Appcues vs Pendo: Which Is Best For Your SaaS?

Wondering whether Pendo or Appcues is the best option for your SaaS company?

This article is going to dive into the Pendo vs Appcues debate and try to answer a key question: Which is the better tool for user onboarding, as well as other use cases?

In the post below, we’ve covered all the common use cases and done an in-depth analysis of the key features of Pendo and Appcues – as well as compared it to an alternative solution that may be better in some situations.

Let’s get into it!

TL;DR

Let’s explore how Pendo, and Appcues compare when it comes to user onboarding and other common use cases.
- - Pendo is a product adoption platform that lets teams monitor product usage, analyze user behavior, and publish in-app guides. The no-code solution focuses on increasing user engagement and driving feature discovery.
- - 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.
If you’re looking for a better option for user onboarding, Userpilot exceeds both functionality and value for money compared to other tools on the list.
- 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.
Get a Userpilot demo for user onboarding and drive your product growth code-free.

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What is Pendo?

Pendo is a product adoption platform that lets teams monitor product usage, analyze user behavior, and publish in-app guides. The no-code solution focuses on increasing user engagement and driving feature discovery.

Additionally, Pendo also lets you survey users, segment customers, and see how many site visitors or MAUs your web app is getting. Certain features like product areas, data explorer, product engagement score, and resource centers are locked to the Starter plan or higher.

What is Appcues?

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.

What makes this platform even better is the fact that it offers no-code features that make it suitable for non-technical teams.

Pendo vs Appcues for user onboarding

In this section of the article, we’re really going to compare Pendo vs Appcues in terms of user onboarding. That way, we’ll be able to figure out which tool – Pendo or Appcues – is the best option depending on your use case.

Pendo for user onboarding

Pendo is a product adoption platform that has the usual onboarding features that are commonly included with similar solutions. However, those using Pendo Free will need to note that they’ll need to find a new onboarding solution once they cross 500 MAUs or upgrade to the paid version.

There are a few ways you can use Pendo to improve your new user onboarding flows:

Guide Layouts: Pendo has layout templates for lightboxes, banners, and tooltips that you can use to build onboarding flows for new users.
Flow Triggers: Pendo’s guide activation options let you trigger an onboarding flow when new users land on a particular URL, use a specific device type, interact with a tagged element, or match the target segment.
Localization Settings: Localization settings can stop an onboarding flow from triggering if it hasn’t been translated into the user’s chosen language. Because Pendo has no AI-powered localization features, you’ll need to upload language CSVs manually for this to work.
Onboarding Module: You can add the onboarding module to your in-app resource center in two clicks then change the color, text style, and progress icon to align it with your product’s brand palette.

Appcues for user onboarding

Onboarding new users seamlessly is one of the primary use cases of Appcues. The platform offers a wide array of features to help you improve user activation, conversion, and retention.

Let’s take a closer look at how Appcues facilitates new user onboarding:

Drag-and-drop builder: Appcues’s no-code builder lets you create personalized onboarding tours and checklists to assist and educate new users. You can customize UI patterns like hotspots, modals, slideouts, and tooltips to guide users.
In-app user guides and product tours: You can use various UI patterns, such as hotspots and tooltips, to introduce new users to product features in a pre-defined sequence. Similarly, you can use checklists to guide users as they explore your app.

Checklists: You can also create checklists with Appcues (NOT available on the Essentials plan) and prompt users to take action. These are ok but have limited functionality (you can’t trigger JS functions or add gamification elements) compared to alternatives, such as Userpilot.
Segmentation: You can use one of the pre-defined audience segments or create customer segments based on plan tier, lifecycle stage, and other factors. It’s possible to target individual segments with personalized messaging and journeys.

Measure and improve: You can track in-app flow performance and measure events (limited to 5 on the Essentials plan) to identify areas of improvement.

Test and optimize: The newly introduced A/B testing feature lets you test different onboarding flows. You can compare the performance of different in-app sequences, identify the best-performing ones, and refine onboarding flows.

Pendo vs Appcues for product adoption

In this section of the article, we’re really going to compare Pendo vs Appcues in terms of product adoption. That way, we’ll be able to figure out which tool – Pendo or Appcues – is the best option depending on your use case.

