Appcues vs Chameleon vs UserGuiding for Customer Satisfaction
Looking for a good customer satisfaction tool and wondering which one of Appcues, Chameleon, and UserGuiding is the best option for your SaaS company? Let’s compare them!
There are plenty of tools for customer satisfaction on review sites, but they don’t make the choice any easier.
The crux of the issue is – to make the right choice, you need to account for your priorities: your different jobs to be done, budget, and the size of your company. But don’t worry – we’re coming to help!
In this post, we’ll discuss exactly that – which tool is best for customer satisfaction depending on the different criteria that different SaaS companies may have.
Let’s dive in!
TL;DR
- Customer satisfaction is a measurement that shows how well your product meets your user’s expectations. It hints whether they’ll stay around as loyal customers and recommend your product to others.
Let’s explore how Appcues, Chameleon, and UserGuiding compare when it comes to customer satisfaction.
- Appcues is a robust product adoption and user onboarding platform for web and mobile apps. It enables product teams to create, implement, and test personalized in-app onboarding experiences. The platform also helps you announce new product features and collect customer feedback.
- Chameleon is a product adoption platform. It enables SaaS teams to leverage real-time user data to build beautiful on-brand experiences, improve user onboarding, and drive product-led growth.
- 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.
- 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.
- If you’re looking for a better option for customer satisfaction, Userpilot exceeds both functionality and value for money compared to other tools on the list. Get a Userpilot demo for customer satisfaction and drive your product growth code-free.
There is a better tool for your SaaS than Appcues!
What is customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is a measurement that shows how well your product meets your user’s expectations. It hints whether they’ll stay around as loyal customers and recommend your product to others.
Appcues for customer satisfaction
Appcues plays a key role in taking your product’s customer experience (CX) up a notch.
It helps enhance CX in the following ways:
- UI patterns like checklists, hotspots, modals, and tooltips let you create guided in-app tours and tutorials and simplify customer onboarding.
- A Launchpad lets users access Appcues onboarding flows from a notification dropdown within your product.
- NPS surveys help you collect customer feedback and improve your product. However, unlike Userpilot, Appcues only offers NPS surveys.
- Other features like user segmentation (for personalization) and event tracking also come in handy.
That said, Appcues alone can’t guarantee a flawless customer experience. It only covers the onboarding aspect of CX. You’ll need to focus on other aspects like customer support and relationship-building to improve the overall UX, and for those you need multiple types of user surveys, on-demand support (using a resource center) and proper analytics, which Appcues lack.
Appcues pros
As a first-comer in the no-code product adoption landscape, Appcues offers several valuable features. It’s suitable for mid-market SaaS businesses looking for a simple, easy-to-use tool that enhances user onboarding, retention, and the overall customer experience.
Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of Appcues:
- Intuitive UI and UX: Appcues offers a straightforward interface that’s easy to navigate and use. Users with non-technical backgrounds can design captivating in-app flows and onboarding journeys with its simple drag-and-drop builder. You can tailor user journeys with various UI patterns, from modals and hotspots to tooltips, slideouts, and banners.
- Simple setup: You can get started with Appcues in minutes by adding the SDK to your app’s source code or integrating Appcues with Segment or Google Tag Manager. Then, add a Chrome extension to launch the Appcues Builder in a few quick clicks and start creating in-app flows.
- Feedback options: Create Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to collect actionable user feedback. You can even check and analyze NPS analytics on your Appcues dashboard.
- Mobile onboarding: Besides web apps, you can use Appcues to create end-to-end experiences for mobile apps. It supports various mobile environments, including Native Android, Native iOS, React Native, Flutter, and Iconic.
- Extensive integrations: Appcues integrates with 20+ email automation, CRM, and analytics tools, including Heap, Zapier, HubSpot, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager. Many of these include two-way integrations.
Appcues cons
Appcues comes with a ton of useful features you’d expect from a leading product adoption platform, but it does have a few shortcomings.
Let’s look at a few drawbacks of Appcues:
- Poor element detection: The Appcues algorithm occasionally struggles to detect in-app elements, unlike some of its competitors like Userpilot. It’s particularly limiting when you want to add tooltips to individual options in a dropdown menu.
- Limited customization capabilities: While Appcues lets you customize pre-designed templates, you’re limited to basic options like font style, size, color, and padding. Advanced customization requires working with CSS code, which can be challenging for non-technical teams.
- Basic analytics: Appcues provides insights into product usage and customer behavior. However, you can’t access in-depth analytics without connecting to a third-party tool like Amplitude or Google Analytics.
