9 Best Onboarding Platforms for SaaS Companies

What are the best onboarding platforms available on the market in 2024?

This depends on your use case.

Are you looking for an onboarding solution for web or mobile apps? Do you need it to support customer or employee onboarding processes? Are you after specific features to support your onboarding tasks? What’s your budget? There are many variables to consider.

To help you make an informed choice, our guide introduces 9 best-in-class onboarding platforms. And although it most likely won’t answer all your questions, it will hopefully narrow down the choices a bit.

Ready to dive in?

TL;DR

• Onboarding platforms allow organizations to design personalized onboarding experiences that enable new users to realize the product value. They also offer feedback features and analytics to support data-driven decision-making.
• Renowned for its robust analytics and mobile app support, Pendo provides interactive in-app guides and retroactive analytics, positioning itself as a top choice for enterprises looking for comprehensive mobile onboarding solutions.
• Specializing in guided customer onboarding experiences, WalkMe streamlines user interactions across applications with interactive guides and checklists, though its analytics features are somewhat limited.
• Focused on personalized customer communication, Intercom leverages messenger-based interactions and targeted messaging for a highly personalized onboarding experience complemented by a suite of support and marketing tools.
• Known for its code-free onboarding flow creation, Appcues enables personalized in-app experiences focusing on user engagement and retention. However, its less advanced analytics compared to competitors let it down.
• Userlane offers interactive user onboarding guides and tutorials within web applications, employing AI for updates and customization, focusing on improving user experience and adoption through in-app guidance.
• Distinguished for its customizable in-app product tours and onboarding flows, Chameleon aids in navigating apps effectively with a no-code editor and basic analytics, making it suitable for businesses aiming to improve software engagement.
• Gainsight targets customer success and onboarding automation, combining in-app guides with comprehensive analytics and feedback management aimed at enterprises focusing on deep customer insights and product experience improvement.
• While not exclusively an onboarding platform, ClickUp’s customizable project management tools facilitate processes for onboarding new hires, making it a versatile choice for businesses already using its broader workflow management capabilities.
• Excelling as an all-in-one customer onboarding solution, Userpilot offers interactive onboarding flows, UI patterns, and analytics without the need for coding, making it ideal for web applications but not for mobile apps. Book the demo to find out more!

How can onboarding software improve the customer onboarding process?

There are a few benefits of investing in a dedicated onboarding system.

For starters, such tools allow you to personalize the onboarding process to lead users with different cases to value along the most direct route. Reducing time to value is essential for user retention and product adoption.

It doesn’t stop there.

Many onboarding tools allow companies to create self-service resources, like knowledge bases or video tutorials, for on-demand after-hours support. This removes friction from the user journey and reduces the load on the support teams.

Moreover, you can use them to collect user feedback to track user sentiment and identify areas for improvement.

Finally, most of the tools enable you to track the performance of your onboarding flows and support resources so you can make data-driven optimization decisions.

In the best platforms, analytics are not limited to onboarding experiences. Instead, they support in-depth user behavior analysis to help you better understand user needs and inform the product development process.

9 Best onboarding tools to use in 2024

Now that you know why having a robust onboarding platform matters for product success, let’s have a look at 9 excellent options currently available on the market.

#1. Userpilot: Best all-in-one tool for customer onboarding

Userpilot is a comprehensive customer onboarding solution. It offers functionality for effective user engagement at all stages of the user journey, from the moment they first sign up for your product until they become loyal customers, and beyond.

Userpilot features

Userpilot enables you to create interactive onboarding flows and customize them to blend seamlessly into your native UI without any coding.

Userpilot’s engagement layer includes:

• UI patterns – tooltips, modals, banners, hotspots, slideouts, and driven actions.

• Interactive walkthroughs – to guide users through complex processes or introduce new features.

• Onboarding checklists – to guide users to activation in a structured way.

In addition, you can further support your users via the resource center.

Finally, there’s a handy AI writing assistant and automatic localization so that you can easily create microcopy for your onboarding flows and translate it into multiple languages to increase product inclusivity.

The writing assistant and localization work also with the in-app surveys, which are equally easy to create thanks to the template library and visual editor.

What sets Userpilot apart from other onboarding platforms is its analytics. Its functionality includes:

• Segmentation – essential for personalization and in-depth analytics.
• Custom event tracking – to easily track multiple actions and trigger in-app experiences.
• Funnel analysis – to track user progress along the journey.
• Path analysis – to map out user actions at different journey stages.
• Flow analytics – to analyze engagement with in-app experiences.
• Trend analysis – for tracking metrics over time
• Retention analysis.
• Analytics dashboards – for easy access to key insights from one place.
• A/B and multivariate testing – to select the best-performing in-app flows.

Thanks to them, you can analyze user journeys to identify the happy paths to activation and personalize the onboarding experiences for different user personas.

Does Userpilot have any limitations?

It doesn’t support mobile apps and it isn’t suitable for onboarding employees.

Userpilot pricing

Considering its powerful capabilities, Userpilot is very competitively priced.

