Why You Need an All-in-One Mobile App Engagement Platform for Your Product Team13 min read

Choosing the right mobile app engagement platform can determine whether your app thrives or gets abandoned, especially as spending in the mobile app market increased to $36.2 billion in 2024.

Users now expect seamless experiences between web and mobile apps, personalized messaging, and real-time responsiveness. However, fragmented tools can’t meet these expectations. They often cause inconsistent interactions and data silos that leave your team guessing and your users frustrated.

The answer is a single mobile customer engagement platform that combines onboarding, push notifications, and analytics to improve user engagement.

How the mobile engagement platforms landscape has evolved

With about 69% of the global population being smartphone users, mobile-native apps have become a critical touchpoint for businesses aiming to connect with their customers. Conversely, as mobile app adoption rises, user expectations continue to evolve.

Today’s users demand seamless experiences across various communication channels, whether on mobile or web, and expect instant, personalized interactions that feel intuitive and relevant.

As product managers, the challenge goes beyond delivering consistent cross-platform customer experiences. You have to:

• Maintain consistent user experiences.
• Track user interactions across devices.
• Ensure that the web and mobile version features offer the proper functionality.

You also have to analyze user behavior across devices to create data-driven strategies that encourage user engagement.

A mobile app engagement platform can help you address these challenges with features like push notifications, behavior tracking, and personalized messaging. However, most solutions don’t have all these features, making them fragmented.

The cost of fragmented engagement solutions

Relying on multiple fragmented engagement tools complicates customer workflows and drains your resources.

Here’s how:

• Paying for multiple tools when you can pay for one all-in-one solution: Juggling different SaaS tools is expensive, and, every additional tool you add increases your budget and management overhead, often with overlapping features that teams barely use.
• Not having consistent customer experiences and risking losing users: Fragmented engagement platforms often result in inconsistent experiences, frustrating users who expect seamless customer interactions.
• Having siloed data and making wrong decisions because of this: Fragmented tools store information separately, making it nearly impossible to form a clear picture of customer behavior across channels. Without integrated data, your product team risks making incorrect decisions based on incomplete data.
• Issues with team collaboration and management: Each additional tool introduces complexity and forces team members to jump back and forth between systems to access essential information. Such context switching significantly reduces productivity. In turn, your workflow efficiency and product quality can drop.

This realization brings us to the main solution: a wholesome customer engagement software.

Why do you need an all-in-one mobile app engagement platform

Besides cost savings, here are some advantages that come with a complete engagement platform:

• Gain real-time, actionable insights into user interactions from a unified dashboard: Instead of jumping between analytics tools and spreadsheets, you’ll immediately understand how users interact with your mobile and web apps. It’ll be quicker to spot friction points and fix them before they impact user retention.
• Combine onboarding, in-app messaging, and user feedback: Without any need for different tools, you can create experiences, analyze those experiences, and improve them based on real user feedback.
• Personalization and segmentation tools: To easily group customers based on real-time behavior, device, or lifecycle stage. You can then trigger tailored in-app messages automatically so every interaction resonates with the individual user rather than feeling generic or disconnected.
• No more juggling multiple tools and fragmented data: You can track user behavior across your web and mobile apps in one platform to reveal insights that fragmented tools never could.

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Key benefits for product teams

Product managers

Maintaining feature consistency between web and mobile onboarding experiences can be tough, and any mismatch confuses users. A wholesome mobile app engagement platform provides unified analytics across both platforms to help you:

• Identify friction points.
• Optimize user journeys.
• Run targeted re-engagement campaigns through push notifications.

If users become inactive after installation, you can run surveys to understand their experiences and proactively prevent churn.

Product marketers

A complete mobile app engagement platform helps product marketers get clear insights into how their cross-platform campaigns perform.

Onboarding and re-engagement also become more effective. With personalized, behavior-based campaigns, you can trigger mobile onboarding flows tailored to specific customer interactions. For instance, when users don’t adopt critical features, you can send personalized push notifications or use in-app messaging to highlight the value they’re missing out on.

