UserGuiding vs Whatfix: Which is Better for No-Code Growth?

UserGuiding vs Whatfix – quick summary

• Let’s explore how UserGuiding and Whatfix compare when it comes to enabling SaaS no-code growth.
  • 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.
  • Whatfix is a digital adoption platform that helps enterprise organizations with onboarding, training, and supporting their employees or customers. It accomplishes this through in-app guidance and messaging to provide on-demand support whenever it’s needed. The solution also lets you track analytics on all in-app guidance, collect user feedback, build out self-serve content, and automate certain flows. Whatfix even has integrations with Salesforce, Amplitude, Google Analytics, Slack, Confluence, and other platforms to maximize collaboration.
• If you’re looking for a better option for no-code growth, 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 and drive your product growth code-free.

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 e.g. 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.

Must have features for no-code growth tools

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. 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 to 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 pushing 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 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.

No-code product tours in UserGuiding

UserGuiding does have the features necessary for creating basic product tours, but the no-code implementation will depend on how complex you need these onboarding flows to be. Full integration of the UserGuiding solution does require some updates to your coding.

Here are a few UserGuiding features you can use in your product tours:

• Guides: The UserGuiding Chrome extension lets you add multi-step guides to any page of your website with elements like modals, tooltips, and input fields, then preview the flow before publishing.
• Checklists: Onboarding checklists give users a sense of progress as they move through your product tours (but UserGuiding only lets you have two active at a time unless you upgrade to the Professional plan or higher).
• Hotspots: A more subtle way to highlight specific features, buttons, or elements during product tours would be to use UserGuiding’s hotspot UI pattern.

Product growth analysis in UserGuiding

Product growth is the end goal of all onboarding and adoption efforts. UserGuiding may not have the most advanced analytics capabilities (especially in comparison to competitors like Userpilot or Pendo), but it does have data filters and content engagement metrics that you can monitor.

Here are the UserGuiding features and settings you can use to extract insights from growth analytics:

• Logic Filters: UserGuiding’s and/or filters help you narrow down results (such as data or users) based on which conditions are met. This makes it possible to conduct growth analysis for different segments, cohorts, or users with similar attributes in order to spot patterns.
• Content Engagement: While UserGuiding lacks more detailed growth metrics, it does track engagement for all materials created within the platform. This lets you monitor the view count and completion rate for guides, checklists, or other UserGuiding material currently in use.
• Analytics Limitations: One of the biggest limitations of UserGuiding’s analytics capabilities is the fact that you can’t view data in real-time. All analytics are only calculated and refreshed once every 10 minutes, so you’ll need to wait for dashboards to be updated before checking metrics.

Whatfix for no-code growth

Whatfix is a digital adoption platform that helps enterprise organizations with onboarding, training, and supporting their employees or customers. It accomplishes this through in-app guidance and messaging to provide on-demand support whenever it’s needed.

The solution also lets you track analytics on all in-app guidance, collect user feedback, build out self-serve content, and automate certain flows. Whatfix even has integrations with Salesforce, Amplitude, Google Analytics, Slack, Confluence, and other platforms to maximize collaboration.

No-code product tours in Whatfix

Whatfix’s digital adoption platform may be separate from its product analytics solution. Still, it does offer a well-rounded feature set for building no-code product tours, task lists, and smart tips that help new customers/employees learn about a product.

• Product Tour: Whatfix lets you use custom pop-ups that greet customers, brief employees, and lead into an interactive tour of the product’s core functionality. You’ll also be able to embed multimedia — such as microvideos — that help with onboarding and adoption.
• Task List: Whatfix’s task lists (essentially onboarding checklists) give each customer or employee a tailored list of in-app flows that they should complete before proceeding. You can even tweak the settings to keep the task list visible until all tasks have been completed.
• Smart Tips: The smart tips feature shows contextual guidance within the UI of a particular product. For instance, this could be a tooltip that expands when customers use a specific feature. These smart tips can also be used to validate text field inputs from users.

