Introduction
Are you considering alternatives to Pendo to help you roll out new technologies in your company or team?
Pendo is a great tool for digital adoption or onboarding, getting product analytics, improving product experience and in-app feedback.
It combines customer sentiment, product analytics, user guidance and in-app messaging for a complete solution. But it may still not be the right one for you or your needs.
Seeking an alternative from the many Pendo competitors may give you a greater result or better user experience.
But with many alternatives to Pendo, choosing the right tool might be challenging. So we’re here to help!
We've compared different Pendo alternatives and competitors to help you find the best tool for your digital adoption.
Let’s get started!
Top Pendo alternatives to check out
- WalkMe.
- Amplitude.
- Scribe.
- Appcues.
- UserPilot.
- Whatfix.
- Mixpanel.
- Heap.
- Gainsight PX.
What is Pendo?
G2 Review: 4.5/5 Stars
Pendo pricing: Free plan for up to 1000 monthly users. For greater than 1,000 monthly users contact Pendo for a custom pricing plans including: Growth, Portfolio & Premium.
Pendo is a popular product analytics, integration and user engagement tool that software companies use to develop customer-driven software or apps.
Put simply, Pendo is a product user experience platform that software development teams use to create products people love. It helps app/software makers "drive product adoption, customer loyalty and team innovation."
The platform allows software development teams to embed in their products many tools for user engagement, better product user experience and product insights for the team.
Organizations can use Pendo in different digital adoption contexts, such as:
- User onboarding.
- Feature adoption.
- Customer retention.
- Upselling/cross-selling to existing customers.
- Company growth.
What does Pendo do?
Pendo is a product experience platform for teams to gain insight into a product and improve its user experience.
Pendo's main focus is showing teams, through in-app analytics and feedback, how users use and feel about the product. It also provides training and guidance features that help users learn effective product usage.
To do this, Pendo offers key features, including:
- Insights. This feature allows product teams to capture/capture product usage data to monitor and analyze how users interact with a website, app and other digital content.
- Sentiment (in-app surveys). This feature captures product user behavior. Developers can embed survey questions, polls, etc. into their websites, apps, etc., to ask focused questions at the right times in the user's journey that captures their feeling or thinking about the product or the product's specific moments.
- Guidance. This feature lets app developers embed user-friendly app messaging, walk-throughs, tips, reminders, etc., to influence user behavior. It's a great feature for onboarding and feature adoption.
- Feedback. The feedback functionality allows app developers to gather user feedback and update users on the status of their suggestions, requests and product updates.
By enabling product teams to analyze their customer usage, influence user behavior and gather feedback, teams can learn which apps/features drive engagement.
They can also target segmented groups with certain features to enhance customer experience.
Why you might want Pendo alternatives
Although Pendo is a great tool, it might not be the perfect fit for all users.
When choosing digital adoption solutions, tools may appear to have more similarities than differences. But certain core elements and a team's critical requirements can make the difference. Some of these things are:
- Pricing. Pendo pricing plans are tiered depending on the features your team needs. Also, although it has the Pendo free plan, it doesn't list the premium pricing plans on its site, making it difficult to choose.
- In-app flow builder might be confusing. In 2018, Pendo scrapped its Chrome extension builder, making users build guides in their dashboards. This isn't very clear compared to Appcues or Userpilot's Chrome-extension-based in-app guide builders.
- Few onboarding elements. This limits the creation of a user onboarding guide.
- Pendo offers so many things in one. Although this is great for larger teams with many categories, the mix of onboarding, analytics and user feedback may be more than you need. For example, you may need an app with particular offers like process flow documentation, such as Scribe, rather than everything at once.
9 Top Pendo alternatives of 2023
Here are 9 Pendo alternatives from so many Pendo competitors to help guide your decision on what digital adoption or other tool you might need.
