Let’s face it: without the right user onboarding tools, you can’t deliver a great onboarding experience for your new users. And without a great onboarding experience, your users don’t activate and churn. According to TechCrunch, if your users don’t understand your software during the onboarding process, 77% of them won’t come back. That’s why we’ve compiled a list of the 50 best free and paid user onboarding tools to help you smash your user activation, product growth, and revenue goals.

And not just that: for your convenience, we grouped the tools into 9 categories by the different goals you can achieve with them – signup flow tools, in-app onboarding software, email onboarding tools, user analytics, user feedback tools, customer support, and success tools, etc. – and then proposed a sample tool stack.

So if you’re interested in any particular category, simply jump to the relevant sections on the left of this page!

What are the best user onboarding tools for SaaS in 2024?

• There are several different categories of user onboarding tools:

1. In-app user onboarding tools.
2. Signup flow tools – for removing friction from your user onboarding process.
3. Email onboarding tools.
4. Video onboarding tools.
5. In-app chat tools.
6. User behavior analytics software.
7. Session recording tools.
8. User feedback tools.
9. Knowledge base & resource center tools.

• The best user onboarding tools in each category:

1. In-app onboarding tools: Userpilot, Appcues, Pendo, Userguiding Intercom.
2. Signup flow tools: Auth0, Kinde.
3. Email-onboarding tools: Drip, Customer.io, Intercom, User.com, Mailchimp, SendinBlue, GetResponse.
4. In-app chat tools: Intercom, Olark, Livechat, Drift.
5. Video onboarding tools: Wistia, Vidyard, Loom.
6. Webinar tools: Sequel.io, Demio, Zoom, E-Webinar.
7. Analytics tools: Mixpanel, Heap, Userpilot.
8. Onboarding engagement analytics tools: Pendo, Userpilot.
9. Session recording tools: Hotjar, LogRocket, FullStory.
10. Feedback tools: Typeform, Userpilot (for NPS).
11. Customer support tools: Zendesk, Helpscout, Freshdesk.

• To streamline your user onboarding processes and save costs, look for tools that integrate natively with each other. Also, consider tools that cover several use cases – e.g. onboarding users in-app and via emails, analyzing customer data, and customer engagement via live chat.
• Here are a few user onboarding tools that integrate natively with each other:

1. Userpilot (for in-app user onboarding), Intercom (for email onboarding and in-app chat), and Amplitude, Mixpanel, or Heap (for in-depth product analytics) – all have native integration with each other to make your email-in-app user onboarding seamless and more data-driven.
2. Hotjar and Zendesk – have a native integration that will allow you to cut your response time to customer feedback.
3. Userpilot, Loom, and Typeform – so you can easily embed your Loom video tutorials and Typeform surveys into your onboarding flow.

• Examples of the complete SaaS user onboarding tool stack:
• The “complete” user onboarding tool stack for growth SaaS companies: OAuth (signup) + Userpilot (in-app onboarding, NPS) + Intercom (email onboarding, in-app chat) + Wistia (video onboarding) + Sequel (webinars) + Typeform (feedback) + Mixpanel/Amplitude/Heap (user behavior analytics) + Zendesk (Knowledge base) + Fullstory (session recording).
• The “MVP” user onboarding tool stack for startups on a budget: Auth0 (signup – freemium) + Intro.js (in-app, free) + MailChimp (email, freemium) + Loom (video, freemium) + Ewebinar (webinars) + Typeform (surveys, freemium) + Mixpanel (analytics, freemium) + Helpdesk (Knowledge Base) + LogRocket (session recording).

In-app user onboarding tools

Probably the first tool you should think of when building your onboarding tools tech stack is your in-app onboarding tool. Such tools allow you to build in-app product tours to guide your new users through your product, thus significantly improving the chances they will activate (and reducing day-1 and week-1 churn). In this section, we’ll cover both no-code user onboarding tools, and DIY “budget” solutions that require coding.

These tools include:

• Userpilot.
• Appcues.
• Pendo.
• Userguiding.
• Intercom’s product tours.

Userpilot – the “all in one” user onboarding tool

Userpilot is a no-code platform designed to provide an all-in-one solution to product teams. It has built-in in-app engagement tools that allow you to create personalized onboarding experiences. As well as robust product analytics that helps you gather data from users throughout their journey—all without writing code.

Key features of Userpilot:

• Chrome Extension for in-app onboarding flows: Offers a visual “what-you-see-is-what-you-get” (WYSIWYG) editor. It enables you to create interactive in-app experiences such as banners, spotlights, tooltips, and modals.
• In-app experiences: Userpilot offers an extensive range of UI patterns for creating in-app experiences, including interactive checklists, tooltips, modals, etc. Additionally, you can set up a Resource Center, a one-stop hub inside your app where users can access guides, FAQs, and video tutorials.
• No-code survey builder: You can create Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, satisfaction surveys, or custom surveys to gather insights from your users directly within your app. Responses can also be used to segment users and personalize their experience further.
• Flow analytics: You can track clicks, form submissions, and other key user actions in real-time. Then, these analytics can help you segment users based on their behaviors, identify bottlenecks, and refine your onboarding strategy.
• Retroactive analytics: The platform automatically gathers data on how users engage with each in-app element, including tooltips, modals, and checklists (without any manual setup). This data can then be visualized through customizable dashboards, where you can monitor key performance indicators, track user progress, and generate reports to share with your team.

