Top Pendo Alternatives: 11 Dynamic Alternatives to Optimize Product Adoption

So you're looking for Pendo Alternatives. You're in luck. We've got a nice list of user onboarding and analytics tools that can fulfill whatever needs Pendo may not be fulfilling. 

That is because while Pendo is a great tool, it lacks in quite a few ways, primarily because it’s trying to do a bit of everything. It wants to offer solutions for user onboarding, but it also wants to go deep into product analytics, while also wanting to dab on product roadmapping 

But this is the day and age of specialized services. It has become so easy to find best-in-class tools and create custom stacks that work for your specific needs. It simply isn’t necessary at all to have one tool to rule them all. Besides, if Pendo goes down, that means all your tools go down. That’s a hefty risk. 

In this article we’ll look at some robust alternatives to Pendo, all categorized in reasons why you may be seeking an alternative in the first place. 

The old saying, ‘jack of all trades, master of none’ applies to Pendo. While trying to do everything, it ends up lacking in all of them in certain ways, which leads to inevitable frustrations. Let’s dive into them.

Pendo’s suite of onboarding tools is broad but they still lack variability when compared to other tools. For instance, it doesn’t have slideouts, and its Resource Center feature can be a bit clunky as it tries to handle checklists as something you have to access within the Resource Center instead of making it its own feature. 

Therefore, if you're looking for something specific for feature adoption, you may find Pendo lacking.

Pendo's user analytics capabilities go deeper than most digital adoption platforms. But if product analytics is your desired use case, you need to look for a more dedicated tool with deeper levels of data granularity and more advanced analytics features. 

Pendo comes with a lot of bells and whistles, and it has a price tag to match. Plus, they can tack on fees for additional features like premium integrations later down the line, which can lead to the cost for Pendo to be quite heavy.

In the end, it might be better just to get a tool that’s more focused on what you have in mind, whether that is solely product adoption or analytics. 

As we mentioned, Pendo’s styling and targeting options can be a bit frustrating if you’re trying to really get deep control. Here are the best alternatives for that. 

We pride ourselves on being the deepest product adoption platform in the market, and we don't take that lightly. Chameleon is a powerful onboarding and user engagement platform. We offer a full suite of flexible UX patterns that can be used to deploy product tours, tooltips, in-app feedback tools, self-serve help widgets, and more.

Not only that, our product enables you to customize and target so that every in-app experience is fully personalized and styled to blend in with your product.

Chameleon pricing: 

Plans start at $299/month

Key advantages of Chameleon over Pendo:

• Chameleon offers a lot of flexibility in terms of targeting and functionality, allowing you to create highly personalized onboarding experiences.

• Chameleon has much deeper styling options than Pendo.

• Chameleon has deeper two-way integrations with other SaaS tools.

• Chameleon offers more value for equivalent plans.

As one of the big names in onboarding, Appcues is a good option if you want more customization and variability for your in-app messaging. It has Slideouts, which Pendo doesn't. Its user onboarding checklists are markedly better than Pendo's. It also allows you to collect user feedback.

One place where Appcues lags behind Pendo is when it comes to analytics, but that's to be expected since Pendo is more focused on analytics.

Appcues pricing: 

Starting at $249 per month with up to 2,500 MAUs

Key advantages of Appcues over Pendo:

• Appcues offers a broader range of UX patterns than Pendo. 

• Appcues is easier to use than Pendo, as evidenced by G2 scores. 

Pendo prides itself on analytics, and it is true that Pendo analytics is good at measuring in app user behavior. But there are limits to it. That's what happens when you keep on tacking other things into your product suite instead of digging deeper into one area.

Here are some better pendo competitors for product analytics.

Mixpanel is one of the best product analytics platforms in the market that allows you to track user behavior and analyze product usage data in real-time. Its capacity to analyze and visually organize customer feedback makes it one of the best product analytics software out there.

Plus, its analytics capacities go deeper than Pendo with better event tracking features and analytics capacities as evidenced by G2 scores when put side by side. 

Mixpanel pricing: 

Plans start at $20/month, and it increases by the number of events you're tracking. 

Key advantages of Mixpanel over Pendo:

• Mixpanel offers more advanced product analytics capabilities than Pendo.

• Mixpanel offers a lot of flexibility in terms of data visualization and reporting.

Another great alternative is Heap. In addition to being an all-in-one digital analytics platform, Heap also prides itself on being the single source of truth, and being able to get much more granular insights.

Heap does lag behind Pendo when it comes to mobile app analytics, but Heap presents a solid alternative as a robust user analytics solution.

Heap pricing: 

Contact Heap for pricing information

Key advantages of Heap over Pendo:

• Heap has automatic capture for every user interaction, Pendo apparently doesn’t. 

• Heap has broader data warehouse integrations than Pendo. 

• Heap’s insights are more capable at answering product-related questions than Pendo. 

Another compelling Pendo alternative that stands out for product analytics is Amplitude. It offers a comprehensive suite of product analytics capabilities and unique strengths.

