Userpilot vs Appcues: Which is Best for Your SaaS?
Wondering whether Userpilot or Appcues is the best option for your SaaS company?
This article is going to dive into the Userpilot vs Appcues 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 Userpilot and Appcues – as well as explaining which one is better in certain cases.
Let’s get into it!
TL;DR
- Let’s explore how Userpilot, and Appcues compare when it comes to user onboarding and other common use cases.
- 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.
- Appcues is a robust product adoption and user onboarding platform for web and mobile apps. It enables product teams to create, implement, and test personalized in-app onboarding experiences. The platform also helps you announce new product features and collect customer feedback.
- However, in certain situations, as one of the first product adoption platforms in the market, Appcues comes with a robust set of features. However, Userpilot takes the lead in the following areas:
- Ease of use: Both Appcues and Userpilot offer intuitive, user-friendly interfaces. But Userpilot keeps things simple with a single dashboard to create, implement, and track in-app experiences. In comparison, Appcues requires you to constantly switch between Appcues Builder and Appcues Studio.
- Advanced analytics: Unlike Appcues, Userpilot provides in-depth product analytics (funnels, trends, paths, retention analysis) without a third-party tool.
- Efficient element detection: Userpilot’s algorithm does a better job at detecting complex UI elements. That, in turn, helps you create more detailed and personalized user journeys.
- Prompt customer support: Userpilot offers multi-channel support via email, phone, and live chat. The presence of live chat support enables you to get your queries addressed and resolved in real time. This key feature is absent in Appcues.
- Better value for money: Userpilot packs more features, user licenses, and audience segments than Appcues at a comparable price tag. These include a comprehensive library of survey templates, a full set of UI patterns, detailed built-in analytics, and multilingual support, starting at $249/mo.
- Get a Userpilot demo for user onboarding and drive your product growth code-free.
Userpilot – A Better Alternative for Your SaaS
What is Userpilot?
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.
What is Appcues?
Appcues is a robust product adoption and user onboarding platform for web and mobile apps. It enables product teams to create, implement, and test personalized in-app onboarding experiences. The platform also helps you announce new product features and collect customer feedback.
What makes this platform even better is the fact that it offers no-code features that make it suitable for non-technical teams. 
Userpilot vs Appcues for user onboarding
In this section of the article, we’re really going to compare Userpilot vs Appcues in terms of user onboarding. That way, we’ll be able to figure out which tool – Userpilot or Appcues – is the best option depending on your use case.
Userpilot for user onboarding
User onboarding is a crucial part of the customer journey as it speeds up the adoption process and increases retention rates. Onboarding is one of Userpilot’s core use cases along with product growth analytics and user feedback, so it has plenty of features that you can utilize.
Here are some Userpilot features you can use when onboarding new users:
- No-code builder: Creating flows with Userpilot is as simple as installing the Chrome extension, selecting the UI patterns you’d like to use, and then editing the content/settings to suit your use case. You can also use templates to create modals, slideouts, tooltips, and driven actions.
- Native tooltips: Userpilot lets you create native tooltips that show up when users hover over an element or click on an information badge. Since these native tooltips attach to the element itself, they aren’t page-dependent and will show up on any screen where that element is visible.
- Funnel analytics: Userpilot’s advanced analytics lets you create funnel reports that track the onboarding journey. You can also add filters (like name, user ID, signup date, operating system, country, etc.) and monitor the total conversion rate from the first step of the funnel to the last.
- User segmentation: Userpilot lets you segment users based on the device they’re using, where they’re located, their engagement data, or which NPS rating they selected on the latest survey. You can then filter your analytics dashboards to see which segments struggle with onboarding.
Appcues for user onboarding
Onboarding new users seamlessly is one of the primary use cases of Appcues. The platform offers a wide array of features to help you improve user activation, conversion, and retention.
Let’s take a closer look at how Appcues facilitates new user onboarding:
- Drag-and-drop builder: Appcues’s no-code builder lets you create personalized onboarding tours and checklists to assist and educate new users. You can customize UI patterns like hotspots, modals, slideouts, and tooltips to guide users.
- In-app user guides and product tours: You can use various UI patterns, such as hotspots and tooltips, to introduce new users to product features in a pre-defined sequence. Similarly, you can use checklists to guide users as they explore your app.
- Checklists: You can also create checklists with Appcues (NOT available on the Essentials plan) and prompt users to take action. These are ok but have limited functionality (you can’t trigger JS functions or add gamification elements) compared to alternatives, such as Userpilot.
