Digital Adoption Platform Shortlist
Here’s the list of the tools that I’ll cover in this article.
Our one-on-one guidance will help you find the perfect fit.
Even the easiest-to-use software can be tough for new users to get to grips with. Many businesses try to get around this with employee training and in-person onboarding programs, but these are costly to run and often ineffective. A digital adoption platform helps address user engagement and retention at a fraction of the cost.
What Is A Digital Adoption Platform?
Digital adoption platforms are software that you add to an existing app, website or digital product to help users with software adoption. You may have seen this as the in-app guidance that gives you hints on how to navigate the user interface. It is also seen as step-by-step guides and onboarding checklists that take you through your first x number of items using the platform.
Overviews Of The 10 Best Digital Adoption Platforms
Here’s a brief description of each digital adoption solution to showcase each tool’s best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a snapshot of the user interface.
Product Fruits
DAP with detailed adoption analytics
Product Fruit’s step-by-step walkthroughs guide users through complex software processes, helping them understand how to use the software and complete tasks efficiently. Additionally, Product Fruits provides real-time guidance, meaning users can get help as they work, rather than having to stop and consult an external resource.
One standout feature of Product Fruits is its ability to provide personalized guidance to users. The tool tracks individual user behavior and can adapt its guidance based on a user's specific needs and skill level. This feature helps ensure that users are receiving the guidance they need to master new software, regardless of their experience level.
Product Fruits offers integrations with popular software platforms, including Slack, Google Analytics, Heap, Segment, and HubSpot.
Pricing for Product Fruits begins at $89/month. A 14-day free trial is also available.
Plotline
Best for consumer brands—across mobile and web platforms
Plotline is an in-app engagement platform for consumer brands that provides digital adoption tools such as tooltips, in-app videos, animations, and spotlights. You can use it to communicate with your users in your app and improve new feature adoption within your product. You can craft personalized onboarding flows, create tours and tutorials and highlight new features with their UI template library.
You can also run user feedback surveys right in the system, collecting invaluable insights to inform your product strategy and roadmap. Their segmentation engine allows you to target specific user cohorts with in-app messages.
Integrations include Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Mixpanel, Slack, Clickhouse, Amplitude, Segment, Rudderstack, and OneSignal. Paid plans start from $499 per month, and a 21-day free trial is available.
Paid plans start from $499 per month, and a 21-day free trial is available.
Absorb LMS
Create interactive digital adoption content
Absorb LMS is a cloud-based learning management system that can be used to improve user adoption through product education and training. You can create, track, and manage online courses for your customers, helping them better understand how to make the most out of your product. The course builder lets you create engaging and interactive courses with multimedia elements like videos, quizzes, and interactive scenarios.
What sets Absorb LMS apart from other tools in the market is its focus on the user experience. It's not just about delivering content, but about creating more engaging and interactive content. With features like gamification, social learning, and personalized learning paths, Absorb LMS makes learning more enjoyable and effective. You can even reward users with badges and certificates, helping to turn new customers into power users.
The software integrates with other tools like Google Suite, Microsoft Azure, Namely, Okta, Salesforce, WebEx, Workday, Zoom, and more. Pricing is available upon request, and a free trial and demo are both offered.
Constructor
Adoption software that allows companies to create personal learning experiences
Constructor is a digital adoption platform designed to help organizations onboard and train employees in using different digital tools and software.
It can be used to onboard new employees, train people to use software and tools, support employees using different resources, track employee progress and provide analytics, and create custom tutorials to meet a company’s specific requirements.
Constructor features a learning management system, and an enterprise resource planning solution to help train people to adopt digital tools. Employees and customers will be able to learn using different interactive content. Constructor’s LMS allows organizations to create custom quizzes and provides people with hands-on learning environments, and their ERP streamlines all an organization’s financial operation needs. Using the different tools that Constructor provides effectively helps users train people to use a company’s tools and products and makes learning complex topics much easier. Both the Virtual Lab and Coding Lab are instrumental in optimizing training and demonstrations for employees, partners, and customers.
The platform comes with real-time data collection to support a trainee’s personalized training program and trainees can have a personalized learning journey, learn with other people, and have an intuitive and reliable platform to create interactive courses. Using this platform can help boost course completion rates and ensure that trainees can effectively use the software on which they’re trained.
