What is WalkMe? Features, Pricing, and Alternatives

What is WalkMe? Which features does it offer to product teams? How much does it cost? How does it compare to other similar tools?

These are the main questions we discuss in this article, so if you’re after the answers, you’re in the right place!

Let’s dive in, shall we?

TL;DR

• WalkMe is a digital adoption platform. It’s widely used to support digital transformation projects through super detailed user education programs and new employee onboarding.
• SaaS startups can use WalkMe to onboard customers, keep them in the loop about product changes, and provide ongoing support inside the product.
• To create onboarding experiences for your users, you can create Smart Walk-Thrus, which are interactive step-by-step guides. User segmentation features allow you to personalize them for different user personas or cohorts.
• SmartTips and ShoutOuts are on-screen WalkMe’s UI patterns for in-app messaging.
• WalkMe supports analytics features such as Tracked Events, Session Streams, User Recordings, and AI Predictive Analysis to gain actionable insights into user in-app behavior.
• WalkMe Surveys allow you to collect customer feedback, including NPS data.
• Thanks to ActionBot and Resources, WalkMe users can provide on-demand support and guidance to customers without engaging the customer support team.
• WalkMe offers custom pricing plans based on predicted usage.
• Userpilot is an alternative product adoption platform with better analytics and feedback features. It’s easier to implement and use and offers greater value for money.
• If you want to see how Userpilot can support your product onboarding and in-app communication, book the demo!

What is WalkMe digital adoption platform?

WalkMe is a digital adoption platform that organizations use for delivering onboarding experiences to improve the adoption of their mobile and web applications.

While its original use case was employee onboarding, it has now also been developed to support customer onboarding.

What is the use of WalkMe?

Product and customer success teams can use WalkMe to boost product adoption and take advantage of account expansion opportunities.

WalkMe also helps organizations to:

• Support digital transformation processes.
• Create personalized onboarding experiences.
• Provide on-demand self-serve support.
• Drive new feature discovery and adoption with contextual guidance.
• Discover and remove friction points from the user journey to promote customer success.
• Collect and analyze data on product usage to make informed decisions.

WalkMe for employee experience: feature overview

As an employee onboarding platform, WalkMe is used for retraining existing employees when implementing new software solutions and onboarding new staff.

The relevant features include:

• Management dashboards.
• Analytics to track engagement with the product features and digital experiences.
• Workflow automation to streamline repetitive and routine tasks.
• In-app experiences to provide on-screen guidance and drive engagement.
• Workstation employee hub.

WalkMe for customer experience: feature overview

WalkMe also offers a dedicated package for creating customer experiences. It relies on some of the features used for employee onboarding as well as dedicated features like NPS surveys.

To enable its customers to make good use of the product and all its features, the company offers training and certification programs via its Digital Adoption Institute.

Create interactive user onboarding for different segments

WalkMe enables product teams to deliver user onboarding experiences with Smart Walk-Thrus.

What are they?

They are basically interactive product tours made up of ‘tip balloons’ that provide users with step-by-step guidance. For example, you could use them to walk your customer through the key product features when they first sign up.

What’s important is that you can personalize your onboarding flows and guidance for each user segment.

In this way, you ensure your users get only the relevant information and only at the time they need it. This helps you avoid overwhelming them and reduces the time to value.

Trigger in-app messages to engage customers

Another way to provide on-screen guidance and drive user action is through SmartTips and ShoutOuts.

SmartTips are basically tooltips that appear inside the product to provide additional information about a UI element. For example, you can use them to attract user attention to a specific feature that is important for their use case.

ShoutOuts are in-app messages for customer communication – they are excellent for bringing software end users up to do with product updates and providing additional information about features.

What’s more, you can use them to prompt your users to complete a task by adding a CTA button. You can also attach a video tutorial, add a knowledge base document, or link to another page in the ShoutOuts. In this way, you ensure that users see essential information.

The easiest way to create ShoutOuts is by choosing one of the pre-designed templates from Theme Gallery and customizing them with the Visual Designer (WYSIWYG editor) to match your native UI design.

Track product analytics for data-driven decision-making

WalkMe offers a range of analytics features that allow detailed analysis of user in-app behavior.

With Tracked Events, you can track user engagement with specific features over time. You can also track user engagement with in-app experiences like SmartTips, ShoutOuts, or WalkThroughs.

What’s more, Session Streams enable you to map out the paths users take inside the product. In this way, you can identify the happy paths for different customer segments and optimize their user journeys.

User recordings offer even more granular insights into user behavior. They allow you to watch every single action that the user takes while interacting with the product, enabling you to identify friction areas in the UI.

WalkMe also offers AI Predictive Analytics, which enable teams to anticipate user actions. In short, the feature analyzes user behavior and predicts what they might do next. For example, it could warn you about potential user churn so that you can re-engage the at-risk users in time.

