10 PLG Software Shortlist
Here's my pick of the 10 best software from the 27 tools reviewed.
Our one-on-one guidance will help you find the perfect fit.
With so many different product-led growth solutions available, figuring out which one is right for you is tough. You know you want to increase user adoption, organic customer acquisition through word of mouth, improved customer satisfaction, and a more efficient and scalable customer acquisition model 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, sharing my personal experiences using dozens of different tools with large teams and diverse products, with my picks of the best product-led growth software.
What Is Product Led Growth Software?
Product-led growth software refers to tools and platforms that prioritize the product as the main driver of customer acquisition and retention, emphasizing user satisfaction and advocacy as key elements of business success. Through in-app onboarding guides, user analytics, product usage tracking, freemium models, and referral programs, they empower companies to leverage the product itself as a marketing and sales tool, fostering organic growth through positive user experiences.
Overviews Of The 10 Best Product Led Growth Software
Here’s a brief description of each product led growth system to showcase each tool’s best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a snapshot of the user interface.
UserGuiding is a product walkthrough and user onboarding software designed to assist businesses in creating interactive, personalized onboarding experiences for their users directly within their products.
The tool delivers tailored onboarding flows that can be segmented and customized to meet the specific needs of different user personas, thereby improving trial conversion rates, user activation, and feature adoption.
UserGuiding provides interactive product tours that facilitate step-by-step user guidance through web applications, aiming to accelerate the understanding of core functionalities for new users. Onboarding checklists and tooltips offer structured task completion and contextual hints, respectively, enhancing user familiarity with the application.
Stand-out features include tooltips and user segmentation. Tooltips are small, contextual hints that can be placed next to specific features within the application. They offer quick explanations or tips to help users understand the functions of various elements. User segmentation allows the creation of personalized experiences by segmenting users based on their behavior, properties, or events. Different segments can receive tailored onboarding experiences.
Integrations include Mixpanel, Segment, Intercom, Slack, Google Analytics, Google Tag Manager, Woopra, and HubSpot.
Product Fruits is a comprehensive product adoption software that enables companies to achieve product-led growth. The software helps product owners to onboard new customers and engage existing ones by creating interactive in-app flows. Users can optimize their product onboarding strategy with the software, enhance user experiences, and drive sustainable growth. Product Fruits helps identify areas for improvement for user onboarding so organizations can prioritize product features and make data-driven decisions to stay ahead of the competition. The software requires no prior technical knowledge, making it easy for anyone to set it up. The user-friendly interface also ensures users can access customer onboarding data to maximize activation rates.
Product Fruits allows businesses to onboard new users, ensuring they have a smooth experience with the product. It guides users through the onboarding, providing clear, interactive instructions and tips to ensure they get the most out of the product. With the feedback widget, organizations can prioritize product development efforts based on customer feedback, market trends, and internal objectives. This feature lets users focus on the most important initiatives, align team efforts, and ensure accountability.
Key features include segmentation and rich styling options. Segmentation allows for the personalization of onboarding flows to distinct user personas, such as admins and managed users or new and returning. Styling via custom CSS lets you customize the experience so it looks like an integral part of your app or website.
Product Fruit costs $89 per month with a monthly subscription or $69 per month with an annual payment. There is a 14-day free trial with all the features; no credit card is required.
ProdPad is a product management software designed to help product managers plan and develop their products effectively. It provides tools for road mapping, idea management, customer feedback, and more.
The platform stands out because it integrates customer feedback directly into the product development process. This approach ensures that product decisions are driven by user insights, aligning with the principles of product-led growth. The software’s intuitive interface and features like idea management, product backlogs, and voting on ideas, allow product teams to prioritize and execute the most impactful initiatives.
Another key feature that supports product-led growth is its dynamic product roadmap functionality. Unlike traditional roadmaps that are often static and fixated on timelines, ProdPad's roadmaps are outcome-driven, flexible, and easily adjustable to changing priorities and market conditions.
Furthermore, ProdPad’s integration capabilities allow seamless connection with various customer relationship management (CRM) and project management tools. This connectivity ensures that valuable user insights are not siloed but shared across all platforms to provide teams with a more unified view of the customer journey and product experience.
