UserGuiding vs Walkme: Which is Best for Your SaaS?

UserGuiding vs Walkme: Which is Best for Your SaaS?

Wondering whether UserGuiding or Walkme is the best option for your SaaS company?

This article is going to dive into the UserGuiding vs Walkme debate and try to answer a key question: Which is the better tool for user onboarding, as well as other use cases?

In the post below, we’ve covered all the common use cases and done an in-depth analysis of the key features of UserGuiding and Walkme – as well as compared it to an alternative solution that may be better in some situations.

Let’s get into it!

TL;DR

  • Let’s explore how UserGuiding, and Walkme compare when it comes to user onboarding and other common use cases.
      • UserGuiding is a no-code product adoption tool that lets users create in-app walkthroughs, guides, and checklists. The solution makes it possible for teams to onboard, engage, and retain users without needing coding skills to create these in-app experiences.
      • WalkMe is a digital adoption platform that can help you create frictionless experiences for your customers. The platform is built keeping the compliance, scalability, and security needs of enterprises in mind.
  • If you’re looking for a better option for user onboarding, Userpilot exceeds both functionality and value for money compared to other tools on the list.
  • Userpilot is a product growth platform that drives user activation, feature adoption, and expansion revenue. It also helps product teams collect user feedback, streamline onboarding, and gather actionable insights from analytics. Get a Userpilot demo for user onboarding and drive your product growth code-free.

Userpilot – A Better Alternative for Your SaaS

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What is UserGuiding?

UserGuiding is a no-code product adoption tool that lets users create in-app walkthroughs, guides, and checklists. The solution makes it possible for teams to onboard, engage, and retain users without needing coding skills to create these in-app experiences.

All in all, UserGuiding is a pretty flexible solution that can improve the onboarding process, boost user engagement, and increase customer retention.

What is Walkme?

WalkMe is a digital adoption platform that can help you create frictionless experiences for your customers. The platform is built keeping the compliance, scalability, and security needs of enterprises in mind.

Using it, you can onboard customers and keep them engaged throughout their lifetime with your business. With powerful features like workflow automation and analytics, you can use it to grow your enterprise.

UserGuiding vs Walkme for user onboarding

In this section of the article, we’re really going to compare UserGuiding vs Walkme in terms of user onboarding. That way, we’ll be able to figure out which tool – UserGuiding or Walkme – is the best option depending on your use case.

UserGuiding for user onboarding

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.
  • Create interactive elements, such as product tours, tooltips, and pop-ups, to help keep users engaged and increase the likelihood that they’ll complete the onboarding process.
  • Create a resource center to add different educational resources for your users.

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 and hotspots, 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 which can cost from $299 to $399.

The one drawback when using UserGuiding for onboarding is the fact that its analytics dashboard only encompasses the elements that you’ve created within the platform. In contrast, Userpilot is able to track all elements, events, and behaviors throughout the entire user journey.

Walkme for user onboarding

Any digital adoption platform that seeks to gain the attention of businesses needs to have a solid lineup of features for user onboarding. It’s crucial because this is the stage where you can make a first impression on your users. Hand-holding them in this phase can help them get up to speed soon.

WalkMe has a bunch of features for user onboarding:

  • You can create an onboarding checklist through the Onboarding Tasks feature on WalkMe. It’s possible to set different goals inside your checklist so users can keep checking them as they complete them. The Onboarding Tasks can include Smart Walk-Thrus, videos, and articles to guide your new users.
  • You can also use WalkMe’s SmartTips feature to guide your users through the app’s UI. These serve as on-screen guidance and help reduce the learning curve for new users. Clicking on a SmartTip opens a pop-up that gives more information on the element.
  • Likewise, you can use ShoutOuts to draw your new user’s attention to specific announcements. They’re essentially banners that you can use to show users what they need to know when getting started. You can also get them to take action through ShoutOuts.
  • You could also use Launchers in your onboarding flow for some self-guidance. When users click on Launchers, a new action like a Smart Walk-Thru will get triggered. Users can click on each Launcher you create to learn more about your platform.

UserGuiding vs Walkme for product adoption

In this section of the article, we’re really going to compare UserGuiding vs Walkme in terms of product adoption. That way, we’ll be able to figure out which tool – UserGuiding or Walkme – is the best option depending on your use case.

UserGuiding for product adoption

UserGuiding has multiple features that can promote product adoption early in the user journey (especially during the onboarding process).

Some features that you could deploy when using UserGuiding for your product adoption efforts include:

  • Onboarding checklists: While the onboarding checklist is generally used for profile setups and introducing users to specific features, it can also be used to help users learn more about the product and various ways to begin getting value out of it.
  • Surveys: Because qualitative feedback is a necessary part of guiding your digital adoption strategy, creating a survey with UserGuiding could help you gather the insights that you need to streamline the adoption journey for your users (but we’d suggest going for the Professional tier so you can have three different surveys active simultaneously).
  • Guides: Guides created with UserGuiding can have either a single step or multiple steps which gives you the flexibility to test different combinations and see which setup reduces friction or increases digital adoption amongst users.
  • Hotspots: Much like onboarding checklists, hotspots are primarily utilized to highlight a specific feature. However, you can use the UserGuiding dashboard to see the total number of hotspot clicks to gauge product adoption on a broader level (unfortunately it only displays interactions that occurred in the past seven days).
  • Resource center: Customer education is a crucial part of driving product adoption so using UserGuiding to create a resource center is a handy way to teach new users how the product works.