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Userpilot pricing

Userpilot’s transparent pricing ranges from $249/month on the entry-level end to an Enterprise tier for larger companies.

Furthermore, Userpilot’s entry-level plan includes access to all UI patterns and should include everything that most mid-market SaaS businesses need to get started.

Userpilot pricing.

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).

Appcues

Appcues is a no-code platform designed to help non-technical teams create in-app onboarding tours, surveys, and announcements to guide users through their product journey. While it provides a user-friendly interface, the functionality of its lower-tier plans can be somewhat limited compared to other solutions, such as Userpilot.

Key features of Appcues:

• Easy-to-use UI for building in-app flows: It lets you customize onboarding flows such as product tours, tooltips, and banners in real-time.
• Chrome Extension for in-product building: Allows you to build in-app experiences directly on top of your product. This means you can launch and edit product tours, tooltips, and more, without ever leaving your app.
• Onboarding checklists and action prompts (not available in Essentials plan): Appcues lets you create onboarding checklists that guide users through specific tasks.
• User segmentation and event-based triggers: Appcues allows you to deliver personalized onboarding experiences based on segmented behaviors, properties, or actions they’ve taken within your app (limited to up to five user segments in the Essentials plan).
• Event Explorer for tracking UI engagement: Sets up custom events and tag elements like buttons or forms.

Appcues pricing

Appcues’ pricing starts at $249 per month for the Essentials plan, which includes basic onboarding features like product tours and tooltips. However, if you need more advanced features like onboarding checklists, deeper segmentation, and advanced analytics, you’ll need to upgrade to the Growth plan, starting at $879 per month. The Enterprise plan is custom-priced based on the specific needs of larger organizations.

Pendo

Pendo is a comprehensive digital adoption platform that combines user onboarding features with advanced product analytics, feedback collection, and product adoption tools. It’s primarily targeted at larger enterprises looking for robust analytics and user guidance.

Key features of Pendo:

• Advanced product analytics: Pendo offers in-depth analytics tools, including Paths, Funnels, and Cohorts.
• In-app guides and product tours: Build interactive onboarding flows, such as tooltips and walkthroughs, that guide users through your app.
• Feedback and feature prioritization: With Pendo’s feedback tool, users can submit requests directly in-app.
• Cross-platform support: Pendo supports both web and mobile applications, you can track user behavior and launch onboarding experiences across devices.

However, surprisingly, for a product guidance and engagement tool that claims to be “all in one,” you can’t act directly on the user analytics from Pendo in Pendo. That’s because Pendo doesn’t allow you to target users segmented by in-app events with the in-app guides you’ve built with it.

Here’s a short list of Pendo’s cons:

• It doesn’t allow you to trigger experiences based on in-app events, either. This is probably because of tech debt – but makes Pendo’s analytics pretty much NOT actionable.
• Pendo offers limited onboarding elements, which means you can’t always create the best experience for your users. If you want checklists, these can only be accessed from the Resource Center, which defeats the purpose of having them in the first place.
• Pendo’s pricing is only available to you if you ask for a quote. The company doesn’t list pricing on its site for the higher tiers. However, some reviews say they have prices starting at $20,000-$25,000 per year for a single product and around $50,000 per year for the mid-tier package. This might be Pendo’s biggest downside.

If you’re looking for a tool that shows you user analytics in real-time and allows you to trigger in-app experiences based on in-app events and user behavior in real-time – Userpilot offers these features (and at a lower price tag, too).

Pendo pricing

Pendo’s pricing is available only on request, but reviews indicate that plans for a single product start at $20,000 to $25,000 annually. Pendo’s free plan supports up to 500 monthly active users, while more advanced plans offer additional features like cross-app tracking and enterprise-grade security.

UserGuiding

UserGuiding is a no-code tool designed for creating simple, effective onboarding experiences. It’s a budget-friendly option aimed at startups and small to mid-sized businesses looking to boost product adoption with basic onboarding features.

Key features of UserGuiding:

• Interactive product walkthroughs: Create step-by-step product tours using hotspots, tooltips, and modals to guide users through your app, without coding.
• Onboarding checklists: Build custom checklists to reduce confusion by breaking down complex tasks into actionable steps, enhancing user engagement.
• Segmentation options: Segment users based on their behavior or attributes and deliver personalized in-app guidance.
• Analytics and resource centers: UserGuiding provides basic analytics to track user engagement with your onboarding flows. Additionally, you can create a Resource Center that offers on-demand support with guides and tutorials, allowing users to self-serve when needed.

UserGuiding pricing

UserGuiding’s Basic plan starts at $89 per month, making it an affordable option for startups. The Professional plan, at $249 per month, unlocks more advanced features like language localization and expanded MAU limits. The Corporate plan, starting at $999 per month, is suited for larger businesses needing custom configurations.

Intercom product tours

Intercom, known for its robust customer messaging platform, also offers Product Tours, an add-on designed to provide basic onboarding experiences. It’s ideal for simpler, linear onboarding flows but may be limited to more complex use cases.

