Pendo vs Userguiding: Which Is Better For Customer Feedback

Is Pendo or Userguiding the best tool for customer feedback? Or maybe there is a better in-app onboarding software that would better fit your needs?

There are so many alternatives on review sites which makes it 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 the pricing should also be within 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 anything customers have to say about the products and services they use.
• Collecting customer feedback will help you understand whether your product is meeting customers’ needs, identify friction, and resolve any issues to increase customer satisfaction.
• If you want to create and customize different forms of microsurveys, segment customers based on their responses, and analyze user sentiment, then you need a customer feedback tool.
• An effective customer feedback tool should have the following features: 1) the ability to create various types of microsurveys, such as NPS, CSAT, CES, and PMF, to collect contextual feedback; 2) the ability to customize surveys to match your native interface; 3) the ability to segment users and trigger surveys based on each segment. 4) Ability to analyze the results – both quantitative and qualitative data.
• Pendo and Userguiding are two well-known product adoption tools and they can be used to collect user feedback as well.
• Pendo offers polls (also called micro surveys) through their guides. As a result, you can gather user feedback and gauge sentiment at different points along the user journey. However, the tool doesn’t offer much customization and you can’t use the insights to personalize the user experience. Moreover, NPS surveys are included only in the Pro and Enterprise plans.
• Userguiding allows you to create NPS surveys without writing a single line of code. You can add a thank you page or a follow-up question to collect qualitative data, create custom segments, and trigger surveys based on those segments. Keep in mind that the Basic plan has limited functionality and there are many bugs and performance issues.
• Pendo’s pricing is only available if you request a quote. Pricing information for the higher tiers isn’t available on the company’s website. According to some reviews, they have prices starting at $20,000-$25,000 per year.
• Userguiding has 3 tiers: Basic, Professional, and Corporate. The prices start at $99, $399, and $699/m, respectively.
• Looking for a better alternative? Userpilot’s comprehensive robust surveys offer a range of interactive in-app surveys featuring NPS, CSAT, CES, and PMF. In addition to setting the trigger frequency and specific targeting, you can fully customize the look and feel of the survey. You can then analyze the scores, tag responses, and create specific user segments based on the data. Try it out by scheduling a demo.

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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 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

Why do you need tools for customer feedback?

Wondering why you even need a customer feedback tool? There are several reasons why you may need one:

Collecting customer feedback should be a standard procedure for any product team. It should be consistent and gained 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, 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 microsurveys. 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 interface and don’t look odd. No tool branding is 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 survey and analytics tools so you can enrich your surveys to 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 Q1 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 from Pendo in Pendo.

That’s because Pendo doesn’t allow you to target users segmented by in-app events 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 either. 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. 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 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 experiences based on in-app events and user behavior in real-time – Userpilot offers these features (and at a lower price tag too).

What 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.

And there’s more:

Need to be able to drill more into the Dashboard widgets. For example, using the Stickiness Metrics widget of WAU vs MAU is valuable but I should be able to click into these widgets to figure out which specific Clients these are referring to by different segments. This would be helpful information to hand over to other teams like Customer Success. It would also be helpful to be able to see which Clients are not using certain features when using the Behavior section to create reports. For example, if a CSM has 30 accounts and we can see that 14 are using a specific feature, having a quick list of the 16 not using the fea -Computer Software Admin.

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.

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 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’s pricing 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!

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Userguiding for customer feedback

UserGuiding is a lower-cost, entry-level product adoption tool offering a range of features to help companies onboard new customers and boost product adoption.

UserGuiding excels at building simple onboarding experiences for users. It includes a no-code builder, segmentation options, and easily added UI patterns like hotspots, tooltips, and modals.

Although it also has some other goodies like a resource center and analytics, the meat of this product is its onboarding flow builder. If all you’re looking for is a relatively easy way to build simple onboarding flows, this could be a great choice for you. However, people looking for more analytics, customization, or complex integrations should probably look elsewhere.

With UserGuiding, you can collect user sentiment data with NPS surveys and microsurveys even when using the Basic plan.

Here’s how you can collect user feedback with UserGuiding:

• Build NPS surveys without writing a single line of code.
• Adjust the thank you page and add a follow-up question to gather qualitative data and understand the reasons behind the scores.
• Customize the button texts, colors, and design to match your brand
• Set up custom audiences, segments, timing, and targeting rules to trigger the surveys

The downside of using UserGuiding for collecting user feedback is that you can’t tag NPS responses so you can identify trends between scores. You also can’t create long forms as they neither support it in their native interface nor have integrations with other 3-rd party tools to do the job.

Considering that, Userpilot undoubtedly offers you more value for money. 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 Userguiding

There are some advantages when it comes to choosing UserGuiding. Here are its pros:

• For small startups or independent businesses, the price is an attractive element to consider.
• A good variety of UI patterns to choose from when building flows and guides
• Unlike some of the more expensive options, you can choose to add a Resource Center (a bonus for self-service support).
• For a budget tool, UserGuiding still offers integrations with other applications, such as Mixpanel, Hubspot, Woopra, Slack, Webhook, etc.

Cons of Userguiding

Though UserGuiding is a solid product many improvements are still needed. The cons of using UserGuiding include:

• There are many bugs and performance issues when using the tool. The UI is also fairly tricky to navigate.
• It has limited functionality, particularly on the basic plan. There you only have a small range of features available – all with the UserGuiding watermark/branding.
• Technical knowledge is required to get the maximum out of this product.
• Customization and design options for UI patterns aren’t the greatest.

What users say about Userguiding?

If you check the product review sites, most people like using UserGuiding.

Here are some reviews from real users:

Creating guides/checklists are easy to implement. It does not take a lot of time to make adjustments when you need to make changes.
You can go live with a simple guide or checklist within minutes. I was able to go live within a few days of getting started. – Administrator in Computer Software

However, some people think there’s too much friction due to bugs. Let’s have a look at some negative reviews to see why users complain about:

It is a bit buggy, sometimes it lags or freezes.

And, some people think that there is still room for improvement:

The analytics felt a little elementary. Other than the Mixpanel integration, it wasn’t possible to analyze user data directly on the UserGuiding dashboard. There was an API we could use that required some set up, but this was something I expected to be baked into the product for sure.- Administrator in Computer Software

Is Userguiding the right fit for your business?

UserGuiding is a great fit for small SaaS businesses but it might be not the right fit if you want to:

1. Create fully interactive product tours
2. Build segments completely code-free as segmentation features aren’t very intuitive and may require additional help from a developer
3. Get in-depth analytics. Though UserGuiding does have analytics functionality, it’s not complex and doesn’t give you much data.

Userguiding pricing

UserGuiding’s pricing model is far simpler than others on our list. There are three tiers, each one charging a set amount for access to certain tools.

Here are its packages:

• Basic will give you access to only the most essential onboarding tools: Starting at $99/mo or $69/mo (if you buy the yearly contract), this budget option has a few limitations to consider (i.e. just 1 Team Member, a limit of 20 guides, and 2 checklists, UserGuiding branding on all UI patterns).
• Professional adds unlimited guides, hotspots, and checklists. Starting at $399/mo or $299 /mo if billed yearly.
• Corporate gives you access to everything plus personalized coaching. Starting at $699/mo or $499.mo for a yearly plan.

There is a better tool for your SaaS than Userguiding!

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Is there a better alternative for customer feedback?

Pendo and Userguiding 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

As with any tool, Userpilot also has some disadvantages though:

• 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 the 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!

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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

That’s all you need to know. Now it should be easier now to make an informed decision between Pendo and Userguiding.

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!

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