Wondering whether Pendo or HelpHero is the best option for your SaaS company?

This article is going to dive into the Pendo vs HelpHero debate and try to answer a key question: Which is the better tool for user onboarding, as well as other use cases?

In the post below, we’ve covered all the common use cases and done an in-depth analysis of the key features of Pendo and HelpHero – as well as compared it to an alternative solution that may be better in some situations.

Let’s get into it!

TL;DR

• Let’s explore how Pendo, and HelpHero compare when it comes to user onboarding and other common use cases.
  • • Pendo is a product adoption platform that lets teams monitor product usage, analyze user behavior, and publish in-app guides. The no-code solution focuses on increasing user engagement and driving feature discovery.
    • HelpHero is a tool that enables businesses to build interactive, easy-to-follow product tours that help engage users from day one and speed up feature adoption quicker than ever.
• If you’re looking for a better option for user onboarding, 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 for user onboarding and drive your product growth code-free.

Userpilot – A Better Alternative for your SaaS

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What is Pendo?

Pendo is a product adoption platform that lets teams monitor product usage, analyze user behavior, and publish in-app guides. The no-code solution focuses on increasing user engagement and driving feature discovery.

Additionally, Pendo also lets you survey users, segment customers, and see how many site visitors or MAUs your web app is getting. Certain features like product areas, data explorer, product engagement score, and resource centers are locked to the Starter plan or higher.

What is HelpHero?

HelpHero is a tool that enables businesses to build interactive, easy-to-follow product tours that help engage users from day one and speed up feature adoption quicker than ever.

In addition, with HelpHero, you can easily create and customize walkthroughs without coding. You can use it to ensure users know what’s new and how to use it. The result – is less frustration and confusion and higher user adoption and retention.

Pendo vs HelpHero for user onboarding

In this section of the article, we’re really going to compare Pendo vs HelpHero in terms of user onboarding. That way, we’ll be able to figure out which tool – Pendo or HelpHero – is the best option depending on your use case.

Pendo for user onboarding

Pendo is a product adoption platform that has the usual onboarding features that are commonly included with similar solutions. However, those using Pendo Free will need to note that they’ll need to find a new onboarding solution once they cross 500 MAUs or upgrade to the paid version.

There are a few ways you can use Pendo to improve your new user onboarding flows:

• Guide Layouts: Pendo has layout templates for lightboxes, banners, and tooltips that you can use to build onboarding flows for new users.
• Flow Triggers: Pendo’s guide activation options let you trigger an onboarding flow when new users land on a particular URL, use a specific device type, interact with a tagged element, or match the target segment.
• Localization Settings: Localization settings can stop an onboarding flow from triggering if it hasn’t been translated into the user’s chosen language. Because Pendo has no AI-powered localization features, you’ll need to upload language CSVs manually for this to work.
• Onboarding Module: You can add the onboarding module to your in-app resource center in two clicks then change the color, text style, and progress icon to align it with your product’s brand palette.

HelpHero for user onboarding

With HelpHero, you can create interactive, easy-to-follow product tours that help users get started and adopt new features quicker than ever.

Here’s a brief overview of HelpHero’s use case for user onboarding:

• User Onboarding Checklists: HelpHero’s checklists are a powerful tool that can help boost user onboarding. It lets you display a list of tasks for users to accomplish, making it even easier and quicker to onboard and engage new users to your app.

• Modals: HelpHero’s modals play a crucial role in product tours by providing interactive, contextual guidance. They enable users to ‘learn as they go’, directly within the product environment.

There are still other great features like multiple user onboarding UI patterns – on Userpilot, you can create tooltips, modals, slideouts, driven actions, banners, and hotspots. Each of them can be used individually or combined into a personalized onboarding experience.

Sign up for the Userpilot demo today.

Pendo vs HelpHero for product adoption

In this section of the article, we’re really going to compare Pendo vs HelpHero in terms of product adoption. That way, we’ll be able to figure out which tool – Pendo or HelpHero – is the best option depending on your use case.

Pendo for product adoption

Because product adoption is the primary use case for the Pendo platform, most of its features contribute towards onboarding users, tracking adoption analytics, monitoring usage patterns, or measuring churn rates.

