Chameleon vs Spekit – Which Is Better for Interactive User Guides?
Is Chameleon or Spekit the best option for creating interactive user guides? Or is there an in-app onboarding tool superior to both?
Choosing a no-code tool can be overwhelming – the last thing you want is to get stuck in an expensive annual plan. To make a confident decision, you must consider your requirements and budget, among other factors.
In this post, we’ll discuss the essential features of an interactive user guide tool and guide you to the best fit for your company’s needs. Keep reading to learn more.
TL;DR
- Interactive user guides leverage various UI patterns to educate customers on how to use your product. They can be categorized into two types: full product tours (detailed walkthroughs) and interactive manuals (contextual in-app guidance).
- You should consider building user guides because they shorten time-to-value, increase product adoption, and reduce customer support costs.
- Utilizing a tool for interactive user guides is vital to reduce reliance on developers and trigger guides contextually. An ideal tool must be truly no-code, offer a range of UX patterns, support user segmentation, and enable tracking of product analytics.
- Chameleon is a digital adoption platform that lets users create step-by-step guides and launch microsurveys to collect customer feedback. It offers advanced segmentation and two-way integrations with HubSpot, Segment, Mixpanel, and more.
- On the contrary, it is an expensive tool and may require developer involvement as it isn’t fully no-code.
- Spekit is another digital adoption platform that focuses solely on employee onboarding.
- It lets you add training material and trigger in-app alerts to notify employees of important announcements. However, it lacks essential UX patterns and some users have reported frequent bugs.
- Userpilot is a robust product adoption platform that is a superior alternative to Chameleon and Spekit.
- Some of Userpilot’s impressive features include multiple UX patterns, in-app checklists, interactive walkthroughs, in-app resource centers, and more.
- Userpilot offers great value for money and is quick to start, but is not suited for mobile applications or employee onboarding.
- Curious about what Userpilot can do for you? Schedule a demo today.
Looking for the best tool for interactive user guides? Search no more!
What is interactive user guides?
An interactive user guide is a set of UI patterns designed to work together and help customers understand how to use your product.
There are two main types of user guides: full product tours (which tend to be more detailed and time-consuming), and interactive manuals (using tooltips and real-time guidance to provide more contextual help to your customers).
Interactive user manuals are an excellent way of engaging and educating your users, helping them to get the most out of your product, and improving user onboarding and feature adoption.
Why should you care about interactive user guides?
All product managers want to delight and engage their customers. A big part of that is making sure your users know how to get the most from your application (and in the modern world, that means more than creating a support documentation page).
Fail in that mission, and you risk damaging customer loyalty. Here’s why building interactive user guides is important:
- Interactive user guides improve user onboarding and drive product adoption. How? By helping real users get value from your product through engaging with interactive content relevant to them.
- Contextual and personalized interactive guides will shorten the time to value and reduce friction in the adoption of your product.
- In-app guides are part of a self-serve onboarding strategy and they reduce support and customer success cost while increasing customer satisfaction. Users just get access to help, when they need it.
All in all, interactive user guides are the backbone of a successful onboarding strategy and should be a must for your user experience,
Why do you need tools for building interactive user guides?
Wondering why you even need a tool to create interactive user guides? There are several reasons why you may need one:
For most software companies, creating interactive manuals from scratch is the wrong approach. Why?
Rather than reinventing the wheel, your developers should prioritize their efforts around enhancing your software – making it faster or more visually appealing – and regularly shipping updates that delight your customers.
Here’s how using a tool can help:
- With the low technical barrier to entry, anyone -from operations to customer success managers – can quickly create an interactive tour, which means you can reduce reliance on software developers.
- Rather than a “one size fits all” approach, you can trigger user guides contextually – so based on the specific actions the customer has taken, targeted support is triggered to help them navigate and use the product more effectively.
- There are dozens of variables you might want to adjust, from small changes to copy to tweaking the design. In a custom-built tool, this represents a significant amount of work – in a no-code tool, it’s incredibly simple.
- Customer adoption tools make it easy to see which version of an interactive user guide performs more effectively with A/B testing (and adapt your approach accordingly).
You shouldn’t question the necessity for a tool to build interactive user guides, but you need to understand what functionality you should look for in a tool and which tools are the best.
Must-have features for building no-code interactive user guides?
Not all tools are built the same. Some offer different advantages over others while some will simply get you basic functionality but at a low price. It depends on your budget and needs which will be the best tool to build interactive user guides.
Here’s what to look for as the main functionalities when picking a tool to build in-app guides:
- Good range of UI patterns to use for building your guides.
- Ability to customize each interactive guide to fit your brand and style.
- Segmentation so you could trigger the guides to the right audience at the right time. A one-size-fits-all approach won’t bring you the desired results.
