Best Stonly Alternatives for SaaS

Exploring alternatives to Stonly? With plenty of choices available, it’s difficult to decide which one will be the right fit.

The crux of the issue is – to make the right choice, you need to account for your priorities: your different jobs to be done, your budget, and the size of the company. But don’t worry – we’re coming to help!

In this post, we’ll discuss exactly that – which Stonly competitor is best depending on the different use cases.

Let’s dive in!

TL;DR

• Stonly positions itself as a cheaper alternative to some of the pricier product adoption solutions on the market. In reality, it’s more of a customer service tool that can be used to build knowledge bases rather than an actual onboarding or adoption platform.
• As a result, the tour builder on Stonly feels more like an add-on to its knowledge base functionality rather than a product of its own.
• This also means that its in-app engagement features will be rather limited (especially in the no-code regard) compared to alternatives like Userpilot or Appcues.
• There are a few clear scenarios where Stonly wouldn’t be the best solution to use. If you’re in any of these scenarios then considering an alternative platform would probably be best:
  • Feature Mismatch: If user onboarding or product adoption are your main goals, then Stonly’s feature set may not align with that use case. Its ability to build in-app guides or survey customers is limited by the platform’s coding requirements and pricing structure.
  • Budgetary Constraints: Companies who are operating on a tight budget should steer clear of Stonly due to the extra charges that occur if your guides get more than 4,000 views per month. If guide views reach 30,000 then you’ll be paying an additional $500 on your plan each month.
  • Existing Knowledge Bases: Building knowledge bases is the primary use case for Stonly’s feature set. If you already have an existing knowledge base, then you’d be better off with an alternative like Userflow that integrates with Freshdesk, HubSpot, and Zendesk knowledge bases.
• Here are the top Stonly alternatives you can consider:

1. Userpilot is a product growth platform that drives user activation, feature adoption, and expansion revenue. It also helps product teams collect user feedback, streamline onboarding, 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 — which will guide future development, improve the user experience, and inform your growth efforts.
2. Appcues is a robust product adoption and user onboarding platform for web and mobile apps. It enables product teams to create, implement, and test personalized in-app onboarding experiences. The platform also helps you announce new product features and collect customer feedback. What makes this platform even better is the fact that it offers no-code features that make it suitable for non-technical teams.
3. Pendo is a product adoption platform that lets teams monitor product usage, analyze user behavior, and publish in-app guides. The no-code solution focuses on increasing user engagement and driving feature discovery. Additionally, Pendo also lets you survey users, segment customers, and see how many site visitors or MAUs your web app is getting. Certain features like product areas, data explorer, product engagement score, and resource centers are locked to the Starter plan or higher.
4. Chameleon is a product adoption platform. It enables SaaS teams to leverage real-time user data to build beautiful on-brand experiences, improve user onboarding, and drive product-led growth. In addition, it empowers product teams to create and manage dynamic in-product experiences. With Chameleon, SaaS teams can now create beautiful product tours that help, guide, and delight their users throughout their journey. All of these are possible without coding!

• Interested in driving product growth without coding? Book a demo to see how we can help!

What is Stonly?

Stonly positions itself as a cheaper alternative to some of the pricier product adoption solutions on the market. In reality, it’s more of a customer service tool that can be used to build knowledge bases rather than an actual onboarding or adoption platform.

As a result, the tour builder on Stonly feels more like an add-on to its knowledge base functionality rather than a product of its own.

This also means that its in-app engagement features will be rather limited (especially in the no-code regard) compared to alternatives like Userpilot or Appcues.

What are the main use cases for Stonly?

Understanding the core functionalities and use cases of Stonly is crucial for deciding whether or not it’s the right choice for you.

Without further ado, let’s see the primary scenarios where Stonly is useful for your SaaS business!

Stonly for user onboarding

Seeing as Stonly is a knowledge base builder first and onboarding/adoption solution second, it has quite a few features that are missing, too basic, or difficult to use for user onboarding.

Some workarounds like interface triggers, guides that help you personalize content, and flow reports that show you which stage of the journey customers are getting stuck on could still be used:

• UI Triggers: Stonly lets you add triggers like pills (icons at the bottom of your screen), banners (bars on the top of your page), hotspots, icons next to an element, or hidden conditions. Note that triggers are only available on paid plans, so Basic users won’t have access to them.
• Guides: Stonly lets you build in-app guides through its visual editor. You’ll be able to add steps, links, surveys, contact forms, checklists, automation, and live chat embeds into these guides with little to no coding. Features like UI triggers or guide variables are limited to paid plans.
• Flow Reports: Stonly’s flow reports can help you identify which stages or steps of the onboarding journey most of your users are getting stuck on. However, this data is only updated every 15 minutes so you won’t be able to view real-time user path metrics with Stonly.

