Appcues vs Userpilot

Explore our comprehensive comparison of Appcues vs Userpilot to determine the top product adoption platform.

Sep 13, 2024
Today, we’re comparing two platforms: Appcues and Userpilot. Appcues is a well-established leader in product adoption, while Userpilot, a newer player founded in 2018, is making waves. Will Appcues keep its top spot, or will Userpilot prove itself as a strong competitor?
We’ll look at both platforms' features, pricing, and user experience to help you decide which one is right for you.
In this comprehensive comparison, you'll discover Appcues Vs Userflow different in:
  • User Onboarding
  • Product Adoption
  • Customer experience
  • User Feedback
Let’s see how the two compare!

Appcues vs. Userpilot Overview

At first glance, Appcues and Userpilot seem quite similar. Both platforms provide robust user onboarding solutions and a range of UI elements, including tooltips, checklists, self-serve widgets, and in-product surveys. Their UX patterns are comparably diverse.
Below is a concise comparison of the two tools side by side.
Features
Appcues
Userpilot
User Onboarding
★★★★★ Customizable onboarding tours, checklists, segmentation
★★★★★ In-app surveys, tooltips, guided tours
Product Adoption
★★★★★ No-code flow creation, templates, targeted messaging.
★★★★★ Advanced product tours, interactive elements
Customer Experience
★★★★ Varied UI patterns, Launchpad, NPS surveys
★★★★ User-friendly interface, product tours, engagement tools
User Feedback
★★★★ NPS surveys, review prompts, limited web options.
★★★★ NPS, in-app surveys, feature requests
Pricing
Pricing is based on monthly active users, starting at $249/month for 1,000 monthly active users.
Offers a fully-featured 14-day trial. Pricing starts from $249/month annually for 2,000 active users.
Review Platform ratings
Best For
Mid-Market business
Small Businesses

What is Appcues?

Appcues is a powerful product adoption and user onboarding platform tailored for web and mobile applications. It allows product teams to craft, deploy, and test personalized in-app onboarding experiences.
Additionally, Appcues facilitates announcements of new product features and the collection of customer feedback. A standout feature of Appcues is its no-code functionality, making it accessible for non-technical teams to leverage its capabilities effectively.
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What is Userpilot?

Userpilot is a dynamic product growth platform designed to enhance user activation, feature adoption, and revenue expansion. It aids product teams in collecting user feedback, optimizing onboarding processes, and deriving actionable insights from analytics.
With Userpilot, you can monitor both product usage and user behavior, providing a comprehensive understanding of how customers interact with your product. This insight helps drive future development, refine the user experience, and support your growth strategies.
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Appcues vs. Userpilot for User Onboarding

In this section, we'll compare Userpilot and Appcues specifically for user onboarding. Our goal is to determine which tool—Userpilot or Appcues—best suits your needs based on your specific use case.
Appcues for User Onboarding
Seamless user onboarding is a central focus of Appcues, which provides a diverse set of features to enhance user activation, conversion, and retention.
Here’s how Appcues supports new user onboarding:
  • Drag-and-Drop Builder: Appcues features a no-code drag-and-drop builder for creating personalized onboarding tours and checklists. You can design UI patterns like hotspots, modals, slideouts, and tooltips to guide users through the app.
  • In-App User Guides and Product Tours: Utilize various UI elements, including hotspots and tooltips, to introduce new users to your product’s features in a structured sequence. Checklists are also available to help users navigate your app effectively.
  • Checklists: Appcues allows you to create checklists (not available on the Essentials plan) to prompt user actions. While functional, these checklists lack some capabilities—such as triggering JavaScript functions or adding gamification elements—that are available in Userpilot.
  • Segmentation: Appcues provides pre-defined audience segments or lets you create custom segments based on factors like plan tier or lifecycle stage. This feature enables targeted messaging and personalized onboarding experiences.
  • Measure and Improve: You can track in-app flow performance and measure up to five events (on the Essentials plan) to identify and address areas needing improvement.
  • Test and Optimize: With the new A/B testing feature, Appcues allows you to compare different onboarding flows, identify the most effective sequences, and refine your onboarding strategies accordingly.
Userpilot for User Onboarding
User onboarding plays a crucial role in accelerating adoption and boosting retention rates. As a primary focus for Userpilot, along with product growth analytics and user feedback, the platform offers a range of features tailored to enhance onboarding processes.
Here are some of the onboarding features Userpilot provides:
  • No-Code Builder: Userpilot’s intuitive no-code builder allows you to create onboarding flows effortlessly. With the Chrome extension, you can select UI patterns, customize content, and deploy modals, slideouts, tooltips, and driven actions using pre-designed templates.
  • Native Tooltips: Userpilot’s native tooltips appear when users hover over an element or click an information badge. These tooltips are attached directly to elements, making them independent of page layouts and visible wherever the element is present.
  • Funnel Analytics: Advanced analytics enable you to generate funnel reports to track the onboarding journey. You can apply filters (such as name, user ID, signup date, OS, country) and monitor conversion rates from the initial step to completion.
  • User Segmentation: Userpilot offers detailed user segmentation based on device type, location, engagement data, or NPS ratings. This segmentation allows you to tailor analytics dashboards and track onboarding success across different user groups.
🏆 Winner: Userpilot is the better choice for most companies due to its advanced analytics, cost-effectiveness, and user-friendly features, making it suitable for a wide range of businesses looking for a practical onboarding solution.
ONBOARDONG - SCORE TABLE
APPCUES
USERPILOT🥇
0
1

