Introduction
UserGuiding is a user onboarding tool designed to create self-serve onboarding experiences using assets like checklists, tooltips, surveys, product tours and more.
However, it’s far from perfect.
For one, it doesn’t let you create assets for mobile apps. And even though it’s positioned as a no-code solution, the tool requires extensive CSS and HTML coding to customize your content.
Since the tool is still evolving, some capabilities don’t offer the best-in-class experience.
We know these issues can become a major headache when you’re creating user onboarding journeys.
That’s why we’ve shortlisted the six best UserGuiding alternatives after trying dozens of tools.
TL;DR: UserGuiding top alternatives
But first, let’s explore what UserGuiding can do for your organization and the key reasons why you might need an alternative solution.
What is UserGuiding?
UserGuiding is a no-code user onboarding tool for creating interactive content within your app. You can guide new users to activation and create a seamless, self-serve onboarding experience.
UserGuiding helps with product adoption through:
- Tooltips.
- Product tours.
- In-app surveys.
- Resource centers.
- Onboarding checklists.
- Announcement modals.
UserGuiding isn’t limited to just user onboarding. You can use this tool for a combination of use cases—from feature adoption to delivering on-demand user education.
UserGuiding key features
We tried UserGuiding’s free version to find exactly what sets the tool apart. Here are our insights on its key features:
- Tailored onboarding flows: You can segment users into different categories to tailor the onboarding experience to their exact needs and pain points.
- Customized for your brand: Create an on-brand theme using the advanced theme builder and make your content gel right into your product.
- In-depth user analytics: Monitor user activity and get behavioral data to see how effective your content is. You can work with these insights to tweak your assets.
Now that we’ve seen what UserGuiding has to offer, let’s look at where it lacks. This will help you pick the right tool that ticks all the boxes.
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Why you might need a UserGuiding alternative
After giving UserGuiding a thorough test, I found a few key drawbacks that might hamper your overall experience. Let’s break them down.
- Glitchy interface: A common theme I observed across multiple reviews on G2 was the buggy interface. Users frequently mentioned that the tool freezes sometimes and shows glitches at times when you have to restart the app. This can create friction and make your work inefficient in the long run.
- Missing capabilities: When I compared UserGuiding to a few other user onboarding tools, I realized that this platform lacks several key capabilities—the big one being A/B testing. Besides this, you’ll also find a few capabilities aren’t as sophisticated as other tools. This can limit your ability to fulfill any specific use case.
- Longer learning curve: A big disadvantage of such a feature-packed tool is the learning curve. With so much to explore, you'll likely spend days getting the hang of the tool and how to best leverage it for your needs. This is a common issue across most tools in this category.
- Doesn’t support mobile apps: Another downside of UserGuiding is that it's not suitable for mobile apps. While you can play your content on mobile screens, you can't create assets for the mobile app version of your tool.
Keeping these aspects in mind, we tested dozens of UserGuiding alternatives to handpick the six best options you can try.
Let’s take a closer look at each.
Top 6 UserGuiding alternatives to try in 2024
We spent days trying and reviewing several UserGuiding alternatives in the market.
Here are our best picks for user onboarding tools you can try instead of UserGuiding.
1. Scribe
G2 rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars (60+ reviews)
Capterra Rating: 4.9 out of 5 stars (10+ reviews)
Scribe ranked as the #1 UserGuiding alternative in an article written by Scribe? That’s as biased as it gets, right?
Wrong! We added Scribe to this list because it’s an awesome documentation tool with two-fold benefits:
- You can create product how-tos in seconds without any hassle.
- Your users can intuitively understand your product interface.
Scribe’s AI-powered process documentation capabilities save you the struggle of manually adding hotspots or creating checklists. You can simply capture your product in action and Scribe will work its magic to generate a beautiful step-by-step guide for you.
Here’s one for your reference:
Instead of overwhelming new users with a long product walkthrough or several tooltips, you can simply show them clear, visual step-by-step guides to learn the basics. These user onboarding documents can also make your knowledge base and resource center more interactive and enhance the user experience for on-demand support.
