Whatfix vs Userlane which is better for no-code growth

Is Whatfix or Userlane the best tool for no-code growth? And is there a better in-app onboarding software that would better fit your needs?

With so many alternatives on review sites, it’s a bit tricky to really choose one.

You need to consider your priorities and what functionality you’ll need from the tool to get the job done. Then there’s also the price that needs to match your budget. Right?

In this post, we’ll discuss exactly that – what the perfect tool for no-code growth should deliver and which will be the best choice for your company’s needs.

Let’s dive in!

TL;DR

Let’s explore how Whatfix and Userlane compare when it comes to enabling SaaS 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.
- Userlane is a no-code digital adoption platform used to measure how employees use applications, identify areas for improvement, and offer real-time guidance directly within any application.
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.

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:

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.
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.
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.

Userlane for no-code growth

Userlane is a no-code digital adoption platform used to measure how employees use applications, identify areas for improvement, and offer real-time guidance directly within any application.

In addition, it allows you to get a real-time view of digital transformation progress in your organization. You can now delve deeper into user behaviors across different applications and analyze engagement levels so you can optimize user experiences.

No-code product tours in Userlane

Userlane is primarily designed to create interactive product walkthroughs with simplicity. For companies looking to integrate a basic onboarding experience without coding complexities, Userlane’s no-code platform is an ideal choice.

It provides a seamless solution for businesses to create in-app interactive content. Rather than requiring extensive coding and development effort, Userlane enables organizations to craft intuitive product tours rapidly.

Here’s a breakdown of the features of Userlane for no-code product tours:

Interactive Step-by-Step Guidance: Userlane offers a visual editor that allows creators to design step-by-step instructions directly within the application interface. These guides provide users with a hands-on approach to learning, leading them through real-time processes. This ensures that users aren’t just reading instructions but are actively engaged in performing tasks.
Analytics and Performance Insights Without Code: Beyond just crafting the tours, Userlane’s no-code platform provides businesses with valuable insights into user engagement. Organizations can monitor the effectiveness of their onboarding content, pinpoint areas of improvement, and optimize their guides—all through a user-friendly, code-free dashboard.
Personalized User Segmentation with No-Code Customization: Userlane’s no-code capabilities enable businesses to tailor tours based on user roles, preferences, or behaviors without diving into complex programming.

Product growth analysis in Userlane

Product growth analysis is a key ingredient to increasing product adoption.

Userlane’s HEART analytics is a standardized model to monitor value realization across enterprise applications.
Based on user interaction metrics and usage patterns, a single score indicates the current value realization for each application based on five core value drivers:

Happiness: Users are satisfied with the application and are likely to recommend it. Understand how users feel about your app with the Happiness tool. You can monitor this using a Net Promoter Score (NPS) or surveys. The NPS measures user loyalty by asking about the likelihood of users recommending your application.
Engagement: Users interact with the application actively. Engagement shows your user’s involvement by tracking how many engaged (meaningful) sessions they had and how much time they spent in your application or on a certain page.
Adoption: Users come to the application and utilize it broadly. With the Adoption Score, you can see how many users arrived, and you can track this number compared to the ratio of the expected number of users.
Retention: Users keep coming back to the application. The retention score is a measure of how many of your users are coming back to your application.
Task Success: Users accomplish their tasks. The Task Success Rate will help you measure user interaction with tasks and interesting elements to be aware if users complete tasks or interact with important features easily and efficiently.

Whatfix vs Userlane: 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 Whatfix and Userlane.

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.

Pricing of Userlane

Userlane’s pricing plan is structured in a customizable pattern. This means you need to get a custom quote to know the plan that fits your brand’s purpose based on the level of your SaaS and the number of acquired customers.

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.

Pros and cons of Userlane

While Userlane is undoubtedly powerful, certain scenarios might necessitate exploring alternatives.

