10 Best Product Engagement Software Shortlist
Here's my pick of the 10 best software from the 20 tools reviewed.
With so many product engagement solutions out there, figuring out which one is right for you is tough. You know you want to increase user satisfaction, higher retention rates, improve user experience, and optimize the various touchpoints within a product to enhance user engagement, but need to figure out which tool is best for the job. I've got you! In this post, I'll help make your choice easy as I use my experiences with dozens of different tools with large teams and diverse products to share my picks of the best product engagement software.
What Is Product Engagement Software?
Product engagement software is a category of tools that assesses, analyzes, and improves user interactions with a digital product or service. It focuses on providing insights into user behavior, preferences, and experiences to help businesses create more engaging and valuable products – and it does this through features like user behavior tracking, analytics dashboards, personalized messaging, feedback collection, and A/B testing.
By actively monitoring and optimizing user engagement, businesses can use product engagement software to enhance the overall value proposition of their products, leading to greater success and customer loyalty.
Overviews Of The 10 Best Product Engagement Software
Here’s my in-depth review of each tool. I’ll walk you through the pros & cons, features and functionality to highlight what makes each tool great.
UserGuiding is a comprehensive tool designed for in-app user onboarding, offering a wide range of features to guide users to success, improve engagement, and personalize the user experience.
Why I picked UserGuiding: I chose UserGuiding because it provides a comprehensive suite of features specifically designed to enhance in-app user onboarding. Its standout offerings include product tours, onboarding checklists, and resource centers, which collectively contribute to a guided and personalized user experience.
UserGuiding Standout Features and Integrations:
Features include the pre-built template library, which helps you craft a survey for your customers quickly. You can also set up a custom survey easily, because the system is completely code-free. And once you've collected enough information, you can download the data to your computer so you can manipulate it in other software.
Integrations include Mixpanel, Segment, Intercom, Slack, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Woopra, and HubSpot.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- A variety of onboarding documents and videos are available
- Customer support is helpful and responsive
- Easy to use
Cons:
- No mobile support
- Lack of integration with certain analytics tools
Medallia
Best for powering personalized next-best actions for user engagement
Medallia is a robust product experience management platform that helps proactively capture feedback to uncover granular customer insights from various digital experiences. This software is cloud-based and grants a 360-degree visibility into your customers, which automatically surfaces meaningful insights, elevating the effectiveness of your product engagement.
Why I picked Medallia: Medallia is an enterprise feedback management platform. It helps every business stakeholder become customer-aware, reveal customer loyalty trends, and define the highest impact measures. Medallia enables users to gather feedback anytime, anywhere, through multiple different channels. These include email marketing tools, websites, apps, mobile messaging, IoT-connected devices, software applications, calls, chat, social review sites, and more.
Once you gather the feedback data, you can blend digital behavior with direct feedback and social and operational insights for a single, complete view. Medallia also provides predictive and prescriptive AI analytics models that identify customers on the verge of churning. This alerts your sales team to provide personalized service, orchestrate omni-channel reach-outs, and create more relevant campaigns powered by experience-based segmentation.
Medallia Standout Features and Integrations
Features include its self-service capabilities, which include survey program creation, change management, role-based reporting, data imports, user access controls, and release management controls. Medallia offers a range of templates and an expansive knowledge base to help make the learning curve easy. Moreover, dynamic dashboards and comprehensive workflow escalation capabilities are handy features as well.
Integrations include 90+ tools, like Fivetran, G2, Jira, Rybbon, ServiceNow, Slack, Tableau, Trustpilot, Twilio, Veeva CRM, Zendesk, and Zipline.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Graphical representation for data visualization
- Concise tagging and real-time feedback
- Intuitive and easy-to-navigate user interface
Cons:
- Customer sentiment recording may be negatively biased due to skewed rating scale
- Dashboard alerting could be improved
Best for highly customizable A/B testing and targeted product feature developments
Optimizely heightens user experiences through its robust feature management and A/B testing capabilities. The software is ideal for e-commerce websites looking to scale through personalization and feedback-inspired configuration. It is also useful for testing out different customer pipelines to elevate conversion optimization rates.
Why I picked Optimizely: I picked Optimizely for its highly customized A/B testing capabilities that contribute to targeted feature development and rollouts. You can perform no-code or low-code A/B, server-side, or multivariate testing experiments directly on your website with an easy-to-use WYSIWYG visual editor. This speeds up web experimentation and leads to tailored digital experiences for specific users or groups. Optimizely also allows you to measure the impact of your personalization efforts from customer insights and centralize audiences to target them with feature experimentation.
