# Product Onboarding — Full Text
Curated articles from productonboarding.com, built and maintained by the team at Frigade.
# SaaS Onboarding Metrics That Predict Retention in 2026
Source: https://productonboarding.com/articles/saas-onboarding-metrics-that-matter
Author: Christian Mathiesen
Published: 2026-05-08
> Most onboarding dashboards measure things that look impressive but do not predict retention. Here is the short list of metrics that actually do, and why AI-tailored onboarding beats static flows on every single one.
Every SaaS company eventually builds an onboarding dashboard. It usually looks something like this: signups today, signups this week, conversion rate, NPS, time on page, scroll depth.
None of those predict retention.
That is the problem. A team is told to "improve onboarding," they wire up a dashboard, every number on it goes up over a quarter, and yet the cohorts retain at the same rate. The dashboard was full of vanity metrics dressed up as activation metrics.
There is a second pattern showing up in 2026: the *shape* of onboarding is changing too. The teams that move retention the most are not the ones authoring better static checklists. They are the ones letting users ask the questions they actually have and answering those questions in-product, tailored to who that specific user is and what they came to do. AI-powered onboarding (think [the Frigade Assistant](https://frigade.com)) outperforms one-size-fits-all flows on the metrics below, because every user comes to your product with a different goal and a static flow can only ever serve the average.
Static onboarding still has a place. We will get to where it is the right call. But the metrics below were chosen specifically because they reward each *individual* user's experience, not the average across an authored flow.
After watching a few hundred SaaS teams go through this, here is the short list of metrics that actually predict whether a cohort sticks.
## The three metrics that matter
### 1. Time to First Value (TTFV)
The wall clock time from signup to the moment the user does the thing your product is for. Not "logs in." Not "opens the dashboard." The thing.
For Slack, that is sending a message in a channel with at least one teammate. For Figma, that is opening a file. For Stripe, that is processing a real charge. For your product, it is whatever defines "the user got what they came for."
The shape that matters is *the distribution*, not the average. The average is dragged around by outliers. Look at the median, p25, and p90. A cohort where p90 is 4 minutes is a fundamentally different cohort than one where p90 is 4 days.
```sql
with first_event as (
select user_id, min(created_at) as signup_at
from users group by 1
),
first_value as (
select user_id, min(created_at) as activated_at
from events
where event_name = 'project_created' -- your activation event
group by 1
)
select
date_trunc('week', f.signup_at) as cohort,
percentile_cont(0.5) within group (order by extract(epoch from v.activated_at - f.signup_at)) / 60 as p50_minutes,
percentile_cont(0.9) within group (order by extract(epoch from v.activated_at - f.signup_at)) / 60 as p90_minutes
from first_event f
left join first_value v on f.user_id = v.user_id
group by 1
order by 1;
```
The thing AI-tailored onboarding does to this metric is collapse the long tail. A user who needs help on a specific step can ask for it and get an answer without leaving the product, which keeps p90 from blowing out into days when one user gets stuck on something the static flow never anticipated.
### 2. Step Completion Rate (per step, in your activation flow)
If your activation flow has 5 steps, you need 5 numbers, not one. The aggregate "60% of users complete onboarding" is useless because it hides where the bleed is.
Plot the funnel. The biggest drop tells you where to spend the next sprint. Usually one step is responsible for half the loss, and that step almost always does one of the following: asks for data the user does not have yet, requires a permission they did not anticipate, or requires admin access from someone else on the team.
[Loom's onboarding checklist](/examples/loom-onboarding-checklist) is a clean example of a static checklist done well, but it is also a textbook case of where static breaks down. Every user gets the same five steps in the same order. If the worst step asks for a teammate to invite, every solo user hits a wall there even though the step is irrelevant to them. The fix in static-flow land is almost always structural (re-order, make optional, skip for some segment) rather than copy-level.
### 3. Day-1 Retention by Activation State
Slice your day-1, day-7, and day-30 retention curves by *whether the user activated on day 0*. You will see two distinct populations.
The activated users will look healthy. The non-activated users will look like a dying battery. The gap between those two curves is the value of activation, expressed in retention points. That is the number you are trying to grow.
