Appcues vs UserGuiding: Which is Better for Customer Feedback?
Is Appcues or UserGuiding the best tool for customer feedback? And is there a better software that would better fit your needs?
With so many alternatives on review sites, it’s a bit tricky to really choose one.
It would be best to consider your priorities and the functionalities you’ll need from the tool to get the job done. Then there’s also the price that needs to match your budget. Right?
In this post, we’ll discuss exactly what the perfect tool for performing customer feedback should deliver and which will be the best choice for your company’s needs.
Let’s dive in!
TL;DR
- Let’s explore how Appcues and UserGuiding compare when it comes to collecting customer feedback.
- 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.
- 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.
- Considering functionalities and value for money, Userpilot is a better choice when it comes to collecting customer feedback. With features such as NPS surveys, in-app surveys, and survey analytics, it can help you with collecting and analyzing customer insights without coding.
- Get a Userpilot demo and drive your product growth code-free.
Try Userpilot for Collecting and Analyzing Customer Feedback
What is customer feedback?
Customer feedback is important if you want to truly serve your customers and come up with solutions that can solve their pain points.
Here is why customer feedback matters:
- Understand whether customers see value in your product and if it meets their needs.
- Uncover weak spots of your product and bottlenecks that disturb the customer journey.
- Make your customers voices heard and acknowledge them that they are important to you.
- Collect real-time insights on the go as you’re introducing new features or product updates.
Must have features for customer feedback tools
On the lookout to find the best customer feedback tools? We’ve curated a list of the best tools that are trustworthy:
- Userpilot: best customer feedback tool for creating NPS surveys without Userpilot branding and with NPS tagging capability
- Appcues: best customer feedback tool for creating mobile surveys
- UserGuiding: best customer feedback tool for creating different types of micro surveys
- Pendo: best customer feedback tool for feedback analytics
- Chameleon: best customer feedback tool for contextual in-product feedback
Let’s dive deeper into how each stacks up for different company sizes, budgets, and jobs to be done!
Appcues for customer feedback
As a product adoption platform, Appcues offers limited features that enable you to collect customer feedback. There is only one type of survey available (Net Promoter Score), and it comes with templates and analytics.
- NPS templates: You can customize pre-built NPS templates using the drag-and-drop builder.
- NPS targeting: Use NPS results to encourage promoters to review your product on app stores or ask detractors for more feedback.
- You could add a survey lookalike on top of a modal, but that means you won’t be collecting and analyzing results easily, defeating the purpose of using a survey for user feedback.
NPS surveys in Appcues
Appcues simplifies the process of creating and implementing in-app NPS surveys. You can set up the survey from Appcues Studio and customize it to match your brand image.
Besides no-code survey design, Appcues also lets you:
- Preview the survey before publishing it in real-time.
- Access, analyze, and import in-depth survey results.
- Segment users based on survey results and target them with personalized messaging.
However, it’s worth noting that when it comes to breaking down NPS survey results, Appcues has a few limitations as it only gives you the score and answers. You can’t tag responses or do more in-depth analysis unless you download a CSV file with all answers and do a manual analysis.
Other platforms like Userpilot do a better job of breaking down responses by score, behavior patterns, and other parameters.
In-app surveys in Appcues
Appcues only lets you create NPS surveys to collect feedback from customers. You can use a workaround and add a microsurvey to a modal, but this won’t be collecting any analytics, and analysis responses will be difficult.
If NPS surveys are enough for you, here’s what Appcues offers:
- NPS: The most commonly used survey option is NPS, which lets you identify loyal users and detractors.
- Survey analytics: You can track, analyze, and visualize NPS survey results. It’s also possible to export the results into a PDF file.
- Target and trigger your NPS survey to specific audiences.
UserGuiding for customer feedback
UserGuiding’s recently-added surveys feature does make it possible to collect user feedback. However, that’s the extent of user feedback capabilities that you’ll be able to get within the UserGuiding toolkit.
Here are a few pros and cons of UserGuiding’s survey feature:
- Build NPS surveys without writing a single line of code.
- Adjust the thank you page and add a follow-up question to gather qualitative data and understand the reasons behind the scores.
- Customize the button texts, colors, and designs to match your brand.
- Set up custom audiences, segments, timing, and targeting rules to trigger the surveys.
