Best Appcues Alternatives: Top 8 Choices to Enhance User Experience

Whether you're currently using Appcues, or thinking about buying Appcues, you must've thought at least once: is there a good Appcues alternative? The short answer to this is ‘yes'. There is an ocean of digital adoption platform alternatives out there. A more detailed answer would be, ‘it depends on your needs.' 

So instead of you trying to sift through a flood of different tools and platforms, we've put together a concise list of great appcues alternatives and competitors, categorized into different reasons why you might want to look elsewhere than Appcues. 

By the end of this article, we are hoping you can find the right user onboarding platform for your requirements. Let's get started!

You don’t just wake up one day and think ‘I should find an alternative to Appcues’. It always starts with a specific gripe, a blocker, or a frustration while using the tool. In short, it starts with a reason. 

Money is always an issue, and it doesn't help that Appcues is one of the more expensive solutions in the user onboarding space. Starting at $249 per month with up to 2,500 MAUs, the price can get pretty hefty depending on how many users you're tracking. Not to mention the premium integrations and other specific requirements can bump up that price tag.  

Product adoption is a complex process that should be tailored to each and every product. On that note, Appcues offers a lot of customization options for your user onboarding flows, but you might find yourself needing even more flexibility and control. 

Having good interactive user onboarding experiences is only the first step. You need great analytics to follow up. Appcues does have an analytics dashboard, but frankly, it's not their specialty. While Appcues offers some basic analytics and reporting features, often you're going to need something much more advanced in order to get real value out of your data and better understand how your users are interacting with your product.

Finally, you might be looking for an alternative to Appcues that is specifically designed for employee training and internal onboarding rather than customer onboarding. While Appcues can be used for internal onboarding, it's much more about engaging end-users at scale, which means other tools might be more fitting for this role. 

For more affordable alternatives, we focused on tools that save you money. The bottom line is this. The best way to pay less upfront fee, or not at all if you’re really in a pinch, is to actually do it yourself, provided you have the engineering resources. 

If you want to go the more DIY route but don't want to start absolutely from scratch, IntroJS could be your option. It is an open-source library that allows you to create step-by-step product tours and onboarding experiences.

It's a great option for businesses on a tight budget and don't need a lot of bells and whistles for building an onboarding process.

IntroJS pricing: 

Starting at $9.99 for a lifetime license

Key advantage of IntroJS over Appcues:

• IntroJS is a very cheap alternative to Appcues. If you have the dev resources to make the configurations and customizations, IntroJS could be a good tool. 

If you still want to have a no-code tool but get it a fraction of what you’d have to spend on Appcues, then UserGuiding can be your answer. It does lag behind Appcues in certain ways, like how few integrations it has, or the depth of its customizations, but it still has the core features offered by Appcues like product tours and user onboarding checklists. 

UserGuiding pricing: 

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

Key advantages of UserGuiding over Appcues:

• UserGuiding’s lowest plan is a third of what Appcues costs, making it much more affordable. 

• Despite being low-cost, UserGuiding is still a no-code tool that can offer a lot of what Appcues also offers. 

Unlike IntroJS, ShepherdJS is 100% free and open-source. Of course, you do need to have enough dev capacity in order to work the library into something you need. If you do indeed have the engineering resources, then this could be a great way to start implementing user onboarding without spending a dime. 

ShepherdJS pricing: 

Complete free.

Key advantages of ShepherdJS over Appcues:

• ShepherdJS is free, and if you're in a pinch that could be a great plus.

Being able to customize and configure your user experiences is key to winning users over. In that sense, you might find yourself getting more blocked on trying to create what you really want with the Appcues builder. Chameleon might be what you're looking for here...

We are tooting our horn, but for very good reasons. Chameleon is a powerful product adoption platform that offers best-in-class UX patterns and targeting capabilities, allowing you to create completely on-brand and highly contextual user onboarding flows.

