User onboarding software helps drive user retention, product adoption, and customer satisfaction. It’s well-established that a digital adoption platform (DAP) is essential for competing with other SaaS products in an increasingly crowded marketplace, but how can you choose the right tool for the job?
This article will explore three product onboarding tools, Product Fruits, Pendo, and Usetiful, and compare features, pricing, customer support, and other categories to help you decide the best onboarding software for your business.
Image by KamranAydinov on Freepik
1. Features
The best way to judge a digital adoption solution is by what it can do for your SaaS product. So, let’s take a look at the features that define Product Fruits, Pendo, and Usetiful.
Product Fruits
Product Fruits helps SaaS teams build engaging, interactive onboarding content. Let’s take a look at some of the tool’s best features.
Product tours and guides: Build handy step-by-step guides that drive product and feature adoption.
Hints and tooltips: Subtle cues that point users to features without overloading them with information.
Onboarding checklists: Gamify your onboarding to keep users engaged.
In-app announcements: Message users inside your product with new features, news, and product announcements.
NPS & Surveys: Collect user feedback from within your app.
Life Ring: Searchable in-app help center to provide 24-7 support.
When you combine the robust feature set with Product Fruits AI writing tools and no-code capabilities, you get an onboarding solution that can help your SaaS product win and retain users.
Pendo
Pendo is a popular Product Fruit alternative that comes with a lot of features. The product is focused on collecting user analytics, but we’ll focus more on its user onboarding qualities.
Interactive walkthroughs: Build solid walkthroughs that demonstrate how to get value from your product.
Tooltips and hotspots: These discrete UI elements provide explanations and contextual help to keep your users in the moment while they explore your product.
Progress bars and checklists: Pendo has flexible options for helping users track their onboarding progress, ensuring higher motivation and completion rates.
Personalization: Pendo offers the potential of personalized onboarding flows for different user segments.
A/B testing: Pendo users can test out different onboarding flows to see which works best.
Overall, Pendo has a solid set of features that can boost user onboarding.
Usetiful
Usetiful is an excellent alternative to Product Fruits and Pendo. It’s well-known for providing a comprehensive set of features for competitive prices.
Let’s explore what makes Usetiful a great user onboarding tool.
Interactive product tours: Build engaging step-by-step walkthroughs incorporating a mix of media, modals, pointers and more.
Onboarding checklists: Usetiful’s onboarding checklists help break down complex onboarding workflows into easily digestible chunks, providing a more flexible and effective learning approach.
Smart tips: Smart tips provide the contextual support you need during onboarding, allowing users to learn while exploring and at their own pace.
Customization and Segmentation: Users can tailor onboarding experiences around user roles, language, or behavior. This approach ensures relevant and effective guidance.
Customer self-service: Usetiful also promotes customer self-service thanks to resource center features like an in-app knowledge base for articles, videos, FAQs, and more.
NPS & CSAT surveys: Quality and timely feedback is essential for SaaS success. Usetiful provides in-app survey features that boost participation rates, giving you access to actionable insights that can improve the customer experience.
Multi-language support: Finally, Usetiful supports onboarding materials in multiple languages, which is essential for SaaS products that serve different jurisdictions and countries.
Overall, Usetiful provides an incredible range of onboarding features, especially when you consider it’s competitive pricing, which we’ll get into next.
2. Pricing
There are a lot of onboarding tools out there, with just as much diversity in pricing. However, too many tools just don’t provide the value for money that SaaS teams need.
Let’s compare Product Fruits, Pendo, and Usetiful pricing and see who has the best price-to-feature ratio.
Product Fruits pricing
Product Fruits comes with three pricing tiers: Core, Boost, and Enterprise.
While the prices are stated above, it’s worth noting that they charge based on Monthly Active Users (MAU). These types of pricing models have unpredictability baked in, which makes it difficult to know what you’re paying each month.
Product Fruits lets you evaluate the product for 14 days before you buy. However, there’s no free version. So, if you want a free product tour software, you’ll need to look elsewhere.