- Segmentation: You can use one of the pre-defined audience segments or create customer segments based on plan tier, lifecycle stage, and other factors. It’s possible to target individual segments with personalized messaging and journeys.
- Measure and improve: You can track in-app flow performance and measure events (limited to 5 on the Essentials plan) to identify areas of improvement.
- Test and optimize: The newly introduced A/B testing feature lets you test different onboarding flows. You can compare the performance of different in-app sequences, identify the best-performing ones, and refine onboarding flows.
Userpilot vs Appcues for product adoption
In this section of the article, we’re really going to compare Userpilot vs Appcues in terms of product adoption. That way, we’ll be able to figure out which tool – Userpilot or Appcues – is the best option depending on your use case.
Userpilot for product adoption
Product adoption is when users become repeat users of your product. It covers the entire journey spanning from the awareness stage to trial signup and finally full-on adoption. As a product growth platform, Userpilot has advanced analytics capabilities for tracking adoption over time.
Here are the Userpilot features that can help you measure and improve product adoption:
- Product analytics: Userpilot lets you create trend reports to track adoption over time by feature or segment, funnel reports that show you which steps of the process most users get stuck on, and integrations with third-party analytics providers so you can sync data between tools.
- Product usage dashboard: It collects all your key product usage metrics automatically without you having to set anything up: your Daily, Monthly, and Weekly Active Users and Companies, Trends of Active Users and Companies over time, user stickiness, top pages, features, and events, as well as the most engaged users, highest user activity times throughout the day, user retention, average session duration and product usage by browser.
- Feature engagement: Userpilot’s click-to-track feature tagger lets you see how often a feature is used and by how many people. You’ll also be able to see the top 20 events for a certain time period or create custom events that group multiple features together for clearer insights.
- Feedback collection: Userpilot has a no-code survey builder with 14 templates to choose from. You’ll be able to collect quantitative data like CSAT, CES, or NPS ratings and qualitative feedback on the strongest/weakest parts of your product straight from your users.
- User insights: The Insights dashboard lets you monitor user activity based on which segment they’re in and which company they’re from. You’ll also be able to choose from daily, weekly, and monthly time periods to see if user activity is shifting towards full product adoption over time.
Appcues for product adoption
Onboarding new users seamlessly is one of the primary use cases of Appcues. The platform offers a wide array of features to help you improve user activation, conversion, and retention.
Let’s take a closer look at how Appcues facilitates new user onboarding:
- Drag-and-drop builder: Appcues’s no-code builder lets you create personalized onboarding tours and checklists to assist and educate new users. You can customize UI patterns like hotspots, modals, slideouts, and tooltips to guide users.
- In-app user guides and product tours: You can use various UI patterns, such as hotspots and tooltips, to introduce new users to product features in a pre-defined sequence. Similarly, you can use checklists to guide users as they explore your app.
- Checklists: You can also create checklists with Appcues (NOT available on the Essentials plan) and prompt users to take action. These are ok but have limited functionality (you can’t trigger JS functions or add gamification elements) compared to alternatives, such as Userpilot.
- Segmentation: You can use one of the pre-defined audience segments or create customer segments based on plan tier, lifecycle stage, and other factors. It’s possible to target individual segments with personalized messaging and journeys.
- Measure and improve: You can track in-app flow performance and measure events (limited to 5 on the Essentials plan) to identify areas of improvement.
- Test and optimize: The newly introduced A/B testing feature lets you test different onboarding flows. You can compare the performance of different in-app sequences, identify the best-performing ones, and refine onboarding flows.
Userpilot vs Appcues for customer experience
In this section of the article, we’re really going to compare Userpilot vs Appcues in terms of customer experience. That way, we’ll be able to figure out which tool – Userpilot or Appcues – is the best option depending on your use case.
Userpilot for customer experience
Userpilot gives you an eagle-eye view of the customer experience through user analytics, trend/funnel reports, and feedback collection through different types of surveys.
Here’s how you can use Userpilot to track and analyze customer experience insights:
- User analytics: The users dashboard gives you an overview of all your users while letting you sort by segment, company, or when they were last seen. You can also export user data in bulk as a CSV or click on the Insights tab to see segment-specific insights for a given time period.
- Trends and funnels: Userpilot’s trends and funnels reports let you track certain events like a specific feature’s usage, add filters to narrow down the data, and then create a breakdown based on segmentation data or user attributes — offering quick and actionable CX reports.