Integrations include JIRA, Pivotal Tracker, Dropbox, GitHub, Confluence, Slack, Doorbell.io, Trello, Rally, Uservoice, Azure DevOps, Salesforce, Intercom, and more.
Appcues
Create Personalized Onboarding Flows to Help Customers Adopt Products
Appcues helps product managers enroll new customers, monitor their behavior, and create interactive workflows. The platform allows you to provide a self-service onboarding experience to new customers when they sign up for your product. Your marketing department can use the platform to manage product promotions, create announcements in your application, and start referral campaigns.
The key features of Appcues help your customer reduce their time to value by assisting them in learning what your app can do quickly. These features include feedback collection, user onboarding tours, A/B testing, and goal management. You can easily add these features without the need of a developer by using Appcues’ drag-and-drop builder.
Appcues integrates with popular software to help you measure and create user experiences, such as Klaviyo, Heap, Customer.io, and Google Analytics.
Appcues costs from $299/month or $249/month when paying annually for up to 2,500 active monthly users. They also offer a free trial that allows you to show up to 50 Appcues flows and track up to 10 events.
Pendo is a product experience program that helps various software teams determine which features their customers are using and which they’re ignoring. These insights can help you set up in-app guides, messages, and walkthroughs to help your users get the most from your product. The data from Pendo’s platform can also help you to analyze customer usage across web and mobile applications.
Pendo’s behavioral analytics tool helps organizations extract and analyze data, such as time spent, trends over time, and drop-off points. These details can help you make any necessary changes based on results and create material for a specific user group. To enhance your customer’s experience, Pendo provides tools to send feedback surveys and polls, enabling you to gather qualitative and quantitative data to understand where there’s any dissatisfaction.
Pendo integrates with multiple third-party applications such as Calendly, Figma, HubSpot, Microsoft Teams, and Optimizely.
Pendo offers customized pricing upon request, but the platform has a free forever option.
Sisense
Infuse Business Intelligence in Customer and Employee Applications
Sisense is an AI-powered analytics platform that helps innovative startups to global brands explore their applications’ data and take action based on the results. The platform can empower you to interpret your data efficiently and present its critical insights in plain text. Sisense also helps organizations gather data from multiple sources for a complete business overview.
Sisense can provide you with everything you need to organize your data and give your users a branded analytics dashboard. You can build data visualizations and actionable components to optimize your application’s performance and manage your resources. The platform helps you integrate analytics into your products, no matter your tech stack.
Sisense integrates with Salesforce, Amplitude, and Amazon Web Services. It also integrates with SQL databases, such as PostgreSQL and MySQL.
Sisense offers customized pricing upon request, as well as a free trial.
Heap’s platform allows you to see and understand everything your customers do when using your product. Your marketing and product teams can see where to make vital improvements to the product or your website. With these details, you can create a product that keeps your customers coming back.
Heap can pinpoint where your customers might be struggling in their journey using your product so you can make fast improvements to their experience. The platform helps you see every action from every user. You can get a complete set of behavioral data and learn what your customers are clicking, where they’re going, and what they’re doing.
Heap integrates with over 100 third-party applications, including Shopify, Salesforce, Intercom, and HubSpot.
Heap offers customized pricing upon request, but they provide a free version for up to 10,000 monthly sessions.
Refiner
Create Configurable Survey Widgets to Close The Customer Feedback Loop
Refiner is a survey solution for data-driven SaaS organizations. The platform helps companies create micro survey widgets to help SaaS organizations segment their customers, track satisfaction levels, or research what to make next. You can use the platform to ask users questions while they’re using your product.
Refiner allows organizations to customize their surveys by adding brand-specific colors and multiple languages and visualize the data they collect. Product managers can preview surveys they create to ensure they stay on brand and that the survey is easily understandable for customers. You can also receive notifications about surveys your customers complete and set up triggers to contact them according to their responses.
Refiner integrates with other software such as Salesforce, HubSpot, Heap, Airtable, and Zapier.
Refiner costs from $99/month for up to 5,000 interactions with your survey when paying monthly and $79/month when paying annually. The platform also offers a 14-day free trial.
