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.
For some, it's just too comprehensive. Others are lacking advanced analytics capabilities. Whether you're looking for a more lightweight documentation solution or need a more robust product experience software, there are plenty of alternatives to Pendo that will fit your exact needs.
We've compared different Pendo alternatives and competitors to help you find the best tool for your digital adoption.
Let’s get started!
TL;DR: Top Pendo alternatives
What is Pendo?
G2 Review: 4.4/5 Stars
Pendo pricing: Free plan for up to 500 monthly product users. For greater than 500 monthly users, contact Pendo for 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."
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 experience the product. It also provides training and guidance features that help users learn to navigate products effectively.
To do this, Pendo offers key features, including:
- Analytics. This feature allows product teams to capture product usage data to monitor and analyze how users interact with a website, app and other digital content.
- Feedback. Product teams can embed surveys, polls, etc. into user journeys to collect feedback in the right place at the right time.
- In-app guidance. Developers can implement user-friendly app messaging, walkthroughs, tips, and notifications into the product experience (PX) to influence user behavior. It's a great feature for onboarding and feature adoption.
- Validation. Pendo facilitates idea testing with dedicated functionality for targeted feedback collection. Contrary to ongoing feedback forms, idea tests are highly targeted and offer insights you can act on immediately.
- Roadmapping. Pendo added product planning to its functionality to help product teams inform their strategy with data-driven insights and set priorities, all in one place. Yet it's not the key feature of the product.
- AI-powered insights and personalization. A lot of tech solutions have incorporated AI capabilities, and Pendo is no exception.
By enabling product teams to analyze their customer usage, influence user behavior and gather feedback, teams can learn which apps/features drive engagement.
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.
- Limited customization. A major drawback users often mention is "limited customization options when building dashboards." If you want to build a custom product analytics dashboard, you'd rather look for a more flexible platform.
- 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.
- You need a no-code solution. Pendo requires some technical expertise or assistance from developers, which isn't an option for many teams and companies.
Pendo is generally considered a great product experience monitoring platform, but its other products like in-app surveys or roadmapping aren't as versatile as similar tools by Pendo competitors.
9 top Pendo alternatives
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 the team for a custom quote.
Why WalkMe is a good alternative to Pendo:
"It is fully customizable in so many ways. In particular, the ability to create custom triggers has made building so much easier for the complex processes my company tends to use."
WalkMe is a leading digital adoption platform (DAP), focusing 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.
Pendo vs. WalkMe
- WalkMe is built for enterprises in the first place.
- Pendo puts a stronger emphasis on customer experience; WalkMe focuses on internal digital adoption.
- WalkMe offers a higher level of customization and more diverse tools for in-app guidance creation.
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 to Pendo:
"Amplitude is a very useful tool, especially for Product Managers and other non-technical users, to gain quick insight into the performance of their tools, services and offerings."
Amplitude is an app analytics solution for modern product teams to understand and personalize digital products and optimize them for a greater user experience.
The Amplitude platform is more useful to teams with a mobile-focused product and a need for more insights into raw data.
Amplitude allows tracking of product usage on most platforms — web, app, desktop — without losing value.
Pendo vs. Amplitude
- Amplitude offers more sophisticated analytics capabilities than Pendo.
- Compared to Pendo, Amplitude has more limited in-app content creation tools.
- Amplitude has stronger AI capabilities.
3. Scribe
G2 Rating: 4.8/5 stars
Scribe Pricing: Free plan is available. Pro plan is $29/user/mo.
Why Scribe is a good alternative:
"I love that I'm able to create training materials so quickly and easily. All I have to do is turn on the extension, and then I can just click through a few steps and create an amazing training resource for my time."
Scribe is a tool adoption solution that makes it easier than ever to document product guides.
When we looked at the reviews of Pendo and its competitors, we couldn't help but notice the following:
- "My number one request would be for Amplitude to update their documentation as it is currently lacking."
- "It is quite a lot to take on and it's difficult to teach yourself how to use it. Sophisticated products take time to learn. That's the largest issue for me."
- "There is a huge learning curve to utilizing the system effectively."
Ironically, even leading DAPs have trouble creating intuitive product documentation, which is the cornerstone of a smooth PX. Scribe will help you prevent such comments from your users and finally improve the learning curve.
Whether you choose Pendo or its alternatives for product analytics and in-app guidance, add Scribe to your toolkit to handle the task none of these DAPs can do — automate product documentation.
Scribe will automatically capture and turn any digital (adoption) process into beautiful, organized process docs — complete with text, screenshots and more.
Pendo vs. Scribe
- Scribe is a complementary product for your digital adoption toolkit, allowing you to create comprehensive product documentation in seconds.
- While Pendo focuses on in-app guidance and product experience monitoring, Scribe serves as a knowledge management platform.
- Scribe is perfect for both employee onboarding and customer training.
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4. Appcues
G2 Review Rating: 4.6/5 stars
Appcues Pricing: Essentials plan starts at $249/mo; Growth plan starts at $879/mo if paid annually.