Pendo’s product adoption features include:

• Product Analytics: Pendo analytics can show you patterns in user behavior, underutilized areas of your product, and other usage data. Pendo divides its analytics into funnels, paths, and retention — the latter of which is capable of tracking cohort churn over time (months or weeks).
• Feature Engagement: Pendo’s dashboard widgets let you see feature engagement from multiple lenses to ensure you get the full picture. You’ll be able to view the features that generate the majority of click volume and track features used by accounts/visitors.
• Build guides to drive engagement: Pendo has layout templates for lightboxes, banners, and tooltips that you can use to build onboarding flows for new users.
• Feedback Collection: Pendo can gather user feedback through polls, input fields, and NPS surveys. Its NPS surveys can be delivered both in-app and via email while giving the option to include follow-up questions that provide qualitative feedback.

Note: Pendo in-app resource centers can only be created if you’re on the Growth or Portfolio plan.

HelpHero for product adoption

With HelpHero, you can create interactive, easy-to-follow product tours that help users get started and adopt new features quicker than ever.

Here’s a brief overview of HelpHero’s use case for user onboarding:

• User Onboarding Checklists: HelpHero’s checklists are a powerful tool that can help boost user onboarding. It lets you display a list of tasks for users to accomplish, making it even easier and quicker to onboard and engage new users to your app.

• Modals: HelpHero’s modals play a crucial role in product tours by providing interactive, contextual guidance. They enable users to ‘learn as they go’, directly within the product environment.

There are still other great features like multiple user onboarding UI patterns – on Userpilot, you can create tooltips, modals, slideouts, driven actions, banners, and hotspots. Each of them can be used individually or combined into a personalized onboarding experience.

Sign up for the Userpilot demo today.

Pendo vs HelpHero for customer experience

In this section of the article, we’re really going to compare Pendo vs HelpHero in terms of customer experience. That way, we’ll be able to figure out which tool – Pendo or HelpHero – is the best option depending on your use case.

Pendo for customer experience

Customer experience is the sum of touchpoints across your customer support, customer success, marketing, and sales teams but the product experience also plays a key role. Pendo lets you survey, poll, and collect feedback from users on the customer experience through multiple features.

Here are the Pendo features that can be used to gather customer experience insights:

• Polling Features: Using Pendo to poll specific segments can guide your customer experience optimization (CXO) efforts. You’ll also be able to add polling widgets to your home dashboard so you can view responses, response rates, and other poll-related data points.
• NPS Surveys: Pendo NPS surveys can collect both quantitative and qualitative data by combining rating scales with follow-up (open-ended) questions. You can view all NPS survey analytics from the NPS section on your sidebar or the NPS widget on your home dashboard. Note: All NPS surveys have Pendo branding on them unless you upgrade to the Starter plan, which costs $7,000/year.
• Segmentation: Pendo segmentation settings like you create different flows, guides, and onboarding journeys for each user. You can segment users based on the type of device they’re on, what operating system it’s running on, which browser they’re using, or when they joined.
• Path Analytics: Pendo’s path analytics dashboard shows you the paths users take to get to a specific page or when coming from a specific page. These insights help you identify the areas where you need to reduce friction and add contextual UI patterns.
• Feedback Module: You can add a feedback module to your in-app resource center in two clicks to get direct insights from users on how to improve the customer experience.

HelpHero for customer experience

With HelpHero, you can give your users the guidance they need before they ask for it with contextual product tours, thereby improving customer experience.

• Real-Time Engagement: The use of hotspots and tooltips allows for on-demand assistance. Customers can access contextual hints, feature explanations, and prompts at their convenience, enhancing their understanding of your product or service. This real-time engagement improves user satisfaction and reduces frustration.
• Performance Optimization: HelpHero’s analytics and optimization features are invaluable for improving the customer experience. You can identify pain points and areas that require improvement by tracking user interactions and completion rates.

When it comes to using surveys to improve customer experience, HelpHero lags. With Userpilot, you can gain customer experience insights by tracking user data, feature usage, events, survey statistics, and more.

Pendo vs HelpHero for user feedback

In this section of the article, we’re really going to compare Pendo vs HelpHero in terms of user feedback. That way, we’ll be able to figure out which tool – Pendo or HelpHero – is the best option depending on your use case.

