User Onboarding Software Shortlist
Here’s a quick glance at the tools I evaluated in this list.
After investing so much time in developing a kick-ass product, it is a shame that users can stop using it simply because they don't understand how to make the most of its features. This is a wake-up call for any product team that hasn’t yet built a user onboarding process for their product, website, or app. The best onboarding experience will introduce consumers to your product. It will explore the user interface, guide them through key features and show them shortcuts. But don’t worry: you don’t need to build this process from scratch if you employ user onboarding software.
What is user onboarding Software?
A user onboarding tool is a software solution designed to guide users through the process of getting started with a product or service. It typically includes features such as tutorials, walkthroughs, and prompts that provide step-by-step instructions to help users understand the product's features and functionality. The goal of a user onboarding tool is to ensure that users can quickly and easily navigate the product and achieve their desired outcomes, leading to higher user engagement and retention rates.
A user onboarding tool can guide new users through your product, typically using video or interactive web pages to show off features, processes, and shortcuts. User onboarding software can help build customer experiences that are more satisfying and intuitive for both company and customer.
Overviews Of The 10 Best User Onboarding Software
Here’s a brief description of each user onboarding platform to showcase each tool’s best use case and standout features. Feel free to check out how I picked the software on this list at any time.
Product Fruits
Best for customized onboarding paths with a feedback widget
Product Fruits is a user onboarding software that helps customers learn a product via step-by-step guidance, in-app messages, tooltips, and walkthroughs. It offers behavior-tracking options, which can be used to monitor how customers interact with a product. Product Fruits' interactive guides are customizable, so businesses can tailor them to their specific products, brand, and audience. Product Fruits also enables the insertion of multimedia content such as videos, images, and GIFs.
Product Fruits captures and analyzes critical data such as engagement levels, time spent on each process, and user journey flow. Product Fruits allows businesses to create user groups with individual product preferences, personas, and other data-driven criteria. This feature enables businesses to create highly relevant user onboarding experiences that address the specific needs of each audience segment.
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.
Plotline
Best product tours and tutorials for consumer apps —across mobile and web
Plotline is an in-app engagement platform that can be used to create custom user onboarding flows in your product. Product tours and tutorials can be built to showcase different product verticals and features using in-app videos, tooltips, and animations. Personalized onboarding flows can be set up in the system by segmenting users based on real-time events and attributes of the user.
Plotline allows you to segment users, run tests, and communicate with your user base inside your app (mobile or web). It is also possible to collect user feedback on new product launches or the onboarding experience with the in-built in-app surveys feature.
Integrations include Snowflake, BigQuery, Redshift, Mixpanel, Slack, Clickhouse, Amplitude, Segment, Rudderstack, and OneSignal. Paid plans start from $499 per month, and a 21-day free trial is available.
Paid plans start from $499 per month, and a 21-day free trial is available.
Absorb LMS
Best for engaging, dynamic self-serve training modules
Absorb LMS is a learning management system that can be used to support user onboarding and improve customer adoption. It has a content builder that allows you to create, track, and manage trainings and courses for your customers. Multimedia elements like videos, quizzes, and interactive scenarios can be added for a more dynamic and engaging experience.
The product is built around creating interactive content and delivering an engaging end user experience. You can reward users with badges and certificates, helping to turn new customers into power users quickly. For onboarding more customers without overloading your customer success representatives, it can be a great tool for a self-serve option.
The software integrates with other tools like Google Suite, Microsoft Azure, Namely, Okta, Salesforce, WebEx, Workday, Zoom, and more. Pricing is available upon request, and a free trial and demo are both offered.
Apty
Best for turning free trial users into paying subscribers
Apty is customer onboarding and user adoption software for SaaS companies that houses intuitive walkthroughs designed to highlight your service’s best features for new clients. Apty has specifically positioned itself as a system that can propel free trial users into paying customers. They do this by helping you highlight tooltips and key features that your customers can’t live without.
With Apty, you can employ a straightforward interface and code-free editor to craft the perfect training/onboarding solution. You can design and implement on-screen guidance content dedicated to highlighting your must-have features. You can then track who is accessing your onboarding content as well as when, where, and how long. That way, you can continue to improve anywhere you see a bounce rate.
Apty is, by far, the best user onboarding software for SaaS companies looking to make the most out of freemium or free trial sign-ups.
Apty offers customized pricing upon request and a free trial for up to 45 days, where you can test out their workflows with full admin access.
Userpilot
Best user segmentation for personalized onboarding
Userpilot is cloud-based software that helps businesses improve product adoption and customer onboarding. Admins can segment users, based on certain attributes or in-app events. They can also create multilingual walkthroughs or add tips and hits to improve the client's overall experience.
