The Best Tools for Interactive User Guides (In-Depth Analysis)17 min read

Looking for the best tools for interactive user guides for your company?

There are plenty of solutions for interactive user guides 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 your company.

But don’t worry: I’m coming to help! In this post, I’ll explain which interactive user guide software is the best fit for your company and needs.

Must-have features of good interactive user guide tools

Not all tools are built the same. Some offer different advantages over others, while some will get you basic functionality at a lower price. Therefore, the best tool for you will depend on your needs and budget.

Still, there are some must-have functionalities to watch out for when picking a tool to build in-app guides:

• A good range of UI patterns to use for building your guides.
• Ability to customize each interactive guide to fit your brand and style.
• Segmentation features enable you to trigger the guides to the right audience. A one-size-fits-all approach won’t bring you the desired results.
• The ability to trigger the user guides following specific in-app events is nice to have and will help you build more contextual in-app experiences.
• Minimum product usage analytics to enable you to track how users engage with the product and where they get stuck so you can build relevant user guides to help them.

The above list is not exhaustive, but it’s a good starting point. Depending on your product, you might also need automated localization, A/B testing capabilities, advanced analytics or security, and more.

Best interactive user guide tools at a glance

In-depth analysis of the best tools for interactive user guides

Let’s now explore each of these tools in detail. What are their key features? Why should you use them? And, what concerns have others expressed about them?

1. Userpilot

Userpilot is a powerful product growth platform for SaaS companies that want to create no-code interactive user guides and in-app experiences. It is designed to help its users improve user onboarding, drive feature adoption, and boost user satisfaction as efficiently as possible.

Here’s a breakdown of its key features:

• No-code WYSIWYG builder: One of the features I love most about Userpilot is that it enables me to create in-app experiences without writing any code. Just drag, drop, and see your creation come to life in real time.

• Multiple UI patterns: From tooltips and modals to hotspots and checklists, Userpilot offers a variety of methods for creating in-app flows. My favorite is Driven Action, which looks like a tooltip but requires the user to take action (e.g., fill out a form) before progressing to the next step in the flow.
• Segmentation: Userpilot enables advanced user segmentation based on user behavior, demographics, company data, NPS responses, and more. This allows me to create interactive user guides for a very specific subset of users who meet particular conditions.

• Localization: Userpilot’s localization features allow for the translation of in-app content. The goal is simple: help for users shouldn’t be limited because they don’t speak your native language.

• Flow analytics: To prevent you from flying blind after publishing an interactive guide, Userpilot provides detailed analytics on its performance. This includes its completion rates and drop-off points: data that helps optimize your flows for maximum effectiveness. Userpilot also offers advanced analytics features, like session replays and funnel analysis, that give you more insights into the performance of guides.

• Experimentation: Want to see how different variations of an in-app guide resonate with your audience? Userpilot’s A/B testing feature helps you do just that. The data from this experiment will then help you identify the most effective approach.

• Session replay: Userpilot’s session replay feature helps you see how users interact with your interactive guides in real-time. Through this, you can identify where they drop off, struggle, or hesitate – allowing you to refine your guides for a more intuitive onboarding experience.

Pros of Userpilot

• Userpilot is an all-in-one solution with advanced analytics, onboarding, support, and feedback features. The value for money you get from Userpilot is unbeatable.
• Its features work on both web and mobile apps. This ensures you create a consistent experience across apps.
• The Chrome builder is easy to install and start building.

Cons of Userpilot

• Considering its price, Userpilot is not suitable for startups with tight budgets.
• Thanks to its many customization options, Userpilot may take some getting used to.

What users say about Userpilot

Userpilot may not be for everyone, but its 4.6-star rating on G2 points to a well-loved product.

For example, after employing Userpilot to scale its onboarding process and boost user activation rates by 100%, our customer Impala had this to say:

“Userpilot enabled us to create personalized onboarding experiences without burdening our development team, leading to a 100% increase in user activation.” –
Sierra Szkrybalo, Partnerships and Customer Success Associate at Impala

Users have also complimented Userpilot on its ease of use, with some noting that it remains easy to use despite having a learning curve.

