Skip to main content

Top alternatives to UserGuiding



The market for DAP-s is growing, and many people are just getting familiar with the advantages that Digital Adoption Platforms can bring to their platforms. Now is the best time to get acquainted with the DAP market and see your options.


In this article I will discuss 3 alternatives to Userguiding, their pros and cons, to help you make an informed decision. 


First things first - what is Userguiding? 

Userguiding is a product walkthrough and user onboarding software as a service. It promises to help you create onboarding and product guides without any coding. 


You can create product adoption tours, user onboarding experiences such as onboarding checklists, NPS surveys and more.


Userguiding is integrated with Mixpanel, Google Tag Manager, Slack and more tools.


While offering a solid feature range - Userguiding’s pricing is based on MAUs - monthly active users, which can come up quite costly very quickly as your user base grows. 



Userguiding reviews


Userguiding has a rating of 4.2 out of 5 on ProductHunt based on 10 reviews, 4.7 out of 5 on G2 based on 75 reviews, and 4.7 out of 5 on Capterra (49 reviews). 


Pros 👍

Cons 👎

"We use UserGuiding for training new users, and the product tours are nice enough. What helped us most were the hotspots and tooltips for new features and updates."

"The price is a bit high. It would be great there is a free plan and feature based pricing."



Userguiding Pricing


  • Basic plan - up to 2,500 MAU - $129/mo

  • Professional plan - up to 20,000 MAU - $499/mo

  • Corporate plan - custom number of MAU - $999+ per month


MAU - Monthly Active Users


Userguiding has no free plan, which may make it difficult for smaller companies to evaluate it. To be fair, all paid plans come with a 14 day free trial. 


Why consider Userguiding alternatives


  1. Pricing - Userguiding limits their plans by number of Monthly Active Users. While this is a widespread approach in the SaaS industry, it is very restricting and unfair. In many cases, one may want to run tours only on a fraction of the customer base, thus overpaying for the rest of the users who may never interact with content from Userguiding.
    “The price is a bit high. It would be great if there is a free plan and feature based pricing.”

  2. Complexity and confusing interface - based on the online reviews some users find it a bit difficult to understand how the software works. With plenty of tools, Userguiding can be considered a feature-rich platform, but it can become overwhelming.

  3. Page targeting is too simple - as a customer experience professional, you may find it difficult to target your tours. Userguiding has page targeting, but it only works for page URL. There is a way to create customer segments, but it is separated from the guide targeting section, and options in segment creation are quite limited.

  4. Tour building only with extension - Userguiding limits users to build tours only using the extension, which doesn’t give the complete picture of the tour. This also means the tour needs to be built in a specific browser. Also, settings for steps are very limited too. The absence of step triggers may be a serious problem when working in a single-page application environment. 



Userguiding alternatives


Here are 3 great alternatives for Userguiding

  1. Usetiful

  2. InlineManual

  3. Stonly


1. Usetiful


Usetiful is a no-code Digital Adoption Platform that enables you to create highly targeted product onboarding experiences, such as product tours and onboarding checklists, as well as feature announcements, smart tips for forms.



Usetiful has a very democratic pricing and very sophisticated targeting and segmentation toolsets. It is straightforward to install and start using. 


Usetiful has a theme builder that features customization toggles and custom CSS, which allows you to entirely customize the look and feel of your content and make it feel like an organic part of your application. 


Usetiful Pricing


  • Free forever plan - EUR 0 forever - limited to 1 product tour, 1 page with smart tip, 1 checklist and 2,000 assists per month, 1 team seat

  • Plus - EUR 39 / m - 5,000 assists per month, 2 team seats

  • Premium - EUR 92 / m - 10,000 assists per month, 7 team seats

  • Enterprise - custom plan based on customer needs


Usetiful reviews


Pros 👍

Cons 👎

Usetiful is easy to set up and customize (we had to change its style to support RTL languages) and even non-techy people managed to add online tours to the web app we're building for our nonprofit. The tour builder itself is friendly and has all the features required to create complex tours.

Nothing really. Sometimes there are issues with getting the right selector to use with the item to attach a step to, but that's inherent to working with html interfaces.


Usetiful VS UserGuiding



Feature

Usetiful

Userguiding

Free forever plan


✅

❌

Assist based pricing

✅

❌

Sophisticated targeting

✅

❌

Simple to install and use

✅

❌

Completely customizable 

look and feel

✅

❌



Summary

Usetiful is an excellent tool providing easy setup, sophisticated targeting, customization and good pricing. 


But don’t stop here, check out the other two alternatives to Userguiding below. 


2. Lou Assist

Lou Assist is an in-app announcement, hotspots and product tour SaaS. 

Though plans are relatively expensive and the pricing is based on MAUs, Lou features a free forever plan.


Like Usetiful, Lou Assist will not stop delivering content if your MAU’s exceed the monthly limit, this way creating a welcoming environment for growth.