Appcues vs. Userpilot: Product Adoption

When it comes to product adoption, both Appcues and Userpilot offer robust solutions, but each has unique strengths. Here’s a detailed comparison to help you decide which platform better suits your needs for driving user engagement and maximizing product usage.
Appcues for Product Adoption:
Appcues has strong features that help increase free-to-paid conversions and boost upsells. Here's how the platform supports product adoption.
  • No-Code Builder: Facilitates the creation of onboarding flows and announcements without coding.
  • Pre-Designed Templates: Offers templates for quick setup of product tours, in-app tutorials, and announcements.
  • Flow Targeting: Advanced segmentation for delivering targeted messaging to different user groups.
  • Review Prompts: Promotes user reviews and ratings to drive product adoption.
Userpilot for Product Adoption
Userpilot focuses on providing comprehensive tools for tracking and enhancing product adoption through in-depth analytics and user insights.
  • Product Analytics: Userpilot excels in generating trend reports that track feature adoption over time. It provides funnel reports to identify user drop-off points and integrates with third-party analytics tools for seamless data synchronization.
  • Product Usage Dashboard: The dashboard automatically aggregates key metrics, including Daily, Monthly, and Weekly Active Users, trends, user stickiness, top pages, features, events, and user engagement patterns. This setup helps you monitor overall product usage without manual configuration.
  • Feature Engagement: Userpilot’s click-to-track feature allows detailed monitoring of feature usage. You can view metrics on feature popularity and create custom events to group related features, offering deeper insights into user interactions.
  • Feedback Collection: With a no-code survey builder and 14 templates, Userpilot enables you to gather both quantitative data (CSAT, CES, NPS) and qualitative feedback directly from users, helping you understand their experiences and areas for improvement.
  • User Insights: The Insights dashboard provides a detailed view of user activity segmented by various criteria, including company and user segment, and allows you to track changes over daily, weekly, or monthly periods.
🏆 Winner: Userpilot. Userpilot edges out Appcues for product adoption due to its superior analytics and user insights capabilities.
PRODUCT ADOPTION - SCORE TABLE
APPCUES
USERPILOT🥇
0
1

Appcues vs. Userpilot for User Feedback

In this section, we’ll compare Userpilot and Appcues specifically for gathering and analyzing user feedback. This comparison will help determine which tool—Userpilot or Appcues—best fits your needs based on your use case.
Appcues for User Feedback
While Appcues primarily focuses on product adoption, it offers limited features for collecting user feedback, mainly through Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys.
Here’s how Appcues handles user feedback:
  • NPS Templates: Appcues provides customizable NPS survey templates that can be adjusted using the drag-and-drop builder. This allows you to tailor the survey to fit your needs.
  • NPS Targeting: Use NPS survey results to prompt promoters to leave reviews on app stores or request additional feedback from detractors. This can help you leverage user sentiment effectively.
  • Survey Implementation: Although you can overlay a survey on a modal, this approach may hinder easy collection and analysis of feedback, which could undermine the effectiveness of the survey.
Userpilot for User Feedback
Collecting user feedback is crucial for understanding the Voice of the Customer (VoC) and making informed decisions about product development and marketing strategies. Userpilot offers robust tools for feedback collection and analysis.
Here’s how Userpilot supports user feedback:
  • Survey Builder: Userpilot features a no-code survey builder that allows you to customize content, adjust widget styles and placements, and set triggers based on pages or events. This ensures that surveys appear at the most relevant moments without requiring any coding. Surveys can also be translated into multiple languages for broader reach.
  • Survey Templates: Choose from 14 different survey templates tailored to various use cases. Collect both qualitative feedback to improve user experience and quantitative data for benchmarking customer satisfaction, including CSAT and CES scores.
  • Advanced Analytics: Userpilot’s advanced analytics provide insights into common responses, the percentage of users selecting specific options, and detailed open-ended feedback about your product or features.
  • NPS Dashboard: The NPS dashboard aggregates data from all NPS surveys, eliminating the need to manually review each survey. You can view key metrics such as response rates, total views, and historical NPS data, with the ability to segment and sort the data for deeper analysis.
🏆 Winner: Userpilot. Userpilot offers a versatile survey builder with multiple templates, advanced analytics, and a detailed NPS dashboard that simplifies data interpretation and segmentation.
USER FEEDBACK - SCORE TABLE
APPCUES
USERPILOT🥇
0
1