1. WalkMe
G2 Review Rating: 4.5/5 stars
WalkMe Pricing: N/A – No Free Trial. Contact platform for a custom quote
Why WalkMe is a good alternative:
WalkMe was the pioneer of the Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) solution. Today, it focuses more on employee onboarding and third-party app adoption for enterprises in addition to analytics and feedback. It's a great solution for medium and large organizations.
While Pendo focuses on three things: analytics, insights and feedback, WalkMe provides more guidance and training capabilities. Specifically, WalkMe provides easy setup and employee-focused training capabilities, with an in-app self-help menu allowing easier adoption.
In addition to being Easier to set up, WalkMe also has better customer support than Pendo. But if you need an app with better in-app direct customer communication Pendo does well than WalkMe.
2. Amplitude
G2 Review Rating: 4.5/5 stars
Amplitude Pricing: N/A – Free Trial. Contact platform for a custom quote
Why Amplitude is a good alternative:
Amplitude is an app analytics solution for modern product teams to understand and personalize digital products and optimize them for a greater user experience.
Analytics is an important element when comparing digital (adoption) tools and Amplitude offers great analytics capabilities than Pendo. Its advanced analytics features help teams understand insights and feedback better. This can make up for its limited in-app content creation tools, where Pendo has much of its focus.
The Amplitude platform is more useful to teams with a mobile focus product and a need for more insights into raw data. It performs in this category better than Pendo.
Amplitude allows tracking of product usage on most platforms — web, app, desktop — without losing value. In addition, any team member can use Amplitude to measure and track various KPIs and metrics, a feature that Pendo falls short of.
3. Scribe
G2 Rating: 5/5 stars
Scribe Pricing: Free plan is available. Pro plan is $29/user/mo.
Why Scribe is a good alternative
We can't produce a list of Pendo alternatives without showing off our product’s awesome capabilities!
Scribe is a tool adoption solution that makes it easier than ever to show anyone how to use even the most complex technologies.
Scribe is a step-by-step guide generator that automatically documents your processes for you. Simply run through your product to create a guide in seconds.
Turn any digital (adoption) process into beautiful, organized process docs — complete with text, screenshots and more. These “how to” processes are a unique signature you can't get from Pendo.
While Pendo has great features for onboarding (including onboarding customers), it offers little focus on employee training. Unlike Pendo, any project team member can use Scribe to:
- Create share or embed project documentation.
- Support onboarding.
- Hold customer or employee training.
- Implement new tools and technologies.
… and so much more! Scribe's ability to enforce compliance with documentation standards cultivates consistency and helps keep processes running smoothly.
4. Appcues
G2 Review Rating: 4.7/5 stars
Appcues Pricing: Essentials plan starts at $249/mo; Growth plan starts at $879/mo.
Why Appcues is a good alternative:
Appcues and Pendo are both great onboarding and analytics tools. But, compared to Pendo, Appcues offers limited analytics options, with its analytics dashboard updating only every 12 hours, making it less actionable.
But Appcues introduced many new onboarding elements: checklists, tooltips, slideouts and more, making it a key Pendo competitor. These customer-focused solutions allow users to combine different UI features to streamline onboarding just like Pendo.
Unlike Pendo, Appcues offers a wide range of onboarding elements, customer segments and UI patterns, helping users create particular product experiences. It's a great alternative to Pendo if your budget can support its high cost.
5. UserPilot
G2 Review Rating: 4.7/5 stars
Userpilot Pricing: Traction plan starts at $249/mo; Growth plan start at $499/mo; Enterprise Plan $1,000/mo
Why Userpilot is a good alternative
Userpilot helps product teams and SaaS customer success teams increase digital user adoption using no-code behavior-triggered product experiences.
Unlike Pendo, that's general for digital adoption, Userpilot is designed for SaaS product adoption and growth. Besides helping teams give their users a great onboarding experience, Userpilot also has robust user analytics and in-app feedback tools, including NPS and micro surveys.