Lou Assists’ Pricing

  • Free Forever  - $0 - Limited to 2 announcements and 1 tour, 1 team seat

  • Startup - $99 per month or $948 annually - Unlimited tours and announcements, 3 team seats, 2,500 MAUs

  • Growth - $239 per month or $2388 annually - Unlimited team seats, 10,000 MAUs

  • Enterprise - starts at $3588 annually, 10,000+ MAUs

Even though Lous Assist’s pricing seems relatively fair compared with Userguiding, it is still based on MAUs, and the Startup plan is still pretty costly.

Lou Assist’s Reviews

Lou has a rating of 4.7/5 at G2, 4.6/5 at Capterra. 



Pros 👍

Cons 👎

I like being able to engage users with integrated tooltips and the ability to collect feedback and personalize the user experience. Our end users love the ability to have a guided tour.

The product is a little bit outside of our budget at this time but other than that we really love the features available in Lou and look forward to following it in the future.



If you are looking for an alternative to Userguiding, we certainly recommend checking out Lou.


3. Stonly

Stonly provides interactive, multimedia guides. The pricing is based on guide views, an interesting departure from the industry standard and unfair MAU-based pricing. 


Stonly is rich with templates, such as release notes, NPS survey, contact form and classic step-by-step guides. 


If you reach the guide-view limit of your current plan, Stonly will automatically upgrade you to the next plan and notify you in advance - to ensure content is being served continuously as you grow. 


Stonly has removed its free forever, basic and starter plan, and its pricing is hidden.


Stonly Pricing


  • Basic - $0, 5 guides, no team seats, 1,000 guide views per month

  • Starter - $49 per month, 30 guides, 3 team seats, 2,500 guide views per month

  • Small Business - unlimited guides, 5 team seats, 4,000 guide views per month

  • Enterprise- based on unique volume, support and integration needs

You can only find out their actual pricing by scheduling a demo, this makes it less transparent and harder to do business with.



Stonly Reviews


Stonly has a 5/5 rating on Capterra based on 5 reviews, and 4.8/5 on G2 based on 11 reviews. 


Pros 👍

Cons 👎

Aside from the power and versatility of Stonly, their customer service is stellar. Any issue or confusion I ever had was almost immediately cleared up by their team, and no one ever made me feel like I was wasting their time (which I was on a couple of occasions with dumb questions)

The learning curve is a little steep for new users, but I don't know that this is a fault of the design. The service is powerful - we were able to create an interactive help hub for our company and that's not something we would have been able to support on our own. The time taken to learn how to use it was paid back tenfold.


Stonly is a sophisticated and complex tool, though it might be costly, that can deliver good results with onboarding experiences. 



Summary

Userguiding is a good tool that has its advantages and disadvantages. In this article, we outlined the top 3 alternatives to consider. 


If you are looking for high customizability and excellent customer service all while maintaining reasonable pricing - Usetiful is the best alternative. At the same time, no onboarding software works exactly the same in every use case. Also, make sure to consider the other two alternatives to make an educated decision.


Want to see Usetiful in action? Click here to have a first-hand experience. Or try out Usetiful Premium on your use cases now with a 14-day free trial.



Related:

Popular posts from this blog

4 Types of Customer Satisfaction Survey and Their Best Practices

  A customer satisfaction survey is a fantastic tool for gathering information from current and past users. They can help your customer success teams understand the areas where your business is doing well — and where you’re lacking. Leveraging this information allows you to improve the customer experience, retain users, and even build loyalty. Image by Freepik In this article, we'll look at the four most valuable types of customer satisfaction surveys and some of the best practices you can employ to make them work. What is customer satisfaction? Customer satisfaction measures how your products or services meet customer demand. It's a strong gauge of the overall customer experience users have with your brand. Customer satisfaction can seem like a nebulous concept. However, there are many great surveys that can help you understand how your users feel about your product or service. Benefits of customer satisfaction surveys Running a customer satisfaction survey has many benefits. ...
Read more

Hotspots and their purpose in user onboarding

When done well, Hotspots can help with user onboarding by quickly highlighting features or functions.
Read more

Surveys vs Forms: What are the differences and How to use them

  While surveys and forms sound similar, they are different things with their own goals, formats, and best practices. However, they are both crucial elements of customer success because they allow you to collect a vital resource: feedback. Any company worth its salt needs feedback. It allows you to improve your product and understand your customers at the same time. But before you start rushing out and asking the questions that matter, you need to understand the difference between forms and surveys and where to use them. Image by Freepik What is the difference between a form and a survey? Forms and surveys are used to gather information. However, the type of information they collect can help tell them apart.  Surveys are best for collecting opinions, feedback, and information from individuals or larger groups of people. Typically, they use multiple-choice questions. However, many surveys include options for open-ended questions. Forms are best for collecting objective inform...
Read more