Pros
- Get started in minutes and create step-by-step guides by simply toggling the browser extension.
- Choose from 100+ free, customizable templates in the Scribe template gallery.
- Design a topic-wise knowledge hub or resource center using Pages with multiple Scribes, media and other resources.
- Customize and fine-tune your product documentation with features like annotate, crop, blur, merge/delete steps and more.
- Share your guides with a link or embed them anywhere using a customizable embed code with your branding.
Cons
- Doesn’t offer in-app surveys or messaging.
- Doesn’t support audience segmentation.
Why Scribe is a good alternative to UserGuiding
A big reason why Scribe is a great alternative for UserGuiding is that you can create product how-tos for desktop, mobile, and browser-based apps. You can download Scribe’s desktop and mobile app to record your product in action—something that UserGuiding doesn’t offer.
What Scribe user Claire Mai C. said:
"I am a product manager and use Scribe often as a way to share knowledge with different teams across my company. I have made Scribes as onboarding guides, as a tool to teach non-technical teams and external vendors how to test features pre-release (which, in the past, we had to hop on a meeting to discuss), to create training materials, etc.
I love how quick and easy it is to access Scribe from Chrome and how much flexibility they give in customizing the Scribe once it's been recorded.”
💡 Want a more in-depth look? Check out our blog on Scribe vs. UserGuiding for the full breakdown.
2. Pendo
G2 rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars (1380+ reviews)
Capterra Rating: 4.5 out of 5 stars (200+ reviews)
Pendo is a digital product adoption tool designed to create in-app guides, collect user feedback and monitor their activity. As a user onboarding solution, Pendo helps you stay on top of customer interactions within the product and deliver meaningful guidance whenever they need help.
It’s a great solution for teams with a large customer base looking to create a tech-touch onboarding experience with minimal human intervention.
Pros
- Get ahead of your users to see where they get stuck or need help with Session Replay.
- Leverage Pendo AI to access critical product engagement data points and create your onboarding experience.
- Integrate Pendo with the rest of your tech stack and easily connect data across different platforms.
Cons
- Doesn’t let you create product walkthroughs.
- Can be slow and buggy at times.
Why it's a good UserGuiding alternative
Unlike UserGuiding, Pendo helps you design mobile experiences for any app. You can deliver in-app messaging and track user activity with a dedicated function: Pendo for Mobile.
“We use Pendo almost every day to gather Data insights about the client user. Pendo offers multiple powerful features that help us streamline day-to-day operations.”
📌 If you’re evaluating software solutions, check out our list of the top Pendo alternatives.
3. Appcues
G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars (290+ reviews)
Capterra Rating: 4.8 out of 5 stars (100+ reviews)
Appcues is another no-code user onboarding platform catering to a range of use cases for SaaS teams, like onboarding training, feature adoption, announcements, mobile adoption and more.
Appcues lets you create different content assets within your app, including:
- Welcome modal.
- Tooltips and slideouts.
- Onboarding checklists.
- User feedback surveys.
- Announcement banners.
You can also track granular metrics to see how users interact with these elements and what’s working well.
Pros
- Create audience segments based on specific criteria, like role, use case and more.
- Set custom metrics to define success and get an in-depth view of your performance.
- Design tailored experiences for mobile apps using all elements available for desktop apps.
Cons
- Doesn’t offer quick support and resolution.
- Frequent price hikes and lack of transparency.
Why Appcues is a good alternative to UserGuiding
As an alternative, Appcues offers everything that UserGuiding brings to the table, with the added capability of mobile-specific user experiences. Plus, you can also run A/B tests to create the best-performing assets for user onboarding.
"It's friendly and relatively easy to explain and use for all of our team; I love being able to create audiences and the amount of customization we can do through our app events."
📌 Learn more: Scribe vs. Appcues — which is best user onboarding platform?
4. Chameleon
G2 rating: 4.4 out of 5 stars (180+ reviews)
Capterra Rating: 3.8 out of 5 stars (<10 reviews)
Chameleon is a digital adoption platform that sits right within your app and helps you educate users about your product. You can create tooltips, modals, banners, cards, checklists, surveys and a lot more. Plus, you can embed product tours using integrations like Arcade and Navattic.
