PLG Software Shortlist
Here’s the list of the best tools that I’ll cover in this article.
Product led growth software is one of the latest buzzwords in the SaaS industry. Using a product led growth (PLG) strategy helps a company’s product sell to a target audience on its own, which can give everyone time to focus on growth.
PLG software allows a target audience to use a product without restrictions, enabling them to get value from it immediately. As we all know, if you eliminate restrictions, more people will buy! If you’re having difficulty deciding the best PLG products you can use to enhance your application, I’m here to solve them with this detailed software list.
Comparison Criteria
What do I look for when I select the best product led growth platform? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria:
- User Interface (UI): I look for straightforward navigation throughout the entire platform. Users should enjoy exploring the platform, even if it’s full of features. Excellent UI doesn’t intimidate users, so they’re afraid to push a button. It makes the user comfortable by providing them with details about where they are, where they were, and where they can go.
- Usability: I look for a platform that can perform the proper tasks quickly. Users shouldn’t have to click 27 times to complete a daily task. It’s also essential for the user to easily remember how to use the platform effectively for future use.
- Integrations: I look for software that can integrate easily with other third-party platforms you’re considering using. The software you decide to use shouldn’t cause any disruptions to your processes and work with your data. It should also fit with the programs you’re currently using already.
- Value for $: I look for platforms that provide the most features at a reasonable price. The platform that provides the most features for your needs at the lowest possible price wins! I look for the average price among the competition and see what each software offers you.
Product Led Growth Solution: Key Features
When looking for the best product led growth software, I look for platforms that have the following key characteristics and features:
- Assortment: Product assortment is how platforms create different product packages to accommodate various buyers.
- Audit logs: Audit logs show product managers and other stakeholders who performed an activity, what they did, and the platform’s response.
- Role-based access control: This allows the organization’s administrators to limit users’ permissions to access or change particular details.
- Change management: Admins should have the tools and rights to deploy any changes their teams make.
- Security: Data security is vital, and this feature can help protect an organization’s product data from intruders and allows them to respond to any incidents.
- Team collaboration: The best product management tools allow teams to see what each member is working on and collaborate accordingly.
- Reporting and analytics: As more people within the organization use the platform, reporting is important to demonstrate the value they gain from the software.
- Service level agreement (SLA): You can trust the features each platform promises when they offer an SLA to illustrate any consequences when features don’t meet your needs.
- Portability: Users need to be able to use a platform from various devices to remain productive when managing their product creation.
- Onboarding automation: Step-by-step guidance from the vendor’s support team is vital to ensure all users can quickly start using the platform to achieve their goals.
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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.
Product Fruits
Best for its guided onboarding feature
Product Fruits is a comprehensive product analytics software that enables companies to achieve product-led growth. It helps businesses track and analyze their product performance metrics, including usage, engagement, and retention rates, to gain deep insights into the needs and preferences of their customers. By leveraging this data, users can optimize their product strategy, enhance user experiences, and drive sustainable growth. Product Fruits helps identify areas for improvement, 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 behavior, engagement, and retention data without significant challenges.
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. Its product roadmaps allow companies to keep their product development efforts organized and aligned with their business goals. 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.
Product Fruits allows businesses to measure and optimize the adoption of new features or changes to existing ones. Its product analytics features analyze customer journey stages, such as acquisition, user onboarding, and conversion. By accessing data that charts a customer's path from the initial visit to the purchase stage, growth teams can identify and optimize each stage of the sales funnel. Having data insights in various stages of the customer journey helps identify the product roadmap, reduce churns, and create targeted content and marketing efforts that boost product growth.
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
Capture Product Usage Data to Improve Customer Experience
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
Identify Hidden Insights in User’s Journey
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.
Readme
Generate and Manage Interactive API Documentation
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.
