Best Spekit Alternatives for SaaS
What is Spekit?
Spekit is a digital enablement tool that focuses on employee onboarding rather than user onboarding. The software is effective at educating new employees about which tools are in your tech stack and how to use each solution.
Spekit also has an internal database system that lets users add, update, or search for information — called Speks. These Speks could consist of onboarding material, product documentation, best practices, SOPs, or other types of resources.
What are the main use cases for Spekit?
Understanding the core functionalities and use cases of Spekit is crucial for deciding whether or not it’s the right choice for you.
Without further ado, let’s see the primary scenarios where Spekit is useful for your SaaS business!
Spekit for user onboarding
Spekit isn’t a user onboarding tool as it’s only built for employee onboarding. This means it can help your new users navigate third-party tools and workflows through its no-code walkthroughs. Here’s an overview of how Spekit can help with employee onboarding:
- Codeless Walkthroughs: Spekit lets you build step-by-step walkthroughs for new employees without needing to write any code. Unfortunately, the UI patterns available for walkthroughs are limited to tooltips and modals.
- Flow Versioning: Spekit lets you record and edit walkthroughs or save them as drafts to finish later. You’ll also be able to preview the placement of each step, edit text, and delete superfluous steps at any point then update your changes.
- Multi-Tool Flows: You can create a single flow that guides your new employees across two or more tools. This is because Spekit is installed at the browser level rather than on the actual third-party tool so you’re free to switch between various software platforms during flows.
Spekit for product analytics
Spekit is installed as a Chrome extension rather than code that’s inserted into the third-party application. This means that it has no means of reporting on (or even accessing) product analytics data. The only metrics center around engagement with your training materials.
Spekit for self-service support
Spekit cannot be used to build a self-service support infrastructure as the solution is not installed on any software itself (instead functioning as a UI layer only visible to employees on your team). However, Spekit can still be utilized as a self-service support tool for internal use.
Any resources created with Spekit — known as Speks — can be accessed by clicking on the Chrome extension and using the search bar. This makes the company wiki accessible on any page and provides easy access to every Spek created through the Spekit web app or Chrome extension.
What are the pros and cons of Spekit?
Pros of Spekit?
Spekit is a handy solution for employee onboarding use cases.
Here are some of its main benefits:
- Chrome Extension: Spekit can be installed in any web-based application and then accessed through the Chrome extension.
- Knowledge Bases: You can build multiple knowledge bases with different formats for each respective team in your organization.
- Internal Access: Your new employees will be able to find all the resources they need in a single place instead of having to ask coworkers multiple questions per day.
Cons of Spekit?
Spekit has notable limitations that could be a deal-breaker for certain companies or use cases:
- Onboarding Limitations: Tooltips and modals are the only UI patterns that you can use when building in-app flows with Spekit.
- Product Experience: Spekit’s software has numerous bugs and performance issues that you’ll need to reckon with when using the tool (along with subpar UI navigation).
- Analytics Shortcomings: Spekit lacks feedback collection and analytics reporting capabilities which makes it hard to identify areas that need improvement.
What do users say about Spekit?
Spekit users have cited the platform’s document storage capabilities, third-party integrations, and customer service as its core strengths.
“Document storage, Salesforce integration, excellent customer service.”
Spekit customers note that the platform’s analytics, searchability, indexing, and organizing capabilities leave much to be desired.
“Analytics and search function still requires work. Indexing needs work and organizing documents is a bit haywire.”
Does Spekit fit your budget?
While Spekit previously charged $20/month for each user, they have since updated their pricing model. The price will now vary based on the size of your organization and which use cases you’ll be deploying the product for.
Spekit doesn’t have a freemium plan nor does it offer a free trial.
This means that you’ll need to contact the Spekit sales team and pay for a proof-of-concept to get an idea of how the solution works. Features like seismic integration, knowledge checks, and knowledge check analytics are sold as add-ons that cost extra on top of your base subscription.
3 Reasons why you might need a Spekit alternative
Spekit is perfectly viable as an employee onboarding tool but its usability is limited by the narrowly focused feature set.
