Product tour software is a must if you want to improve your user onboarding and provide interactive guidance to your customers. But how to choose the right one?

Well, it depends on several factors, including your company size, budget, and technical resources to implement and use the tool.

Let’s dive straight into the best product tour software we’ve carefully selected based on the requirements of SaaS companies of different sizes. We picked the best 13 options for you.

What are the best Product Tour Tools in 2024? 

• Product tour software is any tool meant for building product guides and in-app onboarding, to improve new user activation rate, trial-to-paid conversion rate, and overall user retention.
• Benefits: The tools help product managers and PMMs build these in-app experiences without (almost any) coding – and without relying on their engineering team. This means product tour tools help product teams work more independently on their onboarding flows and save time and money.
• There are a few key features of a good product guidance tool:

1. Easy installation and a truly no-code product tour builder, with no-code styling options.
2. Interactive walkthroughs – a more effective onboarding UI pattern than linear product tours, allowing your users to learn by doing;
3. Analytics + segmentation options – so you can segment your users based on their attributes and in-app behavior and show relevant content to each group, as well as understand the performance of your tours.
4. A/B testing
5. Versioning and team features.
6. Integrations (especially with analytics tools and CRMs).
7. Pricing – which tools offer the best value for money, considering your individual requirement, and what are the technical and security differences between the different, seemingly “equal” options?

• Here are the best 13 Product Tour Tools for your SaaS, based on the selection criteria listed above:

1. Userpilot
2. Intercom
3. Appcues
4. Pendo
5. WalkMe
6. WhatFix
7. Chameleon
8. Userlane
9. Helphero
10. Userguiding
11. Userflow
12. Stonly
13. Product Fruits

What is product tour software?

Product tour software is a tool designed for building in-app product tours for user onboarding. They allow you to provide contextual in-app guidance, enhance user experience, and turn new customers into active users. Most product tour tools allow you to build these guides largely code-free (or low-code) – which will save you tons of money and time in terms of your engineering resources.

Let’s see some of the key benefits of a product tour tool and the features a good tool should have, before diving into the in-depth comparison.

Why do you need product tour software?

Product tour software has become a must for most SaaS companies and for some really good reasons.

Here are the key benefits of using tools for building product tours (+ rather than hard-coding them yourself):

• Since the tools allow you to build in-app experiences code-free, they give your product team (product managers and marketers) more control over the shape and look of your onboarding. You don’t need to wait for your devs to finish the sprint anymore before experimenting with your onboarding flows to improve trial-to-paid conversion rates!
• You free up your engineering resources to do what really matters – working on building and improving your product.
• Product tour tools typically have in-built analytics, experimentation suite, version control, roles & permissions, and code-free styling…it would literally take millions for your dev team to develop these solutions from scratch. And without them – you’re walking in the dark – and can’t measure the engagement with your onboarding, experiment, or quickly change it if needed.
• Some product guidance software offers the option to build tours on top of third-party apps – to foster digital adoption for the employee onboarding use case.

Hopefully, this convinces you really need a tool to build your product tours, and that it’s a not a good idea to just ask your devs to build them from scratch 😉 but before we dive into the list of the best software, let’s quickly look at the features you should be searching for when choosing a product tour tool.

Must-have features of good product tour software

Now, good product tour software solutions should have the following features:

• Code-free product tour building and styling + easy installation This one is a no-brainer; since the main benefit of using a product guide tool is to be able to build the tours quickly without coding, you need to check if the tool is really code-free – and doesn’t require tons of development resources to install and implement in the first place.
• Triggering options: Everybody hates linear product tours read more about the better interactive walkthroughs here. Interactive walkthroughs essentially “wait” for your user to take the required action before showing them the next step, while linear product tours only show a series of tooltips with a “next” button – often overwhelming your users. A good product tour software should also allow real-time, event-based triggering of the in-app experiences – allowing you to respond to users’ actions in real-time.
• Usage and Engagement Analytics + sophisticated user segmentation: on the one hand, you need to know what your users are doing and be able to segment them – both by user attributes and behavior (in-app events) – so that you can trigger the right product tours to the right segment of people. Your product guides are most effective when they are really relevant and personalized to the users’ role and JTBD – so segmentation capabilities are a must. Also – to make sure your product guides are actually successful, you need to know how your users are engaging with them – so the completion rate of each step, and goal completion – are the minimum of analytics you should expect of a product guidance tool.
• A/B testing: to make sure your product guides are actually successful, you need to be able to run experiments – testing one version of your onboarding flow against another version, and seeing which one leads to a better outcome – higher goal completion, or higher conversion rate. Few product tour tools offer that, unfortunately.
• Roles & permissions + version control: if you’re a member of a larger product team, you should be able to use the tool collaboratively. So being able to invite your team members, having different roles and permissions, and being able to see the different versions of your onboarding flow and revert any “unplanned” or unfortunate changes – is a big plus.
• Integrations: being able to push the data from your product analytics tool (e.g. Amplitude, Mixpanel) or to and from your CRM (Salesforce, Hubspot) is critical to both get the relevant data into your product tour software solution, and to pass the data from your in-app onboarding to your CRM, email automation platforms etc.
• Pricing – obviously, you don’t want to pay thousands of dollars for features you aren’t going to be even using. On the other hand – there’s no point in saving $50 per month and getting saddled with a buggy, half-baked solution that doesn’t meet your technical and security requirements (you should aim for SOC-2 Type II certified tools).

Now that you know what to look out for, let’s look at the best tools – and compare them based on the above criteria.

Best product tour software tools for SaaS companies

Now let’s go over the best tools to create product tours:

Product Tour Software #1: Userpilot

Product tours are an effective way to show new users what a product can do and reduce the time-to-value (TTV) for them. Userpilot lets you build advanced product tours, set contextual triggers, and target specific audiences, all without writing a single line of code.

Here are the Userpilot features that you can use to build a product tour for your users:

• Flow builder: Userpilot’s no-code flow builder has a variety of UI patterns to choose from, such as modals, slideouts, tooltips, and driven actions. All UI patterns are available for use regardless of which Userpilot plan you’re on. All you need to do is install the Chrome extension.

  

• Contextual triggers: Userpilot lets you set triggers for your flows to ensure that they appear at the most contextual moments. Flows could be triggered when users land on a specific page or when a tracked event occurs. There are also manual triggering options that you can tinker with.
• Audience targeting: Userpilot’s audience targeting setting lets you set the conditions needed for a flow to show up for a specific user. You can use these settings to create flows that target a specific segment or exclude certain users from seeing a flow if certain conditions are met.

 

Pros of building your interactive product tours with Userpilot

• You create interactive product tours with Userpilot directly on top of your app, mimicking your users’ behavior as you do it. This is (in my option) the most intuitive way of building user onboarding without code:

• You can build branched and fully interactive walkthroughs/product guides. Using our unique Driven Actions system, you can set event-based triggers for different elements of the tour. For example, you can require a user to complete a text field or go to another page in your app before moving on. This turns a passive tour into something much more interactive and conducive to learning, which minimizes Time To First Value. In this way, Userpilot is highly focused on helping you drive user activation.
• Userpilot is one of only two tools on the market that offer real-time, event-based triggering of the onboarding flows. This means you can react to your user behavior in real-time!
• We have a visual WYSIWYG builder with a comprehensive range of UX elements including native tooltips, hotspots, checklists, welcome screens, modals, microsurveys, slideouts, resource centers, and more
• To take your product tour to the next level, we also have a range of segmentation and personalization options. For users who have different use cases, you can build different experiences that are relevant to them:

• You can supercharge your product growth with actionable insights from Trend analysis, spot drop-offs and improve trial-to-paid conversion rate with Funnels, and understand the impact of your efforts better with Cohort Analysis.

• Did we mention our easy-to-use, visual interface allows you to build any experience or UI pattern in minutes, without code?
• Userpilot is also quick and easy to deploy, requiring only a Chrome extension download and installation of a JS snippet across your site.
• You can easily pass all your in-app events and user attributes via Segment integration.
• As one of the very few tools that offer experimentation capabilities, Userpilot allows you to A/B test different versions of your onboarding experiences to achieve your growth goals.

• Plus, Userpilot has 14 survey templates to choose from that help you collect both qualitative and quantitative feedback from your users. These include customer satisfaction benchmarks like CSAT or CES surveys and open-ended questions about specific features.

