Pendo is a well-known, recognized digital adoption and user onboarding platform. But like most tools, it’s not one size fits all.
Non-transparent pricing tiers, lack of key features, and longer time to going live are some of the sore points among its users. Luckily, if you’re on the hunt for Pendo alternatives, we’ve got you covered.
In this post, we will share the top five digital adoption platforms which are making great strides with affordable pricing and a range of features that Pendo lacks.
What is Pendo?
Pendo is a digital adoption and product analytics software known for its all-in-one approach from first touch to conversion. Pendo offers ample features to help companies collect users’ feedback, understand their behaviour, and boost engagement rates.
Pendo's key features
Pendo’s pricing plans
Pendo offers a free plan for up to 500 monthly active users, in-app guides, and NPS surveys with Pendo branding.
All four paid plans come with custom pricing and offer the following features.
Core: Includes everything in the base plan and session replays, such as playbacks, AI-suggest replays, and 30-day session data retention.
Pulse: Includes everything in the core plan and advanced product discovery features such as customer portal, Jira integration, and AI-powered feedback summaries and insights.
Ultimate: This plan offers top-notch features with some additional features still costing extra bucks such as API access.
Why do customers look for Pendo alternatives?
Despite being a major player in the product adoption category, Pendo has some limitations that make users look for its alternatives.
Here are the top three reasons:
Reason #1: Limited analytics capabilities
Pendo’s analytics dashboards lack certain custom widgets and customization options, limiting data visualization and interpretation. It means you might struggle to extract the exact metrics you need, leading to a restricted understanding of user behaviour.
Additionally, the reporting dashboards don't offer much customization, forcing you to rely on a third-party app for further analysis. Or you might end up exporting the data, leading to unnecessary steps in your workflow.
Users have also reported data aggregation limitations at the account level using Net Promoter Score (NPS). Lack of such analysis means you will get isolated NPS scores, giving you incomplete account-level insights.
Reason #2: Limited and complex pricing structure
Pendo offers five pricing plans, each based on custom pricing, making it a long process to assess the actual cost to your businesses. And the product isn’t cheap at all.
Even though Pendo offers a free plan, its 500 monthly active user limit caps its usage only for early-stage startups or small businesses with a limited user base. Additionally, the free plan doesn’t give access to some key features, such as automated workflows and integrations.
Another reason their pricing falls on the higher end of the spectrum is due to additional costs on top of the base pricing to access certain features. For example, if you’re on their base or core plan, you must pay extra for the NPS survey feature.
Reason #3: Steep learning curve, especially for non-technical users
Being a low-code platform, Pendo has a steep learning curve requiring technical assistants to get the best out of the product.
Moreover, the Pendo’s interface and functionality can take time to understand, particularly for users new to product analytics or in-app guidance tools.
What are the best alternatives to Pendo in 2025?
Pricing and missing features are among the major challenges Pendo users face. We have enlisted 5 affordable and intuitive Pendo alternatives worth considering to combat this.
Let’s dive into each one of these.
2. UserGuiding: For creating in-app onboarding experience for early-stage users within budget
3. Whatfix: For enterprise-level digital adoption and customer onboarding
4. Userpilot: For building advanced user engagement experiences through auto-localization
5. Appcues: For in-depth product analytics for web and mobile-based user onboarding
1. Supademo - The Best Pendo Alternative
Supademo is a leading digital adoption platform and one of the best Pendo alternatives on the market. The platform helps you build interactive product walkthroughs to showcase your product’s value, generate leads, offer asynchronous customer onboarding, and resolve customer queries through a self-paced learning model.
From one-person teams to enterprises, Supademo is an all-in-one tool for improving product adoption rates, reducing churn, enhancing customer experience, and upskilling employees.
Supademo’s key features
Supademo's demo analytics dashboard gives a 360-degree view of your demo’s performance, highlighting key metrics like total number of viewers, demo completion rate, and average engagement rate.
You can filter demo performance for a certain period or workspace.
By clicking the detailed insights button, you see individual demo performance data showing the following details.
• Demo engagement, drop-offs, and completion rate
• Identified (known email) and unidentified (anonymized but unique) viewers
• View and export all email leads captured through gated Supademos
You also see a bar graph depicting the progression of viewers throughout the steps. When you hover over a specific step, you’ll see how many viewers finished it or dropped it off.
Supademo gives you full control over your product demo’s editing. You can crop images to draw users’ attention to key elements, zoom in or out to emphasize certain clicks and maintain privacy by blurring sensitive information.
But, apart from these basic editing features, Supademo offers much more.
• You can add voiceover to dictate the steps in 15+ languages and accents
• You can screen record yourself to add a human touch to every product walkthrough
• You can use dynamic variables to personalize each demo. You can add this variable in the demo title, steps, and CTAs
• You can create a full on-brand experience by adding your brand logos, colors, custom domain, colors, and more.
Ever wanted to trigger interactive demos within your app without recording one from scratch? Supademo’s in-app product tour helps you do that.
You can record interactive demos using Supademo’s Chrome extension, edit it the way you want, and add a code snippet to your app to trigger it there.