If you only look at one retention curve aggregated across both populations, you will think your product is fine when actually one half of it is on fire.
## The metrics that are mostly noise
These are the ones that go up reliably whenever a team "ships onboarding improvements" without retention actually moving:
- **Tour completion rate.** Lots of users will click "next" until a tour ends. None of that means they will come back tomorrow.
- **Average session duration during onboarding.** Longer is not better. A user who fumbles around for 12 minutes before figuring it out is not more activated than one who succeeds in 3.
- **NPS of new users.** New users have not used your product yet. Their NPS is mostly a reflection of how nice your marketing site was.
- **Onboarding completion rate.** Same problem as tour completion. Users will mash through a checklist if it is small enough. Whether they came back is the question.
## When static onboarding is the right call
Before going further, the honest acknowledgement: static onboarding is not always wrong. It is the right tool when:
- There are 3-5 well-defined steps every user must take in roughly the same order to get value (true setup checklists, configuration wizards).
- The steps do not depend on user intent. Everyone has to verify their email; everyone has to add a payment method.
- The flow rarely changes. Auth setup, billing setup, "connect your domain."
- You need an authored marketing surface (a billing banner, a one-time launch announcement). That is just an authored experience, not really onboarding.
For most other onboarding (the "help users figure out how to use the product to do the thing they came for" surface), static is the wrong shape because users come with different goals and a static flow only serves one of them at a time.
## How to instrument this
The bare minimum is two events: `signed_up` and your activation event (whatever that is). Everything else can be derived.
Most teams over-instrument because they want flexibility, then end up with 200 events and no clear semantic ownership. Pick one activation event per persona (if you have multiple personas), name it carefully, and wire it everywhere it can fire.
For step completion rate, track the *outcome* event, not the click. "User clicked Submit" can fire even when the submit failed validation. "Project created" only fires when a project actually exists. The latter is what you want.
## What to do with the numbers
Once you have these three things, the workflow is dumb but effective:
1. Look at the per-step funnel, find the worst step.
2. Form a hypothesis about why it is the worst step.
3. Ship a fix to that one step.
4. Wait two weeks for the cohort to mature, then measure again.
You will be tempted to ship five fixes at once. Do not. You will not learn anything.
The teams that win at activation are the ones that pick the right single number to chase, then ruthlessly chase it. Most of the metrics on the typical onboarding dashboard are not that number.
## The AI shift: closing the loop
The slowest part of the workflow above is "wait two weeks." If your product is shipping changes faster than your activation cohort can mature, you are always one cohort behind. This is the case for most early-stage SaaS, and it is the case where instrumenting the funnel by hand stops being enough.
A different shape, worth knowing about: an autonomous AI agent watching real-time user friction. The Frigade Assistant does this. It analyses behaviour as users move through the product, identifies the steps where users are getting stuck, intervenes inline (proactively, via [Frigade Suggestions](https://frigade.com/updates/suggestions), before the user even thinks to ask for help), answers tailored questions when they do ask, and surfaces those friction points back to the team.
Less "wait two weeks for the cohort to mature" and more "here are the four steps that lost the most users this morning, in order." Less "every user follows the same five-step path" and more "every user gets the path that matches their goal." The cohort math gets faster, the metric distribution gets tighter, and the cases where a static flow was the wrong shape entirely get caught and fixed in real time instead of two cohorts later.
The metrics in this post still matter. The point of an AI agent is that the time between "metric moves" and "user got help" collapses from weeks to seconds, and the path each user takes is shaped by what they actually need rather than what your team authored last quarter.
---
# The Onboarding UX Patterns Library: 8 Components Every SaaS Should Know
Source: https://productonboarding.com/articles/onboarding-ux-patterns-library
Author: Frigade Team
Published: 2026-05-07
> A reference for the 8 core onboarding components every product team uses, with do/dont examples pulled from real products. Tour, checklist, hint, banner, card, announcement, form, survey.
Most onboarding flows are built from the same eight or so components, recombined in different ways. If you know the components, you can read any onboarding flow on the internet and tell pretty quickly what is going on, what is going to work, and what is going to flop.