Key features of Intercom Product Tours:

• Basic, linear product tours: Intercom Product Tours guide users through your app with a series of non-interactive information panels. While effective for straightforward, linear onboarding, it lacks interactive elements like modals, checklists, or hotspots that more sophisticated tools provide.
• Seamless integration with Intercom’s messaging: Product Tours integrates seamlessly with Intercom’s chat and messaging tools, allowing teams to combine onboarding with customer support, live chat, and other engagement strategies.
• Frameless video support: You can embed videos in your product tours, giving users additional guidance via visual walkthroughs.

Now, using just Intercom for your onboarding has certain drawbacks, including:

• Linear tours only, no real interactivity.
• Restricted range of user experiences.
• Styling requires coding – you can always tell if someone’s been using Intercom’s product tour software because the product tours always look kinda the same…
• Entry-point pricing may seem attractive, but it increases sharply with the growing number of users you may have. There’s no transparent pricing on Intercom’s website.

Intercom’s product tours are an add-on, so you can only get them if you already have a subscription with them (Intercom’s pricing plans are notoriously complicated and tricky to navigate). The basic Starter plan starts at $74, and you’ll have to pay $199/mo for the product tours feature.

“DIY” user onboarding solutions (require coding)

We understand not every startup can afford to buy the convenient (but quite expensive) no-code user onboarding software, and may need to code up the guides for their user onboarding process themselves. Let’s look at some js libraries that can help with that, including:

• INTRO.js
• Shepherd.js

INTRO.js (Free)

Intro.js, a javascript guide, allows you to harness this principle by allowing you to insert a progress bar into your onboarding flow and get users to actually cross the finish line.

Shepherd.js

The Shepherd.js library is another javascript library for creating product tours that is highly customizable and helps you with your user onboarding process.

It basically does everything that Intro.js does, but it’s still being updated and worked on, unlike Intro.js, it seems (it has so many open issues on GitHub that nobody is responding to…).

You should choose an open-source solution for your user onboarding that can offer you support when you need it.

Signup flow tools – for removing friction from your user onboarding process

If you don’t want to lose users before they have even signed up for your product, your signup flow should be as frictionless as possible. This can be achieved with Single-Sign-On. Single sign-on (SSO) is a property of access control of multiple related, yet independent, software systems. With this property, a user logs in with a single ID and password to gain access to a connected system.

Filling out long and detailed sign-up and registration forms has always been boring and time-consuming. No one likes that!

While building the in-app experience, you could add SSO so your users will have fewer forms to fill.

You can get such kind of frictionless authorization tools to streamline your user onboarding flow with the following companies:

AuthO (Freemium)

Auth0 is a freemium platform that provides authentication and authorization solutions for both web and mobile applications. It allows you to integrate Single Sign-On (SSO), multi-factor authentication, and social logins into your app, helping users sign up with fewer steps and added security.

Key features of Auth0:

• Single Sign-On (SSO): Allows users to log in with one ID for multiple applications, improving conversion rates and reducing signup abandonment.
• Multi-factor authentication and social login: Has multi-factor authentication (MFA) and the option to sign up on social platforms like Google, Facebook, or Twitter.
• Secure user data and APIs: Auth0 provides high-level security for user data, securing your APIs and preventing unauthorized logins.

It’s based on the freemium model and it starts at $0 per month and goes up to $800 per month for 500 regular active users.

Because of its flexibility and freemium model, AuthO is suitable both for small and medium businesses and large enterprises.

Kinde

Kinde is a newer platform that offers a simple solution for startups looking to integrate Single Sign-On (SSO) and improve their signup flow. With minimal setup, Kinde provides essential authentication features that make the signup process faster and more secure for users.

Key features of Kinde:

• Developer-friendly SSO integration: Kinde allows you to easily integrate SSO into your product, helping users sign up with fewer barriers and improving activation rates with minimal development effort.
• Customizable signup flows: Tailor your registration forms to suit your product’s specific needs, including user roles and permissions, making account management simpler for growing businesses.
• User roles and permissions: Kinde offers flexible options for managing user roles and permissions, ensuring that the right users have access to the appropriate features.

Kinde’s flexible pricing offers affordable options that scale as your business grows. It starts free, but you can upgrade as you need it starting with a $25/month plan that offers everything you need, up to $250/month for businesses who need to handle Enterprise customers.

Email onboarding tools

Even when you have great in-app onboarding, email onboarding using email automation tools is still essential in user onboarding. Email verifications, sending transactional emails, invoicing, trying to re-engage users who haven’t logged in for a couple of days, or sending a list of links to read – can be only done via email. Just like a lot of a-synch support. So let’s see which email tools are best for improving the user onboarding experience, including:

• Drip.
• Customer.io.
• Intercom.
• User.com.
• Mailchimp.
• Brevo (formerly SendinBlue).
• GetResponse.

Drip

Drip is an email automation platform primarily used in e-commerce but is also effective for SaaS onboarding. It helps you create highly personalized email workflows that engage users based on their interactions with your app.

Key features of Drip:

• Trigger-based email workflows: Set up automated email sequences that trigger based on specific user actions.
• Multi-channel marketing: Engage users across various channels, including email, SMS, and social, to ensure your onboarding messages reach them wherever they are.
• Personalization: You can customize your every email sending sequence to suit your particular user interests, experiences, and needs.

Drip starts at $49 per month for having 2500 users in your list and then jumps to $122 for up to 5000 people.

Customer.io

Customer.io is an email marketing platform designed to send behavior-triggered emails, making it perfect for SaaS onboarding. It enables you to deliver the right message at the right time based on how users interact with your app.

