Pendo vs UserGuiding vs Product Fruits for Customer Experience Management
Looking for a good customer experience management tool and wondering which one of Pendo, UserGuiding, and Product Fruits is the best option for your SaaS company? Let’s compare them!
There are plenty of tools for customer experience management on review sites, but they don’t make the choice any easier.
The crux of the issue is – to make the right choice, you need to account for your priorities: your different jobs to be done, budget, and the size of your company. But don’t worry – we’re coming to help!
In this post, we’ll discuss exactly that – which tool is best for customer experience management depending on the different criteria that different SaaS companies may have.
Let’s dive in!
TL;DR
- Customer Experience Management (CXM) is the practice of strategically managing and optimizing every interaction and touchpoint that a customer has with a company throughout their entire customer journey.The goal of CXM is to ensure that customers have positive and satisfying experiences at every stage of their interaction with a brand, from initial awareness through post-purchase support and beyond.
Let’s explore how Pendo, UserGuiding, and Product Fruits compare when it comes to customer experience management.
- Pendo is a product adoption platform that lets teams monitor product usage, analyze user behavior, and publish in-app guides. The no-code solution focuses on increasing user engagement and driving feature discovery.
- UserGuiding is a no-code product adoption tool that lets users create in-app walkthroughs, guides, and checklists. The solution makes it possible for teams to onboard, engage, and retain users without needing coding skills to create these in-app experiences.
- Product Fruits is a platform designed to help you tackle issues related to software adoption. With a focus on seamless customer onboarding, this tool allows companies to create engaging in-app journeys.
- 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.
- If you’re looking for a better option for customer experience management, Userpilot exceeds both functionality and value for money compared to other tools on the list. Get a Userpilot demo for customer experience management and drive your product growth code-free.
There is a better tool for your SaaS than Pendo!
What is customer experience management
Customer Experience Management (CXM) is the practice of strategically managing and optimizing every interaction and touchpoint that a customer has with a company throughout their entire customer journey.
The goal of CXM is to ensure that customers have positive and satisfying experiences at every stage of their interaction with a brand, from initial awareness through post-purchase support and beyond.
Pendo for customer experience management
Pendo is a product adoption platform that has the usual onboarding features that are commonly included with similar solutions. However, those using Pendo Free will need to note that they’ll need to find a new onboarding solution once they cross 500 MAUs or upgrade to the paid version.
There are a few ways you can use Pendo to improve your new user onboarding flows:
- Guide Layouts: Pendo has layout templates for lightboxes, banners, and tooltips that you can use to build onboarding flows for new users.
- Flow Triggers: Pendo’s guide activation options let you trigger an onboarding flow when new users land on a particular URL, use a specific device type, interact with a tagged element, or match the target segment.
- Localization Settings: Localization settings can stop an onboarding flow from triggering if it hasn’t been translated into the user’s chosen language. Because Pendo has no AI-powered localization features, you’ll need to upload language CSVs manually for this to work.
- Onboarding Module: You can add the onboarding module to your in-app resource center in two clicks then change the color, text style, and progress icon to align it with your product’s brand palette.
Pendo pros
Let’s take a look at some of the benefits of using Pendo:
- No-Code: Pendo lets you create surveys, in-app guides, and track metrics without needing to write your own code, which saves a lot of time (while making product experiments or split-testing a lot easier).
- Custom Themes: Pendo’s themes let you create multiple palettes and ensure that any in-app materials published align with your existing brand palette (however, you can only create/customize themes after you’ve installed the Pendo snippet).
- Flexible Dashboards: Pendo has plenty of widgets that you can add to your dashboard, including feature adoption, net promoter score, poll results, guide engagement, product stickiness, and MAUs — so you always have your most important metrics within reach.
- Integrations: Pendo has 50 different integrations to choose from including popular tools like Intercom, Jira, Okta, and HubSpot. Unfortunately, only four of these — Salesforce, Segment, Workato, and Zendesk — are two-way integrations that can share data both ways.
