How to Choose the Right User Engagement Platform? Practical Guide

If I had to give one piece of advice to every product lead looking for a user engagement platform, it would be this:

There’s no “best tool” in the market. The best vendor for you isn’t the one with the most powerful features, but the one that can handle your specific use case.

That’s why in this article, I’m going to share my 4-step process for evaluating software that’s not just more “innovative” or “feature-packed”, but also the one that your team actually uses to get a job done. And if you’d like to learn more real-life examples and get recommendations of actual tools, join my session during Product Drive on October 7th.

Why choosing the right product engagement platform matters: Avoiding a costly mistake

I often see product teams falling into one of the two common pitfalls: either they buy too many tools or struggle with limited stacks.

Here’s why it’s essential to choose a product engagement platform that works just right for you and your team:

• Custom development is expensive: Even if your team manages to build a working internal solution, chances are it will be too rigid. SaaS products evolve often. Your product team may not be able to use your in-house software without engineering help, and it will be hard to scale as your company grows. On top of that, you can expect high maintenance costs and a lot of wasted engineering time.
• Stacking too many tools causes data silos: The opposite problem is to plug so many solutions for different use cases that it causes tool fatigue, context switching, and adoption friction. Not only that, teams are more likely to be more isolated when they use different platforms, leading to siloed data, inconsistent customer experience, and an overpriced tech stack.
• No internal adoption equals no ROI: The biggest waste is to pay for a product that your team won’t use. Even if the product offers advanced features, this could happen because it’s too complex, too rigid, or simply doesn’t align with your needs.

Step-by-step framework for choosing the right user engagement platform

To avoid any of the aforementioned problems, it’s essential to choose a product that aligns with your unique use cases.

So here’s my 4-step framework for choosing user engagement software, which involves:

1. Aligning with product goals: Determining the outcome you’re looking to get from a product.
2. Defining specific use cases: Knowing the jobs-to-be-done (JTBDs) and particular use cases for achieving your outcome.
3. Mapping platform strengths based on use cases: Specifying the features that align with your needs.
4. Evaluating based on the main criteria: Evaluate different products based on the feature choice, usage flexibility, pricing, and usability.

Step 1: Align with product goals

The first step is to determine what kind of tool you need based on your product goals.

One common mistake I see product teams make is to choose the user engagement platform based on the list of offered features. But this is a flawed approach. There’s no use in evaluating the variety of features if your team won’t use half of them in the first place.

Instead, think about the outcomes you need to get from the product. Ask yourself:

• What do I need to do to achieve my goal?
• What’s the biggest obstacle?
• Which outcomes are essential?

For a product engagement platform, for instance, these are some examples of outcomes you commonly want:

Step 2: Define specific use cases

Once you understand your product goals and the outcomes you need, you must transform them into concrete use cases.

Be specific about how you’re going to achieve your goal. For instance, if your goal is to “improve onboarding”, you can turn it into “I need to add walkthroughs, checklists, and an in-app resource center to improve activation rates.”

Here’s what I recommend for defining your use cases for a product engagement platform:

• Know your user segments: Think about how a tool affects different types of users. If you’re looking for an onboarding solution, think about the needs of a new user vs. a power user. In the same way, a technical user might require different engagement tactics than a non-technical person, and so on.
• Prioritize use cases: List your use cases and label them as must-haves or nice-to-haves. This will help you prioritize in-app engagement features if your goal is, for example, to increase activation rates.
• Test against specific examples: Figure out what specific scenarios will happen, and evaluate if a product can handle them. For example, if you need to translate your product to an RTL language, does the product support those languages? Will it require additional setup or an upgrade?

Step 3: Map platform strength to these use cases based on specific criteria.

After listing your use cases and determining their priorities, it’s time to start defining your buying criteria.

The first and most complex criterion will be the features. The goal here is to define what exact features you’ll need to fulfill your use cases. Pay close attention: although many tools seem to offer the same features, there are always slight differences that can make or break them for you.

