As many as 60% of users who sign up for a free trial of your SaaS app will use it once and never come back. 

Consequently, a wide array of new SaaS solutions has emerged to address this issue. While having many options might seem beneficial, the reality is that the market is now crowded and confusing. 

In this vendor landscape, I break down the main product adoption software solutions, helping you better understand which solution might be the best fit for your business.

What to consider when comparing product adoption software

In this vendor review, I will evaluate seven market leaders based on four main factors to consider when purchasing a product adoption solution.

1. Increase Conversions: Improve the adoption rate of new users and engage existing users with walkthroughs and personalized in-app messaging.

2. User Feedback: Launch a survey to find out your net promoter score (NPS) or identify at-risk accounts.

3. Product Analytics: Measure your onboarding funnel.

4. Employee Onboarding: Help your employees use software faster.

For this vendor review, I will rank the seven market leaders on how well they solve these four factors above:

If you’d like to skip to the vendor review of a solution you’re currently evaluating, just click the solution below:

1. Appcues
2. Gainsight
3. Pendo
4. Userlane
5. WalkMe Growth
6. Whatfix
7. UserGuiding

Alternatively, if you’re looking for the best solution based on specific criteria, here are my “Best-In-Class” ratings for each solution:

• Best user onboarding solution
• Best value
• Best mobile onboarding
• Most secure
• Cutting edge solution
• Customer support hero
• No-code-setup 

Alright, let’s dive into comparing the top product adoption software solutions, starting with Appcues. 

1. Appcues vendor review

Best-In-Class: User onboarding solution

Appcues is a solid point solution if you want to drive product adoption and learn more about your users through NPS surveys or custom feedback forms.

Appcues specializes in user onboarding and has gone out of its way to provide you with onboarding tools like Interactive Modals, Checklists, Walkthroughs, and Callouts, which can help you convert new users into paying customers.

If you already have a third-party analytics tool, Appcues can easily be rolled out to your application and is one of the most affordable solutions in the space.

However, if you don’t have product analytics already in place, you might be better off checking out another solution.

One thing you never want to do is optimize an application without product analytics. It’s like trying to find the fastest way from Toronto to Los Angeles without a map.

Core problems Appcues addresses

Appcues features

Appcues overview  

• Great for: The SaaS product team that wants to easily roll out user onboarding, feature announcements and NPS surveys.

• Ideal customer: The SaaS business with a free trial or freemium model, between 50 and 10,000 employees, and a third-party analytics tool in place, such as Amplitude or Mixpanel.

• Pricing: Plans start at $249 per month for 1 App (3 team members)

2. Gainsight vendor review

Best-In-Class: For what you get, Gainsight is the best value.

Gainsight takes a holistic approach to solving product adoption and enables customers to execute product-led growth strategies. It’s one thing to build user onboarding walkthroughs, but knowing what impact you’re making on the business is what counts.

Most user onboarding solutions provide analytics on walkthrough performance but won’t help you understand your impact on sales.

Gainsight is extremely powerful at:

• It provides both user and account-level product analytics. This feature is extremely helpful if you want to be proactive about combating churn and growing the lifetime value (LTV) of each account. 

Most analytics software will show you the performance of each user in your product, but this isn’t really too helpful if you’re trying to decide which accounts are at risk or could benefit from a new solution your company’s rolling out. 

• The solution identifies product-qualified leads (PQLs). If you know what PQLs are, you know that they are extremely important to understanding how users are adopting your product.

Overall, Gainsight has built a product adoption platform that can help you improve your customer acquisition efforts, increase each customer's LTV, and identify at-risk accounts to combat churn.

Core problems Gainsight addresses

Gainsight features 

Gainsight overview  

• Good for: SaaS businesses that want to understand how people use their product and be able to do something about it

• Solution is not recommended for: Early stage companies that are not yet prepared for a comprehensive solution.

• Ideal customer: High-growth B2B SaaS companies typically with annual revenue above $20M who are looking to improve product adoption, reduce churn, and increase trial conversion.

• Pricing: Not transparent. You need to talk to a Sales Rep to find out the pricing.

