What are the Best User Adoption Software and Tools for SaaS?

• What is user adoption?
• Why is user adoption important for SaaS?
• How can you improve user adoption for your SaaS business?
• Best SaaS User Adoption Tools for Functionality – Userpilot
• Best SaaS User Adoption Tools for Ease of User – Appcues
• Best SaaS User Adoption Tools for Price – Userguiding
• Final thoughts

TL;DR

• Userpilot offers the most robust functionalities at the best price. With each plan including unlimited features – it’s a steal at just $250 per month.
• With Userpilot, you get 4 actions and 5 UI patterns included in its flow builder, including modals, slideouts, tooltips, and driven actions; in addition to time delays, page refreshes, scroll positions, and page changes.
• Userpilot is also very user-friendly – you don’t need to have any previous coding experience to build user adoption experiences and it has a bunch of other features such as onboarding checklists and more!

• Appcues is the best tool for ease of use – it has the longest history in user adoption tools, so they’ve had plenty of time to polish their UI and UX.
• A few cons of using Appcues include limited UI patterns and only one action. The price tag is also considerable – the basic plan has very limited functionality. If the basic plan is too restrictive for your needs, you will need to upgrade to the “Growth” plan at $879 paid annually to enjoy the same level of ‘freedom’ to build user adoption experiences as in Userpilot.

• Userguiding is the cheapest user adoption tool we’ve found for SaaS. At $169 per month billed yearly, it offers an adequate solution for those with a really limited budget.
• However, Userguiding is quite buggy and offers rather limited functionality compared to Userpilot and Appcues. If you can stretch your budget a bit more, you might consider paying $90 extra for a proper user adoption tool, which will be a good investment in the long run.

How can software help you with user adoption?

User adoption, or product adoption, is the degree to which users have adopted different features of your product. It ensures that users are achieving their desired goals by using your SaaS product.

You can calculate user adoption by dividing the number of features of your product a certain user is using regularly by the total number of features x 100%.

To get a better idea, you should monitor user adoption in different user segments and cross-reference it with churn and NPS. This helps you track how the adoption of different features affects user satisfaction and retention.

Why is user adoption software important for SaaS?

You created your SaaS product to cater to the particular needs of your target user groups. These users won’t get the real value of your product unless they’re using the features that are designed to cater to their needs.

This will likely lead to churn. The fewer features they use, the less likely your users are to stick around. Ultimately, lower user adoption leads to lower user retention.

It’s no secret that SaaS businesses make the most money from retaining their users, as the entire SaaS model is based on recurring revenue streams. However, user retention is also a key component of growth, as it leads to more referrals i.e., more users.

Decreasing churn through user adoption ensures regular revenue streams and sustained growth for your SaaS business.

This emphasis on user retention makes it essential for SaaS companies to push for higher user adoption and develop a product adoption strategy.

How can you adapt user adoption software to your SaaS business?

Onboarding is the first step to improve your user adoption. To help your users get familiar with your product quickly, make sure you use a welcome screen with a micro survey to segment your users accordingly.

Segmenting your users helps you learn about each individual’s use case, and that’s exactly what Postfity did.

Build a welcome screen like this code-free in Userpilot. Try it out now!

There are a few ways you can optimize your onboarding and overall user adoption process, including personalizing the process, using onboarding checklists, and more.

Personalization

Personalizing the onboarding process helps you learn relevant details about your users, including their roles, use cases, and more.

This allows you to identify the needs of your users and push them to adopt the key features that cater to these needs. Personalization also nudges more users to the activation point and reduces time to value.

Onboarding checklists

Onboarding checklists display all the steps that a user needs to complete to get the product’s value. This shows each user their onboarding progress, giving them goals to complete.

You can also include ‘dummy’ pre-ticked items that will help you nudge your users towards completing the rest of the list – cue the Zeigarnik effect!

Wanna build checklists like this code-free? Jump on a call with us now!

Resource center

A resource center acts as a help hub that compiles all your onboarding experiences, help-docs, videos, and resources into one place. This is searchable and can be accessed within the app.

Again, something you can build code-free in Userpilot!

Secondary onboarding

Secondary onboarding helps you encourage users to adopt more advanced features of your product regardless of how far they have progressed in their user journey!

When users are already using your product and making the most of its basic features, you can nudge them to adopt more advanced features.

Your goal is to keep showing your users more and more value along their user journey, thus allowing you to increase product adoption. This is where secondary onboarding comes in.

Secondary onboarding provides users with more use cases, guiding them to become more engaged with the product. This helps you boost user retention in the long run.

To make the process more efficient, you need to find a tool that will help you create all these in-app experiences, ideally without coding.

Best user adoption software for functionality – Userpilot

A user adoption tool with robust functionality will help you build a range of UI patterns and experiences to increase user adoption, and this is where Userpilot offers the best value for money.

