As the competition in the world of software products continues to grow, user engagement has become a top priority for product teams. With the rise of in-app messaging and digital adoption platforms, two big players have emerged: Appcues and Pendo.
These DAP provders help software companies increase user adoption and retention by providing personalized experiences to their users.
According to an Epsilon study, 86% of users say personalization plays a role in their purchasing decisions. What’s more is that 44% of consumers say they will likely become repeat buyers after a personalized shopping experience. These numbers highlight the importance of providing a tailored experience for users and why Appcues and Pendo have become such popular solutions for product teams.
Appcues and Pendo both offer similar features, but they differ in greatly their approach and implementation.
In this article, we’ll compare Appcues and Pendo to help you decide which platform best suits your team. We will dive into their key features, pricing plans, customer reviews, and overall user experiences.
By the end of this article, you’ll have a better understanding of which platform can help you deliver personalized and engaging experiences to your users – and why Whatfix may be the best DAP provider for you.
Appcues vs. Pendo: Comparing Key Features
Herea are the core features of Appcues and Pendo.
Appcues features
1. Mobile first
While not technically a feature, Appcues is a mobile-first DAP. This means that Appcues is built specifically with mobile apps in mind, and its content editor and features reflect that. Its biggest marketshare is also with mobile applications.
2. Visual editor
Appcues’ visual editor lets you create customized user experiences without any coding expertise. This functionality allows you to customize and design pop-ups, tooltips, and banners to navigate users across your platform or website.
The visual editor offers an extensive library of design templates, fonts, colors, and images that you can choose from to create an engaging user experience. You can also enhance the user experience by adding interactive elements like clickable buttons, videos, and animations.
A notable feature of Appcues’ visual editor is the real-time preview capability that displays the final product as it’s being developed. This feature empowers you to make necessary adjustments before going live, ensuring the best possible user experience.
3. Targeting and segmentation
Appcues’ targeting and segmentation capability is intended to assist you in generating personalized user experiences based on specific criteria such as user behavior, demographics, and preferences. This feature empowers you to direct specific groups of users towards personalized experiences, resulting in improved engagement and enhanced conversion rates.
The user segmentation and targeting feature allows you to develop user segments based on various factors, including user behavior, location, device, and other characteristics. This allows you to aim personalized experiences at specific user groups tailored to their unique needs and preferences.
4. Analytics and reporting
Appcues’ analytics and reporting capability is an all-encompassing tool that permits you to track and evaluate the effectiveness of your experiences. This feature lets you scrutinize user behavior, engagement rates, and conversion metrics, providing valuable insights into how users engage with your product.
Appcues’ analytics and reporting feature offers an array of metrics and data points, including click-through rates (CTR), conversion rates, and engagement rates. This empowers you to understand which experiences resonate with users and drive the highest engagement and conversions.
Appcues’ also analytics and reporting feature provides detailed user behavior data, including how users navigate a website, which pages they visit, and the duration spent on each page. This data can help pinpoint areas that may be causing friction and optimize the experiences accordingly.
5. Integrations
Appcues’ integration capability is designed to assist businesses in integrating their experiences seamlessly with other software and tools they may already be using. This feature allows you to link Appcues with third-party applications, including customer relationship management (CRM) software, email marketing tools, and more.
Appcues’ integrations feature enables you to harness the power of your current software stack to enhance user experiences and drive higher engagement rates. For instance, by integrating Appcues with their CRM software, businesses can create personalized user experiences based on demographic data, purchase history, and other customer data points.
In addition, by integrating Appcues with their email marketing tools, users can generate personalized experiences that are activated by specific email campaigns. This can enhance engagement rates and drive conversions by providing users with a smooth and customized experience across multiple touchpoints.
TIP: Explore the best Appcues DAP alternatives.
Pendo features
1. Product usage analytics
Pendo’s product analytics function delivers valuable insights into user interaction with your product. This function helps track user behavior, including which features are being utilized the most, which are being ignored, and which are creating confusion. With this data, you can enhance your product for a better user experience and detect areas that need improvement.