- Satisfaction benchmarking: Userpilot has a built-in NPS dashboard that tracks customer loyalty over time. In addition to the NPS dashboard, you can also use Userpilot’s survey templates to run CSAT or CES surveys and gather additional quantitative and qualitative insights on the customer experience.
- Self-service support: Userpilot lets you build in-app resource centers, which can include feedback widgets to collect feedback passively, checklists to walk users through specific processes, or integrations with knowledge bases to leverage existing documentation.
- In-app flows: Userpilot’s no-code flow builder helps you create product experiences that can help you optimize the customer experience by educating customers and reducing their time-to-value (TTV). All UI patterns are available on every Userpilot plan from Starter to Enterprise.
Appcues for customer experience
Appcues plays a key role in taking your product’s customer experience (CX) up a notch.
It helps enhance CX in the following ways:
- UI patterns like checklists, hotspots, modals, and tooltips let you create guided in-app tours and tutorials and simplify customer onboarding.
- A Launchpad lets users access Appcues onboarding flows from a notification dropdown within your product.
- NPS surveys help you collect customer feedback and improve your product. However, unlike Userpilot, Appcues only offers NPS surveys.
- Other features like user segmentation (for personalization) and event tracking also come in handy.
That said, Appcues alone can’t guarantee a flawless customer experience. It only covers the onboarding aspect of CX. You’ll need to focus on other aspects like customer support and relationship-building to improve the overall UX, and for those you need multiple types of user surveys, on-demand support (using a resource center) and proper analytics, which Appcues lack.
Userpilot vs Appcues for user feedback
In this section of the article, we’re really going to compare Userpilot vs Appcues in terms of user feedback. That way, we’ll be able to figure out which tool – Userpilot or Appcues – is the best option depending on your use case.
Userpilot for user feedback
User feedback is an essential part of listening to the Voice of the Customer (VoC) and making product development or marketing decisions that best suit your customer base. Userpilot has a no-code survey builder, 14 templates to choose from, and advanced analytics for extracting insights.
Here are the Userpilot features you can use to collect customer feedback and analyze it:
- Survey builder: Userpilot’s survey builder lets you edit the content, update the widget’s style/placement, and set page-specific or event-specific triggers to ensure that users see the survey at the most contextual moment — all without writing a single line of code. You can also translate surveys into your audience’s native language.
- Survey templates: There are 14 survey templates to choose from with a wide array of different use cases. You can collect qualitative responses on how to improve the user/product experience or quantitative data for customer satisfaction benchmarking such as CSAT and CES scores.
- Advanced analytics: Userpilot’s advanced survey analytics will show you what the most common responses were, what percentage of users selected a specific option, and display open-ended feedback about your product or specific features.
- NPS dashboard: Userpilot’s NPS dashboard compiles response data from all NPS surveys so you don’t have to manually go into each survey and check its analytics. You’ll be able to view key metrics like response rates, total views, and NPS history and sort all the data by different segments.
Appcues for user feedback
As a product adoption platform, Appcues offers limited features that enable you to collect customer feedback. There is only one type of survey available (Net Promoter Score), and it comes with templates and analytics.
- NPS templates: You can customize pre-built NPS templates using the drag-and-drop builder.
- NPS targeting: Use NPS results to encourage promoters to review your product on app stores or ask detractors for more feedback.
- You could add a survey lookalike on top of a modal, but that means you won’t be collecting and analyzing results easily, defeating the purpose of using a survey for user feedback.
Userpilot vs Appcues: 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 Userpilot and Appcues will provide you with a detailed roadmap for making a well-informed decision!
Pros and cons of Userpilot
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.
Pros and cons of Appcues
Pros of Appcues
As a first-comer in the no-code product adoption landscape, Appcues offers several valuable features. It’s suitable for mid-market SaaS businesses looking for a simple, easy-to-use tool that enhances user onboarding, retention, and the overall customer experience.
Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of Appcues:
- Intuitive UI and UX: Appcues offers a straightforward interface that’s easy to navigate and use. Users with non-technical backgrounds can design captivating in-app flows and onboarding journeys with its simple drag-and-drop builder. You can tailor user journeys with various UI patterns, from modals and hotspots to tooltips, slideouts, and banners.
- Simple setup: You can get started with Appcues in minutes by adding the SDK to your app’s source code or integrating Appcues with Segment or Google Tag Manager. Then, add a Chrome extension to launch the Appcues Builder in a few quick clicks and start creating in-app flows.
- Feedback options: Create Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to collect actionable user feedback. You can even check and analyze NPS analytics on your Appcues dashboard.
