Best Walkme Alternatives for SaaS

Looking for a good user onboarding tool and wondering if Walkme is the best option for your SaaS company?

There are plenty of Walkme alternatives on review sites, but they don’t make the choice any easier.

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 Walkme competitor is best depending on the different criteria that different SaaS companies may have.

Let’s dive in!

TL;DR

• WalkMe is one of the pioneers in the market of adoption tools. It is a cloud-based software that allows you to create product tours and in-app experiences to drive adoption faster.
• WalkMe user onboarding solution consists of 3 main guiding elements that help you provide interactive in-app guidance to your customers: WalkThrus, SmartTips, and ShoutOuts. 
• You can create personalized flows for your users using WalkMe’s powerful analytics and insights. To dive deep into your users’ behavior, it provides built-in features such as funnels, session replay, etc.
• With WalkMe, you can create different types of surveys, implement surveys at any stage of the customer journey, and analyze the survey results.
• Users are mostly happy with WalkMe’s features: on-screen guidance, interactive walkthroughs, customizable UI patterns, and journey segmentation are highly used and appreciated by customers. But Walkme is not a perfect solution, most complaints are about hard implementation and annual contract pricing.
• Some reasons you might consider a WalkMe alternative are a yearly subscription (starting at $9000), hard implementation, and outdated UX design.
• These are the top alternatives and competitors you may want to consider:
• Userpilot
• Whatfix
• Userlane
• Appcues

What is Walkme?

WalkMe is one of the pioneers in the market of adoption tools. It is a cloud-based software that allows you to create product tours and in-app experiences to drive adoption faster.

WalkMe is best for enterprise companies as they are focused on employee onboarding rather than user onboarding.

Walkme for user onboarding

WalkMe user onboarding solution consists of 3 main guiding elements: WalkThrus, SmartTips, and ShoutOuts. These allow you to provide interactive in-app guidance to your customers.

Let’s have a quick look at each of these functionalities and how they help with user onboarding:

• WalkMe’s WalkThrus are its primary engine for creating user onboarding experiences. They overlay the target software or web app and provide on-screen guidance to help users complete tasks. In most cases, this means step-by-step instructions and tips that lead users from a starting point to the completion of a given task.
• SmartTips are also a form of on-screen guidance, but they’re less about the process and more about resolving points of friction. ​​For example, with a SmartTip you can trigger a small note to pop up suggesting relevant links or giving more information about how to complete a form.
• ShoutOuts operate like SmartTips, but are geared toward in-product messaging. You can trigger them to pop up and give more information about relevant features, new updates, or product promotions.
• WalkMe also offers a couple of other more niche features for onboarding. For example Launchers (buttons that launch other WalkMe features or experiences), surveys, and an ActionBot (automated robo-chat to help users resolve issues and answer questions).

Walkme for user analytics

WalkMe offers powerful analytics and insights to get a good understanding of your users so that you can create personalized flows for them. It has built-in features, such as funnels, session playback, etc to dive deep into your user’s behavior.

Now let’s have a quick look at what WalkMe’s analytics functionality offer:

• Real-time insights on how customers interact with your web or desktop app.
• Employee engagement data across your tools stack.
• Capture interactions such as clicks, page views, input changes, key presses, form submissions, element selections, etc.
• Session playbacks that help you uncover friction points across the user or employee journey.
• AI analytics capabilities that allow you to understand, predict and act on user data.
• Integrate with internal tools, such as Salesforce to get more insights and analyze user behavior.

Walkme for user feedback

Walkme allows collecting feedback from users so you can make data-driven decisions and improve your product experiences.

Here is what Walkme’s user feedback functionality can offer you:

• Create different types of surveys such as NPS, CSAT, and CES and customize them with different question types such as free text, single selection, multiple selections, and rating to gather feedback from users.
• Implement surveys at any stage of the customer journey to pinpoint areas of improvement and collect ongoing data.
• Analyze the survey results and data in the “Insights” section.
• Customize the design of the surveys with CSS and make sure they are aligned with your brand colors and style.
• Set frequency rates and decide how often and when the surveys should appear to end users.

