Pendo vs WalkMe: Which is Better for Customer Feedback?19 min read
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Pendo vs WalkMe – quick summary
- Let’s explore how Pendo and WalkMe compare when it comes to collecting customer feedback.
- 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.
- WalkMe enables you to create NPS, feedback, and knowledge test surveys. Feedback surveys help you collect specific feedback related to new features that you’ve released. Similarly, NPS surveys let you understand where your customer loyalty and satisfaction stand.
- Considering functionalities and value for money, Userpilot is a better choice when it comes to collecting customer feedback. With features such as NPS surveys, in-app surveys, and survey analytics, it can help you with collecting and analyzing customer insights without coding.
- Get a Userpilot demo and drive your product growth code-free.
What is 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.
Must have features for customer feedback tools
On the lookout to find the best customer feedback tools? We’ve curated a list of the best tools that are trustworthy:
- Userpilot: best customer feedback tool for creating NPS surveys without Userpilot branding and with NPS tagging capability.
- Appcues: best customer feedback tool for creating mobile surveys.
- UserGuiding: best customer feedback tool for creating different types of microsurveys.
- Pendo: best customer feedback tool for feedback analytics.
- Chameleon: best customer feedback tool for contextual in-product feedback.
Let’s dive deeper into how each stacks up for different company sizes, budgets, and jobs to be done!
Pendo for customer feedback
User feedback is crucial to growth as it can guide both product development and marketing initiatives. Pendo’s native analytics mostly focus on product analytics and behavioral data but it does have some features that focus on gathering user feedback.
Here are Pendo’s main user feedback features:
- Polls: Pendo lets you create multiple-choice polls with analytics for the number of responses, overall response rate, and which options got the most votes. You’ll also be able to view poll responses from your home dashboard by adding the poll widget.
- NPS Surveys: Creating NPS surveys with Pendo is fairly easy as you’re able to target specific segments, ask a follow-up question, and select the delivery method (either in-app only or combined with email). You can also integrate Pendo with Slack to set up response forwarding.
- Feedback Module: You can add a feedback module to your in-app resource center in two clicks. This gives users a chance to share their thoughts on the available resources, overall product experience, or specific issues they’ve been facing.
NPS surveys in Pendo
Pendo has a dedicated product area for creating NPS surveys and analyzing responses. NPS surveys are available on all plans, but you’ll need to upgrade to the Starter plan (which starts at $7,000/year) to remove the Pendo branding.
Here’s a breakdown of Pendo’s NPS capabilities and limitations:
- NPS Dashboard Widgets: Adding the Net Promoter Score widget to your Pendo dashboard will display multiple data categories on your homepage, including survey responses, trends over time, and product usage by score.
- Response Sorting: Pendo lets you add filters for which browser the respondent was using, how long it’s been since their first visit, when the response was received, and whether they responded in-app or through email so you can optimize targeting or response rates.
- Delivery Methods: When creating an NPS survey with Pendo, you’ll be able to choose between delivering the survey exclusively in-app or sending it to users through email as well. If you select the in-app + email option, then you’ll also be able to set the subject line.
In-app surveys in Pendo
In-app surveys yield higher response rates than email surveys and offer more accurate feedback because they give users the opportunity to share their thoughts as they’re actively using the product. However, Pendo’s polling features may not be as expansive as other survey tools.
Here are some of the benefits you could reap by using Pendo polls:
- Segmentation: You can target individual segments with Pendo polls to ensure that you get responses from the most suitable customers. For instance, you could poll new users on how their onboarding experience went or power users on which features they like the most.
- Analytics: Pendo’s analytics dashboard shows you the response rate for all your polls as well as which options got the most votes (for multiple-choice polls). You’ll also be able to add poll analytics to your Pendo homepage in the form of a widget.
- NPS: Pendo has a separate feature for NPS surveys that offers more advanced customization and analytics options than its standard polls. You’ll be able to choose how the survey is delivered, what follow-up question to ask, and what success message to display.
Note: All NPS surveys include Pendo branding that can only be removed by upgrading to the $7,000/year Starter plan.
