Is Chameleon or Userlane the best tool for interactive user guides? Is there a better in-app onboarding software that would better fit your needs?

With so many alternatives on review sites, it’s a bit tricky to choose one.

You need to consider your priorities and what functionality you’ll need from the tool to get the job done. Then there’s also the price that needs to match your budget. Right?

In this post, we’ll discuss exactly that – what the perfect tool for creating interactive user guides should deliver and which will be the best choice for your company’s needs.

Let’s dive in!

TL;DR

• Let’s explore how Chameleon and Userlane compare when it comes to creating interactive user guides.
  • 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.
  • Userlane is a no-code digital adoption platform used to measure how employees use applications, identify areas for improvement, and offer real-time guidance directly within any application.
• If you’re looking for a better option for creating interactive user guides, Userpilot exceeds both functionality and value for money compared to other tools on the list.
• Userpilot is a product growth platform that drives user activation, feature adoption, and expansion revenue. It also helps product teams collect user feedback, streamline onboarding, and gather actionable insights from analytics. Get a Userpilot demo and drive your product growth code-free.

Userpilot – A Better Alternative for Building Interactive User Guides

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What is an interactive user guide?

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.

Must have features for interactive user guide tools

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 creating interactive user guides

An interactive user guide is a combination of prompts used when onboarding users in order to help them understand how to use your product. Users learn and build habits by interacting, so here’s how to make that happen with Chameleon:

• Hotspots: Hotspot is a beacon or a pulsating dot that can be attached to any element on your product’s interface. A hotspot captures a user’s attention without breaking their flow or current intention. By clicking (or hovering) on the hotspot, a user can get more details on that feature and begin to engage better.
• Launchers: Launchers function based on customizable widgets that can be used as checklists or help menus (more like manuals) to deepen user engagement and feature discovery. With these checklists, you can motivate and guide users to complete key setup or activation tasks. These self-help menus provide searchable interactive guidance for key workflows, pro tips, or common questions.
• Tours: Tours help you guide, successfully onboard, support, or celebrate your users’ journey, from discovery to mastery of your product. Chameleon’s tour is not very interactive, and Chameleon doesn’t offer interactive guides unlike other tools (Userpilot).

Offering interactive self-service support with a resource center feature is very important, but Chameleon falls short of this. For now, Hotspots and launchers are the most beneficial features for interactive user guides. Aside from being able to do all these on Userpilot, you can also track and analyze the efficiency of your interactive guides on user behavior.

No-code product tours in Chameleon

Product tours are an essential tool for a product manager in guiding users toward their “Aha!” moment or showcasing high-value features that are being underused.

Below is a range of features that are accessible for use when creating product tours with Chameleon:

• Partially no-code editor: Product tour software with little development support is essential. Therefore, creating an effective interactive product tour should require minute coding knowledge. However, Chameleon has a steeper learning curve and is not entirely a no-code tool.
• Fully customizable styling: From simple things like fonts, colors, and button shapes to custom CSS, you should be able to tailor every single in-product tour to look 100% on-brand.

• Native A/B testing: Chameleon helps you create variations of in-app flows until you find what users engage with the most. Let’s say you create a segment for an e-commerce product campaign, you can test the flow of in-app messages repetitively using different copies and designs.
• Contextual targeting: One of the most powerful capabilities of Chameleon is the ability to show in-product experiences to the most relevant users. All you need to do is define specific user groups and create segments that you use to target your experiences. Chameleon offers a few basic pre-configured audiences, which you can use without sending any custom data to Chameleon. This is set automatically.

In-app messaging in Chameleon

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.

Userlane for creating interactive user guides

With the Userlane Editor, you can create powerful interactive guides within applications, enhancing user experiences and facilitating content creation and editing.

You can create guides within the application or tooltips to add explanations to an element within the application for your users. Let’s take a look at how Userlane can help you create interactive user guides:

• Real-time assistance: Userlane’s interactive guides are more than just pop-up hints. They provide context-aware help right when and where a user needs it. If a user seems stuck or unsure of the next step, Userlane’s guides can nudge them in the right direction, ensuring they’re not frustrated or overwhelmed.
• Sleek learning path: Userlane allows the creation of adaptive learning paths. This means the guides can adjust in complexity and depth based on the user’s previous interactions, ensuring a customized and efficient learning experience. The platform’s no-code functionality allows these adaptive paths to be set up without needing to delve into complex coding or scripting.
• Seamless integration: Userlane understands that users have different learning preferences. Some prefer text, while others benefit from visuals or videos. The platform seamlessly integrates multimedia elements into the guides, ensuring a comprehensive and engaging learning experience.