Walkme pricing

WalkMe works on a custom pricing plan that requires you to request a quote from their sales team (could be spending from $9000 to $50000 a year).

Their main two plans are:

• WalkMe for employee onboarding experience: engagement tools and analytics
• WalkMe for customer experience: engagement tools and analytics
• Add-ons: Session Streams, TeachMe, AI analytics through UI intelligence

Walkme reviews

Users are mostly happy with WalkMe’s features: on-screen guidance, interactive walkthroughs, customizable UI patterns, and journey segmentation are highly used and appreciated by customers.

Here are some reviews from real users.

“The most valuable thing WalkMe provides is time. WalkMe provides the user with on-screen guidance to get them to where they need to be without weighing down support teams on training for every function. The automated steps can remove multiple clicks and quickly send the user to what they need to see. The ability to view user activity and search terms allows mapping new build requirements properly.”

“WalkMe is very user-friendly and easy to learn! There are so many different features of WalkMe to provide a customizable and creative experience for all of our users. I love creating smart walkthroughs and building flows charts, which is the most fun part of my day-to-day tasks!”

But Walkme is not a perfect solution, most complaints are about hard implementation and annual contract pricing.

Here are some words from real Walkme users:

We never had time to implement the product. It takes a huge time investment and isn’t designed for the full documentation. Rather than maintain two sets of documentation, we removed Walkme from our product. This company is as bad as AOL or TimeWarner: they will not let you out of your multi-year contract no matter how unhappy you are with the product.

The tool is not very intuitive and has countless challenges using and technical difficulties.

Pros of Walkme

WalkMe has its fair share of advantages that make it a solid tool. So what are WalkMe’s pros?

Here are our top three:

• Offers a high level of customization and works on both your own tool and 3rd party tools.
• Allows you to create in-app quizzes to test user or employee knowledge after completing a flow.
• Get access to a vast list of integrations that simply enhance your data collection or allow you to connect multiple tools in your stack.

Cons of Walkme

WalkMe is an established tool on the market but it does have its own share of cons too.

Here are the main ones you should consider:

• There’s a steep learning curve and a fair amount of technical knowledge required to create WalkMe user guides and get them implemented the way they’re intended.
• WalkMe is designed for enterprise organizations, and its pricing reflects that.
• You could end up spending anything from $9000 to $50000 a year on WalkMe. That’s a lot of money for startups and SMEs.

3 reasons why you might need a Walkme alternative

Is WalkMe all you need or are there better alternatives that can provide more value at a much lower price? Here are the main reasons you should look for an alternative:

1. WalkMe offers only yearly pricing contracts which start at $9000 so if you want to onboard new customers or provide in-app guidance then there are better solutions that won’t lock you in.
2. WalkMe is known for its hard implementation so it’s not recommended for non-technical people. Generally, it can take weeks or even months. For better comparison, Userpilot can be set up in just a few minutes as it’s completely code-free.
3. Bad and outdated UX design is another thing that might disappoint you and make you search for alternatives.

Walkme alternatives and competitors

These are the top alternatives and competitors you may want to consider:

1. Userpilot
2. Whatfix
3. Userlane
4. Appcues

Let’s have a look at them in more detail.

Walkme vs Userpilot

Walkme is a great option for many SaaS companies, but in a lot of ways, Userpilot is better than Walkme. Let’s explore the features of Userpilot, how it’s better than Walkme, and how it may fall short too.

Userpilot for user onboarding

Userpilot was built specifically for SaaS product teams that want to improve their user onboarding experience and boost user activation.

You can build a huge variety of user onboarding experiences and in-app guidance flows without needing to code.

Get the best value for money and drive growth at every stage of the user journey.

