Have you ever attempted to use an app or software that you didn’t know how to use? I know I have, and it’s really frustrating! 

55% of consumers say they have returned or abandoned a product because they didn’t know how to use it. Wouldn’t it be nice if you could get guidance through the onboarding process? 

The good news is that there are a ton of no-code product onboarding software options. They make it easy to create beautiful onboarding experiences to guide users through your product.

As I was searching for a product onboarding software for my SEO tool, GrowthBar I did a ton of research to find the right product. This post should help you find the right tool for yours. By the way, when I implemented product onboarding, I was able to improve our churn rate by over 5% per month!

What is User Onboarding?

The goal of user onboarding is to give new users a clear understanding of what your product does and how they can use it. It can be as simple as a tour of the app or as complex as a multi-step process involving email marketing and live chat. 

A great product onboarding tool can increase revenue, decrease churn, and even give you opportunities to upsell or cross-sell other products. 

Creating a great experience for users or nudging them in the direction of key actions is essential to retaining customers and making more money for your SaaS business.

Product onboarding tools are important for modern web and mobile apps – you’d be hard pressed to find a successful company that doesn’t think about user onboarding. 

Which Are the Best Product Onboarding Tools?

In this post, I will cover the best product onboarding software tools.

This will be based on factors such as:

• Product features
• Ease of implementation 
• Customer support
• And pricing

Again, I’ve tested every tool on this list — so I guarantee you’ll find one you like.

1. Hopscotch

Hopscotch is a completely no-code onboarding software solution that enables you to make customized product onboarding flows, which will help you drive adoption and reduce churn. I ended up choosing Hopscotch as my product onboarding solution for GrowthBar because of its simplicity (one line of code to drop on the app) and ease of use. The price is pretty awesome too. The only downside is that Hopscotch doesn’t yet have A/B testing or surveys built in, like some other tools on this list. But for simple onboarding at a very fair price, Hopscotch is great. If your SaaS business is making $100k MRR or less, Hopscotch is definitely the affordable onboarding tool you’ve been searching for.

Features:

• Onboard users with product tours that can include image, video, GIF and text.
• Guide users through new features with branding that is customized to your website.
• Choose how many times and when to show tips to users. 
• See analytics about your tours.
• Notify users about upcoming product features, webinars, and more.
• Spotlight features.
• Use conditional logic to segment in-app messaging based on individual user activity — they have a ton of in-built ways to do this.
• Easy preview experience, so you know what things look like before you publish.
• Great email support.

Customers:

• Small and midsize SaaS companies like GrowthBar, Loganix, Wellprept, Vism, and more.

Pricing:

• Starter: $99/mo for up to 3,000 users
• Growth: $249/mo for up to 20,000 users
• Enterprise: pricing not provided  

2. Appcues

Appcues makes it stupid simple to create custom onboarding flows for your products with little or no code. With Appcues’ Google Chrome Extension builder, you can make pixel-perfect, drag-and-drop experiences for onboarding users. 

Like Hopscotch, Appcues’ drag-and-drop editor means anyone (even non-designers) can create code-free experiences for onboarding audiences. Flows look really great and Appcues has a dashboard so you can read results and optimize your experiences. Unfortunately, Appcues is prohibitively expensive for some companies, but it is a very strong product – maybe the best in terms of sophistication and feature set. 

Features:

• One line of code installation and Segment integration. 
• Create and target user segments based on virtually any behavior (like the completion of another flow or using a specific feature) or attribute (like job title or location).
• Easy preview experience, so you know what things look like before you publish.
• Integrations with Zapier, Heap, Google Analytics, Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack and more.

