Chameleon vs Walkme: Which Is Better For New Client Onboarding
Chameleon or Walkme? What’s the best tool for new client onboarding? Is there a better in-app onboarding software that would fit your needs more?
With so many alternatives on review sites, it’s a bit tricky to really choose one.
You should consider your priorities and what functionality you need from the tool to accomplish your task. In addition, the price needs to match your budget. Right?
In this post, we’ll discuss exactly that – what the perfect tool for new client onboarding should deliver and which will be the best choice for your company’s needs.
Let’s dive in!
TL;DR
- New client onboarding is a process that’s used to welcome new clients, answer their questions, and ensure they understand what the company or product offers.
- It’s a crucial phase for SaaS companies as good or bad onboarding is a deciding factor for new customers. Either they will continue using the product or will look for alternatives.
- To provide a first great impression and smooth onboarding to your users, you’ll need a solid onboarding tool that will allow you to create interactive walkthroughs to guide new customers, segment them to personalize the customer journey, and send microsurveys to collect feedback and measure customer experience.
- Chameleon and Walkme are user onboarding tools that allow you to build product tours to onboard new customers. You will also get segmentation and user feedback capabilities.
- Though both are good tools in a SaaS market, they are not the right fit for everyone. For example, Chameleon doesn’t offer an in-app resource center or NPS feedback surveys which are key components for a good user onboarding tool.
- When it comes to Walkme, it’s super expensive and mostly used by enterprise companies. Plus, you need to have a fair amount of technical knowledge to set up Walkme guides as there is a steep learning curve.
- There is a better alternative for Chameleon and Walkme. To get more value for your money, try considering Userpilot. It’s a code-free user onboarding tool that offers you a wide range of UI patterns to create interactive and personalized onboarding experiences for new customers. You will also be offered powerful segmentation and analytics functionality to better understand and serve your customers.
Looking for the best tool for new client onboarding? Search no more!
What is new client onboarding?
New client onboarding is a process that involves welcoming new clients, answering their questions, and ensuring they understand what your company offers. It’s usually delivered by Customer Success Managers for high-touch “white glove”client onboarding and may be automated for lower-ACV prosumer customers e.g. in SaaS.
Either way, it’s the time when your company establishes the relationship with your new client/customer, so it’s critical to get things right.
New clients might feel stressed about the onboarding time, wondering about the amount of time it will take them to truly understand and adopt your service/product, and feeling buyer’s remorse – whether they made the right choice and that you’re worth their time and money.
On the flip side, your customer success agents don’t know what the cooperation with the new client will be like, what are the client’s goals, and if it will be really possible to meet their expectations.
Let’s dive deeper into why new client onboarding is important, and how to get it right!
Why should you care about new client onboarding?
The new client onboarding phase is like the first date you may have with a new “romantic interest” – it’s a make-or-break few hours that determine if the next date is going to happen. Likewise, client onboarding may not last long, but it sets the stage for your whole relationship with that client.
Here’s why it’s so critical:
- The onboarding stage is a deciding factor for a lot of your clients whether to continue business with your company or not. According to Hubspot, 63% of customers consider the onboarding process when making a purchase.
- And no wonder – as the first interactions with your team, and whether there’s a lot of friction in the onboarding process or not – determine how your client perceives your company’s service level.
- Based on that, they would probably recommend your product/service to their friends or…not. So client onboarding also affects your Word of Mouth (WOM)
- This means that a bad client onboarding experience will likely leave you with poor reviews. And reviews on review sites like G2 or Capterra are an important deciding factor for most prospects considering your tool.
- Last but not least – the client onboarding phase affects the churn likelihood of your clients. If the goals are not set right in the onboarding phase, the expectations are not managed, and your client does not feel like they are reaching success – they will be more likely to feel disappointed in your product and churn.
Why do you need tools for new client onboarding?
Wondering why you even need a new client onboarding tool? There are several reasons why you may need one:
Let’s face it: you can’t provide a premium onboarding service to every client by hand, especially if you’re growing rapidly, and you’re selling to several client sectors.
And yet – considering what we discussed in the ‘importance of client onboarding’ – you really cannot afford to drop the ball on your ‘smaller’ users. So what can you do? To conduct new client onboarding well and reduce the friction for your new clients, you need the right onboarding tools
Here’s what the right new client onboarding tool that will allow you to do:
- Provide personalized onboarding flows that will be self-serve – will reduce the time your CSMs will need to spend with your clients explaining every feature of your product.
- Segment your users by company size, role, use case, and Job-to-be-done – to make sure you can deliver the right onboarding experiences to the right person, at the right time.