“It is quite surprising how easy it is to implement and start building guides with Userpilot. Today, Userpilot is used by multiple roles in my product team and covers analytics, building guides, and creating product communication.” – Gustavo M.

“With great customizability options comes a learning curve. It takes some time and effort to implement a flow, but having a dedicated customer success manager makes a HUGE difference.” – Bianca R.

Userpilot pricing

There are three main pricing categories to select from with Userpilot:

• Starter: Starting from $249/month, this plan allows you to create interactive user guides like flows, spotlights, and checklists, with user segmentation and analytics options.
• Growth: Starting from $799/month, this plan provides for AI-powered content localization, advanced event-based triggers, and native mobile app support. It also provides a resource center for managing support documentation.
• Enterprise: This plan features custom pricing that fits your needs. It offers extra security, priority support, SLA, custom roles, and more.

Note: Userpilot also offers a 14-day free trial period for those who want to test the product before committing to any financial expense.

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2. Appcues

A familiar name in the space, Appcues helps non-technical teams create in-app tours, announcements, and surveys without coding. Its key features include:

• UI patterns: Appcues offers similar UI patterns to Userpilot, including modals, tooltips, slideouts, and hotspots. These patterns are a part of Appcues’ visual flow builder and are great for providing contextual information.

• Targeting and segmentation: Appcues provides basic segmentation capabilities for targeting specific user groups. You can build segments based on user properties and in-app user interactions.
• Flow analytics: Appcues enables its users to track the performance of in-app experiences. It gives you insights into completion rates and overall flow performance.

• Appcues goals: Also known as conversions, goals are the ultimate outcomes of your flows. In Appcues, you can create and track goals on the dedicated Goals page.

Pros of Appcues

• Appcues is renowned for its friendly user interface, relatively simple setup, and pre-defined templates that can save you time.
• It supports deployment on both web and mobile apps.
• It offers decent personalization and customization features.

Cons of Appcues

• Appcues offers limited segmentation capabilities compared to competitors like Userpilot. This can make it difficult to deliver highly personalized experiences.
• Appcues pricing model makes it an expensive option as your user base grows. You’ll need the Grow plan to access the full range of its in-app flow features, starting at $1,000/month paid annually.
• Appcues lacks some of the advanced features needed for product adoption strategies, like robust A/B testing and in-depth analytics.

What users say about Appcues

Appcues has a 4.6-star rating on G2, proof that most users feel positive about the product.

For example, one user highlights just how easy it was to set up the product despite a lack of experience with this class of products:

“I like how easy it is to set up new flows on here. The interface is very user-friendly and the docs are very resourceful, especially for someone who had little experience with this type of software.” – Shawn M.

However, some have complained about the lack of advanced features:

“As much as I like how the onboarding guides turn out that we created, they are lacking some deeper analytics in-app. For example, it was hard to track feature adoption by visitors or accounts after releasing a new guide.” – Alan S.

Others have abandoned it altogether for a more user-friendly product:

“I tried Appcues, but I found Userpilot more user-friendly when building the flow. I could actually build the flows myslelf without anybody’s help.” – Rachel Lightfoot, Co-Founder at Touchright

Appcues pricing

There are three broad Appcues pricing plans plus a 14-day free trial. The paid plans include:

• Start: $370/month for a maximum of 12,500 displayed in-app messages per month.
• Grow: $1,000/month for a maximum of 30,000 displayed in-app messages per month.
• Enterprise: Custom pricing with support for unlimited licenses, SLAs, and a dedicated customer success manager.

All things considered, Appcues doesn’t offer the best value for money compared to some Appcues alternatives. The throttling of displayed messages combined with the already-throttled number of monthly tracked users (MTUs) makes scaling on any plan rather expensive.

3. Chameleon

Chameleon is a well-known tool for creating user manuals. It is designed to help SaaS companies create personalized onboarding experiences to improve key metrics.