Customers:

• Freshworks
• FullStory
• Zapier
• Lyft
• ProfitWell

Pricing:

• Essentials: $249/mo for 3 user licenses, 10 trackable events, and up to 2,500 monthly active users
• Growth: $879/mo for 10 user licenses, 20 trackable events, advanced targeting capabilities, and full customer support and up to 2,500 monthly users
• Enterprise: Book a demo for more information

3. Intercom

Intercom is a chat-based customer support software that helps you increase chat conversion rates, reduce churn, and keep your customers happy. You can set up web chat, in-app chat, email, video, and phone support with features like one-click chat, customer feedback, and satisfaction survey. And of course, they have user onboarding features as well!

Unfortunately you cannot buy the product onboarding suite on its own, so Intercom is a fantastic solution if you need multiple features, but not just as a product onboarding tool.

Features:

• Onboard and support customers and highlight new features with guided, adoption-driving tours.
• Boost feature adoption by highlighting what’s new in your product at the perfect time.
• Create customized, conversational bots to qualify leads, triage support inquiries and more.
• Use targeted email, mobile push, and in-app messages to encourage customers to take action, or convert visitors to loyal customers. Outbound Messages enable you to onboard, and proactively support your customers on the web and in your mobile app.
• Simple integration with one line of code on your app or site. 

Customers:

• Shopify
• Udemy
• Livestorm
• Code for America
• Grover
• Keen 

Pricing:

• Starter: $67/mo
• All other plans are custom and require a demo

4. Pendo

Pendo is an enterprise software company that delivers an experience that is personalized, predictive, and delightful. It’s all about building relationships. Pendo is used by world-class brands like Microsoft, Adobe, and Cisco to deliver personalized experiences for their customers. Pendo hangs its hat on product analytics, but of course it also has an incredible in-app guide feature, which enables you to set up flows and onboard users seamlessly. So if you need analytics and user onboarding tools, Pendo could be the tool for you.

Pendo is definitely an enterprise product and with any amount of use it commands enterprise pricing. But if you need a solution to take care of robust product analytics and in-app product onboarding, it may be the tool you’ve been looking for.

Features:

• Best-in-class product analytics suite to understand which features are most important for users.
• Pendo codelessly tracks all product activities, so you never have to add additional lines of code to capture user data.
• Product onboarding suite is one of the most sophisticated, and includes in app guides, product callouts, and announcements.
• Target

Customers:

• Microsoft
• Adobe
• Cisco
• Cision
• Coursera

Pricing:

• Free: In-app guides for up to 1,000 monthly visitors
• All other plans require you to speak with a salesperson – Pendo gets expensive fast

5. Userpilot

Userpilot helps product teams deliver personalized in-app experiences to increase growth metrics at every stage of the user journey. Userpilot enables you to engage users with a no-code product onboarding suite, track and analyze growth, plus get feedback and NPS scores from users with simple popups.

I like Userpilot because it really is end-to-end. If what you’re looking for is a product onboarding tool, it has everything you need and nothing you don’t. However, it comes at an enterprise price similar to Appcues.

Features:

• Capture usage trends and growth insights with one code drop, which records all events as soon as it’s on your site.
• Establish goals and track progress to those goals, much like you would in Google Analytics.
• Create personalized engagement flows with no code.
• Create contextual experiences based on conditions like “user has taken X action.”
• Run A/B tests on your onboarding experiences to find winning combinations.
• Gather feedback with no-code surveys and NPS prompts directly in your app.

Customers:

• Prowly
• Adobe
• Phocas
• UiPath
• Rockcontent

Pricing:

• Growth: $249/mo for all features up to 2,500 users
• Enterprise: $749/mo for all features, up to 2,500 users plus GDPR compliance, user permissions, and phone support

6. Whatfix

Whatfix expands digital capabilities through contextual experiences designed to increase proficiency and productivity across all applications for everyone, and every team. Get guidance analytics, user analytics, and collect feedback. There are beautifully designed no-code templates, so you can deploy your experience without the assistance of a developer.

Features:

• To integrate and deploy Whatfix on your web application, all that you need is a single line of code.
• Whatfix guides can be easily created and edited by anyone in multiple browsers like Google Chrome and Mozilla Firefox.
• Customizable displays and templates.
• Whatfix’s smart targeting allows you to perform user-level segmentation on different web pages.

