Appcues for Mobile: Overview, Pricing + Better Alternative9 min read

Appcues is a household name in the product adoption world, with thousands of companies using it to create engaging in-app experiences for mobile apps.

But will it really live up to your expectations? Well, that’s the question. While Appcues was one of the very first tools to emerge in the scene and a benchmark of innovation for a while, there are some areas that it hasn’t quite kept up with. For example, Appcues has very limited survey features for collecting feedback from mobile users. It also lacks an analytics layer, limiting your visibility into user behavior.

In this article, we’ll have a more detailed look into Appcues and its features and explore why an all-in-one platform like Userpilot may be a better fit for your needs.

Appcues Mobile at a glance

Appcues is a no-code platform that enables product and customer success teams to design in-app experiences—like onboarding flows and feature announcements—directly inside your iOS and Android apps.

To start using it, you’ll need developers to integrate Appcues SDK into your app, which is around an hour of work. After the initial setup, even most non-technical team members can build flows using the visual editor without any developer support.

How can businesses use Appcues Mobile?

Now let’s take a closer look at the main use cases of Appcues and the key features enabling them:

Engage users with in-app messages and push notifications

As I’ve already mentioned, Appcues is primarily an engagement tool, this is its strongest suite. As you would expect, it comes with a great variety of UI patterns, such as:

• Modals: Large, full-screen messages perfect for major announcements, like welcoming new users or announcing features.
• Hotspots: Small, interactive icons that direct users’ attention to specific areas in your mobile app. They are ideal for guiding customers to new UI elements or feature updates.
• Tooltips: Small messages near UI elements to provide additional context or guidance. You can use them to help users adopt features through contextual walkthroughs, or announce minor updates.
• Banners: Appear at the top of the user’s screen and display information or calls to action.

Get insights into engagement analytics

Once you deploy your in-app flows, Appcues also offers insights into how users engage with them, allowing you to be

Unlike dedicated product analytics tools, these reports focus on your flows’ performance across web and mobile. For example, you can filter flows by app name and easily track metrics such as when the flow started, ended, or had any issues.

Collect user feedback to improve their app

Appcues Mobile lets you collect real-time user feedback with several customizable survey blocks embedded in your UI patterns:

• Text input: Use open-ended questions to gather detailed feedback, adjusting the input style and character limit to suit your needs. This pattern captures user sentiments or specific issues they want to address.
• Rating: Use star, number, or emoji rating options to quickly gauge user satisfaction. You can customize these ratings for different types of feedback, such as feature requests or product satisfaction.
• Single-select: This block allows customers to select a single response from predefined options. It’s ideal for questions where you need clear, concise feedback on specific aspects of the app.
• Multi-select: Users can select multiple items from a list, which helps gather more detailed input. This block is perfect for understanding user preferences or prioritizing features.

How much does Appcues cost?

Appcues offers three pricing plans based on the number of Monthly Tracked Users (MTUs):

• Start: This plan begins at $250/month for one app (billed annually) and includes features like in-app and email messaging, mobile push notifications, and no-code event tracking and analysis. It is ideal for early-stage startups.
• Grow: Starting at $1,000/month for one app (billed annually). This plan offers more capabilities, including up to 30,000 monthly messages and premium integrations. It’s suited for high-growth teams that need more advanced tools.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing based on your specific needs. This option includes enterprise-grade security, custom entitlements, SLAs, and a dedicated Implementation & Success manager. It is best for large organizations with high user volumes.

While these plans offer a range of features, Appcues’ pricing can be expensive for a single-point solution, especially if you're looking for a more comprehensive, all-in-one engagement platform.

Weighing pros and cons of using Appcues Mobile

Still not sure whether Appcues is worth your investment or not? Then there is no better way than reading reviews from users who actually did that! We’ve gone through dozens of reviews and compiled them into these pros:

✅ Intuitive and easy to use: Appcues Mobile offers an intuitive interface that makes creating product tours straightforward. Most users appreciate how easy it is to integrate with other tools, such as analytics.

✅ Good customer support: Appcues’ responsive customer support enables non-technical people to adopt and navigate the product better.

It’s cons include:

❌ Limited customization: Appcues has limited customization options, particularly for checklists and banners. Some users feel restricted by the tool's lack of detailed theming and color customization.