Pendo for user feedback

Product feedback can provide targeted data on the product as a whole or specific features. These will offer insight into which features are easiest/hardest to use, which ones make your product sticky, and which changes to make to keep your largest customers satisfied.

Here are the Pendo features that you can utilize to collect product feedback:

• Customer Effort Score (CES) Polls: CES polls created with Pendo can provide insights on which areas of your product are easiest to use. These CES polls can also target specific segments to see if new users are struggling with a feature that power users have no problem with.

• Mobile Reviews: Those using Pendo for mobile apps can also use its product feedback features to collect reviews for the iOS App Store or Google Play Store. In addition to offering insights, these reviews could also boost user acquisition (provided they’re mostly positive).
• Pendo Feedback: Pendo offers a separate product called Pendo Feedback that can be used to centralize feedback and integrate that data with tools like Salesforce or Jira. Pendo Feedback uses custom pricing and is charged by the seat.
• Segmented Feedback: Pendo feedback lets you see what segment respondents are in, how much they spend, and other relevant user tags so you can highlight responses from your most valuable customers.

HelpHero for user feedback

Obtaining valuable product feedback at the right moments is paramount for enhancing your application. Whether it’s immediately after a user completes onboarding or interacts with a critical feature, capturing their insights can drive product improvements and expedite your journey to product-market fit.

However, HelpHero falls short in this essential aspect. While it excels in delivering in-app experiences, it lacks the capability to gather valuable product feedback that can fuel your product’s growth and refinement.

With Userpilot, you can harness the power of timely feedback collection to enhance your product, align it with user expectations, and achieve product-market fit more swiftly.

Pendo vs HelpHero: Which one you should choose?

To further simplify this selection process, let’s break down the strengths and limitations of each tool. Understanding the distinct advantages and potential drawbacks of Pendo and HelpHero will provide you with a detailed roadmap for making a well-informed decision!

Pros and cons of Pendo

Pros of Pendo

Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of using Pendo:

• No-Code: Pendo lets you create surveys, in-app guides, and track metrics without needing to write your own code, which saves a lot of time (while making product experiments or split-testing a lot easier).
• Custom Themes: Pendo’s themes let you create multiple palettes and ensure that any in-app materials published align with your existing brand palette (however, you can only create/customize themes after you’ve installed the Pendo snippet).
• Flexible Dashboards: Pendo has plenty of widgets that you can add to your dashboard, including feature adoption, net promoter score, poll results, guide engagement, product stickiness, and MAUs — so you always have your most important metrics within reach.
• Integrations: Pendo has 50 different integrations to choose from including popular tools like Intercom, Jira, Okta, and HubSpot. Unfortunately, only four of these — Salesforce, Segment, Workato, and Zendesk — are two-way integrations that can share data both ways.

• Multi-Platform Analytics: Because Pendo is compatible with mobile applications, you’ll be able to track product analytics for both web apps and mobile apps. This gives you a more holistic view of how users (or specific segments) use your product on different platforms. Note: You’ll need to upgrade to Pendo Portfolio to add more than one product to your account.

Cons of Pendo

While Pendo certainly has quite a few benefits that make it an appealing solution, there are also a few notable drawbacks that you should be aware of before you choose the platform as your product adoption tool:

• Pricing Jumps: While Pendo does offer a free version, it has a limit of 500 MAUs. Upon reaching the MAU limit, you’ll need to upgrade to continue using most of Pendo’s features (and paid plans tend to cost thousands of dollars per month).
• Locked Features: Key features like the data explorer, resource center, and product engagement score are locked behind the Growth or Portfolio plan.
• Data Lag: Pendo’s analytics dashboards only update once per hour. In some cases, this data lag could lead product teams to make the wrong decisions or draw false conclusions from outdated insights.