Here are a few scenarios where you should consider using alternative solutions instead of Spekit:
- Onboarding Analytics: Despite Spekit focusing on (employee) onboarding it lacks the detailed analytics that you’d need to optimize your flows. You’ll likely need to use additional tools to collect and analyze data if you use Spekit as your primary onboarding platform.
- UI Navigation: While installing the Chrome extension is fairly straightforward, actually navigating through its interface can be more difficult due to the subpar layout and performance issues.
- Contextual Onboarding: If you want to create contextual onboarding flows for multiple segments then Spekit might not be the best tool. Its segmentation capabilities aren’t the best and there are plenty of other tools in the same space with better segment targeting features.
Better alternatives to Spekit
Considering alternative options to Spekit can often lead to discovering more tailored solutions that better suit your needs. Here are the top Spekit 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.
- WalkMe is a digital adoption platform that can help you create frictionless experiences for your customers. The platform is built keeping the compliance, scalability, and security needs of enterprises in mind. Using it, you can onboard customers and keep them engaged throughout their lifetime with your business. With powerful features like workflow automation and analytics, you can use it to grow your enterprise.
- Userlane is a no-code digital adoption platform used to measure how employees use applications, identify areas for improvement, and offer real-time guidance directly within any application. In addition, it allows you to get a real-time view of digital transformation progress in your organization. You can now delve deeper into user behaviors across different applications and analyze engagement levels so you can optimize user experiences.
- UserGuiding is a no-code product adoption tool that lets users create in-app walkthroughs, guides, and checklists. The solution makes it possible for teams to onboard, engage, and retain users without needing coding skills to create these in-app experiences. All in all, UserGuiding is a pretty flexible solution that can improve the onboarding process, boost user engagement, and increase customer retention.
Let’s see the features and functionalities of these tools for different use cases!
Spekit vs Userpilot
There are many ways how Userpilot is different (and in a lot of ways better!) from Spekit. Let’s explore the features of Userpilot, how it’s better than Spekit, 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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).
Spekit vs WalkMe
There are many ways how WalkMe is different (and in a lot of ways better!) from Spekit. Let’s explore the features of WalkMe, how it’s better than Spekit, and how it may fall short too.
WalkMe for user onboarding
Any digital adoption platform that seeks to gain the attention of businesses needs to have a solid lineup of features for user onboarding. It’s crucial because this is the stage where you can make a first impression on your users. Hand-holding them in this phase can help them get up to speed soon.
WalkMe has a bunch of features for user onboarding:
- You can create an onboarding checklist through the Onboarding Tasks feature on WalkMe. It’s possible to set different goals inside your checklist so users can keep checking them as they complete them. The Onboarding Tasks can include Smart Walk-Thrus, videos, and articles to guide your new users.
- You can also use WalkMe’s SmartTips feature to guide your users through the app’s UI. These serve as on-screen guidance and help reduce the learning curve for new users. Clicking on a SmartTip opens a pop-up that gives more information on the element.
- Likewise, you can use ShoutOuts to draw your new user’s attention to specific announcements. They’re essentially banners that you can use to show users what they need to know when getting started. You can also get them to take action through ShoutOuts.
- You could also use Launchers in your onboarding flow for some self-guidance. When users click on Launchers, a new action like a Smart Walk-Thru will get triggered. Users can click on each Launcher you create to learn more about your platform.
WalkMe for product analytics
Product analytics can help you uncover useful insights related to your product usage. It can play an important role in understanding how users engage with different elements on your pages and the features they use the most.
Getting insights into your product analytics can help you design a product that drives higher engagement.
WalkMe offers some advanced features for product analytics:
- The session playback feature can help you look into user sessions from the past year. By default, up to 1000 session playbacks will be visible in your account at any given time. You can use them to analyze past user sessions and even ones happening in real time.
- You also get user funnel tracking capabilities on WalkMe. It enables you to create a custom funnel to track various events. You can then monitor various metrics like funnel completion rates and drop-off rates to see how users interact with your platform. WalkMe also lets you filter the data based on browser, date ranges, and more.
- It’s also possible to get analytics on your in-app experiences to determine which features are being used the most by your users.
WalkMe for self-service support
Whether you’re looking to onboard new customers or employees, self-service support can go a long way to enhance the experience. It plays a key role in empowering users and minimizing the burden on your customer support team.