Pendo pricing
Pendo doesn’t share its pricing on its website. Instead, you need to request pricing. This lack of transparency is frustrating for SaaS product owners trying to work to a budget.
While Pendo doesn’t display monthly pricing, the website Simply Analytics has posted what customers need to pay.
As you can see, Pendo is a really pricey solution that can run into four or five figures annually.
Pendo does have a free version, but its feature set is very limited, and MAU restrictions mean it will only work for very particular SaaS projects.
Usetiful pricing
Usetiful is built to be accessible to everyone, from bootstrapped startups to enterprises. Instead of pricing based on MAUs (like Product Fruits and Pendo), Usetiful bills companies based on team members and assists, so the Plus or Premium versions are perfect for growing businesses, while the Enterprise plan will work for more established businesses.
What’s more, Usetiful has a forever free version. So, if you’re a small company and you need free walkthrough software or other onboarding content, we’ve got your back.
3. Customer support
Strong customer support is another vital category when evaluating the right digital adoption platform. Support channels, responsiveness, and overall quality of the support should be considered.
Let’s see how these products stack up against each other.
Product Fruits
Product Fruits has solid customer support options. They take an omnichannel approach to user help and offer live chat, phone, and email support. You can also reach them around the clock with 24-7 support options available.
The quality of support is another big selling point. Product Fruit customers say that help is friendly and responsive and that support agents are very knowledgeable.
Finally, in terms of user self-service, Product Fruit comes with a knowledge base that offers access to help articles, technical guides, and troubleshooting content.
Pendo
Pendo users have a few different options when it comes to customer support. It doesn't offer traditional phone or email support and instead operates with a Resource Centre that you can access inside the platform. From there, you can request customer service or technical support.
Additionally, Pendo users also get access to a dedicated customer success manager, which partly explains the high pricing. Typically, Pendo clients say these professionals provide good value and genuinely help users get the most from their implementation.
Usetiful
Usetiful offers users a chat option for assistance from customer support reps. The support team also offers email support and an extensive knowledge base with endless help articles, technical documents, troubleshooting help, and how-to guides.
What’s more, Usetiful customers consistently rate the customer support as excellent and very reactive.
4. Ease of use
A great digital adoption tool should make things easy for your customer. However, these solutions should also be simple to use for any nontechnical members of your team.
Product Fruits
Product Fruits has made great strides in recent years to improve its ease of use. Its updated UI was just what its users needed. Now, it has a WYSIWYG editor to help you build onboarding content. Additionally, it also comes with a no-code editor, allowing you to set up and customize your tours and content even if you’re a technical novice.
Pendo
While Pendo has a decent reputation in SaaS circles, it’s not known for its ease of use. Many customers bemoan the solution's steep learning curve, while others have suggested that the user interface lacks the intuitiveness you might expect of modern solutions.
For example, the features for building product tours in Pendo are more difficult than they need to be and suffer from the lack of a WYSIWYG editor. When you throw in the limited customization options for modules and layouts, it’s easy to sympathize with Pendo’s user base.
Usetiful
One of Usetiful’s biggest strengths is its simplicity and ease of use. These are qualities you need in your onboarding if you want to drive production adoption. An elegant interface with no-code capabilities and a WYSIWYG editor are among the reasons why Usetiful is by far the easiest-to-use onboarding solution on our list.
5. Customer ratings
If you’re still not sure about which user onboarding tool is right for your business, it’s worth hearing what Product Fruits, Pendo, and Usetiful customers have to say about the products on the esteemed G2 review site.
Product Fruits: 4.7⭐- “Building support and guidance content for our site has become incredibly easy.”
Pendo: 4.4⭐- “Guides have helped us make a positive change in our users' experience.”
Usetiful: 4.7⭐- “ If you need a simple and powerful digital adoption platform, Usetiful is the perfect choice!”
Final thoughts
Product Fruits and Pendo are good options for anyone who wants to grow their Saas product with a user onboarding tool. Usetiful is hard to beat when it comes to affordability, customization options, and sheer user-friendliness.
If you want to try a digital adoption platform for free, create an account and start with Usetiful today.