Pendo vs Walkme which is better for customer feedback

Pendo vs Walkme - which is better for Customer Feedback

Would Pendo or Walkme be a better tool for customer feedback? What would be a better alternative to the other in-app onboarding software tools?

There are so many options on review sites that choosing one can be difficult.

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

  • Collecting customer feedback is an important task for any product team. It helps you understand your users’ needs, and the weaknesses of your product, and collect real-time usage insights to inform future feature and product decisions.
  • Customer feedback tools are essential for your team to be able to collect user feedback at scale, without being reliant on your engineering and data science team for launching and analyzing surveys.
  • A good customer feedback tool should have a certain set of features: 1) the ability to create different forms of micro surveys, such as NPS, CSAT, CES, and PMF to collect contextual feedback; 2) the ability to customize the surveys to match your native UI; 3) Ability to segment the user and trigger the surveys by the different segments. 4) Ability to analyze the results – both quantitative and qualitative.
  • Product adoption tools with in-built survey functionality are common choices for collecting user feedback for SaaS product teams.
  • Pendo and Walkme are popular product adoption tools commonly chosen also for collecting customer feedback in-app.
  • Pendo is a rather expensive product adoption tool that also offers polls (also called micro surveys) through their guides. This allows you to 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 which starts at $7,000 per year.
  • The polls don’t offer a lot of customization, like themes or emojis available, but it’s enough to collect data in-app.
  • 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. The NPS survey is only available in the Growth plan. Considering the price you have to pay for Pendo, you’d expect more from it.
  • Walkme is an enterprise onboarding tool, mostly used for employee onboarding. Unlike Appcues, Walkme offers a quite good customer feedback collection and analysis tool for SaaS – you can create different types of surveys such as NPS, CSAT, and CES  with Walkme, and customize them with different question types such as free text, single selection, multiple selections, rating, etc. Then, you can easily analyze the survey results and data in the “Insights” section.
  • On the flip side, Walkme is punishingly expensive – with the on-demand-only pricing reportedly starting at $55,000.
  • What’s the best alternative to both the limited Appcues customer feedback and the exorbitantly expensive Walkme tool? Userpilot offers the best of both worlds – easy setup of the in-app customer feedback surveys, full customizability, and in-app analytics options and yet – it’s perfectly affordable with plans starting at $249 per month!
  • Userpilot’s new robust surveys offer a range of interactive in-app surveys featuring NPS, CSAT, CES, and PMF. You can fully customize the survey look and feel and set the trigger frequency and specific targeting. Then, you can analyze the scores, tag responses, and use the data to create specific user segments.
  • Userpilot lets you 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.
  • From Walkme vs Pendo, Userpilot is the best choice for customer surveys.

Looking for the best tool for customer feedback? Search no more!

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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, 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 Q2 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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Walkme for customer feedback

WalkMe is one of the pioneers in the market of adoption tools. It is a cloud-based software that allows you to create product tours and in-app experiences to drive adoption faster.
WalkMe is best for enterprise companies as they are focused on employee onboarding rather than user onboarding.

Walkme allows to collect feedback from users so you can make data-driven decisions and improve your product experiences.

Here is how Walkme’s user feedback functionality can offer you:

  • Create different types of surveys such as NPS, CSAT, CES and customize it with different question types such as free text, single selection, multiple selection, rating to gather feedback from users
  • Implement surveys at any stages of the customer journey to pinpoint areas of improvement and collect ongoing data
  • Analyze the survey results and data in the “Insights” section
  • Customize the design of the surveys with CSS and make sure they are aligned with your brand colors and style
  • Set frequency rates and decide how often and when the surveys should appear to end users

Pros of Walkme

WalkMe has its fair share of advantages that make it a solid tool. So what are WalkMe’s pros?

Here are our top three:

  • Offers a high level of customization and works on both your own tool and 3rd party tools.
  • Allows you to create in-app quizzes to test user or employee knowledge after completing a flow.
  • Get access to a vast list of integrations that simply enhance your data collection or allow you to connect multiple tools in your stack.

Cons of Walkme

WalkMe is an established tool on the market but it does have its own share of cons too.

Here are the main ones you should consider:

  • There’s a steep learning curve and a fair amount of technical knowledge required to create WalkMe user guides and get them implemented the way they’re intended.
  • WalkMe is designed for enterprise organizations, and its pricing reflects that.
  • You could end up spending anything from $9000 to $50000 a year on WalkMe. That’s a lot of money for startups and SMEs.

What do users say about Walkme?

Users are mostly happy with WalkMe’s features: on-screen guidance, interactive walkthroughs, customizable UI patterns, and journey segmentation are highly used and appreciated by customers.

Here are some reviews from real users.

“The most valuable thing WalkMe provides is time. WalkMe provides the user with on-screen guidance to get them to where they need to be without weighing down support teams on training for every function. The automated steps can remove multiple clicks and quickly send the user to what they need to see. The ability to view user activity and search terms allows mapping new build requirements properly.”

“WalkMe is very user-friendly and easy to learn! There are so many different features of WalkMe to provide a customizable and creative experience for all of our users. I love creating smart walkthroughs and building flows charts, which is the most fun part of my day-to-day tasks!”

But Walkme is not a perfect solution, most complaints are about hard implementation and annual contract pricing.

Here are some words from real Walkme users:

We never had time to implement the product. It takes a huge time investment and isn’t designed for the full documentation. Rather than maintain two sets of documentation, we removed Walkme from our product. This company is as bad as AOL or TimeWarner: they will not let you out of your multi-year contract no matter how unhappy you are with the product.

The tool is not very intuitive and has countless challenges using and technical difficulties.

Is Walkme the right fit for your business?

Is WalkMe all you need or are there better alternatives that can provide more value at a much lower price? Here are the main reasons you should look for an alternative:

  1. WalkMe offers only yearly pricing contracts which start at $9000 so if you want to onboard new customers or provide in-app guidance then there are better solutions that won’t lock you in.
  2. WalkMe is known for its hard implementation so it’s not recommended for non-technical people. Generally, it can take weeks or even months. For better comparison, Userpilot can be set up in just a few minutes as it’s completely code-free.
  3. Bad and outdated UX design is another thing that might disappoint you and make you search for alternatives.

Walkme pricing

WalkMe works on a custom pricing plan that requires you to request a quote from their sales team (could be spending from $9000 to $50000 a year).

Their main two plans are:

  • WalkMe for employee onboarding experience: engagement tools and analytics
  • WalkMe for customer experience: engagement tools and analytics
  • Add-ons: Session Streams, TeachMe, AI analytics through UI intelligence

There is a better tool for your SaaS than Walkme!

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Is there a better alternative for customer feedback?

Pendo and Walkme 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.
    segment-nps-responses-tag-userpilot
  • 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 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

Making an informed decision between Pendo and Walkme should now be easier. There is no one tool that is superior to the other, since both have their advantages and disadvantages. It depends on your product and current needs. If you want the best value for money, we recommend the alternative option. Are you interested in seeing how Userpilot can help you with customer feedback? Book a demo below.

There is a better tool for your SaaS than Pendo!

Try Userpilot FREE

  • 14 Day Trial
  • No Credit Card Required
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