10 Best Pendo Competitors of 2024 [In-Depth Comparison]

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

Let’s dive in!

Pendo alternatives – all you need to know

• Pendo is a popular product adoption tool with robust analytics and in-app feedback tools. It allows teams to design user and employee onboarding experiences on mobile and web apps.
• Pendo’s main downsides include a lack of real-life data updates, limited UI patterns for onboarding, a steep learning curve, and high pricing.
• Userpilot promises greater value for money and offers better analytics, onboarding, and feedback features for web products.
• Appcues analytics are less developed than Pendo’s but it allows teams to build more diverse onboarding experiences for mobile apps at a lower price point.
• Chameleon is known for a high level of customization of the onboarding elements but this requires coding. However, its segmentation is better than Pendo’s and allows you to trigger personalized event-based flows.
• Whatfix is a worthy Pendo competitor in the employee onboarding niche.
• Due to its low pricing, UserGuiding is an excellent Pendo alternative for early-stage companies. However, it offers limited analytics.
• WalkMe is a complete solution for employee and customer onboarding. It’s trusted by many enterprise businesses that have the resources to manage the complex setup.
• Creating contextual onboarding flows in Userlane is easier than in Pendo thanks to its intuitive no-code UI.
• Gainsight PX helps teams drive product engagement and improve product experience through in-app guidance and prompts. It comes with feedback functionality and robust analytics but may be harder to learn.
• As a dedicated analytics platform, Mixpanel surpasses Pendo’s analytics but offers no engagement or sentiment layer.
• Google Analytics is a free alternative to Pendo that allows you to track user behavior inside web and mobile apps.
• If you’re considering Userpilot as a Pendo alternative, book the demo to see how it can help your team!

What is Pendo?

Pendo is a digital adoption platform (DAP) that is extremely popular among enterprise-level SaaS organizations.

As an enterprise software, it’s best known for its quality analytics, which enable granular product usage analysis. It also allows you to collect customer feedback and design onboarding experiences to drive product adoption.

What features does Pendo offer?

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

What are the weaknesses of Pendo?

Pendo is one of the most established adoption tools on the market. As it’s been around for a while, it offers robust functionality. However, there are a few areas that limit its usefulness.

Product analytics features are lacking

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

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

Expensive and complex pricing

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

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

For other features, like Pendo Feedback and Session Replay, you need to pay separately as they’re not included in any of the plans.

Limited UI patterns for user onboarding

Pendo offers only 4 UI patterns that you can use for user guidance and onboarding. These are Lightbox (pop-up window), Banner, Tooltip, and Polls.

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

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

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

Steep learning curve for product teams

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

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

10 top Pendo alternatives for SaaS companies

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

1. Userpilot – best Pendo alternative for product managers and teams

What makes Userpilot stand out in the duel against Pendo?

Userpilot offers robust user analytics.

Thanks to them, you can easily tag features and events to track, create custom events, and analyze product usage in heatmaps. You can also use it for funnel, paths, retention, and trends analysis.

Even as a product growth software, it stands on par with an advanced product analytics tool with features like A/B and multivariate testing, advanced segmentation with granular user/company profiles, and analytics dashboards.

To drive product adoption, you can create personalized user onboarding for different customer segments.

Userpilot supports more UI patterns than Pendo. These include modals, tooltips, banners, slideouts, hotspots, and driven actions. Thanks to the AI writing assistant, you can easily create your microcopy and fully customize the look of the patterns in the WYSIWYG editor.

Once they’re ready, you can trigger them individually or as part of interactive walkthroughs or onboarding checklists. And guess what? All of this is available in all plans without any limits.

As a solid adoption platform, Userpilot allows you to collect user feedback through in-app surveys.

These are easy to create thanks to the template library that includes NPS, CES, and PMF surveys, etc. You can fully tailor them to your user needs and even automatically translate them for audiences across the globe with the localization feature.

The NPS dashboard in Userpilot is more detailed and lets you tag qualitative responses for easier analysis. Soon, the qualitative analysis will be even better, thanks to the AI features coming soon.

Apart from collecting active feedback, you can also enable the feedback widget to gather passive feedback and customer requests.

To drive feature adoption, you can trigger contextual in-app messaging. It’s an effective way because users get prompted to engage with the feature at the moment when they really need it.

Userpilot allows organizations to provide in-app training and on-demand support for users through the resource center. The resource center modules are easy to customize and group, and the feature supports different content types.

Does Userpilot have any limitations? It does.

Firstly, it doesn’t support mobile apps for now, and it’s not suitable for employee focused training options.

Userpilot pricing

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

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

2. Appcues – digital adoption platform alternative for mobile apps

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

Appcues allows teams to build fully customizable in-app onboarding experiences to improve engagement and adoption. It offers more UI patterns than Pendo: tooltips, modals, hotspots, slideouts, pins, and banners.