It offers 3 plans:

• Starter – from $249 per month.
• Growth – from $799 per month.
• Enterprise – custom pricing.

The most popular Growth plan gives you access to all the engagement, feedback, and analytics features.

#2. Pendo: Best onboarding software for mobile onboarding

Pendo is another strong contender in the digital adoption platform market. It’s one of the best-established platforms, known for its analytics and catering to large enterprise clients.

As Userpilot doesn’t currently support mobile apps, we recommend Pendo as a worthy alternative.

Pendo features

Pendo onboarding is based on in-app experiences called Guides. There are 5 main guide types:

• Lightboxes – like Userpilot’s modals, can include various kinds of content, like videos.
• Banners – like Lightboxes but larger and with limited customization options, so can only be used for maintenance notifications.
• Tooltips.
• Polls – microsurveys for feedback collection.
• Walkthroughs – made up of tooltips, they guide users through the product.

In addition, you can create:

• Onboarding checklists – available through the resource center, and cannot be triggered contextually.
• Resource Center – that allows knowledge base integration (e.g. Zendesk).

When it comes to analytics, Pendo supports:

• User segmentation.
• Retroactive analytics (no need to tag events or features to track them).
• Funnel analysis.
• Path analytics.
• Cohort analysis.
• Pendo AI – to help teams find trends and insights in user behavior data.
• Session replays – recordings of user interactions with the product UI, available as an add-on.

Pendo pricing

Pendo offers 3 pricing plans:

• Free.
• Growth.
• Portfolio.

While Pendo claims the pricing to be ‘downright simple’, it doesn’t seem to be. For starters, prices for the Growth and Portfolio plans are available upon request only, and many of its features are available as add-ons.

Overall, Pendo is said not to be the cheapest onboarding solution.

#3. WalkMe: Best for guided customer onboarding experiences

WalkMe is recognized as an excellent tool for creating guided customer onboarding experiences. It aims to streamline user experiences across applications and support SaaS businesses in their efforts to improve customer satisfaction and speed up product adoption processes.

Its application isn’t limited to customer onboarding. Companies can use it to support digital transformation and staff onboarding, the latter being essential for employee retention and productivity.

WalkMe features

Relevant onboarding features in WalkMe include:

• Interactive Walk-Thrus (step-by-step guides).
• ShoutOuts and SmartTips – tooltips, pop-ups, and balloons.
• Task Lists (checklists).
• Segmentation and personalization.
• Surveys.

Analytics analytics features are fairly limited. They include:

• Product usage tracking.
• Event tracking.
• Session streams.
• User Recordings.
• AI Predictive Analysis.
• Dashboards.

WalkMe Pricing

WalkMe offers two pricing plans: WalkMe for employees and WalkMe for customers. Both of them come with custom pricing available upon request.

#4. Intercom: Best for personalized customer communication during onboarding

Intercom is a customer support platform that helps businesses build better customer relationships through personalized, messenger-based experiences.

It’s widely used for support, sales, and marketing by enabling live chat on websites, in-app messaging, and automated chatbots to engage with customers in real-time.

Such capabilities can be a massive advantage during onboarding. However, on its own, it may not always be sufficient to support the whole process.

Intercom features

Here’s an overview of key Intercom features:

• In-app messaging – modals, tooltips, and banners.
• Product tours and onboarding checklists.
• Live Chat and AI-powered chatbot.
• Email campaigns.
• User segmentation for targeted messaging.
• Surveys.
• Knowledge base.

Analytics are available in Intercom as an add-on and allow you to analyze user acquisition, engagement, and retention data. It offers 4 dashboards where you can view data on segments, user attributes, support conversations, and teammate performance.

Intercom Pricing

If you think Intercom functionality matches your needs, you have 3 plans to choose from:

• Essential – from $39 per seat/month.
• Advanced – from $99 per seat/month.
• Expert – from $139 per seat/month.

#5. Appcues: Best for building and optimizing onboarding flows without code

Appcues is a cloud-based platform designed to help businesses improve user onboarding, engagement, and retention through personalized in-app experiences.

It focuses on making it easier for product teams to create and manage in-app tours, tips, announcements, and surveys without needing to write code.

The platform supports both mobile and web apps, but its analytics features are no match for Userpilot or Pendo.

Appcues features

Appcues features include:

• UI patterns – tooltips, modals, hotspots, slideouts, hotspots, pins, banners.
• Checklists.
• Interactive walkthroughs.
• Surveys, including NPS.

Appcues analytics are limited mostly to event tracking and flow analytics. For example, you can conduct funnel analysis of onboarding flow stages, but not user journey stages.

Apart from that, there’s also segmentation, goal tracking, and experimentation (A/B tests).

Appcues Pricing

There are 3 Appcues pricing plans:

• Essentials – from $249 per month.
• Growth – from $879 per month.
• Enterprise – custom pricing.

#6. Userlane: Best for interactive user onboarding guides and tutorials

Userlane is a digital adoption platform designed to facilitate seamless onboarding, training, and support for software users, including customers and new team members. Just like WalkMe, it also supports digital transformation projects and change management processes.