Compared to Appcues, Chameleon gives you much more control and styling options – play around with it yourself below 👇

For example, you can get really granular with your Checklists. With Appcues however, what you get are basic color, font, and size changes, resulting in cookie-cutter design like this: 

Whereas with Chameleon, you can get quite diverse with the designs: 

Chameleon even has an Alerts feature that allows you to monitor user experience 24/7. With such depth, you can build much more effective product adoption with Chameleon. 

Plus, Chameleon provides other tools to be able to collect user feedback and set up self-serve customer support.

All in all, it is the most flexible, versatile, and comprehensive user onboarding tool.

Chameleon pricing: 

Plans start at $299/month

Key advantages of Chameleon over Appcues:

• Chameleon offers best-in-class UX patterns and targeting capabilities, enabling you to get as granular as possible. 

• Chameleon offers a high degree of integration with other popular SaaS tools.

• Chameleon supports Shadow DOMs and Single Page Applications (SPAs).  

While Appcues does offer some analytics capabilities, it is primarily focused on onboarding and user engagement. Simply put, analytics is not their bread and butter. If sophisticated product usage data analysis is what you're seeking, you need to go elsewhere. 

Pendo is a product analytics and onboarding platform that allows you to track user behavior and create personalized onboarding experiences. It beats Appcues by offering deep features like heatmaps and session replays.

To sum it up, you can have both advanced analytics and onboarding with Pendo. Plus, if you want to do onboarding for mobile apps, Pendo does support iOS and Android like Appcues.

Pendo pricing: 

Contact Pendo for pricing information

Key advantages of Pendo over Appcues:

• Pendo offers more comprehensive product analytics capabilities than Appcues while also offering user experience building. 

If Pendo is a jack of all trades, then Mixpanel is your master of analytics. It is an advanced user analytics platform that enables you to track and analyze interactions, giving product managers a full 360 view of their users. It helps you understand user behavior patterns, as well as identify insights that can lead to more growth. 

Mixpanel pricing: 

Plans start at $20/month, and it increases depending on how many events you’re tracking. 

Key advantages of Mixpanel over Appcues:

• Mixpanel offers more advanced product analytics capabilities than Appcues, allowing you to track user behavior and analyze data in real-time.

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

Employee training is essentially a different ball game. While you could technically use Appcues to fulfill the demands of internal onboarding and training, a more specialized tool could be better, such as the ability to create and manage training courses, track employee progress, and provide assessments and certifications. 

WalkMe is essentially the grandfather of digital adoption platforms. Founded in 2011, it is a digital adoption tool that allows you to create interactive guides and tutorials for your employees.

To sum it up, WalkMe is more of an enterprise software, so it's ideal for large organizations that need an internal onboarding solution for platforms like Oracle, Microsoft, and Salesforce.

WalkMe pricing: 

Contact WalkMe.

Key advantages of WalkMe over Appcues:

• WalkMe is specifically designed for employee training and internal onboarding, making it a more focused option than Appcues. 

• WalkMe integrates with various internal management platforms like Oracle, SAP and Salesforce. 

While WalkMe is a grandfather of digital adoption platforms, Whatfix is more like the millennial. Their tools are easier to use, and better to look at compared to WalkMe’s based on user feedback on G2. 

So if you're looking for a good internal onboarding and employee training solution, Whatfix could be a good alternative as well.

Whatfix Pricing: 

Contact Whatfix. 

Key advantages of Whatfix over Appcues:

• Whatfix offers specialized digital adoption solutions for platforms like Salesforce, Workday, Microsoft and Oracle.

In conclusion, there are many great alternatives to Appcues that can help you achieve your specific needs and goals, whether that is budget, the degree of customization, the need for better analytics, or the difference between end-user adoption and internal training. 

But this is only the beginning. Take a close look at all your options, try them out as much as you want, identify clear value in them, and choose the one that gets the most ROI.

In the meantime, if Chameleon is the alternative that fits your requirements, try the interactive demo below to find out!