Stonly for Proactive Customer Service: Features, Pricing, and Review
Looking for an effective proactive customer service tool and wondering if Stonly is the best option for your SaaS company?
With numerous of Stonly alternatives, it can be challenging to make a final decision.
In this article, we’ll delve into precisely that – helping you determine whether Stonly is the ideal choice for your proactive customer service needs. We’ll explore its features, pricing, and offer a comprehensive review to aid in your decision-making process.
Let’s get started!
TL;DR
- Stonly is a good choice for proactive customer service and it comes with features such as tooltips, modals, in-app resource center, and interactive walkthroughs.
- There are a few clear scenarios where Stonly wouldn’t be the best solution to use. If you’re in any of these scenarios then considering an alternative platform would probably be best:
- Feature Mismatch: If user onboarding or product adoption are your main goals, then Stonly’s feature set may not align with that use case. Its ability to build in-app guides or survey customers is limited by the platform’s coding requirements and pricing structure.
- Budgetary Constraints: Companies who are operating on a tight budget should steer clear of Stonly due to the extra charges that occur if your guides get more than 4,000 views per month. If guide views reach 30,000 then you’ll be paying an additional $500 on your plan each month.
- Existing Knowledge Bases: Building knowledge bases is the primary use case for Stonly’s feature set. If you already have an existing knowledge base, then you’d be better off with an alternative like Userflow that integrates with Freshdesk, HubSpot, and Zendesk knowledge bases.
- If you’re looking for a better option for proactive customer service, Userpilot exceeds both functionality and value for money compared to Stonly. Ready to see Userpilot in action? Schedule a demo today to explore its powerful proactive customer service capabilities firsthand.
Looking for a Better Alternative for Proactive Customer Service? Try Userpilot
What is Stonly?
Stonly positions itself as a cheaper alternative to some of the pricier product adoption solutions on the market. In reality, it’s more of a customer service tool that can be used to build knowledge bases rather than an actual onboarding or adoption platform.
As a result, the tour builder on Stonly feels more like an add-on to its knowledge base functionality rather than a product of its own.
This also means that its in-app engagement features will be rather limited (especially in the no-code regard) compared to alternatives like Userpilot or Appcues.
Must have features of proactive customer service tools
When choosing a customer service tool, focus on features that predict needs, enhance user experience, and simplify operations. Here are some features that you should consider:
- In-app guidance: A tool with contextual onboarding tooltips and other UI patterns can ease user frustration when understanding basic product features instead of navigating a busy support center.
- Targeted in-app help: Look for the tools that let you segment users by their jobs to be done, goals, and problems. This will enable you to provide users with relevant in-app help.
- Self-service options: Providing customers with the ability to solve their problems through chatbots, knowledge bases, and FAQ sections can be proactive and efficient.
- Real-time monitoring: Tools that monitor real-time product usage patterns can help you identify potential issues earlier to offer proactive support immediately.
- Feedback collection: Gathering feedback via various in-app surveys or feedback forms can reveal areas for improvement.
- Funnel analysis: Using funnel analysis, you can easily spot where customers are facing problems. With this information, you can provide proactive support in those areas and reduce churn.
Stonly features for proactive customer service
In-app support is where Stonly shines since the platform is essentially a knowledge base builder with a few extra onboarding and adoption features added on. Its in-app support features include multiple builder views to choose from, content localization, and AI-generated answers:
- Builder Views: Stonly’s knowledge base builder lets you toggle between multiple editor views using the sidebar. These include views for editing the content of a knowledge base, adjusting its layout, adjusting its design, and tweaking other settings.
- Content Localization: Clicking on the language button of your knowledge base editor will show you all its versions or let you add more languages by selecting the “Manage languages” option. Header/footer text will automatically be translated but guides need to be translated separately.
- AI-Generated Answers: Stonly’s AI-generated answers can use existing guide content to address a user’s search queries directly. Unfortunately, the AI Answers feature is only available for Enterprise customers, and even then it’s an add-on rather than part of the base subscription.
