Pendo vs Spekit: Which is Better For Customer Feedback
Is Pendo or Spekit 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
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Customer feedback refers to the insights you gather from people after they use your product and interact with your customer service department.
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Customer feedback helps you discover friction points in your product and determine if your product is valuable to them. By acting on the data you collect, you can improve the product and the user experience.
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Using tools, you can automate feedback collection and analysis, as well as ensure relevant data is collected from the right users.
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It’s wise to choose a tool that supports multiple types of microsurveys out of the box, while also allowing you to add your own customizations.
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The next key features are feedback analytics and response monitoring, which will not only help you collect feedback but also analyze it and understand your customers’ intent.
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With Pendo, you’ll have access to impressive analytics, in-app feedback, and product adoption features, all in one place.
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You can collect feedback through Pendo’s guides using polls. Their main problem is that they come with limited customization options (no themes, no emojis).
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With Pendo you will need a paid plan if you want to collect feedback using NPS surveys, for example.
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The disadvantage of using Pendo for collecting user feedback is that the insights cannot be used to personalize the experience. You cannot segment users based on NPS scores or specific responses in your polls, for example.
- Compared to the other solutions on the market, Spekit is a digital adoption platform that focuses on employee onboarding rather than user onboarding. Their technology is excellent for using targeted feature adoption flows to quickly familiarize new employees with internal capabilities.
- Using Spekit you can build short surveys designed to quiz your employee’s knowledge about the platform they are using.
- Not exactly user feedback, but the surveys you can build with Spekit are interactive and accessible in-app, which increases engagement with them. If you want to collect true user feedback in various stages of the journey you should look at a different tool.
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Not what you were expecting? A great alternative to collecting customer feedback is Userpilot. Utilize survey templates out of the box, customize them to match your brand and UI, and trigger them contextually. Get a Demo to see it in action.
Looking for the best tool for customer feedback? Search no more!
What is customer feedback?
Customer feedback refers to the insights you gather from people after they use your product and interact with your customer service department.
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 it meets their needs
- Uncover weak spots of your product and bottlenecks that disturb the customer journey
- Make your customers voices heard and acknowledge them that they are important to you
- Collect real-time insights on the go as you’re introducing new features or product updates
Do you need tools to collect customer feedback?
Collecting customer feedback should be a standard procedure for any product team. It should be consistent and collected 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 literally without any coding.
Here’s how customer feedback tools help.
- Create different forms of microsurveys, such as NPS, CSAT, CES, 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.
What are the must-have features of a customer feedback tool?
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 microsurveys.
- 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 customers’ scores.
- 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.
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 only need analytics, there are more affordable tools out there with better functionality too.
- If you want to build more than simple in-app guides and trigger them contextually, Pendo is not the best tool due to its basic guides functionality.
- 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: 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 Premium: Custom MAU, multi-app, everything in other plans plus custom roles and permissions and advanced security
- 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!
Spekit for customer feedback
Compared to the other solutions on the market, Spekit is a digital adoption platform that focuses on employee onboarding rather than user onboarding. Their technology is excellent for using targeted feature adoption flows to quickly familiarize new employees with internal capabilities.
Spekit prides itself on the robustness of its internal database system.
Employees and managers can easily add to, update, and search for information, so everyone is aware of internal best practices. This database can also assist new employees to get up to speed quickly, as they can use the database rather than bugging other employees when they have questions.
Here’s what you can do using Spekit’s Knowledge checks:
- Build short surveys designed to quiz your employee’s knowledge about the platform they are using.
- Trigger those surveys in-app to specific user segments.
- Determine who passes based on your selected answers and required completion.
Not exactly user feedback, but the surveys you can build with Spekit are interactive and accessible in-app, which increases engagement with them. If you want to collect true user feedback in various stages of the journey you should look at a different tool.
Pros of Spekit
Spekit is a useful tool for your employee onboarding needs. Here are the main advantages to consider if you’re still deciding:
- It’s easy to use and easy to install in any web-based application.