• Userpilot has a wide range of one-click integrations, both with analytics tools (Amplitude, Heap, Mixpanel, Google Analytics), CRMs (Hubspot), and webhooks.
• It offers excellent value for money with all features being available without any limitations in all plans.
• Get a free demo of Userpilot to see how it can drive your SaaS product growth.

Cons of Userpilot

• It doesn’t work on mobile apps. Yet. Keep an eye out!
• It’s not suitable for employee onboarding on third-party apps such as Salesforce or Hubspot.

RELATED: In our last blog, we showed you what you need to do to build awesome product tours and walkthroughs. Check it out if you’re looking for more tips on creating your next product tour!

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 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).

Product Tour Software #2: Intercom

You’re probably already familiar with Intercom, the conversational marketing and engagement platform, also known for its product tour software.

Well, they also have an add-on called Intercom Product Tours.

Don’t get me wrong. The Intercom product is great. But Intercom Product Tours is only really suitable for really basic product tours, as we’ve discussed in an earlier blog.

• It only supports linear onboarding – that is, a series of non-interactive information panels like in the picture above, not interactive product tours:

• The UX is quite basic, which limits how contextual the cues given can be. There are no modals, slideouts, checklists or hotspots, for example. If you are supporting multiple use cases and multiple audience segments, or if your product has a lot of different functionality, this one-size-fits-all approach is problematic.
• Intercom Product Tours doesn’t support A/B testing. So how will you work out whether your onboarding can be improved?

• Although it claims to be no-code, in fact the styling you can employ without CSS coding is pretty limited. If you want complete control over the look and feel, you’re doing to need a web developer on the case.

Finally, Intercom Product Tours is only available as an add-on to the main Intercom product.

That is, you can’t buy it separately – you have to spend at least $149 per month extra on top of your Intercom subscription.

Pros of Intercom

• If you’re a diehard Intercom user and your onboarding needs are simple, it integrates seamlessly with the rest of their tools
• The frameless videos look great!

Cons of Intercom

• 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 product tour pricing

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.

Product Tour Software #3: Appcues

Appcues has been around for years in the product onboarding space, and their service offers a comprehensive range of product tour features.

It supports the full range of different UX elements, giving you lots of design options for designing onboarding tours.

But, Appcues still only supports linear onboarding.

Their “Flows” don’t drive users to complete tasks – they are passive.

That’s ok for onboarding materials in a help center, perhaps. Linear onboarding of this sort is good for very basic introductory steps.

But when a user is actively engaged in a task, they want the help available right then and there – contextually. This is called reactive onboarding – because you’re reacting to your user’s behavior in-app in real-time.

Conversely, linear tours used as a form of proactive onboarding are just annoying for users who aren’t interested in the feature at the time you’ve decided to train them on it.

I also find Appcues a bit difficult to use. Perhaps that’s because they’ve added so many bits and pieces to the service over the years.

But I don’t like having to switch between pages when I’m designing a Flow.

Pros of Appcues

• Lots of UX options mean that you can be really imaginative with your tours
• Appcues produces loads of great content, on their own blog and on Really Good UX

Cons of Appcues

But as any tool, Appcues is not without its flaws – and at this price point, we think you may really want to consider some options that offer the same or more advanced functionality, but at a lower price tag:

• Appcues lacks certain transition actions like driven actions, scroll position, or page change, which would make product tours more interactive.
• It heavily limits the functionality available in the lowest (Essentials) plan. If you need checklists, more than 10 events, or more than 5 user segments, you’ll need to upgrade to the Growth plan (starting at $879/mo payable annually, which means you need to fork out more than $10,500 to start using Appcues for more use cases.
• Appcues doesn’t have a resource center feature, meaning you can’t use it to offer self-service support to your users.
• Native styling options are limited – full control again depends on CSS coding
• Linear onboarding really limits its ability to drive user activation

Appcues pricing

Pricing for Appcues starts at $249 per month, with the platform offering three distinct tiers – Essentials, Growth, and Enterprise. The total cost can vary depending on the number of monthly active users (MAU). For instance, the Essential plan starts at $249 per month for 2500 MAU but jumps to $299 for 5000 MAU.

It’s also worth noting that Appcues is pricier than some of the other product adoption tools available in the market, including Userpilot. For instance, Userpilot’s basic tier (Starter) lets you add up to 10 audience segments and includes the complete set of UI patterns.

