Discover the Best Pendo Alternatives
Founded in 2013, Pendo is an industry leader in product analytics and user adoption, but there are many great alternatives that might be a better fit for your needs.
What is Pendo?
Pendo is a digital adoption platform (DAP) designed to help companies improve the user experience inside their web and mobile applications.
Pendo’s product suite combines product usage analytics to see how end-users are really using your product and in-app guides to aid in feature adoption, plus feedback and roadmapping tools.
Pendo’s key features
Pendo helps you understand user behavior and guide user engagement through a number of features.
Product analytics
Pendo’s analytics are like Google Analytics but for your web and mobile applications, allowing you to track pageviews, clicks, etc of users who are logged-in.
Like most product analytics tools, Pendo has event tagging, funnels and segments. But unlike many other competitors where every event must be set up before it can be tracked, Pendo allows you to retroactively tag events, meaning you can analyze data as soon as you think of it.
Pendo is known for its easy setup and use, but unlike some other solutions, data is not available in real-time.
In-app guides
Pendo makes it easy to deploy product tours, feature walkthroughs, announcements, tooltips and more in your web and mobile applications. Its visual designer allows non-technical teams to create useful messaging to improve product adoption, customer success and conversion. User segmentation allows messages to target the right audience.
Feedback & roadmaps
Pendo also offers a feedback portal to capture, centralize and analyze customer feedback, allowing customers to share their voice while reducing support burden, and an internal product roadmap tool (customer-facing roadmaps are planned) that links to customer feedback.
Pricing
Pendo offers a free plan for customers with up to 500 monthly active users (MAU).
Pendo’s “Starter” plan ranges from $8,000-40,000 per year for up to 10,000 MAU.
Pricing is not publicly listed for enterprise plans.
The Feedback product has its own pricing, separate from Analytics & In-app Guides.
Make sure you’re not missing opportunities to boost customer satisfaction and reduce churn. Dive into 7 categories of customer retention software:
Billing analytics - See how customer retention affects growth and track ongoing progress.
Product adoption - Increase user engagement with in-app messaging, tours and tooltips.
User feedback - Collect user sentiment in-app to help identify promoters and detractors.
Product analytics - Discover how customers are using your app.
Customer health - Analyze data from multiple sources to detect at-risk customers.
Dunning - Resolve failed payments and delinquent accounts.
Cancellation flows - Reduce churn 10-39% with ProsperStack.
Pendo competitors
Amplitude
Used by over 2,000 companies, Amplitude’s product analytics help businesses track and understand user behavior to improve customer outcomes, drive growth and reduce churn.
Unlike Pendo, Amplitude has no in-app guidance or feedback features, but it can integrate with Appcues, Chameleon and others.
Amplitude sets itself apart by by offering two additional products with every plan:
Amplitude Data - billed as the “first insights-driven Customer Data Platform,” it centralizes user data from multiple sources into a single database, much like Twilio Segment.
Amplitude Experiment - combines feature flagging and A/B testing to improve product design and rollout.
Amplitude’s pricing plans are based on monthly tracked users (MTUs). This is a free plan. The “Start” plan is $61 per month. Contact sales for pricing of “Growth” and “Enterprise” plans.
ProsperStack makes it easy for subscription-based brands to prosper by automating the customer retention experience.
Here’s how it works: deploy a few lines of code and start delivering exit surveys and persuasive offers to customers at the point of cancellation. Iterate quickly, A/B test offers and surface actionable insights to maximize retained revenue. That’s subscriber retention done right.
Appcues
Appcues is an affordable Pendo alternative, offering both in-app experiences (product walk-throughs, surveys, announcements, etc) and product usage analytics.
Appcues’s no-code visual designer makes creating guides easy for non-technical staff. Installation is simple, and no code is required afterward to deploy messages or track new usage events.
Pricing starts at $249/mo. There is a 14-day free trial.
Chameleon
Like Pendo, Chameleon offers a variety of user onboarding features and surveys to collect user feedback.
Chameleon is not product usage analytics software, but can be integrated with Amplitude, Heap and others.
Pricing starts at $279/mo.
Gainsight PX
PX, part of the Gainsight software suite, is for user adoption and product analytics across web, mobile and desktop.
Gainsight’s product analytics are similar to Pendo’s. What sets it apart: no more manual tagging—PX can programmatically map the hierarchy of your product features, and even automatically tag new features as they are added.
Like its competitors, PX allows non-technical teams to easily create in-app guides, dialogues and walkthroughs with a WYSIWYG editor. You can also create onboarding checklists, self-support help content and “knowledge center bots.”
Pricing for Gainsight PX is not publicly available.
Heap
Heap is an “all-in-one solution for creating great digital experiences” used by over 10,000 companies.
Heap’s product analytics features include heatmaps, season replay and Heap Illuminate, a data science layer that can automatically surface insights.
Heap has a free plan for up to 10k monthly sessions. Pricing for other plans is not publicly available.
Mixpanel
Product analytics from Mixpanel help you understand customer behavior, track KPIs, and identify growth opportunities. Mixpanel does not have user adoption features such as in-app guides.
Mixpanel’s analytics features are robust, but unlike Pendo and others, tracked events must be purposefully defined and sent (either server-side or client-side). To simplify setup, Mixpanel integrates with popular CPDs, data warehouses and Google Tag Manager.
Mixpanel’s “Starter” plan is free. “Growth” starts at $20/mo for up to 100M monthly events. Even the “Enterprise” plan, which starts at $833/mo, has transparent pricing.
Smartlook
Smartlook, now part of Cisco, offers product analytics and visual user insights, including comprehensive event tracking, heatmaps, session replay and funnels. It works across web and mobile.
Like Pendo, Smartlook tracks events automatically. You can also define custom events if needed.
Smartlook has three plans: Free, Pro (starting at $55/mo), and Enterprise (contact sales for pricing).
More to explore
Pendo is one of the top digital adoption software solutions on the market, combining product analytics and user product adoption features.
No customer success and retention strategy is complete without putting to use each of the 7 customer retention software categories, from billing analytics to cancellation flows like ProsperStack.
Every day ProsperStack helps subscription companies retain 10-30% more customers with our drop-in cancellation flow. We make it simple to start collecting quality feedback, save subscribers with incentives and deflections, and continue to improve over time with A/B testing and powerful analytics. Get a demo.
