Best Stonly Alternatives for SaaS Based On Different Use Cases

Best Stonly Alternatives for SaaS Based On Different Use Cases

Looking for a good user onboarding tool and wondering if Stonly is the best option for your SaaS company?

There are plenty of Stonly alternatives on review sites, but they don’t make the choice any easier.

The crux of the issue is – to make the right choice, you need to account for your priorities: your different jobs to be done, your budget, and the size of the company. But don’t worry – we’re coming to help!

In this post, we’ll discuss exactly that – which Stonly competitor is best depending on the different criteria that different SaaS companies may have.

Let’s dive in!

TL;DR

  • 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 as with 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 it’s 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.
  • Userpilot is a comprehensive digital adoption platform (DAP). It enables product teams to track product usage and user behavior to guide product development and optimize the user experience. In addition, it allows them to gather user feedback and design personalized onboarding experiences to drive product adoption. All of this is possible without coding.
  • Appcues is another no-code user onboarding platform that helps non-technical teams track and analyze product usage.You can publish in-app onboarding tours, announcements, and launch surveys. Unlike Userpilot, the functionality is limited if you are using the basic plans.
  • UserGuiding is a product adoption tool that helps companies to create interactive user guides and in-app walkthroughs to onboard, engage, and retain their users. It provides a no-code solution that allows non-technical teams to design and implement in-app experiences without any coding skills. Overall, UserGuiding is a powerful tool that can help companies to streamline their onboarding process, increase user engagement, and drive customer retention.
  • Chameleon is a digital adoption platform with a difference: while the other tools discussed are mostly no-code, Chameleon will require some developer involvement. Nevertheless, it’s a powerful and effective tool that works in a similar way to Userpilot and offers similar features: styling, analytics, templates, goals, A/B testing, and checklists. However, it doesn’t offer a resource center, or dedicated NPS, and it’s a lot worse value for money with limited features in the basic plan, which is over $150 more expensive for the same number of MAUs.

There is a better tool for your SaaS than Stonly!

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What is Stonly?

stonly builder

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 as with 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 it’s 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 for user onboarding

stonly tour editor in-app

Stonly’s product tours are not the most intuitive (and require quite a bit of coding), and it come with limited integrations. In fact – its 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…

Stonly for user analytics

stonly analytics

Stonly’s analytics are limited to basic product tour insights. The so-called “guide Insights” allow you to track performance of a guide over time. You can use them to see how many people viewed a guide, how much time they spent in it, what path they took through the steps, and how they responded to interactive elements like inputs, checklists, and surveys. Apart from that, Stonly doesn’t offer any insights into user behavior.

Stonly for user feedback

Stonly user feedback

Stonly pricing

Stonly new pricing

Stonly offers two main pricing plans for its customers, catering to different business sizes and needs. The pricing details are as follows:

  • Small Business: Billed at $199/mo, this plan is designed for small businesses and startups looking to scale self-serve support, targeted product tours, and interactive knowledge management. Features include:
    • Unlimited guides in multiple languages.
    • Targeting using your user data.
    • 3 knowledge bases.
    • 4,000 guide views per month.
    • 5 team members.
  • Enterprise: Pricing available upon contacting Stonly, this plan is geared towards employee digital adoption and knowledge resources or high-volume personalized customer guidance. Features include:
    • SSO (Single Sign-On).
    • Group rights management.
    • Private knowledge bases.
    • Other enterprise features.

Customers can save 20% on both plans when billed annually.

Stonly reviews

Stonly positive review

Stonly negative review 3 Stonly negative review 2

Stonly negative review 2

Pros of Stonly

Stonly has a number of advantages:

  • 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

There are also several considerable downsides to using Stonly though:

  • 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: stonly installation
  • 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:
    stonly tour editor in-app
  • There is a lack of certain popular product tour features, such as progress bars and checklists.