Extensive Third-party Integrations: While Userlane offers some key integrations if your business heavily relies on a diverse range of third-party tools and you need a seamless, in-depth integration for all of them, you might want to explore platforms like Pendo or Mixpanel that offer broader integration ecosystems.
Budget Constraints: While Userlane offers a plethora of features suitable for established enterprises or growing companies, it might be beyond the reach of early-stage startups with limited funds. If you’re on a strict budget and looking for a more affordable solution, platforms like UserGuiding, Intercom, or Intro.js might be more aligned with your financial constraints.
Complex Customization Needs: If your platform requires highly specialized or intricate onboarding experiences that go beyond standard walkthroughs and tooltips, you might find Userlane’s customization options a bit restrictive. In such cases, tools like WalkMe or Appcues, known for their deep customization capabilities, might be a better fit.

Pros of Userlane

Higher productivity, less support effort, and happier users are what Userlane is created for. From a vast spectrum of capabilities to elegantly crafted UI elements that cater to any walkthrough, regardless of its level of customization, Userlane stands out as a robust platform to bolster user engagement and product familiarization.

Let’s dive into the pros of using Userlane:

Streamlined no-code interface: Userlane boasts a user-friendly dashboard, enabling even those with no coding background to easily design and implement onboarding flows.
Product adoption analytics: Get a real-time view of digital transformation progress in your organization. Delve deeper into user behaviors across different applications and analyze engagement levels so you can optimize user experiences.
Dynamic user walkthroughs: Craft compelling and interactive walkthroughs that intuitively guide users through your software, ensuring they grasp every essential feature.
Versatile in-app communication tools: Whether tooltips, banners, or pop-up modals, Userlane offers many tools to engage users directly within your platform. With Userlane’s customer onboarding solution, you can tailor communications for different user segments, guiding them through the tasks and processes they will most likely need help with.
Seamless third-party integrations: Integrate Userlane with various analytics tools, CRM platforms, and other essential software to ensure a harmonious workflow and data sharing.
Granular audience segmentation: Understand your users and their needs better by segmenting them based on behavior, user type, or other customizable metrics. This ensures that your messaging and tours are always relevant and timely.
Optimized A/B testing capabilities: Refine your onboarding and in-app messaging by A/B testing different approaches, enabling you to continually enhance user experience based on concrete data.
Thoughtful pacing with walkthrough rate limiting: Ensure users aren’t too quickly bombarded with too much information. With Userlane’s rate limiting, you can pace the introduction of new features or tasks, striking a balance between informing and overwhelming.

Cons of Userlane

As with any tool, weighing its strengths and weaknesses is essential. Here are the notable drawbacks of adopting Userlane:

Visual Customization Restrictions: One of Userlane’s apparent setbacks lies in its restricted visual customization capabilities. If you have an eye for aesthetic and unique branding elements might find the platform limiting. The lack of diverse templates and somewhat rigid design elements could impede brands from truly reflecting their identity.
Analytical Ambiguities: In the age of data-driven decision-making, Userlane’s analytical powers — or the lack thereof — stand out. While it offers basic insights, those looking for a deep dive into granular user behavior, funnel analysis, heatmaps, and more might need to bridge the gap with external integrations.
Integration Quandaries: Speaking of integrations, Userlane might not be the Swiss Army knife of connectivity that some businesses might be hoping for. While essentials like Zendesk, Google Analytics, Hubspot, and Salesforce are on the list, those yearning for a wider array of integration options might need to strategize around these limitations.
Cost Considerations: Userlane’s pricing structure could be a roadblock, especially for startups and SMEs keen on budget constraints. The initial investment for Userlane might seem daunting, especially considering the added costs of potential integrations and the learning curve associated with maximizing the platform’s potential.

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.

main-dashboard-userpilot.

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.

no-code UI builder userpilot

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.

flow trigger for contextual support

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.

audience flow settings

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.

userpilot funnel for cro

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.

Userpilot-trends-1-1

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.

path analysis

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.

It 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, user 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 Whatfix and Userlane. 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.

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

CONTENTS

TL;DR

Userpilot – A Better Alternative for No-Code Growth

What is no-code growth?

Must have features for no-code growth tools