Product Tour Software #4: Pendo

Pendo is a comprehensive digital adoption platform with impressive analytics, in-app feedback, and product adoption features.

It caters primarily to enterprise users and probably has the most advanced analytics of all the tools we’re covering in this article. But it all comes at a price.

Pros of Pendo

Despite the price and its steep learning curve, Pendo does have a few pros compared to its competitors.

• Pendo is known for its good and easy-to-use analytics tools like Paths, Retention, and Funnels. (As of Q1 2023, Userpilot will have the same analytics features, with more robust functionality). These may not be necessary though if you’re looking just for tour software.
• Pendo has a shareable product-planning tool to organize customer feedback and prioritize high-value features. It helps keep teams aligned with the shared feature-planning guide.
• It works on web apps and mobile apps so if you need both, this might be a good choice for you.

Cons of Pendo

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 has 4 pricing plans divided into 2 tiers (“plans to get started” and “plans to grow”), and 2 products (“engage” and “adopt”).

The basic “plans to get started” start at $7000 per year, paid annually only. This plan doesn’t make a lot of sense as it has extremely limited features (compared to Userpilot’s “Traction” plan, which gives you all the features and integrations + up to 2,500 MAUs for $2988!):

• no NPS
• no Resource Center
• no integrations (!)
• only basic analytics

The “growth” plans to 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.

The tricky part when it comes to Pendo’s pricing is that you get to pay separately for different modules:

• Pendo Free: up to 500 MAU, single-app, and basic functionality and analytics.
• Pendo Starter $7000/year: 2,000 MAU limit, multi-app, and access to premium features like NPS but it doesn’t include advanced analytics or integrations.
• Pendo Growth: Custom MAU, single-app, NPS and PES, resource center, and access to support compared to lower plans.
• Pendo Portfolio: Custom MAU, multi-app, cross-journey reports, experimentation, and 1 free integration included.
• Pendo Premium: Custom MAU, multi-app, everything in other plans plus custom roles and permissions and advanced security.
• Pendo Feedback: collecting feature requests is a separate module with custom pricing.
• Pendo Adopt: employee onboarding is a separate module with custom pricing.

Product Tour Software #5: WalkMe

If anything, WalkMe is even better known than Appcues. It has massive brand recognition and so is the first name that comes to mind when many people are looking for product tour software.

WalkMe used to be on-premise software that you had to install locally, but now it is pure SaaS – which is a great improvement.

One really interesting feature is WalkMe’s context-intelligent algorithm, which attempts to work out user needs and intentions and then serve up the most appropriate tours and onboarding flows.

Pros of WalkMe

• Lots of name recognition and a strong brand reputation
• Loads of features – it aims to provide a complete Digital Adoption Platform, including analytics, A/B testing and task automation
• Product tours don’t have to be completely linear, but reviews suggest that not all use cases can be accommodated
• Works on 3-rd party apps, so you can build digital adoption flows on e.g. Salesforce of Hubspot to train your employees with it

Cons of WalkMe

• One of the most expensive product tour software options out there
• Very hard to install and actually use – requires a lot of technical set up and dev resources to customize (read this case study of a customer who switched from Walkme to Userpilot and saved dozens of dev hours)
• Only suitable for large enterprises
• Best for employee training and onboarding, not user onboarding
• poor value for money – with even the “startup plans” in the area of $12,000 per year and going up to $55,000 per annum.
• only annual plans available
• no free trial to actually check how it works.

RELATED: [Case Study] How Touchright Software saved hours of dev time after switching from Walkme to Userpilot

WalkMe pricing

WalkMe is popular with enterprise-level businesses, who appreciate its massive range of features (which go way beyond WalkMe product tours – it’s an entire Digital Adoption Platform) and very high-security spec.

That’s pretty amazing when it works well, but it comes at a price. WalkMe pricing is bespoke, but it tends to range from anywhere between $9,000 and $50,000.

But that number of features can be intimidating and hard to get to grips with. A wide variety of templates (pictured above) helps with that, but WalkMe really delivers best when you have a lot of time (and development support) to dedicate to it.

Product Tour Software #6: WhatFix

WhatFix has a lot of great functionality – including the ability to create product tours of the sort we believe are essential to driving user activation.

Here’s an example of designing a tooltip in WhatFix.