11 reasons why you might need a Stonly alternative

You may need an alternative to Stonly for the following reasons:

  1. Confusing builder: The extremely confusing builder in Stonly may slow down the process of creating and managing your product tours, potentially affecting your team’s productivity.
  2. Code-heavy product tour setup: Despite being advertised as a “no-code tool,” Stonly requires significant coding knowledge for product tour setup, making it challenging for non-technical users.
  3. Confusing installation: The installation process is complicated and not accessible for non-technical users, which can create a barrier to entry for your team members.
  4. Limited customization options: Stonly requires knowledge of CSS to customize, and its customization options are worse than the market standard. This limitation may prevent you from creating onboarding experiences tailored to your brand and user preferences.
  5. Lack of in-app content editing: Stonly does not allow you to add content (text) directly in the Chrome Extension, which may slow down the content creation process.
  6. Missing popular product tour features: Stonly lacks certain popular features such as progress bars and checklists, potentially reducing the effectiveness of your onboarding efforts.
  7. Focus on customer support rather than onboarding: Stonly is primarily a customer support tool for building knowledge bases, while other alternatives like Userpilot are fully-fledged product adoption tools for onboarding.
  8. Less advanced tour builder: Compared to other solutions like Userpilot, Stonly’s tour builder is less advanced and feels like a makeshift add-on to the knowledge bases.
  9. No NPS and native surveys: The lack of Net Promoter Score (NPS) tracking and native surveys can limit your ability to measure user satisfaction and gather insights for improvement.
  10. No reporting for the Resource Center: The absence of reporting for the Resource Center can limit your understanding of how users engage with your resources and content.
  11. Buggy tour triggering: Buggy triggering can lead to suboptimal user experiences and may hinder the effectiveness of your onboarding efforts.

Considering these limitations, you may want to explore more comprehensive alternatives like Userpilot that offer a greater focus on onboarding, advanced product tour builders, and more features to optimize your user onboarding experience.

Stonly alternatives and competitors

These are the top alternatives and competitors you may want to consider:

  1. Userpilot
  2. Appcues
  3. Userguiding
  4. Chameleon

Let’s have a look at them in more detail.

Stonly vs Userpilot

Userpilot is a comprehensive digital adoption platform (DAP). It enables product teams to track product usage and user behavior to guide product development and optimize the user experience.

In addition, it allows them to gather user feedback and design personalized onboarding experiences to drive product adoption. All of this is possible without coding.

Stonly is a great option for many SaaS companies, but in a lot of ways, Userpilot is better than Stonly. Let’s explore the features of Userpilot, how it’s better than Stonly and how it may fall short too.

Userpilot for user onboarding

Userpilot was built specifically for SaaS product teams that want to improve their user onboarding experience and boost user activation.

You can build a huge variety of user onboarding experiences and in-app guidance flows without needing to code.

Here’s what you’ll get when you start using Userpilot:

  • Forget about coding in-app experiences: Userpilot is a no-code solution and only requires your dev to install a line of javascript inside your app and for you to download a Chrome extension that opens up the visual builder.
  • Build in-app flows using the largest range of UI patterns (modals, slideouts, tooltips, hotspots, banners) and in-app onboarding experiences (checklists, microsurveys, NPS surveys, in-app resource center).
  • Get access to a built-in NPS tool for collecting and analyzing user sentiment so you can improve your onboarding process based on real data.
  • Create and track combinations of in-app events like clicks, hovers, and form fills, and then analyze all these interactions under your own custom events, which can be built without code or API calls.
  • Use advanced product analytics and in-app flows analytics to identify where users need help and create granular user segments to trigger in-app experiences contextually (segment based on user identification data, in-app engagement, custom events, clicks, hovers, form fills, user feedback responses, NPS scores and more).
  • Enhance the onboarding experience with in-app help by launching a Resource Center directly inside your app. Add in-app guides, and video tutorials, and give users access to search the knowledge base or reach out to support. Self-service has never been easier.

The best user onboarding is contextual and it happens right where the users need it, inside your app. There isn’t a better user onboarding tool out there that offers more value for the money than Userpilot.

Schedule a demo with our team and get ready to build the best onboarding experiences your users have seen.