Here’s what you’ll get when you start using Userpilot:

• Forget about coding in-app experiences: Userpilot is a no-code solution and only requires your dev to install a line of javascript inside your app and for you to download a chrome extension that opens up the visual builder.
• Build in-app flows using the largest range of UI patterns (modals, slideouts, tooltips, hotspots, banners) and in-app onboarding experiences (checklists, microsurveys, NPS surveys, in-app resource center)
• Get access to a built-in NPS tool for collecting and analyzing user sentiment so you can improve your onboarding process based on real data.
• Create and track combinations of in-app events like clicks, hovers and form fills, and then analyze all these interactions under your own custom events, which can be built without code or API calls.
• Use advanced product analytics and in-app flows analytics to identify where users need help and create granular user segments to trigger in-app experiences contextually (segment based on user identification data, in-app engagement, custom events, clicks, hovers, form fills, user feedback responses, NPS scores and more)
• Enhance the onboarding experience with in-app help by launching a Resource Center directly inside your app. Add in-app guides, and video tutorials, and give users access to search the knowledge base or reach out to support. Self-service has never been easier.

The best user onboarding is contextual and it happens right where the users need it, inside your app. There isn’t a better user onboarding tool out there that offers more value for the money than Userpilot.

Schedule a demo with our team and get ready to build the best onboarding experiences your users have seen.

Userpilot for user analytics

You can’t drive success, no matter what your goals are, without proper user analytics.

How would you know what needs to be improved?

When it comes to proper user onboarding that drives long-term product adoption, Userpilot has the right analytics to help you succeed.

Let me explain.

I’m not talking about product usage only. Analytics is about collecting customer feedback, and tracking in-app behavior but also tracking how users engage with your in-app experiences. Right?

You need all of these for a proper picture of how healthy your product is. And then you need to be able to act on those insights.

That’s where proper user segmentation capabilities come in. And Userpilot has you covered here.

Userpilot has really improved in terms of its analytics functionality in recent years, and now offers the most robust functionality from all the product adoption platforms (including Pendo, which has always taken prime in user analytics).

In short, Userpilot analytics allows you to:

• Track all of your user interactions with your app – without coding- with the powerful feature tagging functionality, you can simply tag your users’ actions (clicks, hovers, form fills) with a no-code, point-and-tag editor on top of your product.
• See all your user clicks, activity trends, etc. in an easy-to-use dashboard – Userpilot also allows you to drill down into feature usage, down to the individual user level, as well as company level.
• Analyze your user paths from up to 4 pages at a time, at a glance.
• Create ‘user funnels’ made up of feature tags and tracked events, and see where your users are dropping out of the funnel – and act on these drop-off points instantly with in-app experiences.
• Track feature usage by user segments with heatmaps, directly on the different pages of your product.
• Create and track combinations of in-app events like clicks, hovers and form fills, and then analyze all these interactions under your own custom events, which you can build without code or API calls.
• Create custom events that consist of feature tags as well – or combinations of tracked events you’ve passed through the Userpilot track script with features you have tagged with the Chrome Extension.
• The powerful trends overview allows you to filter your events and feature tags’ usage by segments, time period, and even company. This allows you to track and analyze event usage trends and even drill down to the individual users (or companies) who engaged with specific custom events and show them the right in-app experience.
• Apart from product usage data, Userpilot also has built-in analytics for in-app engagement with in-app flows and experiences.
• Analyze how users engage with your checklists or resource center modules, identify trends, and A/B test different approaches to improve engagement.
• Last but not least, Userpilot allows you to use all that data to build highly granular user segments and reach users with the right engagement flows at the right time.
• You can even create user segments based on survey responses or NPS scores.

Now, with so much power on your hands – what are you going to do with all this data?

Userpilot for user feedback

There are two types of feedback you should be focusing on collecting to better understand the health of your product and users.

First, you have user sentiment which looks at user satisfaction and effort scores or loyalty (using NPS surveys). Then you may also want to collect feedback on the functionality of the product or specific features.

You can do all these with Userpilot. In short, you can:

• Collect and track (NPS) in-app with a built-in NPS widget that allows you to fully customize the survey look and feel, and set the trigger frequency and specific targeting.
• Analyze NPS scores, tag responses, and use the data to create specific user segments.
• Build and trigger in-app micro surveys like the classic PMF survey, or similar ones and mix multi-choice and open-ended types of questions to collect specific insights.
• Be in charge of who gets which survey type and when with advanced segmentation capabilities, and of course, you can use the answers to segment your audience.

