Comparison \ Product Marketing \ SaaS \ Updated \ User Onboarding

The Ultimate Guide To Using Walkthrough Software for SaaS

Imagine driving to a new destination without a GPS. It’d probably take you hours and you might not even get to the right place. SaaS apps also need walkthrough software to guide their users through their products.

A walkthrough software uses interactive walkthroughs to support new user onboarding. If you get your new user onboarding wrong, it’ll create a domino effect on all your product metrics.

The consensus is that time to value needs to be as low as possible so that more users can get the value of your product early during their onboarding process; that way more of them stick around.

The Aha! moment is the first experience of value in your product. To help users reach there faster before losing their interest in the product, you need to have great interactive walkthroughs that can only be provided by equally great interactive walkthrough software.

If you are on the lookout for a walkthrough software that will knock the experience out of the park for your users, keep on reading!

Walkthrough software for SaaS summary

An interactive walkthrough provides step-by-step guidance, allowing users to trigger the next step as they perform actions, leading them to value faster than traditional product tours.
Interactive walkthroughs are user-triggered and action-based, while product tours are linear and non-interactive, often overwhelming users with too much information at once.
Interactive walkthroughs improve user onboarding, drive feature adoption, push upsells, and reduce support costs, significantly impacting key metrics like activation rates and user retention.
They are used for new user onboarding, secondary feature adoption, pushing upsells, and decreasing support costs by guiding users through key actions step-by-step.
Walkthrough software helps create interactive walkthroughs with minimal coding, using custom events and feature tags to trigger steps based on user actions.
Benefits include less reliance on development teams, cost savings, faster onboarding experiments, and better activation, adoption, and retention metrics.
Types include onboarding software for SaaS, employee onboarding on 3rd party apps, and mobile walkthrough software for mobile applications.
Top 3 interactive walkthrough software for SaaS companies
1. Userpilot: Customizable app flows, A/B testing, checklists, resource center, product analytics, user feedback features, localization, AI writing assistant.
2. Pendo: No-code guides, UI patterns, cross-app consistency.
3. Walkme: Smart Walk-Thrus, SmartTips, ShoutOuts, launchers, user analytics.
Interactive walkthroughs enhance onboarding experiences, drive feature adoption, push upsells, and reduce support costs. Choosing the right walkthrough software, such as Userpilot, is crucial for achieving these benefits. Book your demo today to learn more!

What is an interactive walkthrough?

An interactive walkthrough provides step-by-step guidance to help users perform the key actions required to use your product and derive the value they signed up for. Unlike traditional, linear product tours, users trigger the next step as they perform actions.

Interactive walkthroughs focus on one or two key events at a time. Since the users learn by actually doing and are not asked to act 2 before taking step 1, interactive walkthroughs take them to value (activation) much faster.

Interactive walkthroughs vs product tours

An interactive walkthrough follows customer behavior where every step in the flow is triggered by a custom event – one action by the user triggers the next step until the flow is complete.

In this case, the users interact with the product while learning how to complete specific actions to get the value they need.

On the other hand, product tours are linear and non-interactive; they do not engage the user. Product tours heap a lot of information on the user at one go – showing you around the product from one feature to the next.

By the end of the tour, the user may not have retained anything and has not engaged with the product. This makes product tours confusing and boring.

Product tours do not drive customers to value and do not follow specific actions of the user within the product to inform the tour. Moreover, giving customers too much information at one go emphasizes the complexity of your product. This scares them away.

Why are interactive walkthroughs important?

If new users go into your product and there are no interactive walkthroughs to train them on using the product, most of them will leave.
Do you care about your metrics? Not providing a good user onboarding experience that works affects every metric down the line from activation rates, and feature engagement, to product adoption and user retention.
To retain users you have to keep driving value even in the later stages of the user journey. New user onboarding is not all there is to onboarding.
Interactive walkthroughs will also help you drive adoption rates and improve new feature usage.
Studies have shown it is 4x cheaper to upsell existing customers than to acquire new ones. When customers use your product, they need to unlock more value from it over time. This will mostly come in the form of expanded or secondary features in a higher-cost plan. You’ll need to show them additional value using interactive walkthroughs.

How are interactive walkthroughs used in SaaS?

Interactive walkthroughs are used in SaaS apps to help with the following:

New User Onboarding: When new users sign up, these walkthroughs guide them using step-by-step actions to reach value faster before they lose interest in the product.
Secondary feature adoption: You don’t want to develop new features that nobody is using. Interactive walkthroughs help companies to accelerate new or secondary feature adoption.
Pushing upsells: Every SaaS company is pushing for more revenue. Interactive walkthroughs help your company push the upsells at later stages of a customer’s journey so that they can upgrade their subscriptions to reflect the added value your product brings to them.
Decrease support costs: Interactive walkthroughs help users figure out things without contacting your support team. This leads to reduced support costs.

What is walkthrough software?

Walkthrough software helps you create interactive walkthroughs for your SaaS.