Userpilot for user analytics

You can’t drive success, no matter what your goals are, without proper user analytics.

How would you know what needs to be improved?

When it comes to proper user onboarding that drives long-term product adoption, Userpilot has the right analytics to help you succeed.

Let me explain.

I’m not talking about product usage only. Analytics is about collecting customer feedback, tracking in-app behavior but also tracking how users engage with your in-app experiences. Right?

You need all of these for a complete picture of how healthy your product is. And then you need to be able to act on those insights.

That’s where proper user segmentation capabilities come in. And Userpilot has you covered here.

Userpilot has really improved in terms of its analytics functionality in recent years, and now offers the most robust functionality from all the product adoption platforms (including Pendo, which has always taken prime in user analytics).

In short, Userpilot analytics allows you to:

  • Track all of your user interactions with your app – without coding- with the powerful feature tagging functionality, you can simply tag your users’ actions (clicks, hovers, form fills) with a no-code, point-and-tag editor on top of your product.
  • See all your user clicks, activity trends, etc. in an easy-to-use dashboard – Userpilot also allows you to drill down into feature usage, down to individual user level, as well as company level.
  • Analyze your user paths from up to 4 pages at a time, at a glance.
  • Create ‘user funnels’ made up of feature tags and tracked events, and see where your users are dropping out of the funnel – and act on these drop-off points instantly with in-app experiences.
  • Track feature usage by user segments with heatmaps, directly on the different pages of your product.
  • Create and track combinations of in-app events like clicks, hovers and form fills, and then analyze all these interactions under your own custom events, which you can build without code or API calls.
  • Create custom events that consist of feature tags as well – or combinations of tracked events you’ve passed through the Userpilot track script with features you have tagged with the Chrome Extension.
  • The powerful trends overview allows you to filter your events and feature tags’ usage by segments, time period, and even company. This allows you to track and analyze event usage trends and even drill down to the individual users (or companies) who engaged with specific custom events and show them the right in-app experience.
  • Apart from product usage data, Userpilot also has built-in analytics for in-app engagement with in-app flows and experiences.
  • Analyze how users engage with your checklists or resource center modules, identify trends and A/B test different approaches to improve engagement.
  • Last but not least, Userpilot allows you to use all that data to build highly granular user segments and reach users with the right engagement flows at the right time.
  • You can even create user segments based on survey responses or NPS scores.

Now, with so much power on your hands – what are you going to do with all this data?

Userpilot for user feedback

There are two types of feedback you should be focusing on collecting to better understand the health of your product and users.

First, you have user sentiment which looks at user satisfaction and effort scores or loyalty (using NPS surveys). Then you may also want to collect feedback on the functionality of the product or specific features.

You can do all these with Userpilot. In short, you can:

  • Collect and track (NPS) in-app with a built-in NPS widget that allows you to fully customize the survey look and feel, and set the trigger frequency and specific targeting.
  • Analyze NPS scores, tag responses, and use the data to create specific user segments.
  • Build and trigger in-app micro surveys like the classic PMF survey, or similar ones and mix multi-choice and open-ended types of questions to collect specific insights.
  • Use different survey templates from Userpilot’s gallery (including Product Market Fit survey, CES survey, CSAT survey, Feature review survey etc.) and customize them to fit your needs.
  • You can also build surveys from scratch, add different types of question types and use advanced branching logic.
  • Be in charge of who gets which survey type and when with advanced segmentation capabilities, and of course, you can use the answers to segment your audience.

The advantage of using Userpilot for collecting feedback over other survey tools is that you can better control who sees the surveys but also you can instantly use the data collected to segment your user base and trigger the right experience for them.

For instance, if your users give you a low NPS or CES score because they think you’re missing a critical feature (that you actually have already), you can push an interactive walkthrough guiding them to find and explore this feature.

Userpilot reviews

Let’s check what real users like about Userpilot.