- Mobile onboarding: Besides web apps, you can use Appcues to create end-to-end experiences for mobile apps. It supports various mobile environments, including Native Android, Native iOS, React Native, Flutter, and Iconic.
- Extensive integrations: Appcues integrates with 20+ email automation, CRM, and analytics tools, including Heap, Zapier, HubSpot, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager. Many of these include two-way integrations.
Cons of Appcues
Appcues comes with a ton of useful features you’d expect from a leading product adoption platform, but it does have a few shortcomings.
Let’s look at a few drawbacks of Appcues:
- Poor element detection: The Appcues algorithm occasionally struggles to detect in-app elements, unlike some of its competitors like Userpilot. It’s particularly limiting when you want to add tooltips to individual options in a dropdown menu.
- Limited customization capabilities: While Appcues lets you customize pre-designed templates, you’re limited to basic options like font style, size, color, and padding. Advanced customization requires working with CSS code, which can be challenging for non-technical teams.
- Basic analytics: Appcues provides insights into product usage and customer behavior. However, you can’t access in-depth analytics without connecting to a third-party tool like Amplitude or Google Analytics.
- Limited survey options: Appcues lacks variety in feedback collection and survey options and doesn’t offer integrations with other platforms like Google Forms and Typeform. You can only build NPS surveys. This is in contrast to some of its competitors, like Userpilot, which offers an extensive library of customizable survey templates.
- Higher pricing: Starting at $249 per month, the Appcues Essential tier has several constraints, such as limited UI patterns and no custom CSS support. Moreover, localization support is only available in the Enterprise tier. If your app is multilingual, you’ll have to shell out a ton of money to make the most of Appcues.
- No live chat: While Appcues offers educational resources and a help center (Help Docs), customer support is limited to email and phone.
Appcues comes with a ton of useful features you’d expect from a leading product adoption platform, but it does have a few shortcomings.
Let’s look at a few drawbacks of Appcues:
- Poor element detection: The Appcues algorithm occasionally struggles to detect in-app elements, unlike some of its competitors like Userpilot. It’s particularly limiting when you want to add tooltips to individual options in a dropdown menu.
- Limited customization capabilities: While Appcues lets you customize pre-designed templates, you’re limited to basic options like font style, size, color, and padding. Advanced customization requires working with CSS code, which can be challenging for non-technical teams.
- Basic analytics: Appcues provides insights into product usage and customer behavior. However, you can’t access in-depth analytics without connecting to a third-party tool like Amplitude or Google Analytics.
- Limited survey options: Appcues lacks variety in feedback collection and survey options and doesn’t offer integrations with other platforms like Google Forms and Typeform. You can only build NPS surveys. This is in contrast to some of its competitors, like Userpilot, which offers an extensive library of customizable survey templates.
- Higher pricing: Starting at $249 per month, the Appcues Essential tier has several constraints, such as limited UI patterns and no custom CSS support. Moreover, localization support is only available in the Enterprise tier. If your app is multilingual, you’ll have to shell out a ton of money to make the most of Appcues.
- No live chat: While Appcues offers educational resources and a help center (Help Docs), customer support is limited to email and phone.
Userpilot vs Appcues – Why Userpilot might be a better choice?
As one of the first product adoption platforms in the market, Appcues comes with a robust set of features.
However, Userpilot takes the lead in the following areas:
- Ease of use: Both Appcues and Userpilot offer intuitive, user-friendly interfaces. But Userpilot keeps things simple with a single dashboard to create, implement, and track in-app experiences. In comparison, Appcues requires you to constantly switch between Appcues Builder and Appcues Studio.
- Advanced analytics: Unlike Appcues, Userpilot provides in-depth product analytics (funnels, trends, paths, retention analysis) without a third-party tool.
- Efficient element detection: Userpilot’s algorithm does a better job at detecting complex UI elements. That, in turn, helps you create more detailed and personalized user journeys.
- Prompt customer support: Userpilot offers multi-channel support via email, phone, and live chat. The presence of live chat support enables you to get your queries addressed and resolved in real time. This key feature is absent in Appcues.
- Better value for money: Userpilot packs more features, user licenses, and audience segments than Appcues at a comparable price tag. These include a comprehensive library of survey templates, a full set of UI patterns, detailed built-in analytics, and multilingual support, starting at $249/mo.
Conclusion
Hopefully, this post helped you decide whether Userpilot or Appcues is more appropriate for your company. As you can see – both have many upsides and downsides.
However, 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!
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