- The ability to trigger the user guides when specific in-app events happen is nice to have and will help you build more contextual in-app experiences.
- Minimum product usage analytics, to be able 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 starting point. Depending on your product, you might also need automated localization, A/B testing capabilities, advanced analytics or security, and more.
Chameleon for interactive user guides
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 $100 more expensive for the same number of MAUs.
Chameleon is a no-code solution for SaaS product adoption. It offers four key products:
Step-by-step tours: to guide users through the product
Self-serve launchers: for easy access to resources
Tips: for unblocking users and giving best practices
In-product microsurveys: for gathering contextual feedback
By allowing you to personalize customer experiences, you’re able to create user flows that will lead to the successful adoption of your products.
Additionally, Chameleon offers highly customizable styling, allowing you to create experiences that look native rather than like external products.
Pros of Chameleon?
Chameleon is a robust tool for your onboarding and adoption needs. Here are the main pros to consider if you’re still deciding:
- Offers a good range of in-app messaging and UI patterns. You can create custom modals, slideouts, tooltips, hotspots, launchers (checklists or resource hubs), and more.
- Good segmentation options, you can either build different user segments inside the product, or you can integrate your Chameleon account with other tools and import your data.
- Can be used on 3rd party tools, meaning you can use it for employee onboarding too.
- Offers a good range of two-way integrations: Mixpanel, Segment, Intercom, Customer.io, Segment, HubSpot, etc.
Cons of Chameleon?
While Chameleon is a great tool, the main downside is the cost and restrictions you get with it. Here are the main cons of the tool:
- There are some limitations to user onboarding flows. You can’t run multiple in-app experiences at the same time, as you can in Userpilot. Instead, Chameleon enables you to create user onboarding campaigns (different sequences of product tours shown over time).
- It’s built for single-page apps: Chameleon can’t build flows that run over multiple URLs.
- 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 can’t be both.
- It has a steeper learning curve and it’s not a completely no-code tool.
- The Startup (starter) plan is quite restrictive and expensive (starts at $349/mo for 2500 MAU and includes 1 Launcher only and 5 micro surveys). You will need to go for Growth ($1249/mo) if you want to drive product adoption.
What users say about Chameleon?
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 is a good tool overall and it’s loved by its users. Most complaints are about the price and some limitations such as customization of tours and reporting and analytics.
I wish there was an easier way to schedule content for release and more button options on the Tours. However, I think the scheduling feature is coming soon! I also wish it was easier to customize how launchers look without needing to know how to code UI changes in. – Lubana L.
There is limited reporting and dashboarding functionality within Chameleon currently. – Administrator in Financial Services
I think the software is a bit on the pricey side, but since it lets us do things that we would normally need our developers to do, we are truly saving in the grand scheme of things. It means we can focus on features and bug fixes, instead of building a new communication method that would only be used internally!-Nathalie L.
Is Chameleon the right fit for your business?
Chameleon is a great tool but we can’t say it’s the best there is. Here are three main reasons why you might consider an alternative.
- 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.
- Chameleon focuses on customization but in most cases, you will need a lot of CSS to achieve the look and feel of your brand. There are other tools that are truly no-code.
- If you need proper product and user analytics without having to pay for extra tools and integrate with Chameleon, you might need to consider a different tool.
Chameleon pricing
Chameleon split their pricing options primarily by the number of monthly active users, but you should keep in mind that the Startup plan also has limited features and might not be enough for interactive user onboarding and adoption for SaaS products:
- 0 – 2500 MAUs: Startup plan from $349/mo, Growth plan from $1249/mo
- 2000 – 3000MAUs: Startup plan from $419/mo, Growth from $1299/mo.
- 3000 – 5000 MAUs: Startup plan from $489/mo, Growth from $1449/mo.
- 5000 – 10,000 MAUs: Startup plan from $629/mo, Growth from $1749/mo
Disclaimer: with the Startup plan you only get 5 microsurveys and 1 launcher, no A/B testing, no Goals, and no localization.
There is a better tool for your SaaS than Chameleon!
Spekit for interactive user guides
Compared to the other solutions on the market, Spekit is a digital adoption platform that focuses on employee onboarding rather than user onboarding. Their technology is excellent for using targeted feature adoption flows to quickly familiarize new employees with internal capabilities.
Spekit prides itself on the robustness of its internal database system.
Employees and managers can easily add, update, and search for information, so everyone is aware of internal best practices. This database can also assist new employees to get up to speed quickly, as they can use the database rather than bugging other employees when they have questions.
Spekit sits on top of any web-based application like Salesforce and provides instant access to curated content, such as training videos, guides, and other materials. So if you want to drive product adoption by collecting useful data in one place, Spekit is perfect for that.
