Is Pendo or Apty the best tool for customer feedback? And is there a better in-app feedback 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 customer feedback should deliver and which will be the best choice for your company’s needs.
Let’s dive in!

TL;DR

• Customer feedback refers to the insights you collect from people about their experience in using your product and interacting with your product service teams.
• Feedback helps you understand if customers see value in your product and let you uncover friction points. Acting on the data you collect will lead to more informed decisions when it comes to product and user experience improvements.
• Tools help automate feedback collection and analysis while also making sure you collect relevant data from the right users, with the help of segmentation.
• Before choosing a tool, make sure it supports multiple forms of micro surveys out of the box, while also allowing you to add your own customizations.
• Feedback analytics and response monitoring are the next key features if you want to not only collect feedback but also analyze it and understand the intent behind your customers’ scores.
• Pendo is a comprehensive digital adoption platform with impressive analytics, in-app feedback, and product adoption features.
• Pendo offers polls through their guides which you can use to collect feedback. The main problem is that they come with basic functionality and limited customizations (no themes, or emojis,).
• If you want to collect feedback using NPS surveys, for example, you will need a paid plan that doesn’t come cheap with Pendo.
• The downside of using Pendo for collecting user feedback is that you can’t use the insights to personalize the user experience. For example, you can’t create user segments based on NPS scores or specific answers you collect with your polls.
• Apty allows you to enable timely employee feedback so you can be contextual and use the insights to improve the employee experience.
• Unlike Pendo, Apty focused on employee adoption of enterprise software so its user feedback functionality is designed to collect feedback from employees using 3rd party software.
• With Apty you can trigger different in-app surveys embedded into multiple UI patterns and then get detailed feedback analytics inside the Admin Console.
• Not exactly what you’re looking for? Userpilot is the perfect alternative for collecting and analyzing customer feedback in-app. You can use survey templates out of the box, customize them to fit your brand and UI, and trigger them contextually using segmentation. Get a Demo to see it in action.

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What is customer feedback?

Customer feedback is any information provided by customers about their experience with a product or service. By analyzing customer feedback, you can reveal their level of satisfaction and pinpoint areas for improvement.

Why should you care about customer feedback?

Customer feedback is important if you want to truly serve your customers and come up with solutions that can solve their pain points.

Here is why customer feedback matters:

• Understand whether customers see value in your product and if the product meets their needs.
• Uncover weak spots in your product that add friction to the customer journey.
• Make your customers voices heard and acknowledge that they are important to you.
• Collect real-time insights on the go as you’re introducing new features or product updates.

Benefits of using tools for collecting customer feedback

Wondering why you even need a customer feedback tool?

Collecting customer feedback should be a standard process for any product team. It should be consistent and implemented across different stages of the customer journey so you can measure customer experience in different situations. This might be time-consuming but thanks to customer feedback tools, the process can be hassle-free and without any coding.

Here’s how customer feedback tools help:

• Create different forms of micro surveys, such as NPS, CSAT, CES, and PMF to collect contextual feedback.
• Customize the surveys so they are aligned with your brand and match the interface of your app.
• Segment customers by their feedback so you can create personalized flows for them.
• Conduct a user sentiment analysis to understand your customers better.

Now you might ask yourself, how to choose the right customer feedback tool for your SaaS? This is what we will be discussing next.

Tool’s must-have features for customer feedback?

Before deciding which customer feedback tool works best, you should understand what features any solid tool must provide.

Here’s what to look for before making a buying decision:

• Make sure the tool you choose supports multiple forms of micro surveys. The most important and popular ones for collecting customer feedback include the Net Promoter Score, Customer satisfaction score, Customer effort score, product-market fit survey, etc
• You should also get customization capabilities so that the surveys you create match your UI and don’t look odd. No watermarks are also preferable.
• Feedback analytics and response monitoring are the next key features if you want to not only collect feedback but also analyze it and understand the intent behind your customer’s feedback.
• Integration with 3rd party tools so you can enrich your surveys and make the most out of the customer feedback.

There you have it. These are the basic features you should be looking for, but the tool you should go with must be dependent on your specific goals. You might need a tool that must cover all of these features but if you don’t need complex features, you should be completely ok with a tool with limited functionalities.