Stack Overflow
Enhances Product Innovation by Enabling Cross-Team Collaboration
Stack Overflow for Teams helps an organization share knowledge during each step in the product lifecycle. The platform provides a central knowledge base for your organization so multiple teams can resolve challenges. It helps reduce distractions by letting individuals document their experience with specific challenges to help anyone who comes across the same one in the future.
Product teams can use Stack Overflow to work together and deliver a better user experience. They can do this by collecting and analyzing feedback from multiple departments, saving historical knowledge, and developing product roadmaps by implementing siloed information. Your teams can use feedback loops from your marketing, sales, and support departments to incorporate their input and create better products.
Stack Overflow integrates with many tools you might already be using, such as Slack, Jira, Okta, and GitHub.
Stack Overflow costs from $6/user/month and offers a free version for you to try.
Pocus
Provides Insights to Help Sales Teams Convert Self-Serve Users to Paying Customers
Pocus helps organizations identify how self-serve customers engage with its products to help the sales team prioritize its top leads. The platform aggregates customer and product data to determine high-value leads. The information provides details about the customers, their use of your product, and why they’re an excellent opportunity to pursue.
Pocus has a scoring model that’s easy to understand, transparent, and flexible. This explains why a specific customer appears in a particular segment or view. These scoring models are also configurable without using code that anyone in your growth team can use.
Pocus can integrate well with various data warehouses and customer relationship management (CRM) platforms.
Pocus offers customized pricing upon request.
Calixa
Customer Journey Analytics Platform
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.
Best Product Led Growth Software Summary
Tool | Free Option | Price | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Product Fruits Best for its guided onboarding feature | 14-day free trial available | From $79/month | Visit Website |
2 | Appcues Create Personalized Onboarding Flows to Help Customers Adopt Products | 14-day free trial | From $249/month (billed annually) | Visit Website |
3 | Pendo Capture Product Usage Data to Improve Customer Experience | Free trial + free plan available | From $7,000/year (up to 2,000 users/month) | Visit Website |
4 | Sisense Infuse Business Intelligence in Customer and Employee Applications | Free trial + free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
5 | Heap Identify Hidden Insights in User’s Journey | 14-day free trial + free demo | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
6 | Refiner Create Configurable Survey Widgets to Close The Customer Feedback Loop | 14-day free trial | From $99/month (up to 5,000 users/month) | Visit Website |
7 | Readme Generate and Manage Interactive API Documentation | Not available | From $99/project/month | Visit Website |
8 | Stack Overflow Enhances Product Innovation by Enabling Cross-Team Collaboration | Not available | From $6/user/month | Visit Website |
9 | Pocus Provides Insights to Help Sales Teams Convert Self-Serve Users to Paying Customers | Not available | Pricing Upon Request | Visit Website |
10 | Calixa Customer Journey Analytics Platform | Not available | Visit Website |
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Other Options
Here are a few more that didn’t make the top list.
- Social Intents - Live, web-based chat software for engaging with website visitors.
- CloudTalk - Create a virtual call center with local phone numbers to provide customer support.
- Userflow - Build customizable in-app tours, surveys, and checklists without using code.
- Zendesk - Provide customer service via text, phone, live chat, social media, and e-mail.
- Intercom - Allows marketing, sales, and support departments unify their customer’s experience.
- HubSpot - Everything you need to track, organize, and build relationships with your customers for free.
- Salesforce - Use with your cloud technology to connect with customers and partners through the popular CRM.
- MixPanel - Identify valuable insights to engage, convert, and retain customers and learn their behaviors.
- ChartMogul - SaaS subscription analytics to measure, understand, and grow recurring revenue.
- ChurnZero - Subscription businesses can understand how their customers use their products and optimize the customer’s experience.
- 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.
- 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.
- Upzelo - Provides real-time analytics to increase customer retention and also see how well your application is performing against comparable companies.
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. A PLG strategy consists of:
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.
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.
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 that help them find value, keep them engaged, and have the right metrics you can monetize.
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.
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.
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