- Templates: Collecting user feedback can be pretty quick with UserGuiding, thanks to its template gallery. If you select one of the six templates, then you could have a new survey up and running in less than a minute (but it may need some tweaking further down the line).
- Those on the Basic version of UserGuiding will only be able to have one survey active at a time which means you won’t be able to have multiple single-purpose surveys in your app, unless you upgrade your subscription.
- UserGuiding survey analytics are quite limited as they only show you total views and total responses rather than the number of views/responses for a specific date range.
- The survey builder on UserGuiding is quite intuitive as it lets you add new questions with a simple dropdown menu of various question types.
NPS surveys in UserGuiding
The Net Promoter Score is a highly reliable metric for customer satisfaction and brand advocacy, which is why UserGuiding has a template for this use case. However, there are some limitations you need to be aware of when using UserGuiding to gather NPS data:
- NPS Analytics: UserGuiding automatically calculates the percentage of promoters, detractors, and neutrals so you can gauge customer sentiment at a glance.
- Survey Analytics: Unlike the other metrics, survey analytics aren’t readily available on the UserGuiding home dashboard. Furthermore, they only show you the total views and responses for a survey instead of letting you choose a specific data range to analyze.
- Survey Limitations: Because users on the Basic plan are only allowed to have one survey active at a time, running an NPS survey all the time will prevent you from creating additional surveys (unless you deactivate it or upgrade your subscription).
In-app surveys in UserGuiding
While UserGuiding didn’t launch with surveys as a feature, it was added later in the product development cycle and is available to users on all pricing tiers. In-app surveys tend to have higher response rates and offer more accurate insights into the customer experience than email surveys.
Here are a few pros and cons of UserGuiding surveys:
- Templates: There are six survey templates to choose from, covering the areas of feature feedback, support, NPS, churn, and feature requests.
- Analytics: UserGuiding does offer survey analytics as a part of its platform, but it’s not visible on the home dashboard and doesn’t show you the number of views/responses for specific periods.
- Limitations: Users on the Basic plan can only have one active survey at a time, while those on the Professional plan can have three active.
Pros and cons of Appcues
Are you wondering if Appcues is the right fit for your user onboarding needs or if you should check out other options?
Here are a few reasons why using an Appcues alternative makes sense:
- You want more customizability. Customization options on Appcues are limited to color, size, and style. Advanced customization will require you to work with CSS code. It can be a roadblock when your team members lack technical expertise, leaving you dependent on developers.
- You’re on a budget. With Appcues, you’ll have to pay more to access advanced features like custom CSS, localization or even simple checklists. If you’re a startup or small business with a limited budget, you might benefit from using a tool like Userpilot that offers more value for money.
- You want to collect detailed customer feedback. Appcues offers limited functionality in terms of surveys. If you want to explore other survey and feedback collection formats apart from NPS, Appcues may not be an ideal choice.
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.
Pros and cons of UserGuiding
You might need an alternative solution to UserGuiding if you fall into any of the following use cases:
- Advanced analytics: If you’re looking for a product adoption platform with full-suite native analytics then you’ll likely need to look at platforms like Userpilot or Appcues that are better suited to your needs.
- Create fully interactive product tours: While UserGuiding excels in creating in-app experiences and user guides, it may not offer the breadth of tools needed to fully support a comprehensive product adoption strategy.
- Build segments completely code-free: As segmentation features aren’t very intuitive and may require additional help from a developer.
Pros of UserGuiding
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.
Cons of UserGuiding
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).
Userpilot – A Better Alternative for Collecting Customer Feedback
Appcues vs UserGuiding: Which one fits your budget?
Understanding the cost implications is paramount when selecting the right solution for customer feedback, so here’s a detailed pricing comparison of Appcues and UserGuiding.
Pricing of Appcues
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.
Pricing of UserGuiding
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.
Userpilot – A better alternative for customer feedback
User feedback is an essential part of listening to the Voice of the Customer (VoC) and making product development or marketing decisions that best suit your customer base. Userpilot has a no-code survey builder, 14 templates to choose from, and advanced analytics for extracting insights.
Here are the Userpilot features you can use to collect customer feedback and analyze it:
- Survey builder: Userpilot’s survey builder lets you edit the content, update the widget’s style/placement, and set page-specific or event-specific triggers to ensure that users see the survey at the most contextual moment — all without writing a single line of code. You can also translate surveys into your audience’s native language.