Stonly’s tooltips
Stonly lacks traditional tooltips that expand when users hover over an element but it does have information icons that can trigger guides:
Here’s how you can use Stonly to trigger contextual guides that work as onboarding tooltips:
- Icons: Icons are one of the UI triggers that you can add with Stonly. You can then launch a guide, tour, or knowledge base module when users click on the information icon next to an element or feature.
- Triggers: Because icons are a type of UI trigger, you’ll be able to apply Stonly’s targeting settings to them. These include URL rules for which pages the icon should be enabled on, targeting conditions based on user properties, and customized designs.
Note: UI triggers are only available on Stonly’s paid plans so users on the Basic version of the platform won’t be able to use them.
- Limitations: Unfortunately, Stonly doesn’t support native tooltips that expand when users hover over an element. Furthermore, failing to tag a UI element properly and set the necessary URL rules could lead to your tooltip triggers being deactivated entirely.
Note: Alternative adoption solutions like Userpilot and Appcues support hover tooltips.
Stonly’s modals
UI modals are the most effective way to grab a user’s attention but they should be used sparingly to avoid becoming too intrusive.
Here’s an overview of Stonly’s modal design capabilities:
- Step Types: Stonly’s visual editor lets you change the widget type of a particular step even after you’ve published the guide. This means you can edit your existing guides to transform them from a corner popup to a modal that appears in the center of the screen.
- Zendesk Integration: In addition to onboarding new users or making announcements, Stonly modals can also be used to help your support agents. The Zendesk integration makes it possible for agents to view your guides as a modal popup when assisting customers.
- Modal Limitations: Because Stonly’s modals can only be created as a step within your guides, it’s not possible to create standalone modals. This can make it difficult to create personalized modals for each segment or use modals to make announcements outside of guides.
Stonly’s in-app resource center
In-app resource centers speed up the onboarding process, improve the customer experience, and give users easy access to product documentation. Stonly makes it possible to build a full-on knowledge base and let users access it through the in-app widget.
- Knowledge Base Builder: The Stonly knowledge base editor makes it possible to switch between four builder views. This means you’ll be able to edit content, change the layout, customize design, and change other settings, all without leaving the knowledge base builder.
- Multi-Language Support: Stonly lets you build knowledge bases in multiple languages and then quickly switch between versions by clicking on the language icon. While header and footer text will be automatically translated, note that guides must be translated separately.
- Resource Center Integrations: Stonly has third-party integrations with tools like Zenesk, Freshdesk, Intercom, and more. This makes it possible to launch external apps from within your resource center so that users can get assistance from a live representative if needed.
Stonly’s interactive walkthroughs
Interactive walkthroughs are better than linear product tours because they help users learn by doing. Stonly’s knowledge base capabilities may be more fleshed out than its onboarding functionality, but it does have a guide builder, UI patterns, and analytics for walkthroughs too.
Here’s how Stonly lets you use interactive walkthroughs to improve onboarding:
- Guide Builder: The Stonly guide editor lets you create guides, add steps, and edit your content without writing a single line of code. You can also add special steps like surveys, checklists, automations, or external integrations for chat apps like Freshchat and Intercom.
- UI Patterns: Stonly lets you trigger specific guides using various UI patterns. These include pill buttons at the bottom corner of the screen, banners on the top, info icons next to elements, and hidden triggers that activate conditionally. You can also edit the design or targeting for triggers.
Note: UI triggers are only available on Stonly’s paid plans so users on the Basic version of the platform won’t be able to use them.
- Analytics Dashboard: In addition to letting you build interactive walkthroughs and trigger them contextually, Stonly also has an Insights dashboard for global analytics. This will help you track the total number of guide views, how many unique visitors saw them, and track top guides.
What are the pros and cons of Stonly?
Stonly’s pros
While Stonly isn’t as capable as full-on digital adoption solutions like Userpilot, Pendo, or Appcues, it does have a few benefits:
- Self-Service Support: Because building knowledge bases is the primary use case for Stonly (and arguably its core product), it has advanced self-service support features that could outperform other adoption solutions, such as abundant live chat integrations.
- Analytics Dashboard: Stonly has a unified analytics dashboard that can show you global insights across all your guides. This makes it easier to track content engagement and monitor your key performance indicators (KPIs).