It achieves this by offering interactive, step-by-step guides directly within web applications, helping users to navigate complex software environments more easily.

If you’re looking for a solution that will help you enhance the user experience and ensure your users can leverage software to its full potential without extensive training, Userlane may be the tool.

Userlane features

Userlane offers a range of interactive user onboarding features you’d expect from a tool of this caliber:

• UI patterns – tooltips, modals, banners.
• Userlane Guides (interactive walkthroughs).
• Checklists.
• Surveys – basic feedback functionality.
• AI-powered updates and customization (it automatically detects UI changes).
• User segmentation.

When it comes to product analytics, Userlane enables teams to track HEART analytics. This is an acronym for Happiness, Engagement, Adoption, Retention, and Task Success, and was originally developed by Google.

Userlane Pricing

If you were hoping to get Userlane pricing plan details here, then I must disappoint you. Userlane offers only custom pricing and to get it, you need to contact the sales team. This adds friction to the decision-making process.

#7. Chameleon: Best for in-app product tours and onboarding flows

Chameleon is a product adoption platform best known for its highly customizable in-app product tours and onboarding flows.

By focusing on interactive and intuitive in-app guidance, teams can use Chameleon to help their customers navigate through apps more effectively, which improves the user experience and drives product adoption.

Chameleon features

Chameleon offers a wide range of onboarding features that address most use cases:

• Tooltips (their different styles include Help, Info, Hotspot, Beacon, and Labels).
• Modals and banners.
• Tours (Flows, Walkthroughs, Guides, Tutorials).
• Checklists (triggered from Launchers).
• Dynamic experience personalization through segmentation and environments.
• Resource Center.
• Localization.
• In-app microsurveys.

Just like Appcues, Chameleon offers basic analytics features, which include:

• Real-time event tracking for contextual triggering.
• Experience reporting (from one dashboard).
• Goals (conversion tracking).
• A/B testing.

Chameleon Pricing

There are 4 Chameleon pricing plans:

• Helpbar – free.
• Startup – from $279 per month.
• Growth – from $1250 per month.
• Enterprise – custom pricing.

Gainsight: Best for customer success and onboarding automation

Gainsight is a company known for its Customer Success (CS) and Product Experience (PX) software, which helps businesses manage customer relationships more effectively.

Customer success teams use Gainsight’s software to track customer health scores, manage accounts, and automate communications. It also provides analytics and insights into customer behavior, helping companies to understand their customers’ needs and preferences more deeply.

Additionally, Gainsight PX, a part of their product offering, focuses on enhancing the product experience by gathering user feedback, conducting A/B testing, and personalizing user journeys.

Gainsight features

Gainsight supports a few relevant features for customer onboarding:

• In-app guides – walkthroughs, tooltips, banners, modals.
• Bots – onboarding checklists.
• Knowledge Center.
• Surveys and feedback management enable teams to use feedback to inform product development.
• A/B testing.

Gainsight offers fairly advanced analytics. In addition to the Customer Health Score and Customer 360 which offers a comprehensive, unified view of each customer’s data and interactions with your business, Gainsight supports:

• Retention analysis.
• Funnel analysis.
• Adoption analytics.
• Path analytics.
• In-app, email, survey, and knowledge center performance analysis.

Gainsight Pricing

The company offers two pricing plans: Essentials and Enterprise.

Both of them offer the same onboarding functionality – and both come with custom pricing plans. The word is that it costs over $2500 per month, though. If that’s true, it isn’t the most affordable solution in the roundup.

ClickUp: Best collaborative employee onboarding software

ClickUp is a cloud-based project management and productivity software that makes a robust solution for new hire onboarding.

Is it the best employee onboarding software?

It is probably not because it isn’t a dedicated onboarding platform and doesn’t offer features like an employee self-service portal that you can find in other HR tools.

However, its highly customizable functionality makes it more than adequate for onboarding new employees, especially if you already use it to manage other workflows in your business.

In addition, hiring managers can use it to support HR processes – for example, as an applicant tracking system or to manage staff development.

ClickUp features

What ClickUp features could you leverage to support the employee onboarding process?

• ClickUp Forms – to collect all necessary employee details and gather feedback.
• ClickUp Docs – for document management, e.g. SOPs.
• Task management – to stay on top of all the new hire onboarding tasks.
• Automated workflows – to eliminate repetitive tasks.
• Custom dashboards.
• Templates – including employee onboarding templates, handbook templates, SOP templates, and HR templates.

ClickUp Pricing

There are 4 ClickUp pricing plans available:

• Forever Free.
• Unlimited – from $7 per member/month.
• Business – from $12 per member/month.
• Enterprise – custom pricing.

Conclusion

Whether you’re onboarding remote employees or digital app users, a solid onboarding platform can help you automate the process and create experiences tailored to each individual’s unique needs.

What are the next steps for you?

Hopefully, having read our round-up you know which tools to consider and which not. It’s time to analyze their pricing plans in more detail to ensure they include the features you need, look at the online reviews, sign up for free trials, and book demos.

Talking of demos, if you’d like to learn more about Userpilot’s onboarding features, you can get the demo here!