Appcues vs. Userpilot for Customer Experience

In this section, we’ll compare Userpilot and Appcues in terms of enhancing customer experience, helping you determine which platform—Userpilot or Appcues—best fits your needs.
Appcues for Customer Experience
Appcues is designed to elevate your product’s customer experience by enhancing specific aspects of the user journey.
Here’s how Appcues contributes to improving customer experience:
  • UI Patterns: Appcues offers a variety of UI patterns, such as checklists, hotspots, modals, and tooltips, which can be used to create guided in-app tours and tutorials, simplifying customer onboarding and enhancing the user experience.
  • Launchpad: The Launchpad feature allows users to access Appcues onboarding flows from a notification dropdown within your product, providing easy access to guided experiences.
  • NPS Surveys: Appcues enables you to collect customer feedback through NPS surveys, helping you gauge user satisfaction and identify areas for improvement. However, Appcues only supports NPS surveys, unlike Userpilot, which offers a broader range of survey types.
  • User Segmentation and Event Tracking: Appcues also includes user segmentation for personalized experiences and event tracking to monitor user interactions, adding depth to the customer experience.
Userpilot for Customer Experience
Userpilot offers a comprehensive view of the customer experience by leveraging user analytics, trend and funnel reports, and diverse feedback collection methods.
Here’s how Userpilot helps you monitor and enhance the customer experience:
  • User Analytics: Userpilot’s users dashboard provides a detailed overview of all your users, allowing you to sort them by segment, company, or last activity. You can export user data in bulk as a CSV file or explore segment-specific insights through the Insights tab for a given time period.
  • Trends and Funnels: The trends and funnels reports in Userpilot allow you to track specific events, such as feature usage. You can apply filters to refine the data and create detailed breakdowns based on user segmentation or attributes, delivering actionable insights for customer experience improvements.
  • Satisfaction Benchmarking: Userpilot features a built-in NPS dashboard that tracks customer loyalty over time. Additionally, you can utilize survey templates for CSAT or CES surveys to gather both quantitative and qualitative insights into the customer experience.
  • Self-Service Support: Userpilot enables you to create in-app resource centers that can include feedback widgets for passive feedback collection, checklists to guide users through processes, or integrations with existing knowledge bases to provide on-demand support.
  • In-App Flows: Userpilot’s no-code flow builder allows you to create seamless product experiences that optimize customer journeys by educating users and reducing time-to-value (TTV). All UI patterns are available across Userpilot’s plans, from Starter to Enterprise.
🏆 Winner: Userpilot. Userpilot edges out Appcues due to its more comprehensive feature set for tracking and enhancing customer experience, diverse feedback options, and cost-effective pricing.
CUSTOMER EXPERIENCE - SCORE TABLE
APPCUES
USERPILOT🥇
0
1

Pros & Cons of Appcues vs. Userpilot

In a nutshell, here’s a pros & cons of Appcues and Userpilot:
Features
Appcues
Userpilot
Interactive Walkthroughs
Customizable Templates
Mobile App Support
In-App Messaging
A/B Testing
User Segmentation
NPS Surveys
Analytics & Reporting
Multiple Integrations
Checklists
Resource Center

Conclusion

In the debate of Appcues vs. Userpilot, the best choice depends on your specific needs.
Appcues is the go-to platform if you require advanced customization, detailed segmentation, and comprehensive onboarding solutions. It’s perfect for teams that need to create complex onboarding flows and drive product adoption with precision.
Userpilot, on the other hand, is ideal for teams focused on product growth and feature adoption through behavior-driven experiences. It offers a more intuitive, straightforward approach to user onboarding and engagement, making it a strong choice for growth managers and customer success teams.
In the end, both platforms offer powerful tools to improve user onboarding, product adoption, and customer experience. And based on our research, Userpilot wins in this comparison and you can also take your decision which should be guided by your team's specific goals and the unique needs of your SaaS product.