- Guide Builder: While other Stonly features such as event tracking, user targeting, data streaming, and styling require coding, the guide builder uses an intuitively designed visual interface to let you add, edit, or delete steps.
Stonly’s cons
Unfortunately, there are quite a few drawbacks to using Stonly that stem from its lopsided features, no-code capabilities (or lack thereof), and view-based pricing model:
- Feature Set: Seeing as Stonly is a knowledge base builder first and onboarding/adoption solution second, it has quite a few features that are missing, too basic, or difficult to use. If user onboarding and product adoption are your main use cases, consider alternatives.
- Coding Requirements: Unlike most of its competitors, Stonly doesn’t advertise itself as a no-code onboarding/adoption platform. This means you’ll need coding knowledge to track events, target users, stream data, and style your content.
- Pay-as-You-Go Pricing: Stonly’s pricing charges additional fees based on the number of views that guides get. Customers who don’t exceed 4,000 guide views per month won’t be charged extra, but those who do will pay an additional $250 to $500 monthly depending on volume.
What do users say about Stonly?
Despite Stonly’s limitations, there are some aspects of the platform that garner praise from users, such as the ease of publishing:
The ease of creating and embedding a guide in my website. It’s super easy to move from written doc to live guide that is also accessible from my website, which is a live saver.
Of course, there are also plenty of criticisms stemming from Stonly being positioned as an interactive guide solution when it’s more of a knowledge base builder:
“It is very easy to get lost when creating guides and steps in Stonly. because everything is extremely granular and fragmented by design, it is possible to accidentally create the same information in multiple places (instead of ‘linking’ to relevant, already created steps. The real danger here is that should one version of the information be updated, and the other not, you end up with conflicting information in your system, which leads to poor customer experience. It would be nice if there was some way to get a birds-eye view of a knowledge base, including relevant links between steps and guides to minimize this issue.
Another missing element that would be highly desired is a functional “draft/approve” process. We currently use a folder outside of the main KB for new draft articles, however, should one of our lower-level team members be tasked with drafting an update to an existing guide, it is very hard to obtain a clear list of what guides have been edited, where and what has changed, and then as an admin, be able to review, approve and publish. Ideally I would desire some sort of list where the guide edit page is not opened, but rather a list of changes, when you click one you get a pop-up of before/after comparison, and then you can approve and publish without a page load.
The report issues function could do with a link in the resulting email to take you to the edit page for the doc. Currently we need to copy/paste the guide name from the email to the editor portal to find the guide. This has on more than one occasion led to the incorrect guide being edited (sometimes related to the topic in paragraph one of these notes)
When first loading the customer-facing site, the search field shows up, you can start typing, but then the search is cleared and you end up with part of your search term missing and have to start again (minor frustration, however, customers will experience this as a touchpoint of our product, not Stonly, wo it looks bad on our part)
For the tours, you have element selectors for ID and CSS selector. XPATH support would be highly desirable for some of the elements in our app.”
Stonly’s pricing
Stonly offers two paid plans. In addition to the base subscription cost, customers will also be charged additional fees if their guides get more than 4,000 views per month.
Here’s an overview of Stonly’s two subscription tiers:
- Small Business: Stonly’s Business tier is the entry-level paid plan that starts at $249/month but offers a 20% discount if you bill annually. It includes five team seats, unlimited guides, multi-language support, guide variables, and integrations. You’ll be billed extra if you exceed 4,000 guide views.
- Enterprise: The Enterprise version of Stonly uses quote-based pricing and includes all the features of the Business tier. It has additional features like surveys, automatic guide translation, advanced permissions, additional integrations, priority support, and single sign-on (SSO).
3 Reasons why you might need a Stonly alternative
There are a few clear scenarios where Stonly wouldn’t be the best solution to use. If you’re in any of these scenarios then considering an alternative platform would probably be best:
- Feature Mismatch: If user onboarding or product adoption are your main goals, then Stonly’s feature set may not align with that use case. Its ability to build in-app guides or survey customers is limited by the platform’s coding requirements and pricing structure.