Most walkthrough software usually requires no or less coding knowledge and relies on custom events or feature tags to trigger steps based on user behavior and actions. To set up your new tool, you’ll usually need to implement a piece of JavaScript code in the header of your app and use a browser extension or API.

What are the benefits of walkthrough software?

There are several benefits to having walkthrough software to help with your onboarding:

Less reliance on your internal development/engineering teams. The walkthrough is added as a layer that sits on top of your product and involves little to no code.
Walkthrough software is specialized SaaS companies themselves. Pricing is usually a few hundred dollars per month. Using them saves you time, resources, and money you would spend building product walkthroughs internally. Atlassian, who built an internal walkthrough software for themselves, spent 2 years and approximately $3 million on the project.
Your product team can really “own” the onboarding process.
This makes you more agile because you can create walkthroughs in seconds and deploying tweaks to the walkthroughs is much easier due to the low-code or no-code aspect of walkthrough software.
Experimenting with onboarding is faster with walkthrough software. You can test different versions of onboarding flows, copy, and visuals through A/B tests. This will help you drive better activation, adoption, and retention metrics.

What are the different types of walkthrough software?

There are various types of walkthrough software:

Interactive walkthrough software for onboarding new users using your SaaS. Such walkthrough software accelerates feature adoption while reducing support costs.
Employee onboarding software on 3rd party apps. By using onboarding software for new employees from the first day at work, they can start using your software without any extra training required.
Mobile walkthrough software for onboarding new users in mobile apps. Helping users take necessary steps to get quick wins that deliver value to the user helps with mobile app adoption challenges.

How to choose the right walkthrough software?

When looking for the best walkthrough software for your product, you need to consider the factors below:

Use case – Are you looking for user onboarding for SaaS, employee onboarding on 3rd party applications, or mobile walkthrough software for mobile applications?
Budget – Most walkthrough software will charge a subscription fee per month for continued use of the software. Pricing also varies depending on the stage of your company and the number of monthly active users (MAUs).
Features – Some tools only do walkthroughs. Other tools do more than create product tours and walkthroughs with valuable features like user segmentation, experimentation through A/B testing, advanced analytics or NPS, and user sentiment.
Integrations – Some walkthrough software integrates with other tools better than others. Know the integrations you need while looking for a walkthrough software solution.

Top 5 interactive walkthrough software for SaaS companies

Let’s go over the top tools for interactive walkthroughs:

Userpilot

Userpilot is a digital adoption platform for creating interactive product walkthroughs and in-app experiences that drive growth. Here are the key features.

Customized app flows: Userpilot allows you to build interactive walkthroughs and customize the onboarding experience as desired. You can customize colors, text, modals, and other UI elements; add videos, images, your company logo, and so on.

Welcome survey created with Userpilot.

A/B testing: Not sure which in-app walkthroughs will resonate best with your audience? Userpilot allows you to perform product experiments and automatically deploy the best versions to specific user segments.
Checklists: As seen earlier in the onboarding examples, checklists help guide users through key activation steps. With Userpilot, you can easily build and customize your in-app checklists with a few mouse clicks.

Resource center: Take advantage of Userpilot’s drag-and-drop resource center editor to provide on-demand self-service resources that users can visit when confused.

Product analytics: Generate behavior reports—including funnels, paths, and trends analysis—to understand user behavior and identify friction areas.

Trends analysis report in Userpilot.

User feedback features: Collect quantitative and qualitative feedback from users and understand their onboarding experience. You can build surveys from scratch or save time with Userpilot’s survey templates. In addition, Userpilot allows you to perform easy survey analysis and extract valuable insights.

Collect feedback with Userpilot.

Localization features: No need to hire a translator. Userpilot allows you to localize your in-app content in multiple languages and reach a wide audience.
AI writing assistant: It can be challenging to fit all your ideas into a modal or small tooltip box, but Userpilot comes to the rescue. This AI assistant can create content, improve or summarize existing writing, and fix grammar errors.

Pendo

When it comes to in-app guidance using interactive walkthroughs, most flows need a combination of messaging and UI patterns to help users navigate through the process. Product tours and interactive walkthroughs are both different forms of in-app guidance with varying degrees of efficacy.

Here are Pendo’s top features for building interactive walkthroughs:

No-Code Guides: Create in-app walkthroughs for your users without having to write a ton of code or request support from the engineering team. You’ll also be able to target guides to specific segments to maximize relevancy and build contextual onboarding flows.
UI Patterns: Pendo’s in-app flows consist of lightboxes, banners, and tooltips. Each of these UI elements have templates in the layout gallery that you can use to build flows quicker — or select the option to start from scratch if that’s what you prefer.

Cross-App Consistency: Using Pendo to create in-app walkthrough flows for your mobile and web apps ensures that the experience will feel cohesive across both platforms. Do note that you’ll need to subscribe to Pendo Portfolio if you plan to add more than one app to your account.

Note: You’ll need to upgrade to the Complete plan or higher to use Pendo resource centers.

Let’s compare Userpilot and Pendo for final decision.

