Picking the right product experience platform is an important task for any product manager.
In this article, we’ll be conducting an in-depth analysis and comparison of the 15 best tools currently available on the market.
Let’s dive in.
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What is a product experience platform?
A product experience platform is a tool enabling you to build, maintain, analyze, and enhance the product experience. But what exactly does that mean?
Product experience (PX) is a term encompassing the entire customer journey, including the customer’s interactions with your product, how they feel about it, and their overall satisfaction.
Must-have features of a good product experience management software
Product experience is pivotal to get right as it can lead to increased sales, customer loyalty, and favorable word-of-mouth. However, it doesn’t happen by accident, it must be designed.
Here’s a handy list of must-have features to look out for in any good product experience management tool:
User onboarding. Onboarding is all about helping your users understand how to get value from your product. Product experience management software should offer a range of features for primary, secondary, and tertiary onboarding.
Intuitive user interface. The tool’s UI should be intuitive and easy to follow. It shouldn’t require a steep learning curve.
Customer segmentation. It should enable you to understand, analyze, and personalize interactions to deliver the best possible experience to all your user groups.
User feedback. You need to be able to gather product feedback directly from your users (launching surveys within your app is one fantastic option).
Product analytics. You need to be able to identify patterns and trends in behavior to make informed decisions – analytics can help here.
Integrations. Good product experience management software will integrate with your existing tech stack. The more integrations the better.
Scalable. Your tech platform needs to scale with the needs of the business. When you grow, the product experience tool must grow with you (without crippling your team with excessive running and maintenance costs).
The 15 best product experience platforms for product teams
Next up, we’re going to get into the details of what product experience management software is out there, its core features, and how much it’ll cost.
Let’s dive in!
1. Userpilot – best overall customer experience platform
Userpilot is a powerful, multi-faceted product adoption platform giving you everything you need to craft meaningful, potent product experiences.
Alongside in-built analytics, it has an impressive array of features:
- Gather user feedback. Collect feedback with in-app surveys and analyze quantitative and qualitative data.
- Advanced user segmentation capabilities. Identify and craft personalized experiences for distinct user groups.
- Track performance against goals. Conduct user journey analysis against specific milestones.
- Heatmaps. Understand how users navigate your app with heatmaps. This extremely actionable information will help you identify ways to make your UI easier to navigate.
- Build experiences with a range of onboarding UI patterns. Choose from slideouts, hotspots, tooltips, onboarding checklists, modals, banners, and more to boost engagement and adoption.
- Event-based message triggering. Launch contextual in-app guidance and messages.
- Experiment and iterate. Run experiments and measure performance against hypotheses with A/B testing.
Userpilot pricing
Pricing is flexible (scaling with user volumes), but there are three broad tiers on offer:
- Traction is an entry-level plan starting at $249/month for 2,500 MAUs. Unlike some competitors, this plan will give you access to most of the core features described above.
- The Growth and Enterprise plan have bespoke pricing.
2. Pendo – best for enterprise clients
Pendo is a comprehensive digital adoption platform that caters primarily to enterprise users. You can use Pendo to easily gather feedback, launch surveys (including NPS surveys), build guides, and more – all of this will contribute to creating positive customer experiences.
Pendo pricing
Pendo’s ‘Engage’ offering has a few publicly available tiers:
- Free: Up to 500 monthly active users (MAUs).
- Starter: From $7,000 for 2,000 users and up to $35,000 a year for 10,000 users.
- Custom pricing for Growth and Portfolio plans.
3. UserGuiding – best product experience platform for SaaS startups
UserGuiding is a no-code product management and onboarding tool. Its attractive pricing means it’s a great choice for early-stage SaaS companies.
Key features include:
- Interactive product walkthroughs
- Onboarding checklists to drive customers to the activation point
- Variety of UI patterns, like tooltips, modals, and slideouts to create the best possible product experience
- Emojis, gifs, images, and videos to customize your onboarding flows
UserGuiding pricing
UserGuiding’s biggest selling point is its $89/month Basic plan – however, it’s fairly limited in terms of functionality.
To get the best out of this product experience management software, you’ll need one of the more expensive pricing plans: Professional at $389/month, or Corporate at $689/month.
4. Appcues – best experience management platform for mobile apps
This product experience platform can be used to onboard new users, create product tours, and drive feature adoption. A quick bit of market research will tell you that Appcues is best for creating great product experiences on mobile apps.
Appcues pricing
Appcues pricing is fairly simple, and divided into three plans: Essentials for $249/month, Growth for $879/month, and Enterprise with custom pricing.
5. Qualtrics – best for sentiment analysis
Qualtrics is a product experience management tool renowned for its in-depth sentiment analysis and concept testing. Its main features include using machine learning and natural language processing to categorize data from customer feedback.
Qualtrics pricing
Qualtrics pricing is not publicly available for all. To know their pricing, you need to contact their sales team.
