5 Best React Product Tour Libraries for Onboarding UX (2024)

React product tour library pros

• Flexibility: Building your onboarding experience in-house offers infinite customization options & you can develop an open-source library beyond its core functionality. This allows you to create exactly what you want that meets your brand requirements.
• Pricing: Most of the React libraries we’ve shared below (Reactour, React Shepherd.js, Joyride ) are offered under the MIT license that permits you to fork, modify, and distribute them for free.

React product tour library cons

• Heavy engineering resources: Creating and maintaining an in-house library requires engineering resources that’ll only grow as your product scales. For every new onboarding UX element you want to create, or experiment with, you’ll need to rely on your engineering team to make those changes and manage maintenance.
• Lack of pre-built elements: React libraries have certain onboarding UX elements.
• Compatibility issues: React libraries can have compatibility issues with specific applications.
• Vulnerability: A maintainer who has access to the source code of a library you use can slip in malware that can infect your stack and cost you more to clean it up than a mainstream SaaS onboarding solution.
• No built-in analytics: React libraries require product teams to utilize a third-party solution for tracking the effectiveness and performance of product tours and overlay wizards.

Pros of using a SaaS platform for creating product tours:

• No-Code: Most onboarding SaaS platforms are no-code by default so that non-technical users can modify them using a drag-and-drop editor; they’re ideal if you have limited engineering resources or your developers are already stretched thin.
• Setup: It’s easy to setup almost instantly without needing to read over product documentation to understand how to inject an onboarding library into your product or website.
• Security & Support: SaaS products offer better support, especially with security concerns since their product depends on their reputation; in comparison, if you detect a security bug in an open-source onboarding library, there’s no obligation for the maintainer to fix it.
• Variety of Onboarding UX Elements: DAPs and other product tour SaaS providers often provide many types of onboarding UX elements outside of just a product tour, including things like interactive walkthroughs, task lists, tooltips, beacons, pop-ups, self-help centers, and more. 
• User Analytics: SaaS product tour providers also have built-in product analytics to analyze the effectiveness of onboarding experiences and to identify friction points inside these flows. 

Cons of using a SaaS platform for creating product tours:

• Pricing: Onboarding SaaS platforms are targeted at mid-to large-scale companies and their pricing ranges usually from a limited free tier to enterprise plans that can cost $20,000 annually.
• Not as Flexible or Customizable: While an onboarding SaaS platform might offer more responsive support, it’s usually only for their existing features and it’s a given that most software companies don’t build features on a whim, simply because you requested them. As a result, it can take months or years before they release certain critical features, no matter how essential they are to your onboarding experience.

React Joyride helps product teams and engineers create guided tours for your product or app by embedding a few lines of code. Among others, it offers engineers a tool to select DOM elements and overlay:

• UX hotspots that expand into text dialog boxes.
• Step-by-step guidance where you can include text, images, GIFs, and links.
• Interactive walkthroughs that engage users with subtle cues and spotlights that get them to click around your product’s user interface.