Whatfix is a widely used digital adoption platform with 700+ enterprises using it. It comes in handy for onboarding new users and employees alike. However, the platform has a steep learning curve and complex pricing, which pushes many businesses to look for Whatfix alternatives.
If you’re in these businesses, we’ve got you covered. Drawing from our thorough testing process, we’ll share our insights to ensure you have everything you need to make a well-informed decision.
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Overview of Whatfix
Whatfix is a digital adoption platform that helps enterprise organizations with onboarding, training, and supporting their employees or customers. It works across multiple platforms, including web, mobile, and desktop.
Whatfix’s notorious features include:
- Interactive walkthroughs – You can use the no-code editor to build seamless guided tours to help users adopt a certain feature or walk an employee through a workflow.
- Self-help center -You can build an in-app hub that’s available on-demand and integrate it with existing knowledge base content.
- In-app task lists – Onboarding checklists that give new users or employees a clear next step on their journey toward product adoption.
- User surveys – You can add in-app surveys to Whatfix-authored product experiences to collect feedback and understand user sentiment.
- Guidance analytics – With Whatfix, you get user behavior analytics in the form of funnel and trend analysis reports. This can help you identify drop-off points and determine commonly used Self Help queries.
- Sandbox environment -Create replicate environments for your software to facilitate hands-on IT training and help conduct beta user testing without affecting the actual application.
Reasons to look for Whatfix alternatives
After scrolling through dozens of reviews, interviewing ex-customers, and having several members of our team try out the platform, here are the main Whatfix drawbacks we found:
- Complex implementation – Users claim that the variety of features can be overwhelming and make it difficult to navigate the platform. Also, you’ll need CSS knowledge if you want to customize in-app flows and align them with your branding.
- Broad feature set – Whatfix tries to be an all-in-one digital adoption platform, with its extensive feature set. However, the platform falls short for certain use cases. For instance, despite offering some analytics, it pales in comparison to specialized analytics tools like Mixpanel. Similarly, in-app surveys are restricted to Whatfix-authored experiences and don’t support branching logic.
- Expensive pricing – While Whatfix isn’t transparent with its costs, on review platforms, users report that paid plans start at $2000 per month. Also, you have to pay user license fees, along with a flat per-application fee.
Top 5 Whatfix alternatives for user onboarding
Whatfix’s alternatives for user onboarding include:
1. Userpilot
Userpilot is an all-in-one product adoption platform that offers robust user engagement, feedback, and analytics features.
Like Whatfix, Userpilot lets you design checklists and interactive walkthroughs, localize their content, and analyze how users interact with them.
As a platform specializing in user onboarding, Userpilot offers several additional features that let enterprises design more contextual experiences.
These features include:
- A/B testing – Userpilot comes with robust product experimentation capabilities – you can run controlled A/B tests, head-to-head A/B tests, and controlled multivariate tests to determine which onboarding flow variations result in more conversions and optimize the user experience accordingly.
- Session replay – See the recreations of users’ interactions within your product, capturing actions like mouse movements, clicks, scrolls, and page views. These replays allow you to observe the user experience firsthand, helping identify usability issues, understand user behavior, and enhance overall user satisfaction.
- Auto capture for multiple types of events – Upon registering, Userpilot automatically records important user interactions such as clicks, form submissions, and text input changes, eliminating the need to manually tag each event you want to track and enabling you to conduct retroactive analysis.
- User profiles – Get a granular analysis of each user’s interactions, sessions, survey responses, and more.
- Robust resource center – Userpilot lets you build an in-app resource center and add various types of content. Additionally, you can define targeting for individual modules, providing more contextual support to each user. It’s also possible to add checklists to your help center, which isn’t the case with Whatfix.
- In-app surveys – Userpilot’s variety of pre-built survey templates is unparalleled for collecting customer feedback. You can choose from NPS, CSAT, CES surveys, and more. Additionally, you can use branching logic to modify the sequence of questions in a survey based on previous responses.
It is, however, worth noting that Userpilot is only compatible with web apps. If you want to add a product experience layer to desktop or mobile apps, Whatfix is a better fit.
