Pendo vs Userflow: Which is Best for Your SaaS?
Wondering whether Pendo or Userflow is the best option for your SaaS company?
This article is going to dive into the Pendo vs Userflow 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 Userflow – 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 Userflow compare when it comes to user onboarding and other common use cases.
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- 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.
- Userflow is a user onboarding solution centered around building in-app flows and guides quickly and seamlessly. It helps product teams onboard new users, creates guides/checklists, and surveys customers to gather valuable feedback.
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- 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
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 Userflow?
Userflow is a user onboarding solution centered around building in-app flows and guides quickly and seamlessly. It helps product teams onboard new users, creates guides/checklists, and surveys customers to gather valuable feedback.
Each flow has its own analytics that shows how many views each step of a funnel gets and what percentage of users end up seeing a particular stage. Lastly, the flow builder (Userflow’s main feature) also has versioning capabilities so you can restore your flows to a previous variant.
Pendo vs Userflow for user onboarding
In this section of the article, we’re really going to compare Pendo vs Userflow in terms of user onboarding. That way, we’ll be able to figure out which tool – Pendo or Userflow – 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.
Userflow for user onboarding
Userflow positions itself as a user onboarding tool, so most of its features are targeted towards that use case. Here are the Userflow features and functionalities that you can use to onboard new users to your product:
- Flows: In-app flows are the primary user onboarding feature that Userflow offers. You’ll be able to add steps like speech bubbles, tooltips, modals, or hidden steps used as triggers. You can also select whether a step is mandatory for flow completion and change the size or theme if needed.
- Targeting: You can create personalized and contextual onboarding flows with Userflow due to its auto-start settings. You can add trigger conditions like what page users are on, which segment they’re in, when they signed up, which elements they’ve clicked, and which flows they’ve seen.
- Checklists: Userflows lets you create checklists with an unlimited number of tasks, trigger them if certain targeting conditions are met, configure whether tasks need to be completed in a specific order, and prevent users from dismissing the checklist if needed.
Pendo vs Userflow for product adoption
In this section of the article, we’re really going to compare Pendo vs Userflow in terms of product adoption. That way, we’ll be able to figure out which tool – Pendo or Userflow – 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.
Userflow for product adoption
Userflow positions itself as a user onboarding tool, so most of its features are targeted towards that use case. Here are the Userflow features and functionalities that you can use to onboard new users to your product:
- Flows: In-app flows are the primary user onboarding feature that Userflow offers. You’ll be able to add steps like speech bubbles, tooltips, modals, or hidden steps used as triggers. You can also select whether a step is mandatory for flow completion and change the size or theme if needed.
- Targeting: You can create personalized and contextual onboarding flows with Userflow due to its auto-start settings. You can add trigger conditions like what page users are on, which segment they’re in, when they signed up, which elements they’ve clicked, and which flows they’ve seen.
- Checklists: Userflows lets you create checklists with an unlimited number of tasks, trigger them if certain targeting conditions are met, configure whether tasks need to be completed in a specific order, and prevent users from dismissing the checklist if needed.
Pendo vs Userflow for customer experience
In this section of the article, we’re really going to compare Pendo vs Userflow in terms of customer experience. That way, we’ll be able to figure out which tool – Pendo or Userflow – 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.
Userflow for customer experience
A good customer experience is imperative to lasting user retention. While Userflow’s lack of product analytics capabilities limits the customer experience insights it can offer, the software does let you add questions.
- Question blocks: Userflow lets you add question blocks to steps in the flow builder. Text-based questions are ideal for collecting qualitative feedback on the customer experience while scale or star ratings can be used to create CSAT or CES surveys within your no-code flows.
- NPS surveys: Userflow lets you create NPS surveys to see how satisfied users are with their customer experience and are loyal to your brand. Unfortunately, you’ll only be able to add two questions unless you upgrade to the Pro plan which starts at $680/month.
Note: Because Userflow has no unified analytics dashboard, you’ll need to go into the settings of each individual NPS survey to see data like total views, response rate, and the aggregate score from all respondents.
- Segmentation: Userflow lets you filter or target users by what language they speak, how much they spend on your product, how long ago they signed up, which features they’ve interacted with, and which segment they’re in so you can offer a personalized customer experience.
Pendo vs Userflow for user feedback
In this section of the article, we’re really going to compare Pendo vs Userflow in terms of user feedback. That way, we’ll be able to figure out which tool – Pendo or Userflow – 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.
Userflow for user feedback
Product feedback can be used to identify pain points and high-friction areas during onboarding flows or later in the customer experience. Here are the product feedback features that Userflow offers:
- Question blocks: Every in-app flow can have a question block added to one of its steps which helps you collect actionable feedback within different product areas. You can also bind responses to user attributes to easily sort through customers or trigger follow-up flows.
- Targeted feedback: Since Userflow lets you set conditions for which elements users have interacted with or which flows they’ve seen/completed, you can collect targeted feedback from customers who have already tested specific features and then trigger flows based on their response.
- NPS surveys: Auto-start conditions let you create NPS surveys that only trigger after users have interacted with a specific feature or product area. By comparing their survey responses to the ratings of a control group segment, you can test the impact a feature has on the product.
Pendo vs Userflow: 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 Userflow 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 Userflow
Pros of Userflow
Userflow has multiple benefits but the most notable is how easy it is to create and edit flows within the software. Userflow’s ease-of-use makes it an attractive solution for product teams, marketers, and even solopreneurs.
Here are the pros of using Userflow:
- Flow builder: Userflow’s intuitive drag-and-drop flow builder makes it easy to add new steps, create links between steps, and reorder steps by moving them around. Speech bubbles, tooltips, and modals are the three primary UI elements that you can use when creating steps.
- AI assistant: Userflow lets you create in-app AI assistants that can respond to customers in their native language (but will default to English if unsure which language the customer is speaking). Do note that you’ll need to pay an additional $100/month if you exceed 100 monthly messages.
- Integrations: Userflow integrates with tools like Amplitude, Mixpanel, Segment, Salesforce, Heap, HubSpot, and more — which makes it easy to integrate Userflow with your existing tech stack so you can sync data between platforms.
Cons of Userflow
Of course, there are some limitations to Userflow since it’s one of the newer onboarding solutions on the market. Let’s take a look at some of the downsides of choosing Userflow as your onboarding tool:
- Analytics: This is undoubtedly Userflow’s biggest weakness. It doesn’t have a home dashboard for analytics which means you’ll need to manually go into every flow, checklist, launcher, or resource center to view the analytics for it.
Note: Competitors like Userpilot and Pendo include native analytics dashboards on their entry-level plans.
- Reordering: While reordering steps in a flow can be done in a drag-and-drop fashion, the links between steps aren’t automatically severed. This means you’ll need to manually remove cross-step links and reconnect the steps whenever you change their order which can be a hassle.
- Limitations: Userflow’s entry-level plan has restrictive limitations like only being able to include two questions in NPS surveys and needing to pay extra if you want to add more than three team members (while competitors on the market like Userpilot usually offer five seats or more).
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 Userflow 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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