Appcues is online software for creating in-product experiences such as user onboarding, feature announcements, etc. without writing any code. (The vendor believes it's the non-technical people who oftentimes have the best information about a software user's needs and desires.) The goal of using Appcues is to improve product engagement within the user's own customer base.
$299
per month/billed monthly
UserGuiding
Score 9.9 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
UserGuiding helps companies to improve product adoption by designing interactive user onboarding flows. Non-technical people can create step by step product walkthroughs, without any coding. UserGuiding also provides analytics to track the performance of the tours, segmentation to create more personalized experiences, NPS for capturing feedback, and onboarding checklists for a wholesome onboarding experience. From Red Ventures to Young Capital, thousands of companies trust UserGuiding.
[Appcues] is a great service for self learning a software to train people a software and to beta test software applications. I see lots of possibilities for training that people who are not great with technology using Appcues but still the pricing is not the best in the other services in the digital adoption space
I would recommend this to teams who have multiple people who can work together in getting the necessary source codes input, the guides built, and the parameters identified. I would also recommend this product to anyone who is primarily concerned about price. Compared to competitors, the price vs the feature set was by far the best out of the 6 companies I demoed with. If one person is trying to get this set up and it isn't part of their full-time job, it will take a while because there is a pretty big learning curve as to what order to do things. Further, once the basics are set up, it does take a fair amount of time and testing to build the walk-throughs, especially if you want to use advanced logic
Appcues makes the setup process extremely simple. Rather than having to build all of the cues and flows into our app, we simply installed the Appcues code which essentially lays over top our app and allows us to build any new flows we'd like and push them live without having to consult our engineers.
Appcues provides a variety of cue options to display to users. There are tooltips, slide outs and full modals. This allows us to target users on different pages without being too invasive.
Their targeting and reporting is also superb. We're able to show flows to certain users based on URL paths and other actions they've taken within our app. We can also see some great reports of users who have completed our flows and metrics on where they stopped if they did not complete a flow.
The initial setup process isn't as transparently intuitive as it was sold
It's a fairly large barrier to entry for one person to get the guides set up
We weren't instructed how to 'turn off' the URL hits until we had our parameters segmented so the first two months we hit our limits before anything was even launched on our end. That made testing hard.
We took a demo for Whatfix but thought them nowhere to be close to Appcue's functionalities. Even though I want more theming options in Appcues, it still has more variety than Whatfix. Also, to make changes to flows, Appcues is more nimble, and you can preview the resultant changes in seconds.
By far the best price for the available features. They had a really easy demo scheduling process (and had availability to demo within a day or two where some of the other products were a week+ to schedule). You can build unlimited guides and if you don't hit your user limit because you failed to identify target parameters at the start, that is a huge selling point ;)
We lost two months due to running out of 'hits' before we were able to target the right fields. This was partly our fault for not having enough time to dedicate to it, but it would have been helpful to have a 'pause' button or be told to look out for this scenario.
We canceled our account after 4 or 5 months because I, as the sole user on our team, didn't have nearly enough time to build out the guides the way we had envisioned. It wasn't quite as easy to understand as I'd hoped. It was doable, but a slow process and I got too busy with other pressing issues with my company.
It would have been a good ROI for the available features and price if I'd had a solid amount of time to really build it out and understand it better. The training options could have been a lot more user-friendly to help bridge that knowledge gap.
