Appcues vs Walkme: Which Is Best For Your SaaS?
If you’re facing the ‘Appcues vs Walkme’ choice – we know it’s not easy to pick the right one just based on review sites. Both have a long pedigree with enterprise tools, with Walkme especially. Appcues is more well-known for it’s easy-to-use interface. But which is really better for user onboarding, as well as other use cases? Which one offers the best value for money, and will be most appropriate for a company of your size, with your resources?
Let’s find out! 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.
Hopefully we’ll help you solve the Appcues vs Walkme debate once and for all!
TL;DR:
- Both Appcues and Walkme are popular user onboarding tools for SaaS.
- Walkme is a more bulky, and a more expensive enterprise software. It’s chosen mostly for the employee onboarding use case and enterprise integrations.
- Appcues is easy to use and offers mobile onboarding.
- Walkme has more sophisticated analytics.
- Both tools are quite pricey and don’t offer a full spectrum of features for mid-market SaaS.
- For SaaS companies looking for a robust, easy-to-use and yet affordable tool for product adoption and use onboarding – Userpilot is the best choice.
Try the best user onboarding tool for your SaaS now!
Appcues vs Walkme – similarities and differences
Appcues and Walkme are both applications for user onboarding, user analytics, and user feedback with several areas of overlap. Both Appcues and Walkme are popular SaaS tools used mostly for user onboarding in SaaS companies. Both products have several similar features.
Nevertheless, the way these features are implemented in both products may make a significant difference for the buyer.
Additionally, their pricing plans differ greatly. Let’s examine the details.
Appcues vs Walkme for user onboarding – similarities and differences
This section of the article will dig into the nitty-gritty of each area of product functionality. Based on your use case, we’ll determine whether Appcues or Walkme is the best option for you.
Appcues for user onboarding
Appcues used to provide onboarding templates, which made it easy to use the tool.
However, it was more expensive than other onboarding software due to its predefined approach. The onboarding templates have been removed by Appcues at the time of writing (end of 2022) without being replaced with another solution.
Appcues allows you to design flows that make onboarding processes a breeze. These flows are what you use to create product tours and other in-app communication with users.
Here’s what you’ll get when you start using Appcues:
- Creating product tours in Appcues is quite easy. You just need to open their chrome extension on top of your application and start building your in-app experiences with a WYSIWYG editor. You simply select a UI pattern and customize it ‘live’, or point to the elements you want to e.g. append your tooltips to.
- Previously it was even easier – you chose one of its templates, they would basically create the product tour for you, and you just needed to customize each step. This limited the options for customizing but it was useful for beginners. We don’t know if Appcues plans to bring their templates back.
- Appcues gives you access to an easy-to-use UI that anyone on the team can handle for building in-app flows without coding.
- 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 (can’t trigger JS functions, or add gamification elements) compared to alternatives, such as Userpilot.
- Events Explorer allows you to tag elements without coding to track UI engagement.
- In the events explorer, you can create custom user segments based on user properties, flows, interactions, or events.
Walkme for user onboarding
WalkMe user onboarding solution consists of 3 main guiding elements: WalkThrus, SmartTips, and ShoutOuts. These allow you to provide interactive in-app guidance to your customers.
Let’s have a quick look at each of these functionalities and how they help with user onboarding:
- WalkMe’s WalkThrus are its main feature used to build user onboarding experiences. They overlay the target software or web app and provide on-screen guidance to help users complete tasks. In most cases, this means step-by-step instructions and tips that lead users from a starting point to the completion of a given task.
- SmartTips are also a form of on-screen guidance, but they’re less about the process and more about resolving points of friction. For example, with a SmartTip you can trigger a small note to pop up suggesting relevant links or giving more information about how to complete a form.
- ShoutOuts operate like SmartTips, but are geared toward in-product messaging. You can trigger them to pop up and give more information about relevant features, new updates, or product promotions.
- WalkMe also offers a couple of other more niche features for onboarding. For example Launchers (buttons that launch other WalkMe features or experiences), surveys, and an ActionBot (automated robo-chat to help users resolve issues and answer questions).
Better alternative for user onboarding – Userpilot
Userpilot was built specifically for SaaS product teams that want to improve their user onboarding experience and boost user activation.
You can build a huge variety of user onboarding experiences and in-app guidance flows without any code.
Here’s what you’ll get when you sign up for Userpilot:
- Forget about coding in-app experiences: Userpilot is a no-code solution and only requires your dev to install a line of javascript inside your app and for you to download a chrome extension that opens up the visual builder.