- You can create versatile knowledge bases with different formats for different teams.
- Your new employees have answers to their questions in one place. So instead of interrupting other employees’ work, they can easily find what they are looking for with Spekit.
- You can collect a data dictionary that will be available to your users across different apps.
Cons of Spekit
The main downside that comes with Spekit is the absence of feedback collection and more advanced analytics. Here are the main cons of the tool:
- There are some limitations to user onboarding flows as Spekit only offers tooltips and modals as part of their flows UI patterns.
- There are many bugs and performance issues when using the tool. The UI is also fairly tricky to navigate as the tool is on the right-hand side.
- As the tool is missing some advanced analytics, it’s hard to find friction points and solve any issues with user experience.
What users say about Spekit?
On the whole, users feel positive about Spekit – here are some examples summarizing some key points about its features and the value it offers. You can find more reviews on G2 or Capterra.
The in-app guidance using field speks and the ability to view step by step instructions side by side using the sidebar dock have been a game changer for our organization!
The only downside I can think of is the use of the extension. I’ve had to “nag” users over and over again to get them to download it and discover all the magic that comes with it. – Samantha L.
The plug in is intuitive, easy to use and makes finding answers/solutions easy and efficient. For months we had tons of valuable resources and collateral that went untouched because reps didn’t know it existed. Now they have it right at their fingertips.
Our only pitfall was the flows piece. We aren’t able to leverage as easily as we would like.
-Administrator in Information Technology and Services/mid-market.
Most complaints about Spekit are about the upside bar positioning and some implementation issues.
” Great Idea! A bit tougher on the implementation side. ” I like the idea of this platform. It’s essential to train folks where they work. The sales team was very responsive throughout the pre-sales process. Unfortunately, our experience with implementation was nowhere as easy as we thought it would be. The slack integration was inadvertently set up internally before the full implementation. This caused an issue (which is understandable), but it took 4+ weeks for Spekit to determine the root cause. This has still not been addressed, unfortunately. Because of the difficulties with implementation/embedding into our environment, we are focused on one value proposition only: the slack Q&A creation process. We’ve needed to purchase other software that will better meet our needs. – Executive Sponsor in Information Technology and Services / Enterprise
Some users think it still has room for improvement.
“Nice, but needs work“. Customizable content, but we don’t have the capacity for someone to always manage that. Button position is very inconvenient, even though I know I can move it around. Don’t need the sidebar. I would also like to toggle off the buttons near things I have already learned so that I am not always interrupting work flows to click out of a window that I have mistakenly opened. – User in Airlines/Aviation / Mid-market
While other people think it’s overpriced.
“It’s cool, but overpriced in my opinion.” Extremely flexible. Lets us do things we wouldn’t be able to otherwise and is pretty easy to use. It looks a little funny on the screen. Kind of clutters up the screen. It looks a little funny and is too expensive in my opinion. – Administrator in Newspapers
Is Spekit the right fit for your business?
Spekit is a great tool when it comes to employee onboarding but has limited usability. Here are three main reasons why you might consider an alternative.
- Spekit focuses on employee onboarding but in most cases, you will need another tool that will provide you with in-depth analytics. There are other tools that are truly no-code.
- Spekit has a fairly tricky UI to navigate as users have encountered performance issues when using the tool.
- If you want to create more contextual onboarding with different segments, you might want to consider an alternative tool.
Spekit pricing
Spekit has recently updated its pricing policy. The price will vary depending on your organization and specific use cases.
Previously, Spekit charges 20 $ per person monthly so it’s more suitable for small to midsize businesses. It also doesn’t provide a free trial or a freemium version of its features.
Some features such as seismic integration, knowledge checks, and knowledge check analytics are sold as add-ons that come with an extra fee.
There is a better tool for your SaaS than Spekit!
Is there a better alternative for customer feedback?
Pendo and Spekit are good tools for customer feedback. 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.
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
There you have it. It should be easier now to make an informed decision between Pendo and Spekit. 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.
There is a better tool for your SaaS than Pendo!
