Product Adoption Software For User Onboarding Shortlist
Here’s the list of the best tools that I’ll cover in this article.
Product adoption software is no longer a nice-to-have system in this era of hybrid work. These platforms are vital to onboarding new users and facilitating software adoption. Although user adoption platforms are gaining more traction, as of 2020, 30% of companies investing in these platforms aren’t scaling and realizing their full value. But no matter where your company currently is in its adoption of new technology, there’s still time to search for solutions to help improve adoption, learning, and onboarding.
That’s where I come in! Product adoption is a crucial indicator of your organization’s health. After discovering your product, they start the adoption funnel and go through multiple stages before reaching adoption. If your potential users make it to this final stage, it indicates that your product provides them with enough value to help them achieve their goals. Throughout this article, I’m going to show you a list of the top platforms to help you guide your users through this funnel and build your user base.
Software Selection Criteria
What do I look for when I select the best product adoption tools? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria:
- User Interface (UI): I look for a platform that is clean, easy to configure, and has an uncluttered user interface. These features help your teams deliver effective guidance to your users. This also means that the platform’s features intuitively present themselves to make them easier to locate.
- Usability: I look for software that’s easy for your teams to use. It should have features that are easy to understand and, more importantly, easy to use. These features should also work the way you would expect them to.
- Integrations: I look for software that can integrate with a broad range of other applications that you might already be using. For a product adoption tool to be fully effective, it should be able to easily integrate with at least three product types. These types include product analytics, user feedback, and customer management.
- Value for Price: I look for platforms that help your users start experiencing your product quickly. The more you can improve your onboarding flow to decrease your time-to-value, the more you can increase adoption. This speed can drive cost-savings for your budget that might not be otherwise attainable.
Product Adoption Software: Key Features
Here’s a list of key features I look for when choosing product adoption software.
- Save time and resources: Product adoption platforms should provide your engineering team with a significant amount of relief. It should also allow your other teams to develop user experiences quickly and efficiently. But everyone should be able to implement changes and add features easily.
- In-product experiments: Successful products happen from continuous improvement and iteration. For this to happen, a platform should allow product managers to perform in-product experiments to get the right feedback. It also gives you guidance on how to optimize your product and enables you to make evidence-based decisions.
- Product usage data: To assess product adoption, you should be able to rely on product usage data. This information can help you understand how your product’s users are engaging, where they’re getting stuck, and opportunities to improve their experience.
- In-app communications: Messaging your product’s users in the app is an excellent way to raise awareness of key features and encourage better product usage. Having the ability to communicate with users directly allows you to contact them when this information is most relevant.
- User support: Providing support materials in a product allows users to find the right information whenever they’re stuck or have questions. This information helps minimize the likelihood that they will give up and leave your product. Making support readily available for users is a crucial tactic in product adoption software.
- No-code implementation: The main reason to invest in product adoption platforms is to reduce development resources strain when creating and managing in-product experiences. This is why no-code implementation is crucial. It can help your teams create tailored experiences according to users’ requirements.
- A/B testing: The product adoption platform you invest in should provide you with native A/B testing capabilities. This is where you test two different variations of your product to determine which outperforms the other.
- Precise user targeting: To create tailored user flows, it’s essential to be able to control how, where, and when specific experiences appear for your users. If your product has pages that target different audiences, it’s beneficial to be able to control which user sees which experience.
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Overviews Of The 10 Best Product Adoption Software Solutions
Here’s a brief description of each product adoption platform to showcase each tool’s best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a snapshot of the user interface.
Product Fruits
Best product tours/walkthroughs with a feedback widget
Product Fruits is a user onboarding and adoption platform that helps make the adoption process simpler and quicker for users. The software creates journeys that guide users through the product's features and functionalities. These journeys can be customized based on specific user segments and provide real-time feedback and analytics so businesses can track user behavior and identify areas for improvement.
Product Fruits has in-app walkthroughs and guided tutorials to provide users with an interactive learning environment. The walkthroughs offer a series of straightforward steps that lead users through a software's features individually, highlighting important information and how the software is meant to be used. It monitors and tracks user behavior inside the software and presents this data through intuitive analytics dashboards, enabling companies to identify trends or gaps that impact product adoption. Product Fruits also features a to-do list as a guide for new users. It allows them to check off tasks or actions as they complete them. This feature is meant to motivate users to move through the onboarding process and complete all necessary steps to fully utilize the software.
One of the coolest things about Product Fruits is that it incorporates a feedback widget in the tutorial process. This means that users can report bugs or errors, or even just make suggestions for future improvements. This sets Product Fruits apart, as it ensures that product adoption communications are a two-way street between the developer and end user.