WalkMe for customer feedback
If you want to understand how users feel about your product, it’s important to collect user feedback. The insights you gather from user feedback can be used to recalibrate your product development and customer service efforts, which, in turn, can elevate the user experience.
With WalkMe, you can collect user feedback with ease:
- WalkMe enables you to create NPS, feedback, and knowledge test surveys. Feedback surveys help you collect specific feedback related to new features that you’ve released. Similarly, NPS surveys let you understand where your customer loyalty and satisfaction stand.
- You can set the frequency for surveys to decide when and where your surveys should show up. It’s also possible to target the surveys to specific segments in your user base to collect targeted insights.
- You can track the results of your surveys in WalkMe Insights. It’ll show you metrics like detractors, promoters, and passives for NPS surveys.
NPS surveys in WalkMe
NPS surveys help you identify loyal users and reward them. They also enable you to identify users who are about to churn and take proactive steps to engage them and reduce the churn rate.
With WalkMe Surveys, adding NPS surveys to your application is fairly straightforward.
- You can customize the NPS-style template to match the look and feel of your product. You can also modify the message to ensure it resonates with users.
- You can use different settings options to control where, when, and how frequently NPS surveys appear.
- WalkMe automatically collects NPS survey results and adds them to the Insights dashboard.
In-app surveys in WalkMe
In-app surveys can go a long way to help you collect feedback and understand user sentiment. That, in turn, can help you improve user experience and product usage. You can easily create and implement surveys on WalkMe using the Surveys feature.
With WalkMe Surveys, you can deploy different types of surveys within your product. These include:
- NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys.
- Feedback collection surveys.
- Knowledge test questionnaires.
You can configure the appearance, timing, and frequency of these surveys to maximize engagement. WalkMe also gives you access to detailed survey analytics on the Insights dashboard.
However, it is worth noting that WalkMe doesn’t offer as much variety in pre-designed survey templates. If you’re looking for a faster and simpler way to implement in-app surveys, Userpilot might be a better fit.
Pros and cons of Pendo
There are a few obvious instances where you’ll likely need an alternative solution to Pendo — such as these use cases:
- Over 500 MAUs: If your product has more than 500 MAUs then you’ll need to subscribe to a premium Pendo plan (which tends to be significantly more expensive than other competitors on the market).
- Real-Time Analytics Needs: Companies that operate in fast-paced work sprints will likely opt for product adoption solutions with real-time analytics since Pendo’s one-hour data lag can data-driven decision-making difficult.
- Expensive Pricing Model: Pendo is more expensive than most solutions on the market and the subscription cost rises rapidly as your MAUs grow. Even if you’re on the Starter plan, you could be paying $35,000 annually once you reach 10,000 MAUs — which makes it harder to scale.
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 WalkMe
WalkMe ticks a lot of the right boxes if you’re looking for a digital adoption platform that’s intuitive and scalable. However, business requirements can vary and that could mean that WalkMe might not be the right fit for you. Here are three reasons why you may need to opt for a WalkMe alternative:
- You have a low budget: WalkMe is purpose-built for enterprises and it shows in its pricing. You can expect the cost to go into thousands of dollars annually. If your business doesn’t have a huge budget, it might be better to opt for another platform.
- You want to get started quickly: If you want a platform that offers near-plug-and-play functionality, you’re better off choosing another digital adoption platform as WalkMe has a moderate learning curve.
- You don’t want to work with CSS/HTML: Even though WalkMe is marketed as a no-code/low-code platform, there are some aspects where you’ll need CSS/HTML knowledge for customizations. If you want a fully no-code solution, you’re better off opting for an alternative.
Pros of WalkMe
WalkMe is among the most popular platforms out there for digital adoption, especially for enterprises. It’s got a range of useful features that businesses can leverage to create in-app engagements, track user behavior, and retain customers, among other things. Here are the pros of using WalkMe:
- Multiple in-app engagements: Offers a bunch of in-app engagement options, including product tours, tooltips, help widgets, onboarding checklists, and more. Using them well can help you engage your customers.
- User-friendliness: The platform is quite user-friendly in terms of creating in-app engagements. And while it does have a moderate learning curve as a whole, it becomes easy to use once you get the hang of it.