Some of its key features for creating interactive user manuals include:

• UI patterns: Chameleon’s product tours feature a range of UI patterns, including tooltips, banners, modals, checklists, and launchers (which provide access to help content).
• Customizable tour builder: Chameleon’s visual tour builder offers extensive customization options. You can change your tours’ font, color, and opacity, even adding some CSS styling if you’re technical enough.

• Targeting: You can target content to different user segments based on various characteristics. Like Userpilot, it even offers real-time, event-based content triggering.
• Launchers: Chameleon’s launchers are “fluid” in-app widgets. They can open checklists and notification centers or even act as resource centers that house a list of resources.

Pros of Chameleon

• Like Userpilot, it offers other complementary features to drive product adoption, including NPS surveys, A/B testing, styling, analytics, and checklists.
• It offers good segmentation options using its own data or third-party data.
• It provides a decent amount of flexibility and styling options when designing in-app tours.

Cons of Chameleon

• Chameleon’s user interface and workflow are sometimes complex, requiring a steeper learning curve than some competitors.
• It isn’t a complete no-code solution, requiring developer involvement in certain parts of the build process.
• It also doesn’t support the creation of onboarding flows that run over multiple URLs.

What users say about Chameleon

Chameleon has a decent 4.4-star rating on G2. So, you can expect several positive comments, like this one:

“My teams can design, prototype, and launch in-app experiences without going through regular dev cycles and competing for engineering resources.” – Conrad L.

But some complain about its poor build, technical requirements (coding knowledge), and unreliable performance:

“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.” – Nikki D.

“Sometimes, tours don’t trigger based on specified user segments.” – Aneesh A.

Chameleon pricing

Like its competitors, Chameleon’s pricing is based on monthly tracked users. The paid plans include:

• Startup: For $354/month, you’ll get 5 surveys, 1 launcher, and unlimited tours for 2,500 MTUs.
• Growth: For $1,500/month, you’ll get unlimited experiences, plus A/B testing, goal tracking, and customer success management.
• Enterprise: For a custom price, you’ll get localization, account-switching, roles & permissions, and unlimited seats.

While Chameleon boasts some really good features, it’s expensive. You’ll need at least $1,500/month to access most of its important features. And, while they also have a free plan, it only enables searching in your help bar.

4. Pendo

Pendo is a powerful product experience platform with built-in guidance capabilities for creating comprehensive user manuals. It caters primarily to enterprise users who want to drive product adoption, track how users interact, and collect user feedback.

Its key features for onboarding users include:

• In-app guidance: Pendo’s in-app guides support tooltips, banners, polls, lightboxes, and walkthroughs. All these are part of a WYSIWYG visual editor. There are multiple templates offered to streamline Guide creation.

• Checklists: Pendo enables PMs to create checklists for their users. This would be perfect, except that these checklists can only be accessed via the resource center as they aren’t standalone elements.
• Product roadmapping: Roadmapping is one of Pendo’s less popular but valuable features. It helps PMs to prioritize feature development based on user data.

• Mobile support: Create interactive user guides for Android and iOS mobile apps.

Pros of Pendo

• Pendo’s analytics is one of the best in the industry. It is robust and easy to use, featuring tools like path, retention, and funnel analysis (which is only matched by Userpilot).
• Pendo is an all-in-one solution offering features, like analytics, in-app guidance, feedback collection, and session replay.
• It is great for enterprise-level software companies with complex needs.

Cons of Pendo

• For all its features, Pendo’s in-app guides are fairly basic, allowing very little customization without coding.
• Pendo is also one of the more expensive options on this list. Its pricing system is complex, shrouded in secrecy, and rumored to be at least $20,000 for a single product.
• If that wasn’t enough, Pendo’s analytics data is only updated every hour. This means you can’t trigger experiences based on real-time in-app events.

What users say about Pendo

Pendo’s rating on G2 is a decent 4.4 stars. While this isn’t bad, it’s lower than the ratings of most products in this category. And it’s easy to see why when you look at the reviews.