Apty
Discover pain points within your tech stack
Apty is digital adoption software that helps get your employees up to speed with new technologies. This ensures you get the most from your software investment.The tool has plenty of analytics features. Managers can see how employees use the software and which business processes work.
You can see technology adoption and how this changes over time. The tool will even highlight the specific points that are causing issues.When you spot a point of friction, it’s easy to create in-app help that guides people past these barriers. This improves employee onboarding, new product adoption, and how people use your existing tools.
The tool works with any web-based application, meaning you can use it across your tech stack.
The company doesn’t advertise pricing, but you can contact the team for a quote via the website.
Whatfix
Full-featured DAP
Whatfix is a digital adoption platform that promises to streamline how people use your product. You can use it with both employees and customers. The software has several helpful features. Flows help you create product tours that are targeted toward specific user segments.
Use these alongside in-app task lists to get users up to speed with your tool. Beacons are another useful feature—these allow your product team to highlight specific features, for example, new releases or updates. Or you can use in-app pop ups with videos to communicate information to all users, while surveys allow you to collect customer opinions without dedicated customer feedback software.
The final feature is knowledge bases. You can build these directly into the app so that users can easily access all they need to use your product.
Thanks to the browser plugin that works with Chrome and Firefox, all these features are easy to use. And you can customize all the content so that it matches your branding.
Whatfix doesn’t advertise pricing, but you can contact the company for a quote.
Appcues
DAP with user personalization features
Appcues is easy-to-use software that lets you build onboarding flows. It uses no-code tools so anyone can create workflows and publish them within a day.The tool has personalization features so you can build customized journeys. For example, you can create different onboarding workflows depending on the user’s role in the company.
You can show a designer the most relevant features, while leading a manager through the features someone in their role is most likely to use.The tool lets you create checklists with a progress bar that shows customers how far into the onboarding process they are. This automatically updates as they complete more tasks, so they can see exactly how far they have come on their journey with your product.
There are also features designed for introducing users to product updates and new functionality. For example, you can create introductions and product flows to quickly get people up to speed, then add further information via the announcement center.
Appcues starts at $299 per month for up to 2,500 monthly active users. You can get started for free on the website.
WalkMe
DAP software to maximize investment value
WalkMe is a digital adoption tool with plenty of features to help you teach employees about your software.The biggest draw is that you can build on-screen experiences that guide users through each step in a process. This helps your team get up to speed with new software or features.
WalkMe also has powerful analytics and reporting. These tools show user behavior such as how long people use different tools and the places where they struggle. Use this to see underutilized apps and build help flows to increase engagement. The tool is easy to use—the no-code platform lets anyone in your team build learning experiences.
It also integrates with plenty of other tools to increase the data you collect. And you can use the tool with any app that uses Amazon Web Services.
The company doesn’t provide pricing, but you can request a quote via the website.
Usetiful
DAP with tools for quickly implementing software help
Usetiful is digital adoption software with plenty of features to help people get up to speed with your tools. It’s used for onboarding, customer self-service help, and feature adoption. The onboarding features help customers see the value of your tools faster. This can, in turn, lead to a reduction in churn. Create a product tour that guides them through the setup process and include a checklist so they get everything done.
You can also use these tours to guide people through new features and updates.The tool makes it easy to get started. You can begin with one-off smart tips to quickly provide help if you don’t have time to create a full onboarding sequence. Just use it to highlight essential information about your product’s most important features.
The product tours are easy to create using the Usetiful no-code tools. They use a visual interface, so it’s easy for anyone to create flows, and then you use the customization tools to match the tour with your branding. You can also easily review tours with the browser extension to make real-time improvements. Another helpful feature is the ability to create different product tours for user segments, device types, or pages.
This ensures everyone gets the most relevant help content. It’s easy to integrate your tours with your product by adding a code snippet. Pricing starts at $29 per month with a free trial. There’s also a completely free version that allows you to create a single product tour.
Inline Manual
DAP with easy-to-use visual tour builder
Inline Manual is a digital adoption platform with features for creating in-app walkthroughs, tooltips, surveys, and support articles. Use this for staff training, onboarding, or teaching employees about new tools. In-app walkthroughs are the main feature. Create them with easy-to-use no-code tools—just point-and-click at elements on the screen to create each step.
