Chameleon for In-App Messaging: Features, Pricing, and Review
Looking for an effective In-app messaging tool and wondering if Chameleon is the best option for your SaaS company?
With numerous of Chameleon alternatives, it can be challenging to make a final decision.
In this article, we’ll delve into precisely that – helping you determine whether Chameleon is the ideal choice for your In-app messaging needs. We’ll explore its features, pricing, and offer a comprehensive review to aid in your decision-making process.
Let’s get started!
TL;DR
- Chameleon is a good choice for In-app messaging and it comes with features such as self service support, in-app resource center, onboarding checklist, and in-app messaging.
- Despite its strong performance when it comes to creating personalized and highly customized user experiences, Chameleon is not the most competitive tool when compared to similar products.
- Here are three reasons why you might need to look elsewhere:
- You are on a budget: To get access to all the needed tools for proper onboarding and adoption, you need to pay for the higher plans that can get expensive.
- Requires CSS knowledge: Custom CSS works by targeting specific elements of Chameleon Experiences to change their styling. However not all users have an idea what CSS is all about, so, you need to be technically savvy.
- Analytics are not advanced: Chameleon doesn’t pose of robust analytics features like Userpilot does. You might want to consider another tool if you need accurate product and user analytics, without paying for additional tools.
- If you’re looking for a better option for In-app messaging, Userpilot exceeds both functionality and value for money compared to Chameleon
- Ready to see Userpilot in action? Schedule a demo today to explore its powerful In-app messaging capabilities firsthand.
Looking for A Better Alternative for In-app messaging? Try Userpilot
What is Chameleon?
Chameleon is a product adoption platform. It enables SaaS teams to leverage real-time user data to build beautiful on-brand experiences, improve user onboarding, and drive product-led growth.
In addition, it empowers product teams to create and manage dynamic in-product experiences. With Chameleon, SaaS teams can now create beautiful product tours that help, guide, and delight their users throughout their journey. All of these are possible without coding!
Must have features of In-app messaging tools
Overall, the best tool for your business will depend on your specific needs and goals. When choosing an in-app messaging tool, it’s important to consider factors such as:
- Targeting and segmentation: The ability to target messages to specific users or user segments based on behavior, preferences, or other attributes.
- Automation and scheduling: The ability to automate the delivery of messages based on specific triggers or user actions.
- A/B testing: The ability to test different message content, formats, or delivery methods to determine which is most effective.
- Personalization: The ability to personalize messages based on user behavior, goals, or other attributes.
- Analytics and insights: The ability to track message performance, such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates, and gain insights into user behavior and preferences.
- Different UI patterns: The ability to deliver in-app messages with different patterns: tooltips, modals, pop-ups, or slideouts.
Overall, an in-app messaging tool should provide a robust and flexible platform for delivering targeted and personalized messages to users within your application.
Chameleon features for In-app messaging
Imagine a tool without sufficient in-app support and guidance. Well, whatever you think it would be is not what Chameleon is. This tool is big on product tours, product guides, product walkthroughs—or whatever you want to call it, in-app guidance makes your product better.
Here is what you will get with Chameleon to drive in-app support:
- In-app messages: Send targeted in-app messages to users, providing timely support and assistance within the application.
- Onboarding guides: Walk users through the essential steps of setting up their accounts, configuring preferences, and exploring key features, reducing the need for external support resources.
- User segmentation: When users sign up, ask them for some basic info on their roles and jobs-to-be-done. This enables you to create and trigger in-app guides that are targeted at specific users and highlight their specific pain points and solutions.
- Tooltips: Chameleon enables you to implement in-app tooltips that offer contextual help to users when they encounter issues or uncertainties.
Chameleon’s self service support
The self-service methodology focuses on giving users the tools necessary to solve some problems on their own without having to reach out to support agents. This often includes elements like knowledge bases, chatbots, and interactive walkthroughs.
Here are Chameleon features that will help you provide self-service support for SaaS companies:
- Tooltips: Tooltips help users understand unfamiliar or complex parts of your product when they need it the most. It keeps your UI simple by reducing the noise or the need to explain everything within your interface. Since your users may have different levels of expertise and backgrounds, they may not find everything in your product intuitive, you can use hover tips to explain certain product terminologies and elements in your workspace.