Walkme for product adoption

Any digital adoption platform that seeks to gain the attention of businesses needs to have a solid lineup of features for user onboarding. It’s crucial because this is the stage where you can make a first impression on your users. Hand-holding them in this phase can help them get up to speed soon.

WalkMe has a bunch of features for user onboarding:

  • You can create an onboarding checklist through the Onboarding Tasks feature on WalkMe. It’s possible to set different goals inside your checklist so users can keep checking them as they complete them. The Onboarding Tasks can include Smart Walk-Thrus, videos, and articles to guide your new users.
  • You can also use WalkMe’s SmartTips feature to guide your users through the app’s UI. These serve as on-screen guidance and help reduce the learning curve for new users. Clicking on a SmartTip opens a pop-up that gives more information on the element.
  • Likewise, you can use ShoutOuts to draw your new user’s attention to specific announcements. They’re essentially banners that you can use to show users what they need to know when getting started. You can also get them to take action through ShoutOuts.
  • You could also use Launchers in your onboarding flow for some self-guidance. When users click on Launchers, a new action like a Smart Walk-Thru will get triggered. Users can click on each Launcher you create to learn more about your platform.

UserGuiding vs Walkme for customer experience

In this section of the article, we’re really going to compare UserGuiding vs Walkme in terms of customer experience. That way, we’ll be able to figure out which tool – UserGuiding or Walkme – is the best option depending on your use case.

UserGuiding for customer experience

Because UserGuiding was built with the goal of creating no-code onboarding flows, its features are better suited to the earlier stages of the user journey rather than the full course of the customer experience.

That said, there are still certain UserGuiding features that can be adapted for customer experience optimization:

  • Surveys: Customer experience optimization (CXO) is heavily reliant on gathering feedback that can help improve and streamline user journeys. Collecting qualitative feedback with UserGuiding surveys can be the first step towards improving the customer experience.

  • MAUs: While the MAU metric isn’t as granular as customer satisfaction metrics like NPS or CSAT scores, looking at trends in how many MAUs your product is getting from month to month can help you determine if the customer experience is getting better or worse.
  • Activity feed: UserGuiding’s activity feed can show you which areas of the tool users have been engaging with the most. You can then use these insights to identify areas where the customer experience could be improved.

Walkme for customer experience

The clear path to better user retention and low churn is a frictionless customer experience. When users can use your product well to achieve their goals, they’ll likely stick to it. This can boost product adoption and revenue as well.

Here’s what WalkMe has to offer for elevating your customer experience:

  • The Onboarding Tasks feature helps you create a smooth onboarding journey for your customers. It enables them to understand how to use it well through a self-service checklist.
  • Similarly, you can use SmartTips, ShoutOuts, and Smart Walk-Thrus to help your users discover new features and make it easy for them to start using them. You can also provide targeted guidance to them by creating segments in your audience.
  • The ActionBot can be used to direct users to relevant knowledge base articles to help them overcome any roadblocks.
  • WalkMe gives you detailed analytics on your users and how they engage with your in-app engagements. You can use them to improve your product and features further to boost customer experience.

UserGuiding vs Walkme for user feedback

In this section of the article, we’re really going to compare UserGuiding vs Walkme in terms of user feedback. That way, we’ll be able to figure out which tool – UserGuiding or Walkme – is the best option depending on your use case.

UserGuiding for user feedback

With surveys being UserGuiding’s only feedback collection, the platform is better suited to user feedback than product feedback. After all, product feedback should be comprehensive and gathered from multiple sources such as customer interviews or support ticket analysis.

Here are some UserGuiding features you could consider using to collect product feedback:

  • Surveys: Due to the limitations of the Basic plan, UserGuiding surveys could be more useful when collecting user feedback. Product feedback surveys usually focus on a specific area or feature which means you’ll need more than one active survey running concurrently.
  • Net Promoter Score (NPS): While satisfaction metrics like Net Promoter Scores fall into the quantitative data category, looking at NPS trends both before and after a major product update can help you determine how users are responding to the latest set of changes.
  • Checklists: Checklists are traditionally used to facilitate onboarding and feature discovery but you could conceivably add a step that prompts users to leave product feedback after completing their product tour.

Note: Because UserGuiding only lets users on the Basic plan have one survey active at a time, there’s a high likelihood that the volume of product feedback you’re able to collect will be bottlenecked at some point.

Walkme for user feedback

Like user feedback, it’s important to collect feedback on your product as well. This feedback can play an instrumental role in helping you make informed decisions about your product. Here’s how WalkMe makes product feedback collection possible:

  • You can use feedback and NPS surveys to collect product feedback from users. Feedback surveys, in particular, are helpful as they can give you insight into what needs changing.
  • WalkMe offers different question types for surveys and you can also set them to play automatically at various frequencies.
  • You can track the survey analytics through WalkMe Insights to understand what needs to change to boost product experience.