The tool also allows you to merge and deploy code at any time without having to actually release features or changes, resulting in faster releases with less risk.
Optimizely Standout Features and Integrations
One standout feature is the Customized Commerce platform that provides you with flexible solutions to grow your e-commerce business. With this feature, you can effortlessly manage inventory and acquire a holistic view of digital sales. It also provides automatic tagging to recommend the next best purchases and multi-channel commerce to acquire new users from various channels. You can even build and deploy a mobile app for digital self-service, which is easily customizable using Optimizely’s Mobile Commerce SDK.
B2B enterprise users can also build digital commerce solutions with Configured Commerce.
Integrations include 200+ tools, such as Adobe Experience Manager, Facebook, FullStory, Google Tag Manager, Hootsuite, Invoca, Jira, LinkedIn, Salesforce ROI Analytics, Sendgrid, Showpad, and Wisepops. Additionally, you can access thousands of other apps using its integration with Zapier.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Performance edge feature enables A/B testing without slowing down the site
- Easy editing for variations using a visual editor
- Multi-page testing for evaluating conversion funnels
Cons:
- Occasional issues related to platform stability, bugs, and updates
- Data fields in reports are not context-aware of event actions
Mixpanel is an advanced product analytics platform that helps businesses capture and understand user action data. Its interactive reports and in-depth analytics help differentiate your audience into segmented cohorts and highlight the most engaged users.
Why I picked Mixpanel: Mixpanel operates from an event-based data model. Mixpanel records each interaction a customer has with your digital product. Its various capabilities can help you better understand which product features are doing best with different audience cohorts. Mixpanel monitors product engagement through the steps taken by a user once they enter your website or application.
The software’s “data-science models” can help you predict users’ actions and identify any correlations. This helps you further refine your product development.
Mixpanel Standout Features and Integrations
Features include its Signal capability, which finds user behaviors corresponding to higher engagement. With Mixpanel’s in-app notifications feature, you can communicate targeted messages to specific users. It even allows you to A/B test your messaging templates. Moreover, you can freely explore data in Mixpanel without SQL. This helps extract granular insights to uncover valuable user trends.
Integrations include 115+ tools, such as Apphud, Batch, CleverTap, Fivetran, HappyFox, HubSpot, Mailchimp, Meya, Plotline, Segment, UserGuiding, and Zoho Desk. Mixpanel also integrates with Zapier to build workflows with thousands of additional apps.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Live view feature presents a filtered focus on events of interest
- Offers custom dashboards and A/B test experiments for data analysis
- Real-time event updates and user engagement tracking
Cons:
- Limited documentation and support, lead to a steep learning curve
- Lacks interactive search for menus like event search
Braze is a comprehensive product engagement platform built to power interactions between consumers and brands with personalized messaging and customer journey analytics. This software provides customer engagement, acquisition, and retention solutions to businesses across multiple industries, including retail, hospitality, media and entertainment, and financial services.
Why I picked Braze: Braze is an extremely user-friendly and flexible customer engagement platform, perfect for targeting audiences at specific stages of the sales funnel. It has robust capabilities for personalization and gamification across various channels. Using the Liquid Personalization feature, you can customize emails, in-app messages, and mobile push notifications to increase product engagement through various campaigns. Users can also personalize in-app messages for gamification and boost sales conversions.
Braze also brings multi-channel components together with its Canvas Flow feature and makes it super easy to send a single-channel message in the Braze Campaigns tab. This tool is easy to set up and comes with a robust collection of learning resources and training.
Braze Standout Features and Integrations
Features include its data-driven A/B testing capabilities. Sage AI by Braze can create compelling cross-channel customer experiences while minimizing bottlenecks, driving next-best actions, and leading to more conversions. The accessible A/B testing tools make it easy to optimize and personalize every aspect of the customer journey. Sage AI also supports real-time implementation of these changes by processing user behavior and preferences and attributing the data insights.
Integrations include 140+ tools, such as ActionIQ, Blueconic, Clarisights, Databricks, Extole, Gimbal, Google Cloud, Iterate, Kubit, Microsoft Dynamics 365, Pinterest, and Rokt Calendar.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Provides segmentation and triggering through custom attributes and events
- Current Tools feature offers robust event-level reporting
- Enables personalization and dynamic content population using Liquid Code feature
Cons:
- Analytics insights are not detailed enough
- Passing user profile attributes to internal company databases can be improved
WalkMe
Best for guiding users through business workflows and optimizing digital adoption initiatives
WalkMe is essentially a digital adoption platform (DAP) that provides the visibility and insights you need to deliver frictionless digital experiences. The software can help you build powerful on-screen experiences that guide users through every step of a process, from user onboarding to change management.