For instance, some product platforms offer in-app engagement, but many of them will support different UI patterns. For this, you’d need to ask yourself what specific features (such as checklists, walkthroughs, spotlights, etc.) you need to achieve your product goals, and so on.

In the case of product engagement platforms, there are three primary use cases you must deeply evaluate:

Use case 1: Improving activation, product adoption, and launching new features

For effective onboarding and adoption strategies, you’ll need flexibility when it comes to communicating with users. So besides triggering tooltips, you’ll also want to announce new features in-app, communicate with users via email, send push notifications, etc.

These are the attributes I recommend focusing on:

• UI pattern variety: A product engagement platform must support all of your communication strategies. Think of banners for feature announcements, interactive walkthroughs for onboarding, checklists for feature adoption, etc.

• Customizability: Besides supporting UI patterns for your messaging strategy, these patterns should be on-brand with your product’s UI and feel native to your app.
• Mobile support: If your product has a mobile version, make sure the product supports mobile communications via carousels, push notifications, or slideouts.

• Team usability: If many of your team members are not technical, it’s important that the tool allows them to build product experiences easily and without coding.
• Multi-step flows and behavioral triggers: A good engagement platform should allow you to trigger complex onboarding flows based on the user’s actions. For this, check for branching logic, advanced targeting conditions, and segmentation.

• Targeting and segmentation: To personalize the onboarding experience, an engagement tool must offer segmentation. Analyze if the product can segment users based on roles, lifecycle stage, company size, language, Net Promoter Score (NPS), and so on.

• Experimentation and analysis: Check if a tool lets you A/B test your onboarding flows to optimize their performance. Even better if it integrates with analytics to figure out how different messages resonate with different segments.

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Use case 2: Understanding your users with analytics

Many tools offer product analytics, but can they help you understand how your users interact with your product? Which features are ignored and by whom? Can you take immediate action on its insights?

There are four aspects that you should pay attention to. The first one is the capacity to collect product data, for which I recommend:

• Data autocapture: If the platform can track user interactions from day one and automate the data-capturing process, you will be more self-sufficient in marking events and setting up triggers, without relying on the engineering team.

• Event-based analytics: You should be able to visualize and analyze the actions users take inside your product.
• Retroactive tracking: It allows you to track historical data on demand after installing the script.

The second aspect is the types of analytics reports you can use to get actionable insights. For which I recommend:

• Funnel visualizations: So you can see how users progress through different funnels and identify steps with high drop-offs.

• Trend reporting: You’ll need to spot trends in feature usage among different segments and adapt your strategy to them.

• Path analysis: It lets you see how users navigate your product from a starting point, allowing you to spot paths with high chances of success.

• Cohort analysis: It lets you separate users into different groups (e.g., signup date) and compare their retention rates over time.

Third, the flexibility to unify different types of data and make meaningful correlations. The most important features for this include:

• Multi-dimensional segmentation: Deeper segmentation options allow you to implement more sophisticated personalization strategies. Look for segments based on in-app events, survey responses, page visits, content engagement, or company data.

• Correlation between quantitative and qualitative data: A good product analytics platform should let you correlate users’ in-app behavior with their survey responses. You should also be able to see their sessions to understand the why behind users’ actions.

• Cross-platform tracking capabilities: If your product works on multiple platforms, the analytics tool should connect all data in one place.

Finally, you must evaluate if the product can provide insights that are actionable and relevant to your business. Here’s what’s best for it:

• Customizable dashboards: You should be able to build dashboards with the metrics that matter the most for your goals. It should also be easy to share with stakeholders.

• Data exports and API access: The tool should let you export data to your CRM or BI platforms without workarounds.
• Ability to act on insights: Analytics is useless if it doesn’t lead to meaningful actions. That’s why you should also look for a product that lets you implement data-driven strategies right away without bouncing between tools and losing momentum.

Use case 3: Collecting user feedback and UX research

Collecting customer feedback provides qualitative data that explains the “why” behind the quantitative data.