- Budgetary Constraints: Companies who are operating on a tight budget should steer clear of Stonly due to the extra charges that occur if your guides get more than 4,000 views per month. If guide views reach 30,000 then you’ll be paying an additional $500 on your plan each month.
- Existing Knowledge Bases: Building knowledge bases is the primary use case for Stonly’s feature set. If you already have an existing knowledge base, then you’d be better off with an alternative like Userflow that integrates with Freshdesk, HubSpot, and Zendesk knowledge bases.
Userpilot – A better alternative for proactive customer service
In-app support can increase customer satisfaction and retention rates. Userpilot has native in-app support features like resource centers and native tooltips as well as third-party integrations with popular support tools like Intercom to help you cover all your bases.
Here’s an overview of Userpilot’s in-app support capabilities:
- Resource center: Userpilot in-app resource centers let you add flows, checklists, external links, tutorial videos, external knowledge bases, and chatbots. You’ll also be able to view resource center analytics so you can check its performance.
- Native tooltips: In-app support must be proactive — which is why you should insert tooltips that guide users before they even think to open the resource center. Userpilot lets you add native tooltips that appear whenever users hover over an element or click on the info badge.
- Contextual flows: Userpilot’s trigger settings let you create contextual flows that automatically appear when a user reaches a certain page or performs a specific action. This can be used to offer in-app guidance and support whenever users try out a feature for the first time.
- Intercom integration: While Intercom is famous for its live chat embeds, you can do more than that by integrating it with Userpilot. You’ll see which events a user has done within Userpilot and whether or not they’ve completed onboarding to personalize support accordingly.
Userpilot’s tooltips
Tooltips are the most straightforward way to offer contextual information to users without interrupting their workflows. Userpilot lets you create tooltips as part of your in-app flows, attach standalone tooltips to individual features, and leverage the power of AI to streamline the process.
Here are the ways you can use Userpilot to create tooltips:
- Tooltip flows: Tooltips are one of the UI elements you can utilize when creating in-app flows. You’ll be able to edit the size, placement, and behavior of your tooltip as needed. You could also toggle the option to continue or dismiss the flow if a tooltip’s element can’t be located.
- Native tooltips: Userpilot spotlights let you create native tooltips that expand when users click on an element or hover over a feature. Since these tooltips are attached to the features rather than specific pages, they’ll show up anywhere that the element is present.
- AI assistance: Userpilot’s AI-powered capabilities help you create better tooltips in less time. You could use the writing assistant to create, shorten, or extend the content of tooltips and leverage automated localization to translate your flow’s tooltips to any of the 32 languages available.
Userpilot’s modals
Modal UX design is a difficult task even for experienced designers, as you want to capture the user’s full attention without annoying them.
Userpilot’s modals can be made using templates, have advanced blocks added to them, and be translated into 32 different languages through AI. Here’s an overview of Userpilot’s modal design capabilities:
- Templates: There are six different modal templates to choose from but you can also create a new design from scratch. After making changes or building your own design, you can click on the bookmark icon to save this template for future use and add it to the template gallery.
- Blocks: Userpilot lets you add blocks that contain buttons, text, emojis, images, videos, input forms, or custom JavaScript functions to make your modals as engaging as possible. You’ll also be able to edit or delete any existing blocks from the template you’ve chosen.
- Localization: Userpilot’s AI-powered localization engine comes pre-loaded with 32 languages that you can use to automatically translate your modals. You also have the ability to add languages manually by uploading a CSV to expand the translation options for your modals.
Userpilot’s in-app resource center
In-app resource centers help users find answers to their questions without needing to leave your product. Userpilot’s resource centers leverage advanced segmentation to target specific customers or use cases, have detailed analytics, and can be built using the no-code editor.
Here’s a closer look at Userpilot’s resource center editor:
- No-code editor: Userpilot lets you build in-app resource centers without needing to write any code. You can add modules like internal/external links, tutorial videos, in-app flows, custom JavaScript functions, and checklists — or group multiple modules into a single section.
- Targeted modules: Userpilot’s module segmentation features let you show/hide specific resources depending on which segment a user is in. This helps you personalize your in-app resource center and only show the resources that are most relevant to a particular user.