Integrations include Segment, Mixpanel, Heap, Customer.io, HubSpot, Sessionstack, Smartlook, and Google Analytics. If you use another platform, you can use their JS API to forward events.
Product Fruits starts from $79/month and comes with a 14-day free trial.
Apty
Best for driving business processes and outcomes
Apty is an adoption platform that helps enterprise-sized organizations drive business by resolving specific application challenges. Apty helps you understand how users are leveraging your onboarding training and helps you update your material accordingly. You can track and analyze how your customers interact with your product and address any gaps within your current processes.
Apty takes a digital approach to ensure business process compliance. It works with many web-based applications and helps your customers get the most out of your software. This is especially beneficial when your product is brand new to the market. You also don’t have to bring on additional training tools.
Apty integrates with applications such as Google Forms, Jira, Mixpanel, Amplitude, and Salesforce.
Apty offers custom pricing upon request.
Whatfix
Best for expediting customer onboarding
Whatfix is an adoption platform that helps organizations with customer engagement, product adoption, and onboarding. The analytics features within the platform provide you with the best insights to help you identify product adoption improvement opportunities. The platform is also a popular choice for employee training and product change management.
Whatfix allows digital product owners to create a product walkthrough and task lists to help guide and train new customers. They also offer personalized self-help features and conversational support directly to customers when they’re using your product. Whatfix’s features help improve your customer’s experience as they learn to use your product. For example, the automation feature helps increase onboarding speed and your teams’ productivity.
Whatfix integrates with applications such as Google Analytics, Salesforce, Amplitude, SurveyMonkey, and Confluence.
Whatfix offers customer pricing upon request.
Appcues
Best for user-segmented onboarding tours
Appcues is a cloud-based platform that helps product teams apply user experience design processes throughout their product. The platform enables product managers to enroll new users, monitor behavior, and create workflows. Appcues also helps organizations provide users with self-service assistance by adding hotspots, walkthroughs, and widgets throughout a product.
Appcue’s guided tours, which they call flows, allow you to improve product activation and engagement by guiding users around your product. You can segment and target customers by lifecycle stage and persona to provide custom experiences. The platform instantly provides your teams with insights into how your customers use your product’s features. You can then use this information to expand, cross-sell, upsell, and keep customers.
Appcues integrates with popular applications, such as Salesforce, Slack, Heap, and Klaviyo, to help you create and measure user experiences across multiple channels.
Appcues costs from $299/month when paid monthly or $249/month when billed annually. All plans come with a 14-day unlimited free trial.
Intercom
Best for in-app live chat and chatbots
Intercom is an engagement platform that allows product owners to communicate with users directly. If customers are having any difficulties with your product, you can use Intercom’s resolution bot to automatically reply to users’ questions. The platform also provides product tours to allow you to onboard new customers to your application by providing step-by-step guidance.
When you want to create a custom chatbot, Intercom provides you with a block builder interface. From here, you can determine the content of your bot and figure out what pages you want your chatbot to show by using specific rules. In the intercom platform, you can get a complete overview of all the users who communicate with your chatbot. When you click on a username, you can see that user’s custom tags, field, and the recent pages they viewed.
Intercom integrates with over 300 third-party applications, such as Google Analytics, Outlook Calendar, Salesforce, and HubSpot.
Intercom costs from $65/month for up to a year for eligible start-ups. They also offer a 14-day free trial. You can also customize your plan with specific add-ons.
Pendo
Best for in-depth product user analytics
Pendo is a product adoption software that mainly caters to enterprise products to help companies offer better experiences. The set of solutions that the platform provides businesses covers in-app support, user onboarding, feedback collection, product engagement, and revenue growth. Pendo is a great choice for anyone looking for a better understanding of their users.
Not only does Pendo allow your team to understand the impact of your onboarding content, but it also allows you to customize your content automatically based on your users’ feedback and their behavior when using your product. The platform provides product managers with data about various user segments, such as stickiness ratios for your product’s features and adoption rates. Pendo continuously collects user data without the need to install any trackers within your product via codes. This allows you to tag users directly from the platform and start monitoring historical data without having to get help from your development team.
Pendo integrates with many of the tools you’re already using daily, such as Jira, HubSpot, Salesforce, and Zendesk.
Pendo offers customized pricing upon request.
Airdeck
Best for adding audio or video to the onboarding process
Airdeck allows product owners to record a presentation and share it with every customer. This saves you and your team time by building a presentation and not being on a call with the customer to show them how to use your product. With this platform, you can create engaging presentations to onboard your customer and provide them with a unique experience they won’t get anywhere else.