Product growth analysis in Whatfix

Growth analytics are an integral way of measuring the success of a product and identifying opportunities to improve it. Whatfix’s separate product analytics solution handles data collection and analytics reporting in three distinct stages:

1. Track: The “Track” phase focuses on collecting relevant data and organizing them into categories. This offers a holistic view of how users interact with the product without needing to code a custom data collection system.
2. Analyze: The “Analyze” phase of Whatfix analytics highlights any patterns, trends, or actionable insights that were extracted from data collected in the previous step. This can help you find the specific actions that would improve certain areas of your product.
3. Act: The final step is to act on the data that Whatfix collected and analyzed. This could consist of implementing in-app guidance from Whatfix’s digital adoption solution, making feature or UI updates, and other transformative changes that improve the user experience.

UserGuiding vs Whatfix: Which one fits your budget?

Understanding the cost implications is paramount when selecting the right solution for no-code growth needs, so here’s a detailed pricing comparison of UserGuiding and Whatfix.

Pricing of UserGuiding

UserGuiding has three plans to choose from, targeted towards a range of business sizes from startup to enterprise.

Here are UserGuiding’s specific pricing details:

• Basic: Costing $129/month, the Basic plan is targeted towards startups and SMBs. The Basic plan is quite limited as it caps your account at one active survey, two active checklists, and no more than 2,500 MAUs. Features include:
  • Access to user identification features.
  • Integrations with Google Analytics, HubSpot, Intercom, and more.
  • Email and chat support.
  • Customizable theme (only one).
• Professional: The Professional plan costs almost 4x as much as the Basic tier at $499/month. That said, it significantly increases capacity to 20,000 MAUs and improves the quality of customer support you’ll receive. Features include:
  • Removal of UserGuiding branding.
  • Language localization.
  • Full customer support access.
  • Five team member seats.
  • Five customizable themes.
  • Unlimited guides and checklists.
• Corporate: Subscriptions on the Corporate plan start at $999/month. Of course, this higher price does come with its fair share of enterprise perks. Features include:
  • Service Level Agreement (SLA) + Data Processing Agreement (DPA).
  • Up to 10 active surveys.
  • Custom MAU capacity based on your needs.
  • Unlimited team member seats.
  • Unlimited customizable themes.

All monthly plans are marked down by 30% when customers choose to bill annually.

Pricing of Whatfix

Whatfix doesn’t have public pricing listed on its website. It also charges separately for its product analytics solution but we won’t be going over those plans since we’re focusing on the digital adoption platform.

Here’s an overview of the three plans available for Whatfix web:

• Standard: This includes core features like in-app guidance, contextual guidance, a multi-media knowledge base, and content aggregation capabilities. It also includes access to pre-built surveys and up to two integrations.
• Premium: This includes additional features such as automatic content localization, automated flow testing, unlimited integrations, and single sign-on (SSO). You’ll also be able to build custom surveys while on the Premium plan.
• Pro: This includes the features from previous plans as well as enterprise-exclusive options such as self-hosting. This plan is targeted towards customer-facing applications with a million or more users.

Pros and cons of UserGuiding

You might need an alternative solution to UserGuiding if you fall into any of the following use cases:

• Advanced analytics: If you’re looking for a product adoption platform with full-suite native analytics then you’ll likely need to look at platforms like Userpilot or Appcues that are better suited to your needs.
• Create fully interactive product tours: While UserGuiding excels in creating in-app experiences and user guides, it may not offer the breadth of tools needed to fully support a comprehensive product adoption strategy.
• Build segments completely code-free: As segmentation features aren’t very intuitive and may require additional help from a developer.

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).

Userpilot – A Better Alternative for No-Code Growth

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Pros and cons of Whatfix

Whatfix is priced lower than its closest competitor (WalkMe) while letting you onboard both customers and employees to software applications. That said, there are a few clear scenarios where you might want to look for alternative solutions:

• If you’re the type of customer who wants to “try before they buy”, then Whatfix isn’t going to be the right fit. The trial request form on their website is buggy, you’ll need to wait a month to hear back on your request, and you might end up with a demo instead of a trial.
• Many customers have complained about the subpar support that Whatfix offers. There are multiple reviews on websites like G2 citing slow resolution times, high success manager turnover, and an overall lack of technical assistance from the Whatfix team.
• Despite claiming to be built for enterprise organizations, Whatfix’s analytics capabilities leave much to be desired. If you’re looking for advanced analytics capabilities, then find alternatives like WalkMe, Userpilot, or Appcues.