3. Pendo vendor review

Best-In-Class: Mobile onboarding hero

Pendo is heavily focused on helping product teams provide user insight, guidance, and communication seamlessly.

The software solution accomplishes this by utilizing user feedback and detailed usage data to automate and personalize user onboarding and in-app communications. Pendo does more than just help users understand the impact of their onboarding content; it also allows them to automatically customize that content based on user or account profiles, provided feedback, in-app behavior, and previous interactions with the content.

In addition, Pendo stands out from its competitors with two key differentiators:

• Mobile apps: Most product adoption solutions in the B2B SaaS space focus only on Web apps. Pendo provides a solution that spans both web and native mobile apps. If you do have a mobile app, this may be a great solution for you.

• Integrations: Pendo has over 50 integrations including many common knowledge base, help desk, and chat tools. These allow users to bring relevant support content directly into the product rather than forcing users to search through external portals.

Overall, Pendo’s product seems very straightforward. They also have a free NPS tool worth checking out.

Core problems Pendo addresses

Pendo features

Pendo overview

• Good for: A product team that wants to understand and guide their users.

• Why founders don’t choose Pendo: Many early-stage SaaS companies opt not to use Pendo primarily because of its cost.

• Ideal customer: Well-established, expansion-stage B2B SaaS companies who have a freemium or free trial offer.

• Pricing: Pendo offers a free product for up to 500 monthly active users. I tried to get pricing on their paid plans, but they don’t like to share that info, even if you ask nicely. But you can request pricing for the Base, Core, Pulse, and Ultimate plans. 

4. Userlane vendor review

Best-In-Class: The most secure product adoption platform

Userlane prioritizes function over design. This is partly because Userlane has one of the most secure systems in the world, and its platform is being used in some sectors, like banking.

Userlane differentiates itself in two big ways:

• Security: Userlane prides itself on security. Its platform can be installed on-site and has been used by some of the largest banks and investment firms in the world.

• Employee onboarding: Userlane helps companies with complex internal tools get up to speed faster. This is much like user onboarding, with the exception that you don’t have to onboard people on your software.

 If your highly paid employees can save hours or days learning new software, you could potentially save millions over a year.

Overall, Userlane takes a unique position in the market by focusing on security and speed. If these two elements are crucial for your business, I’d recommend checking out Userlane.

Core problems Userlane addresses

Userlane features

Userlane overview

• Good for: Enterprise teams that need a navigation system for software both internally and externally.

• Why founders don’t choose Userlane: Userlane is not the best option if you’re looking for a pretty design. Userlane prioritizes function over design.

• Ideal customer: Fortune 500 and mid to large SaaS companies.

• Pricing: Choose from a range of scalable pricing tiers, with a plan tailored to your business priorities.

5. WalkMe Growth vendor review

Best-In-Class: Cutting-edge user adoption platform

WalkMe is the pioneer of the product adoption space. Founded in 2011, they have defined many of the features and best practices for a product adoption platform. For the purposes of this vendor review, I'm going to focus on their product WalkMe Growth.

Like Gainsight and Pendo, WalkMe Growth focuses on taking a holistic approach to addressing product adoption.

Two of the most unique offerings of WalkMe Growth are:

• Using AI to improve retention and find accounts that are likely to churn. This feature can come in handy if you have a large number of users and want to pin down what actions in the product are leading indicators of churn or, on the bright side, upgrading their account.

• User recordings: Watching your users go through and use the product can help your product team build a better user experience and identify frustrating moments in the product. What’s extra special about this is that if you use Zendesk or another support integration, you can see the user recording associated with each customer support ticket. This can help you save time identifying what the real problem is.

Overall, WalkMe Growth borrows many of the power features from its enterprise products and packages them well to improve product adoption. That said, it is one of the more expensive applications on the market. 

Core problems WalkMe Growth addresses

WalkMe Growth features

 WalkMe Growth overview

• Good for: SaaS businesses that want a holistic approach to solving product adoption.

• Why founders don’t choose Walkme Growth: The cost is much higher than point solutions.

• Ideal customer: SaaS companies who have 150 employees or less.

• Pricing:  WalkMe Growth starts at $1,500/month. The company’s pricing plans vary depending on application/user count.