- Easily conduct surveys to understand your users’ goals, motivations, expectations, JTBDs, and desired outcomes.
- Track user journeys with simple user analytics and react to any problems as they arise.
- Provide self-serve support materials right inside your product, in a resource hub.
Your new client onboarding tools will allow you to do all the above synchronously, without having to deploy an army of CSMs on every single client.
Tool’s must-have features for new client onboarding?
Before picking your new client onboarding tool, you should check if it has most of the must-have features of a good onboarding tool:
Here’s what to look for before picking your client onboarding solution:
- Great segmentation capabilities – so you can segment your new clients by size, job to be done, role, use case, etc. – but also by in-app behavior.
- Ability to create no-code microsurveys – so you can easily collect additional information about your new clients that will help you customize their onboarding flows and experience.
- Features for creating no-code in-app experiences for onboarding: onboarding flows, checklists, tooltips, and modals.
- The option to create in-app resource centers for your new clients with multimedia content hubs – including help docs, knowledge base articles, video tutorials, as well onboarding flows. The knowledge hub should be available in-app and searchable by KWs.
- User analytics to monitor new client behavior inside your product, and catch customers that are failing to achieve their goals early – to offer them more personalized “human” support.
Chameleon for new client onboarding
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 over $150 more expensive for the same number of MAUs.
You can build widgets (launchers) and classic guides and tours with Chameleon as the main drivers of user onboarding.
Here’s how Chameleon’s main functionality helps with user onboarding:
- Chameleon’s product tours help you build flows for guidance. You can use several UI patterns for this: modals, banners, tooltips, and hotspots.
- You can customize the styling (font, color, opacity, etc) of your product tours and even add in some CSS styling if you want advanced branding.
- Launchers are where Chameleon is different compared to its competitors. These are in-app widgets that can open checklists, small help widgets, or notification centers. The downside is that you can’t have one launcher with multiple types of content.
- You can target content to different user segments based on multiple data sources including event triggering.
- Ability to use micro surveys with great customization and question-and-answer types.
- On Growth Plan and higher, you also get access to more functionality like A/B testing, multiple environments, localization (Enterprise plan only), and advanced integrations like Hubspot
All in all, Chameleon has good functionality for user onboarding but will be very limited on the Startup plan as you only get one Launcher and five micro surveys.
To build contextual and efficient user onboarding you will need more than that. Considering what you get for the money, Userpilot offers much better value.
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 hub), 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 ($999/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 a 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 $899/mo
- 2000 – 3000MAUs: Startup plan from $419/mo, Growth from $899/mo.
- 3000 – 5000 MAUs: Startup plan from $489/mo, Growth from $899/mo.
- 5000 – 10,000 MAUs: Startup plan from $517/mo, Growth from $999/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!
Walkme for new client onboarding
WalkMe is one of the pioneers in the market of adoption tools. It is a cloud-based software that allows you to create product tours and in-app experiences to drive adoption faster.
WalkMe is best for enterprise companies as they are focused on employee onboarding rather than user onboarding.
WalkMe user onboarding solution consists of 3 main guiding elements: WalkThrus, SmartTips, and ShoutOuts. These allow you to provide interactive in-app guidance to your customers.
Let’s have a quick look at each of these functionalities and how they help with user onboarding:
- WalkMe’s WalkThrus are its primary engine for creating user onboarding experiences. They overlay the target software or web app and provide on-screen guidance to help users complete tasks. In most cases, this means step-by-step instructions and tips that lead users from a starting point to the completion of a given task.
- SmartTips are also a form of on-screen guidance, but they’re less about the process and more about resolving points of friction. For example, with a SmartTip you can trigger a small note to pop up suggesting relevant links or giving more information about how to complete a form.
- ShoutOuts operate like SmartTips, but are geared toward in-product messaging. You can trigger them to pop up and give more information about relevant features, new updates, or product promotions.
- WalkMe also offers a couple of other more niche features for onboarding. For example Launchers (buttons that launch other WalkMe features or experiences), surveys, and an ActionBot (automated robo-chat to help users resolve issues and answer questions).
Pros of Walkme
WalkMe has its fair share of advantages that make it a solid tool. So what are WalkMe’s pros?
Here are our top three:
- Offers a high level of customization and works on both your own tool and 3rd party tools.
- Allows you to create in-app quizzes to test user or employee knowledge after completing a flow.
- Get access to a vast list of integrations that simply enhance your data collection or allow you to connect multiple tools in your stack.
Cons of Walkme
WalkMe is an established tool on the market but it does have its own share of cons too.