Userpilot offers contextual onboarding, something you won't easily find in Pendo and other Pendo alternatives. This customization is a great feature because there are no one size fits all walk-throughs. You can show the right in-app message to different users at different moments. You can also tailor your onboarding to individual users, using in-app user behavior to trigger onboarding elements only when they need them.
Also, Userpilot offers complete — no-code — control over onboarding elements' styling. You just select your theme colors from the pre-built builders and roll out the style.
6. Whatfix
G2 Review Rating: 4.7/5 stars
Whatfix Pricing: N/A – contact for a custom quote
Why Whatfix is a good alternative
Compared to Pendo, Whatfix offers wider functionalities and provides a top Pendo alternative. Like Pendo, Whatfix offers user analytics and insights, allows in-app surveys, and enables guided walk-throughs and other in-app training. But, unlike Pendo's main focus on analytics, which is limited, Whatfix has more self-help and self-paced training options.
Whatfix has some unique, versatile and widely applicable features to Pendo, such as:
- Learning management system (LMS) integration and Enterprise platform integration for both customers- and employee-facing platforms like Workday, Salesforce and ServiceNow.
- Multiformat training walk-through content like slideshows, videos, or articles and automatic updates of each.
- Self-help menu.
- Flexible deployment models, including cloud-based and self-hosted models.
While Pendo offers great customer onboarding features, Whatfix offers more features for employee training, which goes a long way toward customer success.
7. Mixpanel
G2 Review Rating: 4.5/5 stars
Mixpanel Pricing: Free plan available, Growth Starting at $25.00/Mo; Enterprise: Contact Mixpanel for customer pricing.
Why Mixpanel is a good alternative
In the Pendo vs. Mixpanel comparison (and other alternatives), it is easy to say that Mixpanel is the best platform for learning how and why your users are engaging with your product. This platform offers all analytics capabilities a PM would need at a much lower price than Pendo.
Mixpanel uses data science techniques, such as "look-alike modeling," to help you understand users' behaviors. It surpasses Pendo's analytics and insights to help transform product offerings.
If you've used (or want to use) Pendo specifically for analytics, then Mixpanel is your next best alternative and a key competitor on other features. But it falls short on other features like acting on the insights that require you to pair it with an onboarding tool like Scribe or Userpilot.
8. Heap
G2 Review Rating: 4.3/5 stars
Heap Pricing: Free plan available for 1000 sessions; Growth Starting at $3,600/Yr; Pro and Premier content Heap for custom pricing.
Why Heap is a good alternative
While Pendo focuses on analytics, Heap focuses on insights. This key difference makes Heap a great alternative for Pendo (based on session volume).
Heap analyzes your dataset to illuminate hidden insights in your product user's digital journey to enable you to act with confidence. It allows you to see and understand every single thing a user does, enabling product and marketing teams to know where to make the most impactful improvements. Its objective is to deliver better products and better user experiences.
9. Gainsight PX
G2 Review Rating: 4.4/5 stars
Gainsight PX Pricing: Contact Gainsight PX for a pricing quote
Why Gainsight PX is a good alternative:
Gainsight PX digital onboarding platform is known for Customer Success. The platform is designed with a personalized product experience in mind, enabling product teams to track product usage and customer health scores.
Like Pendo, Gainsight PX combines the power of rich product analytics, user engagements, and feedback to help teams accelerate adoption, engagement and product-led growth. This is why it's the best platform for companies to acquire, retain and grow customers driven by engagements and product usage data.
Gainsight PX is a great Pendo competitor because of its comparable actionable analytics and product insights. But the Gainsight PX platform is only a complete onboarding tool if combined with Gainsight, which you must install only through Salesforce.
Finding the right Pendo alternative
There are different ways to adopt technology quickly and easily.
Choosing the right digital product adoption solution is a critical decision depending on your goal and budget.
The platforms we've covered here are among the top Pendo alternatives. Now, it’s up to you to choose the best fit for your product adoption and customer experience needs.
Want to give Scribe a try? Ramp up your digital adoption time and strengthen your teams. Sign up for free today!