❌ Expensive compared to alternatives: Appcues' pricing can be costly, especially for companies with a large monthly active user base. Many users have expressed concerns about the cost and how it can feel disproportionate to the offered features.

❌ No automatic localization for flows: Appcues flows lack automatic flow localization. Without this feature, you have to translate text and adapt designs to different languages manually.

Userpilot: A better alternative to Appcues Mobile

Userpilot is an all-in-one platform that combines engagement, surveys, and quantitative and visual analytics for mobile. Unlike Appcues, which focuses mainly on in-app messaging, Userpilot gives you a broader set of tools to gather data and drive product adoption.

Create customized messages to engage and guide users

Userpilot offers various patterns to help you engage users and drive key actions within your app. Here are a few ways to use them:

• Carousels: Help you create up to 10 pages to guide users through onboarding, introduce new features, or invite them to webinars. The ready-to-use templates make it easy to set up and start engaging your users immediately.
• Slideouts: These deliver contextual messages without disrupting the user experience. You can use slideouts for onboarding, announcing features, or promoting offers.

• Resource center: Userpilot’s resource center allows users to access in-app tutorials, video guides, and FAQs whenever they need help. It’s a great way to reduce friction by offering on-demand assistance.
• Push notifications: Use push notifications to re-engage users. For example, trigger a notification to remind users about an abandoned cart or encourage them to try a new feature.

Understand user behavior with advanced analytics features

Userpilot’s analytics tools help you track user behavior to pinpoint where users are struggling or dropping off. With features like:

• Dashboards: Provide crucial metrics like product adoption rate, customer retention rate, and cost per acquisition at a glance.
• Reports: Like paths, funnels, and retention to help you easily monitor mobile app performance.
• Session replays: Allow you to see how users interact with your product so you can identify pain points and optimize the UX for better engagement.

Collect and analyze user feedback at scale

Appcues Mobile only supports NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys, which limits your ability to gather feedback for your app.

On the other hand, Userpilot provides a full suite of survey tools, including:

• NPS surveys. Including custom follow-up questions based on score.
• CSAT surveys. Which you can trigger at key touchpoints to understand user satisfaction.
• CES surveys. To measure how easy (or difficult) it is for users to complete tasks and find usability problems.
• Custom feedback surveys. Ask multiple-choice, open-ended, or rating scale questions to collect deeper insights.

How much does Userpilot cost?

Userpilot’s mobile features are available as an add-on to the Growth and Enterprise plans for $6,000.

The Growth plan costs $799/month (billed annually) and includes features like a resource center, content throttling(to manage how many flows you want your users to see), and localization.

The Enterprise plan is a quote-based pricing model for large organizations.

Userpilot mobile vs Appcues mobile: Head-to-head comparison

How is Userpilot Mobile better than Appcues Mobile?

Userpilot stands out as a more affordable and feature-rich alternative to Appcues Mobile, with a user-friendly interface that’s easier to navigate. Here’s why it’s the better choice:

• Mobile-specific UI: Userpilot allows you to create and manage mobile-optimized content separately, ensuring the best experience for mobile users. In contrast, Appcues uses the same UI for web and mobile devices, which can get cluttered and harder to manage.
• Bespoke user surveys: Unlike Appcues, Userpilot offers a variety of survey types and analytics, helping you collect highly contextual feedback. Appcues lacks these tailored capabilities, limiting your ability to gather and analyze user insights effectively.
• Unified analytics: Userpilot provides a single source of truth for tracking user behavior across web and mobile, giving you a comprehensive view of the user journey. Appcues doesn’t offer the same integration, making it challenging to optimize experiences across platforms.

Is Appcues Mobile the right fit for your app?

Appcues Mobile offers decent engagement features, but you may want to think twice before investing in it. Keep in mind that it has a couple of huge drawbacks, such as a lack of product analytics, limited survey features, and a high price tag (for a standalone tool, at least). So, if you are looking for mainly an engagement platform and have a large budget, it’s worth a shot.

But if you want a more robust tool that will allow you to visualize user behavior data, watch real users navigate the product, and complement this with qualitative survey responses, Userpilot is a better choice. Book a demo today and discover the advantages of our all-in-one platform.