- Limited survey options: Appcues lacks variety in feedback collection and survey options and doesn’t offer integrations with other platforms like Google Forms and Typeform. You can only build NPS surveys. This is in contrast to some of its competitors, like Userpilot, which offers an extensive library of customizable survey templates.
- Higher pricing: Starting at $249 per month, the Appcues Essential tier has several constraints, such as limited UI patterns and no custom CSS support. Moreover, localization support is only available in the Enterprise tier. If your app is multilingual, you’ll have to shell out a ton of money to make the most of Appcues.
- No live chat: While Appcues offers educational resources and a help center (Help Docs), customer support is limited to email and phone.
Appcues pricing
Pricing for Appcues starts at $249 per month, with the platform offering three distinct tiers – Essentials, Growth, and Enterprise.
The total cost can vary depending on the number of monthly active users (MAU). For instance, the Essential plan starts at $249 per month for 2500 MAU but jumps to $299 for 5000 MAU.
Here’s a detailed glimpse of the different pricing tiers:
- Essentials: It’s the basic tier that starts at $249 per month. It includes 3 user licenses and lets you add up to 5 audience segments. Some UI patterns, such as checklists, launchpads, and custom CSS support, aren’t available. Customer support is only available through email.
- Growth: This tier starts at $879 per month (for 2500 monthly active users) and includes 10 user licenses. You can target unlimited audience segments and use the full spectrum of UI patterns. Additionally, you can access the Premium Integrations package, which includes integrations with Slack, Salesforce, Marketo, and Zendesk.
- Enterprise: This is the most feature-packed tier and includes robust security controls like role-based access and activity logs. It’s also the only tier that comes with multi-account and localization support. Besides email and phone support, you also get a dedicated Customer Success Manager and Technical Implementation Manager. Pricing is available on request.
All three plans come with a 14-day free trial, where you can test unlimited flows and track up to 5 events. You can extend the trial by another 14 days by installing the Appcues SDK in your app. Additionally, you don’t need a credit card to sign up for the free trial.
Keep in mind that the above pricing plans are applicable to web apps. Pricing for Appcues Mobile is available on request.
It’s also worth noting that Appcues is pricier than some of the other product adoption tools available in the market, including Userpilot. For instance, Userpilot’s basic tier (Starter) lets you add up to 10 audience segments and includes the complete set of UI patterns.
Chameleon for customer satisfaction
Customer experience is the impression your customers have of your brand based on all of the interactions they’ve had with your business.
Chameleon improves the customer experience in product adoption through features like:
- In-app guidance: Utilizing product tours to improve customer experience. Note that you will need to have CSS knowledge to make styling changes in the Chameleon Builder.
- Personalization through segmentation: Chameleon offers you to personalize user experiences by tailoring product onboarding and in-app experiences for the users most prone to interact and be interested in them. But keep in mind that your segmentation filters are limited compared to other tools like Userpilot.
- User progress tracking: This feature enables you to identify areas where users might be facing difficulties or dropping off due to friction. By tracing user progress, you can scale their experience on your app.
Chameleon pros
From a wide array of features to aesthetic UI patterns that can create any flow no matter how customized they need to be, Chameleon is no doubt a powerful tool for scaling product adoption.
It works in a similar way to Userpilot and offers similar features: styling, analytics, templates, goals, A/B testing, and checklists.
Let’s look at the pros of using Chameleon:
- Intuitive no-code builder: Chameleon comes with an easy-to-use Chrome Extension builder.
- Engaging tour guides: Build interactive tours to onboard users, announce features, and create other customer in-product experiences using simple steps.
- Good range of in-app messaging and UI patterns: Easy to create custom modals, slide-outs, tooltips, hotspots, launchers (checklists or resource hub), and more.
- Full two-way and deep analytics integrations: Chameleon fits into your stack, and easily connects with your favorite tools to send data to, and from Chameleon. It offers the deepest integrations, with analytics tools, CRMs, and more.
- Effective segmentation and targeting system: Leverage user data and experiences to structure effective marketing messages and tour guides for a specific target audience.
- Advanced A/B testing: Drive continuous improvement of in-app messages and define the ideal user experience with precise A/B testing.
- Rate limiting: No user wants to be overwhelmed with multiple product tours, in-app messages, and tasks. With rate limiting, you can reduce the number of user experiences — one step at a time, with clarity over speed.
Chameleon cons
While Chameleon is a deep production adoption tool with an array of great features, there are still some downsides. Here are the main cons of the tool:
- Not entirely no-code: Early on, we stated that Chameleon can be used without code. True. But it is not a completely no-code tool. You’ll need the help of a technical-savvy employee in your team to sort out some build-up as the learning curve is steeper.
- Hard-to-use interface: The new UI is a bit harder to use (a lot of clicking), and there can be minor bugs here and there.