That makes WhatFix a real competitor, but there are some important caveats to be aware of.

Firstly, in-app styling is pretty basic – which means, once again, you’ll need CSS skills or resources to get your onboarding experiences aligned with the look and feel of the rest of your app.

Pros of WhatFix

• Offers interactive walkthroughs.
• Lots of different UX options.
• Easy to install via Chrome extension and JS snippet.

Cons of WhatFix

• Only has basic in-app styling options.
• No A/B testing in-app or built-in analytics. It does, however, support Google Analytics integration.
• Bespoke pricing makes it hard to know who to recommend WhatFix to.
• WhatFix’s customer support seems to not be the best. Check out the review sites and you’ll see a lot of grumbles.

WhatFix pricing

WhatFix is very cagey on pricing. No bands are given on-site – it’s by quote only. Not to mention, there is no free trial option.

Product Tour Software #7: Chameleon

This is another onboarding and product tour software service.

Chameleon has a lot of good features and can definitely hold its own against rivals like Appcues.

It offers a wide variety of UX elements (tooltips, hotspots, beacons etc) and can be used to build complicated walkthroughs. It also has an innovative “launcher” function which you can use to deploy checklists and other widget elements.

It has advanced user segmentation and personalization (which it did not until recently), and event-based triggers – although these are not as customizable as, say, Userpilot offers.

Personally, I find the UI fairly hard to use – maybe because it has so many elements.

Chameleon’s main differentiator is that they will do the styling coding for you. This is great if you have very specific look and feel needs for your product tours but lack the resources in-house to execute it.

Pros of Chameleon

• Highly competitive range of UX and tools.
• Extensive range of integrations, with tools like Mixpanel, Amplitude, Heap, Intercom, Zapier, Slack etc.
• Bespoke coding makes it perhaps the most suitable option for services with a really distinctive look and feel needs.

Cons of Chameleon

• Bespoke coding, of course, will slow down the speed at which it can be deployed.
• Access to a lot of the best features are restricted on the lower pricing tiers (eg the Startup package offers only 5 microsurveys and 1 launcher, and it omits A/B testing entirely).

Chameleon pricing

Chameleon offers three pricing plans:

• Startup: from $349/ mo with limited features
• Growth: from $899/mo
• Enterprise: enhanced security and support with custom pricing

Product Tour Software #8: Userlane

Userlane is a code-free digital adoption platform that allows you to create in-app interactive content to guide new users and increase product adoption.

Pros of Userlane

Userlane is a popular digital adoption tools and comes with many benefits. Here are its pros.

• Lanes are easy to set up and implement.
• Easy to add gamification elements to your onboarding.
• Includes real-time analytics so you can identify behavior trends and act on them.
• Doesn’t require technical knowledge as it’s mostly code-free.

Cons of Userlane

However, this tool has some flaws so it’s better to get an overview of its cons iif you’re thinking of buying it:

• Not that many integration options. As of now, it has integrations with Confluence, Zendesk, and KnowledgeOwl.
• Some of the UI patterns, like hotspots and tooltips, aren’t as functional as users might like.
• Offers only interactive walkthroughs, known as lanes.
• Works only in the dashboard and can’t be launched in a Chrome extension as most of its competitors, like Userpilot does.
• Unclear pricing.

Userlane Pricing

Userlane’s pricing is not public and you should reach out to their sales team to get a quote.

But keep in mind that it is based on two things: the number of guided users and the product features you want access to.

Product Tour Software #9: Helphero

If you’re looking for really inexpensive product tour software, Helphero is one of the best. It starts at just $55 per month for up to 1,000 users, making it affordable for even really small businesses. It’s also fairly simple to use thanks to its Chrome Extension that allows you to build the product onboarding tours directly on top of your app, but unfortunately, the builder is a bit clunky and the styling options are very limited (+ there are no templates unlike in e.g. Userpilot).

Of course, this is not true interactivity of the sort Userpilot enables because it only depends on a click input. As the tooltip itself says, the click is just a substitute for a “Next” button in a linear flow – but nevertheless, it’s a smart way of using the functionality.

If you’re looking for really inexpensive product tour software, Helphero is one of the best. It starts at just $55 per month for up to 1,000 users, making it affordable for even really small businesses. It’s also fairly simple to use thanks to its Chrome Extension that allows you to build the product onboarding tours directly on top of your app, but unfortunately, the builder is a bit clunky and the styling options are very limited (+ there are no templates unlike in e.g. Userpilot).