- Analytics dashboard: Userpilot’s resource center analytics can show you key metrics like the total number of visitors, how many modules have been clicked, and changes in the click rate to help you gauge performance. You can also sort data by a specific time period if needed.
Userpilot’s interactive walkthroughs
Interactive walkthroughs are better than linear product tours because they let new users learn by doing instead of dumping a ton of information on them all at once. Userpilot’s no-code features let you build advanced interactive walkthroughs and create personalized flows for each segment.
Here are the Userpilot features you can use to create interactive walkthroughs:
- No-code builder: Installing the Userpilot Chrome extension makes it possible to build interactive walkthroughs with zero coding needed. You’ll be able to use every UI pattern — such as modals, slideouts, tooltips, and driven actions — regardless of which plan you’re on.
- Welcome surveys: Userpilot lets you create welcome screens that survey users on what their primary use cases, roles, needs, etc., are. You can create different walkthroughs depending on their responses to ensure that there’s a personalized experience for all.
- Audience settings: The audience settings on Userpilot flows help you trigger or hide walkthroughs from specific users and segments. This makes it possible to create interactive walkthroughs that target a particular segment or trigger a flow when certain conditions are met.
What are the pros and cons of Userpilot?
Userpilot pros
As a full-suite digital adoption platform, Userpilot has all the features you need to onboard users, track analytics, and gather feedback from customers without writing a single line of code. Here are a few pros of using Userpilot as your product growth solution:
- No-code builder: Userpilot’s Chrome extension lets you build flows, add UI elements, and tag features without writing a single line of code.
- UI patterns: There are plenty of UI patterns to choose from when using Userpilot, such as hotspots, tooltips, banners, slideouts, modals, and more!
- Startup-friendly: Userpilot’s entry-level plan gives you access to all available UI patterns so you can hit the ground running.
- Walkthroughs and flows: Build engaging interactive walkthroughs and personalized onboarding flows that target specific segments of your user base.
- Self-service support: Build an in-app resource center to help users solve problems, customize its appearance to align it with your brand, and insert various types of content (videos, flows, or chatbots) to keep your customers satisfied.
- A/B testing: Userpilot’s built-in A/B testing capabilities will help you split-test flows, iterate on the best-performing variants, and continually optimize based on user behavior.
- Feedback collection: Userpilot has built-in NPS surveys with its own unified analytics dashboard and response tagging to help you retarget users. There are other survey types to choose from and you can even create your own custom survey.
- Survey templates: There are 14 survey templates to choose from so you can gather feedback on specific features or run customer satisfaction benchmarking surveys like CSAT and CES.
- Advanced analytics: Userpilot lets you analyze product usage data, monitor engagement on all in-app flows, and use the data to create user segments that are based on behaviors instead of demographics.
- Event tracking: Userpilot’s no-code event tracking lets you tag UI interactions (hovers, clicks, or form fills) and group them into a custom event that reflects feature usage.
- Third-party integrations: Userpilot has built-in integrations with tools like Amplitude, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, Segment, Heap, HubSpot, Intercom, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager so you can share data between all the solutions in your tech stack.
Userpilot’s cons
Of course, no tool is perfect and there are a few cons to consider before choosing Userpilot as your user onboarding or product growth solution:
- Employee onboarding: Currently, Userpilot only supports in-app customer onboarding.
- Mobile apps: Userpilot doesn’t have any mobile compatibility which could make it difficult for developers with cross-platform applications to create a consistent user experience for both versions of their product.
- Freemium plan: There’s no freemium Userpilot plan so those bootstrapping their startup and need sub-$100 solutions should consider more affordable onboarding platforms like UserGuiding or Product Fruits.
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.
Userpilot’s 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, user feedback, and customization.
- Growth: The Growth plan starts at $499/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).
Conclusion
There you have it.
It should be easier now to make an informed decision whether Stonly is your go-to option for proactive customer service. Ultimately, the best choice will depend on your product and current needs.
If you’re looking for a better alternative to Stonly for proactive customer service, book a Userpilot demo today to experience firsthand how it can enhance your user experience and drive product growth!
Looking for a Better Alternative for Proactive Customer Service? Try Userpilot