Walkme

WalkMe does an excellent job of letting you build guided interactive walkthroughs to help users navigate your product. The features that can be of use here include:

Smart Walk-Thrus lets you create step-by-step journeys to handhold users through your product. You can even tailor the journey based on user behavior and preferences. You can visualize their entire journey in the builder too.
SmartTips lets you provide detailed guidance to users on each page. You can use them to draw attention to specific UI elements. The no-code builder enables you to customize them completely.
ShoutOut lets you communicate important product updates and changes.
Launchers to let users trigger specific Smart Walk-Thrus, ShoutOuts, and other WalkMe actions whenever they want.
User analytics to help you monitor engagement within a walkthrough and identify and eliminate points of friction.

Now let’s compare Walkme and Userpilot:

Examples of successful interactive walkthroughs from SaaS products

Now, we get to the core of this article. Below are seven interactive walkthrough examples and why they work.

1. Rocketbots

Rocketbots (respond.io) is an AI-powered customer communication platform designed to manage and automate customer conversations across various messaging apps.

The platform begins its onboarding flow with a welcome screen that eases new users to the interface and collects their data upfront.

Rocketbots welcome screen.

Next, users see an onboarding checklist with a list of tasks to complete. Crossing off the first task for users and showing a progress bar was a good way to motivate action.

Next, tooltips showcase key features to new users so they can get started right away.

2. Groupize

Groupize is a meeting and event management platform that needed help with easy-to-grasp product walkthroughs. The company utilized Userpilot to create a gamified onboarding flow.

The flow begins with a welcome screen introducing G.G., the interactive assistant that will guide new users through the product. This offered an engaging way for users to learn about the product.

Users also have the option to continue onboarding or shift it to later. This flexibility is important as not all new signups are using your tool for the first time or are interested in following a guided tour.

The flow proceeds with a detailed guide, showing users how to achieve their goals with Groupize:

Groupize leveraged an in-app resource center and embedded its onboarding guide so users can access it at any time. This approach alone drastically reduced support tickets, allowing Groupize’s CS team to focus more on issues that can’t be addressed in a resource center.

3. Demio

Demio is a webinar hosting service that supports live, automated, and on-demand webinars.

Its onboarding process begins with a product tour showing the tool’s core features and what a webinar will look like when you host it. This simple tour is available on the website for new visitors to quickly go through and understand the platform.

Upon signing up, users will see a sample event scheduled for them, and a human product specialist will join to show the nitty-gritty of how the product works.

Next is the interactive session. Users will receive an onboarding checklist that serves as a guide to help them independently complete tasks to host a webinar. Demio’s onboarding flow is a good example of how to combine a product tour with an interactive walkthrough to drive sign-ups and boost adoption.

4. Kommunicate

Kommunicate is a customer service platform that enables businesses to automate conversations with their customers using chatbots and live chat.

One of the primary adoption drivers for Kommunicate is having new users install the chatbot and begin customizing the chat widget.

Kommunicate turned to Userpilot to create a product walkthrough that makes the process easy for users.

The first onboarding screen listed all the steps users will take from start to finish. Seeing the list of tasks before they get started helps reduce overwhelm and uncertainty about how long or short the process will be.

Once users complete that first task, they’ll see a small checklist showing them the next step to take:

After a user chooses their preferred step, they’ll receive an interactive product walkthrough that shows them step-by-step how to complete it. For example, here’s the walkthrough for widget customization.

Within a short time of implementing this interactive approach, Kommunicate saw a 4% increase in adoption and 3% boost in product usage.

5. Salesflare

Salesflare is an intelligent CRM platform for small and medium-sized businesses, particularly those operating in B2B sectors.

The onboarding begins with a welcome page that gives users an option to skip the walkthrough.

For users who choose to be guided, the walkthrough explains core features using interactive tooltips:

The walkthrough combines information and instructions (top right), helping users get familiar with the product by completing tasks.

It ends with prompting users to integrate third-party tools that will make sales activities easier.

6. Notion

Notion is an all-in-one workspace where teams and individuals can plan, collaborate, and get organized.

Due to its versatile nature, Notion has different user groups. To cater to each of these groups, Notion decided to use branched onboarding instead of a generic onboarding flow.

The first step was to trigger the welcome survey below to understand user needs and JTBD. The data from this step enables them to branch out their walkthrough and display the most relevant templates for each user.

Notion also uses a checklist to help users get started. The onboarding checklist itself demonstrates how Notion pages function, efficiently serving as both a guide and an example.

7. Figma

Figma is a cloud-based design tool widely used for user interface design and prototyping.

Like Notion, Figma provides branched onboarding based on its two main use cases:

Instead of greeting new users with an empty state, Figma uses onboarding videos and demo content to guide users and help them start designing with confidence.

Conclusion

Interactive walkthroughs will deliver greater onboarding experiences for new users, drive feature adoption, push upsells, and decrease customer support costs in your product.

The result is better activation rates, retention, and product adoption.

However, to create great interactive walkthroughs, choosing the right walkthrough software is important.

Userpilot stands out in terms of features, versatility, and value for SaaS companies. Why don’t you jump on a quick call with us to see how it fits into your product goals?