Here’s what you can expect from Spekit’s digital adoption capabilities:
- Spekit allows you to drive retention and assess your users with knowledge checks.
- You can embed your training beside fields, objects, and picklists for easier adoption.
- In-app alerts allow you to communicate updates and drive behavior.
- You can sync Spekit to your tool to automatically create a data dictionary that updates in real-time.
As in the case of contextual onboarding, it lacks personalization, segmentation, and more advanced features.
Due to this, you might find it limited when it comes to targeting in-app experiences unless you also pay for other product adoption tools.
Pros of Spekit?
Spekit is a useful tool for your employee onboarding needs. Here are the main advantages to consider if you’re still deciding:
- It’s easy to use and easy to install in any web-based application.
- You can create versatile knowledge bases with different formats for different teams.
- Your new employees have answers to their questions in one place. So instead of interrupting other employees’ work, they can easily find what they are looking for with Spekit.
- You can collect a data dictionary that will be available to your users across different apps.
Cons of Spekit?
The main downside that comes with Spekit is the absence of feedback collection and more advanced analytics. Here are the main cons of the tool:
- There are some limitations to user onboarding flows as Spekit only offers tooltips and modals as part of their flows UI patterns.
- There are many bugs and performance issues when using the tool. The UI is also fairly tricky to navigate as the tool is on the right-hand side.
- As the tool is missing some advanced analytics, it’s hard to find friction points and solve any issues with user experience.
What users say about Spekit?
On the whole, users feel positive about Spekit – here are some examples summarizing some key points about its features and the value it offers. You can find more reviews on G2 or Capterra.
The in-app guidance using field speks and the ability to view step by step instructions side by side using the sidebar dock have been a game changer for our organization!
The only downside I can think of is the use of the extension. I’ve had to “nag” users over and over again to get them to download it and discover all the magic that comes with it. – Samantha L.
The plug in is intuitive, easy to use and makes finding answers/solutions easy and efficient. For months we had tons of valuable resources and collateral that went untouched because reps didn’t know it existed. Now they have it right at their fingertips.
Our only pitfall was the flows piece. We aren’t able to leverage as easily as we would like.
-Administrator in Information Technology and Services/mid-market.
Most complaints about Spekit are about the upside bar positioning and some implementation issues.
” Great Idea! A bit tougher on the implementation side. ” I like the idea of this platform. It’s essential to train folks where they work. The sales team was very responsive throughout the pre-sales process. Unfortunately, our experience with implementation was nowhere as easy as we thought it would be. The slack integration was inadvertently set up internally before the full implementation. This caused an issue (which is understandable), but it took 4+ weeks for Spekit to determine the root cause. This has still not been addressed, unfortunately. Because of the difficulties with implementation/embedding into our environment, we are focused on one value proposition only: the slack Q&A creation process. We’ve needed to purchase other software that will better meet our needs. – Executive Sponsor in Information Technology and Services / Enterprise
Some users think it still has room for improvement.
“Nice, but needs work“. Customizable content, but we don’t have the capacity for someone to always manage that. Button position is very inconvenient, even though I know I can move it around. Don’t need the sidebar. I would also like to toggle off the buttons near things I have already learned so that I am not always interrupting work flows to click out of a window that I have mistakenly opened. – User in Airlines/Aviation / Mid-market
While other people think it’s overpriced.
“It’s cool, but overpriced in my opinion.” Extremely flexible. Lets us do things we wouldn’t be able to otherwise and is pretty easy to use. It looks a little funny on the screen. Kind of clutters up the screen. It looks a little funny and is too expensive in my opinion. – Administrator in Newspapers
Is Spekit the right fit for your business?
Spekit is a great tool when it comes to employee onboarding but has limited usability. Here are three main reasons why you might consider an alternative.
- Spekit focuses on employee onboarding but in most cases, you will need another tool that will provide you with in-depth analytics. There are other tools that are truly no-code.
- Spekit has a fairly tricky UI to navigate as users have encountered performance issues when using the tool.
- If you want to create more contextual onboarding with different segments, you might want to consider an alternative tool.
Spekit pricing
Spekit has recently updated its pricing policy. The price will vary depending on your organization and specific use cases.
Previously, Spekit charges $20 per person monthly so it’s more suitable for small to midsize businesses. It also doesn’t provide a free trial or a freemium version of its features.
Some features such as seismic integration, knowledge checks, and knowledge check analytics are sold as add-ons that come with an extra fee.
There is a better tool for your SaaS than Spekit!
Is there a better alternative for interactive user guides?
Chameleon and Spekit are good tools for interactive user guides. We’ve seen how they compare to each other and what you can achieve with them. Call us biased, but if you’re looking for something better, Userpilot offers more value for your money than these tools.