Pendo for product adoption

Because product adoption is the primary use case for the Pendo platform, most of its features contribute towards onboarding users, tracking adoption analytics, monitoring usage patterns, or measuring churn rates.

Pendo’s product adoption features include:

Product Analytics: Pendo analytics can show you patterns in user behavior, underutilized areas of your product, and other usage data. Pendo divides its analytics into funnels, paths, and retention — the latter of which is capable of tracking cohort churn over time (months or weeks).
Feature Engagement: Pendo’s dashboard widgets let you see feature engagement from multiple lenses to ensure you get the full picture. You’ll be able to view the features that generate the majority of click volume and track features used by accounts/visitors.
Build guides to drive engagement: Pendo has layout templates for lightboxes, banners, and tooltips that you can use to build onboarding flows for new users.
Feedback Collection: Pendo can gather user feedback through polls, input fields, and NPS surveys. Its NPS surveys can be delivered both in-app and via email while giving the option to include follow-up questions that provide qualitative feedback.

Note: Pendo in-app resource centers can only be created if you’re on the Growth or Portfolio plan.

Appcues for product adoption

Onboarding new users seamlessly is one of the primary use cases of Appcues. The platform offers a wide array of features to help you improve user activation, conversion, and retention.

Let’s take a closer look at how Appcues facilitates new user onboarding:

Drag-and-drop builder: Appcues’s no-code builder lets you create personalized onboarding tours and checklists to assist and educate new users. You can customize UI patterns like hotspots, modals, slideouts, and tooltips to guide users.
In-app user guides and product tours: You can use various UI patterns, such as hotspots and tooltips, to introduce new users to product features in a pre-defined sequence. Similarly, you can use checklists to guide users as they explore your app.

Checklists: You can also create checklists with Appcues (NOT available on the Essentials plan) and prompt users to take action. These are ok but have limited functionality (you can’t trigger JS functions or add gamification elements) compared to alternatives, such as Userpilot.
Segmentation: You can use one of the pre-defined audience segments or create customer segments based on plan tier, lifecycle stage, and other factors. It’s possible to target individual segments with personalized messaging and journeys.

Measure and improve: You can track in-app flow performance and measure events (limited to 5 on the Essentials plan) to identify areas of improvement.

Test and optimize: The newly introduced A/B testing feature lets you test different onboarding flows. You can compare the performance of different in-app sequences, identify the best-performing ones, and refine onboarding flows.

Pendo vs Appcues for customer experience

In this section of the article, we’re really going to compare Pendo vs Appcues in terms of customer experience. That way, we’ll be able to figure out which tool – Pendo or Appcues – is the best option depending on your use case.

Pendo for customer experience

Customer experience is the sum of touchpoints across your customer support, customer success, marketing, and sales teams but the product experience also plays a key role. Pendo lets you survey, poll, and collect feedback from users on the customer experience through multiple features.

Here are the Pendo features that can be used to gather customer experience insights:

Polling Features: Using Pendo to poll specific segments can guide your customer experience optimization (CXO) efforts. You’ll also be able to add polling widgets to your home dashboard so you can view responses, response rates, and other poll-related data points.
NPS Surveys: Pendo NPS surveys can collect both quantitative and qualitative data by combining rating scales with follow-up (open-ended) questions. You can view all NPS survey analytics from the NPS section on your sidebar or the NPS widget on your home dashboard. Note: All NPS surveys have Pendo branding on them unless you upgrade to the Starter plan, which costs $7,000/year.
Segmentation: Pendo segmentation settings like you create different flows, guides, and onboarding journeys for each user. You can segment users based on the type of device they’re on, what operating system it’s running on, which browser they’re using, or when they joined.
Path Analytics: Pendo’s path analytics dashboard shows you the paths users take to get to a specific page or when coming from a specific page. These insights help you identify the areas where you need to reduce friction and add contextual UI patterns.
Feedback Module: You can add a feedback module to your in-app resource center in two clicks to get direct insights from users on how to improve the customer experience.

Appcues for customer experience

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.

Pendo vs Appcues for user feedback

In this section of the article, we’re really going to compare Pendo vs Appcues in terms of user feedback. That way, we’ll be able to figure out which tool – Pendo or Appcues – is the best option depending on your use case.

