LouAssist vs HelpScout vs Userpilot: Which is Best for Your SaaS?
Struggling to decide between LouAssist, HelpScout, and Userpilot?
We understand the challenges of selecting the ideal product adoption platform for your SaaS. That’s why we’ve undertaken a comprehensive comparison of these three tools. In this analysis, we delve into greater detail regarding their features, use cases, advantages, and disadvantages compared to what you typically find on review websites.
Whether your primary focus is enhancing user onboarding, improving product analytics, gathering user feedback, or assessing NPS (Net Promoter Score), we provide insights into how LouAssist, HelpScout, and Userpilot stack up against each other. By the end, you’ll have a clear understanding of which option is the most suitable for your needs.
Let’s dive right in!
TL;DR
- LouAssist is a user-friendly product adoption and onboarding platform. It allows product teams to create captivating in-product experiences such as product tours, onboarding checklists, and feature announcements without coding. However, customization options may be limited, and it’s more focused on intuitive experiences than advanced analytics.
- HelpScout is a user-friendly customer support platform with a collaborative inbox, knowledge base, and chat features. While its reporting capabilities may be limited, it offers effective communication channels for businesses.
- Userpilot is a powerful product adoption and user onboarding platform. It helps product teams create personalized user experiences through product tours, onboarding checklists, and feature announcements. Userpilot’s code-free solution enables easy implementation, allowing businesses to engage and guide their users effectively. Book a demo to learn more!
Comparing LouAssist vs HelpScout vs Userpilot? Try the best one!
What is LouAssist?
LouAssist is a user-friendly product adoption and onboarding platform. It allows product teams to create captivating in-product experiences such as product tours, onboarding checklists, and feature announcements without coding. However, customization options may be limited, and it’s more focused on intuitive experiences than advanced analytics.
What is LouAssist best for?
Typically, SaaS Product Managers consider LouAssist for the following reasons: they want to improve their user onboarding, they need product adoption, and would also be able to measure their user feedback. How does LouAssist perform when it comes to these top-three use cases? Let’s examine it all, and then compare it to the other tools we’re discussing in this post.
LouAssist for user onboarding
Here’s how LouAssist helps with user onboarding:
- You can create product tours and onboarding checklists to provide self-serve product experiences and guide users across their journey.
- It has custom themes to make the building product experiences fast.
- Create custom segments and decide who you want to target for your onboarding experiences. You will have pre-defined segments, called Turnkey segments so you can use them without prior setup.
All in all, LouAssist has good functionality for user onboarding but is lacking to offer self-serve support as there is no help center feature.
LouAssist for product adoption
LouAssist is a product adoption tool that helps you create step-by-step guides, assist customers and drive adoption. Here is what you can do with the LouAssist product adoption feature:
- Create interactive walkthroughs to guide customers from the very first moment they log in to the account.
- Use modals, tooltips, hotspots, and banners to create fully customize product tours from scratch or select from pre-built templates.
- Build in-app announcements to promote new features or simply highlight specific features and show value.
- Segment customers and send in-app announcements to only a selected group of users, such as nudging users who haven’t adopted a feature yet.
- Visualize and analyze the impact of your product tours, and in-app announcements and see how it’s impacting user behavior.
LouAssist for user feedback
Here’s how you can collect user feedback with LouAssist:
- Run NPS and other short forms of in-app surveys to gather feedback at key moments.
- Choose one from the pre-built templates or start from scratch right in Lou’s no-code builder.
- Create custom segments or use Turnkey segments to target your surveys to specific groups.
- Analyze your Net Promoter Score in one dashboard, and organize responses into detractors, passives, and promoters.
There is a better tool for your SaaS than LouAssist!
What is HelpScout?
HelpScout is a help desk designed to support businesses in their customer service efforts, offering a variety of tools for customer interactions.
These tools include a knowledge base, contextual help through beacons, live chat and in-app messaging, and reporting.
By using HelpScout, businesses can efficiently manage customer interactions and monitor and resolve any issues.
If you need to improve your email support, provide Help Center resources for customers, or engage with them through live chat, HelpScout is a great option. It offers pricing plans that are based on the number of users, starting from $20 per user per month when billed annually. However, if you want to drive adoption and improve your onboarding efforts, this tool might not be the best choice for you.
What is HelpScout best for?
Similar to LouAssist, HelpScout is typically considered for user onboarding, product adoption, and user feedback. Let’s examine HelpScout for these use cases before we compare it to Userpilot.
