. At first, she observed that adding existing reports to a dashboard could be unintuitive because the button placement was quite off. Then, she hypothesized that users might misclick the report they wanted to add, causing friction.

This led her to watch session replays of users who added existing reports and find out that users were indeed misclicking the “add” button. The priority for this wasn’t too high, so the solution came later on when there was a need to update the feature.

Finally, when the time came, the team updated the feature to allow adding multiple dashboards at once (solving the issue by allowing users to select the reports when hovering over their names).

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Here’s the most essential part to remove existing and potential bottlenecks

If you want to fix bottlenecks without getting lost in the data, you must indeed follow a solid framework.

However, the real backbone for your bottleneck analysis will be the tech stack you use to get the data you need.

For example, let’s say you’re a product analyst or PM who needs to find bottlenecks within your app. An all-in-one platform like Userpilot won’t only let you track your product performance but also create in-app experiences (e.g., walkthroughs or checklists) and A/B test them to validate your bottleneck solutions.

So if you’re looking for a platform that can allow you to find and fix bottlenecks in one place, consider booking a Userpilot demo to get started.

Is your UX redesign strategy setting you up for success or steering you toward another expensive miss?

Imagine you’ve just rolled out a redesign project, only to watch users struggle and bounce.

Many UX teams dive headfirst into new layouts and features and then discover they’re solving the wrong problems.

You can prevent this by focusing on genuine user feedback, having a deeper understanding of your audience’s pain points, and validating your UX design strategy.

Here’s a step-by-step process to help you identify what truly matters to your audience, prioritize high-impact fixes, and launch changes that spark excitement rather than confusion.

7 Steps to follow for a successful UX redesign

A product redesign is more than just a visual update. It’s about identifying your product’s friction points, aligning improvements with business goals, and launching changes that delight your users.

Use these steps to go from problem discovery to a successful rollout.

1. Audit the current user experience to spot areas of concerns

Auditing your current UX helps you understand precisely where users stumble and why. Here’s how to do it:

Conduct a funnel analysis to identify users that dropped off from the customer journey. To get insights as to why those users abandoned the journey, watch their in-app sessions with a no-code tool like Userpilot. Look out for usability issues, rage clicks, friction points, and more.

If something remains unclear, interview those customers and ask direct questions to gather qualitative insights.

Following the above user research approach prevents guesswork about where problems lie and ensures you focus on what matters most: fixing the real issues.

2. Focus on high-impact UX issues first

Fixing all potential UX design mistakes at once is unrealistic because it consumes too much time and resources.

Instead, prioritize the issues that have the biggest impact on business metrics, like user retention or conversion rate, or those problems users frequently complain about.

Use product prioritization frameworks to decide which tasks to tackle first. Some examples of such frameworks include:

• The Kano model.
• MoAR (Metrics over Available Resources).
• The RICE (Reach, Impact, Confidence, Effort) model.
• The MoSCoW (Must-Have, Should-Have, Could-Have, and Won’t-Have) method.

Focusing on high-impact issues streamlines your UX redesign process and prevents you from spreading efforts too thin and seeing minimal results.

3. Define clear goals (and success metrics) to stay on track

Once you’ve identified which issues to tackle first, set well-defined product goals to keep your UX redesign on track and ensure everyone is going in the same direction.

Goal-setting is a crucial step that shouldn’t be missed. It helps allocate resources effectively and lays the foundation for measuring performance later on. For instance, if you want to improve activation levels, your goal from the redesign process could be a 15% increase in user activation rate.

4. Test big design decisions early on

Major design decisions in a UX redesign can dramatically affect user experience, so it is crucial to validate them early to avoid mistakes. User testing helps here.

Here are some practical tips to help you test your design decisions:

• Use preference testing to test design changes.
• Perform usability testing to see how real users interact with the new design.
• Conduct A/B tests to assess changes in in-app messaging.

In addition to the above methods, implement continuous feedback loops throughout this design process to refine your approach and avoid unpleasant surprises once you launch.

5. Build and refine the redesigned elements

Start by incorporating insights from user feedback into prototypes or early mockups.

Then, share these prototypes with a small test group, collect additional feedback, and iterate.

Each round of revisions brings you closer to a final design that meets user needs. This loop of building and refining—anchored by frequent input from actual users—prevents overlooked problems and ensures your UX redesign delivers meaningful improvements once it goes live.

6. Roll out the redesign in phases to make timely tweaks

Launching your entire redesign at once can be risky because you won’t catch problems until everyone is affected.

Instead, roll out the updated experience in phases using the following ways:

• Beta tests: Use a beta test to uncover glaring issues early. Invite a select group of target users to try the new features in a controlled setting. This will allow you to gather real-world feedback and address significant issues before the redesign goes public.
• Feature toggles: This method involves turning certain features on or off for a user segment to gather incremental feedback.
• Dark launches: In a dark launch, new features run in the background without disrupting the main product. Only a small subset of users see them, giving you time to gather performance data and refine the experience.