Userpilot is an incredible, user-friendly software that allows us to create unforgettable experiences for our clients! From basic to complex experiences, we have been able to do them all with ease! I would highly recommend this software to anyone who wants to provide their clients or users with the best product tour experience. The possibilities of what you can create are endless! – Tayla G.

Userpilot is simple to set up, use, and does not require any dev – which means instant publishing. This is critical for us as a SaaS company that releases new features frequently; we need the ability to inform our customers of changes quickly, and doing this in our platform through Userpilot allows us to reach the right audience, at the right time, in the right place. There have been many awesome extra features we’ve discovered since coming on board, and it’s been great to see new features released frequently. The tool itself is intuitive and reliable. Having used similar products previously that were clunky and buggy this has really made us happy with our decision to move to Userpilot. – Melina K.

Userpilot pricing

Userpilot offers great value for money compared to other similar tools on the market. Even its entry-level plan (Starter) provides all the necessary features for product growth. On the Growth and Enterprise plans you get advanced features needed for your growth stage.

The price-to-feature ratio is the best for Userpilot. Other cheaper tools in the market would definitely not fulfill your needs, and others like Pendo would be out of budget. Userpilot sits in that sweet spot. – Saurav S.

The pricing is based on the number of Monthly Active Users (MAUs) your company has.

Here’s the detailed Userpilot pricing:

  • Starter: For up to 2500 users, this plan is $249/ mo.
  • Growth: Custom pricing based on your needs, this plan is suitable for larger teams and compared to the Starter plan it includes the Resource Center functionality, content localization, Advanced event triggering, webhooks, Hubspot integration, and a dedicated customer Success manager.
  • Enterprise: For large-scale businesses, this plan also comes with custom pricing, and it gives you access to everything in Growth plan plus custom roles and permissions, custom data retention, custom contract and SLA, dedicated infrastructure and more.

There is a better tool for your SaaS than Stonly!

Try Userpilot FREE

  • 14 Day Trial
  • No Credit Card Required

Stonly vs Appcues

Appcues is another no-code user onboarding platform that helps non-technical teams track and analyze product usage. You can publish in-app onboarding tours, announcements, and launch surveys.

Unlike Userpilot, the functionality is limited if you are using the basic plans.

There are many ways how Appcues is different (and in a lot of ways better!) from Stonly. Let’s explore the features of, how it’s better than Stonly and how it may fall short too.

Appcues for user onboarding

Appcues used to provide onboarding templates, which made it easy to use the tool. However, it provided a predefined way of thinking about onboarding all while having a higher price tag than other onboarding software. As of the time of writing (end of 2022), Appcues has removed its onboarding templates – without really replacing them with another solution.

Appcues allows you to design flows that make onboarding processes a breeze. These flows are what you use to create product tours and other in-app communication with users.

Here’s what you’ll get when you start using Appcues:

  • Access to an easy-to-use UI that anyone on the team can handle for building in-app flows without coding.
  • Building a product tour in Appcues is relatively easy. You just need to open their chrome extension on top of your application and start building your in-app experiences with a WYSIWYG editor. You simply select a UI pattern and customize it ‘live’, or point to the elements you want to e.g. append your tooltips to.
  • Previously it was even easier – you chose one of its templates, they would basically create the product tour for you, and you just needed to customize each step. This limited the options for customizing but it was useful for beginners. We don’t know if Appcues plans to bring their templates back.
  • You can also create checklists with Appcues (NOT available on the Essentials plan) and prompt users to take action. These are ok but have limited functionality (can’t trigger JS functions, or add gamification elements) compared to alternatives, such as Userpilot.
  • Track UI engagement with Events explorer which allows you to tag elements without coding.
  • Build custom user segments (up to 5 on the Essentials plan) based on user properties, flows, interactions, or events you set up in the events explorer.

Appcues for user analytics

Appcues user analytics is focused on the Event Explorer functionality and user segments that allow you to track user engagement and group users based on their main stage in the user journey.