This is a reference. One section per component, with what it is for, when to use it, and links to real examples in production at named companies.
## 1. Announcement
A modal or full-screen overlay that announces something new. The big one, in the middle of the screen, that you have to dismiss to continue.
**Use it when:** You ship a major new feature, do a redesign, or have something the user genuinely needs to see before continuing.
**Avoid it when:** The user is mid-task, the change is incremental, or the announcement is more for the marketing team than the user.
**Good examples in the wild:**
- [Notion's feature announcement](/examples/notion-feature-announcement)
- [1Password's new feature announcement](/examples/1password-new-feature-announcement)
- [Mercury's redesign announcement](/examples/brex-redesign-announcement)
**Anti-pattern:** Announcing every minor change with a modal. You train users to dismiss instinctively, and the one announcement that matters gets dismissed too.
See more on the [Announcement component](/components/announcement) page.
## 2. Banner
A horizontal strip across the top or bottom of a page. Less intrusive than a modal, persistent until dismissed.
**Use it when:** You have a piece of information that is timely and lower-priority than a modal. Maintenance windows, feature trial expiry, billing reminders.
**Avoid it when:** You stack three of them. Banners do not compose well. One banner is signal. Three is noise.
**Good examples in the wild:**
- [GitHub's inline banner](/examples/github-inline-banner)
- [Anthropic's onboarding hint and banner](/examples/anthropic-onboarding-hint-and-banner)
- [Dropbox Sign's new feature banner](/examples/dropbox-sign-new-feature-banner)
See more on the [Banner component](/components/banner) page.
## 3. Card
An inline card that sits in the product flow, often promoting a feature or guiding next action. Persistent and dismissible, but not blocking.
**Use it when:** You want to surface a recommendation or feature without getting in the way. Often used inside dashboards, project sidebars, or empty states.
**Avoid it when:** You have nothing useful to put in the card. An empty-feeling card is worse than no card.
**Good examples in the wild:**
- [Notion's inline card](/examples/notion-inline-card)
- [Brex's "new" badge](/examples/brex-new-badge)
- [Slack's AI feature upsell](/examples/slack-ai-feature-upsell)
See more on the [Card component](/components/card) page.
## 4. Checklist
A list of steps the user needs to complete to be set up. The single highest-leverage onboarding component for most SaaS products.
**Use it when:** Activation requires multiple steps and the user benefits from visible progress.
**Avoid it when:** There is genuinely only one step, or you are using it to pad a thin onboarding into something that *looks* substantive.
**Good examples in the wild:**
- [Loom's onboarding checklist](/examples/loom-onboarding-checklist)
- [Cal.com's product checklist and feature promos](/examples/cal-product-checklist-and-feature-promos)
- [Warp's onboarding checklist](/examples/warp-onboarding-checklist)
We wrote a whole article on what makes a checklist work in [How to Build Effective Product Checklists](/articles/design-kickass-checklists). The short version: keep it under five steps, mark steps complete based on real product events, and let the user dismiss it.
See more on the [Checklist component](/components/checklist) page.
## 5. Form
An in-product form for capturing user input. Onboarding forms (intent capture, profile setup), feature configuration forms, feedback forms.
**Use it when:** You need data you cannot infer, and the data will change something the user sees soon.
**Avoid it when:** The form is for the CRM, not for the user. Long demographic forms during onboarding are the most common version of this anti-pattern.
**Good examples in the wild:**
- [Notion's signup form](/examples/notion-signup-form)
- [Typeform's new user guide](/examples/typeform-new-user-guide)
- [Dropbox's new user onboarding](/examples/dropbox-new-user-onboarding)
See more on the [Form component](/components/form) page.
## 6. Hint
A small contextual callout pointing at a specific UI element. Less heavyweight than a tour. Often opt-in.
**Use it when:** You want to draw attention to a specific feature without forcing the user through a sequence.
**Avoid it when:** You sprinkle hints everywhere. Hints are valuable because they are rare. If every button has a hint, none of them do.
**Good examples in the wild:**
- [Figma's AI feature hint](/examples/figma-ai-feature-hint)
- [Anthropic's onboarding hint and banner](/examples/anthropic-onboarding-hint-and-banner)
See more on the [Hint component](/components/hint) page.