Key features of Customer.io:

• Event-triggered emails: Send personalized emails based on real-time user actions.
• Omnichannel messaging: In addition to emails, Customer.io supports push notifications and SMS, allowing you to engage users on multiple platforms throughout their onboarding experience.
• Detailed user segmentation: Segment users based on behavior, properties, or in-app events to deliver highly targeted onboarding messages.

Customer.io’s basic package costs $150 per month, and you can have up to 12.000 customers on your list.

If you’re an early-stage company, Customer.io, because of its pricing, probably isn’t the best choice for you – but as you grow, it can become more meaningful for your business than you think.

Intercom

Intercom offers an all-in-one solution for customer engagement, including email onboarding, live chat, and in-app product tours. Its email onboarding functionality integrates seamlessly with its other tools, helping you keep all communications in one place.

Key features of Intercom:

• Email and in-app message sync: Intercom allows you to manage emails and in-app messages in a single inbox.
• Behavior-based email triggers: Send targeted onboarding emails based on user actions, ensuring that your users receive timely and relevant guidance as they move through your product.
• Segmentation and user insights: Segment your audience based on their actions and behaviors to send personalized onboarding emails that cater to their specific needs.

The plan that allows you to do it all (aside from the startup plan) starts at $199 per month.

User.com

User.com is a marketing automation tool that provides a complete suite for user engagement, including email, live chat, SMS, and more. It’s a powerful platform for companies looking to streamline their communication efforts across various channels.

Key features of User.com:

• Automated email and SMS campaigns: Create email and SMS campaigns that trigger based on user actions to keep users engaged throughout their onboarding journey.
• Popups, chatbots, and live chat: In addition to email onboarding, User.com lets you engage users through real-time channels like live chat and chatbots.
• Comprehensive analytics: User.com provides detailed insights into how users engage with your communications.

User.com has a Pay-as-You-Go pricing model, with prices calculated based on several different criteria.

MailChimp

Mailchimp is a widely used email marketing platform, especially among small and medium-sized businesses. It has evolved from a simple email tool to a full marketing hub, making it useful for creating onboarding email sequences.

Key features of Mailchimp:

• Customer journeys: Set up automated, trigger-based email sequences to guide users through your onboarding process.
• Easy-to-use interface: Mailchimp’s drag-and-drop email builder makes it easy to create professional-looking onboarding emails.
• Detailed reporting: Track how users engage with your emails through open rates, click-throughs, and other key metrics.

Mailchimp’s pricing starts with a free plan, with paid plans starting at $11 per month, depending on the size of your email list.

Brevo (Formerly SendinBlue)

Brevo, formerly known as Sendinblue, is an affordable option for businesses looking for email and SMS automation. It offers a range of tools designed to help businesses manage customer relationships, including email marketing, SMS campaigns, marketing automation, and live chat.

Key features of Brevo:

• Transactional emails and SMS: Send triggered emails and SMS messages to users based on their behavior.
• Multi-channel marketing: Manage email, SMS, and other channels in one platform to ensure a cohesive onboarding experience for your users.
• Detailed analytics: Track your email performance with detailed reports on open rates, click rates, bounce rates, and more.

Brevo offers a free plan that allows you to send up to 300 emails per day. Paid plans start at $9 per month, providing increased email volume, advanced reporting, and premium features.

GetResponse

GetResponse has, in recent years, become a household name in SaaS email onboarding. In addition to email marketing, auto-funnels, landing pages, marketing automation, webinars, and autoresponders, it also provides enterprise marketing tools.

GetResponse pricing starts at $19 per month for the Basic plan, with more advanced plans available depending on the features and number of users required.

Demo video + onboarding video tools

Video tutorials with an actual human behind them, make it easier for a user to engage. This could be included in your initial product tours (e.g. in the welcome screen – here built-in Userpilot) or while showing certain features.

It not only lets you add that extra touch of personalization to your product, but it will also make learning more engaging by breaking down complex processes. Inserting a video in an introductory marketing email increases click-through rates by 96%.

The best tools for this include:

• Wistia.
• Vidyard.
• Loom.

Wistia (Freemium)

Wistia is a professional video hosting platform designed to help businesses create, host, and share video content seamlessly. It’s ideal for user onboarding, offering features that allow you to incorporate videos directly into your onboarding flows.

Key features of Wistia:

• Customizable video player: Wistia allows you to customize the video player to match your brand’s identity and include video play-by-play of your app in action.
• Video analytics: Detailed insights help you track how users engage with your videos, including heatmaps that show where viewers lose interest.
• Interactive elements: Add CTAs, email subscription forms, or video chapters.

Wistia’s pricing plan starts at $19 per month for creating and monitoring up to 20 videos per month and then jumps to $79 per month for 50 videos.

If you’re in the early stages of your business, their free plan can certainly help you to create better videos for personalization, making your user onboarding process simple and enjoyable.

Vidyard (Freemium)

Vidyard is a video platform tailored for business use, enabling companies to host, manage, and track video content. It’s a great option for adding personalized video content to your user onboarding process.

Key features of Vidyard:

• Customizable video player with CTAs: Vidyard’s player allows you to add customizable CTAs and video chapters.
• Video engagement analytics: Track user interactions with your videos in real time.
• Interactive video options: Add quizzes, polls, and other interactive elements to your onboarding videos.