- Build in-app flows using the largest range of UI patterns (modals, slideouts, tooltips, hotspots, banners) and in-app onboarding experiences (checklists, microsurveys, NPS surveys, in-app resource center)
- Get access to a built-in NPS tool for collecting and analyzing user sentiment so you can improve your onboarding process based on real data.
- Create and track combinations of in-app events like clicks, hovers and form fills, and then analyze all these interactions under your own custom events, which can be built without code or API calls.
- Use advanced product analytics and in-app flows analytics to identify where users need help and create granular user segments to trigger in-app experiences contextually (segment based on user identification data, in-app engagement, custom events, clicks, hovers, form fills, user feedback responses, NPS scores and more)
- Enhance the onboarding experience with in-app help by launching a Resource Center directly inside your app. Add in-app guides, and video tutorials, and give users access to search the knowledge base or reach out to support. Self-service has never been easier.
The best user onboarding is contextual and it happens right where the users need it, inside your app. There isn’t a better user onboarding tool out there that offers more value for the money than Userpilot.
Schedule a demo with our team and get ready to build the best onboarding experiences your users have seen.
Try Userpilot – the best user onboarding solution for SaaS
Appcues vs Walkme for user analytics – similarities and differences
We’ll be digging into the nitty-gritty of each area of product functionality for user analytics in this section. By doing so, we will be able to determine which tool – Appcues or Walkme – is the best fit for your needs.
Appcues for user analytics
Appcues user analytics is focused on the Event Explorer functionality and user segments that allow you to track user engagement and group users based on their main stage in the user journey.
Let’s look at each of these functionalities and how they can help. First, let’s explore their Event Explorer:
With Events Explorer, you can view, validate, and visualize events all in one place.
With Appcues, events are defined as user interactions with your product’s features or flows.
There are only 10 events included in the Essential plan. The Growth plan ($879/month annually) is the only option if you need more.
When trying to analyze product usage, this can be a little limited.
Now, let’s quickly see how Appcues segmentation can help. Appcues only gives you five user segments included in their Essentials plan, which isn’t a lot. It won’t be long before you need to upgrade the plan for more user segments.
The pre-defined user segments in Appcues (Evaluators, Beginners, Regulars, Champions) are very limiting if you want to access proper user analytics. Even building segments has its own limitations. You can create segments based on:
- User properties (when a survey was completed or when they’ve seen in-app flows)
- Flows interaction (has been completed or not?)
- Checklists (in progress, skipped, completed, not seen)
- Event (based on the ones you set up using event explorer)
- One of the predefined segments (Evaluators, Beginners, Regulars, Champions)
Walkme for user analytics
WalkMe offers powerful analytics and insights to get a good understanding of your users so that you can create personalized flows for them. It has built-in features, such as funnels, session playback, etc to dive deep into your user’s behavior.
Now let’s have a quick look at what WalkMe’s analytics functionality offer:
Identify how customers interact with your web or desktop application in real-time.
Data on employee engagement across your toolset.
Capture interactions such as clicks, page views, input changes, key presses, form submissions, and element selections.
Playbacks of sessions that help you identify friction points in user or employee journeys.
Using AI analytics capabilities to understand, predict, and act on user data.
- Integrate with internal tools, such as Salesforce to get more insights and analyze user behavior.
Better alternative for user analytics: Userpilot
You can’t drive success, no matter what your goals are, without proper user analytics.
How would you know what needs to be improved?
When it comes to proper user onboarding that drives long-term product adoption, Userpilot has the right analytics to help you succeed.
Let me explain.
I’m not talking about product usage only. Analytics is about collecting customer feedback, tracking in-app behavior but also tracking how users engage with your in-app experiences. Right?
You need all of these for a proper picture of how healthy your product is. And then you need to be able to act on those insights.
That’s where proper user segmentation capabilities come in. And Userpilot has you covered here.
Userpilot has really improved in terms of its analytics functionality in recent years, and now offers the most robust functionality from all the product adoption platforms (including Pendo, which has always taken prime in user analytics.)
In short, Userpilot analytics allows you to:
- Track all of your user interactions with your app – without coding- with the powerful feature tagging functionality, you can simply tag your users’ actions (clicks, hovers, form fills) with a no-code, point-and-tag editor on top of your product.
- See all your user clicks, activity trends, etc. in an easy-to-use dashboard – Userpilot also allows you to drill down into feature usage, down to individual user level, as well as company level.