The software gets new users up and running faster by offering a personalized user onboarding experience. Enterprises can add custom triggers or conditions and preview them across staging and production environments. To optimize performance, they can also perform A/B testing, set up milestones, and track engagement rates.
This tool integrates with platforms such as Google Analytics, Amplitude, Intercom, and Segment.
Userpilot costs from $249/user/month. A 14-day free trial is also available.
Appcues
Best for tracking onboarding KPIs
Appcues delivers native-looking onboarding experiences designed to engage users, increase activations, and improve retention. Using the no-code builder, you can drag and drop images, change text, or adjust buttons.
Segmenting and targeting users by persona, plan tier, lifecycle stage, or account owner is easy. You can track the impact of each onboarding flow, to better guide and support users.
Appcues measures how flows impact key business metrics, so you can identify areas where improvements are needed. You can make adjustments and iterations to maximize the number of free-to-paid conversions.
Appcues integrates with Salesforce, Marketo, HubSpot, Zendesk, Slack, Intercom, Mailchimp, Heap, Mixpanel, Amplitude, Google Analytics, Segment, and others. Plus, a paid plan through Zapier can unlock even more integration options.
Appcues costs from $249/month (billed annually) and offers a free trial for up to 50 onboarding “flows” and 10 tracked events.
GuideCX
Best for user onboarding task lists
GuideCX is client onboarding software that turns the learning process into a series of tasks lists with status indicators for progress checking. Using the fundamentals of digital project management, GuideCX lets you build a customer onboarding workflow populated with learning materials that you set up yourself. You can white-label the system, so it’s all in line with your personal branding.
Key features include time tracking, resource management, a reporting/analytics engine, collaboration tools, and a client portal (no login required!). You also get a mobile app, flexible user permissions settings, private internal communications channels, automated dependency logic, end date forecasts, a timeline view, and storage/attachment capabilities.
GuideCX integrates natively with Salesforce, Hubspot, Gainsite, Slack, and Jira. You can unlock more integrations through Zapier, but this may require a paid plan.
GuideCX offers customized pricing upon request. They offer a free trial and a free demo.
WalkMe
Best for interactive website walkthroughs
WalkMe is a cloud-based interactive guidance platform that helps you manage customer experiences on your company website. Using automated tip balloons, the software drives customers to specific walkthroughs. You can play these automatically or allow the user to initiate them.
You can use segmentation to change the display based on a user's role, location, and language. You can also embed content into walkthroughs such as videos, articles, and more. Thanks to the analytics feature, you can track user interactions with the platform and modify the way they are guided through the site.
WalkMe integrates with Salesforce, AWS, Segment, Gainsight, Google Analytics, Heap, Slack, Google Workspace, LiveAgent, Intercom, Livechat, Zendesk, and other apps.
WalkMe costs from $2-3000/annually. It comes with a free demo.
Intercom
Best user onboarding paired with customer support services
Intercom is a sales, marketing, and support solution that helps businesses acquire, engage, and support customers. The software includes a bot-based algorithm, targeted emails, push and in-app messages, and an integrated helpdesk.
Intercom includes a product tour function designed to produce polished, engaging onboarding tutorials. Simple to use, this feature makes it possible for anyone to create an effective, engaging onboarding guide.
For more complex apps, custom bots can be built. These automatically capture new users' intent, then send them on the appropriate tour directly from the bot conversation.
Intercom integrates with Stripe, Instagram, WhatsApp, Google Analytics, Segment, Heap, Outlook, Slack, Salesforce, and hundreds of other options. You can also access their robust API for additional DIY connections.
Intercom costs from $74/month (billed annually) for small businesses and increases from there. You can try it for free for up to 14 days.
Pendo
Best user onboarding software for feature discovery
Pendo personalized in-app guides help you create better product experiences with in-app web and mobile communication. Out-of-the-box user onboarding tours, product walkthroughs, and in-app support help optimize the user experience.
The software includes a visual design studio for building targeted in-app guide campaigns across both desktop and mobile apps. You can deliver tooltips and best practice advice in-app, to increase user retention and reduce customer support inquiries.
Marketing teams can serve tailored messages to users, based on their behavior and segmentation. In addition, Pendo’s retroactive analytics help you determine when, where, and how to guide users to successful activation.
Pendo integrates with apps like Slack, Zendesk, Confluence, Salesforce, Fivetran, Intercom, Segment, HubSpot, and Drift. Integrations are limited to paid plans.
Pendo is free for up to 1000 monthly active users. You can contact them for paid plan pricing when you’re ready to expand.
The 10 Best User Onboarding Software Comparison Chart
Here is a table with all the tools we just covered in the overviews.