Here is a quick recap of how Whatfix compares to Userpilot:
Apart from all the features that help it stand out from the other Whatfix alternatives, Userpilot is also very easy to use, as experienced by our client Justin from Groupize.
Userpilot pricing
Paid plans for Userpilot start at $249 per month (billed annually). The starter plan allows up to 2000 monthly active users (MAUs), 10 different user segments, and basic analytics. All plans come with a 14-day free trial, allowing you to test the platform before committing.
Looking for Whatfix Alternatives? Try Userpilot and Take Your User Onboarding to the Next Level
2. Appcues
Appcues is one of the pioneer platforms in the user onboarding scene. It offers a wide variety of UI patterns besides traditional modals and tooltips such as pins, banners, slideouts, and more. The platform is easy to set up and use, making it particularly suitable for non-technical users.
Additionally, you get pre-built user segments, which make it easy to divide your user base and deliver personalized experiences. You also have the option to create custom segments.
However, like Whatfix, Appcues lacks advanced analytics capabilities. You can monitor the performance of Appcues-authored flows, but there’s no option to create detailed product usage reports like funnel and paths. There are also no qualitative data analysis features like session replays.
Appcues pricing
Appcues offers a 14-day free trial. Paid plans start at $249 per month (billed annually). That makes it more affordable than Whatfix. However, compared to Userpilot, Appcues’s starter plan only allows 5 audience segments and 10 tracked events.
3. UserGuiding
UserGuiding is probably the cheapest onboarding software out there. Despite the low price, it actually has decent capabilities – from interactive tours and checklists to in-app surveys, UserGuiding offers all the basic features you need to design functional onboarding flows.
Moreover, it even includes a resource center, something even its highly-priced, much more popular competitors like Pendo lack.
The catch is even though it offers a bit of everything, all of them are very basic – whether it’s customization or in-app flow triggering settings.
For example, unlike Whatfix, UserGuiding doesn’t support automated localization, so translating your content for global audiences will be a bit of a hassle – you’ll need to upload individual CSV files for every language used in your in-app flows.
The analytics capabilities are very limited, too. You don’t get advanced features like survey data analytics, heatmaps, session replays, or retention reports.
UserGuiding pricing
With paid plans starting at $69 per month (billed annually), UserGuiding is a cost-effective alternative to Whatfix. That is if you’re only looking for user engagement and onboarding features. You can choose from three pricing tiers and use the 14-day free trial to try out various features.
4. Pendo
Pendo is a widely used digital adoption platform that’s particularly popular among enterprise-level SaaS companies.
What sets the platform apart from Whatfix is its robust suite of analytics features. For starters, you get automatic feature tagging, which eliminates the need to set up events manually. Pendo and Userpilot are the only tools in our list that offer this feature.
Additionally, you get analytics reports like funnel charts, path analysis, and cohort analysis for analyzing quantitative data and session replays to understand the ‘why’ behind user behavior.
One crucial area where Pendo falls short is real-time analytics. Unlike Userpilot, you can’t use event-based triggers for in-app flows, making it difficult to create contextual experiences.
Pendo’s in-app survey options are very basic and non-customizable. However, the platform offers some juicy user research and product discovery features like idea testing and public roadmaps.
Pendo pricing
Pendo’s forever-free plan includes retroactive analytics, in-app guides, surveys, and roadmaps but allows only 500 monthly active users. Pendo also has four paid plans, but pricing information isn’t available on the website.
5. Intercom
Intercom is an omnichannel customer support platform with features like AI-based chat agents, live chat widgets, and a ticketing system.
You can even create automated workflows for routine tasks like routing and wrapping up conversations with customers. That, in turn, minimizes the burden on support executives and improves their productivity.
Keep in mind that user engagement and onboarding aren’t Intercom’s primary offerings. While you can use the Product Tours add-on to design basic in-app flows, the onboarding features are limited compared to other specialized Whatfix alternatives like Appcues and Userpilot.
Intercom pricing
Intercom offers three paid plans starting at $29 per month per user (billed annually). If you need user onboarding features, you’ll have to pay extra for the Product Tours add-on.