The Calixa platform gives organizations details to understand their customers’ actions when using their products. You can use this information to engage with customers to improve your conversion rate when they reach vital milestones. When a customer performs a specific action or hits an essential metric, the platform can give you real-time alerts so you can engage with them right away.
Calixa lets you see your customers’ actions when using your product and how they interact with you. You can see payments, events, e-mails, and other actions to give you an idea of what you can do to have efficient conversations. The platform can reduce the time it takes for you to gain the best insights and take action when you get a qualified lead.
Calixa integrates with popular apps and data warehouses, such as Salesforce, Intercom, Clearbit, and Amplitude.
Calixa costs from $499/month and offers a free plan for up to five team members and 5,000 users.
If your application has an API file that developers can use to integrate your features into their systems, ReadMe can help you create documentation to help them. The platform creates everything a developer needs to start, such as sample code tutorials, help guides, and your API reference. You can also monitor who’s viewing your guide or making an API call and see what features they’re using or if they’re experiencing any challenges.
ReadMe makes it easy to create interactive documentation that lets your potential users try out your API. You can use the platform to automatically generate code snippets to help integrate your application with the customer’s app. ReadMe also creates shareable links for every request to use your API so your team can easily debug issues or provide user support. As your API evolves, you can maintain old or beta versions of your documentation for users.
ReadMe integrates with other third-party applications to help you enhance your customer’s experience with your API, including Slack, Zendesk, Google Site Verification, and reCAPTCHA.
ReadMe costs from $99/project/month and offers a free version to help you start documenting your API.
Best Product Led Growth Software Summary
| Tools | Price | |
|---|---|---|
| UserGuiding | From $89/month (billed annually) | Website |
| Product Fruits | From $89/month | Website |
| ProdPad | From $25/user/month | Website |
| Appcues | From $249/month (billed annually) | Website |
| Pendo | Pricing upon request | Website |
| Sisense | Pricing upon request | Website |
| Heap | Pricing upon request | Website |
| Refiner | From $99/month (up to 5,000 users/month) | Website |
| Calixa | No price details | Website |
| Readme | From $99/project/month | Website |
Compare Software Specs Side by Side
Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.
Compare SoftwareOther Options
Here are a few more that didn’t make the top list.
- Pocus
Provides Insights to Help Sales Teams Convert Self-Serve Users to Paying Customers
- Stack Overflow
Enhances Product Innovation by Enabling Cross-Team Collaboration
- Survicate
Best for user research & feedback
- Frontegg
User Management Platform for B2B, B2C, and SaaS Product Developers
- Intercom
Allows marketing, sales, and support departments unify their customer’s experience.
- CloudTalk
Create a virtual call center with local phone numbers to provide customer support.
- ChartMogul
SaaS subscription analytics to measure, understand, and grow recurring revenue.
- HubSpot
Everything you need to track, organize, and build relationships with your customers for free.
- Totango
Grade the health of your application by identifying return users, how often they use the app, and for how long to build your marketing campaigns.
- ChurnZero
Subscription businesses can understand how their customers use their products and optimize the customer’s experience.
- Upzelo
Provides real-time analytics to increase customer retention and also see how well your application is performing against comparable companies.
- Salesforce
Use with your cloud technology to connect with customers and partners through the popular CRM.
- Google BigQuery
Provides scalable data warehouses that are easily accessible and stream data in real-time to give you up-to-date information on your processes.
- Social Intents
Live, web-based chat software for engaging with website visitors.
- Mixpanel
Identify valuable insights to engage, convert, and retain customers and learn their behaviors.
- Zendesk
Provide customer service via text, phone, live chat, social media, and e-mail.
- Userflow
Build customizable in-app tours, surveys, and checklists without using code.
Selection Criteria: How I Picked the Best PLG Software
To craft my list of the best product led growth software, here are the criteria I evaluated:
Core Functionality
There are a few different types of software on this list. So I’ve made a point of highlighting the core functionality of each platform. Some provide product analytics while others streamline product development workflows. Whatever the case, I’ve explained how each software will contribute to your product led growth model in their overviews.