Let’s look at each of these functionalities and how they can help. First, let’s explore their Event Explorer:

  • Events Explorer makes it easy to view, validate, and visualize events in one place.
  • Appcues defines events as user interaction with your features or flows inside your product’s UI and you can set these up with a few clicks.
  • The Essential plan includes only 10 events. If you need more, you’ll have to upgrade to the Growth plan ($879/mo annually).
  • This can be a little limited when you are trying to analyze product usage.

Now, let’s quickly see how Appcues segmentation can help. Appcues only gives you five user segments included in their Essentials plan, which isn’t a lot. It won’t be long before you need to upgrade the plan for more user segments.

The pre-defined user segments in Appcues (Evaluators, Beginners, Regulars, Champions) are very limiting if you want to access proper user analytics. Even building segments has its own limitations. You can create segments based on:

  • User properties (when a survey was completed or when they’ve seen in-app flows)
  • Flows interaction (has been completed or not?)
  • Checklists (in progress, skipped, completed, not seen)
  • Event (based on the ones you set up using event explorer)
  • One of the predefined segments (Evaluators, Beginners, Regulars, Champions)

Appcues for user feedback

Can you use Appcues to collect user feedback? Of course.

Collecting data is not hard, analyzing and acting on it is where it gets tricky. What’s the purpose of having data if you can’t act on it?

If you want to track your NPS score over time and collect user feedback with short micro surveys, you can do that with Appcues. But to analyze the feedback data in-depth, you’ll have to use other tools.

In a nutshell, Appcues allows you to:

  • Build and trigger NPS surveys in-app without coding.
  • Edit the NPS survey questions.
  • Target the survey at a specific user segment (or choose one of the predefined segments) and adjust the survey display frequency.
  • Collect user feedback with short surveys built on top of modals: add numerical scale, open-ended questions, or radio button questions.
  • On the flip side: you can’t tag your NPS/survey responses in-app and use these tags to segment your audience by them.
  • You can’t analyze the responses in-app. You can only download a CSV report to start analyzing your data – and we all know how time-consuming that is.

Based on the above, when it comes to user feedback, Appcues is not the ideal tool, as it lacks the ability to segment users based on survey responses.

Appcues reviews

What do Appcues users share about their experience? Overall users feel positive about Appcues.

Here’s an example summarizing some key points about its features and the value it offers. You can find more reviews on G2 or Capterra.

The chrome extension works pretty well to create and build flows. Generating these experiences with the benefit of seeing what the look and feel will be like on-the-fly is immensely helpful.

Further, targeting elements is pretty simple, so you won’t have to open up a code editor and dig in to deliver a great experience. It’s a great tool for a number of reasons, but I love the fact that you can deliver specific communication to a specific audience in your application when you need to, without having to leverage a development department. – Verified User

Appcues-positive-review

Appcues pricing

All things considered, Appcues does not offer the best value for money compared to some Appcues alternatives – at $249 per month. If your product has 2,500 active users, the costs for different plans are:

  • Essentials: $249/month (Up to 3 user licenses)
  • Growth: $879/month (Up to 10 user licenses)
  • Enterprise: Custom (Unlimited user licenses)

There is a better tool for your SaaS than Stonly!

Try Userpilot FREE

  • 14 Day Trial
  • No Credit Card Required

Stonly vs UserGuiding

UserGuiding is a product adoption tool that helps companies to create interactive user guides and in-app walkthroughs to onboard, engage, and retain their users. It provides a no-code solution that allows non-technical teams to design and implement in-app experiences without any coding skills.

Overall, UserGuiding is a powerful tool that can help companies to streamline their onboarding process, increase user engagement, and drive customer retention.

There are many ways how UserGuiding is different (and in a lot of ways better!) from Stonly. Let’s explore the features of UserGuiding, how it’s better than Stonly and how it may fall short too.

UserGuiding for user onboarding

As a no-code onboarding tool, UserGuiding has numerous features that will help you create onboarding flows for your new customers and guide them throughout their journey.