Userpilot for interactive user guides
Userpilot is a powerful product adoption platform that enables you to quickly build personalized, flexible, contextually relevant in-app experiences targeted to different user segments – all without writing a line of code.
Product adoption describes the process of getting users to the point where they are experiencing value from your product.
Userpilot is a powerful product adoption platform that enables you to quickly build personalized and contextual in-app experiences targeted to different user experiences – all without writing a line of code.
It’s a great option for enterprise users too since it’s SOC 2 Type II certified and offers robust features for large-scale usage.
Here are some of Userpilot’s product adoption features that you may find helpful:
- A broad range of UI patterns to build fully customizable, contextual, and interactive in-app flows: modals, slideouts, tooltips, hotspots, driven actions, banners, and more. And – most importantly – you are not limited by plan when it comes to how many UI patterns or designs you can build.
- Advanced in-app checklists with built-in gamification elements like progress bars or ”automatically marked complete” tasks: checklists also come with analytics so you can track who is interacting with them and how.
- Fully interactive walkthroughs walk users through engaging and adopting specific features of your app.
- The self-service in-app resource center lets users search your knowledge base directly inside the app, access chat, and support but also launch guides and tutorials when they get stuck.
- User feedback tools allow you to collect insights to improve the product and the user experience, thus leading to a higher product adoption rate. You can also collect NPS data and tag responses to uncover patterns into what makes users stick, or build micro surveys for more granular data. Then you can use all the feedback collected to build user segments based on the answers and personalize the path to higher product adoption for each segment.
Want to see Userpilot in action? Get a demo and improve product adoption with contextual and personalized in-app flows that actually help users.
Pros of Userpilot?
Userpilot has a number of advantages, especially for mid-market SaaS companies looking for a robust but at the same time very easy-to-use, no-code tool for user onboarding, product adoption, and simplified product analytics. Let’s have a look at the pros of using Userpilot:
- No-code builder – Userpilot comes with an easy-to-use Chrome Extension builder.
- Multiple UI patterns – choose from a range of options to build customized flows: modals, slideouts, banners, tooltips, hotspots, and checklists are all at your disposal.
- UI patterns are not limited by plan – you get access to all of them on every single plan, meaning you get value even with the Traction plan (this is the entry-level one).
- Engaging walkthroughs and onboarding flows – build interactive walkthroughs targeted to distinct user segments.
- In-app help – build a resource center offering self-service support to your users, customize it with your branding, and select from a range of help options to boost user satisfaction (i.e., videos, in-app flows, chat, and more).
- Experimentation – built-in A/B testing for flows lets you explore and quickly iterate based on direct user behavior.
- Powerful feedback options – integrated NPS surveys with analytics and response tagging unlock insight into how your users feel.
- Advanced analytics and segmentation – analyze product usage and in-app flow engagement and build user segments using the data.
- Event tracking and feature tags – tag UI engagement (clicks, form fills, hovers) and group them into one custom event to track what really matters.
- More value with integrations – unlock value faster with built-in integrations with popular tools like Segment, Amplitude, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, Intercom, Heap, and more.
Cons of Userpilot?
There are, however, some downsides to Userpilot as well:
- Browser/web app only – Userpilot won’t run on mobile devices/applications.
- Doesn’t support employee onboarding- The tool is better suited for customer onboarding than for employee onboarding as you can’t build in-app guides on third-party tools.
- Missing integrations – doesn’t have built-in integrations with some tools, but it has webhooks, and HubSpot and Zapier are coming soon.
- Not appropriate for small startups on a shoestring budget (<$100) – Userpilot is a powerful, mid-market to enterprise-level tool. So $249 a month might be too expensive for really small startups.
What users say about Userpilot?
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.
Get more value for your money with Userpilot!
Userpilot pricing
Userpilot offers great value for money compared to other similar tools on the market. Even its entry-level plan (Traction) provides all the necessary features without any usage limit.
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 differentiation happens mostly on the service level (e.g., custom domain hosting, dedicated Customer Success Manager, SLA) and is based on the number of Monthly Active Users (MAUs) your company has.
Here’s the detailed Userpilot pricing:
- Traction: For up to 2500 users, this plan is $249/ mo.
- Growth: For up to 10,000 users, this plan is $499/ mo.
- Enterprise: For large-scale businesses, these plans begin from $1000/ mo.
Conclusion
Deciding between Chameleon and Spekit is now simpler. While both tools have their pros and cons, there isn’t a single “best” tool, as it depends on your product, current needs, and budget.
We suggest considering Userpilot if you’re looking for value for money. Interested in exploring how Userpilot can assist you with interactive user guides? Schedule a demo today.
There is no better tool for your SaaS than Userpilot!