Of course, this is not true interactivity of the sort Userpilot enables because it only depends on a click input. As the tooltip itself says, the click is just a substitute for a “Next” button in a linear flow – but nevertheless, it’s a smart way of using the functionality.

Pros of Helphero

• The price makes it accessible to even the smallest companies.
• A surprisingly wide range of UX elements, including checklists.
• Simple integration with Intercom, making it a real competitor to Intercom Product Tours
• Some basic engagement and usage analytics:

Cons of Helphero

• At the end of the day, it’s still restricted to linear and branching onboarding.
• Styling options are limited unless you’re able to use CSS.
• A/B testing is only available to technical users who can code

• If you have a lot of users per month, Helphero’s competitive advantage on price quickly disappears.

Helphero pricing

• 14-day free trial
• Up to 2500 MAU: $115/month
• Up to 5000 MAU: $179/month
• Up to 10.000 MAU: $249/month
• Up to 20.000 MAU: $299/month
• More than 20.000 MAU: Custom plan

Product Tour Software #10: Userguiding

UserGuiding is a lower-cost, entry-level product adoption tool offering a range of features to help companies onboard new customers and boost product adoption.

UserGuiding excels at building simple onboarding experiences for users. It includes a no-code builder, segmentation options, and easily added UI patterns like hotspots, tooltips, and modals.

Although it also has some other goodies like a resource center and analytics, the meat of this product is its onboarding flow builder. If all you’re looking for is a relatively easy way to build simple onboarding flows, this could be a great choice for you. However, people looking for more analytics, customization, or complex integrations should probably look elsewhere.

Pros of Userguiding

There are some advantages when it comes to choosing UserGuiding. Here are its pros:

• For small startups or independent businesses, the price is an attractive element to consider.
• A good variety of UI patterns to choose from when building flows and guides
• Unlike some of the more expensive options, you can choose to add a Resource Center (a bonus for self-service support).
• For a budget tool, UserGuiding still offers integrations with other applications, such as Mixpanel, Hubspot, Woopra, Slack, Webhook, etc.

Cons of Userguiding

Though UserGuiding is a solid product many improvements are still needed. The cons of using UserGuiding include:

• There are many bugs and performance issues when using the tool. The UI is also fairly tricky to navigate.
• It has limited functionality, particularly on the basic plan. There you only have a small range of features available – all with the UserGuiding watermark/branding.
• Technical knowledge is required to get the maximum out of this product.
• Customization and design options for UI patterns aren’t the greatest.
• The most valuable integrations are limited only to the Enterprise plan!
• For the Hubspot Integration: Hubspot Enterprise Plan is required. To enable Userguiding’s integration, you must be subscribed to Hubspot’s enterprise plan.

Userguiding Pricing

UserGuiding’s pricing model is far simpler than others on our list. There are three tiers, each one charging a set amount for access to certain tools.

Here are its packages:

• Basic will give you access to only the most essential onboarding tools: Starting at $99/mo or $69/mo (if you buy the yearly contract), this budget option has a few limitations to consider (i.e. just 1 Team Member, a limit of 20 guides, and 2 checklists, UserGuiding branding on all UI patterns).
• Professional adds unlimited guides, hotspots, and checklists. Starting at $399/mo or $299 /mo if billed yearly.
• Corporate gives you access to everything plus personalized coaching. Starting at $699/mo or $499/mo for a yearly plan.

Product Tour Software #11: Userflow

Userflow is a lower-end product tour builder with a rather user-friendly interface and simplified analytics. It’s suitable for startups (with pricing starting at $200).

Pros of Userflow

Userflow offers several benefits for product tours, including:

1. Easy to use (well…for some): Userflow’s drag-and-drop interface allows you to build the flows in the dashboard and see an overview of the whole flow (all steps) at once. Some people really like using the visual way of building the whole flow on a dashboard rather than inside your app. This has some limitations too, which we’ll discuss in the next section though.
2. Customizable: Using Userflow, product tours can be customized with branding elements, visual design, and interactivity.
3. Data-driven: Userflow provides simple analytics and feedback tools, enabling product teams to track user engagement and make data-driven improvements to the tour over time.

