Pendo.io is a product engagement platform with features for in-app analytics, surveys and feedback, and guidance.
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UserGuiding
Score 10.0 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
UserGuiding helps companies to improve product adoption by designing interactive user onboarding flows. Non-technical people can create step by step product walkthroughs, without any coding. UserGuiding also provides analytics to track the performance of the tours, segmentation to create more personalized experiences, NPS for capturing feedback, and onboarding checklists for a wholesome onboarding experience. From Red Ventures to Young Capital, thousands of companies trust UserGuiding.
By far the best price for the available features. They had a really easy demo scheduling process (and had availability to demo within a day or two where some of the other products were a week+ to schedule). You can build unlimited guides and if you don't hit your user limit …
Pendo.io is useful in generating great dashboards that present user analytics in the best possible view that could be used for analysis & derive key insights on what could be done if there's a feature that's not being recognized by end users or if there are any pain points where users are struggling more around a workflow which is technically not that difficult. Pendo.io also can be used to create impactful guides where intercatoin of a user with the Guide can be created in less steps & have relevant information about that workflow that the user is completing. Pendo.io's resource center can act as a one stop hub to present any sidewide updates which could be information of Prod releases, New KB Articles, Register to any event, & much more. Segments can be created in as many variation as one can. In fact, Segments are the ruling property or feature that works so handy, which reduces a lot of iterative work.
I would recommend this to teams who have multiple people who can work together in getting the necessary source codes input, the guides built, and the parameters identified. I would also recommend this product to anyone who is primarily concerned about price. Compared to competitors, the price vs the feature set was by far the best out of the 6 companies I demoed with. If one person is trying to get this set up and it isn't part of their full-time job, it will take a while because there is a pretty big learning curve as to what order to do things. Further, once the basics are set up, it does take a fair amount of time and testing to build the walk-throughs, especially if you want to use advanced logic
Preview is problematic if the Pendo.io user doesn't have access to the target environment or application where the guide is going to display
It would be ideal to have a gallery of thumbnail images of previously used guides to select from, either to pull a screen capture or to use as a template. It's cumbersome to go to the guides, find the one you want, click on Preview, etc.
The initial setup process isn't as transparently intuitive as it was sold
It's a fairly large barrier to entry for one person to get the guides set up
We weren't instructed how to 'turn off' the URL hits until we had our parameters segmented so the first two months we hit our limits before anything was even launched on our end. That made testing hard.
We have had an excellent experience with Pendo. When we've had questions or concerns, Pendo is very quick to respond and communicate with us. We have experienced top-notch customer support and customer engagement. We have actually modeled some of our implementation and product processes after Pendo's examples.
It is intuitive for core tasks like tracking feature usage, building Guides, and viewing dashboards. The interface is clean and well structured, making it easy for product managers and operational teams to get value quickly without heavy technical support. However, there is a noticeable learning curve when setting up advanced custom events, reports, or integrations, which can take some time and internal knowledge-sharing to master.
Every time I have logged into Pendo, the service has been available for me to use. The page has never been down when I am trying to get info from there.
They've been great anytime that we have needed help with something. They also have some really great help articles. We're able to figure most things out through their articles, but when we've had to call in they've been very helpful and we haven't had any problems. I'd highly recommend working with them.
The training schedule was well thought out and tailored to meet our needs. Chantelle stayed with us through the whole implementation and made sure that we were good to go.
I have just very superficial experience with Google Analytics but I do believe that Pendo.io is a much much better tool in pretty much all aspects of it. It has a ton more features and capabilities and even for the capabilities where there is overlap, Pendo seems to come out ahead easily. There are aspects that Pendo could improve for sure such as what metadata it captures from the users; an example of this is screen resolution which Google Analytics captures but Pendo does not.
By far the best price for the available features. They had a really easy demo scheduling process (and had availability to demo within a day or two where some of the other products were a week+ to schedule). You can build unlimited guides and if you don't hit your user limit because you failed to identify target parameters at the start, that is a huge selling point ;)
Reducing development time with in-app guides and resource center, with product management being able to agilely create guides in real time, this could be as much as 1 full time developer in savings.
Reducing business time scoping "rock fetches" than are proven to be invaluable based on analytics, each time 1 single piece of analtical data saves around ~20 hours across multiple resources.
Increasing user satisfaction with in-app guides and resource center
Increasing usage of key features through targetted messaging, those key features either drive costs ou of our business or add value to customers business.
We lost two months due to running out of 'hits' before we were able to target the right fields. This was partly our fault for not having enough time to dedicate to it, but it would have been helpful to have a 'pause' button or be told to look out for this scenario.
We canceled our account after 4 or 5 months because I, as the sole user on our team, didn't have nearly enough time to build out the guides the way we had envisioned. It wasn't quite as easy to understand as I'd hoped. It was doable, but a slow process and I got too busy with other pressing issues with my company.
It would have been a good ROI for the available features and price if I'd had a solid amount of time to really build it out and understand it better. The training options could have been a lot more user-friendly to help bridge that knowledge gap.
