UserGuiding vs WalkMe – Which is Better for No-Code Growth?

Which tool, UserGuiding or WalkMe, is more suitable for achieving no-code growth? Or, is there a more appropriate in-app onboarding software available that would better suit your requirements?

With a multitude of options available on review platforms, selecting the most suitable tool can be difficult.

It’s important to take into account your priorities and the necessary features the tool should have to accomplish your objectives. And, the price should be within your budget.

In this article, we will examine precisely what features a perfect tool for no-code growth should offer and determine which option is most suitable for your business needs.

Let’s get started!

TL;DR

• No-code growth is essential if you want your SaaS to be product-led. In addition to reducing CAC, no-code growth reduces customer support and success costs and increases customer satisfaction.
• For no-code growth, you need a solid tool. In addition to being truly no-code, the tool you choose should offer basic UI patterns, support user segmentation, provide analytics features, and integrate with other tools.
• UserGuiding is a product adoption platform that offers interactive product walkthroughs, checklists, resource centers, and more – all at an affordable price point.
• However, customization options aren’t great and basic features are limited.
• WalkMe is another tool for no-code growth that is better suited for employee onboarding. WalkMe is extremely customizable and offers a range of features, like in-app quizzes and SmartTips.
• However, WalkMe is an expensive tool that isn’t truly no-code.
• A better option than UserGuiding and WalkMe is Userpilot. Userpilot is a powerful product adoption platform that offers a complete range of UI patterns, user segmentation, product analytics, and integrations with third-party tools.
• However, Userpilot is not suited for mobile applications.
• If you want to achieve no-code growth using Userpilot, book a demo now.

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What is no-code growth?

No-code growth is a method of achieving product-led growth (using your own product as a lever and revenue growth channel) without coding, using no-code tools.

It essentially allows people like product managers, product marketing managers, or marketers (who may not necessarily have a background in engineering) to create in-app onboarding experiences, optimize signup and onboarding flows, etc. in order to achieve higher conversion rates, user activation rates – and in the long run – drive retention.

No-code movement in general empowers non-programmers to create software elements using a graphical user interface, instead of writing code. According to no-code advocates, technology should enable and facilitate creation, not act as a barrier.

Why should you care about no-code growth?

Product-led growth may be a bit of a buzzword, but achieving no-code growth is particularly important for SaaS companies with low ACV, freemium models, and generally those in the SMB sector.

Product-led growth is a way of generating revenue from the product itself – by improving user engagement metrics, working on smarter pricing and product plans to unlock more revenue through expansion, promote word of mouth, etc.

It’s essentially free revenue from your existing user base, which is particularly important when your customers’ LTV is around $150 in total. By giving your product managers and marketers no-code tools, you can generate more no-code growth. Simple.

Let’s look in more detail at some reasons why no code growth is important, especially for companies such as the ones mentioned above:

• No code growth can massively reduce your CAC.
• Generating product-led growth without code also means you don’t need to hire programmers to implement these tactics – which further reduces your operational costs.
• Applying product-led growth practices also reduces your customer support and success costs – as your agents don’t need to reply to the same repetitive questions over and over again, and can replace them with reactive tooltips – themselves, without any help from the developers.
• This contributes to higher satisfaction from the users in general – as they tend to prefer to self-serve rather than talking to support.
• Finally, no code product-led growth means free expansion revenue for your company – and who wouldn’t welcome that, especially nowadays.

Why do you need tools for no-code growth?

One thing is clear – to drive no code growth, you will need to use proper tools to automate flows and drive engagement.

To achieve product-led growth without coding, you need a no-code tool that will allow you to:

• Capture feature usage (with tools like feature tagging) and record all the events happening in-app regardless of the interaction type (clicks, hovers, form fills).
• Capture qualitative data with e.g., session recordings
• Create interactive walkthroughs and onboarding flows
• Use your product to promote upsells

Tool’s must-have features for no-code growth?

Before deciding which no-code growth tool deserves your try, you should have a basic understanding of what features you should be looking for in “the one.”

Although the exact features you need will differ based on factors such as the size of your company, your business strategy, and your goals, here are the most crucial features you should look for:

• Truly “no code” – make sure the no code growth tool you pick really allows you to build and style robust and native-looking in-app experiences without coding. You will be surprised how many tools require the knowledge of CSS to publish decent-looking onboarding flows.
• Make sure the tool you choose has all the basic UI patterns available – e.g., checklists, modals, tooltips, banners, and hotspots. This will allow you to create all the product-led growth experiences you may need.
• Targeting the experiences to the right user segments is extremely important for your PLG plays to be successful. So make sure your no-code growth tool offers advanced segmentation capabilities so you can build customer segments based on product usage, in-app behavior, feedback, and user persona so you can craft hyper-personalized messages and trigger them at the right time.
• On that note – real-time, event-based triggering is an important feature of a product growth platform that only a few solutions on the market currently offer. Being able to respond to your users’ actions in real time can be critical to push them toward those precious conversion points.
• Finally, product analytics is another “must-have” that a good no-code growth platform should provide. You should be able to monitor your users’ behavior with it, the engagement with your PLG in-app experiences, and how they contribute towards improving your metrics.
• The right code-free PLG tool should also offer integrations with other tools so you can add them to your stack and get better insights on your data under one roof.

UserGuiding for no-code growth

UserGuiding is a lower-cost, entry-level product adoption tool offering a range of features to help companies onboard new customers and boost product adoption.