Pendo for user feedback

Product feedback can provide targeted data on the product as a whole or specific features. These will offer insight into which features are easiest/hardest to use, which ones make your product sticky, and which changes to make to keep your largest customers satisfied.

Here are the Pendo features that you can utilize to collect product feedback:

Customer Effort Score (CES) Polls: CES polls created with Pendo can provide insights on which areas of your product are easiest to use. These CES polls can also target specific segments to see if new users are struggling with a feature that power users have no problem with.

Mobile Reviews: Those using Pendo for mobile apps can also use its product feedback features to collect reviews for the iOS App Store or Google Play Store. In addition to offering insights, these reviews could also boost user acquisition (provided they’re mostly positive).
Pendo Feedback: Pendo offers a separate product called Pendo Feedback that can be used to centralize feedback and integrate that data with tools like Salesforce or Jira. Pendo Feedback uses custom pricing and is charged by the seat.
Segmented Feedback: Pendo feedback lets you see what segment respondents are in, how much they spend, and other relevant user tags so you can highlight responses from your most valuable customers.

Appcues for user feedback

Appcues provides a robust suite of tools to collect and analyze your product feedback for mobile apps. However, if you want to collect feedback for your web app, you only have access to an NPS survey.

Mobile app product feedback features include:

Survey prompt asking a user to rate their experience of using a specific feature.
Survey forms asking users about feature improvements or new features they’d like to see in your product.
Collect and analyze NPS survey results to improve in-app experiences.
App Store review prompts to encourage promoters to rate and review your product on leading app stores.

Pendo vs Appcues: Which one you should choose?

To further simplify this selection process, let’s break down the strengths and limitations of each tool. Understanding the distinct advantages and potential drawbacks of Pendo and Appcues will provide you with a detailed roadmap for making a well-informed decision!

Pros and cons of Pendo

Pros of Pendo

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of using Pendo:

No-Code: Pendo lets you create surveys, in-app guides, and track metrics without needing to write your own code, which saves a lot of time (while making product experiments or split-testing a lot easier).
Custom Themes: Pendo’s themes let you create multiple palettes and ensure that any in-app materials published align with your existing brand palette (however, you can only create/customize themes after you’ve installed the Pendo snippet).
Flexible Dashboards: Pendo has plenty of widgets that you can add to your dashboard, including feature adoption, net promoter score, poll results, guide engagement, product stickiness, and MAUs — so you always have your most important metrics within reach.
Integrations: Pendo has 50 different integrations to choose from including popular tools like Intercom, Jira, Okta, and HubSpot. Unfortunately, only four of these — Salesforce, Segment, Workato, and Zendesk — are two-way integrations that can share data both ways.

Multi-Platform Analytics: Because Pendo is compatible with mobile applications, you’ll be able to track product analytics for both web apps and mobile apps. This gives you a more holistic view of how users (or specific segments) use your product on different platforms. Note: You’ll need to upgrade to Pendo Portfolio to add more than one product to your account.

Cons of Pendo

While Pendo certainly has quite a few benefits that make it an appealing solution, there are also a few notable drawbacks that you should be aware of before you choose the platform as your product adoption tool:

Pricing Jumps: While Pendo does offer a free version, it has a limit of 500 MAUs. Upon reaching the MAU limit, you’ll need to upgrade to continue using most of Pendo’s features (and paid plans tend to cost thousands of dollars per month).
Locked Features: Key features like the data explorer, resource center, and product engagement score are locked behind the Growth or Portfolio plan.
Data Lag: Pendo’s analytics dashboards only update once per hour. In some cases, this data lag could lead product teams to make the wrong decisions or draw false conclusions from outdated insights.

Pros and cons of Appcues

Pros of Appcues

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.

Cons of Appcues

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 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.

Userpilot – A better alternative for your SaaS

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.

With Userpilot, you’ll be able to track both product usage and user behavior to get a holistic view of how customers use your product — which will guide future development, improve the user experience, and inform your growth efforts.

Pros of Userpilot

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.

Cons of Userpilot

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.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this post helped you decide whether Pendo or Appcues is more appropriate for your company. As you can see – both have many upsides and downsides.

Undeniably, Userpilot provides a better value for money and is a better choice for a mid-market SaaS, especially when it comes to user onboarding and user feedback.

If you’re interested in finding more, book a demo with our team here!

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