- Multi-Platform Analytics: Because Pendo is compatible with mobile applications, you’ll be able to track product analytics for both web apps and mobile apps. This gives you a more holistic view of how users (or specific segments) use your product on different platforms. Note: You’ll need to upgrade to Pendo Portfolio to add more than one product to your account.
Pendo cons
While Pendo certainly has quite a few benefits that make it an appealing solution, there are also a few notable drawbacks that you should be aware of before you choose the platform as your product adoption tool:
- Pricing Jumps: While Pendo does offer a free version, it has a limit of 500 MAUs. Upon reaching the MAU limit, you’ll need to upgrade to continue using most of Pendo’s features (and paid plans tend to cost thousands of dollars per month).
- Locked Features: Key features like the data explorer, resource center, and product engagement score are locked behind the Growth or Portfolio plan.
- Data Lag: Pendo’s analytics dashboards only update once per hour. In some cases, this data lag could lead product teams to make the wrong decisions or draw false conclusions from outdated insights.
Pendo pricing
Pricing for most paid Pendo plans (except Starter) is only provided on a quote basis and there are no listed price ranges on the solution’s website. That said, certain reviews have stated that prices start at upwards of $20,000 per year for a single product and more than twice that for higher plans.
Pendo has three paid plans and one free version that is limited to 500 MAUs which makes it accessible to startups but difficult to scale in the long run.
Here are the differences between each Pendo plan:
- Pendo Free: The free version of Pendo can accommodate 500 MAUs and has features like native analytics dashboards, feature tagging, event tracking, segmentation, NPS surveys (with Pendo branding), analytics reports, and in-app guides.
- Growth: Pendo’s Growth plan is designed to be used for a single web or mobile app but can accommodate a custom number of MAUs. It includes features like native analytics dashboards, in-app guides, NPS surveys and response tracking, and customer support.
- Starter: The Starter plan starts at $7,000 per year (or $2,000 per quarter) for 2,000 MAUs and is the cheapest upgrade option available for freemium users. Starter includes features like Product Areas, NPS surveys without Pendo branding, and (limited) NPS analytics. Note: You’ll need to upgrade to the Growth or Portfolio plan to get full NPS analytics.
- Portfolio: Pendo’s Portfolio plan is targeted towards customers who want to use the tool for multiple web and/or mobile apps. Features include guide experiment capabilities, cross-app executive dashboards, cross-app journey reporting, and access to product engagement scores.
UserGuiding for customer experience management
As a no-code onboarding tool, UserGuiding has numerous features that will help you create onboarding flows for your new customers and guide them throughout their journey.
Here’s what you’ll get when you start using UserGuiding:
- Create interactive product walkthroughs without disturbing your developers as it’s completely code-free.
- Build onboarding checklists and drive customers to the activation point by eliminating the guesswork on what the next step should be.
- Create interactive elements, such as product tours, tooltips, and pop-ups, to help keep users engaged and increase the likelihood that they’ll complete the onboarding process.
- Create a resource center to add different educational resources for your users.
Though UserGuiding is a great tool for startups that don’t have much money to invest in an onboarding tool, it has very strict limitations for the Basic plan.
You can only create a maximum of 20 guides and hotspots, 2 onboarding checklists, and 1 resource center. If you want to create unlimited guides with unlimited UI patterns, you should go for the Professional plan which can cost from $299 to $399.
The one drawback when using UserGuiding for onboarding is the fact that its analytics dashboard only encompasses the elements that you’ve created within the platform. In contrast, Userpilot is able to track all elements, events, and behaviors throughout the entire user journey.
UserGuiding pros
UserGuiding has quite a few benefits as a product adoption solution, particularly for early-stage SaaS companies that need an easy-to-use starter tool for their small (but growing) team of product developers or marketers. Let’s look at some of the pros that UserGuiding has to offer:
- Chrome extension – UserGuiding utilizes a no-code Chrome extension.
- Survey template gallery – UserGuiding lets you choose from six survey templates or create your own survey from scratch.
- Analytics dashboard – users can see their monthly active users (MAUs) for the month, monitor the number of views their guides are getting, and see how many interactions checklists or resource centers have had in the past week from the UserGuiding homepage.