Customer support and success

For customer service teams, collecting inconsistent or slow feedback across platforms can result in missing opportunities for better customer retention. The ideal customer service tool makes gathering immediate feedback easy by directly embedding surveys like NPS, CES, and CSAT into your mobile app.

UX teams

As a UX designer, understanding why users abandon critical flows, like mobile app checkouts, is guesswork without visibility into their actual behavior. An all-in-one mobile app engagement platform can help you address these challenges with features like push notifications, behavior tracking, and personalized messaging.

Consequently, mobile navigation changes also become easier to optimize. Instead of guessing how updates affect user interactions, you can launch in-app surveys after releasing navigation changes. Immediate user feedback helps pinpoint usability issues, ensuring every update enhances the user experience.

Comparing the best customer engagement platforms for mobile

Here’s a table to compare the top customer engagement tools at a glance:

Userpilot

Userpilot supports the widest range of frameworks and is ideal for product teams aiming for streamlined onboarding, user engagement, and targeted re-engagement, all with an easy, code-free setup.

Its key features include:

• Carousels: Create up to 10 pages with ready-made templates, making mobile onboarding simpler and more engaging. Carousels help deliver clear, step-by-step instructions within your mobile app.
• Slideouts: Deliver contextual messages that catch the user’s attention without interrupting their current task. They are ideal for guiding users and announcing new features.
• Surveys: Gather feedback directly on mobile using NPS, CSAT, CES, or any other custom survey to help you collect real-time user insights.
• Push notifications: Keep your users engaged even when not using the app. Use timely, relevant messages to drive feature adoption, share important updates, or prompt specific actions.
• Mobile analytics: Track user behavior, feature adoption, and engagement trends with real-time analytics built for mobile.
• Advanced segmentation & localization: Deliver personalized experiences to the right audience at the right time. Filter users by behavior, attributes, or language preferences to ensure each segment sees content that resonates with them, no matter where they are.
• Supported frameworks: Userpilot’s Mobile SDK supports iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, Ionic, Capacitor, Cordova, and Xamarin. This makes it easy to integrate with a wide range of tech stacks and deliver seamless in-app experiences.

Userpilot’s pricing plans start at $249/month(billed annually). You can book a demo to test it and see how it fits your business goals.

 

Pricing – Userpilot

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Pendo

Pendo offers analytics-driven engagement but lacks Userpilot’s genuinely mobile-first interface and ease of use.

Some of its features include:

• NPS-only surveys: Use Pendo’s built-in NPS surveys to capture direct user feedback at key points in the user journey.
• Guides: Create in-app guides to collect user feedback, conduct polls, and walk users through personalized onboarding flows. By tailoring each guide to specific user segments, you ensure customers discover the features most relevant to their needs, driving faster time-to-value.
• Supported frameworks: Pendo supports iOS, Android, Xamarin, MAUI, React Native, Expo, Flutter, and Swift UI.

Pendo has custom pricing based on monthly active users (MAUs) and other requirements.

Appcues

Appcues is effective for in-app experiences but requires multiple installations, unlike Userpilot’s seamless, single-install approach.

Its features include:

• Multi-channel workflows: Combine in-app messages, emails, and push notifications into personalized sequences that adapt to each user’s journey. With branching and conditional logic, you can guide users down the path that best fits their needs without coding.
• Surveys: Embed custom surveys within your mobile app to capture real-time user feedback. Although Appcues doesn’t support NPS on mobile, you can embed a survey directly within the user interface of your mobile or web app.
• Push notifications: Use targeted push notifications to re-engage users, highlight important updates, or prompt a specific action.
• Supported frameworks: Appcues supports iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter, and Ionic.

Appcues’ pricing starts at $250/month(billed annually) and increases based on the number of active users.

Intercom

Intercom is primarily a messaging platform, great for customer communication but limited compared to Userpilot’s comprehensive engagement toolkit.

