Deciding between Spekit, HelpScout, and Userpilot? We know that choosing the best product adoption platform for your SaaS is difficult.

So we decided to write a more in-depth comparison of the three tools – going into more detail about the tools’ features, use cases, pros, and cons – than what you’ll find on review sites.

Whether you’re looking mainly to improve your user onboarding or product analytics, collect user feedback, or NPS – you’ll find out how Spekit performs vs HelpScout vs Userpilot – and which one is the best choice for you!

Let’s dig in!

TL;DR

• Spekit is an employee onboarding tool that enables you to create step-by-step walkthroughs and knowledge bases.
• However, it doesn’t offer complete UI patterns and there have been performance issues reported.
• HelpScout is a user-friendly customer support platform with a collaborative inbox, knowledge base, and chat features. While its reporting capabilities may be limited, it offers effective communication channels for businesses.
• Userpilot is a comprehensive digital adoption platform (DAP). It enables product teams to track product usage and user behavior to guide product development and optimize the user experience. In addition, it allows them to gather user feedback with various survey templates and design personalized onboarding experiences to drive product adoption. All of this is possible without coding. Book a demo to learn more.

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What is Spekit?

Compared to the other solutions on the market, Spekit is a digital adoption platform that focuses on employee onboarding rather than user onboarding. Their technology is excellent for using targeted feature adoption flows to quickly familiarize new employees with internal capabilities.

Spekit prides itself on the robustness of its internal database system.

Employees and managers can easily add, update, and search for information, so everyone is aware of internal best practices. This database can also assist new employees to get up to speed quickly, as they can use the database rather than bugging other employees when they have questions.

What is Spekit best for?

Typically, SaaS Product Managers consider Spekit for the following reasons: they want to improve their user onboarding, they need product adoption, and would also be able to measure their user feedback. How does Spekit perform when it comes to these top-three use cases? Let’s examine it all, and then compare to the other tools we’re discussing in this post.

Spekit for user onboarding

Spekit is not truly a user onboarding tool. It’s built to streamline employee onboarding by guiding new employees through 3rd party tools and processes using no-code, step-by-step walkthroughs.

Here’s how Spekit helps with employee onboarding:

• Spekit’s step-by-step walkthroughs help you build flows for guidance. You can create individual onboarding journeys for different teams. However, the variety of UI patterns is limited to tooltips and modals.
• Spekit allows you to record your flows and edit them, or save them as a draft. You can confirm the positioning of steps looks good, make necessary edits to the texts, and delete steps that are not necessary.
• With spotlights, you can push changes, new resources, or updates to your team the moment they need it – directly within their workflows.
• You can use a single flow to guide employees across multiple tools.

All in all, Spekit has good functionality for employee onboarding but is lacking in collecting user sentiment throughout the onboarding process, as it doesn’t support surveys.

Spekit for product adoption

Spekit sits on top of any web-based application like Salesforce and provides instant access to curated content, such as training videos, guides, and other materials. So if you want to drive product adoption by collecting useful data in one place, Spekit is perfect for that.

Here’s what you can expect from Spekit’s digital adoption capabilities:

• Spekit allows you to drive retention and assess your users with knowledge checks.
• You can embed your training beside fields, objects, and picklists for easier adoption.
• In-app alerts allow you to communicate updates and drive behavior.
• You can sync Spekit to your tool to automatically create a data dictionary that updates in real time.

As in the case of contextual onboarding, it lacks personalization, segmentation, and more advanced features.

Due to this, you might find it limited when it comes to targeting in-app experiences unless you also pay for other product adoption tools.

Spekit for user feedback

Here’s what you can do using Spekit’s Knowledge checks:

• Build short surveys designed to quiz your employee’s knowledge about the platform they are using.
• Trigger those surveys in-app to specific user segments.
• Determine who passes based on your selected answers and required completion.

Not exactly user feedback, but the surveys you can build with Spekit are interactive and accessible in-app, which increases engagement with them. If you want to collect true user feedback in various stages of the journey you should look at a different tool.

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What is HelpScout?

Help Scout is a help desk designed to support businesses in their customer service efforts, offering a variety of tools for customer interactions.

These tools include a knowledge base, contextual help through beacons, live chat and in-app messaging, and reporting.

By using Help Scout, businesses can efficiently manage customer interactions and monitor and resolve any issues.

If you need to improve your email support, provide Help Center resources for customers, or engage with them through live chat, Help Scout is a great option. It offers pricing plans that are based on the number of users, starting from $20 per user per month when billed annually. However, if you want to drive adoption and improve your onboarding efforts, this tool might not be the best choice for you.

What is HelpScout best for?

Similar to Spekit, HelpScout is typically considered for user onboarding, product adoption, and user feedback. Let’s examine HelpScout for these use cases before we compare it to Userpilot.

HelpScout for user onboarding

While Help Scout does offer some basic features for user onboarding and adoption, such as knowledge bases and customer communication tools like live chat and basic feedback collection, it is not specifically designed to provide a comprehensive solution for user onboarding.