Here are the main ones you should consider:
- There’s a steep learning curve and a fair amount of technical knowledge required to create WalkMe user guides and get them implemented the way they’re intended.
- WalkMe is designed for enterprise organizations, and its pricing reflects that.
- You could end up spending anything from $9000 to $50000 a year on WalkMe. That’s a lot of money for startups and SMEs.
What users say about Walkme?
Users are mostly happy with WalkMe’s features: on-screen guidance, interactive walkthroughs, customizable UI patterns, and journey segmentation are highly used and appreciated by customers.
Here are some reviews from real users.
“The most valuable thing WalkMe provides is time. WalkMe provides the user with on-screen guidance to get them to where they need to be without weighing down support teams on training for every function. The automated steps can remove multiple clicks and quickly send the user to what they need to see. The ability to view user activity and search terms allows mapping new build requirements properly.”
“WalkMe is very user-friendly and easy to learn! There are so many different features of WalkMe to provide a customizable and creative experience for all of our users. I love creating smart walkthroughs and building flows charts, which is the most fun part of my day-to-day tasks!”
But Walkme is not a perfect solution, most complaints are about hard implementation and annual contract pricing.
Here are some words from real Walkme users:
We never had time to implement the product. It takes a huge time investment and isn’t designed for the full documentation. Rather than maintain two sets of documentation, we removed Walkme from our product. This company is as bad as AOL or TimeWarner: they will not let you out of your multi-year contract no matter how unhappy you are with the product.
The tool is not very intuitive and has countless challenges using and technical difficulties.
Is Walkme the right fit for your business?
Is WalkMe all you need or are there better alternatives that can provide more value at a much lower price? Here are the main reasons you should look for an alternative:
- WalkMe offers only yearly pricing contracts which start at $9000 so if you want to onboard new customers or provide in-app guidance then there are better solutions that won’t lock you in.
- WalkMe is known for its hard implementation so it’s not recommended for non-technical people. Generally, it can take weeks or even months. For better comparison, Userpilot can be set up in just a few minutes as it’s completely code-free.
- Bad and outdated UX design is another thing that might disappoint you and make you search for alternatives.
Walkme pricing
WalkMe works on a custom pricing plan that requires you to request a quote from their sales team (could be spending from $9000 to $50000 a year).
Their main two plans are:
- WalkMe for employee onboarding experience: engagement tools and analytics
- WalkMe for customer experience: engagement tools and analytics
- Add-ons: Session Streams, TeachMe, AI analytics through UI intelligence
There is a better tool for your SaaS than Walkme!
Is there a better alternative for new client onboarding?
Chameleon and Walkme are good tools for new client onboarding. 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 new client onboarding
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.
Userpilot was built specifically for SaaS product teams that want to improve their user onboarding experience and boost user activation.
You can build a huge variety of user onboarding experiences and in-app guidance flows without needing to code.
Here’s what you’ll get when you start using Userpilot:
- Forget about coding in-app experiences: Userpilot is a no-code solution and only requires your dev to install a line of javascript inside your app and for you to download a chrome extension that opens up the visual builder.
- Build in-app flows using the largest range of UI patterns (modals, slideouts, tooltips, hotspots, banners) and in-app onboarding experiences (checklists, microsurveys, NPS surveys, in-app resource center)
- Get access to a built-in NPS tool for collecting and analyzing user sentiment so you can improve your onboarding process based on real data.
- Create and track combinations of in-app events like clicks, hovers and form fills, and then analyze all these interactions under your own custom events, which can be built without code or API calls.
- Use advanced product analytics and in-app flows analytics to identify where users need help and create granular user segments to trigger in-app experiences contextually (segment based on user identification data, in-app engagement, custom events, clicks, hovers, form fills, user feedback responses, NPS scores and more)
- Enhance the onboarding experience with in-app help by launching a Resource Center directly inside your app. Add in-app guides, and video tutorials, and give users access to search the knowledge base or reach out to support. Self-service has never been easier.
The best user onboarding is contextual and it happens right where the users need it, inside your app. There isn’t a better user onboarding tool out there that offers more value for the money than Userpilot.
Schedule a demo with our team and get ready to build the best onboarding experiences your users have seen.
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
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.
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
That’s all you need to know. Now that you know more about Chameleon and Walkme, you should be able to make an informed choice.
Both tools have advantages and disadvantages, so there is no one that is better than the other. If you want the maximum value for money, we recommend going with the alternative option.
Are you interested in seeing how Userpilot can help with new client onboarding? Book a demo below.
There is a better tool for your SaaS than Chameleon!