Pendo for customer feedback

Pendo is a comprehensive digital adoption platform with impressive analytics, in-app feedback, and product adoption features

It caters primarily to enterprise users and probably has the most advanced analytics of all tools we’re covering in this article. But it all comes at a price.

Pendo offers polls (also called micro surveys at Userpilot) through their guides which collect user feedback and gauge sentiment at different points in the user journey.
Polls come with basic functionality and are available on the free plan. However, if you want to collect user sentiment with NPS surveys, you’ll need a paid plan that doesn’t come cheap at all.
Here’s how you can collect user sentiment feedback with Pendo:

• Add short polls on your guides and UI patterns built with Pendo.
• You can use only text polls, yes/no polls, numbered scales, or multi-choice polls and add them as building blocks when building the guides.
• There’s not a lot of customization, like themes or emojis available, but it’s enough to collect data in-app.
• If you are willing to pay for the Growth plan, you get access to Pendo’s NPS feature too.

The downside of using Pendo for collecting user feedback is that you can’t use the insights to personalize the user experience. For example, you can’t create user segments based on NPS scores or specific answers you collect with your polls.

Considering the price you have to pay for Pendo, you’d expect more from it.

If you want to both collect and act on user feedback, you should use a better tool. And, with the risk of sounding biased, Userpilot gives you more value for money here. You can build micro surveys, embed Typeform long surveys, collect and analyze NPS responses, and segment users based on scores and responses so you can trigger more personalized experiences.

Get a Userpilot demo here.

Pros of Pendo

Despite the price and its steep learning curve, Pendo does have a few pros compared to its competitors.

• Pendo is known for its good and easy-to-use analytics tools like Paths, Retention, and Funnels. (As of Q3 2023, Userpilot will have the same analytics features, with more robust functionality).
• Pendo has a shareable product-planning tool to organize customer feedback and prioritize high-value features. It helps keep teams aligned with the shared feature-planning guide.
• It works on web apps and mobile apps so if you need both, this might be a good choice for you.

Cons of Pendo

Surprisingly for a product engagement tool that claims to be “all in one” you can’t act directly on the user analytics and feedback collected with Pendo in Pendo.

That’s because Pendo doesn’t allow you to target users segmented by in-app events or feedback with the in-app guides you’ve built with it.

Here’s a short list of Pendo’s cons:

• It doesn’t allow you to trigger experiences based on in-app events or feedback. This is probably because of tech debt – but makes Pendo’s analytics pretty much NOT actionable.
• Pendo offers limited onboarding elements, which means you can’t always create the best experience for your users when you find out someone is struggling. If you want checklists these can only be accessed from the Resource Center which defeats the purpose of having them in the first place.
• Pendo’s pricing for their Growth and Portfolio plans is only available to you if you ask for a quote. The company doesn’t list pricing on its site for the higher tiers. However, some reviews say they have prices starting at $20,000-$25,000 per year for a single product, and around $50,000 per year for the mid-tier package. This might be Pendo’s biggest downside.

If you’re looking for a tool that shows you user analytics in real-time and allows you to trigger in-app surveys contextually– Userpilot offers these features (and at a lower price tag too).

What do users say about Pendo

Users appreciate Pendo’s analytics but find it complex for building in-app guidance using the guides feature (to build polls).

As soon as it has been integrated, Pendo is easy to use and manage without the need for developers. I also like that usage is captured retrospectively and the dashboard views or ability to segment users/accounts based on different criteria is really powerful. The guides are great and multi-functional making it really simple for Product Managers to help users navigate with walkthroughs, or post announcements or poll users; they allow Product Managers to get creative with how they engage and interact with users directly in the product. – Parita P.

The best feature about Pendo has been the constant collection of User clicks without the need to set up trackers via code. This enables us to tag the usage directly from the tool and start monitoring historic data without having to involve development teams.- Joseph E.

Most users complain about the lack of granularity in analyzing data and the price.

Not much to dislike here, the general product is fantastic but there are some niggles. I think the track event feature, manual sending of tracking events, is the tool’s weakest link. It is not as developed as the rest of the suit and exploiting that data can be very cumbersome.- Joseph E.

And there’s more:

While reports are thorough, a little more granularity would be welcomed. I don’t like that Feedback is a separate cost, as it is a very powerful tool to find out what users want to see in future releases.- Rob S.

Is Pendo the right fit for your business?