The product usage tracking feature also offers a visual representation of user behavior over time, making it easy to identify trends and patterns. This enables you to determine how your product is utilized, identify areas for refinement, and discover which features function correctly.
2. In-app messaging
Pendo’s in-app messaging feature enables you to communicate with users in real time while they use your product. Using this feature, you can send personalized messages to specific user segments, such as new users or those who haven’t utilized a particular feature. These messages can contain essential updates, alerts, or tips to enhance their product experience.
The in-app messaging feature also includes analytics that allow you to evaluate the performance of your messages, including metrics like click-through rates and user engagement. This data empowers you to fine-tune your messaging strategy and improve communication with your users.
3. Product tours
Pendo’s product tour feature is ideal for new user onboarding and guiding them through the essential features of your product. With this feature, you can create interactive tours that showcase how to use different features and navigate your product’s interface. The tours can include images, videos, and text to provide a comprehensive overview of your product.
Pendo’s product tour feature is highly customizable, enabling you to tailor each tour to specific user segments or use cases. Additionally, you can embed the tours directly within your product, ensuring that users can access them when they need them.
Detailed analytics are provided on user engagement with each tour, including completion rates and time spent on each step. This data allows you to optimize the tours for maximum impact and identify areas for improvement.
4. Feedback collection
With Pendo’s feedback collection feature, you can effortlessly gather user feedback to enhance your product. You have the flexibility to collect customer feedback in various ways, such as surveys, polls, and in-app feedback forms. Moreover, you can tailor these tools to suit your requirements and target specific user groups.
By utilizing this feature, you can access comprehensive analytics on user engagement with each feedback collection method, encompassing response rates and sentiment. This valuable information enables you to prioritize feature development initiatives based on user feedback.
TIP: Explore the best Pendo DAP alternatives.
Meets Requirements
Ease of use
Quality of Support
Good Business Partner
Audio/Visual Walkthroughs
Comparing Appcues vs. Pendo Use Cases
DAP usage can be categorized into two primary types: employee experiences and customer experiences.
Employee experiences focus on motivating employees to use internal applications such as CRM, ERP, and HCM. These use cases include in-app onboarding, training, and providing continuous support based on employee roles to ensure effortless adoption.
On the other hand, customer experiences aim to enhance the usage of customer-facing applications. The use cases in this category consist of solutions for user onboarding, customer support, and other scenarios that aid in driving customer adoption.
Employee Experience (EX) Use Cases
| APPCUES | PENDO | |
|---|---|---|
| Employee Onboarding |
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| Employee Training |
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| Performance Support |
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| IT Support |
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| Change Management |
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| Digital Transformation |
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Customer Experience (CX) Use Cases
| APPCUES | PENDO | |
|---|---|---|
| Customer and User Onboarding |
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| Customer Self-Support |
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| User Engagement Monitoring |
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| Product Analytics |
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| Customer and User Feedback |
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| Digital Transformation |
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Appcues vs. Pendo Pricing Comparison
Appcues pricing
Appcues provides a variety of pricing plans that are tailored to meet users’ specific needs and support requirements. To enable users to try out the software before subscribing to a paid plan, Appcues offers a free trial period.
The pricing plans are based on the number of monthly active users (MAUs) and can be billed annually or monthly. Appcues offers three plans, including Basic, Growth, and Enterprise, each with progressively advanced features and support. This means Appcues can become quite expensive for applications and product teams that are expecting to scale with high user growth.
Appcues also allows customers to choose custom pricing plans that cater to their unique requirements. Users can also opt for add-on features such as translating user flows into multiple languages and personalized training sessions, which attract an additional fee.
Pendo pricing
Pendo provides various pricing alternatives for its digital adoption platform (DAP) to cater to the unique requirements of diverse organizations. The pricing structure is centered on a subscription model that factors in the number of users and the specific features requested.