6. Whatfix vendor review

Best-In-Class: On-demand support

Whatfix is known for its ease of use, ability to support on-demand enablement, and exceptional service.

Whatfix differentiates itself in two big ways:

• Just-in-time help widget: This helps improve user productivity by providing query resolutions that are highly specific and contextual to the user’s state within the application.

• Simplicity: If your team is using popular enterprise applications like Salesforce, SuccessFactors, ServiceNow, or Oracle you can easily roll out training templates to your team that will reduce your onboarding and product adoption time significantly.

Overall, Whatfix is heavily geared towards helping on-demand support teams. They do this by helping companies drive adoption through effective onboarding in a simple, intuitive manner while shortening the learning curve for users.

If your team is swamped with customer support tickets and wants a solution to minimize requests while providing a better user experience, Whatfix might be a good fit.

Core problems Whatfix addresses

Note: Although Whatfix does offer product analytics, it is not as comprehensive as Pendo.io's analytics. With that being said, Whatfix does currently offer ways to see how users engage with your product, with more things on the roadmap.

Whatfix features

WhatFix overview: 

• Good for: Companies looking to provide effective product adoption for users by reducing onboarding time.

• Why founders don’t choose Whatfix: B2C SaaS companies whose main goal is to track users and drive conversions based on product analytics.

• Ideal customer:  SMBs for user onboarding and support. Enterprise for digital adoption, employee training, and change management.

• Pricing: Whatfix's pricing is fully customized and can vary depending on the application, user count, and number of walkthroughs.

7. UserGuiding vendor review

Best-In-Class: No-code-setup

UserGuiding is a no-code product adoption platform that helps increase activation and retention and reduce churn using many in-app walkthroughs and widgets as well as standalone Knowledge Base and Product Updates pages. 

You can provide your users with all the self-serve help they need throughout their journey and gather valuable insights and feedback from them with in-app surveys, which can give you direction and improve your product development. 

The best part is you can do it all without breaking the bank and with zero technical expertise, thanks to the easiest-to-use interface on the market.

Core problems UserGuiding addresses

UserGuiding features 

UserGuiding overview

• Good for: Digital Product People looking to boost adoption and retention proactively, gather insights and feedback, and communicate updates and releases

• Why founders don’t choose UserGuiding: May not be an ideal fit for large enterprises with complex onboarding. 

• Ideal customer:  SaaS businesses of all sizes that are looking for a no-code tool to help improve trail conversion and product adoption while reducing churn.

• Pricing: Plans start at $89 per month. 

Ready to implement your software solution? 

Although there are quite a few product adoption solutions, each one has its unique take on the market.

If you already have product analytics such as Amplitude or Mixpanel and want to improve your user onboarding, I’d recommend checking out Appcues or Whatfix.

If you want to train your employees in external applications (ie SalesForce), I’d recommend checking out Userlane or Whatfix.

If you want a comprehensive solution that includes product analytics, user onboarding, and user feedback, you can’t go wrong with checking out Gainsight, WalkMe Growth, or Userguiding..

Regardless of what solution you choose, I hope this vendor review helps you make a smart decision for your company.

If you need clarification on where product adoption software solutions fit into your scaling strategy for your SaaS, question if the timing is right, or consider if you should focus on another element of your product-led model first, take our free assessment. 

My company, ProductLed, has invested over 80 hours to build this tool, and in under 5 minutes, you can get a personalized 27-page report for your SaaS. The report includes:

• Phase-wise Recommendations: Start with foundational improvements based on your user profile or product-led model.
• Benchmark Scores: Understand your standing across various components like data, process, pricing, and strategy to identify immediate issues.
• Tips + Resource Recommendations: Get targeted tips and free resources to address specific weaknesses in a strategic order.

Get your free personalized report here.

Alternatively, if you’d like to work with a coach to implement a successful product-led approach into your business, check out ProductLed Academy.

Our intensive coaching program helps product-led founders and their teams build a strong foundation for product-led growth so that you can scale faster and with more control.

What’s unique about this program is my team and I will work with you and your team to implement the proven ProductLed System™️ so that you can scale faster with less stress.

You can learn more about our coaching program here.