Key Features
Of course, exact product features will depend on the type of software you’re looking at. But here are some key features I spotted in the software I evaluated for this list:
- Customer journey mapping: The ability to track the end-user’s product experience from sign up through to adoption to help you optimize it.
- Product roadmapping: Some software helps you outline your product roadmap, and many have templates to help speed up the process.
- Self-service customer support: This could be a knowledge base, chatbot, or in-app notifications that help customers make the most of your product.
- Customer onboarding automation: Tools that help new customers get up and running on their own, without the need for sales reps to step in.
- Customer acquisition tools: Anything that will help you acquire new customers in a hands-off way, such as through referral or self-serve signup.
- Analytics and reports: Ideally, you can track user metrics like upsells, churn, and customer acquisition costs (CAC) in a real-time, interactive dashboard.
Usability
The whole idea behind product led growth companies is to provide a frictionless, delightful user experience. So why would you expect anything less from the tools you use to run your business? I’ve looked for products with a user-friendly interface and a quick time to value.
Integrations
How a new software integrates with your existing tech stack is always something to take into account. Different platforms offer different integrations, but I kept an eye out for ones that connect with common workplace SaaS tools.
Many have native integrations with CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce, communication tools like Slack and social media messaging tools, and cloud storage solutions like Dropbox. Some also connect with third-party integration tools like Zapier. And others have an API you can use to build your own connectors.
Pricing
Cost will always be a factor when picking a new software, especially if you’re a startup or small business with a tight budget. Pricing varies pretty widely on this list, because there are so many different product types. That said, many of the providers offer free trials and demos, too. I always recommend taking a new tool for a test drive before purchasing.
What Is Product Led Growth (PLG)?
Product led growth is a business strategy that places your application at the center of a customer’s buying journey. This strategy depends on your product’s performance, features, and virality to do most of the selling for you. What makes PLG different is that it places your product in the middle of all your marketing efforts.
Keep in mind that taking a product led approach takes time and practice. You don’t have to overhaul your business model overnight, and you can implement small changes over time to get there. There are lots of great PLG companies leading by example, and looking to those for inspiration can be a great place to start, too.
Here are some key factors a PLG strategy consists of:
1. Growing Without Dependencies
A PLG strategy means you can grow your business without investing a lot of money on paid advertising or having your sales team call leads all the time. The strategy means you build your product in a way that helps you monetize and grow on its own.
2. Customer-Centric Promotion
PLG focuses on enhancing your customer’s experience to make them happy. When satisfied, they can become your biggest fans and promote your product for you. Your product can make customers happy by solving real problems, which helps your organization grow. You need to understand your customer’s needs and pains and work to develop a product to solve them. Afterward, you can align the company to provide product support.
Adopting a PLG strategy means your organization is doing everything possible to make its product the best one available. You can take customer feedback and create new product features according to what they want to see in your next update. This means your product revolves around your customers, and you see the results.
3. Implementing Independent Product Adoption
A significant factor in a PLG strategy is letting your customers serve themselves and adopt your product independently. It’s vital to your PLG strategy to give customers the ability to onboard themselves. But they also understand that help is always available. The strategy is about getting more from your product development by ensuring your customers can discover its features. It's about helping them find value, keeping them engaged, and having the right metrics you can monetize.
4. Using Non-Committal Pricing
A PLG strategy usually involves implementing a freemium-based pricing model. This is so your customer can start using and interacting with your product on their own without committing to a recurring fee. This aspect also allows small companies to get started for free and begin growing immediately with the understanding they’ll commit to a paid subscription when they’re ready.
A PLG strategy has an excellent onboarding process and engaging product tours to enable users to explore the product and develop their own conclusion on its value. Afterward, you can introduce a paid feature that can make your customers’ lives easier.
Other Product Management Software Reviews
Looking for additional tools to support your product development and management? Here are some of our other reviews:
What Do You Think About This List?
This list includes ten of the best product led growth platforms to help you use your product to generate leads and more customers. When choosing the best software for your application, remember to pick one that can improve your customer’s experience so they won’t hesitate to sign up after their free trial.
Sign up for our newsletter for more information about product management, including the latest insights from top thinkers in the niche.