The platform provides real-time data, insights, and reports to help you make informed product decisions. Amplitude also offers features such as behavioral cohort analysis, predictive analytics, and A/B testing to drive iterative design and development.

So if analytics is on your mind rather than a full scale digital adoption platform, Amplitude could be your go to.

Amplitude pricing: 

Contact Amplitude for pricing information

Key advantages of Amplitude over Pendo:

• Amplitude specializes in granular behavioral analysis, providing deep insights into user interactions.

• Unlike Pendo, Amplitude delivers real-time data analysis, empowering you to make timely decisions based on up-to-the-moment user behavior.

• Amplitude leverages advanced machine learning algorithms to offer predictive analytics, helping you anticipate user actions and trends more effectively than Pendo.

• Amplitude's scalable infrastructure and customizable event tracking allow for flexible data collection and analysis.

If you want to more closely track product usage, really get in the head of your users and sniff out the customer sentiment, FullStory may be the better option.

FullStory records user sessions, provides heatmaps, and offers user behavior analysis to help you understand user preferences and habits. In fact, if you're thinking of session replays, FullStory is the go-to, no contest.

It also offers mobile in addition to its web analytics features, so if that's something keeping you on Pendo, FullStory has you covered.

FullStory pricing: 

Contact FullStory for pricing information

Key advantages of FullStory over Pendo:

• FullStory's session replays are much more robust than Pendo.

• FullStory's error tracking features enable proactive issue identification, ensuring a seamless user experience by addressing technical glitches that might escape Pendo's scope.

• FullStory's advanced search functionality empowers you to quickly locate and analyze specific user sessions based on custom attributes or events.

• FullStory's integrations with various tools broaden your perspective on the user journey.

Hotjar emerges as a powerful alternative to Pendo, focusing on visual analytics and user feedback to enhance your understanding of user behavior. It can even collect customer feedback directly in-product.

Hotjar boasts precision analytics features such as heatmaps, session recordings, surveys, conversion funnels, and feedback polls, which all work together to give a thorough view of the user's interaction within your product.

Hotjar pricing: 

$32 USD per month for up to 100 daily sessions.

Key advantages of Hotjar over Pendo:

• Hotjar gives better visual journey mapping through its heatmaps, session recordings, and more.

• Hotjar's session playbacks are much better at retracing the user's paths step-by-step.

• Hotjar is much more budget friendly with a free basic plan that allows up to 35 daily sessions.

Gainsight PX is probably the closest alternative to Pendo in terms of being a digital adoption platform with a product analytics focus. Like Pendo, it offers in-app guides & engagement solutions, as well as user surveys and feedback collection tools, and provides support for both mobile and web.

So if you are looking for something like Pendo, but can do without all the product management features that comes in their Roadmapping tool, then Gainsight PX could be an answer.

Gainsight PX pricing: 

Contact Gainsight PX for pricing information

Key advantages of Gainsight PX over Pendo:

• Gainsight integrates with a massive list of tools, dwarfing Pendo's available options for integrations.

• Better user feedback collection tools than Pendo.

If budget is your concern, then there are two ways to solve your problem. One is to hack something together on your own, or find a cheaper tool.

Here are our suggestions. 

UserGuiding is one of the cheapest options when it comes to a no-code digital adoption platform. It has a range of useful UX patterns available for common use cases like product tours and self-serve support.

It does have some analytics capacities, though not as good as Pendo’s. But for what you’re paying, you could just take that leftover money and invest on an analytics platform to integrate with it. 

UserGuiding pricing: 

Plans start at $89/month with up to 2,500 MAUs

Key advantages of UserGuidingover Appcues:

• UserGuiding’s a fraction of Pendo’s cost.

• UserGuiding offers an easy-to-use builder.

Well, we did say affordable, and what's more affordable than a flat fee of $9.99? IntroJS is an open-source library that allows you to create step-by-step product tours and onboarding experiences.

When paired with Google Analytics, it can offer a powerful, DIY analytics and onboarding solution. Obviously, you’ll need to bring your engineering chops into this, but that’s what it takes if you don’t want to pay a hefty fee. 

IntroJS Pricing: 

$9.99 one-time fee for a license 

Key advantages of IntroJS + GA over Pendo:

• It’s essentially almost free (minus the small commercial license fee)

• It is much more customizable due to its DIY nature.

So now that we've compared pendo vs various options, it's time to make a decision. Ultimately, the choice to use Pendo or not is up to your needs. Do you need a tool that does everything under one roof? Do you find the idea of having to manage a tech stack of tools a headache? Then sure, Pendo is solid when it comes to being the ‘everything tool’. 

But make no mistake, Pendo is stretched thin from our perspective. And you will run into frustrations with its onboarding tool, its analytics tool, as well as its roadmapping tool. 

So why not build a tech stack with the best-in-class tools that integrate well with each other? Do you want amazing UX patterns for your onboarding? Great, get Chameleon. But do you also want fantastic and insightful analytics? Then get Mixpanel. The two deeply integrate to give you maximum synergy. 

In fact, why not try it now with the interactive demo below? You'll see what we mean.