Vidyard’s pricing (apart from the FREE plan, which includes up to 25 videos in total) starts at $150 per month with 20 videos included and jumps to $850 per month for their Plus and then $2000 per month for their premium package.

Loom (freemium)

Loom is a popular tool for creating quick video tutorials by recording your screen. It’s a user-friendly option for SaaS companies that want to create step-by-step videos to enhance their onboarding process.

Key features of Loom:

• Easy-to-use screen recording: Record your screen with audio and video to create clear, concise onboarding tutorials.
• Quick sharing and embedding: Loom allows you to share and embed videos directly in your app or emails.
• Collaboration and feedback: Teams can leave comments or time-stamped feedback on Loom videos.

It has a free plan and the paid plans start from just $8 – so it’s a great alternative to the more pricey video onboarding tools.

Onboarding webinar tools

Apart from embedding video tutorials, live user webinars organized by CS to help the new users understand your product are an essential part of user onboarding. Let’s go over some webinar user onboarding tools that will help you improve your user onboarding process, including:

• Sequel.io.
• Demio
• Zoom.
• E-Webinar.

Sequel.io

Sequel.io is a versatile webinar platform that lets you embed live and automated webinars directly onto your website or app. This unique feature gives you full control over the user experience while driving higher engagement.

Key features of Sequel.io:

• Embedded webinars: Host webinars directly on your product’s website or app without redirecting users elsewhere.
• Live and automated options: Sequel.io allows you to host live webinars or turn them into evergreen, on-demand sessions to fit different user needs.
• Interactive elements: Add polls, Q&A sessions, and CTAs to engage users during webinars.

Sequel is not the cheapest webinar tool – with plans starting from $150 per month for up to 250 webinar participants. If you’re on a tight budget – you may want to check out some of the cheaper solutions below.

Demio

Demio is a user-friendly webinar platform designed for hosting live, scheduled, and automated webinars. Its minimalistic interface and customization options make it a great choice for onboarding users through engaging live sessions.

Key features of Demio:

• Live and automated webinars: Host live webinars or set up automated sessions that can be scheduled to run on-demand.
• Customizable branding: Personalize your webinar experience with customizable registration pages, thank-you pages, and interactive elements such as polls, handouts, or CTAs.
• Automated email reminders: Keep users engaged by setting up automated email reminders before and after the webinar.

Demio starts at $411 per year, so just over $34 per month. But the lowest plan only allows up to 50 webinar participants, so it may not be the cheapest or most scalable choice either.

Zoom

Zoom is a well-known video conferencing tool that also offers a webinar feature. While not as specialized as other onboarding tools, Zoom Webinars are widely recognized and easy to use, making it a familiar choice for onboarding sessions.

Key features of Zoom Webinars:

• Live webinar hosting: Zoom allows you to host live onboarding webinars with up to 1,000 participants, ideal for businesses with a large user base.
• Recording and on-demand access: Record live webinars and offer them as on-demand videos, allowing users to access onboarding content at their own pace.
• Interactive features: Engage participants with features like polls, Q&A, and chat during live webinars.

Zoom Webinars pricing starts at $690 per year for up to 100 participants. The plan scales up based on the number of attendees and additional features.

eWebinar

eWebinar focuses on automating webinars by turning pre-recorded content into interactive, on-demand sessions. It’s ideal for onboarding users without requiring constant live webinars.

Key features of eWebinar:

• Automated, on-demand webinars: Upload any pre-recorded video and turn it into an interactive webinar that runs on-demand.
• Real-time interaction: Even though the webinars are automated, eWebinar allows for real-time chat, polls, and quizzes.
• Scheduling flexibility: Set your webinars to run at specific times or offer “just-in-time” sessions.

eWebinar’s pricing starts at $150 per month, with flexible options based on the number of participants and the level of customization needed.

In-app chat tools

In order to provide a seamless user onboarding experience, you should also provide real-time customer support – especially if you have high-ticket customers. A self-serve knowledge base or a resource center may not always be enough to answer all your users’ questions – so in-app chat can be the thing to enhance your user onboarding process. Let’s look at the best chat tools below, including:

• Intercom.
• Olark.
• LiveChat.
• Drift.

Intercom

Yet another time – Intercom tops the chart thanks to its holistic approach and integration with its other solutions (email support and in-app tours).

Intercom offers not just one but three kinds of chatbots:

• Task Bot – provides estimated response time when no agents are available and assigns the task to the next available agent.
• Custom Bot – allowing you to answer real questions live.
• Resolution Bot – automatically replies to user questions (based on keywords and pre-defined answers).

After setting up Intercom, you can create two types of chatbots: Task Bots and Custom Bots.

When no live chat agents are available, the Task Bot will interact with you and often display automatic messages such as “We typically respond in two hours.”

Because Intercom is such a large product (with chatbots, helpdesk, and more), it is a bit difficult to set up your chatbot at first. The interface also uses terms like “Outbound” and “Operator” that aren’t explained (unless you search for them). The same is true for the chatbot names – they use Task Bot, Custom Bot, and Resolution Bot – and you first need to find out which one you need to use.

Overall, the interface is very easy to use, but setting up your chatbot can be a bit tricky at first.

Olark

The Olark chat box matches your branding and enables you to chat with customers if they run into a problem.

Also, you can set up live chat automation rules to automatically ask users for feedback during the onboarding process.