UserGuiding excels at building simple onboarding experiences for users. It includes a no-code builder, segmentation options, and easily added UI patterns like hotspots, tooltips, and modals.

Although it also has some other goodies like a resource center and analytics, the meat of this product is its onboarding flow builder. If all you’re looking for is a relatively easy way to build simple onboarding flows, this could be a great choice for you. However, people looking for more analytics, customization, or complex integrations should probably look elsewhere.

As a no-code onboarding tool, UserGuiding has numerous features that will help you create onboarding flows for your new customers and guide them throughout their journey.

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

• Create interactive product walkthroughs without disturbing your developers as it’s completely code-free.
• Build onboarding checklists and drive customers to the activation point by eliminating the guesswork on what the next step should be.
• Use a variety of UI patterns, like checklists, tooltips, modals, and slideouts to prompt the right in-app experience, to the right persona, at the right time in their user journey.
• Add emojis, gifs, images, or videos to customize your onboarding flows and have them match your brand.

Though UserGuiding is a great tool for startups that don’t have much money to invest in an onboarding tool, it has very strict limitations for the Basic plan.

You can only create a maximum of 20 guides, 2 onboarding checklists, and 1 resource center. If you want to create unlimited guides with unlimited UI patterns, you should go for the Professional plan that costs $299.

Pros of UserGuiding?

There are some advantages when it comes to choosing UserGuiding. Here are its pros:

• For small startups or independent businesses, the price is an attractive element to consider.
• A good variety of UI patterns to choose from when building flows and guides
• Unlike some of the more expensive options, you can choose to add a Resource Center (a bonus for self-service support).
• For a budget tool, UserGuiding still offers integrations with other applications, such as Mixpanel, HubSpot, Woopra, Slack, Webhook, etc.

Cons of UserGuiding?

Though UserGuiding is a solid product many improvements are still needed. The cons of using UserGuiding include:

• There are many bugs and performance issues when using the tool. The UI is also fairly tricky to navigate.
• It has limited functionality, particularly on the basic plan. There you only have a small range of features available – all with the UserGuiding watermark/branding.
• Technical knowledge is required to get the maximum out of this product.
• Customization and design options for UI patterns aren’t the greatest.

What users say about UserGuiding?

If you check the product review sites, most people like using UserGuiding.

Here are some reviews from real users:

Creating guides/checklists are easy to implement. It does not take a lot of time to make adjustments when you need to make changes.
You can go live with a simple guide or checklist within minutes. I was able to go live within a few days of getting started. – Administrator in Computer Software

However, some people think there’s too much friction due to bugs. Let’s have a look at some negative reviews to see why users complain about:

It is a bit buggy, sometimes it lags or freezes.

And, some people think that there is still room for improvement:

The analytics felt a little elementary. Other than the Mixpanel integration, it wasn’t possible to analyze user data directly on the UserGuiding dashboard. There was an API we could use that required some set up, but this was something I expected to be baked into the product for sure.- Administrator in Computer Software

Is UserGuiding the right fit for your business?

UserGuiding is a great fit for small SaaS businesses but it might be not the right fit if you want to:

1. Create fully interactive product tours.
2. Build segments completely code-free as segmentation features aren’t very intuitive and may require additional help from a developer.
3. Get in-depth analytics. Though UserGuiding does have analytics functionality, it’s not complex and doesn’t give you much data.

UserGuiding pricing

UserGuiding’s pricing model is far simpler than others on our list. There are three tiers, each one charging a set amount for access to certain tools.

Here are its packages:

• Basic will give you access to only the most essential onboarding tools: Starting at $99/mo or $69/mo (if you buy the yearly contract), this budget option has a few limitations to consider (i.e., just 1 Team Member, a limit of 20 guides, and 2 checklists, UserGuiding branding on all UI patterns).
• Professional adds unlimited guides, hotspots, and checklists. Starting at $399/mo or $299 /mo if billed yearly.
• Corporate gives you access to everything plus personalized coaching. Starting at $699/mo or $499/ mo for a yearly plan.

There is a better tool for your SaaS than UserGuiding!

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WalkMe for no-code growth

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 user onboarding solution consists of 3 main guiding elements: WalkThrus, SmartTips, and ShoutOuts. These allow you to provide interactive in-app guidance to your customers.

Let’s have a quick look at each of these functionalities and how they help with user onboarding:

• WalkMe’s WalkThrus are its primary engine for creating user onboarding experiences. They overlay the target software or web app and provide on-screen guidance to help users complete tasks. In most cases, this means step-by-step instructions and tips that lead users from a starting point to the completion of a given task.
• SmartTips are also a form of on-screen guidance, but they’re less about the process and more about resolving points of friction. ​​For example, with a SmartTip you can trigger a small note to pop up suggesting relevant links or giving more information about how to complete a form.
• ShoutOuts operate like SmartTips, but are geared toward in-product messaging. You can trigger them to pop up and give more information about relevant features, new updates, or product promotions.
• WalkMe also offers a couple of other more niche features for onboarding. For example Launchers (buttons that launch other WalkMe features or experiences), surveys, and an ActionBot (automated robo-chat to help users resolve issues and answer questions).

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 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 no-code growth?

UserGuiding and WalkMe are good tools for no-code growth. 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 no-code growth

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.

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, microsurveys, 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.

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?

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 and Zapier are 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.

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

There is a better tool for your SaaS than Userguiding!

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