Appcues vs Userpilot

Which onboarding software will better suit your needs?

I tested Top In-app Onboarding Software: Appcues, Userpilot, Pendo, Stonly, Userflow, Chameleon, Product Fruits, Userguiding, Usetiful.
Discover the best software here.

Userpilot

Userpilot is like a friend that doesn’t stand out from the crowd, but you can always rely on them. It’s altogether a quality tool that should satisfy the needs of a vast majority of user onboarding managers.

All the features needed to do your job are in place. But compared to Userflow and Stonly, it lacks an element of a positive surprise. It doesn’t shine.

Appcues

What struck me most is that Appcues looks like Userpilot’s clone. Their app panel layouts and flow builders are very similar, with only cosmetic changes.

Nonetheless, Appcues is less “polished” and doesn’t offer the resource center feature, what I treat as a major inconvenience. Also, even though the localization feature is there, I wouldn’t wish using it my worst enemy.

If you think about going for Appcues, check out Userpilot first. In my opinion, it’s better and half as cheap!

Appcues vs Userpilot: Engagement features

Table: Main feature availability

Checklists

Resource centers

Appcues vs Userpilot: Flow setup options

Triggering

You might think there’s not much science to flow triggering. While in most cases you’ll use a page view to trigger a flow, there are some additional possibilities you might find interesting.

• Appcues – Custom event triggering, Element click
• Userpilot – Custom event triggering, Element click, Delay (time)

Audience targeting

Both Appcues and Userpilot allow for the same targeting options based on user attributes and performed events (both generated by interactions with the messages/widgets as well as custom events). There is however one difference — Appcues lets you create endless nested logic groups (logic group in a logic group).

Appcues vs Userpilot: Additional features

Table: Feature availability

Localization

While both tools offer the localization feature, Userpilot is far superior to Appcues in this comparison.

It allows manual localization in the platform/builder, as well as via file upload. You can easily localize images/videos too. You don’t need to unpublish flows to edit translations and you can make changes to the original version whenever you want.

In Appcues, you can localize only flows (and not checklists or pins), and what’s worst is that after localizing the content is locked (you can’t edit it). It causes a lot of trouble, especially for onboarding/lifecycle flows (in contrast to regular, one-off communication) that are meant to stay there for longer and should be subject to iterative optimization.

Account-wide frequency cap (throttling) + Flow prioritization

Appcues offers higher flexibility of guide prioritization (you can define the exact order in which your flows are to be shown), while Userpilot limits it to a few levels (Low, Medium, and High).

Appcues vs Userpilot: Pros, cons, prices

Read full comparison of the 9 top in-app onboarding software here.