No-code product tours in Userlane

Userlane is primarily designed to create interactive product walkthroughs with simplicity. For companies looking to integrate a basic onboarding experience without coding complexities, Userlane’s no-code platform is an ideal choice.

It provides a seamless solution for businesses to create in-app interactive content. Rather than requiring extensive coding and development effort, Userlane enables organizations to craft intuitive product tours rapidly.

Here’s a breakdown of the features of Userlane for no-code product tours:

• Interactive Step-by-Step Guidance: Userlane offers a visual editor that allows creators to design step-by-step instructions directly within the application interface. These guides provide users with a hands-on approach to learning, leading them through real-time processes. This ensures that users aren’t just reading instructions but are actively engaged in performing tasks.
• Analytics and Performance Insights Without Code: Beyond just crafting the tours, Userlane’s no-code platform provides businesses with valuable insights into user engagement. Organizations can monitor the effectiveness of their onboarding content, pinpoint areas of improvement, and optimize their guides—all through a user-friendly, code-free dashboard.
• Personalized User Segmentation with No-Code Customization: Userlane’s no-code capabilities enable businesses to tailor tours based on user roles, preferences, or behaviors without diving into complex programming.

In-app messaging in Userlane

With Userlane, you can deliver in-app messages to your users through the Userlane Assistant. This way, you can communicate with your users without the hassle of using a Google translator to translate to their preferred language.

• Contextual Communication: Delivers tailored messages to users based on their actions, position within the app, or specific milestones, ensuring timely and relevant engagement.
• Role-Based Message Management: Grants specific permissions to administrators, moderators, and contributors in your product team, allowing for streamlined creation, editing, and publishing of in-app messages.
• Content-Rich Announcements: Supports the inclusion of various media types, like images, and offers capabilities to link messages directly to detailed guides, enhancing the depth and versatility of the messaging experience.

Pros and cons of Chameleon

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 possess 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.

Pros of Chameleon

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.

Cons of Chameleon

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.

Userpilot – A Better Alternative for Building Interactive User Guides

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Pros and cons of Userlane

While Userlane is undoubtedly powerful, certain scenarios might necessitate exploring alternatives.

• Extensive Third-party Integrations: While Userlane offers some key integrations if your business heavily relies on a diverse range of third-party tools and you need a seamless, in-depth integration for all of them, you might want to explore platforms like Pendo or Mixpanel that offer broader integration ecosystems.
• Budget Constraints: While Userlane offers a plethora of features suitable for established enterprises or growing companies, it might be beyond the reach of early-stage startups with limited funds. If you’re on a strict budget and looking for a more affordable solution, platforms like UserGuiding, Intercom, or Intro.js might be more aligned with your financial constraints.
• Complex Customization Needs: If your platform requires highly specialized or intricate onboarding experiences that go beyond standard walkthroughs and tooltips, you might find Userlane’s customization options a bit restrictive. In such cases, tools like WalkMe or Appcues, known for their deep customization capabilities, might be a better fit.

Pros of Userlane

Higher productivity, less support effort, and happier users are what Userlane is created for. From a vast spectrum of capabilities to elegantly crafted UI elements that cater to any walkthrough, regardless of its level of customization, Userlane stands out as a robust platform to bolster user engagement and product familiarization.

Let’s dive into the pros of using Userlane:

• Streamlined no-code interface: Userlane boasts a user-friendly dashboard, enabling even those with no coding background to easily design and implement onboarding flows.
• Product adoption analytics: Get a real-time view of digital transformation progress in your organization. Delve deeper into user behaviors across different applications and analyze engagement levels so you can optimize user experiences.
• Dynamic user walkthroughs: Craft compelling and interactive walkthroughs that intuitively guide users through your software, ensuring they grasp every essential feature.
• Versatile in-app communication tools: Whether tooltips, banners, or pop-up modals, Userlane offers many tools to engage users directly within your platform. With Userlane’s customer onboarding solution, you can tailor communications for different user segments, guiding them through the tasks and processes they will most likely need help with.
• Seamless third-party integrations: Integrate Userlane with various analytics tools, CRM platforms, and other essential software to ensure a harmonious workflow and data sharing.
• Granular audience segmentation: Understand your users and their needs better by segmenting them based on behavior, user type, or other customizable metrics. This ensures that your messaging and tours are always relevant and timely.
• Optimized A/B testing capabilities: Refine your onboarding and in-app messaging by A/B testing different approaches, enabling you to continually enhance user experience based on concrete data.
• Thoughtful pacing with walkthrough rate limiting: Ensure users aren’t too quickly bombarded with too much information. With Userlane’s rate limiting, you can pace the introduction of new features or tasks, striking a balance between informing and overwhelming.