- Help widgets (self-serve widget): The self-serve widget (resource center in Userpilot) clarifies where users can get help and what resources are available. Through launchers on Chameleon, you can deploy a self-serve widget out of the box. By showing customized Launchers based on the feature the user is currently using, you can deploy custom and interactive self-serve support across your whole product without pushing users off track to an external knowledge base.
- Interactive product tours: One of the best ways to offer users self-serve support is by allowing them to take interactive product tours at their own pace. You can educate those ready to learn something new while letting other users take it later when they may have more time or are ready to engage further with your platform.
Chameleon’s in-app resource center
Chameleon, unlike Userpilot, doesn’t offer a self-service resource center where users can access multiple guides and tutorials or contact support.
It does provide launchers that are similar but more restricted. A launcher can be a checklist or a list of resources, but it can’t be both.
Also, with Chameleon’s Document360 integration, you can connect your help documentation to HelpBar and enable users to access it when they need answers.
Chameleon’s onboarding checklist
Wes Bush, Author of Product-Led Growth, when asked why he loves user onboarding checklists, said:
Checklists are one of my little “hacks” to double conversion rates. To put it simply, if you want to increase your activation rate, start using checklists.
Here is what you will get with Chameleon:
- Segmentation: Chameleon offers a robust segmentation and targeting feature that empowers you to categorize users effectively according to their unique characteristics, behaviors, or attributes. This sophisticated functionality enables you to deliver highly personalized onboarding checklists that are specifically tailored to meet the individual needs of each user.
- Onboarding checklist template: Chameleon offers a range of pre-designed checklist templates that can be easily tailored to meet your specific needs. These templates serve as a valuable resource for creating comprehensive onboarding checklists, guaranteeing a standardized and well-organized onboarding experience for every user.
- In-app analytics: You get a comprehensive suite of real-time analytics and user engagement data, empowering you to effortlessly track and analyze user progress as they navigate through the onboarding checklists.
Chameleon’s in-app messaging
In-app messages are timely, relevant, and contextual notifications your users see while interacting with your product or app. The common use cases are improving onboarding flows, offering self-serve support, and getting relevant user feedback.
How can Chameleon help you create effective in-app messages? These features are in your arsenal.
- Modals: Modals are used to grab the user’s attention. For example, you can use modals for your in-app tutorials and anchor them to specific elements on the page. Or you can add a pop-up with an animated confetti effect to celebrate once the user successfully completes onboarding.
- Tooltips: Tooltips are short messages related to specific UI elements that provide additional explanations and guide users toward taking specific actions. They often help users discover the product value and quickly reach their “Aha!” moment.
What are the pros and cons of Chameleon?
Chameleon’s pros
From a wide array of features to aesthetic UI patterns that can create any flow no matter how customized they need to be, Chameleon is no doubt a powerful tool for scaling product adoption.
It works in a similar way to Userpilot and offers similar features: styling, analytics, templates, goals, A/B testing, and checklists.
Let’s look at the pros of using Chameleon:
- Intuitive no-code builder: Chameleon comes with an easy-to-use Chrome Extension builder.
- Engaging tour guides: Build interactive tours to onboard users, announce features, and create other customer in-product experiences using simple steps.
- Good range of in-app messaging and UI patterns: Easy to create custom modals, slide-outs, tooltips, hotspots, launchers (checklists or resource hub), and more.
- Full two-way and deep analytics integrations: Chameleon fits into your stack, and easily connects with your favorite tools to send data to, and from Chameleon. It offers the deepest integrations, with analytics tools, CRMs, and more.
- Effective segmentation and targeting system: Leverage user data and experiences to structure effective marketing messages and tour guides for a specific target audience.
- Advanced A/B testing: Drive continuous improvement of in-app messages and define the ideal user experience with precise A/B testing.
- Rate limiting: No user wants to be overwhelmed with multiple product tours, in-app messages, and tasks. With rate limiting, you can reduce the number of user experiences — one step at a time, with clarity over speed.