Why I picked WalkMe: I picked WalkMe owing to its robust capabilities that supercharge product adoption, elevate user productivity, and reduce security risks. These capabilities include application, workflow, and form analytics that relay the extent of product usage and identify friction points resulting in drop-offs. WalkMe also walks you through business workflows within and across applications using in-app guidance, automation, and a conversational self-service content editor.
This tool also provides configurable and application-specific templates for the more difficult actions. WalkMe’s DAP also streamlines omnichannel user experiences on any web, mobile, or desktop software product for personalization, using hyper-automation and in-app guidance and engagement.
WalkMe Standout Features and Integrations
Features include its powerful AI-driven analytics and reporting capabilities. The tool displays user behavior, such as how long users use your product and where they struggle. You can use this to identify under-utilized features and create support processes to boost engagement and feature adoption. WalkMe’s no-code platform allows anybody on your team to create learning sessions. The UI intelligence feature makes all this information available on a simple and intuitive dashboard. Additionally, you can reduce time-to-value and increase reliability throughout the WalkMe building process using pre-configured templates. The Solution Accelerator feature helps you design frictionless workflows that speed up deployment timelines while still delivering top-notch results.
Integrations include 20+ tools, such as Amazon S3, Azure Active Directory, Gainsight, Google Suite, Intercom, LiveAgent, LiveChat, Okta, Segment, Slack, Webhooks, and Zendesk.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Provides the right amount of help at different points in the product use workflow
- Conditional shoutouts feature for seamless customer communications
- Smart walkthroughs with trigger steps and conditions
Cons:
- Lack of in-built templates and advanced reporting features
- Lacks help version management from one version to the next
Hotjar is a powerful user behavior analytics tool that helps you improve product experience and engagement. The software enables you to monitor what users are doing on your website or application and collect data that transforms raw user behavior analytics into actionable insights.
Why I picked Hotjar: I picked Hotjar because of its accuracy and transparency in measuring product engagement. You can literally witness where users scroll, stop, or click in real-time. This is possible owing to Hotjar’s robust capabilities, such as heatmaps, session recordings, feedback surveys, and interviews.
You can record and replay user sessions, annotate recordings with your comments, and share them with other team members. Hotjar also enables you to bring your customer voice into decision-making through surveys. The feedback can further measure customer satisfaction and validate your roadmap ideas.
Hotjar Standout Features and Integrations
One standout feature includes funnels, which indicate where and why your users are dropping off your conversion funnel. It helps you identify conversion blockers, size up issues easily, and double down on the success of your highest-converting flows. You can also compare funnels by segments and unravel the behavior behind your churn rate. Hotjar also allows you to collect feedback by adding a suggestions portal or using NPS surveys. Moreover, its free dashboard allows users to stay on top of user metrics, analyze the impact of product changes, and quickly check user sentiments.
Integrations include 20+ tools, such as AB Tasty, Contentsquare, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, HubSpot, Jira, Kameleoon, Microsoft Teams, Omniconvert, Rudderstack, Slack, and Unbounce. Hotjar also integrates with Zapier to allow you to build workflows with thousands other web services.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Generates automated reports from customer surveys
- Recorded sessions can be shared for real-time feedback
- Robust heat mapping and session recording capabilities
Cons:
- User recordings cannot be viewed on a mobile device
- Dashboard customization or re-ordering of widgets is not allowed
Pendo
Best for creating in-app product guides and managing product feature requests
Pendo is an all-in-one product engagement platform that helps you deliver a best-in-class digital user experience. The software combines retroactive analytics and qualitative feedback to develop a complete understanding of how your customers feel about your product.
Why I picked Pendo.io: I picked Pendo because of its robust targeted walkthroughs and in-app guides that provide personalized onboarding, guidance, and support. The tool enables you to deliver the right messages to the right users to drive feature adoption.
Pendo helps you capture, prioritize, and manage feature requests. As a result, you gain access to several real-time product insights from sources such as user interviews, support tickets, beta testing, etc. Combining this with Pendo’s robust low-code product analytics metrics (like PES), you can improve roadmap planning and build the right product.
Pendo.io Standout Features and Integrations
Features include its native feedback module. This enables users to submit feature requests and leave feedback. You can then connect these requests to your roadmap initiatives for real-time product design and development. Moreover, Pendo also offers a sentiment analysis feature. Using this, you can add an NPS survey or other polls to newly launched features and gauge your customers’ satisfaction.