It all happens within the app, so you get their honest reactions as they succeed or fail. In the future, if you uncover patterns or insights from searchable live chat transcripts, you will get bonus points.

Olark’s monthly plans start at $29 per month.

LiveChat

LiveChat is another popular in-app chatbot tool for communicating with customers and solving their problems in real-time.

With LiveChat’s rich analytics, you can see where your users experience issues during onboarding (or anywhere else in their journey) and quickly respond to their problems and requests.

You can also combine the learnings with your in-app onboarding experiences (e.g. triggered tooltips you’ve built in Userpilot) – and respond to your users’ chat requests with a link triggering the relevant product walkthrough to explain the feature they don’t understand.

LiveChat pricing starts as low as $16/month.

Drift

Another of our favorite tools (which we have used ourselves). With Drift, you can capture qualified leads, engage those leads in a personalized way, and close more sales. Drift is more than just live chat and chatbots.

The software is powerful yet complex to use, which makes the learning curve steep.

Full-on user behavior analytics software

In order to optimize your user onboarding process, you need to be able to analyze your user behavior to see where your users stumble and get stuck.

The tools listed below record all your users’ actions – providing a full-spectrum image of your users’ actions and product analytics. These include:

• Mixpanel.
• Heap.
• Amplitude.

Mixpanel (Freemium)

Mixpanel is a widely used analytics tool for tracking user behavior and product engagement. It’s ideal for companies looking to analyze how users interact with their product, track onboarding success, and identify areas for improvement.

Key features of Mixpanel:

• Event-based tracking: Mixpanel tracks user interactions like clicks, form fills, and page views.
• Funnels and retention: Create funnels to track key onboarding steps and see where users drop off. Use retention reports to monitor how engaged users remain after completing onboarding.
• Segmentation: Segment users based on behavior, device type, or demographics.

Mixpanel starts with $0 per month, but you will have very limited core reports to track, and you can only have 60 days of data history. If you’re in the very beginning, this can be very useful, but you must consider upgrading to the premium package soon (which is $999 per year), but it is worth any penny!

Heap

Heap automatically captures every user interaction without requiring manual event tagging, making it a powerful choice for tracking onboarding flows in real-time. It’s designed for companies that want full-spectrum user analytics without a complex setup.

Key features of Heap:

• Automatic event tracking: Heap captures every user action (clicks, swipes, taps) automatically, eliminating the need for manual event setup.
• Funnel and cohort analysis: Heap helps you build funnels to track how users progress through different onboarding steps, and cohort analysis helps you monitor user retention over time.
• Behavioral segmentation: Segment users based on any captured event, helping you create personalized onboarding experiences.

Heap doesn’t come cheap. Its free package is fairly restricted in usage terms, and the pricing of its paid plans starts from $1,000 per month.

Amplitude

Amplitude is a powerful analytics platform designed to provide actionable insights into user behavior, product adoption, and retention. It’s particularly suited for SaaS companies looking to optimize their onboarding processes with data-driven decisions.

Key features of Amplitude:

• Cross-platform user tracking: Amplitude tracks user behavior across multiple platforms.
• Behavioral cohorts: Segment users into behavioral cohorts to see how different groups engage with your onboarding flow.
• Custom dashboards: Build personalized dashboards to track specific onboarding KPIs, such as completion rates, drop-offs, and time-to-value metrics.

One aspect where Amplitude stands out from the rest is its generous free plan, which allows you to track up to 10 million actions. This is a lot by any standards.

Apart from this, Amplitude’s paid plans aren’t quite affordable and can get increasingly expensive at an alarming rate.

User behavior and onboarding engagement analytics tools

These types of product analytics tools focus more on the onboarding process and less on the overall all-clicks analytics. They also provide cut-and-dry dashboards, which are easier to implement.

These tools include:

• Pendo.
• Userpilot.

Pendo

Pendo offers robust user behavior analytics that integrates with its onboarding tools, making it a popular choice for businesses that want to track product usage while guiding users through onboarding. Pendo’s out-of-the-box analytics allow you to start tracking right away with minimal setup.

Key features of Pendo:

• Paths and funnels: Track how users navigate your app, identify drop-off points, and understand which features are most frequently used during onboarding.
• Cohort analysis: Segment users based on their behavior and see how different groups progress through your onboarding process.
• Product engagement score: Pendo provides a Product Engagement Score (PES) that aggregates feature adoption, user retention, and engagement into a single score.

Pendo’s pricing is available on request, with some plans starting at upwards of $20,000 per year. A free plan is available for startups, but it’s limited to 500 monthly active users.

Userpilot

Userpilot is a leading platform designed specifically for user onboarding, with a focus on tracking user engagement through powerful analytics. It allows you to monitor user behavior and product interactions in real-time, offering granular insights into how users navigate your onboarding flows.