6. Heap – best for actionable insights into user behavior
Heap is a product analytics tool that helps you understand how and why customers engage with your product in a certain way. It offers:
- Automatic data collection. Heap automatically collects all customer data and stores it securely on the cloud.
- Data analysis. funnel analysis, journey analysis, and more.
- Data visualizations: view product analytics data via reports and dashboards.
- Integrations. Integrate with various other tools to create better experiences.
Heap pricing
Heap offers four pricing plans:
- Free: Up to 10,000 sessions/month.
- Growth: 300,000 sessions/month starting at $3,600/year.
- Pro: Custom pricing.
- Premier: Custom pricing.
7. Amplitude – best for customer journey analysis
Amplitude is another advanced analytical tool that helps companies better understand how users navigate through their products by monitoring their journeys.
Key features include:
- Event tracking and analytics. Track page views, clicks, and downloads.
- User segmentation. Segment users into groups and then track their behavior.
- A/B testing. Run experiments to see how changes impact user behavior (and improve conversion rates).
- Predictions. Predict user behavior based on their previous product usage. You can use this feature to identify users likely to churn, convert, and more.
Amplitude pricing
Pricing is based on the number of monthly tracked users (MTUs):
- Starter: Free for up to 100,000 MTUs.
- Growth: Custom pricing.
- Enterprise: Custom pricing.
8. Adobe Experience Manager – best for digital asset management
Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) is a cloud-based software that helps businesses create, manage, and deliver digital assets across all channels. Other features include content management, reporting, analytics, and personalization.
Adobe Experience Manager pricing
Adobe doesn’t mention its pricing on its website. To know how much the software costs, you need to request pricing by providing your company details.
9. Hotjar – best for qualitative insights into the product experience
Hotjar is a powerful website analytics and product experience platform that tracks user behavior and collects qualitative data through interviews.
Key features include session recordings, heatmaps, and surveys.
Hotjar pricing
Hotjar offers four price tiers:
- Basic. Free plan for up to 35 daily sessions.
- Plus. $32/month for up to 100 daily sessions and enhanced data filtering.
- Business. $80/month starting at 500 daily sessions.
- Scale. $171/month starting at 500 daily sessions.
10. UserTesting – best for testing digital products
UserTesting is a software platform that allows businesses to get feedback from real users on their websites, mobile apps, and other products.
As well as offering a comprehensive set of usability testing options, other features include feedback, surveys, recordings, and more.
UserTesting pricing
Contact sales to understand your pricing options and implementation.
The sales team will set out whether the Essentials, Advanced, or Ultimate plan makes sense based on the volume of users, tests, and more.
11. Gainsight – best for driving product adoption
One of the most popular platforms for product adoption, Gainsight offers a range of user-friendly engagement tools, data and insights, advanced segmentation, performance against success measures, support across multiple channels, and more.
Gainsight pricing
To know the pricing of the product experience suite from Gainsight, you need to get in touch with their sales team.
12. Productboard – best for product managers looking to optimize roadmaps
This product management tool is an all-in-one platform that’ll help you prioritize and develop products better.
Product managers can define vision and success metrics, set out strategies, and incorporate customer feedback into their product roadmap.
Productboard pricing
There are several options to choose from:
- Essentials: Starting at $20/month, this plan is designed for individuals and includes basic features like roadmap creation.
- Pro: Starting at $80/month, this plan includes additional features like feature prioritization, product analytics, and more.
- Enterprise: Designed for big teams and large organizations, it includes all the features of the Pro plan, plus additional features like sentiment analysis. You need to request a demo to know the pricing of this plan.
13. Bloomreach – best for increasing customer loyalty
Bloomreach is a digital experience platform built for commerce, offering a unified view of customer and product data.
Key features include funnel analysis, building a conversion funnel, understanding the customer journey, driving engagement across digital channels, and boosting retention and loyalty through optimizing the customer journey.
Bloomreach pricing
Bloomreach pricing is customized to the number of users, the size of your product, and the number of events you execute across its three products; Engagement, Discovery, and Content.
14. Refiner – best platform for product feedback surveys
This product experience management tool specializes in building customer surveys to gather valuable product data and feedback.
You can use it to launch microsurveys, analyze interactions, segment user groups, and take immediate action to deliver a better product experience.
Refiner pricing
There are three pricing tiers. Based on 5,000 MAUs, you’re looking at $75/month for Essentials, $199/month for Growth, and custom pricing for Enterprise.
15. Optimizely – best for A/B testing
This tool is specialized to run experiments and improve your product decision-making.
You can easily A/B test different versions of your app, quickly conduct a market assessment, use feature flags for different user groups, and integrate it with various other tools.
Optimizely pricing
Optimizely will create a bespoke plan based on which elements of the product you need (i.e., Orchestrate, Experiment, or Monetize), the volume of traffic, users, and more.
Conclusion
That wraps up our extensive guide into the world of product experience platforms.
You should now be well equipped with an understanding of what product experience is and which PX management software should you choose.
If you’re looking for a solid product with great value for money, give Userpilot a go. Book a demo call with our team to get started!
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