- Limited experiences: There are some limitations to the user onboarding flows. For instance, you can’t run multiple in-app experiences at the same time, as you can in Userpilot.
- Pricey: The Startup plan is quite expensive (starts at $349/mo for 2500 MAU and includes just one launcher). This means you need to go for the Growth plan, where you pay more but save more at the same time.
Chameleon pricing
a href=”https://userpilot.com/blog/chameleon-pricing/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>Chameleon’s pricing is based on your product’s monthly users. From the Startup plan (for small companies to get started and save) to the Growth and Enterprise plans (for larger organizations with advanced requirements) billed via invoice.
Here’s an overview of the pricing plans, and features of each plan:
- Help Bar: This is a standalone search function on top of your product, allowing users to search your knowledge base articles.
- Startup plan: For small companies to get started. Fee: $354/month, billed Monthly, usage-based, Unlimited Tours and tooltips, 5 microsurveys, 1 Launcher, Custom CSS.
- Growth plan: For growing businesses to drive returns quickly, from $1350/month. Everything in the startup plan, plus: unlimited microsurveys & launchers, A/B testing, and rate limiting is paid annually with bulk pricing.
- Enterprise plan: For larger organizations with advanced requirements. The fee for this plan is not stated on the website rather, you get to talk to the team. You get everything in the growth plan, multi-product account, user permissions, localizations, and SSO/enhanced security.
The Growth plan seems to be the real deal because of the exciting features that can boost your product marketing. For example, you can’t get the rate limiting feature on the Startup plan, including A/B testing. These are relevant and powerful product adoption weapons that should be in your arsenal if you truly want to win more users.
Is the startup plan expensive?
Yes, compared to Userpilot, about a $170 difference. It’s best to opt in for the Growth plan for the juicy benefits, where you pay $1350 annually rather than paying a whopping $5000+ yearly for the startup plan.
UserGuiding for customer satisfaction
Because UserGuiding was built with the goal of creating no-code onboarding flows, its features are better suited to the earlier stages of the user journey rather than the full course of the customer experience.
That said, there are still certain UserGuiding features that can be adapted for customer experience optimization:
- Surveys: Customer experience optimization (CXO) is heavily reliant on gathering feedback that can help improve and streamline user journeys. Collecting qualitative feedback with UserGuiding surveys can be the first step towards improving the customer experience.
- MAUs: While the MAU metric isn’t as granular as customer satisfaction metrics like NPS or CSAT scores, looking at trends in how many MAUs your product is getting from month to month can help you determine if the customer experience is getting better or worse.
- Activity feed: UserGuiding’s activity feed can show you which areas of the tool users have been engaging with the most. You can then use these insights to identify areas where the customer experience could be improved.
UserGuiding pros
UserGuiding has quite a few benefits as a product adoption solution, particularly for early-stage SaaS companies that need an easy-to-use starter tool for their small (but growing) team of product developers or marketers. Let’s look at some of the pros that UserGuiding has to offer:
- Chrome extension – UserGuiding utilizes a no-code Chrome extension.
- Survey template gallery – UserGuiding lets you choose from six survey templates or create your own survey from scratch.
- Analytics dashboard – users can see their monthly active users (MAUs) for the month, monitor the number of views their guides are getting, and see how many interactions checklists or resource centers have had in the past week from the UserGuiding homepage.
- Custom themes – granular theme customization and color selection.
- Easy onboarding – onboarding checklist walks you through key steps, such as how to get the UserGuiding Chrome extension and create your first guide.
UserGuiding cons
While there are quite a few benefits to using UserGuiding, there are three significant drawbacks to note:
- Dashboard customization – you can’t edit your home dashboard or choose which analytics you want to see.
- Pricing jumps – upgrading from Basic (2,500 MAUs) to Professional (20,000 MAUs) increases your subscription cost by more than 4x.
- Manual localization – UserGuiding doesn’t have AI-powered localization, so you’ll need to manually download, translate, and upload every CSV when attempting to localize content for your product.
- HubSpot integration – the UserGuiding-HubSpot integration is only a one-way integration which limits its functionality and prevents you from setting up two-way data synchronization between both platforms.
- Limited analytics – the analytics dashboard only shows you data for onboarding materials created with UserGuiding and even those analytics are quite limited as surveys only show you total responses rather than letting you select a date range.
- Survey limit – you can only have one active survey on the Basic plan which is disappointing considering UserGuiding costs over $1,000 annually (whereas Userpilot lets you create unlimited surveys and collect up to 250 responses per month on the cheapest plan).
UserGuiding pricing
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.