Chameleon’s cons
While Chameleon is a deep production adoption tool with an array of great features, there are still some downsides. Here are the main cons of the tool:
- Not entirely no-code: Early on, we stated that Chameleon can be used without code. True. But it is not a completely no-code tool. You’ll need the help of a technical-savvy employee in your team to sort out some build-up as the learning curve is steeper.
- Hard-to-use interface: The new UI is a bit harder to use (a lot of clicking), and there can be minor bugs here and there.
- Limited experiences: There are some limitations to the user onboarding flows. For instance, you can’t run multiple in-app experiences at the same time, as you can in Userpilot.
- Pricey: The Startup plan is quite expensive (starts at $349/mo for 2500 MAU and includes just one launcher). This means you need to go for the Growth plan, where you pay more but save more at the same time.
What do users say about Chameleon?
Flexible, purpose-fit, intuitive, code-free (debatable), cool tools — so many great adjectives to describe the quality of Chameleon by its users.
Below are some good reviews by Chameleon users:
Chameleon offers a good variety of experiences that can be customized and the final output blends right into our customer interface. We like that they keep launching innovative features like the help bar and help menu, and we find the Chameleon UI initiative. The customer success managers are very supportive, prompt, and knowledgeable.
While Chameleon has some great reviews, there are still some little downsides and quirks (same as every other SaaS tool). No tool is perfect — you need to realize that the satisfactory intent of every user is on a different level.
The UI Itself is difficult to learn. There are hidden actions or language that is unintuitive on most pages. One example – It took me probably 20 minutes to figure out how to turn rate limiting off – our tour names can be long sometimes, so the trash can icon was out of frame to the right and the left-right scroll bar was out of frame at the bottom of my screen. When the tours are displayed. there doesn’t seem to be a uniform set of rules. They’re alphabetized on the rate limiting page, but organized by priority on the tours page. We also have a ton of old tours that have been unpublished but they still show up in the lists. I wish those were filtered to a second tab. Creating custom audiences could be streamlined as well.
Chameleon’s pricing
Chameleon’s pricing is based on your product’s monthly users. From the Startup plan (for small companies to get started and save) to the Growth and Enterprise plans (for larger organizations with advanced requirements) billed via invoice.
Here’s an overview of the pricing plans, and features of each plan:
- Startup plan: For small companies to get started. Fee: $419/month, billed Monthly, usage-based, Unlimited Tours & Tooltips, 5 microsurveys, 1 Launcher, Custom CSS.
- Growth plan: For growing businesses to drive returns quickly, from $1350/month. Everything in the startup plan, plus: unlimited microsurveys & launchers, A/B testing, and rate limiting is paid annually with bulk pricing.
- Enterprise plan: For larger organizations with advanced requirements. The fee for this plan is not stated on the website rather, you get to talk to the team. You get everything in the growth plan, multi-product account, user permissions, localizations, and SSO/enhanced security.
The Growth plan seems to be the real deal because of the exciting features that can boost your product marketing. For example, you can’t get the rate limiting feature on the Startup plan, including A/B testing. These are relevant and powerful product adoption weapons that should be in your arsenal if you truly want to win more users.
Is the startup plan expensive?
Yes, compared to Userpilot, about a $170 difference. It’s best to opt in for the Growth plan for the juicy benefits, where you pay $1350 annually rather than paying a whopping $5000+ yearly for the startup plan.
3 Reasons why you might need a Chameleon alternative
Despite its strong performance when it comes to creating personalized and highly customized user experiences, Chameleon is not the most competitive tool when compared to similar products.
Here are three reasons why you might need to look elsewhere:
- You are on a budget: To get access to all the needed tools for proper onboarding and adoption, you need to pay for the higher plans that can get expensive.
- Requires CSS knowledge: Custom CSS works by targeting specific elements of Chameleon Experiences to change their styling. However not all users have an idea what CSS is all about, so, you need to be technically savvy.
- Analytics are not advanced: Chameleon doesn’t pose of robust analytics features like Userpilot does. You might want to consider another tool if you need accurate product and user analytics, without paying for additional tools.
Userpilot – A better alternative for In-app messaging
In-app support can increase customer satisfaction and retention rates. Userpilot has native in-app support features like resource centers and native tooltips as well as third-party integrations with popular support tools like Intercom to help you cover all your bases.