All the data can be visualized in custom reports and dashboards.

Collect customer feedback via surveys to understand sentiments

WalkMe enables you to collect customer feedback at scale so that you can better understand not only what the users do but also why.

WalkMe Surveys allow you to ask multiple-choice or open-ended questions for qualitative responses. You can trigger them from the WalkThrus, ShoutOuts, or quick start buttons called Launchers.

You can use the in-app surveys to design and trigger NPS surveys to measure user satisfaction and loyalty.

Provide self-service support to users

WalkMe is also a robust platform for round-the-clock self-service support.

Its chatbot feature, called ActionBot, provides users with answers to FAQs, suggests relevant self-serve resources, and responds to common requests. This can help you reduce support tickets and takes the load off the shoulders of the support team.

WalkMe also offers a help center widget called WalkMe Menu Player.

It enables you to embed video and text resources so your users can easily access them without leaving the page. Once the user chooses a particular resource, it simply appears in a window called Lightbox.

How much is WalkMe pricing?

Both WalkMe for employee experience and WalkMe for customer experience comes with custom pricing.

Users have reported that WalkMe isn’t a cheap product and its pricing is more suitable for larger companies rather than startups or scaleups.

An important thing to note is that the cost is based not on actual usage but on potential usage. Basically, you have to sign an annual agreement before you really use the product and state how much you’re going to use it.

Moreover, some features like the user recording analysis and session stream are add-ons so you need to pay extra for them.

Strengths and limitations of WalkMe digital adoption platform

WalkMe is a very robust platform with a number of strengths:

✅ Intuitive UI

✅ Solid set of onboarding features

✅ High levels of customization and personalization

✅ Robust analytics features

However, customers report a number of downsides too:

❌ Complex product and not entirely code-free, which could make it challenging for non-tech users

❌ Steep learning curve

❌ Limited survey functionality

❌ Implementation requires time and resources

❌ High and complex cost

Userpilot: A better alternative than WalkMe for creating powerful user experiences

WalkMe is an excellent solution for enterprise companies with considerable resources available for its implementation and maintenance.

What if you are a small or medium size SaaS business not fussed about staff training but instead looking for an affordable yet powerful alternative that’s easy to set up, manage and use?

Userpilot could be the answer.

Provide dynamic user education with in-app guidance

With Userpilot, you have the choice of 6 different UI patterns for in-app messaging: tooltips, pop-up modals, banners, slideouts, hotspots, and driven actions. They’re easy to design thanks to the template library and WYSIWYG editor.

You can trigger them to provide users in-app guidance at specific times/pages, or contextually, for example when a user completes a specific action.

The in-app messages can be used individually or you can use them together to build interactive walkthroughs or checklists to drive product adoption.

In addition, Userpilot supports the resource center functionality to provide self-service support and boost your customer education efforts.

Collect contextual customer feedback from existing customers

Thanks to Userplitot’s template library, creating surveys is a breeze. All you have to do is pick one of the templates and customize it to your needs by changing the design and modifying the questions.

The templates include industry-standard surveys like PMF, CSAT, and NPS.

Speaking of NPS, Userpilot offers a dedicated NPS dashboard with insights into your survey results. Apart from the standard breakdown into detractors, passives, and promoters, it also provides the overall score and tracks it over time.

What’s more, with Userpilot, you can tag the qualitative NPS responses for easier analysis and user segmentation.

Monitor trends in user behavior in-app

Userpilot offers a range of advanced analytics features that enable teams to make data-driven decisions. These features include:

• User segmentation
• Feature usage tracking (clicks, hovers, form infills)
• Event tracking (including custom events)
• Heatmaps
• In-app experience analytics, including resource center and checklist engagement tracking
• Paths, trends, and funnel analysis (coming in September 2023)

Optimize customer experiences with AI-powered features

Userpilot is working hard to implement AI-powered solutions to provide an even better experience for your customers.

Thanks to the AI writing assistant, you can easily create and refine your product microcopy. The app also uses AI for content localization, so that you can easily translate your surveys for your target audience around the globe.

There are more AI features in the pipeline. The first one to watch out for is AI-powered feedback analysis, but that’s not the end, so watch the space.

How much is Userpilot pricing?

Userpilot offers 3 pricing plans:

• Starter – from $249/month
• Growth – custom pricing
• Enterprise – custom pricing

To see which plan suits your needs, you can book a demo.

Conclusion

WalkMe is an extremely robust platform for customer and employee onboarding and training. You can use it to drive feature and product adoption with in-app experiences and provide on-demand support to improve customer satisfaction.

However, the product comes with a steep learning curve, requires a complex setup, and is not the cheapest digital adoption platform available on the market.

Userpilot offers better value for money and is easier to implement. If you want to see how it can help your organization, book the demo!