Integrations include 50+ tools, such as Algolia, BigQuery, Breadcrumbs, Calendly, Catalyst, Gainsight, HubSpot, Integrately, Intercom, Salesforce, Slack, and Tableau. You can access thousands of additional apps using a paid subscription with Zapier.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Offers onboarding walkthroughs, information tooltips, and feedback forms
- Data Explorer tool is great for its reporting capabilities
- Helps organize all feature improvement requests in a single place
Cons:
- Custom reports are not available on the mobile app
- Roadmapping capabilities need improvement
Heap
Best low-code product engagement software for tracking user behavior across mobile and web sessions
Heap is a digital insights platform that provides a holistic understanding of end-to-end customer digital journeys. The software is compatible with both web browsers and mobile applications and tracks user behavior to make customer experiences intuitive and delightful.
Why I picked Heap.io: Heap is great in terms of usability. Other similar software needs users to learn coding, but Heap can capture and analyze all user interactions without data or shipping code. This means it’s extremely easy to set up within minutes. Once you embed the software into your website or platform, it begins automatically collecting all of your product data. You can use this tool to track any event, such as page views, gestures, clicks, form submissions, and so on.
You also do not need to add tracking code to new features and developments manually as Heap does it for you! This enables you to collect customer insights faster by yourself without relying on your developers. Heap also allows you to integrate web and mobile sessions and attribute it to every individual user.
Heap.io Standout Features and Integrations
Features include its Illuminate and analytics features. Illuminate is a powerful data science-backed layer that identifies hidden points of friction and opportunity and helps avoid confirmation bias. This feature also comes with attributes such as journey maps, path comparisons, and step suggestions that measure the impact of optional steps in a funnel and justify product improvements.
Additionally, Heap’s product analytics provide an overview of product usage by different segments. You can also analyze every individual user based on their customer data, such as their age, gender, email address, payment plan, and total income.
Integrations include 70+ tools, such as Attribution, BigQuery, Census, Clearbit, Flagship, Intercom, Klaviyo, Marketo, Redshift, Shopify, Stitch, and Userlist. Heap.io also integrates with Zapier to allow you to build workflows with thousands of apps.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Offers an intuitive dashboard, funnel analysis, and multiple options for reports
- Easy access to different patterns of data visualization
- High support for self-service with in-depth documentation
Cons:
- Interface for creating segments is cumbersome
- Mobile version is sub-optimal without Flutter support
Pushwoosh
Best for leveraging product engagement via various channels
Pushwoosh is a mobile-inspired product engagement platform that allows product managers and marketers to establish triggered omnichannel communications that support a personalized customer journey.
Why I picked Pushwoosh: I picked Pushwoosh owing to its advanced and efficient push notification and no-code in-app messaging solutions with pre-made inbuilt templates. You can deliver relevant content to your customers using emails, SMS, WhatsApp messages, and even chatbots. With triggered actions, you can tie your marketing campaigns and CTAs to customer behavior to drive engagement and conversions. This will ultimately transform product engagement into sales revenue.
Pushwoosh Standout Features and Integrations
One standout feature is its intelligent data analysis. With historical data gathered from past stages of the customer lifecycle and a custom combination of filters, you can orchestrate web push notification campaigns with Pushwoosh’s visual customer journey builder. This can further engage users in real-time to boost website traffic, CTR, and conversion to a target action.
Integrations include tools like Adjust, Appsflyer, Crashlytics, Google Analytics, Marketo, Mixpanel, mParticle, and Segment.
Pros and cons
Pros:
- Robust capabilities for geo-targeting and easy scheduling of messages
- Different dashboards for different platforms and apps
- Automated push notifications for both apps and browser
Cons:
- Occasional bugs with delivering messages and collecting feedback
- Lacks visibility in the marketplace with CRM and ORM integrations
The Best Product Engagement Software Comparison Chart
Here is a table you can use to compare the tools we just covered in the overviews.
| Tools | Price | |
|---|---|---|
| UserGuiding | From $89/month (billed annually) | Website |
| Medallia | Pricing upon request | Website |
| Optimizely | Pricing upon request | Website |
| Mixpanel | From $20/month | Website |
| Braze | Pricing upon request | Website |
| WalkMe | From $2-3000/annually | Website |
| Hotjar | From $59/month | Website |
| Pendo | Pricing upon request | Website |
| Heap | Pricing upon request | Website |
| Pushwoosh | From $7/month | Website |
Compare Software Specs Side by Side
Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.