The advantage of using Userpilot for collecting feedback over other survey tools is that you can better control who sees the surveys but also you can instantly use the data collected to segment your user base and trigger the right experience for them.

For instance, if your users give you a low NPS score because they think you’re missing a critical feature (that you actually have already), you can push an interactive walkthrough guiding them to find and explore this feature.

Userpilot reviews

Userpilot is clearly not for everyone, but let’s check what users like about the tool:

Userpilot is an incredible, user-friendly software that allows us to create unforgettable experiences for our clients! From basic to complex experiences, we have been able to do them all with ease! I would highly recommend this software to anyone who wants to provide their clients or users with the best product tour experience. The possibilities of what you can create are endless! – Tayla G.

Userpilot is simple to set up, use, and does not require any dev – which means instant publishing. This is critical for us as a SaaS company that releases new features frequently; we need the ability to inform our customers of changes quickly, and doing this in our platform through Userpilot allows us to reach the right audience, at the right time, in the right place. There have been many awesome extra features we’ve discovered since coming on board, and it’s been great to see new features released frequently. The tool itself is intuitive and reliable. Having used similar products previously that were clunky and buggy this has really made us happy with our decision to move to Userpilot. – Melina K.

The price-to-feature ratio is the best for Userpilot. Other cheaper tools in the market would definitely not fulfill your needs, and others like Pendo would be out of budget. Userpilot sits in that sweet spot. – Saurav S.

Userpilot pricing

Userpilot offers great value for money compared to other similar tools on the market. Even its entry-level plan (Traction) provides all the necessary features without any usage limit.

The price-to-feature ratio is the best for Userpilot. Other cheaper tools in the market would definitely not fulfill your needs, and others like Pendo would be out of budget. Userpilot sits in that sweet spot. – Saurav S.

The pricing differentiation happens mostly on the service level (e.g. custom domain hosting, dedicated Customer Success Manager, SLA) and is based on the number of Monthly Active Users (MAUs) your company has.

Here’s the detailed Userpilot pricing:

• Traction: For up to 2500 users, this plan is $249/ mo.
• Growth: For up to 10,000 users, this plan is $499/ mo.
• Enterprise: For large-scale businesses, these plans begin from $1000/ mo.

Walkme vs Whatfix

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

Whatfix for user onboarding

Whatfix’s digital adoption platform makes your user onboarding easier. The tool helps you create personalized walkthroughs by adopting the learning-by-doing technique.

Here are the benefits you can gain if you choose Whatfix:

• Create interactive product walkthroughs and flows code-free with native integration options
• Incorporate different onboarding elements into your flows, including modals, checklists, tooltips, beacons
• With its user-level segmentation, you can set up basic contextual onboarding to differentiate user experience.

However, Whatfix targets mostly large enterprise companies and might not be the right choice for SMBs or startups. If this is the case, you should be looking for alternative tools to power up your user onboarding.

Whatfix for user analytics

Whatfix empowers enterprise product teams to track in-app user interactions with powerful product analytics.

Whatfix analytics consists of 3 categories: behavior analytics, guidance analytics, and feedback analytics. Now let’s see what Whatfix analytics is capable of:

• Capture actionable data and insights on user behavior within your app.
• Additionally, track in-app help content and user flows, like product tours, feature launches, and process walkthroughs.
• Enable tracking features such as User Actions with the click of a button so you don’t have to rely on your development support.
• Identify drop-off points and see where customers need extra help.

Whatfix for user feedback

If you want to collect user feedback on specific interactions, Whatfix is a good tool to build micro surveys for that.

Here’s how you can collect user feedback with Whatfix:

• With user surveys, you can collect feedback on the onboarding tours and training flows, so you can continuously improve your product support.
• Whatfix’s in-app feedback surveys make it easy to gather feedback and insights from users in real-time.
• Add a follow-up question to enable open-minded feedback.
• Send push reminders to customers so they don’t forget about providing feedback.

However, if you want to build traditional NPS surveys with response tagging capabilities, then segment customers based on their feedback, Whatfix might not be the best fit for you. This is something that Userpilot offers.