1. Supports A/B testing: Userflow allows product teams to test different versions of product tours and compare the results, helping to determine the best approach for their users.
2. Integrations: The Userflow product tour tracking and analysis tool integrates with a variety of other tools, including Google Analytics, Intercom, and Slack.

The Userflow platform offers a powerful and flexible solution for creating and designing product tours, helping to educate users and drive adoption.

Cons of Userflow

Although Userflow has many advantages, there are also quite a few drawbacks:

• You don’t build your flows directly on top of your app, which can be confusing (and I personally find it counterintuitive). In order to select an element you want to attach the tooltip to, you need to open a chrome extension that takes a snapshot of your interface:

• This makes the whole process of building your product tour in Userflow a bit clunky:

• Limited customization options: While Userflow provides a range of customization options, some users may find the level of control and flexibility limited compared to other tools or custom development.
• Learning curve: While Userflow is designed to be user-friendly, there may be a learning curve for some users as they get used to the interface and features. For instance, you don’t build your product tour on top of your own interface – you have to build it in the dashboard, and then take a weird snapshot of your UI to select an element you want to e.g. attach your tooltips to:
• Integration limitations: While Userflow integrates with a range of other tools, it may not be compatible with all platforms or systems, and integration with some tools may be limited.
• Requires internet connection: Userflow is a cloud-based tool and requires an internet connection to use, which may be an issue for some users.
• Technical limitations: Userflow may not be suitable for complex or highly customized product tours, and some users may find the technical limitations of the tool to be restrictive.

Overall, Userflow is a powerful and flexible tool for creating product tours, but it may not be the best fit for all users and may have some limitations depending on the specific needs and requirements of a product. As with any tool, it’s important to carefully evaluate the benefits and drawbacks before making a decision to use it.

Userflow pricing

Userflow, as of March 2023, has 3 pricing plans:

• Startup – starting from $200 for 3,000 MAUs, billed annually – this plan also heavily limits the features available: to only 1 checklist and 10 launchers (flows), no NPS surveys, no no-code event tracking, no localization etc.
• Pro – $600 billed annually, so $7200 per year – this plan includes all the features
• Enterprise – only on-demand pricing – this plan includes all in Pro + custom limits, SSO and custom contract.

Product Tour Software #12: Stonly

Stonly positions itself as a budget-friendly alternative to their more expensive competitors, but in fact – it’s more of a CS tool for building knowledge bases than a product adoption tool for onboarding. Similarly to Intercom Product Tours, Stonly’s tour builder feels like a makeshift add-on to the Knowledge Bases rather than a fully-fledged product (compared to its competitors like Userpilot or Appcues).

So it may be good for startups and small businesses with few users and per-view pricing model (which may become super-expensive once you have more users!) and that want a tool primarily for the Knowledge Base use case.

Stonly’s product tours are not the most intuitive (and require quite a bit of coding), and it come with limited integrations. In fact – it’s setup and builder are extremely confusing: you can build the tours both in the Stonly dashboard and on top of your app, but then you need to go back to the dashboard to edit the content of the steps you’ve just built in the Chrome Extension? 🤔 This doesn’t make much sense…

Let’s look at it’s pros & cons for product tours in more detail.

Pros of Stonly

• The ability to support multiple languages
• Small companies with fewer initial views will benefit from this pricing model
• Integrated analytics
• Front, Zendesk, Freshdesk, and Segment integrations
• Knowledge base functionality included

Cons of Stonly

• Extremely confusing builder
• Pretty code-heavy product tour setup for a “no-code tool”
• Confusing installation: it’s impossible to install it for a non-technical user:

• Requires some knowledge of CSS to customize – the customization options are worse than the market standard
• Doesn’t allow you to add content to your product guides (text) directly in the Chrome Extension:

• There is a lack of certain popular product tour features, such as progress bars and checklists

Stonly Pricing

Stonly, as of 2023, has only two plans on its pricing page:

• $249 (or $199 if you pay annually) for up to 4,000 views, then pay as you go – which may become very expensive if you have more MAUs or very active users that use your tool daily.
• custom quote – for enterprise clients only.To be perfectly honest – at the $249 monthly price point you would be better off throwing in the extra $50 and get a monthly subscription of a more intuitive and robust product guidance tool like Userpilot for it.