HelpScout for user onboarding
While HelpScout does offer some basic features for user onboarding and adoption, such as knowledge bases and customer communication tools like live chat and basic feedback collection, it is not specifically designed to provide a comprehensive solution for user onboarding.
If your business is primarily focused on user onboarding and adoption, you may need to look for a specialized user onboarding tool like Userpilot or a customer success platform that provides more comprehensive solutions for user onboarding, adoption, and engagement.
HelpScout for product adoption
While HelpScout is primarily focused on customer support and communication, it does offer some features that can support product adoption to a certain extent.
For example, HelpScout’s knowledge base feature can be used to provide self-service support options to customers, which can help them learn more about your product and increase their usage and adoption.
In addition, HelpScout’s customer feedback features, such as customer satisfaction ratings and NPS surveys, can help businesses gain insights into areas where they can improve their product and increase adoption.
However, HelpScout is not specifically designed to provide a comprehensive solution for product adoption. If your business is primarily focused on optimizing product adoption, you may need to look for a specialized tool like Userpilot or a customer success platform that provides more advanced features for user onboarding, adoption, engagement, and retention.
HelpScout for user feedback
HelpScout offers several features that enable businesses to collect and analyze user feedback.
For example, HelpScout’s customer satisfaction survey allows customers to rate the quality of their support experience. HelpScout also offers Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, which can help businesses measure customer loyalty and identify areas for improvement.
In addition, HelpScout’s reporting and analytics features allow businesses to track and analyze customer feedback data over time, helping them to identify trends and patterns in customer feedback and make data-driven decisions to improve their products and customer support.
While HelpScout provides some user feedback features, it is not specifically designed to be a comprehensive user feedback tool. Businesses looking for a more specialized in-app user feedback tool may need to look at other options such as Userpilot.
Try a better tool for your SaaS than HelpScout!
What is Userpilot?
Userpilot is a comprehensive digital adoption platform (DAP). It enables product teams to track product usage and user behavior to guide product development and optimize the user experience.
In addition, it allows them to gather user feedback and design personalized onboarding experiences to drive product adoption. All of this is possible without coding.
What is Userpilot best for?
Userpilot is used for similar use cases as HelpScout and LouAssist. Let’s see how Userpilot compares to the tools we discussed before it comes to user onboarding, product adoption, and user feedback.
Userpilot for user onboarding
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, micro surveys, 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.
Userpilot for product adoption
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.
Userpilot for user feedback
There are two types of feedback you should be focusing on collecting to better understand the health of your product and users.
First, you have user sentiment which looks at user satisfaction and effort scores or loyalty (using NPS surveys). Then you may also want to collect feedback on the functionality of the product or specific features.
You can do all these with Userpilot. In short, you can:
- Use survey templates or create a survey from scratch.
- Collect and track (NPS) in-app with a built-in NPS widget that allows you to fully customize the survey look and feel, and set the trigger frequency and specific targeting.
- Analyze surveys, NPS scores, tag responses, and use the data to create specific user segments.
- Be in charge of who gets which survey type and when with advanced segmentation capabilities, and of course, you can use the answers to segment your audience.
The advantage of using Userpilot for collecting feedback over other survey tools is that you can better control who sees the surveys but also you can instantly use the data collected to segment your user base and trigger the right experience for them.
For instance, if your users give you a low NPS score because they think you’re missing a critical feature (that you actually have already), you can push an interactive walkthrough guiding them to find and explore this feature.
Tired of bad digital adoption tools? Try Userpilot for your SaaS!
Which tool should you choose?
As you can see, LouAssist, HelpScout, and Userpilot cater to most of the use cases Product Managers typically look for in their SaaS companies.
There are some differences between the tools when it comes to how those use cases are executed in each, of course. So if you’re still on the fence – there are two more factors that can make a difference for you – the tools’ pricing, its reviews, and the final pros and cons. Let’s have a look at both below!
LouAssist pricing
Compared to other companies in the market, LouAssist is a cheaper solution and their pricing plans can be a good fit for companies who do not have big budgets. Though as we have discussed above, some of the features are quite limited. Here are the pricing plans that LouAssist offers:
- Free: allows you to create two announcements, 1 product tour, 1 survey, and basic checklists.
- Startup: includes unlimited product tours, announcements, and one checklist and is priced at $87/month.
- Growth: offers unlimited product tours, checklists, and announcements but the monthly active users shouldn’t exceed 10000. The plan costs $199/month.
- Enterprise: this is the most powerful plan and includes everything in the Growth plan but the monthly active users can be more than 10000. It costs $299.