Whatfix reviews

Overall, Whatfix is a good tool and customers are happy with the product. Here is what their customers say about the product.

Our Whatfix Customer Success Manager Kritika has been amazingly responsive to our questions and creative in finding solutions.

Their team really helped us during a project we were doing, and I think they would be great for any company looking for help. This is a must to onboard customers and drive retention.

Whatfix pricing

Whatfix doesn’t have any pricing plans on its website. Instead, you’ll need to speak with one of their team members to get a custom quote tailored to your needs and organization.

Otherwise, you can request a free trial to see if Whatfix works for you.

Walkme vs Userlane

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

Userlane for user onboarding

Userlane offers all the basic things you need to create interactive in-app guidance and nail your onboarding.

Here is what you can get with Userlane:

• Create interactive in-app guides with modals, tooltips, and checklists to remove the guesswork and guide new customers step by step.
• Target guides, hints, and announcements to the right people at the right time to maximize engagement.
• You can also add videos, gifs, and links to enrich your in-app content.
• With the code-free editor, you can record the tutorials and share them with your users. With multiple language support, make sure that your customers get the in-app experiences in their languages.)
• However, Userlane allows you to only build logic flows (“lanes”) directly in the tool’s dashboard. It doesn’t work in a chrome extension by pointing and building UI patterns directly on top of your native UI (like e.g. in Userpilot).

Userlane for user analytics

Userlane comes in handy if you want to track in-app user interactions and collect user analytics to make data-driven decisions.

Here’s what Userlane’s user analytics can offer you:

• See the in-depth performance of any target group. Just select the group to see the number of targeted users, reached users, reached rate, and other critical data in the form of graphs.
• Find out the interaction rate and the number of your interacted users.
• Select the time range to analyze your users and apply different filters to narrow down the data.
• Identify behavior trends where positive ones are marked in green and negative ones in red.

In a nutshell, Userlane allows you not only to analyze the data but also act on it accordingly, i.e identify and reach out to customers who need support most.

Userlane for user feedback

Userlane allows you to collect user feedback and improve your product experiences with basic survey functionality. Although they are more focused on interactive tours, you can collect feedback too. It’s just harder to analyze and use the data as this is not their main functionality.

Here is what you can do with Userlane’s user feedback:

• Create and send out NPS surveys to measure customer loyalty.
• Set up reminders for those who didn’t respond to the surveys.
• Configure the date and time of sending surveys and create custom dates.
• Create specific user segments and target the surveys to those segments.

Userlane reviews

When it comes to reviews, customers are mostly enjoying a positive experience with Userlane. Here is what they say:

What I find most helpful about Userlane is its simplicity. In that I mean, it’s just easy to start using it out of the box and they continue to add great features all the time.

The tool is really intuitive to use and self-explanatory. Even multi-language support can be handled easily with hardly any effort. I also like the analytical options provided. Last but not least the service team is very supportive not only with technical questions but also in learning how to make the most out of the tool for our specific use cases.

We are using Userlane since almost two years and are always happy to implement the newest features. Big kudos to the Customer Support and Customer Success Team. If you need help, they help you almost instantly and provide easy-understandable solutions. I seldom worked with such a nice organization.

Userlane pricing

Userlane’s pricing is not public and you should reach out to their sales team to get a quote.

But keep in mind that it is based on two things: the number of guided users and the product features you want access to.

Walkme vs Appcues

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

Appcues for user onboarding

Appcues used to provide onboarding templates, which made it easy to use the tool. However, it provided a predefined way of thinking about onboarding all while having a higher price tag than other onboarding software. As of the time of writing (end of 2022), Appcues has removed its onboarding templates – without really replacing them with another solution.

Appcues allows you to design flows that make onboarding processes a breeze. These flows are what you use to create product tours and other in-app communication with users.