## 7. Survey
A short in-product survey for collecting feedback. NPS, CSAT, single-question prompts.
**Use it when:** You need direct user signal that analytics cannot give you, the timing is appropriate, and the question is specific enough to be actionable.
**Avoid it when:** You are running it because it is on the OKR for the quarter and not because you have a real decision to make from the answers.
**Good examples in the wild:**
- [Brex's NPS survey](/examples/brex-nps-survey)
- [Slack's product survey](/examples/slack-product-survey)
We covered the deeper playbook in [The In-App Survey Playbook](/articles/in-app-survey-playbook).
See more on the [Survey component](/components/survey) page.
## 8. Tour
A sequence of overlays guiding the user through a flow. Most commonly seen, most commonly skipped.
**Use it when:** You are introducing a redesign or new section to existing users who already know the product.
**Avoid it when:** The user is brand new and the goal is activation. We wrote about why this fails in [Why Most Product Tours Get Skipped](/articles/why-product-tours-get-skipped) and [Product Tour vs Interactive Walkthrough](/articles/product-tour-vs-walkthrough).
**Good examples in the wild:**
- [Loom's product tour](/examples/loom-product-tour)
- [Slack's redesign tour](/examples/slack-redesign-tour)
- [Figma's redesign tour](/examples/figma-redesign-tour)
See more on the [Tour component](/components/tour) page.
## How to compose these
Most strong onboarding flows use a small subset of these components in coordination, not all of them at once. A pattern that consistently works:
1. **Form** at signup to capture the one or two fields that personalize the rest of the experience.
2. **Checklist** as the activation backbone, with three or four real action items.
3. **Card or Hint** as the contextual prompt for follow-on actions once the checklist is dismissed.
4. **Banner** for time-sensitive announcements.
5. **Survey** at a thoughtful moment, asking one specific question.
6. **Announcement** reserved for the genuinely big things.
7. **Tour** only when introducing changes to users who already know the product.
If you have all eight of these firing on every new user, you have an onboarding flow that will frustrate everyone. If you have one of each used carefully, you probably have something good.
The components themselves are not the work. Picking which ones, when, with what content, is the work. Browse the [examples library](/) to see how named companies make those choices.
## The 9th pattern
There is a 9th pattern emerging that does not fit the rest of the list because it does not require authoring anything: an autonomous in-app agent. [The Frigade Assistant](https://frigade.com) is the version we are building. Instead of authoring tours and checklists, you connect the assistant to your product and it learns the product by using it the way a real user would. From there it works in two modes: on demand when a user asks "how do I do X," and proactively via [Frigade Suggestions](https://frigade.com/updates/suggestions), AI-driven tours and contextual nudges surfaced on their own at the right moment for each user. It guides users through workflows, fills forms, navigates to the right pages, and detects friction before users file support tickets.
If you are evaluating the eight patterns above, it is worth knowing the 9th one exists and is starting to eat the parts of onboarding that flow-builders never solved well.
---
# Pendo vs Userpilot vs Frigade: three generations of the same job
Source: https://productonboarding.com/articles/pendo-vs-userpilot-vs-frigade
Author: Christian Mathiesen
Published: 2026-05-06
> Pendo, Userpilot, and Frigade are not really competing on features. They are three different bets on how to solve the same problem. Here is the honest cofounder take on all three, and which one fits which team.
Most "Pendo vs Userpilot" posts are a four by twelve feature grid with a recommendation bolted on the bottom. The grid is not why anyone picks one tool over the other. The three tools in this headline are not really competing on features. They are three different bets on how you should solve the same problem.
Here is the version that names the bets.
## Pendo
A digital adoption platform with deep analytics, a wide install base, and a long enterprise sales cycle. The interaction model is that a non-engineer authors tooltips, modals, banners, and [product tours](/articles/how-to-build-product-tours) in a dashboard, then publishes them to the live product through a script tag. Once a flow is shipped, it stays shipped. It fires the same content at every user until somebody on your team rewrites it.