- Custom themes – granular theme customization and color selection.
- Easy onboarding – onboarding checklist walks you through key steps, such as how to get the UserGuiding Chrome extension and create your first guide.
UserGuiding cons
While there are quite a few benefits to using UserGuiding, there are three significant drawbacks to note:
- Dashboard customization – you can’t edit your home dashboard or choose which analytics you want to see.
- Pricing jumps – upgrading from Basic (2,500 MAUs) to Professional (20,000 MAUs) increases your subscription cost by more than 4x.
- Manual localization – UserGuiding doesn’t have AI-powered localization, so you’ll need to manually download, translate, and upload every CSV when attempting to localize content for your product.
- HubSpot integration – the UserGuiding-HubSpot integration is only a one-way integration which limits its functionality and prevents you from setting up two-way data synchronization between both platforms.
- Limited analytics – the analytics dashboard only shows you data for onboarding materials created with UserGuiding and even those analytics are quite limited as surveys only show you total responses rather than letting you select a date range.
- Survey limit – you can only have one active survey on the Basic plan which is disappointing considering UserGuiding costs over $1,000 annually (whereas Userpilot lets you create unlimited surveys and collect up to 250 responses per month on the cheapest plan).
UserGuiding pricing
UserGuiding has three plans to choose from, targeted towards a range of business sizes from startup to enterprise.
Here are UserGuiding’s specific pricing details:
- Basic: Costing $129/month, the Basic plan is targeted towards startups and SMBs. The Basic plan is quite limited as it caps your account at one active survey, two active checklists, and no more than 2,500 MAUs. Features include:
- Access to user identification features.
- Integrations with Google Analytics, HubSpot, Intercom, and more.
- Email and chat support.
- Customizable theme (only one).
- Professional: The Professional plan costs almost 4x as much as the Basic tier at $499/month. That said, it significantly increases capacity to 20,000 MAUs and improves the quality of customer support you’ll receive. Features include:
- Removal of UserGuiding branding.
- Language localization.
- Full customer support access.
- Five team member seats.
- Five customizable themes.
- Unlimited guides and checklists.
- Corporate: Subscriptions on the Corporate plan start at $999/month. Of course, this higher price does come with its fair share of enterprise perks. Features include:
- Service Level Agreement (SLA) + Data Processing Agreement (DPA).
- Up to 10 active surveys.
- Custom MAU capacity based on your needs.
- Unlimited team member seats.
- Unlimited customizable themes.
All monthly plans are marked down by 30% when customers choose to bill annually.
Product Fruits for customer experience management
If you’re looking for a tool to simplify your user onboarding process, Product Fruits can be your go-to. This software teaches your customers the ins and outs of your product. Moreover, its affordability makes it an appealing choice for budget-conscious small startups.
Here’s why Product Fruits can shine in your onboarding toolkit:
- Product Tours: Product Tours are a great way to welcome and introduce new users to your product. With Product Fruits you can craft step-by-step guides and embed videos from YouTube or Vimeo for interactive understanding. You can create cards that highlight your unique selling propositions to generate excitement. Additionally, the tours offer the option for users to initiate further exploration via a hint icon or special button. Want insights of your product tour? use Product Fruits Analytics features. It offers data on user interactions, completion rates, time spent, and more, helping you fine-tune your tours.
- In-app Announcements: Product Fruits uses pop-ups that appear over all other content, ensuring that users will see these messages before product tours. These pop-ups can be utilized for one-time announcements and are considered one of the best ways to share promotional content. Alongside pop-ups, Product Fruits offers a newsfeed feature. It lets you publish updates about your product in various formats. The newsfeed widget can be embedded into your application and will appear when a user clicks on an icon. A common practice is to use a bell icon accompanied by a badge showing the number of unread newsfeed items.
- Knowledge Base: This constitutes a database of information that users can use for assistance at any time. It simplifies article version management, allowing you to create work-in-progress versions and publish updates to production without altering the URL. Moreover, it’s possible to launch your help center on a personalized domain and integrate it into the structure of your website. The Life Ring Button allows users to directly access your web-based application’s knowledge base from anywhere on your product. And the best part? You don’t need any coding to do that.