Here’s what you’ll get when you start using Appcues:

• Access to an easy-to-use UI that anyone on the team can handle for building in-app flows without coding.
• Building a product tour in Appcues is relatively easy. You just need to open their chrome extension on top of your application and start building your in-app experiences with a WYSIWYG editor. You simply select a UI pattern and customize it ‘live’, or point to the elements you want to e.g. append your tooltips to.
• Previously it was even easier – you chose one of its templates, they would basically create the product tour for you, and you just needed to customize each step. This limited the options for customizing but it was useful for beginners. We don’t know if Appcues plans to bring their templates back.
• 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 (can’t trigger JS functions, or add gamification elements) compared to alternatives, such as Userpilot.
• Track UI engagement with Events explorer which allows you to tag elements without coding.
• Build custom user segments (up to 5 on the Essentials plan) based on user properties, flows, interactions, or events you set up in the events explorer.

Appcues for user analytics

Appcues user analytics is focused on the Event Explorer functionality and user segments that allow you to track user engagement and group users based on their main stage in the user journey.

Let’s look at each of these functionalities and how they can help. First, let’s explore their Event Explorer:

• Events Explorer makes it easy to view, validate, and visualize events in one place.
• Appcues defines events as user interaction with your features or flows inside your product’s UI and you can set these up with a few clicks.
• The Essential plan includes only 10 events. If you need more, you’ll have to upgrade to the Growth plan ($879/mo annually).
• This can be a little limited when you are trying to analyze product usage.

Now, let’s quickly see how Appcues segmentation can help. Appcues only gives you five user segments included in their Essentials plan, which isn’t a lot. It won’t be long before you need to upgrade the plan for more user segments.

The pre-defined user segments in Appcues (Evaluators, Beginners, Regulars, Champions) are very limiting if you want to access proper user analytics. Even building segments has its own limitations. You can create segments based on:

• User properties (when a survey was completed or when they’ve seen in-app flows)
• Flows interaction (has been completed or not?)
• Checklists (in progress, skipped, completed, not seen)
• Event (based on the ones you set up using event explorer)
• One of the predefined segments (Evaluators, Beginners, Regulars, Champions)

Appcues for user feedback

Can you use Appcues to collect user feedback? Of course.

Collecting data is not hard, analyzing and acting on it is where it gets tricky. What’s the purpose of having data if you can’t act on it?

If you want to track your NPS score over time and collect user feedback with short micro surveys, you can do that with Appcues. But to analyze the feedback data in-depth, you’ll have to use other tools.

In a nutshell, Appcues allows you to:

• Build and trigger NPS surveys in-app without coding.
• Edit the NPS survey questions.
• Target the survey at a specific user segment (or choose one of the predefined segments) and adjust the survey display frequency.
• Collect user feedback with short surveys built on top of modals: add numerical scale, open-ended questions, or radio button questions.
• On the flip side: you can’t tag your NPS/survey responses in-app and use these tags to segment your audience by them.
• You can’t analyze the responses in-app. You can only download a CSV report to start analyzing your data – and we all know how time-consuming that is.

Based on the above, when it comes to user feedback, Appcues is not the ideal tool, as it lacks the ability to segment users based on survey responses.

Appcues reviews

What do Appcues users share about their experience? Overall users feel positive about Appcues.

Here’s an example summarizing some key points about its features and the value it offers. You can find more reviews on G2 or Capterra.

The best part of Appcues is the guided tour features which they call flaws. Especially on a team with limited resources, it allows you to improve your activation and engagement overnight by using this feature to guide your users around your product. What I love even more is the design and UX features are modern unlike other tour tools we’ve researched, and the software is easy-to-use with the need for a developer after the initial installation. – Raeann F.

Appcues pricing

All things considered, Appcues does not offer the best value for money compared to some Appcues alternatives – at $249 per month. If your product has 2,500 active users, the costs for different plans are:

• Essentials: $249/month (Up to 3 user licenses)
• Growth: $879/month (Up to 10 user licenses)
• Enterprise: Custom (Unlimited user licenses)

Conclusion – which of the Walkme alternatives is the best?

As you can see, there are many different competitors and alternatives to Walkme. 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. Let us know if you know any other good Walkme alternatives – and if you need any help with how Userpilot is different, we are always happy to talk!