Stonly for product analytics

Product analytics are essential to monitoring adoption rates across your user base. Unfortunately, Stonly’s analytics dashboard is used to track content engagement metrics rather than product usage data:

This means you’ll only be able to see guide views, page views, session duration, bounce rate, and other content-related metrics in your Stonly account’s Insights tab.

It’s possible to add data sources with the Segment integration but the user properties and events you can track will still be limited.

Stonly for self-service support

Stonly’s core knowledge base functionality and additional onboarding capabilities can help you build self-serve infrastructure for your users.

Here’s how you can use Stonly to build a self-service customer experience:

• Knowledge Bases: Stonly is primarily a knowledge base builder with onboarding/adoption features added on. As such, it lets you build modular knowledge bases in multiple languages and integrate live chats for Intercom or Freshchat when users need additional help.
• In-App Guides: Build in-app guides that trigger when users click on a UI element or land on a certain page. Furthermore, users have the ability to report issues with any guide or knowledge base module so you can improve the self-service resources.

Note: UI triggers are only available on Stonly’s paid plans so users on the Basic version of the platform won’t be able to use them.

• Third-Party Integrations: Stonly has integrations with customer support platforms like Zendesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, and more. For instance, you could integrate your Stonly knowledge base with Intercom so that representatives and users both have access to the same resources.

What are the pros and cons of Stonly?

Pros of Stonly?

While Stonly isn’t as capable as full-on digital adoption solutions like Userpilot, Pendo, or Appcues, it does have a few benefits:

• Self-Service Support: Because building knowledge bases is the primary use case for Stonly (and arguably its core product), it has advanced self-service support features that could outperform other adoption solutions, such as abundant live chat integrations.
• Analytics Dashboard: Stonly has a unified analytics dashboard that can show you global insights across all your guides. This makes it easier to track content engagement and monitor your key performance indicators (KPIs).
• Guide Builder: While other Stonly features such as event tracking, user targeting, data streaming, and styling require coding, the guide builder uses an intuitively designed visual interface to let you add, edit, or delete steps.

Cons of Stonly?

Unfortunately, there are quite a few drawbacks to using Stonly that stem from its lopsided features, no-code capabilities (or lack thereof), and view-based pricing model:

• Feature Set: Seeing as Stonly is a knowledge base builder first and onboarding/adoption solution second, it has quite a few features that are missing, too basic, or difficult to use. If user onboarding and product adoption are your main use cases, consider alternatives.
• Coding Requirements: Unlike most of its competitors, Stonly doesn’t advertise itself as a no-code onboarding/adoption platform. This means you’ll need coding knowledge to track events, target users, stream data, and style your content.
• Pay-as-You-Go Pricing: Stonly’s pricing charges additional fees based on the number of views that guides get. Customers who don’t exceed 4,000 guide views per month won’t be charged extra, but those who do will pay an additional $250 to $500 monthly depending on volume.

What do users say about Stonly?

Despite Stonly’s limitations, there are some aspects of the platform that garner praise from users, such as the ease of publishing:

The ease of creating and embedding a guide in my website. It’s super easy to move from written doc to live guide that is also accessible from my website, which is a live saver.

Of course, there are also plenty of criticisms stemming from Stonly being positioned as an interactive guide solution when it’s more of a knowledge base builder:

“It is very easy to get lost when creating guides and steps in Stonly. because everything is extremely granular and fragmented by design, it is possible to accidentally create the same information in multiple places (instead of ‘linking’ to relevant, already created steps. The real danger here is that should one version of the information be updated, and the other not, you end up with conflicting information in your system, which leads to poor customer experience. It would be nice if there was some way to get a birds-eye view of a knowledge base, including relevant links between steps and guides to minimize this issue.

Another missing element that would be highly desired is a functional “draft/approve” process. We currently use a folder outside of the main KB for new draft articles, however, should one of our lower-level team members be tasked with drafting an update to an existing guide, it is very hard to obtain a clear list of what guides have been edited, where and what has changed, and then as an admin, be able to review, approve and publish. Ideally I would desire some sort of list where the guide edit page is not opened, but rather a list of changes, when you click one you get a pop-up of before/after comparison, and then you can approve and publish without a page load.