Pendo shines when it comes to analytics, but that’s kind of its main superpower. Here are the top three reasons why you should be looking for an alternative if you need to collect customer feedback.

1. If you only need analytics, there are more affordable tools out there with better functionality too.
2. If you want to build more than simple in-app guides with polls and trigger them contextually, Pendo is not the best tool due to its basic guides functionality.
3. Not convinced? The price in itself should be the main reason why Pendo is not the best solution.

Pendo pricing

Pendo pricing for Growth and Portfolio plans which you will need for user sentiment and feedback analysis is only available to you if you ask for a quote. The company doesn’t list pricing on its site for the higher tiers. However, some reviews say they have prices starting at $20,000-$25,000 per year for a single product, and around $50,000 per year for the mid-tier package.

The tricky part when it comes to Pendo’s pricing is that you get to pay separately for different modules:

• Pendo Free: up to 500 MAU, single-app, and basic functionality and analytics.
• Pendo Starter $7000/year(when paid yearly): 2,000 MAU limit, multi-app, and access to premium features like NPS but it doesn’t include advanced analytics or integrations.
• Pendo Growth: Custom MAU, single-app, NPS and PES, resource center, and access to support compared to lower plans.
• Pendo Portfolio: Custom MAU, multi-app, cross-journey reports, experimentation, and 1 free integration included.
• Pendo Feedback: collecting feature requests is a separate module with custom pricing.
• Pendo Adopt: employee onboarding is a separate module with custom pricing.

There is a better tool for your SaaS than Pendo!

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Apty for customer feedback

Apty’s digital adoption platform aims to make employee adoption a snap with engaging onboarding flows and product tours. It does this with a mix of on-screen guidance, interactive walkthroughs, and in-app messaging.

This platform is great for engaging your employees on your platform to increase product adoption, feature adoption, and improve the experience.

Apty allows you to enable timely employee feedback (from your employees) so you can be contextual and improve the overall customer experience. The only thing about using Apty to collect feedback is that you can only embed surveys from other apps into the announcements.

Here is what Apty’s feedback feature offers:

• Embed surveys (Google Forms, Survey Monkey, etc) to in-app announcements to collect feedback.
• See the average ratings and the number of users who completed the surveys.

Pros of Apty

Apty is a robust tool for your employee onboarding and adoption needs. Here are the main pros to consider if you’re still deciding:

• Apty is excellent for employee adoption, training, and onboarding. The tool makes it easy to develop in-app guidance for your new starters.
• You can either build different user segments inside the product, or you can integrate your Apty account with other tools and import your data.

Cons of Apty

While Apty is a great tool, the main downsides are the cost and restrictions you get with it. Here are the main cons of the tool:

• Apty offers tooltips and checklists for building product experience flows, but unlike other similar tools, it lacks some important UI patterns such as modals, hotspots, banners, and slideouts.
• One of the biggest disadvantages of Apty is the absence of in-app customer feedback collection. You are kind of limited to embedding surveys built using other tools.
• Doesn’t offer self-service support like a help center where users can access multiple guides and tutorials or contact support. It does provide guides that are similar but more restricted.

What users say about Apty

Overall, users feel positive about Apty– here’s an example summarizing some key points about its features and the value it offers for employee onboarding.

Apty is incredibly helpful for new employees to get familiar with processes in our project management software. The work flows and tooltips have been essential for our workforce.The only downside to Apty was the learning curve of first building out the application to work with our project management tool. Apty had a great support system to help through those challenges. – Jennifer T

Most complaints are about the missing features, integrations and the steep learning curve.

UX experience when it comes to testing is cumbersome; a lot of back and forth.
Below are critical tools that are missing or need improvement. I would like to see these additions and enhancements as current features are limiting our options for solutions: Auto triggers (Related to Rule Engine, i.e. Specific page load, removing the reliance on triggers such as: Launchers, Menu Widget, and Announcement Button),IDP for standardized User Identifier,eLearning for content creators (Builder Certifications),Surveys,Chatbot etc- Paolo T.

Is Apty the right fit for your business?