- Survey templates: There are 14 survey templates to choose from with a wide array of different use cases. You can collect qualitative responses on how to improve the user/product experience or quantitative data for customer satisfaction benchmarking, such as CSAT and CES scores.
- Advanced analytics: Userpilot’s advanced survey analytics will show you what the most common responses were, what percentage of users selected a specific option, and display open-ended feedback about your product or specific features.
Survey analysis in Userpilot.
- NPS dashboard: Userpilot’s NPS dashboard compiles response data from all NPS surveys, so you don’t have to manually go into each survey and check its analytics. You’ll be able to view key metrics like response rates, total views, and NPS history and sort all the data by different segments.
NPS dashboard in Userpilot.
- NPS response tags: Userpilot comes with NPS response tags that you can use to categorize qualitative NPS answers for analyzing purposes. You can use these tags to identify common issues among passives and detractors or find satisfaction drivers among promoters.
NPS response tags.
NPS surveys in Userpilot
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a reliable measure of how satisfied customers are and how likely they are to recommend your product to others. Userpilot lets you build NPS surveys, analyze response data, and target specific user groups to gather actionable insights.
Here are the Userpilot features you can use when sending NPS surveys:
- No-code builder: The survey builder lets you edit the content of your NPS surveys, style the widget to your liking, restrict surveys to specific pages/paths, and use AI-powered localization to change the language of your survey.
- Audience targeting: Userpilot’s audience targeting features let you choose which users to include in NPS surveys. You could set this to all users, select only me if you’re still in the testing stage, target a particular segment, or set conditions that must be met for a survey to appear.
Userpilot offers multiple options for delivering your NPS surveys to users.
- Analytics dashboard: Userpilot’s dedicated NPS dashboard shows you all the key data gathered from your surveys. These include how many views your NPS surveys have gotten, the number of responses, the overall response rate, and how the score has been trending over time.
NPS dashboard in Userpilot.
- NPS response tags: Userpilot comes with NPS response tags that you can use to categorize qualitative NPS answers for analyzing purposes. You can use these tags to identify common issues among passives and detractors or find satisfaction drivers among promoters.
In-app surveys in Userpilot
In-app surveys are an effective way to collect direct feedback from users without being at the whim of their email inboxes. Userpilot’s built-in functionality lets you create surveys, translate them, and track granular survey analytics that offers additional user insights.
Here are the Userpilot features you can use when building in-app surveys:
- Survey templates: Userpilot’s no-code survey builder has 14 templates to choose from. These include NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys among others for collecting quantitative and qualitative feedback from users. You can add a series of questions to gather valuable insights.
- Survey translation: Userpilot’s AI localization feature lets you translate surveys in a matter of minutes. All you need to do is add the desired locale and leave the rest to Userpilot. You can also make manual tweaks to translations if needed.
- Advanced analytics: Userpilot has detailed analytics that show what percentage of users chose a specific option, summarizes the most popular choices, and lets you browse through open-ended responses to extract insights from qualitative feedback.
Survey analysis in Userpilot.
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Pricing of Userpilot
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, NPS feedback, and customization.
- Growth: The Growth plan starts at $749/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).
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What do users say about Userpilot?
Most users laud Userpilot for its versatile feature set, ease of use, and responsive support team:
I recently had the pleasure of using Userpilot, and I must say it exceeded all my expectations. As a product manager, I’m always on the lookout for tools that can enhance user onboarding and improve overall user experience. Userpilot not only delivered on these fronts but also went above and beyond with its impressive new features, unparalleled ease of use, and truly exceptional customer support.
What truly sets Userpilot apart is its outstanding customer support. Throughout my journey with Userpilot, the support team has been responsive, knowledgeable, and genuinely dedicated to helping me succeed. Whenever I had a question or encountered an issue, their support team was always there to assist promptly, going above and beyond to ensure my concerns were addressed effectively.
Source: G2.
Of course, other users are also kind enough to share constructive criticism regarding specific features like event tracking filters:
“The filtration while analyzing specific events is a little confusing. Understanding of custom properties and data management configuration could have been more organised.”
Source: G2.
Conclusion
This is the end of our thorough comparison between Appcues and UserGuiding. You should be able to make a confident decision by now. If you’re looking for a solid tool for customer feedback that promises great value for money, give Userpilot a go. Book a demo today!
Try Userpilot for Collecting and Analyzing Customer Feedback