Pros and cons of HelpHero

Pros of HelpHero

HelpHero is an effective tool in the world of user onboarding and product adoption. Let’s dive into the pros of using HelpHero:

• Intuitive No-Code Product Tour Builder: HelpHero provides an easy-to-use, no-code builder that simplifies creating onboarding and product adoption flows.
• Diverse UI Patterns: With HelpHero, you have many UI patterns. Whether you prefer banners, tooltips, hotspots, or checklists, you can customize your user engagement just as you want. Regardless of your plan, you’ll have access to all UI patterns, ensuring you get value right from the entry-level plan.
• Engaging Walkthroughs: Create interactive walkthroughs tailored to specific user segments, making onboarding a breeze and driving product adoption.
• In-App Help: HelpHero enables you to build a resource center with self-service support, which can be customized to match your branding. You can choose from various help options, including videos, in-app flows, chat, and more.
• Easy & Affordable: HelpHero is a powerful and easy-to-use onboarding tool that is also cost-effective.
• Advanced Customer Support: With a comprehensive system, you can give users the guidance they need before they ask for it with contextual product tours.
• Onboarding Analytics and Segmentation: Analyze product usage and in-app flow engagement with HelpHero’s advanced analytics. You can also create user segments based on this data, allowing for highly targeted user interactions and improvements in the user experience.

Cons of HelpHero

Overall, HelpHero is a good customer onboarding software, but it has a few limitations that make it less than ideal for some businesses.

• Limited Features: HelpHero does not offer all of the features that some businesses need for customer onboarding, such as the ability to create custom onboarding flows or to track customer progress in real-time.
• Limited Customization Options: HelpHero’s customization capabilities are limited, which may not suit businesses with unique branding or design needs.
• A/B Testing is only available to technical users who can code.
• Integration Challenges: Integrating HelpHero with certain software and systems can be more complex and less seamless than some alternatives.

Userpilot – A better alternative for your SaaS

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.

Pros of Userpilot

As a full-suite digital adoption platform, Userpilot has all the features you need to onboard users, track analytics, and gather feedback from customers without writing a single line of code. Here are a few pros of using Userpilot as your product growth solution:

• No-code builder: Userpilot’s Chrome extension lets you build flows, add UI elements, and tag features without writing a single line of code.
• UI patterns: There are plenty of UI patterns to choose from when using Userpilot, such as hotspots, tooltips, banners, slideouts, modals, and more!
• Startup-friendly: Userpilot’s entry-level plan gives you access to all available UI patterns so you can hit the ground running.
• Walkthroughs and flows: Build engaging interactive walkthroughs and personalized onboarding flows that target specific segments of your user base.
• Self-service support: Build an in-app resource center to help users solve problems, customize its appearance to align it with your brand, and insert various types of content (videos, flows, or chatbots) to keep your customers satisfied.
• A/B testing: Userpilot’s built-in A/B testing capabilities will help you split-test flows, iterate on the best-performing variants, and continually optimize based on user behavior.
• Feedback collection: Userpilot has built-in NPS surveys with its own unified analytics dashboard and response tagging to help you retarget users. There are other survey types to choose from and you can even create your own custom survey.
• Survey templates: There are 14 survey templates to choose from so you can gather feedback on specific features or run customer satisfaction benchmarking surveys like CSAT and CES.
• Advanced analytics: Userpilot lets you analyze product usage data, monitor engagement on all in-app flows, and use the data to create user segments that are based on behaviors instead of demographics.
• Event tracking: Userpilot’s no-code event tracking lets you tag UI interactions (hovers, clicks, or form fills) and group them into a custom event that reflects feature usage.
• Third-party integrations: Userpilot has built-in integrations with tools like Amplitude, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, Segment, Heap, HubSpot, Intercom, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager so you can share data between all the solutions in your tech stack.

Cons of Userpilot

Of course, no tool is perfect and there are a few cons to consider before choosing Userpilot as your user onboarding or product growth solution:

• Employee onboarding: Currently, Userpilot only supports in-app customer onboarding.
• Mobile apps: Userpilot doesn’t have any mobile compatibility which could make it difficult for developers with cross-platform applications to create a consistent user experience for both versions of their product.
• Freemium plan: There’s no freemium Userpilot plan so those bootstrapping their startup and need sub-$100 solutions should consider more affordable onboarding platforms like UserGuiding or Product Fruits.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this post helped you decide whether Pendo or HelpHero is more appropriate for your company. As you can see – both have many upsides and downsides.

Undeniably, Userpilot provides a better value for money and is a better choice for a mid-market SaaS, especially when it comes to user onboarding and user feedback.

If you’re interested in finding more, book a demo with our team here!

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