Product Fruits pros
Product Fruits offers many benefits with its easy-to-use, no-code platform. It is one of the good solutions for companies looking for affordable user onboarding, product adoption, and product analytics.
So, what does Product Fruits bring to the table? Let’s explore its promising pros:
- Guided Product Tours: It guides users to learn about your app through step-by-step tours for new features.
- Newsfeed: Enhance your users’ connectivity by sharing updates about your product. Additionally, you can set specific newsfeed items which will be displayed in the knowledge base.
- Feedback Through Screenshots and Videos: This feature allows users to send screenshots or videos directly within the app to provide feedback.
- Tooltips: These are brief hints added to different parts of the application to guide users and prevent confusion
- Life Ring Button: A comprehensive support hub that combines all guidance and support resources in one location. This allows users to conveniently access onboarding flows, support documents, and tutorials, no matter what page they’re on.
- Custom Events: Trigger actions based on what users do in your app for more personal interaction.
- Segmentation: Create unique experiences for different types of users and show tailored content to separate user groups.
- Analytics: Gain valuable insights into user behavior, identify improvement areas, and address pain points effectively.
- AI Writer: This feature instantly generates your onboarding copy. However, it is only available in higher-tier plans.
Product Fruits cons
While Product Fruits does have its merits, it’s not without its share of issues. Let’s see some potential drawbacks that might have you considering alternatives.
- Absence of A/B Testing: Product Fruits lacks A/B testing, a vital feature for refining your product tours based on user responses and data-backed insights.
- Basic Analytics: Product Fruits does not offer in-depth analytics as its competitors like Userpilot. This makes it difficult to evaluate user interaction and the success of your onboarding.
- Insufficient Segmentation Options: The segmentation options here are only based on user attributes. This means you can’t highlight particular app functions or experiences based on a user’s past actions in your app, which can limit the customization of their experience.
- Missing Event-Based Triggering: The absence of real-time triggers may limit timely content delivery. This could affect the success of all in-app flows, such as product tours, tooltips, walkthroughs, modals, etc.
- Complex Tour Configuration: Configuring tours with specific conditions, especially when tuning CSS selectors, can be challenging and time-consuming.
- Limited Integrations: This tool links up with analytic tools, which is great. However, it doesn’t go beyond that. You won’t be able to bring in your resource center materials or link up your CRM unless you’re a Hubspot user.
Product Fruits pricing
The platform offers two distinct plans. Each of these plans is tailored to accommodate the number of users you have. Here’s a detailed breakdown of each plan:
- Core: $89/month for 1,500 users. This package includes features like tours & walkthroughs, a knowledge base, and basic integrations. Notably, the onboarding checklist is limited to three items, and there’s also a Life Ring Button for support and announcements feature.
- Boost: $149/month for 1,500 users. This package contains everything in the Core plan, with added benefits such as custom event triggers, advanced integrations, and an AI writer. It also includes features like NPS & Surveys, and access management, ensuring a smoother user experience.
- Enterprise: This plan is custom-priced according to your needs. It’s meant for larger organizations requiring features like SAML SSO, custom terms & conditions, SLA, and bespoke features and integrations.
Core plan is reasonably priced but may not provide the depth of features that a growing company might require. Hence, the Boost plan offers more comprehensive user onboarding and engagement tools. The customizable Enterprise plan is a more appropriate choice for organizations with specific requirements.
You can easily subscribe to any pricing plan without a credit card. Plus, there’s a 14-day free trial on offer. Opting for the yearly plan can be cost-effective, saving $20 on any plan.
Better alternative to Pendo, UserGuiding, and Product Fruits
We have discussed Pendo, UserGuiding, and Product Fruits for customer experience management with their pros, cons, and pricing. Let’s take a look at a better alternative – Userpilot.
Userpilot for customer experience management
User onboarding is a crucial part of the customer journey as it speeds up the adoption process and increases retention rates. Onboarding is one of Userpilot’s core use cases along with product growth analytics and user feedback, so it has plenty of features that you can utilize.