As a digital adoption platform, WalkMe offers several features to facilitate self-service support. From in-app messages and interactive guidance to a full-fledged resource center, there are various ways to help users navigate an application and troubleshoot problems on their own.
The features that come in handy here include:
- Smart Walk-Thrus – These include a series of tip balloons that help you provide interactive step-by-step guidance. They’re ideal for creating detailed product tours to handhold new users.
- SmartTips and ShoutOuts – Both these features help you engage users with strategic guidance. SmartTips are tooltips that let you highlight specific features and how to use them. On the other hand, ShoutOuts are in-app messages that help convey urgent announcements and updates. The best part is that you can add CTAs, video tutorials, and web page links to ShoutOuts.
- ActionBot – This is a chatbot feature that’s integral to self-service support. With ActionBot, you can automate the process of responding to user requests, answering FAQs, and nudging users to the right knowledge base resources.
- WalkMe Menu – It’s a handy widget that gives users access to all WalkMe experiences, irrespective of where they are in your product. That, in turn, ensures users can access relevant support resources without exiting the page. The drag-and-drop interface makes it easy to create your menu too.
Additionally, it’s worth noting that you can use WalkMe’s user segmentation features to provide contextual and personalized support to users at the right time.
Pricing of WalkMe
WalkMe’s pricing isn’t transparent, but it’s fully customizable based on your requirements. It offers a bunch of useful features like analytics, a self-serve content creation engine, in-app engagement creation, and more.
However, you need to get in touch with their team to find pricing details for both the customer and employee versions. Considering the platform is specifically built for enterprises, you can expect the cost to be on the higher end. You could end up spending anywhere between $9000 to $50,000 per year if you choose to use WalkMe.
Spekit vs Userlane
There are many ways how Userlane is different (and in a lot of ways better!) from Spekit. Let’s explore the features of Userlane, how it’s better than Spekit, and how it may fall short too.
Userlane for user onboarding
Teams use Userlane to ditch the stress of manual onboarding. The platform allows you to build a customized and interactive onboarding dashboard for each software, promoting an easy software onboarding experience every time.
Here are some ways Userlane helps with onboarding:
- Digital adoption solution: Userlane has a digital adoption solution that provides on-screen, step-by-step guidance to your users. This way, users can navigate your software with ease. You can also create an interactive in-app guide that walks users through tasks, so there’s no steep learning curve or need for external training materials.
- User-specific communication: User onboarding isn’t one-size-fits-all. Everyone’s needs are different. You can customize and improve their walkthroughs and communication based on the user’s behavior and software. Personalized communication makes it easy to remember how to use the features and get help.
- Comprehensive Analytics: Userlane has two applications for user analytics: HEART and Content analytics. HEART is Userlane’s premiere model to monitor software adoption across enterprise apps. The model shows if an application delivers the expected value. And highlights areas teams can improve and optimize. Content Analytics adds a layer of interactivity for guided learning within the platform. This feature allows teams to create guides, tips, and Pop-Ups and host NPS surveys.
Userlane for product analytics
Teams perform product analytics to track the performance of the software they build.
While Userlane excels at employee onboarding and digital adoption, it doesn’t serve as a product analytics tool.
Userlane users can access surveys to identify and address software-related issues, ultimately improving performance.
For comprehensive product analytics, consider UserGuiding or Userpilot.
Userlane for self-service support
It’s one thing to build a great product; it’s another thing to build a system of quality support for your users. They’re functional and emotional experiences can determine customers’ overall satisfaction.
What does self-service support entail?
It entails building solutions that are easily accessible and discourage customers from immediately seeking one-on-one support from an agent.
Here are the features of Userlane for self-service support:
- Interactive Onboarding Guides: Userlane provides step-by-step on-screen guidance, ensuring users understand how to use software or platforms without needing external help.
- Real-time Support: Instead of searching through FAQs or documentation, users receive immediate help directly within the application, reducing the need for support tickets.
- User Analytics and Feedback: This allows you to understand where users might get stuck or confused, enabling continuous improvement of the user experience and promptly addressing potential support issues.