For example, this user praises Pendo’s ease of use for onboarding users and collecting analytics data:

“Pendo is easy to navigate, easy to create guides, and easy to pull insights from. They’ve recently released a ton of new features using AI and have been super helpful in showing how to best use them.” – Brittany N.

However, other users find some features lacking, such as the guide logic and flow conditions:

“I would like to see some enhancements on guide logic, like the ability to automate some clicks for users when taking a guided step walkthrough.” – Crystal N.

Then, there are those who consider the product too limiting for their use. For example, the team at Cuvama struggled with Pendo’s targeting limitations until they abandoned the product:

“With Pendo, I could not create specific flows for specific companies. With Userpilot, I can do it very easily without needing developer assistance.” – Leyre Iniguez, Customer Experience Lead at Cuvama

Pendo pricing

Pendo’s prices are only available on request. A lot of features, like guide experiments, logic, and automation, are also hidden behind paywalls for non-Ultimate users.

Here’s a breakdown of the plans:

• Base: Supports product analytics, basic in-app guides, and one third-party integration.
• Core: Additional support for session replays.
• Pulse: Supports the creation of NPS surveys.
• Ultimate: Supports the full in-app guides experience, plus journey orchestration and data synchronization.

Note that there’s also a free plan, which supports very basic analytics, Pendo-branded in-app guides, and NPS surveys for up to 500 MAUs.

5. UserGuiding

UserGuiding may not be one of the best user manual software in terms of its feature array, but it’s certainly one of the most cost-effective. Its features are also good enough for its price, including:

• In-app messages: UserGuiding offers in-app guidance with interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, hotspots, and checklists.
• Resource center: Provide on-demand in-app support for your users by incorporating all learning materials in one place.

• Targeting: Basic segmentation capabilities to target specific user groups.

Pros of UserGuiding

• Perhaps the best thing about UserGuiding is that it’s really easy to use, with an intuitive interface.
• It is also a budget-friendly option, making it an ideal entry-level digital adoption platform for small startups.
• Unlike some of the more expensive options, you can choose to add a Resource Center (a bonus for self-service support).

Cons of UserGuiding

• The most obvious drawback of UserGuiding is its limited feature offerings. It lacks some of the more advanced features offered by more robust tools.
• UserGuiding’s customization and design options are also quite limited.
• Technical knowledge is required to get the maximum out of this product.

What users say about UserGuiding

UserGuiding enjoys a 4.7-star rating on G2, the highest of any product on this list. For most users, this is because the product is easy to use and intuitive. Consider the following example:

“UserGuiding has been an absolute game-changer for our user adoption process. The platform makes it incredibly easy to create interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, and onboarding flows—all without needing a developer.” – Adam S.

Most complaints, though, center around its limited functionalities. You can see that in this review:

“UserGuiding can sometimes feel limited in customization, especially when compared to more advanced onboarding tools. Additionally, the performance can be inconsistent, with occasional lag or slow loading times affecting the user experience.” – Onur N.

And in this, too:

“Sometimes the editor can feel a bit clunky, especially when customizing the design of the guides. It would be great if there were more options to tweak the appearance without needing to dive into custom CSS.” – Igror G.

UserGuiding pricing

UserGuiding recently reviewed its prices, leaving only the base price public. Still, its pricing model is fairly simplistic:

• Basic: $89/month for up to 2,500 MAUs. The plan supports 20 active Guides and Hotspots each, 2 active checklists, 1 resource center, and 1 survey.
• Professional: Adds unlimited guides, hotspots, and checklists for a custom price.
• Corporate: Gives you access to everything, plus fully customizable CSS, personalized coaching, and enterprise license and security.

Which user manual software should you invest in?

To find the best interactive user manual tool for your product, you must first identify your needs. What is your budget? How complex will your flows be? What level of analytics do you need?

Userpilot is ideal if you’re interested in a powerful and intuitive tool that offers robust features and great value for money. Book a demo today to learn more about how it works.

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