The report issues function could do with a link in the resulting email to take you to the edit page for the doc. Currently we need to copy/paste the guide name from the email to the editor portal to find the guide. This has on more than one occasion led to the incorrect guide being edited (sometimes related to the topic in paragraph one of these notes)

When first loading the customer-facing site, the search field shows up, you can start typing, but then the search is cleared and you end up with part of your search term missing and have to start again (minor frustration, however, customers will experience this as a touchpoint of our product, not Stonly, wo it looks bad on our part)

For the tours, you have element selectors for ID and CSS selector. XPATH support would be highly desirable for some of the elements in our app.”

Does Stonly fit your budget?

Stonly offers two paid plans. In addition to the base subscription cost, customers will also be charged additional fees if their guides get more than 4,000 views per month.

Here’s an overview of Stonly’s two subscription tiers:

• Small Business: Stonly’s Business tier is the entry-level paid plan that starts at $249/month but offers a 20% discount if you bill annually. It includes five team seats, unlimited guides, multi-language support, guide variables, and integrations. You’ll be billed extra if you exceed 4,000 guide views.
• Enterprise: The Enterprise version of Stonly uses quote-based pricing and includes all the features of the Business tier. It has additional features like surveys, automatic guide translation, advanced permissions, additional integrations, priority support, and single sign-on (SSO).

3 Reasons why you might need a Stonly alternative

There are a few clear scenarios where Stonly wouldn’t be the best solution to use. If you’re in any of these scenarios then considering an alternative platform would probably be best:

• Feature Mismatch: If user onboarding or product adoption are your main goals, then Stonly’s feature set may not align with that use case. Its ability to build in-app guides or survey customers is limited by the platform’s coding requirements and pricing structure.
• Budgetary Constraints: Companies who are operating on a tight budget should steer clear of Stonly due to the extra charges that occur if your guides get more than 4,000 views per month. If guide views reach 30,000 then you’ll be paying an additional $500 on your plan each month.
• Existing Knowledge Bases: Building knowledge bases is the primary use case for Stonly’s feature set. If you already have an existing knowledge base, then you’d be better off with an alternative like Userflow that integrates with Freshdesk, HubSpot, and Zendesk knowledge bases.

Better alternatives to Stonly

Considering alternative options to Stonly can often lead to discovering more tailored solutions that better suit your needs. Here are the top Stonly alternatives you can consider:

• Userpilot is a product growth platform that drives user activation, feature adoption, and expansion revenue. It also helps product teams collect user feedback, streamline onboarding, 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 — which will guide future development, improve the user experience, and inform your growth efforts.
• Appcues is a robust product adoption and user onboarding platform for web and mobile apps. It enables product teams to create, implement, and test personalized in-app onboarding experiences. The platform also helps you announce new product features and collect customer feedback. What makes this platform even better is the fact that it offers no-code features that make it suitable for non-technical teams.
• Pendo is a product adoption platform that lets teams monitor product usage, analyze user behavior, and publish in-app guides. The no-code solution focuses on increasing user engagement and driving feature discovery. Additionally, Pendo also lets you survey users, segment customers, and see how many site visitors or MAUs your web app is getting. Certain features like product areas, data explorer, product engagement score, and resource centers are locked to the Starter plan or higher.
• Chameleon is a product adoption platform. It enables SaaS teams to leverage real-time user data to build beautiful on-brand experiences, improve user onboarding, and drive product-led growth. In addition, it empowers product teams to create and manage dynamic in-product experiences. With Chameleon, SaaS teams can now create beautiful product tours that help, guide, and delight their users throughout their journey. All of these are possible without coding!

Let’s see the features and functionalities of these tools for different use cases!

Stonly vs Userpilot

There are many ways how Userpilot is different (and in a lot of ways better!) from Stonly. Let’s explore the features of Userpilot, how it’s better than Stonly, and how it may fall short too.

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.
  

  No-code flow builder in Userpilot.

• 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.
  

  Build native tooltips with Userpilot.

• 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.
• 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. 

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.
  

  No-code feature tags in Userpilot.

• 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.
  

  Create tracked events to monitor server-side data.

• 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).

