Question
Any recommendations for apps for creating product onboarding tours for SaaS products?
I am currently interested in finding a product that can help me easily create product tours within our SaaS product so that they can be informed and educated about how to use it. There are quite a few options out there in the market from Intercom Product Tours, WalkMe, UserGuiding, Userlane, Pendo, etc - which makes it hard to decide which one to use. Help!
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I love this question because in 2019, I demoed every product on the market that offers this functionality -- Userlane, Userpilot, Userguiding, Pendo, WalkMe, Intercom, GainsightPX, Inline Manual, and of course, AppCues.
To bo honest, many of them are great and some are not. Most of them are priced very high, making them out of reach for early or growth stage companies.
And then I came across Userflow (https://getuserflow.com/) and after trying it out, I was convinced that it's doing something that nobody is doing -- making it dead easy to build complex flows while also offering all the fancy features -- at a price that doesn't break the bank.
After we started using it at Integromat, I got to know the founder personally who knows his stuff (quit Google to build this). I cannot recommend Userflow enough.
Oh I would say the 2 cannot be compared. Product Tours by Intercom is just a feature that allows you to offer very simple walkthroughs. On the other hand, Userflow offers everything you need in order to build and deploy complex in-app guides and walkthroughs that are triggered based on events from your app. And like I had mentioned, Userlfow offers a really great flow-building experience.
Userflow founder here đź‘‹
As Arpit mentioned (thanks, Arpit!) the major benefit of Userflow is the ability to build flows for even complex UIs, where other solutions quickly fall short.
I'd also postulate that we have the best and fastest UX for any flow builder. Check out this last update adding full keyboard navigation for #Superhuman-like flow building.
@sebastianseilund Woah that's very cool—don't believe I've seen either a kanban-style workflow builder or a command palette in any workflow-style builder, much less an onboarding tool. That's awesome to see!
Curious, what was your inspiration to build a product to take on user onboarding?
A couple of years ago I had built another product, for which I had hardcoded a really cool interactive onboarding guide. Almost like a tutorial in a video game. New users were much more interested in this onboarding guide than the old product itself, and wanted to know how they could get one themselves or what tool I had used to build it.
I looked through the market and found nothing that I could have built it with. Then I saw a clear path to what Userflow is today :)
Neat, thanks for sharing! There's so much potential for using gamified techniques across a far wider range of software.
I've tried Intercom product tours, and they are very intuitive and easy to set up. You can create a step-by-step tour with text, video, gifs, etc in basically minutes. They are a bit pricey though ($119.00/mo).
Was your team already using Intercom for in-site chat before adding on their product tours? And if so, was that price the additional fee just for the product tours feature?
If you know a little bit of javascript then I would recommend you to try http://bootstraptour.com. It is the best tour making code I found on the internet. The best part about it is that it is absolutely free. I have seen various platforms charging $150-$250 per month you save this money and invest in something which will give you more return. Customization using this are endless. I hope you give it a try.
Thanks for the recommendation @devil_danii. You're absolutely right about the pricing. It is prohibitive to get started. However at the moment I had to go ahead with UserFlow, it's possible that at some point we might outgrow it or it might seem too expensive for us. I would then build internally. Appreciate the contribution and sharing the resource.
Happy to have you at Userflow, Gaurabh :)
3 things for people to keep in mind when choosing between a user onboarding platform, such as Userflow, and coding it in-house:
You'll save a ton of time using a platform, especially developer time, easily making up for the typical cost.
Coding it in-house means waiting for developers to prioritize it (which may or may not happen). With a platform, anyone from the team can build it themselves and get immediate results.
Onboarding is never "done". You'll continuously want to make small tweaks and add new stuff. Whatever your developers spend week(s?) up-front building, the product/customer success team is going to want to change weekly/monthly, often meaning you're stuck with something you can't easily change.
Just my (completely biased) 2 cents :)
Sebastian from https://getuserflow.com
Not denying anything you said @sebastianseilund :) Like I've told you before....Your product is great!
(except I recently realized it doesn't work for many of our enterprise customers who unfortunately still use IE). But I'm sure you're working on making that happen right? :)
@gaurabhmathure Curious, are you seeing your enterprise customers migrate to Microsoft Edge, or are they still sticking with IE for the most part?
...for anyone following along, we just shipped IE11 support this week, and are ironing out a few remaining issues shortly. So, YES, Userflow does support IE11 :)
...for anyone following along, we just shipped IE11 support this week, and are ironing out a few remaining issues shortly. So, YES, Userflow does support IE11 :)
A while back I’d done a bit of research on tools in this space for a community member who wanted to build software walkthroughs that would work offline or on custom domains. Of those, Inline Manual seemed the most interesting.
Pendo is another tool that looks very interesting for onboarding, since it combines onboarding tools with analytics to watch for which features people are using, spots that result in high churn, and more. Feels like that could be a great way to tweak onboarding to improve the overall product experience more than the average tool.
Another newer option to build an interactive walkthrough is Figma. Add your designs to Figma if they’re not already in there, link buttons together, add test callouts and highlights to showcase details, and you can create an interactive version of your app—albeit outside of your app itself. That can be an interesting twist between a demo version and built-in onboarding.
Then, in another discussion about product walkthrough tools, @DimaKanbanize recommended [[Product|AppCues]], mentioning that its tools to place the training directly in your app work really well. They also liked AppCues’ integrations with Segment and Amplitude for stats on your onboarding along with the rest of your product stats.
@Blakejmyer recommended Loom for this in a discussion about their favorite new software, where they use Loom to record quick videos to show people how to use software. That might be better for personalized tips for individuals though.
Awesome. Thanks Charles. Were there any constraints you had to work around with for Intercom?
Not really although it was a bit hard to figure out that you can implement Product Tours with their JavaScript API which fit us better. Other than that all good.
Yes, Appcues has definitely gone through a very buggy phase in their product dev journey. After a big investment at the beginning of 2020 we've seen them resolve some of the biggest issues we've had with the tool + launch a few improvements on debugging and tracking flow performance.
We actually used both Intercom and Appcues for some time but Intercom is extremely invasive in terms of privacy and they weren't willing to deactivate that tracking or sign extended DPAs with us so we dropped the tool.
We started with Appcues (2 -3years ago), was a little buggy and very tedious to manage - although I've heard they've made some great improvements to the admin interface.
We switched to Intercom's Product Tours (as we were already users of Intercom) and have been using it since release. The core functionality is resilient and very easy to manage. I don't think it's as feature-rich as Appcues nor do I feel they've made many interesting releases for Product Tours. Having said that, it's much easier to manage more of the end-to-end solution in one platform.
Appcues used to publish some great content on their blog though!
Thanks @cwilliams. I'm definitely looking to get started quickly and want to ensure I have the least dependency on the engineering team for this. Intercom definitely seems to be frictionless. However, I'm curious if you ever had to deal with the issue of using subdomains for different customer accounts (we are a SaaS app and hence need to provide your name.ourdomain.com/dashboard style domains).
Looking for a better way to plan remote meetings across time zones, and keep up with events. What software is doing that best today?
Thanks! So what would you say is the biggest advantage or reason you would recommend Userflow over Intercom Product Tours?