Customers:

• Experian
• CardinalHealth
• Aramark
• Sentry
• MFS

Pricing:

• Contact for pricing.

7. Product Fruits

Product Fruits is a comprehensive suite of product onboarding tools. It’s a relatively new tool, but it has everything you’ll need to onboard users effectively. It enables you to add all sorts of onboarding widgets to lead users through their first-time experience. It also has all the triggered events you need to customize flows to the language and persona of your users. Also get feedback in your app experiences and export all the data you collect.

Features:

• Step-by-step no-code product guidance.
• Localize your product tours to different languages.
• Target users based on different personas.
• Create beautiful onboarding experiences with no-code and preview your experiences.
• Get feedback from users and announce new features.
• Allow users to record images and record videos.
• Export all data to csv for easy analysis.

Customers:

• Boost.space
• Lamael
• Roletik
• Keboola

Pricing:

• Growing: $59/mo for up to 1,500 monthly users ($459/mo for up to 50,000 monthly users)
• Enterprise: Inquire for more information

Which is the Most Affordable Product Onboarding Solution?

That accolade goes to either Hopscotch or Product Fruits. Some of the other tools seem affordable at first, but have huge up-charges based on usage and additional features. Intercom has unfortunately become quite famous for this.

Why Should You Use User Onboarding Tools?

Onboarding tools shouldn’t replace an intuitive, friendly product. Your product should always “do the talking,” but a user onboarding tool can help fill in the gaps, particularly in complicated parts of your product. User onboarding tools help decrease churn rates, decrease customer support costs, and increase your ability to upsell and cross-sell – all without needing to rely on developers.

And you can segment experiences so that the right users sees the right message at the right time.

Sure, you can build onboarding yourself with code, but you’ll never get the simple, beautiful, code-free experience that one of these tools affords you. I’d 100% recommend using an onboarding tool, as it will free up your development resources for building more core features. 

There are three reasons user onboarding is essential:

1. Decrease Churn Rates

Churn rate is the measure of customers who cancel their subscription to a service or product, and the rate at which this happens. A high churn rate can be a bad thing for most companies, as most companies depend on the revenue they generate from their customer base. This is particularly true of SaaS businesses. 

One of the reasons that churn rates can be high is due to the company not creating a strong enough experience for the customer during onboarding. 

I like to survey my audience and watch product recordings with a tool like HotJar to understand pain points and try to solve those with product features and improved onboarding. During onboarding, highlight the parts of your product that are key to retention and head off pain points with first time user tours. 

2. Decrease In Customer Support Costs

64% of people have contacted customer support. If you had to service 64% of your customers via live customer support, you’d run out of money in a heartbeat. 

The best products and onboarding flows will enable you to objection-handle without the intervention of a support staff. 

3. Increase Cross-Sells

While retention is key to your business, revenue retention is more important. Even if you churn 20% of your customers per month, as long as your existing customers are spending more money with you every month, you might still have a growing business. Customers that are onboarded properly are not only more likely to stay, but they’re more likely to be sold additional products. Believe it or not, 75% of cross-sells happen in the first 90 days a user is on your platform. 

Tactics to improve cross-sells during onboarding include showing users value with hard data, personalizing the experience based on information you collect during onboarding, and by showing product recommendations with customer testimonials. 

Conclusion 

Yes, user onboarding is wildly important. And a product onboarding software tool is going to make your life much easier, by enabling you to service new users with no coding required. Doing so will help you reduce churn, reduce customer support costs, and increase your ability to upsell. 

If you’re looking for the most powerful solution and you have a substantial budget, I’d recommend a tool like Appcues, Intercom and Pendo. However, if you don’t have unlimited funds, I think you’ll find that Hopscotch is a more than adequate solution for your onboarding needs.