HelpScout pricing
HelpScout offers three pricing plans, each with different features and capabilities:
- Standard: The Standard plan is priced at $20 per user per month when billed annually, or $25 per user per month when billed monthly. This plan has some limitations to it such as 2 mailboxes, 1 docs site, and a limit of 25 users. It also comes with in-app messaging with separate pricing if you have more than 2000 unique viewers.
- Plus: The Plus plan is priced at $40 per user per month when billed annually, or $50 per user per month when billed monthly. This plan includes all the features of the Standard plan, plus advanced reporting, automation workflows, and integrations with popular apps like Salesforce and Jira. Add-ons are available
- Company: The Company plan is designed for larger businesses and is billed only annually at $65 per user. This plan includes all the features of the Plus plan, plus personalized onboarding, a dedicated account manager, and enterprise-level security and compliance.
Additionally, HelpScout offers a 15-day free trial, so businesses can test out the platform before committing to a paid plan.
Userpilot pricing
Userpilot’s transparent pricing ranges from $249/month on the entry-level end to an Enterprise tier for larger companies.
Furthermore, Userpilot’s entry-level plan includes access to all UI patterns and should include everything that most mid-market SaaS businesses need to get started.
Userpilot has three paid plans to choose from:
- Starter: The entry-level Starter plan starts at $249/month and includes features like segmentation, product analytics, reporting, user engagement, 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 LouAssist vs HelpScout vs Userpilot?
Now let’s consider user reviews for a better understanding of how these products meet customer needs and exceed their expectations.
LouAssist reviews
HelpScout reviews
Userpilot reviews
Pros & Cons of LouAssist, HelpScout, and Userpilot
LouAssist pros
LouAssist is quite a good tool and mostly meets your user onboarding needs. Here are the main advantages to consider if you’re still deciding whether to try it or not:
- Easy to use platform. No need to have coding skills or rely on developers’ support.
- Create in-app product experiences that are aligned with your brand as you have full control of color, font, size, corner radius, etc. Images, videos, and gifs are also included.
- Pre-built segments that are ready to go, such as new users, returning users, all users, and power users.
- You can collect and visualize the most important engagement metrics, analyze user behavior, and take action to improve customer experience.
LouAssist cons
LouAssist is a good product adoption tool but lacks in some areas. If you’re thinking of giving it a try you need to be aware of its drawbacks too. Here is a short list of LouAssist’s cons:
- The absence of an in-app help center means you can’t offer self-service support to your customers.
- Though it has integrations with some analytics and engagement tools, the number of integrations is not high and you might need a different tool to have all your data in one place.
- Lack of NPS response tagging which makes it difficult to analyze user sentiment.
HelpScout pros
HelpScout’s various tools and features make it easy to provide excellent customer support, while its affordable pricing plans make it accessible to businesses of all sizes. Here are some of the pros of using HelpScout:
- Easy to use and user-friendly interface: HelpScout’s layout and design make it simple to manage and organize customer interactions, which can save you time and reduce confusion.
- Affordable pricing plans, with user-based options: HelpScout offers pricing plans that are based on the number of users, starting from $20 per user per month when billed annually. This makes it a cost-effective option for businesses that need to keep their expenses under control.
- Seamless integrations with popular tools: HelpScout integrates seamlessly with 50+ popular tools. This means businesses can use HelpScout alongside their existing tools and workflows, making it easy to integrate into their existing infrastructure.
HelpScout cons
While HelpScout has many pros, like any software platform, there are also some potential drawbacks to consider. Here are some cons to using HelpScout:
- Lacks the straightforward ticketing feature that most alternatives offer.
- The reporting can be limited to what your needs as a growing company may be. Trying to get the reports emailed and importing information to other services can be a challenge. You may need to use several means of documenting and collecting data for your customers based on what they want to hear about and see the data for.
- Merging tickets can also be a bit confusing as it will sometimes change the profile name but the previous email addresses will remain so when you send, things can go to the wrong party.
Userpilot pros
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.
Userpilot cons
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.
Try the best tool for user onboarding now!
Conclusion
In this post, we’ve discussed how LouAssist, HelpScout, and Userpilot compare when it comes to user onboarding, product adoption, and user feedback. We’ve discussed their features for each use case, pricing, and reviews, as well as the pros and cons. Hopefully, you’ve found these detailed descriptions helpful. Obviously, we’re a little biased, but we think that Userpilot offers the best value for money, and is unrivaled especially when it comes to user onboarding. Hopefully, you’d like to give Userpilot a chance – see you in the free trial soon!