UserGuiding vs Walkme: Which one you should choose?

To further simplify this selection process, let’s break down the strengths and limitations of each tool. Understanding the distinct advantages and potential drawbacks of UserGuiding and Walkme will provide you with a detailed roadmap for making a well-informed decision!

Pros and cons of UserGuiding

Pros of UserGuiding

UserGuiding has quite a few benefits as a product adoption solution, particularly for early-stage SaaS companies that need an easy-to-use starter tool for their small (but growing) team of product developers or marketers. Let’s look at some of the pros that UserGuiding has to offer:

  • Chrome extension – UserGuiding utilizes a no-code Chrome extension.
  • Survey template gallery – UserGuiding lets you choose from six survey templates or create your own survey from scratch.
  • Analytics dashboard – users can see their monthly active users (MAUs) for the month, monitor the number of views their guides are getting, and see how many interactions checklists or resource centers have had in the past week from the UserGuiding homepage.
  • Custom themes – granular theme customization and color selection.
  • Easy onboarding – onboarding checklist walks you through key steps, such as how to get the UserGuiding Chrome extension and create your first guide.

Cons of UserGuiding

While there are quite a few benefits to using UserGuiding, there are three significant drawbacks to note:

  • Dashboard customization – you can’t edit your home dashboard or choose which analytics you want to see.
  • Pricing jumps – upgrading from Basic (2,500 MAUs) to Professional (20,000 MAUs) increases your subscription cost by more than 4x.
  • Manual localization – UserGuiding doesn’t have AI-powered localization, so you’ll need to manually download, translate, and upload every CSV when attempting to localize content for your product.
  • HubSpot integration – the UserGuiding-HubSpot integration is only a one-way integration which limits its functionality and prevents you from setting up two-way data synchronization between both platforms.
  • Limited analytics – the analytics dashboard only shows you data for onboarding materials created with UserGuiding and even those analytics are quite limited as surveys only show you total responses rather than letting you select a date range.
  • Survey limit – you can only have one active survey on the Basic plan which is disappointing considering UserGuiding costs over $1,000 annually (whereas Userpilot lets you create unlimited surveys and collect up to 250 responses per month on the cheapest plan).

Pros and cons of Walkme

Pros of Walkme

WalkMe is among the most popular platforms out there for digital adoption, especially for enterprises. It’s got a range of useful features that businesses can leverage to create in-app engagements, track user behavior, and retain customers, among other things. Here are the pros of using WalkMe:

  • Multiple in-app engagements: Offers a bunch of in-app engagement options, including product tours, tooltips, help widgets, onboarding checklists, and more. Using them well can help you engage your customers.
  • User-friendliness: The platform is quite user-friendly in terms of creating in-app engagements. And while it does have a moderate learning curve as a whole, it becomes easy to use once you get the hang of it.
  • Lots of analytics: WalkMe provides in-depth analytics on a range of things like in-app engagements and forms to help you understand the impact that they’re creating. This helps you optimize your strategies for better results.
  • Workflow automation: Workflow automation features like onboarding automation stand out as they enable you to automate a series of steps and processes like clicking buttons to make your customer experience better.
  • Community: WalkMe offers a strong community of experts and partners who can help you whenever you get stuck.

Cons of Walkme

While WalkMe has a bunch of good things to offer that make it one of the leading digital adoption platforms out there, it does have a few drawbacks that prevent you from unlocking its full potential. Let’s take a look at some of the cons of this platform:

  • Coding knowledge: Even though WalkMe is no-code/low-code for most of its functions, you’ll need to know HTML or CSS to make the most out of the platform.
  • Challenging on complex sites: The process of implementing WalkMe on your website depends on the complexity of your site. You might find it challenging to ensure that your content behaves the way it should if you’ve got a complicated website.
  • Focused on employees: WalkMe’s primary use case lies in digital adoption for employees, even though it has a specific plan for customers. However, this makes it slightly weaker compared to other platforms that have been dedicatedly built for customers.

Userpilot – A better alternative for your SaaS

Userpilot is a product growth platform that drives user activation, feature adoption, and expansion revenue. It also helps product teams collect user feedback, streamline onboarding, and gather actionable insights from analytics.

With Userpilot, you’ll be able to track both product usage and user behavior to get a holistic view of how customers use your product — which will guide future development, improve the user experience, and inform your growth efforts.

Pros of Userpilot

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.

Cons of Userpilot

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.

Conclusion

Hopefully, this post helped you decide whether UserGuiding or Walkme is more appropriate for your company. As you can see – both have many upsides and downsides.

Undeniably, Userpilot provides a better value for money and is a better choice for a mid-market SaaS, especially when it comes to user onboarding and user feedback.

If you’re interested in finding more, book a demo with our team here!

Try Userpilot – The best user onboarding solution for SaaS

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