Userpilot

Userpilot is a product growth platform that allows you to build beautiful user adoption experiences without having to code anything yourself. Userpilot helps you automate the onboarding process across each stage of the user journey through primary, secondary, and tertiary onboarding.

Among the three user adoption solutions you’ll find in this post, Userpilot offers the most robust functionality for user adoption.

With Userpilot, you can build in-app onboarding experiences using its flow builder, which comes with 4 actions and 5 UI patterns.

The tooltips you build in complex flows are fully customizable, both in terms of style and triggering options.

Moreover, you can set a goal for each experience, and track user adoption of the particular feature you want them to adopt over time.

Userpilot’s incredible features help you build fully branched, interactive, and contextual onboarding experiences. This means the onboarding process will be based on what the users actually did, not just working to a strict timeframe, or worse, pushing them to press ‘next’ in a linear, boring product tour everybody hates.

To help you dive deeper into user behavior, you can create experiments with A/B tests and see which experiences lead to the highest user adoption.

Furthermore, you can create checklists to give your users a goal to complete, as well as a searchable resource center that acts as the in-app information hub.

You can also drop more subtle hints by using native tooltips that become part of your native UI. With Userpilot’s strong segmentation capabilities, you can time the native tooltips to disappear from your UI once the user has already seen them or adopted the particular feature you want to point out. You can also set it to disappear after the users have reached a certain milestone or after a certain time. This makes Userpilot unique, as you can’t do the same with hard-coded tooltips.

So what do you get from Userpilot?

You boost your user activation, adoption, and retention, by creating in-app experiences without coding. Userpilot helps you build linear or branched experiences using tooltips, modals, and driven actions. Out of all these adoption tools, Userpilot stands out with its robust capabilities for segmenting and personalizing the onboarding process for each user.

Best user adoption software for ease of use – Appcues

Appcues is a customer experience management platform that allows SaaS businesses to measure and improve user adoption. You can create product tours, deliver in-app welcome messages, and implement walkthroughs without having to code anything.

Apart from no-code design and tracking, Appcues offers great segmentation functionalities that let you subdivide your users based on persona, stage in the user journey, and more. Its powerful targeting engine allows you to target disengaged users and drive re-engagement.

You can easily create in-app walkthroughs and prompts to push users to adopt new and important product features.

Appcues also offers reporting and data visualization – you can create reports that keep tabs on your key metrics and display them using a dashboard.

But how does Appcues compare to Userpilot?

Appcues is an older platform than Userpilot. Although both are quite similar, Appcues offers more templates and comes with a nicer UI and a very intuitive UX.

However, Appcues only comes with 1 available action and 4 UI patterns, which is fewer than Userpilot. You also can’t create Resource Centers and Native Tooltips. Moreover, Appcues doesn’t offer native A/B testing features, so you will need to use the Optimizely integration to get A/B testing functionalities.

Overall, Userpilot offers way more value at a much lower price, but it comes with a less pleasant UI and the UX might be a little more annoying in some areas (but it’s getting better!).

Furthermore, Appcues provides great customer support and gives you access to more integrations than Userpilot. For example, you can integrate with popular platforms like Salesforce or Hubspot. So if you need integrations with these tools and have a budget that can cover the $1000-a-month cost, Appcues may be a better choice for you.

Best user adoption tools for price – Userguiding

Early-stage SaaS startups run on a quite restricted budget and look to cut costs wherever possible. If you find yourself in this position, then Userguiding could be an option – as it provides limited user adoption functionalities at a much more affordable price than Userpilot and Appcues.

But unless you absolutely cannot afford that extra $100/month, we recommend not choosing Userguiding, as you lose more in functionalities than you save in money.

Userguiding offers a simple user adoption tool with a fairly intuitive UI. It’s quite easy to understand and works fine for small startups. However, it also comes with very limited UI patterns in its guide builder.

One big issue with Userguiding is that it offers no actions for the next step. You are restricted to building linear, step-by-step product tours, which most users (read every user) hate.

Userguiding can also get a bit buggy. For example, it gets quite confusing when you try to change the UI patterns in the next steps or link things like the next experience or even a URL change to the buttons in the builder.

Although Userguiding lets you create checklists, it’s more difficult to build one than in Userpilot or Appcues. You also get limited segmentation options, resulting in fewer interactive guides.

Despite being the cheapest option in this list, its pricing has skyrocketed recently – from about $99 to $166.

And let’s face it – even at $99, Userguiding offered pretty limited functionalities for SaaS product adoption teams. (And at $166, you might even say that it’s not worth it anymore). But when it comes to user adoption, some onboarding is better than no onboarding.

Final thoughts

There is no all-purpose user adoption solution that lets you implement your entire user adoption strategy. Each tool comes with its own set of benefits and limitations. You need to identify your specific product adoption needs and look for tools that offer the best solution to them.

But if you’re looking to increase product adoption with in-app onboarding, we’ve got you covered. Get a Userpilot demo today!