Check out the interactive demo of how it works below:
Supademo pricing
Supademo offers a free plan that gives you access to 5 Supademo recordings and editing, unlimited screenshots, sharing via link or embedding, and exports as videos or SOPs.
Supademo’s more advanced features are available on its three pricing tiers. And, you can try Pro and Scale plans with a 14-day free trial without any credit card.
Scale (starts at $50/creator/month): Includes in-app product to triggers, desktop app recording, custom domain, form and calendar embed, and trackable share link.
Enterprise (custom plan): Offers unlimited user seats, HTML-based demo capture, advanced security, and personalized onboarding and training.
Supademo Pros and Cons
✅ Folder and subfolders-based demo organization makes it easy to extract relevant demos
✅ Ease of curating detailed demos through demo showcases
“The ability to create and share collections and Showcases is awesome. I can easily create and group together multiple short demos as a ‘starter kit’ for our new users.” ~ Oliver Meakings, Co-founder, Senja
✅ Accurately records all screen movements, including clicks and video
✅ Ease of sharing through multiple export options such as PDF download and MP4 conversion
❌ HTML-based demos aren’t available yet
❌ Lack of vertical scrolling, SOP views unless the demo is exported
Why choose Supademo over Pendo?
Supademo is recognized as a demo automation leader, letting you create interactive demos for multiple channels—in-app, websites, social media, emails, etc. Pendo’s demo experience is limited to your app only.
But, Supademo wins in other aspects as well over Pendo. Let’s see how:
Reason #1: Supademo's interface is user-friendly
Users have complained about Pendo’s interface being confusing and cluttered, making guide creation time-consuming.
Supademo, on the other hand, is known for its ease of use due to its modern and clean interface. You can access all the features from the left navigation bar, and each element is clearly described.
Another reason Supademo’s interface is better is the ease of organizing all your product tours. You can organize each demo into folders and subfolders, sort them alphabetically, and change the view from gallery to list.
Another standout feature is its mix-and-match workspace creators and viewers.
In addition to paid user seats, you can add internal viewer accounts to your workspace without additional costs. This is particularly beneficial if your team is scaling quickly and requires limited creator-level access.
By giving Viewer access, you can let team members access individual Supademo and Showcases and share feedback.
This boosts transparency across the workspace and ensures stakeholders are involved in the demo creation and iteration process. You can cut down on your total cost without compromising on team collaboration.
Reason #2: Supademo offers more ways to create product walkthroughs
With Pendo, you can create in-app flows, tooltips, checklists, sliders, banners, etc., only on desktop and app.
There is no option to record mobile screen or upload images to build in-app experiences.
You can create product tours by recording your screen, desktop, and mobile app, uploading mobile/desktop screenshots, and even using HTML capture (soon to launch).
Not only this, but once you have the tour created, by adding a code snippet to your app, you can trigger it within your app programmatically.
Reason #3: Supademo offers flexible pricing plans
Despite being a well-known digital adoption platform, Pendo’s pricing isn’t suited for everyone. As the plans are based on monthly active users, pricing can quickly become hefty as the number of users grows.
Supademo plans are far more flexible and affordable.
For example, the Scale plan starts at $50/creator/month (billed monthly) and offers unlimited demos.
You pay for the people who build and manage your product tours, not those who view them. You can create as many demos as you want and show them to unlimited users within your app. Whether you have 100 or 100,000 users viewing your demos, your cost stays the same.
2. UserGuiding
UserGuiding is a customer onboarding software that helps you offer a frictionless and engaging experience through in-app product tours, checklists, announcements, and tooltips.
Compared to Pendo, UserGuiding is an affordable product adoption platform that offers a wide range of in-app engagement features.
Key UserGuiding features
- User segmentation: Triggers relevant and helpful tooltips, in-app guides, or announcements based on user’s activity or demographics.
- Product tours: Engage new customers by offering an interactive step-by-step walkthrough of your product’s features. You can add videos and images and experiment with different UX elements to boost engagement.
- Analytics: The reporting dashboard shows key metrics like MAUs, completion, view, and abandon rate. You can filter the data by predefined segments, time range, user status, and assigned tags.
UserGuiding Pricing
UserGuiding doesn't offer a free plan, but a 14-day free trial for its Basic and Professional pricing plan.
For 1000 monthly active users, here are UserGuiding’s pricing plan:
Professional (Starts at $299/month): Includes unlimited guide, hotspot, and checklists, Impact reports (in beta), company-level data reports, and advanced customization options.
Corporate (Custom plan): Catered to your feature requirements and team size.
UserGuiding Pros and Cons
✅ Offers lots of useful integrations with other tools, even on the entry-level plan
✅ Creating guides and checklists is straightforward and doesn't require much technical skills
❌ The interface can be slow and sluggish, especially when using the editor
❌ You need technical know-how to use more advanced features
❌ Not many options to customize the look and feel of your guides
3. Whatfix
Whatfix is a digital adoption program (DAP) that helps you create in-app product guides, product checklists, pop-ups, smart tips, and a knowledge base. It offers user tracking across web, mobile, and desktop platforms, while Pendo only tracks web applications.