- Lots of analytics: WalkMe provides in-depth analytics on a range of things like in-app engagements and forms to help you understand the impact that they’re creating. This helps you optimize your strategies for better results.
- Workflow automation: Workflow automation features like onboarding automation stand out as they enable you to automate a series of steps and processes like clicking buttons to make your customer experience better.
- Community: WalkMe offers a strong community of experts and partners who can help you whenever you get stuck.
Cons of WalkMe
While WalkMe has a bunch of good things to offer that make it one of the leading digital adoption platforms out there, it does have a few drawbacks that prevent you from unlocking its full potential. Let’s take a look at some of the cons of this platform:
- Coding knowledge: Even though WalkMe is no-code/low-code for most of its functions, you’ll need to know HTML or CSS to make the most out of the platform.
- Challenging on complex sites: The process of implementing WalkMe on your website depends on the complexity of your site. You might find it challenging to ensure that your content behaves the way it should if you’ve got a complicated website.
- Focused on employees: WalkMe’s primary use case lies in digital adoption for employees, even though it has a specific plan for customers. However, this makes it slightly weaker compared to other platforms that have been dedicatedly built for customers.
Pendo vs WalkMe: Which one fits your budget?
Understanding the cost implications is paramount when selecting the right solution for customer feedback, so here’s a detailed pricing comparison of Pendo and WalkMe.
Pricing of Pendo
Pricing for paid Pendo plans is only provided on a quote basis and there are no listed price ranges on the solution’s website. That said, certain reviews have stated that prices start at upwards of $20,000 per year for a single product and more than twice that for higher plans.
Pendo has two paid plans and one free version that is limited to 500 MAUs which makes it accessible to startups but difficult to scale in the long run.
Here are the differences between each Pendo plan:
- Pendo Free: The free version of Pendo can accommodate 500 MAUs and has features like native analytics dashboards, feature tagging, event tracking, segmentation, NPS surveys (with Pendo branding), analytics reports, and in-app guides.
- Growth: Pendo’s Growth plan is designed to be used for a single web or mobile app but can accommodate a custom number of MAUs. It includes features like native analytics dashboards, in-app guides, NPS surveys and response tracking, and customer support.
- Portfolio: Pendo’s Portfolio plan is targeted towards customers who want to use the tool for multiple web and/or mobile apps. Features include guide experiment capabilities, cross-app executive dashboards, cross-app journey reporting, and access to product engagement scores.
Pricing of WalkMe
WalkMe’s pricing isn’t transparent, but it’s fully customizable based on your requirements. It offers a bunch of useful features like analytics, a self-serve content creation engine, in-app engagement creation, and more.
However, you need to get in touch with their team to find pricing details for both the customer and employee versions. Considering the platform is specifically built for enterprises, you can expect the cost to be on the higher end. You could end up spending anywhere between $9000 to $50,000 per year if you choose to use WalkMe.
Userpilot – A better alternative for customer feedback
User feedback is an essential part of listening to the Voice of the Customer (VoC) and making product development or marketing decisions that best suit your customer base. Userpilot has a no-code survey builder, 14 templates to choose from, and advanced analytics for extracting insights.
Here are the Userpilot features you can use to collect customer feedback and analyze it:
- Survey builder: Userpilot’s survey builder lets you edit the content, update the widget’s style/placement, and set page-specific or event-specific triggers to ensure that users see the survey at the most contextual moment — all without writing a single line of code. You can also translate surveys into your audience’s native language.
- Survey templates: There are 14 survey templates to choose from with a wide array of different use cases. You can collect qualitative responses on how to improve the user/product experience or quantitative data for customer satisfaction benchmarking such as CSAT and CES scores.
- Advanced analytics: Userpilot’s advanced survey analytics will show you what the most common responses were, what percentage of users selected a specific option, and display open-ended feedback about your product or specific features.
- NPS dashboard: Userpilot’s NPS dashboard compiles response data from all NPS surveys so you don’t have to manually go into each survey and check its analytics. You’ll be able to view key metrics like response rates, total views, and NPS history and sort all the data by different segments.
- NPS response tags: Userpilot comes with NPS response tags that you can use to categorize qualitative NPS answers for analyzing purposes. You can use these tags to identify common issues among passives and detractors or find satisfaction drivers among promoters.