Key features of Userpilot:

• Track everything with auto-capture: Userpilot automatically tracks every user interaction in your app, including clicks, hovers, form fills, and more, without the need for manual event setup.
• No-code visual labeler to name events: The visual labeler allows you to identify and name events like button clicks, feature interactions, or form submissions with ease—no coding required. You can also edit and update tags as your onboarding process evolves.
• Funnel reports: Allows you to track how many users complete each step of the onboarding process and where drop-offs occur.
• Path analysis: Gives you insights into the specific paths users take while interacting with your product, highlighting areas of friction.
• Retention cohort reports: Allows you to segment users by signup date and see how engaged they remain over time.
• Trend analysis: Helps you track how key user behaviors change over time.
• Customizable dashboard with drag-and-drop widgets: You can build personalized dashboards for your key onboarding metrics, where you’ll be able to choose from a variety of pre-built templates or create custom dashboards by adding drag-and-drop widgets that track specific data points.
• User and company profiles: Track individual user interactions as well as company-wide engagement. These provide a full history of which onboarding flows users have completed, how they’ve interacted with your app, and what features they’ve engaged with the most.
• Complete analytics: You can track everything you build by default (flows, checklists, resource centers, surveys, etc.). For instance, there are resource center analytics that shows term search insights, module clicks, and so on.

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Session recording tools

Sometimes, click-based analytics are not enough to understand your users fully…so to improve user onboarding, you may need a different product analytics tool – one that offers you session recordings. Fortunately, there are a bunch, and a lot of them have a free version!

Here are some great session recording tools, including:

• Hotjar.
• LogRocket.
• FullStory.

Hotjar (freemium)

Hotjar is a widely used tool that combines session recordings with heatmaps, offering a clear view of how users engage with your product. It’s perfect for identifying UX issues and optimizing the onboarding process.

Key features of Hotjar:

• Session recordings: Watch real-time replays of user sessions to see where they hover, scroll, and click, helping you spot bottlenecks and usability issues.
• Heatmaps: Hotjar’s heatmaps show you which areas of your app get the most attention.
• Feedback and surveys: Collect user feedback directly within the app using on-page surveys.

Hotjar offers a free plan that covers up to 2,000 page views per day, with paid plans starting at $39 per month for additional features like unlimited recordings.

Logrocket (freemium)

LogRocket is designed to help both product teams and developers understand user behavior by offering detailed session recordings paired with performance monitoring. It’s especially useful for diagnosing technical issues and improving the user experience.

Key features of LogRocket:

• Session replays: LogRocket records every user session, allowing you to identify technical bugs, friction points, or usability problems that might affect user engagement.
• Console logs and performance monitoring: LogRocket captures console logs and network activity alongside session recordings, giving developers the tools they need to track page load times, slow interactions, errors, and debug issues in real time.
• Analytics: Gives you an overview of application performance, product adoption, and conversion rate at a glance.

LogRocket offers a free plan with basic session recordings and paid plans starting at $99 per month for additional features, including performance monitoring and advanced analytics.

FullStory (freemium)

FullStory offers one of the most comprehensive session recording platforms, capturing every user interaction with detailed insights into user behavior. It’s ideal for teams that want to deeply understand their onboarding flows and improve the overall user experience.

Key features of FullStory:

• Session replays: FullStory captures pixel-perfect session replay and can filter sessions to focus on specific user groups or behaviors.
• Rage clicks and frustration signals: Detects rage clicks (when users rapidly click on an unresponsive element) and other frustration signals.
• Detailed interaction tracking: Tracks every user interaction, from clicks and scrolls to form submissions and errors. This data provides a complete picture of user engagement and helps you optimize the onboarding flow.

With their free plan, together with your two teammates, you can see up to 1000 monthly sessions. Paid plans start at $199 per month and include advanced features like user segmentation, frustration detection, and full event tracking.

User feedback tools

Collecting user feedback – both on your tools’ usability issues and the onboarding process itself – is an essential part of user onboarding.

You can collect feedback in multiple different ways – from simple surveys sent via email to in-app NPS surveys provided by user onboarding tools. Let’s see a few options that will help you improve your user onboarding, including:

• Userpilot.
• Typeform.

Userpilot – in-app NPS & survey tool

Userpilot again?! Yes, this robust product adoption tool has standalone in-app surveys that allow you to collect user feedback during the onboarding, analyze it, and immediately use it to segment users based on their feedback to personalize their experience further.

With Userpilot, you can collect Net Promoter Score (NPS) responses. It allows you to embed NPS surveys into your onboarding flows to measure user satisfaction and track how it changes as users progress through their onboarding journey.

Plus, you can also segment users based on their NPS scores to personalize future onboarding steps.

Typeform

Use a simple form creation tool like Typeform if you only have a limited budget. Typeform has the advantage of being conversational and interactive. In addition, creating a survey is easy – it’s like typing on a notepad, with no coding required.

‍Typeform has a generous free plan, and paid plans start at $25 per month.

Knowledge base & resource center tools

In today’s world, all website visitors and later trial and premium customers immediately want access to any particular information. That’s the reason why every company, whether it’s a small startup or large enterprise, should have an in-depth knowledge base for its customers.

Particularly in user onboarding, the resourceful knowledge base will help us to create better resources for our customers and later to retain more users by giving them answers, ideas, and information about particular things – that can be everything from “How the tool works” to different use cases.

Not to mention that when your potential customer sees your tool in action or in some use case, you will easier and quicker unleash the “Aha moment”.

Hence, here are a few useful Knowledge Base products that can find their purpose in user onboarding, including:

• Zendesk.
• Helpscout.
• Freshdesk.

Zendesk

Zendesk is a well-known customer support platform that offers a robust knowledge base feature, making it easy to provide users with self-service support during onboarding. It integrates with live chat and email, allowing seamless transitions between automated help and human support.

