Appcues vs Walkme: Which is Best for Your SaaS?

Appcues vs Walkme: Which is Best for Your SaaS?

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

This article is going to dive into the Appcues vs Walkme 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 Appcues and Walkme – 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 Appcues, and Walkme compare when it comes to user onboarding and other common use cases.
    • 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.
    • WalkMe is a digital adoption platform that can help you create frictionless experiences for your customers. The platform is built keeping the compliance, scalability, and security needs of enterprises in mind.
  • 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.

Userpilot – A Better Alternative for Your SaaS

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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.

What is Walkme?

WalkMe is a digital adoption platform that can help you create frictionless experiences for your customers. The platform is built keeping the compliance, scalability, and security needs of enterprises in mind.

Using it, you can onboard customers and keep them engaged throughout their lifetime with your business. With powerful features like workflow automation and analytics, you can use it to grow your enterprise.

Appcues vs Walkme for user onboarding

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

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.

Walkme for user onboarding

Any digital adoption platform that seeks to gain the attention of businesses needs to have a solid lineup of features for user onboarding. It’s crucial because this is the stage where you can make a first impression on your users. Hand-holding them in this phase can help them get up to speed soon.

WalkMe has a bunch of features for user onboarding:

  • You can create an onboarding checklist through the Onboarding Tasks feature on WalkMe. It’s possible to set different goals inside your checklist so users can keep checking them as they complete them. The Onboarding Tasks can include Smart Walk-Thrus, videos, and articles to guide your new users.
  • You can also use WalkMe’s SmartTips feature to guide your users through the app’s UI. These serve as on-screen guidance and help reduce the learning curve for new users. Clicking on a SmartTip opens a pop-up that gives more information on the element.
  • Likewise, you can use ShoutOuts to draw your new user’s attention to specific announcements. They’re essentially banners that you can use to show users what they need to know when getting started. You can also get them to take action through ShoutOuts.
  • You could also use Launchers in your onboarding flow for some self-guidance. When users click on Launchers, a new action like a Smart Walk-Thru will get triggered. Users can click on each Launcher you create to learn more about your platform.

Appcues vs Walkme for product adoption

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

Appcues for product adoption

Appcues packs robust features to skyrocket free-to-paid conversions and drive upsells. Let’s take a closer look at how the platform facilitates product adoption.

  • No-code builder: The no-code builder on Appcues lets you create onboarding flows that handhold users through your app. You can also use it to publish in-app announcements that draw a user’s attention to new features and upcoming events.

  • Pre-designed templates: You can choose from many pre-made templates for each UI pattern. It’s easy to create product tours, in-app tutorials and announcements with these templates.
  • Flow targeting: Appcues lets you segment users into different groups based on in-app activity, online behavior, and lifecycle stage. That makes it easier to customize your messaging and win over each segment, helping you convert trials into paying customers.
  • Review prompts: Available on Appcues Mobile, this feature lets you nudge users to rate and review your app on various app stores at the right time. It can help drive new sign-ups as well.
  • Other features, such as event tracking and A/B testing, can also help improve product adoption.

As you can see, Appcues is focused on in-app experiences but is limited by product analytics. Without proper data is hard to understand how your users are adopting your product and where they need help.

You can integrate Appcues with tools like Amplitude, but that comes at an additional cost. If you are looking for a product adoption tool, Appcues might not be the best.

Walkme for product adoption

Any digital adoption platform that seeks to gain the attention of businesses needs to have a solid lineup of features for user onboarding. It’s crucial because this is the stage where you can make a first impression on your users. Hand-holding them in this phase can help them get up to speed soon.