Here’s what you’ll get when you start using UserGuiding:

  • Create interactive product walkthroughs without disturbing your developers as it’s completely code-free.
  • Build onboarding checklists and drive customers to the activation point by eliminating the guesswork on what the next step should be.
  • Create interactive elements, such as product tours, tooltips, and pop-ups, to help keep users engaged and increase the likelihood that they’ll complete the onboarding process.
  • Create a resource center to add different educational resources for your users.

Though UserGuiding is a great tool for startups that don’t have much money to invest in an onboarding tool, it has very strict limitations for the Basic plan.

You can only create a maximum of 20 guides and hotspots, 2 onboarding checklists, and 1 resource center. If you want to create unlimited guides with unlimited UI patterns, you should go for the Professional plan which can cost from $299 to $399.

UserGuiding for user analytics

UserGuiding’s analytics feature provides insights into how users are interacting with your onboarding flows and in-app experiences. Here are some of the functionality that UserGuiding’s analytics offers:

  • Analyze the performance of your onboarding material in detail. This will allow you to figure out what’s working and what’s not.
  • Track how users interact with your app in a given time period and identify product trends.
  • Monitor real-time user engagement.

UserGuiding for user feedback

With UserGuiding, you can collect user sentiment data with NPS surveys and microsurveys even when using the Basic plan.

Here’s how you can collect user feedback with UserGuiding:

  • Build NPS surveys without writing a single line of code.
  • Adjust the thank you page and add a follow-up question to gather qualitative data and understand the reasons behind the scores.
  • Customize the button texts, colors, and designs to match your brand.
  • Set up custom audiences, segments, timing, and targeting rules to trigger the surveys.

The downside of using UserGuiding for collecting user feedback is that you can’t tag NPS responses to identify trends between scores. You also can’t create long survey forms as they neither support it in their native interface nor have integrations with other 3-rd party tools to do the job.

Considering that, Userpilot undoubtedly offers you more value for money. You can build microsurveys, embed Typeform long surveys, collect and analyze NPS responses, and segment users based on scores and responses so you can trigger more personalized experiences. Get a Userpilot demo here!

UserGuiding reviews

If you check the product review sites, most people like using UserGuiding.

Here are some reviews from real users:

Creating guides/checklists are easy to implement. It does not take a lot of time to make adjustments when you need to make changes.
You can go live with a simple guide or checklist within minutes. I was able to go live within a few days of getting started. – Administrator in Computer Software

UserGuiding pricing

UserGuiding offers a range of pricing plans to suit different business needs. Here is an overview of their current pricing models:

  • Basic plan: For a starting price of $99 per month, or $69 per month with an annual contract, the Basic plan provides access to the essential onboarding tools, but it does have some limitations to keep in mind. These include a maximum of 2500 Monthly Active Users, a single team member, a limit of 20 guides and 2 checklists, as well as UserGuiding branding on all UI patterns.
  • Professional plan: With a monthly quota of 20,000 MAUs, the Professional plan offers unlimited guides, hotspots, and checklists. The plan starts at $399 per month or $299 per month with annual billing.
  • Corporate plan: With custom MAUs, the Corporate plan provides access to all features as well as personalized coaching. The plan starts at a minimum of $699 per month, or $499 per month with an annual contract.

Additionally, they offer a 14-day free trial for all of their plans, allowing users to try out the product before committing to a paid plan.

There is a better tool for your SaaS than Stonly!

Try Userpilot FREE

  • 14 Day Trial
  • No Credit Card Required

Stonly vs Chameleon

Chameleon is a digital adoption platform with a difference: while the other tools discussed are mostly no-code, Chameleon will require some developer involvement.

Nevertheless, it’s a powerful and effective tool that works in a similar way to Userpilot and offers similar features: styling, analytics, templates, goals, A/B testing, and checklists.

However, it doesn’t offer a resource center, or dedicated NPS, and it’s a lot worse value for money with limited features in the basic plan, which is over $150 more expensive for the same number of MAUs.

There are many ways how Chameleon is different (and in a lot of ways better!) from Stonly. Let’s explore the features of Chameleon, how it’s better than Stonly and how it may fall short too.