Its key features include:

• Mobile carousels: Create multi-page messages that guide users through your app’s features. Use carousels for onboarding, making feature announcements, or requesting permissions so users are fully engaged with your app.
• AI bot: Use Intercom’s AI bot to provide instant, human-like customer service. The bot helps answer common questions, resolve issues, and assist users, providing seamless support without waiting for a human agent.
• Help center: Embed your help center directly into your mobile app, giving users access to Intercom articles and other helpful content. Display the right information at the right time, ensuring users can self-serve and get the help they need without leaving the app.
• Supported frameworks: Intercom supports iOS, Android, Cordova, and React Native.

Pricing: From $39/seat/month (annual billing) to $132/seat/month for advanced features.

 

From Intercom to Userpilot: How Talana Enhanced Customer Onboarding

Read to find out why Talana decided to switch from Intercom to Userpilot as their onboarding solution. And how they used it to improve CX.

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Whatfix

Whatfix excels in training and internal adoption but focuses more on employee onboarding.

Its key features include:

• In-app walkthroughs: Create interactive, step-by-step in-app guidance that simplifies onboarding and helps users complete tasks. With these walkthroughs, users can easily navigate complex processes or explore new features, all within the app.
• Nudges: Encourage user engagement with contextual Nudges that highlight features, deliver timely alerts, or offer relevant promotions. Nudges guide users toward key actions and help them stay informed within your mobile app.
• Guidance analytics: Track engagement and performance of in-app content created with Whatfix. Monitor metrics like flow drop-offs, and nudge effectiveness to optimize your user guidance strategies.
• Supported Frameworks: iOS and Android.

WalkMe

WalkMe excels in enterprise-level digital adoption and automation but requires coding knowledge for complete setup and customization. This makes it more complex than Userpilot’s no-code solution.

• Launchers: Customizable buttons that trigger WalkMe actions within your mobile app. When clicked, launchers can play Smart Walk-Thrus, open menus, or redirect users to different pages to guide users through the app.
• Smart Walk-Thrus: Provide step-by-step, interactive guidance using tip balloons to highlight features and direct users through processes. These walkthroughs improve onboarding, feature adoption, and overall user experience within your mobile app.
• Shoutouts: In-app messages that grab user attention and prompt specific actions. You can use shoutouts to announce updates, offer tips, promote features, or drive engagement.
• Supported frameworks: iOS and Android.

WalkMe’s pricing is customized based on your user base and specific needs, with no transparent pricing on the website.

Questions to ask when choosing an all-in-one customer engagement platform

Features are significant in making the right choice, but they aren’t everything. The right customer engagement platform should fit your team’s needs now and in the future.

Here are some questions to help you decide if the mobile app engagement platform is worth it:

1. Does the platform support both in-app messaging and push notifications?
2. Can it track and analyze user behavior across multiple platforms (iOS, Android, web)?
3. Can it support multiple platforms and frameworks?
4. Does it offer interactive elements like surveys, feedback forms, and NPS?
5. Can it create and manage user onboarding flows?
6. What analytics and reporting capabilities are included?
7. How does the SDK integrate with your existing mobile app?
8. What is the performance impact on app size and speed?
9. How secure is the platform? Does it comply with GDPR, CCPA, and other privacy regulations?
10. Does it integrate with your existing tech stack (analytics tools, CRM, etc.)?
11. How intuitive is the platform for non-technical team members?
12. Does the platform support accessibility?
13. What kind of onboarding and training does the vendor provide?
14. How easy is it to collaborate across product, marketing, and customer success team
15. How does pricing scale with user count or message volume?
16. Are there usage limits on any features?
17. How often are new features released?
18. Are there dedicated customer success managers?
19. Is there a knowledge base, community forum, or resource library?
20. What is the total cost of ownership (including implementation)?
21. Are there hidden costs for additional features or services?
22. Is there a trial period to test the platform with your users?

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