What Is Pendo and Is It Worth Using?

What is Pendo?

If you’re looking for the answer to this question, you’re in the right place!

In this article, we discuss Pendo’s use cases, main features, pricing, limitations, and how it can help your product grow. We also have a quick look at Userpilot as a worthy Pendo alternative.

Let’s get right to it!

TL;DR

• Pendo is a product growth platform for product, marketing, customer success, and UX design teams.
• It enables businesses to analyze user in-app behavior, collect customer feedback to make data-led decisions, improve user onboarding, and communicate effectively with users.
• Pendo Guides are in-app experiences that you can use to onboard your users and keep them up to date with releases.
• The app allows you to launch in-app surveys to collect qualitative and quantitative user feedback, including NPS data.
• Pendo Feedback is a module for collecting and managing customer requests.
• Paths, Funnels, Segmentation, and Retention analysis are some of the analytics features that Pendo is known for.
• Roadmaps are a new Pendo feature for communicating and sharing product vision.
• Pendo is currently developing AI features to enhance experience personalization, product discovery and accelerate product-led growth.
• Despite its strengths, the app has some obvious drawbacks: high cost, steep learning curve, and lack of real-time data reporting.
• Userpilot is an attractive Pendo alternative. It allows you to complete all the JTBDs that Pendo does – more easily and at a fraction of the cost. To see how it works, book the demo!

What is Pendo?

Pendo is a digital adoption platform (DAP).

What does this mean?

Pendo allows SaaS businesses to track user engagement and in-app behavior to better understand their needs and wants. It also offers surveys and feedback tools that allow you to measure customer insights and collect ideas on how to improve the product.

Finally, Pendo enables you to design in-app onboarding experiences for both customers and staff and communicate with them inside your product to drive product adoption.

Who can use the Pendo app?

Pendo solutions were originally developed for product managers and product teams who wanted to optimize product experiences and collect actionable insights through analytics and customer feedback.

However, other teams from across the organization can also use Pendo to achieve their goals:

• Marketing teams – to better understand user needs and expectations and communicate with them to announce new features or drive upsells and cross-sells.
• Customer success teams – to identify user pain points and provide in-app guidance to address them or to remove friction from the user journey.
• UX designers – to analyze user engagement patterns and optimize UX.

Why should I use Pendo?

Pendo helps product organizations achieve a number of goals and objectives:

• Analyze user behavior inside the product to understand their needs and preferences and inform future product development.
• Collect and analyze user feedback to assess user satisfaction levels and understand the ‘why’ behind their actions.
• Improve user onboarding and help them discover relevant features.
• Drive product adoption and improve customer retention.
• Segment users and deliver personalized product experiences.
• Announce new features and improve their adoption.
• Identify and maximize account expansion opportunities.

How can software companies use Pendo?

Pendo offers a number of valuable features essential to ensure sustainable product growth. These can be used for both web and mobile apps.

In-app guides for increasing user engagement

Pendo Guides are in-app experiences that you can use to communicate with users, help them discover new features, design onboarding experiences, and collect customer feedback.

Guides include UI patterns such as tooltips, lightboxes/modals, and banners. You can trigger these individually or combine them into onboarding walkthroughs and checklists.

The latter are available through the Resource Center which can be used for on-demand self-service customer support.

Sentiment for tracking customer loyalty and satisfaction

Apart from UI patterns and walkthroughs, Pendo Guides also include Polls which are basically in-app surveys you can use to gather feedback.

One of the surveys offered is the NPS survey for tracking customer satisfaction and loyalty. Pendo also offers a dedicated NPS dashboard where you can see the overall score, the breakdown into detractors, passives, and promoters and track NPS trends over time.

You can deliver the NPS surveys not only in-app but also via email to increase response rates. However, please note that all surveys in the Free plan come with Pendo branding.

Feedback for collecting customer requests

While Pendo Polls are used to collect feedback and assess how customers feel about your product, Pendo Feedback focuses on customer requests.

In short, the feature allows teams to collect and prioritize feature requests at scale. They can do it by triggering in-app forms consisting both of close-ended questions, like multiple choice or numerical scale, or open-ended questions to collect qualitative data.

Analytics for tracking user behavior in-app

Pendo is probably best known for its advanced analytics and reporting features.