Here’s an overview of Userpilot’s in-app support capabilities:
- Resource center: Userpilot in-app resource centers let you add flows, checklists, external links, tutorial videos, external knowledge bases, and chat bots. You’ll also be able to view resource center analytics so you can check its performance.
- Native tooltips: In-app support must be proactive — which is why you should insert tooltips that guide users before they even think to open the resource center. Userpilot lets you add native tooltips that appear whenever users hover over an element or click on the info badge.
- Contextual flows: Userpilot’s trigger settings let you create contextual flows that automatically appear when a user reaches a certain page or performs a specific action. This can be used to offer in-app guidance and support whenever users try out a feature for the first time.
- Intercom integration: While Intercom is famous for its live chat embeds, you can do more than that by integrating it with Userpilot. You’ll see which events a user has done within Userpilot and whether or not they’ve completed onboarding to personalize support accordingly.
Userpilot’s self service support
Self-service support helps users solve problems themselves instead of having to reach out to a representative. Userpilot’s no-code resource center makes onboarding guides and product documentation easily accessible to users from within your product.
Here’s how you can use Userpilot to create a self-service customer experience:
- No-code builder: Userpilot’s no-code resource center lets you add modules without writing a single line of code. Module options include links, videos, flows, custom JavaScript functions, and checklists. You can also group modules into sections to help users navigate the resource center.
- Module segmentation: Userpilot’s segmentation settings let you hide or show specific modules within your resource center based on audience settings. This makes it possible to create modules for different user segments and hide resources that aren’t relevant to other users.
- Analytics dashboard: The dedicated analytics dashboard helps you see how many unique visitors your resource center gets, how many modules have been clicked, and the overall click rate across your user base. This will make it easier to gauge resource center performance.
Userpilot’s in-app resource center
In-app resource centers help users find answers to their questions without needing to leave your product. Userpilot’s resource centers leverage advanced segmentation to target specific customers or use cases, have detailed analytics, and can be built using the no-code editor.
Here’s a closer look at Userpilot’s resource center editor:
- No-code editor: Userpilot lets you build in-app resource centers without needing to write any code. You can add modules like internal/external links, tutorial videos, in-app flows, custom JavaScript functions, and checklists — or group multiple modules into a single section.
- Targeted modules: Userpilot’s module segmentation features let you show/hide specific resources depending on which segment a user is in. This helps you personalize your in-app resource center and only show the resources that are most relevant to a particular user.
- Analytics dashboard: Userpilot’s resource center analytics can show you key metrics like the total number of visitors, how many modules have been clicked, and changes in the click rate to help you gauge performance. You can also sort data by a specific time period if needed.
Userpilot’s onboarding checklist
Onboarding checklists help new users learn about a product and reduce their time-to-value (TTV). Userpilot checklists can be created using the no-code builder, used to trigger specific actions, and tracked using the analytics dashboard to gauge overall engagement.
Here’s how you can use Userpilot to create an advanced onboarding checklist:
- No-code builder: Userpilot’s checklist creator lets you edit the content of checklists, add tasks, style icons, and configure the triggers for when your checklist should appear. You’ll also be able to choose from five widget icons (or upload your own) and recolor the widget to match your UI.
- Smart tasks: Checklist tasks can be set to trigger specific actions upon being completed, such as redirecting a user to a different page, launching an in-app flow, or running a custom JavaScript function. You can also set the conditions for when a task and action will be marked as complete.
- Checklist analytics: The Checklists dashboard shows you all relevant metrics. These include the number of live checklists you have, how many views they’ve gotten, and how many have been completed. You can also sort these analytics by segment or time period to identify trends.
Userpilot checklist data analytics dashboard.
Userpilot’s in-app messaging
In-app messaging enables communication within your product to onboard new users or drive feature adoption among existing customers.
Here are a few ways you can send in-app messages using Userpilot:
- Modals: Userpilot lets you use modals to send unmissable in-app messages to your users. Simply choose from one of the six templates or create a new modal from scratch. You’ll be able to use text, emojis, images, and videos to help your modals get the message across to users.
- Banners: Userpilot banners can be used to send in-app messages that are urgent but don’t need to take up the entire screen. You can also add blocks with text, emojis, images, videos, forms, custom JavaScript functions, and more to style banners to your liking.