So if one of your core needs is to listen to customer feedback, then here are the features I recommend looking for:

• Survey types and supported platforms: Check for the different types of surveys based on your needs, be it for NPS, CSAT, CES, or PMF. Additionally, you should be able to send surveys inside your product, via email, or through mobile apps.

• Conditional branching and targeting: To optimize response rates, you must send the right surveys to the right users, and at the right time. For this, look for branching logic (so you can trigger a follow-up based on the user’s answer) and advanced targeting conditions based on behavior.

• Session replay integration for contextual understanding: Session replays: Let you see what happens behind a survey. For this, you’d need to ask yourself what specific features (such as checklists, walkthroughs, spotlights, etc.) you need to achieve your product goals, and so on.
• Survey analysis features: Any tool you use to collect feedback must have built-in analytics for sentiment analysis. Look for capacity to track trends, calculate NPS, filter responses by segment, and response tagging (to investigate common themes across users). It should also integrate with support and CRM platforms.

Step 4: Evaluate platforms based on the 6 main criteria

The last step is to actually evaluate the available tools based on the criteria we discussed. Consider usability, flexibility, pricing, and support options. Here’s how you should prioritize:

1. In-app UX variety and platform support: Check if the platform supports the UI patterns you need for your messaging strategy. This includes checklists, modals, tooltips, or hotspots, as well as the channels you use (i.e., email, mobile, web apps).
2. Ease of setup and use: Think about how quickly you can install the SDK and train people to use the tool. If your team is not technical, code-free software with user-friendly UIs will make it easier to adopt. Also consider how much engineering time you might need for tasks like event tracking, installation, or setting up analytics.
3. Flexibility: The tool should adapt to your needs, not the other way around. Let’s say you only need NPS surveys today. What if you require CSAT surveys in the future? If a tool is too rigid, then look for alternatives with more customization options.
4. Analytics depth: Evaluate if the tool can attribute ROI or goal progress to your engagement strategies. Also, can you quickly adapt your engagement approach based on data? Can you act on data without switching platforms or facing integration issues?
5. Pricing transparency: Besides looking for a price that fits your budget, dig deeper. Is it going to get increasingly expensive during renewal? Are there hidden usage-based costs or essential features locked behind add-ons? During demos, I recommend asking how the pricing will look after a year.
6. Scalability and support: Check how much customer support will be available on your plan. For instance, see if you’re getting access to a dedicated CSM, or if they’ll only help you with implementation. Also, confirm if they offer migration support, integration help, or other professional services.

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What to watch out for when choosing the right engagement platform? 4 Red flags

As a final note, keep an eye on these four red flags when choosing an engagement platform for your team:

• High cost of switching: If the tool requires installing SDKs that you can’t remove without breaking something, then it will be harder to switch later on. This can trap you into staying with a company that demands more and more expensive renewals.
• Paywalled features: Watch out if the product locks essential features like localization behind an expensive add-on or a high-tier plan. They might also push you into paying for features you don’t need.
• Not fully no-code: Some products are marketed as “no-code”, yet still require engineering help for instrumenting events, installing the tool, or implementing experiences. Ensure you pick a platform your teams are actually able to use to the full advantage without getting lost in technicalities.
• Limited features or integrations: To avoid data silos, make sure to choose a product that’s consolidated or integrates with your tech stack. Otherwise, it will be more likely to break or be left unused by your team.

Join Product Drive 2025 for more insights on user engagement and product growth

Again, there’s no one-size-fits-all solution for every team. You must do the work to evaluate which user engagement solution fits your specific needs.

Thankfully, following this framework and using the spreadsheet will help you make an educated decision.

If you want more tips on how to evaluate user engagement platforms, sign up for my Product Drive talks. I’ll provide more real-life insights and also talk about how to unify your lifecycle marketing strategy in one single journey.

P.S.: Registration is free, but there are only 500 seats. Grab yours right now!