Compare SoftwareOther Product Engagement Software Options
Here are other tools that did not make my list, but are worth considering:
- MoEngage
Best AI-powered product engagement software for optimizing omnichannel communication with data-driven insights
- Qualtrics XM
Best for tracking market trends to kickstart product feature optimization
- Airship
Best for enriching users’ app experiences with generative & predictive AI capabilities
- Jotform
Best for enhancing enterprise user experience with customer feedback survey data
- Product Fruits
Best for facilitating user onboarding through guided product walkthroughs and checklists
- inRiver
Best for PIM automation and analysis
- Kayako
Best for simplified and personalized customer service legacy help desks
- SurveySparrow
Best for elevating customer satisfaction using customizable product feedback survey data
- Salsify
Best for managing and publishing product experiences in one unified platform
- Productboard
Best for building product roadmaps by leveraging AI-generated user feedback summaries
Selection Criteria For Product Engagement Software
Here’s a short summary of the main selection and evaluation criteria I used to develop my list of the best product engagement software:
Core Functionality
Here are some of the basic attributes that each product engagement software tool on my list possesses:
- Offers segmentation of customer database by user behaviors, demographics, or where they are in the customer journey
- Enables communication with customers across all relevant channels using native tools or third-party integrations
Key Features
Besides the core functionalities listed above, here are some features that elevate the potential of each product engagement tool on my list:
- Feedback collection: The tools I have selected all come with robust feedback collection functionalities. They supplicate, gather, analyze, and respond to customer feedback in a bid to support the best product development strategies.
- Automation capabilities: The tools I have highlighted particularly include complex automation tools and workflows. This can encompass parsing customer data for marketplace segmentation or sending out omnichannel messages to the proper people at the proper time.
- Reporting and analytics: My tools all include strong reporting and analytics functionalities. They help users capture insights inclusive of who their clients are, their values, what functions of the product they use most, and how they interact with their brand and their employees.
Usability
Measuring product engagement is an ongoing effort. This means that whichever software you choose must be easy to use, both for your customers and your product and content teams.
The tools I have included in this list all fit seamlessly into your Product Experience Management (PXM) workflows. They also convert customer data into metrics that can be easily attributed to product development and optimization initiatives. Last but not least, they come with robust documentation and responsive customer support teams that make it simple to learn how to use them.
Software Integrations
Even the best product engagement platform does not manage all aspects of the entire customer journey natively. This is where third-party integrations come into play.
The tools I have selected for my list come with multiple software integrations, providing customer relationship management, A/B testing, data enrichment, data warehousing, and other capabilities. Some of these include Amazon S3, Google Suite, HubSpot, Microsoft Office 365, Salesforce, Zendesk, etc. A few of them also integrate with Zapier, the combination of which can further enable you to build workflows with thousands of third-party software and apps.
Pricing
Like other SaaS tools, customer engagement tools also follow a monthly or annual recurring pricing model. The tools I have included in my list offer affordable pricing plans that provide you with value for money.
I have also highlighted the software that offers free trials or plans so that you can explore the product features without investing first.
People Also Ask
Here are some frequently asked questions about product engagement with answers that might help you understand the concepts explained above better.
What is product engagement?
Product engagement is a degree of the level of interaction users have with a specific product or service. It gauges how successfully a product captures consumers’ attention.
Product engagement also evaluates how involved clients are in contributing to improving the product and how well the developers take and implement their comments in constructing new features for the product.
High product engagement results in greater product usage and a lift in consumer retention, loyalty, and advocacy.
How do you create product engagement?
To create product engagement, organizations need to incorporate strategies that highlight what value their product brings to the user, create an interactive user experience, and prioritize optimization based totally on customer behavior and analytics.
You can create product engagement with the aid of tailored consumer journey designs. You can also set emails to be sent on action triggers, bolster customer support for faster resolution of user issues, build an online presence on social media, introduce gamified rewards for loyal users, and more.
How is product engagement measured?
When it comes to measuring product engagement, you must define the target parameters and metrics.
Some well-known product engagement metrics include product engagement rating (PES), weekly or monthly active customers (indicating product stickiness), feature adoption rate, retention and churn rates, and time in product (indicating average time spent on the product website or app per individual browsing session).
What’s Next?
I hope this guide has helped you understand the relevance of monitoring consumer interactions for your business in today’s competitive virtual landscape. If you need to know whether users are loving or leaving your product, measuring product engagement is your key to a treasure trove of actionable insights.
The right product engagement software tool enables you to find your product-market fit rather quickly and for an affordable fee. It may also help you communicate with your customers across different channels and draw insights from their interactions and comments to empower buyer journeys. The final goal of an excellent product engagement software is to elevate the consumer experience and drive high-quality outcomes for your enterprise.
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