Userpilot for self-service support

Here’s how you can use Userpilot to create a self-service customer experience:

• No-code builder: Userpilot’s no-code resource center lets you add modules without writing a single line of code. Module options include links, videos, flows, custom JavaScript functions, and checklists. You can also group modules into sections to help users navigate the resource center.
  

  Add different types of content to your resource center.

• Module segmentation: Userpilot’s segmentation settings let you hide or show specific modules within your resource center based on audience settings. This makes it possible to create modules for different user segments and hide resources that aren’t relevant to other users.
  

  Help module visibility condition settings.

• Resource center analytics dashboard: The dedicated analytics dashboard helps you see how many unique visitors your resource center gets, how many modules have been clicked, the overall click rate across your user base, and popular search terms. This will make it easier to gauge resource center performance and identify if anything is missing from your resource center.
  

  Resource center content analytics in Userpilot.

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).

Stonly vs Appcues

There are many ways Appcues is different (and in a lot of ways better!) from Stonly. Let’s explore the features of Appcues, how it’s better than Stonly, and how it may fall short too.

Appcues for user onboarding

Onboarding new users seamlessly is one of the primary use cases of Appcues. The platform offers a wide array of features to help you improve user activation, conversion, and retention.

Let’s take a closer look at how Appcues facilitates new user onboarding:

• Drag-and-drop builder: Appcues’s no-code builder lets you create personalized onboarding tours and checklists to assist and educate new users. You can customize UI patterns like hotspots, modals, slideouts, and tooltips to guide users.
• In-app user guides and product tours: You can use various UI patterns, such as hotspots and tooltips, to introduce new users to product features in a pre-defined sequence. Similarly, you can use checklists to guide users as they explore your app.

• Checklists: You can also create checklists with Appcues (NOT available on the Essentials plan) and prompt users to take action. These are ok but have limited functionality (you can’t trigger JS functions or add gamification elements) compared to alternatives, such as Userpilot.
• Segmentation: You can use one of the pre-defined audience segments or create customer segments based on plan tier, lifecycle stage, and other factors. It’s possible to target individual segments with personalized messaging and journeys.

• Measure and improve: You can track in-app flow performance and measure events (limited to 5 on the Essentials plan) to identify areas of improvement.

• Test and optimize: The newly introduced A/B testing feature lets you test different onboarding flows. You can compare the performance of different in-app sequences, identify the best-performing ones, and refine onboarding flows.

Appcues for product analytics

Besides creating onboarding journeys, Appcues also helps you monitor product adoption and user behavior. The best part here is that you don’t need any coding experience to set up product analytics on Appcues.

Note that since Appcues doesn’t focus on analytics, the features it offers are limited. If you need access to cohorts, retention analysis, funnels, paths or trends, you will need a different tool.

Appcues offers the following features for tracking product usage analytics:

• Click-to-track: Available in Appcues Builder – the Chrome Extension, this feature lets you define and track new events by using feature tags, such as when a user fills a form field or hovers over a menu. It gives you insight into how users are engaging with your product’s UI.

• Events Explorer: Available in Appcues Studio – the main dashboard, Events Explorer lets you validate and visualize various events, making it easier to measure product adoption and user engagement over a given period.

• Appcues also offers integrations with analytic tools like Amplitude if you need more data tracking.
• You can also track flow engagement analytics using Appcues, but this will only tell you how well your in-app guides are performing and how users engage with them.

Keep in mind that Appcues’s element detection algorithm isn’t the most powerful. Platforms like Userpilot do a better job at tracking user engagement for specific in-app elements, on top of offering more advanced analytics features like funnels, trends and cohort analysis.

Appcues for self-service support

Appcues is primarily designed as a tool to facilitate user onboarding through personalized product tours and walkthroughs. There are a few features you can use to provide self-service support, too.

These include:

• Launchpads: With Launchpads, users can access various Appcues flows from a dropdown notifications menu. You can use them to create a robust resource center within your product. That, in turn, lets users troubleshoot common problems on their own.
• Checklists: Checklists let you create contextual in-app walkthroughs that familiarize users with different product features. Combining them with other UI patterns like modals, hotspots, and tooltips can help enhance self-service support.
• Pins: Pins appear as always-available tooltips and buttons that let you provide constant hand-holding to new users.

It’s worth noting that Appcues, as a standalone tool, can’t help you provide complete self-service support. You’ll need other elements, such as AI-powered chatbots and FAQs, to empower users.

Pricing of Appcues

Pricing for Appcues starts at $249 per month, with the platform offering three distinct tiers – Essentials, Growth, and Enterprise.