The result is that it’s easy to build a new walkthrough whenever you identify an issue.The tool has plenty of analytics features. Use these to understand how people are using your software. This is especially useful during onboarding, a time when employees need to take on a lot of new information.
Inline Manual pricing starts at $158 per month for up to 250 monthly active users.
You can try the software for free before committing.
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The 10 Best Digital Adoption Platform Comparison Chart
Here is a table you can use to compare all the tools we just covered in the overviews.
Tool | Free Option | Price | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Product Fruits DAP with detailed adoption analytics | 14-day free trial available | From $89/month | Visit Website |
2 | Plotline Best for consumer brands—across mobile and web platforms | 21-day free trial | From $499/month | Visit Website |
3 | Absorb LMS Create interactive digital adoption content | Free trial + free demo | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
4 | Constructor Adoption software that allows companies to create personal learning experiences | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
5 | Apty Discover pain points within your tech stack | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
6 | Whatfix Full-featured DAP | Free Trial | Pricing Upon Request | Visit Website |
7 | Appcues DAP with user personalization features | 14-day free trial | From $249/month (billed annually) | Visit Website |
8 | WalkMe DAP software to maximize investment value | Free demo | From $2-3000/annually | Visit Website |
9 | Usetiful DAP with tools for quickly implementing software help | Free trial | From $29 per month | Visit Website |
10 | Inline Manual DAP with easy-to-use visual tour builder | 14-day free trial | From $158 per month | Visit Website |
Other Options
Here are a few more that didn’t make the top list but are worth your consideration.
- Userlane - Increase your product’s user adoption
- Walnut - Build personalized product demos to help with sales
- OnScreen - Enterprise digital adoption platform
- Baton - Manage software implementation and onboarding
- Intellum - Complete toolkit for creating educational experiences
- Lemon Learning - Digital adoption tool for users and employees
- Userflow - Easily create product onboarding workflows
- Pendo - Create personalized in-app guides based on analytics
How I Picked The Best Digital Adoption Software
What do I look for when I select the best digital adoption platform software solution? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria:
User Interface (UI)
A clean user interface is important for both software users and the people creating the learning experiences.
Usability
Funny enough, I see how easy it is to adopt these tools. Therefore, I look at any userguiding products they have, like training videos, knowledge base, and manuals.
Integrations
I look at the ways in which the platforms can extend their capabilities by connecting with other apps. These could be other cloud-based SaaS tools like Salesforce, or maybe Microsoft software. Integrations come mainly in 3 types: pre-built, custom, and through a third-party vendor.
Pricing
These tools have high business value. Depending on how you use them, they either increase the value of your software investment or help you keep users for longer. But, you still need to choose one at a price point that makes sense for your business.
What is digital adoption?
Digital adoption is the capacity to learn to use and adopt a new product, whether that is an app, a website, or some other digital product.
Digital adoption is crucial for end-users to have a positive customer experience and the reason why so many companies invest in these platforms to build customizable self-help guides that improve customer success and reduce reliance on customer support tickets and other costly alternatives.
What key features are in digital adoption platforms?
Here are some of the key features I look for when choosing digital adoption software.
- Product tours: Product tours are a type of automation that guide users through your software features from within the app.
- Checklists: Checklists keep track of the tasks users need to do to complete onboarding of new technology.
- Analytics: Analytics features let you track how people use your app. Use this data to build learning experiences for pain points or track the impact of your efforts.
- No-Code builders: No-code, visual builders make it easy for anyone in your team to create learning experiences for your app.
What is a digital adoption software used for?
A digital adoption platform is a tool with features that encourage people to use the software. It has two main use cases.
The first is to increase the adoption of the software organizations use in their businesses through onboarding experiences. This ensures companies get maximum value from software investments and is an essential part of digital transformation. It also ensures organizations make the most of the $700 billion spent annually on digital adoption.
The second use case allows software companies to improve the adoption of their tools. It's especially useful for onboarding new customers or educating existing users about new products. Ultimately, it should lead to a better user experience.
You can use your digital adoption platform alongside product experience management software to improve how people use your tools.
What Do You Think About This List?
This list includes ten of the best digital adoption platforms, plus a few more thrown in for good measure.
When deciding on a tool, first choose your use case and look for products with the features you need. You can then take advantage of either free trials or demos to find out more.
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