- Analyze your user paths from up to 4 pages at a time, at a glance.
- Create ‘user funnels’ made up of feature tags and tracked events, and see where your users are dropping out of the funnel – and act on these drop-off points instantly with in-app experiences.
- Track feature usage by user segments with heatmaps, directly on the different pages of your product.
- Create and track combinations of in-app events like clicks, hovers and form fills, and then analyze all these interactions under your own custom events, which you can build without code or API calls.
- Create custom events that consist of feature tags as well – or combinations of tracked events you’ve passed through the Userpilot track script with features you have tagged with the Chrome Extension.
- The powerful trends overview allows you to filter your events and feature tags’ usage by segments, time period, and even company. This allows you to track and analyze event usage trends and even drill down to the individual users (or companies) who engaged with specific custom events and show them the right in-app experience.
- Apart from product usage data, Userpilot also has built-in analytics for in-app engagement with in-app flows and experiences.
- Analyze how users engage with your checklists or resource center modules, identify trends and A/B test different approaches to improve engagement.
- Last but not least, Userpilot allows you to use all that data to build highly granular user segments and reach users with the right engagement flows at the right time.
- You can even create user segments based on survey responses or NPS scores.
Now, with so much power on your hands – what are you going to do with all this data?
Try Userpilot – the best user analytics solution for SaaS
Appcues vs Walkme for user feedback – similarities and differences
Finally, most SaaS companies considering Appcues vs Walkme want to look at their functionality for user feedback. Let’s dive into it in more detail.
Appcues for user feedback
Can you use Appcues to collect user feedback? Of course.
Collecting data is not hard, analyzing and acting on it is where it gets tricky. What’s the purpose of having data if you can’t act on it?
If you want to track your NPS score over time and collect user feedback with short micro surveys, you can do that with Appcues. But to analyze the feedback data in-depth, you’ll have to use other tools.
In a nutshell, Appcues allows you to:
Create and trigger NPS surveys in-app without coding.
You can edit the NPS survey questions.
You can customize the survey display frequency and target the survey to a specific user segment (or select one of the predefined segments).
Utilize modals to build short surveys that collect user feedback: include numerical scales, open-ended questions, and radio button options.
In contrast, you cannot tag your NPS/survey responses in-app and use them to segment your audience.
In-app analysis is not possible. The only way to start analyzing your data is to download a CSV report – and we all know how time-consuming that is.
Based on the above, when it comes to user feedback, Appcues is not the ideal tool, as it lacks the ability to segment users based on survey responses.
Walkme for user feedback
Walkme allows to collect feedback from users so yo can make data-driven decisions and improve your product experiences.
Here is how Walkme’s user feedback functionality can offer you:
- Create different types of surveys such as NPS, CSAT, CES and customize it with different question types such as free text, single selection, multiple selection, rating to gather feedback from users
- Implement surveys at any stages of the customer journey to pinpoint areas of improvement and collect ongoing data
- Analyze the survey results and data in the “Insights” section
- Customize the design of the surveys with CSS and make sure they are aligned with your brand colors and style
- Set frequency rates and decide how often and when the surveys should appear to end users
Better alternative for user feedback – Userpilot
There are two types of feedback you should be focusing on collecting to better understand the health of your product and users.
First, you have user sentiment which looks at user satisfaction and effort scores or loyalty (using NPS surveys). Then you may also want to collect feedback on the functionality of the product or specific features.
You can do all these with Userpilot. In short, you can:
- Collect and track (NPS) in-app with a built-in NPS widget that allows you to fully customize the survey look and feel, and set the trigger frequency and specific targeting.
- Analyze NPS scores, tag responses, and use the data to create specific user segments.
- Build and trigger in-app micro surveys like the classic PMF survey, or similar ones and mix multi-choice and open-ended types of questions to collect specific insights.
- Be in charge of who gets which survey type and when with advanced segmentation capabilities, and of course, you can use the answers to segment your audience.
The advantage of using Userpilot for collecting feedback over other survey tools is that you can better control who sees the surveys but also you can instantly use the data collected to segment your user base and trigger the right experience for them.
For instance, if your users give you a low NPS score because they think you’re missing a critical feature (that you actually have already), you can push an interactive walkthrough guiding them to find and explore this feature.
Conclusion – which tool is better for your SaaS, Appcues or Walkme?
Hopefully, this post helped you decide on the Walkme vs Appcues question, and which 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!
Try Userpilot – the best user onboarding solution for SaaS