- Tooltips: They are the least intrusive form of in-app messaging as they only show up when users hover over an element or click on an info icon. You’ll be able to adjust the height, shape, color, and placement of tooltips to make them native-like.
What are the pros and cons of Userpilot?
Userpilot’s pros
As a full-suite digital adoption platform, Userpilot has all the features you need to onboard users, track analytics, and gather feedback from customers without writing a single line of code. Here are a few pros of using Userpilot as your product growth solution:
- No-code builder: Userpilot’s Chrome extension lets you build flows, add UI elements, and tag features without writing a single line of code.
- UI patterns: There are plenty of UI patterns to choose from when using Userpilot such as hotspots, tooltips, banners, slideouts, modals, and more!
- Startup-friendly: Userpilot’s entry-level plan gives you access to all available UI patterns so you can hit the ground running.
- Walkthroughs and flows: Build engaging interactive walkthroughs and personalized onboarding flows that target specific segments of your user base.
- Self-service support: Build an in-app resource center to help users solve problems, customize its appearance to align it with your brand, and insert various types of content (videos, flows, or chatbots) to keep your customers satisfied.
- A/B testing: Userpilot’s built-in A/B testing capabilities will help you split-test flows, iterate on the best-performing variants, and continually optimize based on user behavior.
- Feedback collection: Userpilot has built-in NPS surveys with its own unified analytics dashboard and response tagging to help you retarget users. There are other survey types to choose from and you can even create your own custom survey.
- Survey templates: There are 14 survey templates to choose from so you can gather feedback on specific features or run customer satisfaction benchmarking surveys like CSAT and CES.
- Advanced analytics: Userpilot lets you analyze product usage data, monitor engagement on all in-app flows, and use the data to create user segments that are based on behaviors instead of demographics.
- Event tracking: Userpilot’s no-code event tracking lets you tag UI interactions (hovers, clicks, or form fills) and group them into a custom event that reflects feature usage.
- Third-party integrations: Userpilot has built-in integrations with tools like Amplitude, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, Segment, Heap, HubSpot, Intercom, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager so you can share data between all the solutions in your tech stack.
Userpilot’s cons
Of course, no tool is perfect and there are a few cons to consider before choosing Userpilot as your user onboarding or product growth solution:
- Employee onboarding: Currently, Userpilot only supports in-app customer onboarding.
- Mobile apps: Userpilot doesn’t have any mobile compatibility which could make it difficult for developers with cross-platform applications to create a consistent user experience for both versions of their product.
- Freemium plan: There’s no freemium Userpilot plan so those bootstrapping their startup and need sub-$100 solutions should consider more affordable onboarding platforms like UserGuiding or Product Fruits.
What do users say about Userpilot?
Most users laud Userpilot for its versatile feature set, ease of use, and responsive support team:
I recently had the pleasure of using Userpilot, and I must say it exceeded all my expectations. As a product manager, I’m always on the lookout for tools that can enhance user onboarding and improve overall user experience. Userpilot not only delivered on these fronts but also went above and beyond with its impressive new features, unparalleled ease of use, and truly exceptional customer support.
What truly sets Userpilot apart is its outstanding customer support. Throughout my journey with Userpilot, the support team has been responsive, knowledgeable, and genuinely dedicated to helping me succeed. Whenever I had a question or encountered an issue, their support team was always there to assist promptly, going above and beyond to ensure my concerns were addressed effectively.
Source: G2.
Of course, other users are also kind enough to share constructive criticism regarding specific features like event tracking filters:
“The filtration while analyzing specific events is a little confusing. Understanding of custom properties and data management configuration could have been more organised.”
Source: G2.
Userpilot’s 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, user feedback, and customization.
- Growth: The Growth plan starts at $499/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).
Conclusion
There you have it.
It should be easier now to make an informed decision whether Chameleon is your go-to option for In-app messaging. Ultimately, the best choice will depend on your product and current needs.
If you’re looking for a better alternative to Chameleon for In-app messaging, book a Userpilot demo today to experience firsthand how it can enhance your user experience and drive product growth!
Looking for A Better Alternative for In-app messaging? Try Userpilot