If your business is primarily focused on user onboarding and adoption, you may need to look for a specialized user onboarding tool like Userpilot or a customer success platform that provides more comprehensive solutions for user onboarding, adoption, and engagement.

HelpScout for product adoption

While Help Scout is primarily focused on customer support and communication, it does offer some features that can support product adoption to a certain extent.

For example, Help Scout’s knowledge base feature can be used to provide self-service support options to customers, which can help them learn more about your product and increase their usage and adoption.

In addition, Help Scout’s customer feedback features, such as customer satisfaction ratings and NPS surveys, can help businesses gain insights into areas where they can improve their product and increase adoption.

However, Help Scout is not specifically designed to provide a comprehensive solution for product adoption. If your business is primarily focused on optimizing product adoption, you may need to look for a specialized tool like Userpilot or a customer success platform that provides more advanced features for user onboarding, adoption, engagement, and retention.

HelpScout for user feedback

Help Scout offers several features that enable businesses to collect and analyze user feedback.

For example, Help Scout’s customer satisfaction survey allows customers to rate the quality of their support experience. Help Scout also offers Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys, which can help businesses measure customer loyalty and identify areas for improvement.

In addition, Help Scout’s reporting and analytics features allow businesses to track and analyze customer feedback data over time, helping them to identify trends and patterns in customer feedback and make data-driven decisions to improve their products and customer support.

While Help Scout provides some user feedback features, it is not specifically designed to be a comprehensive user feedback tool. Businesses looking for a more specialized in-app user feedback tool may need to look at other options such as Userpilot.

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What is Userpilot?

Userpilot is a comprehensive digital adoption platform (DAP). It enables product teams to track product usage and user behavior to guide product development and optimize the user experience.

In addition, it allows them to gather user feedback and design personalized onboarding experiences to drive product adoption. All of this is possible without coding.

What is Userpilot best for?

Userpilot is used for similar use cases as Userlane and Walkme. Let’s see how Userpilot compares to the tools we discussed before it comes to user onboarding, product adoption, and user feedback.

Userpilot for user onboarding

Userpilot was built specifically for SaaS product teams that want to improve their user onboarding experience and boost user activation.

You can build a huge variety of user onboarding experiences and in-app guidance flows without needing to code.

Here’s what you’ll get when you start using Userpilot:

• Forget about coding in-app experiences: Userpilot is a no-code solution and only requires your dev to install a line of javascript inside your app and for you to download a Chrome extension that opens up the visual builder.
• Build in-app flows using the largest range of UI patterns (modals, slideouts, tooltips, hotspots, banners) and in-app onboarding experiences (checklists, micro surveys, NPS surveys, in-app resource center).
• Get access to a built-in NPS tool for collecting and analyzing user sentiment so you can improve your onboarding process based on real data.
• Create and track combinations of in-app events like clicks, hovers, and form fills, and then analyze all these interactions under your own custom events, which can be built without code or API calls.
• Use advanced product analytics and in-app flows analytics to identify where users need help and create granular user segments to trigger in-app experiences contextually (segment based on user identification data, in-app engagement, custom events, clicks, hovers, form fills, user feedback responses, NPS scores and more).
• Enhance the onboarding experience with in-app help by launching a Resource Center directly inside your app. Add in-app guides, and video tutorials, and give users access to search the knowledge base or reach out to support. Self-service has never been easier.

The best user onboarding is contextual and it happens right where the users need it, inside your app. There isn’t a better user onboarding tool out there that offers more value for the money than Userpilot.

Schedule a demo with our team and get ready to build the best onboarding experiences your users have seen.

Userpilot for product adoption

Product adoption describes the process of getting users to the point where they are experiencing value from your product.

Userpilot is a powerful product adoption platform that enables you to quickly build personalized and contextual in-app experiences targeted to different user experiences – all without writing a line of code.

It’s a great option for enterprise users too since it’s SOC 2 Type II certified and offers robust features for large-scale usage.

Here are some of Userpilot’s product adoption features that you may find helpful:

• A broad range of UI patterns to build fully customizable, contextual, and interactive in-app flows: modals, slideouts, tooltips, hotspots, driven actions, banners, and more. And – most importantly – you are not limited by plan when it comes to how many UI patterns or designs you can build.
• Advanced in-app checklists with built-in gamification elements like progress bars or ”automatically marked complete” tasks: checklists also come with analytics so you can track who is interacting with them and how.
• Fully interactive walkthroughs walk users through engaging and adopting specific features of your app.
• The self-service in-app resource center lets users search your knowledge base directly inside the app, access chat, and support but also launch guides and tutorials when they get stuck.
• User feedback tools allow you to collect insights to improve the product and the user experience, thus leading to a higher product adoption rate. You can also collect NPS data and tag responses to uncover patterns into what makes users stick, or build micro surveys for more granular data. Then you can use all the feedback collected to build user segments based on the answers and personalize the path to higher product adoption for each segment.

Want to see Userpilot in action? Get a demo and improve product adoption with contextual and personalized in-app flows that actually help users.