Tool | Free Option | Price | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | Product Fruits Best for customized onboarding paths with a feedback widget | 14-day free trial available | From $89/month | Visit Website |
2 | Plotline Best product tours and tutorials for consumer apps —across mobile and web | 21-day free trial | From $499/month | Visit Website |
3 | Absorb LMS Best for engaging, dynamic self-serve training modules | Free trial + free demo | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
4 | Apty Best for turning free trial users into paying subscribers | Free demo available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
5 | Userpilot Best user segmentation for personalized onboarding | 14-day free trial | From $249/user/month | Visit Website |
6 | Appcues Best for tracking onboarding KPIs | 14-day free trial | From $249/month (billed annually) | Visit Website |
7 | GuideCX Best for user onboarding task lists | Offer a free trial and a free demo | Pricing Upon Request | Visit Website |
8 | WalkMe Best for interactive website walkthroughs | Free demo | From $2-3000/annually | Visit Website |
9 | Intercom Best user onboarding paired with customer support services | 14-day free trial | From $74/month (billed annually) | Visit Website |
10 | Pendo Best user onboarding software for feature discovery | 14-day free trial + free plan available | Pricing upon request | Visit Website |
Other Options
Here are a few more that didn’t make the top list but are worth your consideration.
- Userlist - SaaS email automation that can be used for various product onboarding messages
- Customer.io - User onboarding centered around data-driven emails, push notifications, and SMS messages
- VidGrid - Enterprise video software that can be used for recording, sharing, and embedding product tutorials
- Helppier - Easy-to-build welcome messages and product tours with a quickstart template library
- Zumvie - Interactive product demos that don’t require a customer to log in anywhere before getting taking a test drive
- Inline Manual - Digital adoption platform for interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, surveys, and support articles
- Process Street - Process and workflow management that can be used for onboarding clients of professional service providers
- Hotjar - Heatmaps and screen recording to track user onboarding flow for product usage optimization
- Vimeo - Record and share video tutorials for detailed product adoption training and feature tutorials
- Userguiding - Onboard your users with no-code product walkthroughs that are served up according to contextual user behavior
How I Picked the Best User Onboarding Software
If you're wondering how I selected the best user onboarding software, here's where I'll break it all down for you. First of all, I started with customer onboarding tools that have high user review and satisfaction ratings. Then, using my experience in product management, I discerned what key criteria were most important for product onboarding tools and compared how each of them stacked up against the rest.
I empathize with how much time it takes to source the right software for a job. I do this work so that you don't have to. I've been using and reviewing customer onboarding tools for years so you can trust me to do the heavy lifting and compile all the facts you need to make your final decision.
If you have more general questions about product onboarding tools, you can skip to our FAQ at the bottom of the page. Or, you can jump right to the best user onboarding software overviews if you're ready to start comparing.
Selection Criteria
After careful consideration, I've determined that these are the most important criteria when selecting the best product onboarding tool. Here's a brief list outlining the whats and whys of my selection.
User Interface (UI)
This is critical when selecting a user onboarding tool because it directly affects how users interact with the tool. A well-designed UI can make the onboarding process more intuitive and straightforward. Meanwhile, a poor UI can cause confusion and frustration for users. An effective UI should be visually appealing, easy to navigate, and provide clear and concise instructions.
Usability
Usability is crucial when selecting a user onboarding tool because the tool's effectiveness depends on how easy it is for users to understand and navigate. A user onboarding tool with poor usability can frustrate users. This leads to confusion, and ultimately drive users away from the product or service being offered. On the other hand, a tool with good usability can help streamline the onboarding process, make it more efficient, and improve user engagement and retention.
Integrations
Integrations are an important factor to consider when choosing a user onboarding tool. They enable the tool to work seamlessly with other systems and platforms used by the organization. Also, integrations can help streamline the onboarding process by automating tasks, eliminating duplicate data entry, and providing a more comprehensive view of user data. For example, an integration with a customer relationship management (CRM) system can help track user activity and engagement.
Pricing
Pricing is an essential factor to consider when selecting a user onboarding tool. Mainly because it directly impacts the budget and financial resources of the organization. While it is important to choose a tool that meets the needs of the organization, it is also crucial to ensure that the cost is reasonable and justifiable. Factors that can impact the pricing of a user onboarding tool include the number of users, the level of customization, the availability of integrations, and the level of support provided.
User Onboarding Software FAQs
Find answer to common questions other people ask about this topic.
What is user onboarding?
What are the key features of user onboarding software?
Why use user onboarding software?
What's Next?
We have a great guide that goes deeper into product onboarding that shows you five tips you can follow for a successful implementation. However, if your product is SaaS software, we have an article that gives you six checklists to optimize your SaaS onboarding.
Related tool lists:
For more industry information—including tools reviews and thought-leadership—subscribe to The Product Manager newsletter.