7. Launch the revamped user experience and monitor performance

After finalizing your redesigned user interface, roll out the changes to your customers and track the success metrics that you set in stage 3.

Here are two additional ways to monitor your UX redesign’s success:

Collect user feedback to gauge the success of the redesign process

Use in-app surveys to ask customers how they feel about the redesign right when they interact with it.

These surveys work best because they capture opinions while the experience is fresh in users’ minds. Though subjective, this feedback reveals emotional reactions and true feelings users have regarding the redesign.

Track user behavior data to gather objective insights

Back up your findings with quantifiable data because user feedback can be biased. Users are often used to a certain interface and might not be satisfied with the change.

Use these behavior analytics methods to see precisely how people navigate your redesigned product objectively:

• Session recordings: Shows how users navigate the app and identifies friction points.
• Heat maps: Offers a visual representation of clicks and scroll depth.
• Trend analysis: Highlights shifts in user behavior over time

This objective data confirms whether the changes in your UX redesign deliver the intended results.

How CYBERBIZ revamped its admin dashboard with Userpilot

CYBERBIZ is a Taiwanese e-commerce platform that supports many local stores. The product team overhauled its admin dashboard and chose Userpilot to improve its UX.

How?

CYBERBIZ recruited beta testers in-app instead of relying on account managers like they did before, as the latter was a time-consuming process. With a better pool of beta testers, they could refine changes to the dashboard before it rolled out for all.

They also used the surveys to measure customer satisfaction with the redesign. Any negative feedback was dealt with in a timely manner – it was added to the backlog, and the customer was contacted for detailed insights.

CYBERBIZ additionally introduced in-app messaging and interactive walkthroughs to guide users through the redesigned dashboard. These announcements explained new features clearly and reduced confusion for first-time adopters.

The CYBERBIZ team also used Userpilot’s product usage dashboard to monitor page view performance and average session duration for gauging the success of the redesign.

The results? Fewer support tickets and higher adoption rates because most users needed minimal assistance.

CYBERBIZ used Userpilot to unify feedback and analytics. An approach that helped them make informed, data-driven decisions every step of the way.

In Userpilot, we can connect user data and the feedback together to see the feedback from a specific user.
– Wei-Di Huang, Senior Product Manager at CYBERBIZ.

Best practices for a successful UX redesign

A successful redesign doesn’t end with the final launch. It’s an iterative process.

Follow these best practices to stay proactive, maintain continuous improvement, and make sure your efforts meet user needs.

Conduct competitive analysis to tap into missing gaps

Analyzing competitor offerings helps you uncover market gaps and differentiators that can set your product apart.

Use these actionable tips to identify and take advantage of such gaps:

• Analyze G2 reviews of competitors to note recurring issues and desired features.
• Test competitors’ products to observe design patterns like onboarding flows.
• Create a detailed comparison of features between your product and competitors to identify missing functionalities.

Understanding how other solutions approach UX can help you integrate proven best practices and avoid common pitfalls. Ultimately, you’ll deliver a more refined UX for your users.

Improve your customer support processes

A major UX redesign often raises questions and uncertainty. Rather than letting user frustration escalate, focus on proactive support.

The goal is to reduce friction, build trust, and keep the redesign rollout running smoothly. So, work on delivering prompt, relevant answers from both self-serve options and well-informed support staff.

Create a dedicated in-app resource center so users can quickly find tutorials, FAQs, and troubleshooting guides without leaving your product.

Another approach is to train your customer support team on every aspect of the redesign so that they can walk users through new features step by step. During your training, emphasize empathizing with users and guiding them toward successful outcomes.

Create hype around the redesign

Surprising your users with a brand-new look can make them apprehensive. Share early teasers or behind-the-scenes peeks to show them what to expect and build excitement around your UX redesign.

For example, you can gather a small group of passionate customers to act as brand ambassadors. Let them test early versions and spread the word about upcoming improvements.

Send email campaigns, social media sneak peeks, or countdown timers to spark interest. You can also incorporate in-app notifications or banners that highlight new features.

With every hype-building tactic, you’ll strengthen user trust and reduce the chances of unexpected resistance on launch day.

Start your UX redesign now

A UX redesign is time and money-intensive. Mistakes can hurt both user satisfaction and your bottom line. You can’t afford guesswork, and you shouldn’t.

Use in-app surveys, product analytics, and interactive onboarding flows to deliver a winning user experience. All of these features can be found in Userpilot.

Book a free demo with Userpilot today and see how straightforward it is to create a seamless, engaging UX that keeps users happy and your business on track for sustainable growth.