Key features of Zendesk:

• Integrated knowledge base: Create a comprehensive knowledge base with articles, guides, and FAQs that users can access directly from your product.
• Live chat and ticketing integration: Zendesk integrates its knowledge base with live chat and ticketing systems, allowing users to escalate issues to support agents if they can’t find the answers they need.
• Other features: Community forums, unified agent workspace, Ticketing system, Automated responses, SLA management, Email to the case, reporting, and analytics.

Zendesk for Service is $49/month billed annually. In contrast, Zendesk for Sales starts at $19/month per user, billed annually.

Helpscout

Helpscout is a customer support tool that includes a straightforward knowledge base solution. It’s designed to help small and mid-sized businesses provide quick and easy access to help articles and documentation during the onboarding process.

Key features of Helpscout:

• Customizable knowledge base: Help Scout lets you create a branded knowledge base that users can access for self-service support.
• Live chat integration: Help Scout integrates live chat and email support with its knowledge base. It also supports integrations with various tools like Slack, HubSpot, Salesforce, Jira, MailChimp, and many others.
• Humanized ticketing: You can make your ticket emails look more humanized, personal, and customized for every user.

Helpscout is a paid tool, and it starts at $20 per month with one docs site, full reports, satisfaction ratings, 50+ APIs and integrations, and many more.

Its “Plus” package supports 4 more docs sites, a few more important integrations, and custom fields and teams.

Freshdesk

Freshdesk is a customer support tool that offers a multi-channel helpdesk solution, including a knowledge base for self-service support. It’s ideal for companies that want to provide a unified support experience across chat, email, and self-service.

Key features of Freshdesk:

• Comprehensive knowledge base: Freshdesk allows you to build a rich knowledge base with FAQs, help articles, and tutorials.
• AI-powered chatbots: Includes AI-driven chatbots that can guide users to the right knowledge base articles based on their queries.
• Ticketing and automation: Integrate your knowledge base with Freshdesk’s ticketing system to ensure that users can escalate issues if they don’t find the answers they need. Freshdesk’s automation rules can also direct users to relevant help articles based on their interactions.

Freshdesk offers a free plan with basic ticketing and knowledge base features, with paid plans starting at $15 per month for advanced features like automation and AI-powered chat.

How to integrate your user onboarding tool stack together?

Connecting your user onboarding tools so they actually “talk” to each other (and don’t cause embarrassing “bloopers” like e.g. sending the same message to the same person twice or asking a user that has already completed a specific action to complete it) is essential for your user onboarding success.

So how can you integrate all your user onboarding tools to avoid such situations? Here are a few tips:

Kill two (or three…or four) birds with one stone

Find user onboarding tools that can do more than one thing at a time – it will significantly reduce your implementation costs and overall subscription costs (even if the all-in-one tools might be a bit more expensive).

Look for tools holistically – choose tools that integrate natively with each other

While choosing your user onboarding tools for the different use cases, look for those that integrate natively with each other – this will save you tons of time zapping things together and save you from expensive/embarrassing mistakes in your user onboarding.

Here are a few user onboarding tools that integrate natively with each other:

• Userpilot (for in-app user onboarding), Intercom (for email onboarding and in-app chat), and Amplitude, Mixpanel, or Heap (for in-depth product analytics) – all have native integration to make your email-in-app user onboarding seamless and more data-driven.
• Hotjar and Zendesk – have a native integration that will allow you to cut your response time to customer feedback.
• Userpilot, Loom, and Typeform – so you can easily embed your Loom video tutorials and Typeform surveys into your user onboarding flow.

Examples of the complete SaaS user onboarding tool stack

The “complete” user onboarding tool stack for growth SaaS companies

OAuth (signup) + Userpilot (in-app onboarding, NPS) + Intercom (email onboarding, in-app chat) + Wistia (video onboarding) + Sequel (webinars) + Typeform (feedback) + Mixpanel/Amplitude/Heap (user behavior analytics) + Zendesk (Knowledge base) + Fullstory (session recording).

The “MVP” user onboarding tool stack for startups on a budget

OAuth (signup – freemium) + Intro.js (in-app, free) + MailChimp (email, freemium) + Loom (video, freemium) + Ewebinar (webinars) + Typeform (surveys, freemium) + Mixpanel (analytics, freemium) + Helpdesk (Knowledge Base) + LogRocket (session recording).

User onboarding tools FAQs

What is user onboarding software?

The best user onboarding software helps guide new users through a product, improving adoption and reducing churn by offering in-app experiences, tutorials, and support.

What is an onboarding tool?

An onboarding tool is a solution that provides step-by-step guidance, tutorials, or checklists to help users get familiar with a product or service.

What is the user onboarding method?

The user onboarding method refers to the process of introducing new users to a product through guided tours, checklists, and interactive tutorials. This ensures users reach milestones that make them achieve success.

What is a user onboarding checklist?

A user onboarding checklist is a list of tasks or steps that users need to complete to fully set up and understand how to use a product, ensuring a smooth onboarding experience.

Conclusion

User onboarding tools are essential for helping new users understand your product quickly.

By using tools like Userpilot, Pendo, and Appcues, you can create personalized onboarding experiences, collect valuable feedback, and analyze data to optimize the process.

That said, why not book a Userpilot demo to see how you can implement, analyze, and optimize your onboarding process?