The total cost can vary depending on the number of monthly active users (MAU). For instance, the Essential plan starts at $249 per month for 2500 MAU but jumps to $299 for 5000 MAU.

Here’s a detailed glimpse of the different pricing tiers:

• Essentials: It’s the basic tier that starts at $249 per month. It includes 3 user licenses and lets you add up to 5 audience segments. Some UI patterns, such as checklists, launchpads, and custom CSS support, aren’t available. Customer support is only available through email.
• Growth: This tier starts at $879 per month (for 2500 monthly active users) and includes 10 user licenses. You can target unlimited audience segments and use the full spectrum of UI patterns. Additionally, you can access the Premium Integrations package, which includes integrations with Slack, Salesforce, Marketo, and Zendesk.
• Enterprise: This is the most feature-packed tier and includes robust security controls like role-based access and activity logs. It’s also the only tier that comes with multi-account and localization support. Besides email and phone support, you also get a dedicated Customer Success Manager and Technical Implementation Manager. Pricing is available on request.

All three plans come with a 14-day free trial, where you can test unlimited flows and track up to 5 events. You can extend the trial by another 14 days by installing the Appcues SDK in your app. Additionally, you don’t need a credit card to sign up for the free trial.

Keep in mind that the above pricing plans are applicable to web apps. Pricing for Appcues Mobile is available on request.

It’s also worth noting that Appcues is pricier than some of the other product adoption tools available in the market, including Userpilot. For instance, Userpilot’s basic tier (Starter) lets you add up to 10 audience segments and includes the complete set of UI patterns.

Stonly vs Pendo

There are many ways how Pendo is different (and in a lot of ways better!) from Stonly. Let’s explore the features of Pendo, how it’s better than Stonly, and how it may fall short too.

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.

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, 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.

Pendo for self service support

Self-service support is a must-have for any SaaS company.

Here are the best Pendo features to use for self-service support:

• Resource Center: Pendo’s in-app resource center can serve as a self-service portal with different modules for each stage of the user journey. Create a dedicated section for onboarding resources or segment the visible modules so users only see the most relevant guides.
• Tooltips: In addition to educating new users, tooltips can also be used to link to product documentation, onboarding resources, and tutorial videos that will help your customers solve their own problems.
• Live Chat Integrations: When you integrate your Pendo account with either Drift or Intercom, you’ll be able to embed a live chat widget within the in-app resource center. This is very helpful for customers who try to solve a problem themselves but realize they need real-time assistance.

Note: You’ll need to upgrade to the Complete plan or higher to use Pendo integrations and resource centers.

Pricing of Pendo

Pricing for paid Pendo plans is only provided on a quote basis and there are no listed price ranges on the solution’s website. That said, certain reviews have stated that prices start at upwards of $20,000 per year for a single product and more than twice that for higher plans.

Pendo has two paid plans and one free version that is limited to 500 MAUs which makes it accessible to startups but difficult to scale in the long run.

Here are the differences between each Pendo plan:

• Pendo Free: The free version of Pendo can accommodate 500 MAUs and has features like native analytics dashboards, feature tagging, event tracking, segmentation, NPS surveys (with Pendo branding), analytics reports, and in-app guides.

• Growth: Pendo’s Growth plan is designed to be used for a single web or mobile app but can accommodate a custom number of MAUs. It includes features like native analytics dashboards, in-app guides, NPS surveys and response tracking, and customer support.
• Portfolio: Pendo’s Portfolio plan is targeted towards customers who want to use the tool for multiple web and/or mobile apps. Features include guide experiment capabilities, cross-app executive dashboards, cross-app journey reporting, and access to product engagement scores.

Stonly vs Chameleon

There are many ways how Chameleon is different (and in a lot of ways better!) from Stonly. Let’s explore the features of Chameleon, how it’s better than Stonly, and how it may fall short too.

Chameleon for user onboarding

Users expect to be shown the red carpet with a welcome tour for your product. Chameleon helps you create welcome tours that gets users beyond their first “Aha”.

Here are some features of Chameleon for new user onboarding:

• Segmentation: You can use custom segments to show a sequence of your product tours over time. The hyper-targeted onboarding flows are tailored to your users’ needs. Here’s a short example of what the tour session can look like:

• Clear Analysis: Easily assess and optimize your user onboarding tours with real-time data.
• Launchers: Build onboarding checklists, including items like Loom videos and knowledge base articles to help users unlock more value.
• Customization options: Enjoy fine control over where the onboarding flow appears, choose who sees it, and define how users can interact with it.