Better alternative to Appcues, Chameleon, and UserGuiding
We have discussed Appcues, Chameleon, and UserGuiding for customer satisfaction with their pros, cons, and pricing. Let’s take a look at a better alternative – Userpilot.
Userpilot for customer satisfaction
Userpilot gives you an eagle-eye view of the customer experience through user analytics, trend/funnel reports, and feedback collection through different types of surveys.
Here’s how you can use Userpilot to track and analyze customer experience insights:
- User analytics: The users dashboard gives you an overview of all your users while letting you sort by segment, company, or when they were last seen. You can also export user data in bulk as a CSV or click on the Insights tab to see segment-specific insights for a given time period.
- Trends and funnels: Userpilot’s trends and funnels reports let you track certain events like a specific feature’s usage, add filters to narrow down the data, and then create a breakdown based on segmentation data or user attributes — offering quick and actionable CX reports.
- Satisfaction benchmarking: Userpilot has a built-in NPS dashboard that tracks customer loyalty over time. In addition to the NPS dashboard, you can also use Userpilot’s survey templates to run CSAT or CES surveys and gather additional quantitative and qualitative insights on the customer experience.
- Self-service support: Userpilot lets you build in-app resource centers, which can include feedback widgets to collect feedback passively, checklists to walk users through specific processes, or integrations with knowledge bases to leverage existing documentation.
- In-app flows: Userpilot’s no-code flow builder helps you create product experiences that can help you optimize the customer experience by educating customers and reducing their time-to-value (TTV). All UI patterns are available on every Userpilot plan from Starter to Enterprise.
Userpilot pros
As a full-suite digital adoption platform, Userpilot has all the features you need to onboard users, track analytics, and gather feedback from customers without writing a single line of code. Here are a few pros of using Userpilot as your product growth solution:
- No-code builder: Userpilot’s Chrome extension lets you build flows, add UI elements, and tag features without writing a single line of code.
- UI patterns: There are plenty of UI patterns to choose from when using Userpilot, such as hotspots, tooltips, banners, slideouts, modals, and more!
- Startup-friendly: Userpilot’s entry-level plan gives you access to all available UI patterns so you can hit the ground running.
- Walkthroughs and flows: Build engaging interactive walkthroughs and personalized onboarding flows that target specific segments of your user base.
- Self-service support: Build an in-app resource center to help users solve problems, customize its appearance to align it with your brand, and insert various types of content (videos, flows, or chatbots) to keep your customers satisfied.
- A/B testing: Userpilot’s built-in A/B testing capabilities will help you split-test flows, iterate on the best-performing variants, and continually optimize based on user behavior.
- Feedback collection: Userpilot has built-in NPS surveys with its own unified analytics dashboard and response tagging to help you retarget users. There are other survey types to choose from and you can even create your own custom survey.
- Survey templates: There are 14 survey templates to choose from so you can gather feedback on specific features or run customer satisfaction benchmarking surveys like CSAT and CES.
- Advanced analytics: Userpilot lets you analyze product usage data, monitor engagement on all in-app flows, and use the data to create user segments that are based on behaviors instead of demographics.
- Event tracking: Userpilot’s no-code event tracking lets you tag UI interactions (hovers, clicks, or form fills) and group them into a custom event that reflects feature usage.
- Third-party integrations: Userpilot has built-in integrations with tools like Amplitude, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, Segment, Heap, HubSpot, Intercom, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager so you can share data between all the solutions in your tech stack.
Userpilot cons
Of course, no tool is perfect and there are a few cons to consider before choosing Userpilot as your user onboarding or product growth solution:
- Employee onboarding: Currently, Userpilot only supports in-app customer onboarding.
- Mobile apps: Userpilot doesn’t have any mobile compatibility which could make it difficult for developers with cross-platform applications to create a consistent user experience for both versions of their product.
- Freemium plan: There’s no freemium Userpilot plan so those bootstrapping their startup and need sub-$100 solutions should consider more affordable onboarding platforms like UserGuiding or Product Fruits.
Userpilot pricing
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, user feedback, and customization.
- Growth: The Growth plan starts at $499/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).
Conclusion
In conclusion, as we’ve explored Appcues, Chameleon, and UserGuiding for customer satisfaction, it becomes evident that there is a diverse landscape of solutions available to cater to your specific needs. Each of these tools brings its own set of features, advantages, and unique capabilities to the table. Whether you’re seeking enhanced functionality, cost-effectiveness, or a different approach to tackling your tasks, our guide has showcased a range of options.
Ultimately, the choice of the best alternative depends on your individual requirements and preferences. We hope that our exploration of these tools has provided you with valuable insights to help you make an informed decision.
There is a better tool for your SaaS than Appcues!