What sets Chameleon apart is its HelpBar function. You can essentially add a searchable bar within your app for users to ask any questions whenever they’re stuck.
Pros
- Configure keyboard shortcuts for in-app navigation to simplify on-demand guidance.
- Get contextual feedback with NPS surveys and feedback forms added to different spots.
- Tailor the onboarding experience with precise segmentation and A/B testing.
Cons
- Doesn’t support mobile experiences.
- Requires a long learning curve.
Why it's a good alternative
Chameleon's on-demand guidance capabilities are key aspects of its edge over UserGuiding. You can help new users get a grip on your product with quick access to support resources using the HelpBar and keyboard shortcuts.
“The onboarding checklists and tooltips are not just helpful; they have transformed the way we guide new users through our application, enhancing feature adoption seamlessly.”
5. Product Fruits
G2 rating: 4.7 out of 5 stars (70+ reviews)
Capterra Rating: 4.9 out of 5 stars (40+ reviews)
Product Fruits is a product adoption platform for web-based apps. The tool helps you create a range of content assets for onboarding new users, such as:
- Interactive walkthroughs.
- Beacons and tooltips.
- Announcements.
- NPS surveys.
- Newsfeed.
One of Product Fruits’ biggest value props is its intuitive editor. Unlike other tools, the no-code editor is easy to learn and you can get started in minutes.
Pros
- Store all your help resources in a dedicated help center and place a self-help widget within your app.
- Create custom events to trigger specific elements based on user behavior or actions.
- Localize your content for multiple languages to cater to users in different regions.
Cons
- Lacks the range of integrations in other tools.
- The user interface isn't as intuitive.
Why it's a good UserGuiding alternative
While Product Fruits gives you all of UserGuiding’s capabilities, it has one standout feature: custom branding. UserGuiding charges a premium to white-label your assets, while Product Fruits lets you create on-brand experiences in all plans.
What a Product Fruits user said
"The best is the versatility of ProductFruits, which can help you to cover all customer onboarding features while using just one tool, from tours, announcements, support buttons, hints to NPS, etc. Implementation is also very easy, and once done, you don't need much support from developers."
6. Userpilot
G2 rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars (300+ reviews)
Capterra Rating: 4.6 out of 5 stars (60+ reviews)
Userpilot is a versatile product adoption platform to create seamless self-serve experiences within your app. The tool lets you design customized user journeys to positively influence in-app behavior with audience segmentation and content elements.
You can also access powerful analytics to closely understand your users. Then, evaluate this user data with overall product usage through integrations with Mixpanel, Segment and similar tools.
Pros
- Create highly targeted and contextual onboarding flows without CSS coding.
- Get started in minutes without wrecking your head over how to use the tool.
- Enjoy greater flexibility in designing content assets and experiences.
Cons
- Lacks as many app integrations as users want.
- Slow performance when tracking more data.
Why it's a good UserGuiding alternative
Userpilot is a good UserGuiding alternative if you want to double down on data. With a core emphasis on product analytics, the tool captures critical events within the app to strategically understand user behavior.
"Userpilot was initially used as our NPS capturing tool. However, it has become one of our most successful channels for our team, serving as a multifaceted solution for capturing NPS feedback, managing crises effectively, and streamlining user onboarding processes.”
📌 Related resource: Top Userpilot Alternatives & Competitors to Consider
Choosing the right UserGuiding alternative
UserGuiding isn’t the all-in-one product adoption platform you’re looking for. It doesn’t work with mobile apps, doesn’t capture granular data and lacks flexibility to build user onboarding experiences effortlessly.
That’s why we’ve curated the best UserGuiding alternatives in this guide. In addition to the tools reviewed here, you can also check out popular options like Whatfix, WalkMe, Trainn and Userflow.
But if you need a solution to quickly get your onboarding flow in place, then sign up for free on Scribe and get cooking!