The buyers who pick Pendo and stay happy are the ones who need analytics depth in the same suite as guidance, and have the org-wide budget to staff for both. The ones who churn are usually the ones who bought the breadth and used a quarter of it.
## Userpilot
A lighter digital adoption platform, built for product-led SaaS. Friendlier to PMs, less analytics, more onboarding focus. Same architecture as Pendo (author flows in a dashboard, render via injection) and the same downstream cost: every flow you ship is a flow your team has to keep current as the product changes.
The buyers who pick Userpilot and stay happy are the ones who would have bought Pendo five years ago but found the renewal price impossible to defend. Userpilot is what most "we want a no-code editor and we want to spend a quarter of the money" decisions land on.
## Frigade
This is us. Two products, and the comparison only makes sense if you know which one is on the table.
[Frigade Engage](https://frigade.com/engage) is the closest analogue to what Pendo and Userpilot ship. Checklists, tours, banners, hints, in-app surveys, forms. The same surfaces you have probably seen at [Notion](/examples/notion-feature-announcement), [GitHub](/examples/github-embedded-promotions), and [Mercury](/examples/mercury-new-user-onboarding). The difference is that they are code-defined components an engineer installs once. After that, a non-engineer manages content and targeting from our dashboard. The trade is that engineering pays the upfront install cost. The payoff is that the surfaces do not break when you change a CSS class, and they do not slow down your app the way a script tag injector does.
[The Frigade Assistant](https://frigade.com) is the part the no-code generation cannot ship. Instead of authoring flows, you connect the Assistant to your product and it learns the product the way a real user would, by using it. From then on it can answer "how do I do X" in plain language, walk a user through the action, fill the form, navigate to the right page. It can also surface tours and nudges on its own at the moment they are useful, personalized to each user instead of authored once for everyone.
Two things are different about that architecture. The Assistant adapts to the product, so the next deploy does not break it. The Assistant adapts to the user, so the guidance is not the same generic checklist for everyone.
## Which one your team should be in
Three patterns, mostly clean.
The growth or marketing team that wants in-product surfaces without filing tickets. Pendo if analytics depth is part of the brief. Userpilot if it is not. Frigade Engage if you want the same surfaces as code, and engineering can spend an afternoon installing once. The honest answer here is that the no-code editors are the safe default if engineering is not willing.
The team tired of authoring tours that go stale. Pendo and Userpilot are the wrong tools for this job. They are flow authoring platforms, and the flow is the thing breaking. The Assistant is what we built for it. We watched too many of our own customers ship tour after tour and watch each one rot in the next quarter to keep treating "more flows" as the answer.
The team in the middle. They have a Pendo or Userpilot subscription and a back catalog of flows that have been live for eighteen months. The honest question for that team is how many of those flows are still load-bearing and how many have been on auto-pilot since whoever shipped them moved teams. The load-bearing ones can stay where they are. The auto-pilot ones should not exist at all. The Assistant covers the auto-pilot bucket cleanly. Most of the teams we work with in this profile end up running both systems for a year, then quietly turning off most of the legacy flows.
## What it costs
Directionally, because this dates fast.
Pendo is enterprise-priced. Quotes start in the high five figures annually for the relevant tiers and scale steeply from there. Userpilot sits in the middle, with published tiers in the low to mid four figures monthly depending on MAU. Frigade is at [frigade.com/pricing](https://frigade.com/pricing).
The line item is the easy part. The harder cost is the team you have to staff around it. Pendo accounts at any meaningful size end up with a "Pendo person" on payroll, sometimes a small team of them, whose job is authoring flows, fixing the ones that broke when the product changed last sprint, building the cohort logic, and shipping the next round of tours. Userpilot is lighter, but the same pattern shows up: a PMM or a growth PM whose calendar is half-eaten by flow maintenance.
The Assistant does not need that role. The product changes, the agent re-learns. A new feature ships, the agent uses it. The cost we are not charging you for is the headcount you would otherwise dedicate to keeping the system honest.
Cost is rarely the deciding factor on the line item. It is almost always the deciding factor once you add the person operating the tool. Paying enterprise rates for a flow builder and a salaried owner for it, on a surface a self-maintaining agent could cover, is more expensive than the contract suggests.