Here are some Userpilot features you can use when onboarding new users:
- No-code builder: Creating flows with Userpilot is as simple as installing the Chrome extension, selecting the UI patterns you’d like to use, and then editing the content/settings to suit your use case. You can also use templates to create modals, slideouts, tooltips, and driven actions.
- Native tooltips: Userpilot lets you create native tooltips that show up when users hover over an element or click on an information badge. Since these native tooltips attach to the element itself, they aren’t page-dependent and will show up on any screen where that element is visible.
- Funnel analytics: Userpilot’s advanced analytics lets you create funnel reports that track the onboarding journey. You can also add filters (like name, user ID, signup date, operating system, country, etc.) and monitor the total conversion rate from the first step of the funnel to the last.
- User segmentation: Userpilot lets you segment users based on the device they’re using, where they’re located, their engagement data, or which NPS rating they selected on the latest survey. You can then filter your analytics dashboards to see which segments struggle with onboarding.
Userpilot pros
As a full-suite digital adoption platform, Userpilot has all the features you need to onboard users, track analytics, and gather feedback from customers without writing a single line of code. Here are a few pros of using Userpilot as your product growth solution:
- No-code builder: Userpilot’s Chrome extension lets you build flows, add UI elements, and tag features without writing a single line of code.
- UI patterns: There are plenty of UI patterns to choose from when using Userpilot, such as hotspots, tooltips, banners, slideouts, modals, and more!
- Startup-friendly: Userpilot’s entry-level plan gives you access to all available UI patterns so you can hit the ground running.
- Walkthroughs and flows: Build engaging interactive walkthroughs and personalized onboarding flows that target specific segments of your user base.
- Self-service support: Build an in-app resource center to help users solve problems, customize its appearance to align it with your brand, and insert various types of content (videos, flows, or chatbots) to keep your customers satisfied.
- A/B testing: Userpilot’s built-in A/B testing capabilities will help you split-test flows, iterate on the best-performing variants, and continually optimize based on user behavior.
- Feedback collection: Userpilot has built-in NPS surveys with its own unified analytics dashboard and response tagging to help you retarget users. There are other survey types to choose from and you can even create your own custom survey.
- Survey templates: There are 14 survey templates to choose from so you can gather feedback on specific features or run customer satisfaction benchmarking surveys like CSAT and CES.
- Advanced analytics: Userpilot lets you analyze product usage data, monitor engagement on all in-app flows, and use the data to create user segments that are based on behaviors instead of demographics.
- Event tracking: Userpilot’s no-code event tracking lets you tag UI interactions (hovers, clicks, or form fills) and group them into a custom event that reflects feature usage.
- Third-party integrations: Userpilot has built-in integrations with tools like Amplitude, Mixpanel, Kissmetrics, Segment, Heap, HubSpot, Intercom, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager so you can share data between all the solutions in your tech stack.
Userpilot cons
Of course, no tool is perfect and there are a few cons to consider before choosing Userpilot as your user onboarding or product growth solution:
- Employee onboarding: Currently, Userpilot only supports in-app customer onboarding.
- Mobile apps: Userpilot doesn’t have any mobile compatibility which could make it difficult for developers with cross-platform applications to create a consistent user experience for both versions of their product.
- Freemium plan: There’s no freemium Userpilot plan so those bootstrapping their startup and need sub-$100 solutions should consider more affordable onboarding platforms like UserGuiding or Product Fruits.
Userpilot pricing
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.
Userpilot 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 $499/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).
Conclusion
In conclusion, as we’ve explored Pendo, UserGuiding, and Product Fruits for customer experience management, it becomes evident that there is a diverse landscape of solutions available to cater to your specific needs. Each of these tools brings its own set of features, advantages, and unique capabilities to the table. Whether you’re seeking enhanced functionality, cost-effectiveness, or a different approach to tackling your tasks, our guide has showcased a range of options.
Ultimately, the choice of the best alternative depends on your individual requirements and preferences. We hope that our exploration of these tools has provided you with valuable insights to help you make an informed decision.
There is a better tool for your SaaS than Pendo!