Why Appcues is a good alternative:
"It's an intuitive platform, with everything you need to promote your products, we use it for onboarding, new features adoption, NPS, and tooltips and pins that allow our users to better use our software."
Appcues and Pendo are both great onboarding and analytics tools for mid-sized companies and small businesses. 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.
Pendo vs. Appcues
- Appcues has more transparent pricing plans.
- Appcues is a mobile-first DAP.
- Contrary to Pendo, Appcues doesn't offer a freemium plan, which makes Pendo a more suitable option for small teams with limited budgets.
See more Appcues alternatives here.
5. Userpilot
G2 Review Rating: 4.6/5 stars
Userpilot Pricing: Traction plan starts at $249/mo; Growth plan from $499/mo; Enterprise plan from $1,000/mo.
Why Userpilot is a good alternative:
"I can quickly draft and publish different alerts and notifications on our website at a moment's notice. I'm a marketer, not a developer, so this puts me in control of immediately publishing time-sensitive alerts to our website without requiring any work from our development team. It saves me and our development team time."
Userpilot helps product teams and SaaS customer success teams increase digital user adoption using no-code behavior-triggered product experiences.
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 walkthroughs. 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. And if you have any questions, Userpilot's highly praised support team will resolve them quickly.
Pendo vs. Userpilot
- Audience segmentation capabilities of Userpilot are more advanced than Pendo's.
- Userpilot is intuitive even for non-tech users, while in Pendo, "setting up surveys and custom in-app messages may require technical expertise. Consultants have to work closely with the tech team in order to implement certain changes".
- Userpilot is more affordable than Pendo.
See more Userpilot alternatives and competitors here.
6. Whatfix
G2 Review Rating: 4.7/5 stars
Whatfix Pricing: N/A – contact for a custom quote
Why Whatfix is a good alternative:
"Whatfix is so versatile as a platform. From training and onboarding, to communications and analytics, it's helped bring our business into the digital age."
Compared to Pendo, Whatfix offers wider functionalities, which makes it a top Pendo alternative. Like Pendo, Whatfix offers user analytics and insights, allows in-app surveys, and enables guided walkthroughs and other in-app training. But, compared to Pendo, Whatfix has more self-help and self-paced training options.
Whatfix has some unique and versatile features, such as:
- Learning management system (LMS) integration and enterprise platform integration for both customer- and employee-facing platforms like Workday, Salesforce and ServiceNow.
- Multiformat training 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 includes great customer onboarding capabilities, Whatfix offers more features for employee training, which goes a long way toward customer success.
Pendo vs. Whatfix
- Whatfix is an excellent alternative for companies struggling to drive digital adoption internally.
- Whatfix is built for large enterprises and may fail to meet the needs (and budgets) of small businesses and startups.
- In addition to user behavior monitoring, Whatfix offers guidance analytics to reinforce your digital adoption efforts.
Read about Whatfix Alternatives here.
7. Mixpanel
G2 Review Rating: 4.5/5 stars
Mixpanel Pricing: Free plan available, Growth starting at $20.00/mo, Enterprise from $833/mo.
Why Mixpanel is a good alternative:
"The real-time data analysis capability — a real game changer for strategic decison-making. You can monitor user engagement across multiple platforms instantly."
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.
Pendo vs. Mixpanel
- Mixpanel is a more affordable alternative for small businesses.
- Similar to Pendo, Mixpanel offers idea validation capabilities, but the latter has slightly stronger customer segmentation and analytics functionality.
- Mixpanel falls short on other features like enabling in-app training or creating targeted surveys.
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 — contact Heap for custom pricing.
Why Heap is a good alternative:
"Heap provides us with really valuable product insights."
While Pendo focuses on analytics, Heap focuses on insights. This key difference makes Heap a great alternative to Pendo.
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.
Pendo vs. Heap
- Like Pendo, Heap focuses on customer experience optimization.
- Aside from session replays (also accessible in Pendo), Heap offers heatmaps, rage click reports and user paths.
- Heap doesn't include user training tools.
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:
"Having moved from a competing product to Gainsight PX, we have been able to massively increase and monitor our NPS scores with our clients. It has also enabled us to engage our users in webinars and product update communications."
Gainsight PX is a product experience platform built to drive user adoption and retention.
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.
Pendo vs. Gainsight PX
- While the two platforms offer very similar functionalities, Gainsight is more versatile when it comes to user engagement and training tools.
- Feedback capabilities are stronger in Gainsight.
- Gainsight combines many tools for streamlining CX that Pendo doesn't have, such as automated customer interactions and customer communities.
Finding the right Pendo alternative
Choosing the right digital product adoption solution is a critical decision depending on your goal and budget. To help you make the right decision, let's group the Pendo alternatives by use case:
- Product analytics: Amplitude, Mixpanel, Heap and Gainsight PX.
- User training: Appcues and Userpilot.
- Internal digital adoption: WalkMe and Whatfix.
- Internal and external documentation: Scribe.
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.
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