After sending an Airdeck presentation to your onboarding customers, you can find out when they opened it and their interaction with it. You can also provide multiple presentations to determine which version outperforms the others. Your custom presentations can help you, so you’re not leaving important product details to your customers’ own interpretations.
Airdeck can integrate with your favorite tools and enhance every step of your onboarding process. These integrations include Salesforce, HubSpot, Gmail, Microsoft Teams, and YouTube.
Airdeck costs from $40/month and comes with a 7-day free trial.
Baton
Best for building flexible, interactive implementation plans
Baton is a platform that organizations can use to manage communications with real-time project status when implementing new applications. The platforms provide you and your teams with tools to establish milestones and templates to build a project foundation. In the Baton platform, your teams can collaborate together to establish the organization’s priorities and share your customers’ feedback when they use your product.
Baton offers custom pricing upon request.
Lemon Learning
Best for directly integrating interactive guides into your product
Lemon Learning makes it easier for your customers to learn about your product by accelerating adoption through in-app walkthroughs. The platform allows you to provide your users with step-by-step guides, create engaging, custom content, and manage your product’s support. You can use Lemon Learning to use your internal processes to create documents, videos, and quizzes to increase engagement.
Lemon learning offers custom pricing upon request.
Userflow
Best for creating custom onboarding flows
Userflow is a custom onboarding platform that helps SaaS businesses increase customer conversion rates and retention. The platform helps reduce your customer success and sales team’s workload by allowing you to create self-service onboarding checklists to help your users get started with your product efficiently. These checklists provide your customers with a structured experience to help guide users to your product’s features and reduce the need for them to contact your support team. Userflow allows you to also guide customers when you add a new feature.
Userflow helps product owners create custom user onboarding flows that would normally take a few weeks and allows them to do it in a few minutes. The intuitive flow builder uses no extra code to add to your product in a simple drag-and-drop interface. The platform’s element selection algorithm identifies your product’s elements based on simple text to help you design the perfect flows. You can also preview and live-edit your flows in Userflow’s draft mode before publishing them to your customers.
Userflow integrates with various third-party applications, such as Zapier, Mixpanel, Heap, and Amplitude. You can also develop custom integrations if you have a development team that can integrate the platform into what you’re already using.
Userflow costs from $250/month when paying monthly and $200/month when billed annually. Each plan comes with a 14-day free trial.
The 10 Best Product Adoption Software Solutions Summary
| Tool | Free Option | Price | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Product Fruits Best product tours/walkthroughs with a feedback widget | 14-day free trial available | From $79/month | Visit Website |
| 2 | Apty Best for driving business processes and outcomes | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
| 3 | Whatfix Best for expediting customer onboarding | Free Trial | Pricing Upon Request | Visit Website |
| 4 | Appcues Best for user-segmented onboarding tours | 14-day free trial | From $249/month (billed annually) | Visit Website |
| 5 | Intercom Best for in-app live chat and chatbots | 14-day free trial | From $74/month (billed annually) | Visit Website |
| 6 | Pendo Best for in-depth product user analytics | Free trial + free plan available | From $7,000/year (up to 2,000 users/month) | Visit Website |
| 7 |  Airdeck Best for adding audio or video to the onboarding process | 7-day free trial | From $40/month | Visit Website |
| 8 |  Baton Best for building flexible, interactive implementation plans | Not available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
| 9 |  Lemon Learning Best for directly integrating interactive guides into your product | Not available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
| 10 |  Userflow Best for creating custom onboarding flows | 14 Days Free Trial | From $20/month (billed annually) | Visit Website |
Other Options
Here are a few more product adoption apps that didn’t make the top list.
- Walnut
Best for creating interactive product demonstrations
- Stonly
Best for creating in-app self-serve, interactive guides
- WalkMe
Leverage data to simply user onboarding experiences.
- Spekit
Empower your team to be self-sufficient when learning new software.
- Intellum
Everything you need to create, present, manage, track, and improve educational experiences.
- OnScreen
Create and embed guides directly in-app within minutes.
- Userlane
Better engage users and develop content quicker.
- UserIQ
Predict user behavior and develop winning product experiences.
What do you think about this list?
Product adoption software provides you with the tools you need to create an excellent product experience for your customers. The tools I discussed in this least offer your business valuable features to improve your customers’ experiences when helping them adapt to your program. Each tool has its own specialized functions, which makes it vital to find the one that best suits your requirements.
Regardless of the solution you decide to use for your business, I hope this list helps you in some way. If you already used one of these tools, leave a comment below and let me know why you chose it. Your experience can help others make their own decisions. If you want more information about product adoption or other product management topics, sign up for our newsletter.
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