Chameleon vs Userlane: Which is Better for No-Code Growth?
Is Chameleon or Userlane the best tool for no-code growth? And 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 really 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 no-code growth 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 enabling SaaS no-code growth.
- 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 no-code growth, 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 No-Code Growth
What is no-code growth?
No-code growth is a method of achieving product-led growth (using your own product as a lever and revenue growth channel) without coding, using no-code tools.
It essentially allows people like product managers, product marketing managers or marketers (who may not necessarily have a background in engineering) to create e.g. in-app onboarding experiences, optimize signup and onboarding flows etc. in order to achieve higher conversion rates, user activation rates – and in the long run – drive retention.
No-code movement in general empowers non-programmers to create software elements using a graphical user interface, instead of writing code. According to no-code advocates, technology should enable and facilitate creation, not act as a barrier.
Must have features for no-code growth tools
Before deciding which no-code growth tool deserves your try, you should have a basic understanding of what features you should be looking for in “the one.”
Although the exact features you need will differ based on factors such as the size of your company, your business strategy, and your goals, here are the most crucial features you should look for:
- Truly “no code” – make sure the no code growth tool you pick really allows you to build and style robust and native-looking in-app experiences without coding. You will be surprised how many tools require the knowledge of CSS to publish decent-looking onboarding flows.
- Make sure the tool you choose has all the basic UI patterns available – e.g., checklists, modals, tooltips, banners, and hotspots. This will allow you to create all the product-led growth experiences you may need.
- Targeting the experiences to the right user segments is extremely important for your PLG plays to be successful. Make sure your no-code growth tool offers advanced segmentation capabilities, so you can build customer segments based on product usage, in-app behavior, feedback, and user persona to craft hyper-personalized messages and trigger them at the right time.
- On that note – real-time, event-based triggering is an important feature of a product growth platform that only a few solutions on the market currently offer. Being able to respond to your users’ actions in real-time can be critical to pushing them toward those precious conversion points.
- Finally, product analytics is another “must-have” that a good no-code growth platform should provide. You should be able to monitor your users’ behavior with it, the engagement with your PLG in-app experiences, and how they contribute towards improving your metrics.
- The right code-free PLG tool should also offer integrations with other tools so you can add them to your stack and get better insights on your data under one roof.
Chameleon for no-code growth
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!
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.
Product growth analysis in Chameleon
Growth analytics looks at each pillar of growth and chooses the metrics that dictate product growth and revenue.
Chameleon can be a valuable tool for product growth analysis by providing insights into user behavior, helping improve user onboarding and feature adoption, and facilitating data-driven decisions to enhance your product’s overall user experience. Here is how:
- Targeted Onboarding Tours: Chameleon allows you to create interactive, step-by-step tours that guide new users through your product. This improves the onboarding experience, helping to increase user activation and reduce churn rates.
- In-App Messaging: With Chameleon, you can design and deploy targeted messages within your application. These can highlight new features, provide helpful tips, or prompt users to take specific actions, driving user engagement and feature adoption.
- User Segmentation: While not a specialized analytics tool, Chameleon does offer basic user segmentation based on attributes like user role, behavior, or custom-defined characteristics. This enables you to deliver more personalized experiences, improving user satisfaction and retention.
- Data Integration: Chameleon can integrate with other analytics tools and platforms, such as Amplitude or Mixpanel, allowing you to combine user engagement data from Chameleon with broader product analytics for a more comprehensive view of your product’s growth.
However, if you’re specifically interested in detailed metrics and analytics related to product growth — like funnel analysis, cohort analysis, and retention analytics, you might need to look at product analytics tools.
Userlane for no-code 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.
In addition, it allows you to get a real-time view of digital transformation progress in your organization. You can now delve deeper into user behaviors across different applications and analyze engagement levels so you can optimize user experiences.
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.
Product growth analysis in Userlane
Product growth analysis is a key ingredient to increasing product adoption.
Userlane’s HEART analytics is a standardized model to monitor value realization across enterprise applications.
Based on user interaction metrics and usage patterns, a single score indicates the current value realization for each application based on five core value drivers:
- Happiness: Users are satisfied with the application and are likely to recommend it. Understand how users feel about your app with the Happiness tool. You can monitor this using a Net Promoter Score (NPS) or surveys. The NPS measures user loyalty by asking about the likelihood of users recommending your application.
- Engagement: Users interact with the application actively. Engagement shows your user’s involvement by tracking how many engaged (meaningful) sessions they had and how much time they spent in your application or on a certain page.
- Adoption: Users come to the application and utilize it broadly. With the Adoption Score, you can see how many users arrived, and you can track this number compared to the ratio of the expected number of users.
- Retention: Users keep coming back to the application. The retention score is a measure of how many of your users are coming back to your application.
- Task Success: Users accomplish their tasks. The Task Success Rate will help you measure user interaction with tasks and interesting elements to be aware if users complete tasks or interact with important features easily and efficiently.
Chameleon vs Userlane: Which one fits your budget?
Understanding the cost implications is paramount when selecting the right solution for no-code growth needs, 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.
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 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.
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 No-Code Growth
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.
Userpilot – A better alternative for no-code growth
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.
Product growth analysis in Userpilot
Tracking growth analytics is essential to gauge the overall trajectory of your product. Userpilot lets you track the completion rates for specific funnels, measure the number of users completing certain goals, and survey your customers to identify the issue whenever growth metrics trend downward. Here’s how Userpilot analytics can help you measure product growth:
- Dashboards: An easy way to keep track of your key product performance and user behavior metrics at a glance, without any technical setup required. There are 4 main dashboards available for your product growth analysis: Product usage, New users activation, Core feature engagement, and User retention.
Product usage dashboard in Userpilot.
- Funnels: Userpilot’s funnel reports show you the number of users that enter a funnel and the percentage that completes each step. These visual charts can help you identify the roadblocks that are hindering user activation, causing churn, or sabotaging the efficacy of upsells.
- Trends: Trend reports let you see how specific product changes impact retention metrics and monitor changes in active user counts over certain time periods. You can also create custom metrics, track events, or use the breakdown tab to perform a correlative retention analysis.
- Paths: It provides a detailed understanding of customer actions through a sequence of steps and helps pinpoint areas where customers tend to drop off – which may indicate frictions that hinder product growth.
- Surveys: Userpilot’s survey builder has 14 survey templates that can help you find the root cause behind slowing growth rates. There are quantitative templates for collecting satisfaction metrics and qualitative surveys you can use to get user feedback on specific product areas or features.
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.
It 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 $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 no-code growth that promises great value for money, give Userpilot a go. Book a demo today.
Userpilot – A Better Alternative for No-Code Growth