Pros of Whatfix

Whatfix may not be as popular or widely adopted as competitors like WalkMe but it does have its fair share of benefits:

• Pricing: While Whatfix does not publish the exact cost of its plans publicly, numerous reports from customers suggest an average entry point of $1,000/month. This is significantly cheaper than its closest competitor, WalkMe, which reportedly starts at closer to $10,000/month.
• Automation: Whatfix Flows helps you automate repetitive tasks to save time. The Whatfix Flows dashboard also lets you analyze your existing flows and then use them to create entirely new automation in a single click.
• Integrations: Whatfix’s third-party integration options make it easy to incorporate the solution into the rest of your tech stack. It integrates with Salesforce, Amplitude, Google Analytics, Slack, and more — providing a good selection of the top CRM, analytics, and communication tools.

Cons of Whatfix

Whatfix offers a more affordable employee onboarding solution than its closest competitors but is limited by its lackluster analytics and support — along with its high-friction trial signup process for prospective customers.

Here are the key drawbacks of using Whatfix:

• Whatfix is quite lacking in the analytics department — both in comparison to direct competitors like WalkMe as well as other onboarding solutions like Userpilot, Appcues, or Pendo. If detailed user data matters to you, you’ll want to consider alternatives.
• Technical assistance (or the lack thereof) is arguably one of Whatfix’s largest weaknesses. While all plans promise to give you a customer success manager, most Whatfix users complain about the subpar support they provide.
• While Whatfix has a trial request page on its website, this form is buggy and inconsistent. You can reach out to support to request a trial directly but resolution times can be upwards of a month — and, in the end, you may even be redirected to a demo call instead of a trial account.

Userpilot – A better alternative for no-code growth

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.

No-code product tours in Userpilot

Product tours are an effective way to show new users what a product can do and reduce the time-to-value (TTV) for them. Userpilot lets you build advanced product tours, set contextual triggers, and target specific audiences, all without writing a single line of code.

Here are the Userpilot features that you can use to build a product tour for your users:

• Flow builder: Userpilot’s no-code flow builder has a variety of UI patterns to choose from, such as modals, slideouts, tooltips, and driven actions. All UI patterns are available for use regardless of which Userpilot plan you’re on. All you need to do is install the Chrome extension.

• Contextual triggers: Userpilot lets you set triggers for your flows to ensure that they appear at the most contextual moments. Flows could be triggered when users land on a specific page or when a tracked event occurs. There are also manual triggering options that you can tinker with.

• Audience targeting: Userpilot’s audience targeting setting lets you set the conditions needed for a flow to show up for a specific user. You can use these settings to create flows that target a specific segment or exclude certain users from seeing a flow if certain conditions are met.

Product growth analysis in Userpilot

Tracking growth analytics is essential to gauge the overall trajectory of your product. Userpilot lets you track the completion rates for specific funnels, measure the number of users completing certain goals, and survey your customers to identify the issue whenever growth metrics trend downward. Here’s how Userpilot analytics can help you measure product growth:

• Dashboards: An easy way to keep track of your key product performance and user behavior metrics at a glance, without any technical setup required. There are 4 main dashboards available for your product growth analysis: Product usage, New users activation, Core feature engagement, and User retention.

Product usage dashboard in Userpilot.

• Funnels: Userpilot’s funnel reports show you the number of users that enter a funnel and the percentage that completes each step. These visual charts can help you identify the roadblocks that are hindering user activation, causing churn, or sabotaging the efficacy of upsells.

• Trends: Trend reports let you see how specific product changes impact retention metrics and monitor changes in active user counts over certain time periods. You can also create custom metrics, track events, or use the breakdown tab to perform a correlative retention analysis.

• Paths: It provides a detailed understanding of customer actions through a sequence of steps and helps pinpoint areas where customers tend to drop off – which may indicate frictions that hinder product growth.

• Surveys: Userpilot’s survey builder has 14 survey templates that can help you find the root cause behind slowing growth rates. There are quantitative templates for collecting satisfaction metrics and qualitative surveys you can use to get user feedback on specific product areas or features.

Pricing of Userpilot

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 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.

Conclusion

This is the end of our thorough comparison between UserGuiding and Whatfix. You should be able to make a confident decision by now. If you’re looking for a solid tool for no-code growth that promises great value for money, give Userpilot a go. Book a demo today.