Pendo offers a free trial period that enables organizations to test the platform before subscribing to a paid plan. Following the trial period, organizations can select from several plans, such as Essentials, Growth, and Enterprise, with each plan offering progressively advanced capabilities and assistance.
Appcues vs. Pendo: What Do Customer Reviews Say?
| APPCUES | PENDO | |
|---|---|---|
| Capterra | 4.8 out of 5 stars “It’s limited to relatively basic exports. This is particularly annoying when it comes to surveys done through Appcues.” | 4.5 out of 5 stars “No control over the data visibility can be frustrating to use any of the reporting they build for you.” |
| G2 | 4.7 out of 5 stars “Reporting takes a bit more time to learn without guidance. Also, being able to filter or export more detailed information about the users would be amazing.” | 4.4 out of 5 stars “The first thing I find not so optimistic about Pendo is the complexity of configuring and customizing the platform; it requires more time and effort on the part of the users so that it can be fully utilized.” |
| Gartner Peer Insights | No ratings or reviews available | 4.1 out of 5 stars “We have recently started using Pendo to track our users and understand their journeys and pain points, it’s an ‘okayish’ experience so far mostly from an ease of use standpoint. While there are lot of functionalities, the tool learning time and deployment is tough.” |
| GetApp | 4.8 out of 5 stars “It’s missing a way to easily analyse your data and to see where your users drop off (only available through third-party integration).” | 4.5 out of 5 stars “Sometimes Pendo can be tricky with older code bases or with iframes, and rarely the guide builder behaves erratically so it’s hard to tell how much you’ve saved.” |
| TrustRadius | 8.6 out of 10 stars “Appcues works well for building in-app walkthroughs, modal windows to pop up information to users, and collect feedback from users. It’s very easy to use, but it can be cumbersome at times and you do run into roadblocks that force you to create workarounds. For more purposes Appcues works great.” | 8.2 out of 10 stars “Pendo is great for getting to know your customers, gathering feedback about your products, getting them to onboard in your products. I think room for improvements is the reporting/dashboards side, you can get so much data into Pendo, it would be useful to have some templates or easy guides about what reports to setup, how to read the data.” |
Appcues boasts that their platform “helps teams build user-centric products without code,” allowing you to create targeted messages and tooltips for your users. On the other hand, Pendo offers “a complete platform for product teams,” with features such as in-app messaging, analytics, and user feedback. But which tool is more effective at improving user engagement and retention?
After comparing Appcues and Pendo, it is clear that both platforms offer impressive capabilities when it comes to improving user engagement and retention. However, a new player in town stands out from the crowd – Whatfix.
Whatfix is a digital adoption platform that helps enterprises to accelerate user adoption and reduce training time. With features like in-app guidance, self-help resources, and personalized user journeys, Whatfix provides a complete user onboarding, engagement, and support solution.
Interactive walkthroughs
One of the standout features of Whatfix is its ability to create interactive walkthroughs that guide users step-by-step through complex workflows. This not only helps users to learn the product faster, but also reduces the need for support tickets and calls, saving valuable time for both users and support teams.
Advanced analytics and reporting
Another feature that sets Whatfix apart is its analytics and reporting capabilities. With detailed insights into user behavior, Whatfix allows product teams to understand how their users interact with their product, identify areas for improvement, and measure the impact of their onboarding and engagement efforts.
Adoption anywhere
Whatfix offers a platform for enterprises to produce interactive walkthroughs, tutorials, and guides that assist users in adopting new software applications, tools, and procedures. These guides are accessible from any location, at any time, and on any device. What’s more, the DAP solution provided by Whatfix streamlines the process for businesses to design customized, contextual, and interactive guidance that caters to the distinct requirements of various user groups.
While Appcues and Pendo are strong contenders in the user engagement space, Whatfix offers a comprehensive solution that can take your user onboarding and engagement efforts to the next level. With features like interactive walkthroughs, advanced analytics, and seamless adoption, Whatfix provides a complete digital adoption platform that can help your enterprise to achieve its goals faster and with less friction.
Experience an effortless and personalized way of learning new software applications with Whatfix today.
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