These include:

• Paths – to identify and track all the possible sequences of user actions leading up to or following an event.
• Funnels – to track how users progress through a pre-defined sequence of actions leading up to a specific goal. For example, you could use it to track user conversion rates and drop-offs in the onboarding flows.
• Segmentation – to group users based on specific criteria, for instance, in-app behavior, survey responses, or demographic properties.
• Cohort and retention analysis – to track how long users stay with the product over time. For example, you could use it to assess the impact of product updates on retention or seasonal fluctuations.
• Reports – to track and analyze data on page views, feature clicks, event completion, and Guide views.

Roadmaps for seamless product planning

Pendo Roadmaps are included in Pendo Feedback and allow you to visualize and share your product vision and strategy.

Thanks to the intuitive drag-and-drop interface, you can easily create timelines, customize swimlanes, and add new initiatives and features.

While Roadmaps are designed for internal use, you can export them as images and share them with customers as well.

Pendo AI for increasing customer satisfaction

Pendo is currently working on implementing AI solutions to enhance its products.

The three AI features in the pipeline are:

• AI-powered personalization – for delivering the right content to the right users at the right time automatically.
• AI-powered product discovery – using AI to identify trends in customer data and feedback in less time.
• AI-powered product-led growth – workflow suggestions and generating campaigns that will improve retention, conversions, engagement and help organizations achieve their business goals.

The features promise to deliver 10x value to the customers once launched.

How much is Pendo pricing?

Pendo offers a free plan, but it’s of limited use. That is because lots of features are not included, and its usage is capped at 500 MAUs.

The Starter plan starts at $7,000 a year for 2,000 MAUs. However, this goes up to $35,000 for 10,000 MAUs and still doesn’t include some of the features like Pendo Feedback.

Pendo offers two more plans; Growth and Portfolio. Both come with custom pricing.

Overall, Pendo turns out to be quite pricey once you take into account the add-ons and usage limits.

Is Pendo worth using?

Is Pendo the product for you? Here’s a list of its pros and cons, so you can decide for yourself.

Pendo’s strengths include:

✅ Support for mobile and web-based apps

✅ Comprehensive analytics

✅ Integrations

✅ Intuitive UI

✅ Promising roadmap with AI features

However, there are also a few weaknesses:

❌ High cost

❌ Steep learning curve – Pendo collects tons of data, but it’s hard to visualize it in a useful way. To generate reports that will provide you with actionable insights, you may need a fair bit of data science expertise.

❌ No real-time data reporting, so you can’t trigger event-based experiences.

Userpilot: A better alternative to Pendo for product adoption and growth

Considering the high cost, steep learning curve, and lack of real-time data reporting, you may want to consider other low-code solutions instead.

Userpilot can help you address all these pain points. Here’s what you can achieve with its features:

• Creating a personalized customer experience – Userpilot allows you to segment your users based on their unique characteristics, like JTBDs, and personalize their experiences accordingly.In this way, users quickly discover the features relevant to their use cases and experience value.

• Increasing engagement through contextual in-app messaging – triggering in-app messages at the exact moment when users need information or when they’re most relevant drives customer engagement and product adoption.

• Collecting and analyzing customer feedback – with Userpilot, you can actively and passively collect feedback. You can also analyze qualitative and quantitative data to gain a better understanding of user needs.

• Measuring how users interact in-app – Userpilot offers robust analytics features like heatmaps and custom events that allow you to track user in-app behavior.Funnels, paths, and trend analysis to be launched in September 2023 will make Userpilot an even more comprehensive product analytics app.

• Providing on-demand customer support – Userpilot offers the resource center functionality for on-demand customer support 24/7. This reduces the number and cost of support tickets and increases user satisfaction and success.

• Optimizing product experiences with AI features – Userpilot offers an AI-powered writing assistant for in-app flows.It also uses AI for content localization, and there are more AI features coming, including AI-driven feedback analysis.

Userpilot pricing

Apart from the features, pricing is another area where Userpilot is a more attractive offering than Pendo.

The lowest plan, Starter, is available for as little as $249/month for up to 2,500 MUAs or $349 for up to 10,000 MAUs. This works out to be yearly $2,988 and $4,188 respectively, which is much cheaper than the $7,000-$35,000 Pendo charges, especially as the plan includes all the analytics and feedback features.

There are also Growth and Enterprise plans that come with custom pricing.

Conclusion

Pendo is a well-established product adoption platform with excellent analytics features. It allows teams to design onboarding experiences and communicate effectively with customers inside mobile and web apps.

However, Pendo has a number of weaknesses like high costs and a steep learning curve.

If you want to see how Userpilot can help you achieve the same objectives as Pendo with less effort and at a lower cost, book the demo!