Userpilot for user feedback

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.

• Use prebuilt templates or build your own 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.
• Localize your surveys automatically.

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.

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So which tool should you choose – Spekit, HelpScout, or Userpilot?

As you can see, both Spekit, HelpScout, and Userpilot cater to most of the use cases Product Managers typically look for their SaaS companies. There are some differences between the tools when it comes to how those use cases are executed in each, of course. So if you’re still on the fence – there are two more factors that can make a difference for you – the tools’ pricing, and its reviews. Let’s have a look at both below!

Spekit pricing

Spekit has recently updated its pricing policy. The price will vary depending on your organization and specific use cases.

Previously, Spekit charges 20 $ per person monthly so it’s more suitable for small to midsize businesses. It also doesn’t provide a free trial or a freemium version of its features.

Some features such as seismic integration, knowledge checks, and knowledge check analytics are sold as add-ons that come with an extra fee.

HelpScout pricing

Help Scout offers three pricing plans, each with different features and capabilities:

• Standard: The Standard plan is priced at $20 per user per month when billed annually, or $25 per user per month when billed monthly. This plan has some limitations to it such as 2 mailboxes, 1 docs site, and a limit of 25 users. It also comes with in-app messaging with separate pricing if you have more than 2000 unique viewers.
• Plus: The Plus plan is priced at $40 per user per month when billed annually, or $50 per user per month when billed monthly. This plan includes all the features of the Standard plan, plus advanced reporting, automation workflows, and integrations with popular apps like Salesforce and Jira. Add-ons are available
• Company: The Company plan is designed for larger businesses and is billed only annually at $65 per user. This plan includes all the features of the Plus plan, plus personalized onboarding, a dedicated account manager, and enterprise-level security and compliance.

Additionally, Help Scout offers a 15-day free trial, so businesses can test out the platform before committing to a paid plan.

Userpilot pricing

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 Spekit vs HelpScout vs Userpilot?

Spekit reviews

HelpScout reviews

Userpilot reviews

The final countdown: Pros & Cons of Spekit, HelpScout, and Userpilot

Spekit pros

Spekit is a useful tool for your employee onboarding needs. Here are the main advantages to consider if you’re still deciding:

• It’s easy to use and easy to install in any web-based application.
• You can create versatile knowledge bases with different formats for different teams.
• Your new employees have answers to their questions in one place. So instead of interrupting other employees’ work, they can easily find what they are looking for with Spekit.
• You can collect a data dictionary that will be available to your users across different apps.

Spekit cons

The main downside that comes with Spekit is the absence of feedback collection and more advanced analytics. Here are the main cons of the tool:

• There are some limitations to user onboarding flows as Spekit only offers tooltips and modals as part of their flows UI patterns.
• There are many bugs and performance issues when using the tool. The UI is also fairly tricky to navigate as the tool is on the right-hand side.
• As the tool is missing some advanced analytics, it’s hard to find friction points and solve any issues with user experience.

HelpScout pros

Help Scout’s various tools and features make it easy to provide excellent customer support, while its affordable pricing plans make it accessible to businesses of all sizes. Here are some of the pros of using Help Scout:

• Easy to use and user-friendly interface: Help Scout’s layout and design make it simple to manage and organize customer interactions, which can save you time and reduce confusion.
• Affordable pricing plans, with user-based options: Help Scout offers pricing plans that are based on the number of users, starting from $20 per user per month when billed annually. This makes it a cost-effective option for businesses that need to keep their expenses under control.
• Seamless integrations with popular tools: Help Scout integrates seamlessly with 50+ popular tools. This means businesses can use Help Scout alongside their existing tools and workflows, making it easy to integrate into their existing infrastructure.

HelpScout cons

While Help Scout has many pros, like any software platform, there are also some potential drawbacks to consider. Here are some cons to using Help Scout:

• Lacks the straightforward ticketing feature that most alternatives offer.
• The reporting can be limited to what your needs as a growing company may be. Trying to get the reports emailed and importing information to other services can be a challenge. You may need to use several means of documenting and collecting data for your customers based on what they want to hear about and see the data for.
• Merging tickets can also be a bit confusing as it will sometimes change the profile name but the previous email addresses will remain so when you send, things can go to the wrong party.

Userpilot pros

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.

Userpilot cons

There are, however, some downsides to Userpilot as well:

• 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 integration available.  And Zapier integration is coming soon.
• Not appropriate for small startups on a shoestring budget (<$100)- Userpilot is a powerful, mid-market to enterprise-level tool. So $249 a month might be too expensive for really small startups.

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Conclusion

In this post, we’ve discussed how Spekit, HelpScout, and Userpilot compare when it comes to user onboarding, product adoption, and user feedback. We’ve discussed their features for each use case, pricing, and reviews, as well as the pros and cons. Hopefully, you’ve found these detailed descriptions helpful.

Obviously, we’re a little biased, but we think that Userpilot offers the best value for money, and is unrivaled especially when it comes to user onboarding. Hopefully, you’d like to give Userpilot a chance – see you in the free trial soon!