WalkMe has a bunch of features for user onboarding:

  • You can create an onboarding checklist through the Onboarding Tasks feature on WalkMe. It’s possible to set different goals inside your checklist so users can keep checking them as they complete them. The Onboarding Tasks can include Smart Walk-Thrus, videos, and articles to guide your new users.
  • You can also use WalkMe’s SmartTips feature to guide your users through the app’s UI. These serve as on-screen guidance and help reduce the learning curve for new users. Clicking on a SmartTip opens a pop-up that gives more information on the element.
  • Likewise, you can use ShoutOuts to draw your new user’s attention to specific announcements. They’re essentially banners that you can use to show users what they need to know when getting started. You can also get them to take action through ShoutOuts.
  • You could also use Launchers in your onboarding flow for some self-guidance. When users click on Launchers, a new action like a Smart Walk-Thru will get triggered. Users can click on each Launcher you create to learn more about your platform.

Appcues vs Walkme for customer experience

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

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.

Walkme for customer experience

The clear path to better user retention and low churn is a frictionless customer experience. When users can use your product well to achieve their goals, they’ll likely stick to it. This can boost product adoption and revenue as well.

Here’s what WalkMe has to offer for elevating your customer experience:

  • The Onboarding Tasks feature helps you create a smooth onboarding journey for your customers. It enables them to understand how to use it well through a self-service checklist.
  • Similarly, you can use SmartTips, ShoutOuts, and Smart Walk-Thrus to help your users discover new features and make it easy for them to start using them. You can also provide targeted guidance to them by creating segments in your audience.
  • The ActionBot can be used to direct users to relevant knowledge base articles to help them overcome any roadblocks.
  • WalkMe gives you detailed analytics on your users and how they engage with your in-app engagements. You can use them to improve your product and features further to boost customer experience.

Appcues vs Walkme for user feedback

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

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.

Walkme for user feedback

Like user feedback, it’s important to collect feedback on your product as well. This feedback can play an instrumental role in helping you make informed decisions about your product. Here’s how WalkMe makes product feedback collection possible:

  • You can use feedback and NPS surveys to collect product feedback from users. Feedback surveys, in particular, are helpful as they can give you insight into what needs changing.
  • WalkMe offers different question types for surveys and you can also set them to play automatically at various frequencies.
  • You can track the survey analytics through WalkMe Insights to understand what needs to change to boost product experience.

Appcues vs Walkme: 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 Appcues and Walkme will provide you with a detailed roadmap for making a well-informed decision!

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.

Pros and cons of Walkme

Pros of Walkme

WalkMe is among the most popular platforms out there for digital adoption, especially for enterprises. It’s got a range of useful features that businesses can leverage to create in-app engagements, track user behavior, and retain customers, among other things. Here are the pros of using WalkMe:

  • Multiple in-app engagements: Offers a bunch of in-app engagement options, including product tours, tooltips, help widgets, onboarding checklists, and more. Using them well can help you engage your customers.
  • User-friendliness: The platform is quite user-friendly in terms of creating in-app engagements. And while it does have a moderate learning curve as a whole, it becomes easy to use once you get the hang of it.
  • Lots of analytics: WalkMe provides in-depth analytics on a range of things like in-app engagements and forms to help you understand the impact that they’re creating. This helps you optimize your strategies for better results.
  • Workflow automation: Workflow automation features like onboarding automation stand out as they enable you to automate a series of steps and processes like clicking buttons to make your customer experience better.
  • Community: WalkMe offers a strong community of experts and partners who can help you whenever you get stuck.

Cons of Walkme

While WalkMe has a bunch of good things to offer that make it one of the leading digital adoption platforms out there, it does have a few drawbacks that prevent you from unlocking its full potential. Let’s take a look at some of the cons of this platform:

  • Coding knowledge: Even though WalkMe is no-code/low-code for most of its functions, you’ll need to know HTML or CSS to make the most out of the platform.
  • Challenging on complex sites: The process of implementing WalkMe on your website depends on the complexity of your site. You might find it challenging to ensure that your content behaves the way it should if you’ve got a complicated website.
  • Focused on employees: WalkMe’s primary use case lies in digital adoption for employees, even though it has a specific plan for customers. However, this makes it slightly weaker compared to other platforms that have been dedicatedly built for customers.

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 Appcues or Walkme 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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