Cons of Userlane

As with any tool, weighing its strengths and weaknesses is essential. Here are the notable drawbacks of adopting Userlane:

• Visual Customization Restrictions: One of Userlane’s apparent setbacks lies in its restricted visual customization capabilities. If you have an eye for aesthetic and unique branding elements might find the platform limiting. The lack of diverse templates and somewhat rigid design elements could impede brands from truly reflecting their identity.
• Analytical Ambiguities: In the age of data-driven decision-making, Userlane’s analytical powers — or the lack thereof — stand out. While it offers basic insights, those looking for a deep dive into granular user behavior, funnel analysis, heatmaps, and more might need to bridge the gap with external integrations.
• Integration Quandaries: Speaking of integrations, Userlane might not be the Swiss Army knife of connectivity that some businesses might be hoping for. While essentials like Zendesk, Google Analytics, Hubspot, and Salesforce are on the list, those yearning for a wider array of integration options might need to strategize around these limitations.
• Cost Considerations: Userlane’s pricing structure could be a roadblock, especially for startups and SMEs keen on budget constraints. The initial investment for Userlane might seem daunting, especially considering the added costs of potential integrations and the learning curve associated with maximizing the platform’s potential.

Chameleon vs Userlane: Which one fits your budget?

Understanding the cost implications is paramount when selecting the right solution for creating interactive user guides, so here’s a detailed pricing comparison of Chameleon and Userlane.

Pricing of Chameleon

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:

• Help Bar: This is a standalone search function on top of your product, allowing users to search your knowledge base articles.
• Startup plan: For small companies to get started. Fee: $354/month, billed Monthly, usage-based, Unlimited Tours and 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.

Pricing of Userlane

Userlane’s pricing plan is structured in a customizable pattern. This means you need to get a custom quote to know the plan that fits your brand’s purpose based on the level of your SaaS and the number of acquired customers.

Userpilot – A better alternative for building interactive user guides

Userpilot is a product growth platform that drives user activation, feature adoption, and expansion revenue. It also helps product teams collect user feedback, streamline onboarding, and gather actionable insights from analytics.

With Userpilot, you’ll be able to track both product usage and user behavior to get a holistic view of how customers use your product — which will guide future development, improve the user experience, and inform your growth efforts.

No-code product tours in Userpilot

Product tours are an effective way to show new users what a product can do and reduce the time-to-value (TTV) for them. Userpilot lets you build advanced product tours, set contextual triggers, and target specific audiences, all without writing a single line of code.

Here are the Userpilot features that you can use to build a product tour for your users:

• Flow builder: Userpilot’s no-code flow builder has a variety of UI patterns to choose from, such as modals, slideouts, tooltips, and driven actions. All UI patterns are available for use regardless of which Userpilot plan you’re on. All you need to do is install the Chrome extension.

• Contextual triggers: Userpilot lets you set triggers for your flows to ensure that they appear at the most contextual moments. Flows could be triggered when users land on a specific page or when a tracked event occurs. There are also manual triggering options that you can tinker with.

• Audience targeting: Userpilot’s audience targeting setting lets you set the conditions needed for a flow to show up for a specific user. You can use these settings to create flows that target a specific segment or exclude certain users from seeing a flow if certain conditions are met.

In-app messaging in Userpilot

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.

Pricing of Userpilot

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, NPS feedback, and customization.
• Growth: The Growth plan starts at $749/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).

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.

Conclusion

This is the end of our thorough comparison between Chameleon and Userlane. You should be able to make a confident decision by now. If you’re looking for a solid tool for building interactive user guides that promises great value for money, give Userpilot a go. Book a demo today.

Userpilot – A Better Alternative for Building Interactive User Guides

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• 14 Day Trial
• No Credit Card Required