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 - $99/mo

• Professional plan - up to 20 000 MAU - $399/mo

• Corporate plan - custom number of MAU - $699+ 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 allow 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 and 2000 assists per month, 1 team seats

• Plus - EUR 29.9 / m - 5000 assists per month, 2 team seats

• Premium - EUR 99 / m - 20 000 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. 

Like Usetiful and Lou, Stonly has a free forever plan limited to 5 guides, no team seats and 1000 guide views per month.

Stonly Pricing

• Basic - $0, 5 guides, no team seats, 1000 guide views per month

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

• Business - $99 per month, unlimited guides, 5 team seats, 4 000 guide views per month

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

It’s worth mentioning that each plan in Stonly’s pricing is customizable, you can select additional team seats or more guide views for a premium cost that adjusts based on what you added. 

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 a little 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 top 3 alternatives to consider. 

If you are looking for high customizability and excellent customer service all while maintaining a 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.