Whatfix is an all-in-one solution, compared to Pendo that is focused primarily on product analytics. Whatfix offers in-app quizzes, multiple export options, and powerful integrations, making it a suitable alternative to Pendo for enterprise-level businesses.
Key Whatfix Features
- Whatfix Flows: Flows offer contextual walkthroughs in-app without disrupting the flow of the user’s work. You can add such flows as pop-ups or tooltips to help users master various features and improve their productivity.
- Whatfix Mirror: You can offer hands-on training to your team members by creating a simulated sandbox environment without impacting the data of your actual software.
- Whatfix AutoTranslation: Whatfix supports 80+ languages, helping you serve customers across the globe in their native language.
Whatfix Pricing
Whatfix offers two products–DAP and product analytics. For the relevancy of this article, we’ll share pricing for its digital adoption platform suite.
The DAP platform offers three paid tiers, pricing for each varies depending on the device you want to track–web & desktop or mobile.
You need to contact their sales team for each plan to get a quote.
Premium: Includes engagement dashboard, auto-translation, auto-testing for flows (only for web-based apps), and advanced data and security features.
Enterprise: Custom setup tailored to your feature requirements, team size, and user base.
Whatfix Pros and Cons
✅ Extensive media library supports multiple content formats (videos, GIFs, images)
✅ Comprehensive resource center offers various content types, including guides, tutorials, and knowledge center articles
❌ Complex initial setup process requires significant time investment and technical expertise
❌ Steep learning curve demands technical knowledge for using advanced features
4. Userpilot
Userpilot is a digital adoption platform (DAP) that offers insights into how users interact with your product. It helps create an interactive customer onboarding experience by building interactive guides, UI elements, and feature tags through a Chrome Extension.
Compared to Pendo, Userpilot offers event-based triggers. It means you can trigger in-app flows based on specific user actions and interactions, delivering a more personalized experience.
Key Userpilot features
- No-code builder: Userpilot offers a Chrome extension-based editor that helps you edit the in-app guides. You can use the templates to create hotspots, tooltips, checklists, or build your own.
- Funnel analytics: You can create a funnel report reflecting the customer’s onboarding journey. By using filters like name, ID, signup date, etc., you can monitor a user's engagement and conversion rate.
- A/B testing: Userpilot offers native A/B testing tools to create variants of different UI elements and run split tests to find the most engaging one.
Userpilot Pricing
Userpilot doesn't have a free tier, but it offers a 14-day trial period to test the features.
The pricing plans are divided into three tiers: Starter, Growth, and Enterprise.
Here’s how each plan costs and what it offers.
Growth (Starts at $799/month, paid annually): Custom number of monthly active users with unlimited segments, custom events setup, advanced product analytics, and targeting features.
Enterprise (Custom pricing): This is the premium plan that is tailored to your needs and user base.
Userpilot Pros and Cons
✅ Shows detailed user engagement insights for different UI elements
✅ Ease of guide creation with drag-and-drop builder
✅ Offers tons of integration at entry-level plan
❌ Limited data analytics capabilities
❌ Complex and buggy interface
❌ Expensive entry-level plans with basic features
5. Appcues
Appcues is a user onboarding platform that helps you build personalized in-app experiences through tooltips, banners, checklists, surveys, and a knowledge base.
Appcues is a user-friendly alternative to Pendo that tracks mobile and web-based user engagement. In addition to the in-app elements offered by Pendo, Appcues also offers slideouts.
Key Appcues features
- Automated workflows: You can create multi-step sequences by building specific user segments to show targeted and most relevant in-app experiences.
- Analytics: Appcues offers in-app event tracking like button clicks to feature usage, and helps you monitor product activation, adoption, and engagement rate for individual users and a company.
- Appcues builder: It’s a Chrome extension-based editor that helps you can create in-app flows, pins, and banners. The builder also lets you add personalization to each item you create.
Appcues Pricing
Appcues offers a 14-day free trial with the option to create unlimited flows and track up to 5 events. But there’s no free plan available.
The pricing is based on the number of monthly active users and comes in three tiers.
Grow (Starts at $1,000/month for 1 app for up to 3000 MAUs): Includes premium in-app experience, 30,000 messages/month, premium integrations, and dedicated customer support.
Scale (Custom pricing): Includes dedicated implementation manager, advanced security, and custom product setup.
Appcues Pros and Cons
✅ Clean, intuitive interface makes navigation simple for new users
✅ No-code flow builder that is packed with customization options
❌ Limited administrative controls make user permission management difficult
❌ Steep learning curve due to insufficient documentation and proper guidance
❌ Pricing becomes expensive for growing companies due to the number of active MAUs billing model
Build a Better User Experience with Supademo
Each platform offers something above and beyond Pendo.
Appcues will spoil you with extensive analytics and several integrations, while Userpilot will help you engage in-app users with relevant and timely guides.
That being said, the decision will depend on your team's specific needs, budget, and user base or team size.
But, if you want a software that offers the fastest deployment time, fits within your budget, and helps you build interactive product tours for desktop and web apps, Supademo is the ideal choice.
So, try Supademo today for free, or book a demo to explore its features and use cases.