Apty is a great tool but has limited usability. Here are three main reasons why you might consider an alternative:

1. To get access to all the needed tools for proper onboarding and adoption you need to pay for the higher plans that can get quite expensive.
2. Apty doesn’t offer user feedback surveys, which are a very effective way to collect user sentiment at scale and improve your product experiences to meet customer expectations. So if you are aiming to be a customer-centric company that puts users and their needs at the heart of the business, you may need to choose another tool
3. Although Apty offers some segmentation options, in Userpilot you can group users on many more attributes and create more advanced segments.

Apty pricing

Apty offers a free trial and custom quotes based on business needs:

• Free trial: Up to 45 days, includes 2-3 flows, works on a single domain.
• Custom pricing: Intelligent analytics, complex flow creation, multilingual support, available on multiple domains.

There is a better tool for your SaaS than Apty!

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Is there a better alternative for customer feedback?

While Apty is not the tool for the job, as we’ve seen above, Pendo is a good tool for collecting customer feedback if you can afford it. 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 customer feedback

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.

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:

• 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 NPS scores, tag responses, and use the data to create specific user segments.
• Build and trigger in-app micro surveys like the classic PMF survey, or similar ones and mix multi-choice and open-ended types of questions to collect specific insights.
• 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.

Pros of Userpilot

Userpilot has a number of advantages, especially for mid-market SaaS companies looking for a robust but at the same time very easy-to-use, no-code tool for user onboarding, product adoption, and simplified product analytics. Let’s have a look at the pros of using Userpilot:

• No-code builder – Userpilot comes with an easy-to-use Chrome Extension builder.
• Multiple UI patterns – choose from a range of options to build customized flows: modals, slideouts, banners, tooltips, hotspots, and checklists are all at your disposal
• UI patterns are not limited by plan – you get access to all of them on every single plan, meaning you get value even with the Traction plan (this is the entry-level one).
• Engaging walkthroughs and onboarding flows- build interactive walkthroughs targeted to distinct user segments.
• In-app help – build a resource center offering self-service support to your users, customize it with your branding, and select from a range of help options to boost user satisfaction (i.e. videos, in-app flows, chat, and more).
• Experimentation – built-in A/B testing for flows lets you explore and quickly iterate based on direct user behavior.
• Powerful feedback options- integrated NPS surveys with analytics and response tagging unlock insight into how your users feel.
• Advanced analytics and segmentation- analyze product usage and in-app flow engagement and build user segments using the data.
• Event tracking and feature tags- tag UI engagement (clicks, form fills, hovers) and group them into one custom event to track what really matters.
• More value with integrations- unlock value faster with built-in integrations with popular tools like Segment, Amplitude, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, Intercom, Heap, and more.

Cons of Userpilot

There are, however, some downsides to Userpilot as well:

• Browser/web app only – Userpilot won’t run on mobile devices/applications.
• Doesn’t support employee onboarding- The tool is better suited for customer onboarding than for employee onboarding as you can’t build in-app guides on third-party tools.
• Missing integrations – doesn’t have built-in integrations with some tools, but it has webhooks, and Hubspot and Zapier are coming soon.
• Not appropriate for small startups on a shoestring budget (<$100)- Userpilot is a powerful, mid-market to enterprise-level tool. So $249 a month might be too expensive for really small startups.

What users say about Userpilot

Let’s check what real users like about Userpilot.

Userpilot is an incredible, user-friendly software that allows us to create unforgettable experiences for our clients! From basic to complex experiences, we have been able to do them all with ease! I would highly recommend this software to anyone who wants to provide their clients or users with the best product tour experience. The possibilities of what you can create are endless! – Tayla G.

Userpilot is simple to set up, use, and does not require any dev – which means instant publishing. This is critical for us as a SaaS company that releases new features frequently; we need the ability to inform our customers of changes quickly, and doing this in our platform through Userpilot allows us to reach the right audience, at the right time, in the right place. There have been many awesome extra features we’ve discovered since coming on board, and it’s been great to see new features released frequently. The tool itself is intuitive and reliable. Having used similar products previously that were clunky and buggy this has really made us happy with our decision to move to Userpilot. – Melina K.

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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).

Conclusion

There you have it.

It should be easier now to make an informed decision between Pendo and Apty. Both tools come with advantages and disadvantages so there isn’t one that is the best. It will depend on your product and current needs. If you want the best value for money, going with the alternative option would be our recommendation. Want to see how Userpilot can help with customer feedback? Book a demo below.

Collect and analyze customer feedback with Userpilot!

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