Pricing of Userlane
Userlane’s pricing plan is structured in a customizable pattern. This means you need to get a custom quote to know the plan that fits your brand’s purpose based on the level of your SaaS and the number of acquired customers.
Spekit vs UserGuiding
There are many ways how UserGuiding is different (and in a lot of ways better!) from Spekit. Let’s explore the features of UserGuiding, how it’s better than Spekit, and how it may fall short too.
UserGuiding for user onboarding
As a no-code onboarding tool, UserGuiding has numerous features that will help you create onboarding flows for your new customers and guide them throughout their journey.
Here’s what you’ll get when you start using UserGuiding:
- Create interactive product walkthroughs without disturbing your developers as it’s completely code-free.
- Build onboarding checklists and drive customers to the activation point by eliminating the guesswork on what the next step should be.
- Create interactive elements, such as product tours, tooltips, and pop-ups, to help keep users engaged and increase the likelihood that they’ll complete the onboarding process.
- Create a resource center to add different educational resources for your users.
Though UserGuiding is a great tool for startups that don’t have much money to invest in an onboarding tool, it has very strict limitations for the Basic plan.
You can only create a maximum of 20 guides and hotspots, 2 onboarding checklists, and 1 resource center. If you want to create unlimited guides with unlimited UI patterns, you should go for the Professional plan which can cost from $299 to $399.
The one drawback when using UserGuiding for onboarding is the fact that its analytics dashboard only encompasses the elements that you’ve created within the platform. In contrast, Userpilot is able to track all elements, events, and behaviors throughout the entire user journey.
UserGuiding for product analytics
Product analytics are a cornerstone of any growth strategy as they offer insights into how existing customers have used the product. They can also highlight similarities between users within certain cohorts (such as power users or churned customers).
Unfortunately, UserGuiding has no native product analytics capabilities. The only data it’s able to collect are interactions with UserGuiding materials such as guides, checklists, hotspots, or resource centers.
It does have integrations with analytics platforms like Amplitude, Mixpanel, Segment, and Woopra. However, the depth and flexibility vary from integration to integration — not to mention the fact that you’ll need to pay extra for a standalone analytics product before you can integrate it.
UserGuiding for self-service support
As an onboarding solution, UserGuiding is targeted toward the initial tours, walkthroughs and flows that new users go through. However, it does have certain customer education features that could be utilized in the context of self-service support:
- Resource Center: The most suitable UserGuiding feature for self-service support is the resource center. Resource centers created with UserGuiding are also equipped with a search function to help users find the resources that they need.
- Localization: Self-service support can be tricky if your product has a multilingual user base, but UserGuiding does have localization features that can help with that. It’s worth noting that the localization is NOT automated, so you’ll need to manually download, translate, and upload CSVs.
- Analytics: UserGuiding’s analytics dashboard shows you how many interactions your resource center has had in the past seven days, which can be useful when trying to measure engagement with self-service resources.
Pricing of UserGuiding
UserGuiding has three plans to choose from, targeted towards a range of business sizes from startup to enterprise.
Here are UserGuiding’s specific pricing details:
- Basic: Costing $129/month, the Basic plan is targeted towards startups and SMBs. The Basic plan is quite limited as it caps your account at one active survey, two active checklists, and no more than 2,500 MAUs. Features include:
- Access to user identification features.
- Integrations with Google Analytics, HubSpot, Intercom, and more.
- Email and chat support.
- Customizable theme (only one).
- Professional: The Professional plan costs almost 4x as much as the Basic tier at $499/month. That said, it significantly increases capacity to 20,000 MAUs and improves the quality of customer support you’ll receive. Features include:
- Removal of UserGuiding branding.
- Language localization.
- Full customer support access.
- Five team member seats.
- Five customizable themes.
- Unlimited guides and checklists.
- Corporate: Subscriptions on the Corporate plan start at $999/month. Of course, this higher price does come with its fair share of enterprise perks. Features include:
- Service Level Agreement (SLA) + Data Processing Agreement (DPA).
- Up to 10 active surveys.
- Custom MAU capacity based on your needs.
- Unlimited team member seats.
- Unlimited customizable themes.
All monthly plans are marked down by 30% when customers choose to bill annually.
Conclusion
As you can see, there are many different competitors and alternatives to Spekit. 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!