Chameleon for user onboarding

You can build widgets (launchers) and classic guides and tours with Chameleon as the main drivers of user onboarding.

Here’s how Chameleon’s main functionality helps with user onboarding:

  • Chameleon’s product tours help you build flows for guidance. You can use several UI patterns for this: modals, banners, tooltips, and hotspots.
  • You can customize the styling (font, color, opacity, etc) of your product tours and even add in some CSS styling if you want advanced branding.
  • Launchers are where Chameleon is different compared to its competitors. These are in-app widgets that can open checklists, small help widgets, or notification centers. The downside is that you can’t have one launcher with multiple types of content.
  • You can target content to different user segments based on multiple data sources including event triggering.
  • Ability to use microsurveys with great customization and question-and-answer types.
  • On Growth Plan and higher, you also get access to more functionality like A/B testing, multiple environments, localization (Enterprise plan only), and advanced integrations like Hubspot

All in all, Chameleon has good functionality for user onboarding but will be very limited on the Startup plan as you only get one Launcher and five microsurveys.

To build contextual and efficient user onboarding you will need more than that. Considering what you get for the money, Userpilot offers much better value.

Chameleon for user analytics

Chameleon doesn’t shine when it comes to user analytics as they don’t really have their own dedicated analytics. But it does offer the minimum data you need.

It also integrates both ways with well-known analytics tools so this might justify the lack of their own reporting.

Here’s what you can expect from Chameleon’s product and user analytics data:

  • A/B testing so you can measure the impact of your flows randomly on a sample group of users.
  • You can track events using the integration available with popular product analytics tools or by setting up custom events via the API (you will need a developer to set these up).
  • You can create user segments based on different user properties (attributes of the user), custom user events, experiences, and flows activity, or Chameleon tags (added manually to specific users).
  • Chameleon doesn’t have a dedicated analytics dashboard.

Chameleon relies a lot on their integration with powerful analytics tools so they haven’t really worked on building its own analytics. Due to this, you might find it limited when it comes to analyzing user engagement and targeting in-app experiences unless you also pay for the other tools.

Chameleon for user feedback

Here’s how you can collect user feedback with Chameleon:

  • Build different types of microsurveys (limited to 5 on the Startup plan) such as NPS, CSAT, CES, Opt-in, and custom feedback types.
  • Personalize the surveys as you wish (you will need help from a developer or may require CSS skills).
  • You can select the survey’s frequency and whether you want it to repeat.
  • You get access to basic completion reports. Most of the additional data will need to be analyzed in your analytics tools that Chameleon integrates with and sends data to.
  • You will see your NPS score in the reports but for the rest of the microsurveys, you will need analytics tools.

It’s great that Chameleon lets you build beautiful microsurveys but it might not be the best tool if you want to analyze the data and most importantly act on it. For example, with Userpilot you can create custom user segments based on survey responses or NPS scores and trigger specific in-app flows for them.

Chameleon reviews

Users appreciate Chameleon’s versatile functionalities. Let’s see what they have to say about it.

I love the variety of formats we can build in Chameleon, from interactive tooltips to progressive tours and launchers! It’s also really easy to track performance of each of these and adjust accordingly. The interface still feels quite clunky whenever I’m in build mode. For instance, I don’t like that I have to use markdown and CSS when formatting text instead of having an inline styling menu to select from. Then there’s also the issue of surveys or tour steps appearing where they’re not supposed to, apparently mistaking an element in another page for the anchor. – Nikki D

Chameleon pricing

There is a better tool for your SaaS than Stonly!

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  • No Credit Card Required

Conclusion – which of the Stonly alternatives is the best?

As you can see, there are many different competitors and alternatives to Stonly. We’ve discussed a few above – but which one is the best?

The answer is “it depends” – but we strongly believe that if you’re a mid-market SaaS company looking for a great user onboarding and product analytics tool, Userpilot is the best option for you.

Hopefully you found this post helpful. Let us know if you know any other good Stonly alternatives – and if you need any help with how Userpilot is different, we are always happy to talk!

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