You can use them to build product tours or launch from a checklist.

What’s more, Appcues supports in-app surveys, including NPS surveys to capture user sentiment.

Unfortunately, Appcues analytics are no match for Pendo. You can use it to track events, monitor how your flows perform, and set custom goals. There are also segmentation and experimentation features but that’s it.

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

Appcues pricing

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

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

Before committing to any of the plans, check their usage caps, as they seem a tad limiting.

3. Chameleon – cheaper alternative with better user segmentation

Chameleon is another product growth tool.

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

What’s more, Chameleon offers a limited number of UI patterns. There are hotspots, beacons, and labels, which you can sequence into Tours.

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

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

There is also dynamic personalization which enables you to tailor experiences for different users and Environments for granular personalization.

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

Chameleon pricing

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

• Startup – from $279/month
• Growth – from $1,250/month
• Enterprise – custom pricing

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

4. Whatfix – Pendo alternative for employee onboarding

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

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

What UI patterns does Whatfix offer? Tooltips, Beacons, and Pop-Ups. You can also create flows and checklists and there’s a resource center and knowledge repository functionality as well.

There are also feedback features, including NPS surveys as well as fairly advanced analytics features like funnels, trends, user journey tracking, and cohort analysis. Mind you, though, that you need the Enterprise plan to be able to use them.

Whatfix pricing

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

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

5. UserGuiding – affordable digital adoption tool alternative for startups

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

Without writing a line of code, you can create interactive product tours, tooltips, hotspots, and user onboarding checklists. All that, combined with the resource center feature, allows you to design effective onboarding experiences.

What’s more, with UserGuiding, you can easily create and launch in-app surveys to collect user feedback.

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

UserGuiding pricing

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

• Basic – from $89/month
• Professional – from $389/month
• Corporate – from $689+/month

6. WalkMe – product experience platform for employees and customers

WalkMe is an enterprise-level product experience product.

While it’s not suited for user onboarding in the SaaS context, it’s a great solution for employee and customer onboarding. If you’re after a tool to support a digital transformation project, WalkMe is a solid Pendo alternative.

What features does it offer?

WalkMe allows you to provide personalized in-app guidance, trigger contextual tooltips and links, and create onboarding checklists and product tours. Your users can also access the resource center with on-demand resources and an AI-powered chatbot.

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

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

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

WalkMe pricing

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

Userlane – user onboarding software for non-tech teams

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

What exactly can you do with Userlane?

Create and localize interactive in-app flows called ‘lanes’ with modals, tooltips, checklists, hints, and announcements and trigger them contextually for specific user segments. It also allows you to record tutorials and share them with your users.

To track the progress of your users and employees, Userlane enables teams to see the in-depth performance of any segment, track the interaction rate and the number of your active users, and identify their behavior trends.

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

Userlane pricing

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

8. Gainsight PX – better in-app user engagement solution compared to Pendo

Gainsight PX is a product experience platform that provides deep insights into user behaviors, allowing businesses to drive product adoption, user retention, and business growth.

To boost user engagement and help them overcome friction, Gainsight allows you to create and trigger interactive walkthroughs, checklists, in-app notifications, and banners. You can also provide users with on-demand support through its knowledge centers.

Its in-app feedback tools include 5 different micro surveys, including CES, CSAT, and NPS. More importantly, Gainsight offers fairly advanced analytics features that allow you to track feature usage, funnel conversions, map user paths, and track customer health scores.

Its AI-powered analytics features enable you to extract actionable insights in less time and prioritize high-value features in the roadmap.

According to its users, one of Gainsight’s downsides is its learning curve. It’s a fairly complex product and its UI is not always intuitive.

Gainsight PX pricing

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

9. Mixpanel – advanced product analytics software (no user onboarding functionality)

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

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

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

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

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

Mixpanel pricing

Mixpanel offers transparent pricing based on 3 plans:

• Free
• Growth – from $20/month
• Enterprise – custom pricing

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

10. Google Analytics – Free Pendo analytics alternative software

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

What features does GA offer?

• You can track user activity and events without coding and in real-time
• Generate audience, acquisition, and behavior reports
• Set goals
• Analyze conversion funnels
• And set up custom dashboards.

Google Analytics pricing

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

Why almost? There’s a paid plan through Analytics 360 that gives you access to advanced features like attribution modeling and costs $12,500 a month as reported by some users.

Conclusion

Pendo is one of the most established DAPs in the market. While it offers solid analytics functionality, and decent feedback and onboarding features, it’s pretty expensive and not very competitive when compared to alternative products.

If you want to see how Userpilot can help you better understand user behavior, collect user sentiment data, organize customer feedback, and enhance product adoption, book the demo!