NPS surveys in Userpilot
The Net Promoter Score (NPS) is a reliable measure of how satisfied customers are and how likely they are to recommend your product to others. Userpilot lets you build NPS surveys, analyze response data, and target specific user groups to gather actionable insights.
Here are the Userpilot features you can use when sending NPS surveys:
- No-code builder: The survey builder lets you edit the content of your NPS surveys, style the widget to your liking, restrict surveys to specific pages/paths, and use AI-powered localization to change the language of your survey.
- Audience targeting: Userpilot’s audience targeting features let you choose which users to include in NPS surveys. You could set this to all users, select only me if you’re still in the testing stage, target a particular segment, or set conditions that must be met for a survey to appear.
- Analytics dashboard: Userpilot’s dedicated NPS dashboard shows you all the key data gathered from your surveys. These include how many views your NPS surveys have gotten, the number of responses, the overall response rate, and how the score has been trending over time.
- NPS response tags: Userpilot comes with NPS response tags that you can use to categorize qualitative NPS answers for analyzing purposes. You can use these tags to identify common issues among passives and detractors or find satisfaction drivers among promoters.
In-app surveys in Userpilot
In-app surveys are an effective way to collect direct feedback from users without being at the whim of their email inboxes. Userpilot’s built-in functionality lets you create surveys, translate them, and track granular survey analytics that offers additional user insights.
Here are the Userpilot features you can use when building in-app surveys:
- Survey templates: Userpilot’s no-code survey builder has 14 templates to choose from. These include NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys among others for collecting quantitative and qualitative feedback from users. You can add a series of questions to gather valuable insights.
- Survey translation: Userpilot’s AI localization feature lets you translate surveys in a matter of minutes. All you need to do is add the desired locale and leave the rest to Userpilot. You can also make manual tweaks to translations if needed.
- Advanced analytics: Userpilot has detailed analytics that show what percentage of users chose a specific option, summarizes the most popular choices, and lets you browse through open-ended responses to extract insights from qualitative feedback.
Pricing of Userpilot
Userpilot’s transparent pricing ranges from $249/month on the entry-level end to an Enterprise tier for larger companies.
Furthermore, Userpilot’s entry-level plan includes access to all UI patterns and should include everything that most mid-market SaaS businesses need to get started.
Userpilot has three paid plans to choose from:
- Starter: The entry-level Starter plan starts at $249/month and includes features like segmentation, product analytics, reporting, user engagement, NPS feedback, and customization.
- Growth: The Growth plan starts at $749/month and includes features like resource centers, advanced event-based triggers, unlimited feature tagging, AI-powered content localization, EU hosting options, and a dedicated customer success manager.
- Enterprise: The Enterprise plan uses custom pricing and includes all the features from Starter + Growth plus custom roles/permissions, access to premium integrations, priority support, custom contract, SLA, SAML SSO, activity logs, security audit, and compliance (SOC 2/GDPR).
What do users say about Userpilot?
Most users laud Userpilot for its versatile feature set, ease of use, and responsive support team:
I recently had the pleasure of using Userpilot, and I must say it exceeded all my expectations. As a product manager, I’m always on the lookout for tools that can enhance user onboarding and improve overall user experience. Userpilot not only delivered on these fronts but also went above and beyond with its impressive new features, unparalleled ease of use, and truly exceptional customer support.
What truly sets Userpilot apart is its outstanding customer support. Throughout my journey with Userpilot, the support team has been responsive, knowledgeable, and genuinely dedicated to helping me succeed. Whenever I had a question or encountered an issue, their support team was always there to assist promptly, going above and beyond to ensure my concerns were addressed effectively.
Source: G2.
Of course, other users are also kind enough to share constructive criticism regarding specific features like event tracking filters:
“The filtration while analyzing specific events is a little confusing. Understanding of custom properties and data management configuration could have been more organised.”
Source: G2.
Conclusion
This is the end of our thorough comparison between Pendo and WalkMe. You should be able to make a confident decision by now. If you’re looking for a solid tool for customer feedback that promises great value for money, give Userpilot a go. Book a demo today!