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

Greater Value for Money and Usability with Userpilot

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