Spoiler alert: when you subscribe for the Starter plan, you get access to just one launcher which is very limited for many onboarding use cases. However, you get unlimited access when you pay an extra $971 for the Growth plan.

Chameleon for product analytics

Here’s a breakdown of Chameleon’s standout features in the context of product analytics:

• Seamless Integrations: Chameleon offers seamless integration capabilities, granting you access to best-in-class user analytics tools such as Segment, Mixpanel, Heap, FullStory, and more. This interconnectedness enhances your capacity to harness a comprehensive view of user behavior.
• Comprehensive Tracking: Chameleon excels in tracking various events throughout your user onboarding process. From tracking tour initiation and completion to monitoring button clicks and user exits, Chameleon provides real-time insights into your product tours. This level of granularity ensures you stay attuned to every user interaction.

• Efficient Data Collection: Simplify data collection through Chameleon’s data schema, easily managed via Google Sheets. This streamlined process ensures that you capture and structure essential data effectively, empowering your product analytics endeavors.

In essence, both Userpilot and Chameleon offer robust solutions for user analytics. However, Chameleon takes the lead in the realm of integrations with top-tier user analytics tools. This integrative approach enhances your ability to harness the full potential of your product analytics initiatives.

Chameleon for self-service support

The self-service methodology focuses on giving users the tools necessary to solve some problems on their own without having to reach out to support agents. This often includes elements like knowledge bases, chatbots, and interactive walkthroughs

Here are Chameleon features that will help you provide self-service support for SaaS companies:

• Tooltips: Tooltips help users understand unfamiliar or complex parts of your product when they need it the most. It keeps your UI simple by reducing the noise or the need to explain everything within your interface. Since your users may have different levels of expertise and backgrounds, they may not find everything in your product intuitive, you can use hover tips to explain certain product terminologies and elements in your workspace.
• Help widgets (self-serve widget): The self-serve widget (resource center in Userpilot) clarifies where users can get help and what resources are available. Through launchers on Chameleon, you can deploy a self-serve widget out of the box. By showing customized Launchers based on the feature the user is currently using, you can deploy custom and interactive self-serve support across your whole product without pushing users off track to an external knowledge base.
• Interactive product tours: One of the best ways to offer users self-serve support is by allowing them to take interactive product tours at their own pace. You can educate those ready to learn something new while letting other users take it later when they may have more time or are ready to engage further with your platform.

Pricing of Chameleon

Chameleon’s pricing is based on your product’s monthly users. From the Startup plan (for small companies to get started and save) to the Growth and Enterprise plans (for larger organizations with advanced requirements) billed via invoice.

Here’s an overview of the pricing plans, and features of each plan:

• Help Bar: This is a standalone search function on top of your product, allowing users to search your knowledge base articles.
• Startup plan: For small companies to get started. Fee: $354/month, billed Monthly, usage-based, Unlimited Tours and tooltips, 5 microsurveys, 1 Launcher, Custom CSS.
• Growth plan: For growing businesses to drive returns quickly, from $1350/month. Everything in the startup plan, plus: unlimited microsurveys & launchers, A/B testing, and rate limiting is paid annually with bulk pricing.
• Enterprise plan: For larger organizations with advanced requirements. The fee for this plan is not stated on the website rather, you get to talk to the team. You get everything in the growth plan, multi-product account, user permissions, localizations, and SSO/enhanced security.

The Growth plan seems to be the real deal because of the exciting features that can boost your product marketing. For example, you can’t get the rate limiting feature on the Startup plan, including A/B testing. These are relevant and powerful product adoption weapons that should be in your arsenal if you truly want to win more users.

Is the startup plan expensive?

Yes, compared to Userpilot, about a $170 difference. It’s best to opt in for the Growth plan for the juicy benefits, where you pay $1350 annually rather than paying a whopping $5000+ yearly for the startup plan.

Conclusion

As you can see, there are many different competitors and alternatives to Stonly. We’ve discussed a few above – but which one is the best?

The answer is “it depends” – but we strongly believe that if you’re a mid-market SaaS company looking for a great user onboarding and product analytics tool, Userpilot is the best option for you.

Hopefully, you found this post helpful. And if you need any help with how Userpilot is different, schedule a demo to get started!