Product Tour Software #13: Product Fruits

Product Fruits is a platform designed to help you tackle issues related to software adoption. With a focus on seamless customer onboarding, this tool allows companies to create engaging in-app journeys.

Pros of Product Fruits

Product Fruits s is one of the cheapest user onboarding tools on the market, so it may be a go-to tool to build product tours for really small startups on a budget under $100.

It’s most commonly quoted pros include:

• the responsiveness of the CS team
• easy set up

Cons of Product Fruits

There are several downsides to this affordable product tour solution though:

• only basic, linear product tours
• clunky UX – making it quite difficult to use
• only basic form of a resource center and checklists
• No NPS
• no native surveys
• no reporting for the Resource Center (“life ring widget”)
• the product tour triggering can be quite buggy

Product Fruits Pricing

Although Product Fruits is still one of the cheapest solutions on the market, its plans went up in price by about 20% recently:

• Core from $79 for 1,500 users
• Boost $129 for 1,500 users and then $249 for up to 5000 MAUs.
• Enterprise – custom quote only.

Beyond the product tour software – How to get the best results

When it comes to selecting the best product tour software, there is some general advice that is very relevant:

It’s not how much you’ve got – it’s how you use it that counts.

Badly designed, badly-targeted product tours don’t achieve the desired results, interactive or not. Good design is all about knowing your audience and knowing your user journey.

In this final section, we’ll share our thoughts on the things you should be doing to make sure your product tours and interactive walkthroughs can soar.

#1 Segment and personalize as much as you can

Contextual microsurveys are brilliant for collecting information that allows you to customize onboarding without boring the user.

Just a few simple questions at strategic moments can give you essential insight into what is important to a user – what value means to them and what they’re hoping to achieve.

Motivation and Ability are both dependent on giving people the right information at the time they need it – so the more you can segment users by these criteria, the more relevant you can make their bespoke tours.

#2 Before or after sign-up?

Have you thought about onboarding people before they’re even signed-up users?

If you’re involved in Product-Led Marketing, then a product tour can be one of the best marketing tools imaginable!

This is something that SalesFlare actually did – basically using their entire walkthrough as a product demo (9:30).

Ask yourself: will this get users to Aha quicker than making them sign up first?

#3 Help center is vital

Your product tours will get users a long way, but there will always be some questions or problems you haven’t anticipated.

So you’re going to need to complement your walkthroughs with:

• FAQs and Document Centers: when users proactively get into the weeds, it’s important that you cater to their more advanced needs.
• Live Chat: sometimes, self-serve will only get you so far. Occasionally, a user will come across a problem that needs human help to solve.

Even if you have thought of everything, there will always be some users who need hand-holding and reassurance and who can’t get to grips with a tutorial.

Your activation strategy needs a comprehensive help center just as much as it needs product tours. Fortunately, that’s part of the Userpilot offering as well…

#4 Iterate using analytics

One of the main problems we see again and again with product tours is that they are treated as “one-and-done” features.

Which is crazy.

A marketer would never just say “Well, that’s the landing page sorted” and simply walk away. They look at the performance data and optimize over time!

So why would a product manager set up all his or her onboarding flows and just move on?

You need to be tying your product tours to activation or other KPIs and tracking the impact they have. If you’re not able to correlate interaction with your tours to users’ engagement or success metrics, you’re missing out on important opportunities to improve.

So, it’s vital to choose a walkthrough software that comes with event-tracking abilities, so that you can leverage in-app events to generate actionable insights.

For example, in Userpilot, you can spot drop-offs in the onboarding process and improve the trial-to-paid conversion rate with Funnels.

#5 Know your user journey

If you’re going to produce a comprehensive onboarding system comprised of short, segmented, contextually-triggered interactive walkthroughs you’re going to need to know your product, your audience, and their use cases inside and out.

To be able to hand-hold users through every step of the journey in detail… that’s a lot of work! No wonder so many people just avoid it and put a one-size-fits-all linear product tour in place instead.

This is where you just need to be an awesome product manager who can put themselves into every user scenario imaginable (and some that aren’t…) and plan out the right solution to each problem. The software can only take you so far with that.

Want to learn more about our product tour software?

Userpilot is by far the best product tours software tool out there that gets you the best value for your money. Not to mention it’s easy to use! Book a demo today with Userpilot!