Top 5 Whatfix competitors for employee onboarding
When it comes to employee onboarding, here are our top picks for Whatfix alternatives:
1. WalkMe
WalkMe is considered Whatfix’s closest competitor and offers very similar features for employee and user onboarding.
One of its standout features is automated workflows that streamline routine tasks and minimize empty clicks, which in turn, minimizes friction and helps employees adopt any tool faster.
Another useful feature is the employee workstation hub. It aggregates all information about a product and helps users understand its features and use cases.
Compared to Whatfix, WalkMe comes with decent user analytics capabilities. You can track in-app actions, such as clicks, form submissions, and element selection, in real time. With Session Playbacks, you also get in-depth insights into how users navigate a product and interact with different elements.
WalkMe was acquired by SAP in September 2024 and will soon launch WalkMeX copilot, which brings together the features of WalkMe and Joule (SAP’s AI copilot).
WalkMe pricing
WalkMe offers two different plans for customer experience and employee experience. Pricing details aren’t available on the website. However, users report that WalkMe’s pricing is based on potential usage. Also, features like enterprise analytics, customization, and collaboration are only available as add-ons on all plans.
2. Apty
Apty is another digital adoption platform and offers mostly the same features as Whatfix.
Apty is notable for its AI/ML algorithms that analyze user behavior and use the data to optimize in-app guidance.
In other words, you can design prescriptive workflows that provide contextual guidance based on how different users navigate an application.
Apty pricing
Apty doesn’t list any pricing information on its website. There’s no option for a free trial, either. Reviews on websites like G2 indicate that Apty offers competitive pricing and is more affordable than other digital adoption platforms with similar features.
3. Lemon Learning
Lemon Learning is a change management tool that facilitates smooth transitions during organizational shifts, particularly when new software or processes are introduced.
Besides using in-app prompts to guide users, you can also offer quick support with AI-driven chatbots.
At the same time, Lemon Learning provides feedback tools like surveys that you can use to collect employee feedback and build better processes.
However, Lemon Learning’s localization capabilities are limited to 35 languages. Also, the platform only supports web-based apps.
Lemon Learning pricing
Lemon Learning doesn’t provide any pricing information on its website. The company claims to offer a free trial, but you’ll have to contact their sales team to get started.
4. Spekit
Spekit is a Salesforce-specific employee onboarding platform.
It appears that when it comes to Salesforce-specific use cases, Spekit outperforms Whatfix in this area.
One indicator of Spekit’s superior performance is its 5-star rating on the Salesforce AppExchange, while Whatfix does not have any reviews on the platform.
Spekit pricing
However, there is a notable difference in pricing. Spekit is a more expensive option, costing $27 per user per month for Salesforce-specific use, compared to Whatfix, which charges $6 per user per month.
5. Scribe
Scribe isn’t a digital adoption platform per se. Instead, it’s an AI-powered tool that lets you create step-by-step guides and tutorials for any process.
With Scribe, you can record your screen while performing a task on any application. When you stop recording, the platform automatically identifies key steps and lays down annotated screenshots, click marks, and instructions. It even redacts sensitive information automatically.
You can embed these guides either into your knowledge base directly or platforms like Notion, HubSpot, and Airtable via third-party integrations.
You also get basic viewer analytics, such as total views and completion rates.
The downside is you can’t trigger Scribe guides based on user actions, making them way less contextual.
Scribe pricing
Scribe offers a forever-free plan with basic features. Custom branding is only available in paid plans, which start at $12 per user per month (billed annually).
Conclusion
So, what’s the best Whatfix alternative available in the market? There’s no one-size-fits-all answer to that question. While platforms like Pendo and Userpilot take the lead in product analytics, UserGuiding is easier to use and more affordable.
When it comes to employee onboarding, options range from digital adoption platforms like WalkMe and Apty to guide creation tools like Scribe. Ultimately, it’s up to you to choose the right Whatfix competitor based on your organization’s needs and use cases.
Userpilot is a powerful alternative to Whatfix that comes with extensive user engagement and analytics features. Schedule a demo to see how Userpilot can help you with your product adoption needs.
Looking for Whatfix Alternatives? Try Userpilot and Take Your User Engagement to the Next Level