## The honest bottom line
Pendo and Userpilot are flow builders. They are good at being flow builders. The reason to leave is not that the flow builder is bad. It is that the flow is the wrong unit of work for most of the surfaces a team is trying to ship in 2026.
Frigade is what we built once we believed that. Engage for the surfaces you still want to author by hand. The Assistant for everything else.
We make one of the three tools above, and we have been compared against most of the rest in the Pendo and Userpilot alternatives lists. We'll tell you on a call which slice of the comparison your team actually fits, including the cases where Pendo or Userpilot is the better answer. That's the conversation worth having before you sign anything.
---
# The State of Digital Adoption Platforms in 2026
Source: https://productonboarding.com/articles/state-of-digital-adoption-platforms-2026
Author: Christian Mathiesen
Published: 2026-05-05
> An honest field report on where DAPs (Pendo, WalkMe, Userpilot, Appcues) actually deliver value, where they are a band-aid for missing engineering time, and the AI-native shift quietly replacing the category.
Every two years or so, someone publishes "the top 10 digital adoption platforms" and it ranks the same five vendors in a slightly different order. This is not one of those posts.
This is a field report. I have spent a lot of the last few years watching teams adopt, expand, and rip out DAPs. Here is what the actual landscape looks like in 2026, what the category is good for, where it stops working, and where it is heading.
The short version, if you do not want to read the rest: the WYSIWYG-and-tour-builder category is plateauing. The next thing replacing it is an AI agent that learns your product and guides users through real workflows without anyone authoring a flow. We have been building that next thing at Frigade. More on that below.
## What a DAP actually is
Strip away the marketing and a digital adoption platform is two things glued together:
1. A WYSIWYG editor that lets a non-engineer author tooltips, modals, banners, checklists, and tours.
2. A runtime that injects those elements into your product via a snippet, browser extension, or SDK.
That is the core. Around that core, every vendor has bolted on analytics, surveys, segmentation, and increasingly, AI features. But the WYSIWYG plus the injector is the actual product.
This matters because most of the disagreement about DAPs is really a disagreement about whether *that combination* is a good fit for your situation.
## When a DAP earns its price
There are roughly three situations where buying a DAP makes obvious sense:
**Internal tools, not product.** If you are rolling out Workday, Salesforce, or some other large enterprise SaaS to thousands of employees, you do not have engineering access to that product. A DAP gives you a way to overlay guidance without modifying the underlying tool. WalkMe has built their whole business on this use case and it is a real one.
**Marketing pages and pricing experiments.** If your team needs to test variants of an in-product banner or checklist without an engineering ticket every time, the WYSIWYG saves real time. Especially if the team running the experiment is not technical.
**Bridging during a migration.** When a team is mid-rebuild and onboarding cannot wait for the engineering side to ship, a DAP can paper over the gap. This is the "band-aid" case but it is a legitimate band-aid.
In all three cases the DAP is doing something the team genuinely cannot or should not do via code. That is when the price tag pencils out.
## When a DAP is a band-aid for missing engineering time
The other 70 percent of DAP deployments fall into a recognizable pattern:
1. PM team is told to "improve activation."
2. Engineering does not have headcount available.
3. PM team buys a DAP because it does not require engineering.
4. PM team builds tours and tooltips.
5. Activation does not move.
6. Renewal comes up. Team debates "is this working."
The problem is that the things the DAP can do (overlays, tooltips, modals on top of the existing UI) are not usually the things that move activation. Activation moves when the *product itself* gets easier to use. A tooltip pointing at a confusing button does not make the button less confusing. It just adds another thing on the screen.
The teams that get the most out of DAPs are the ones that already have a healthy product. The ones who buy a DAP to compensate for a confusing product end up paying for both: the DAP plus the eventual rebuild.
## Where the category is actually going
Three things are changing the shape of the DAP market in 2026:
**1. The frontier is shifting from no-code to autonomous AI.**
Every DAP now has an "AI" mode that promises to write tours for you. Some of them work better than others. Pendo's AI suggestions are reasonable. WalkMe's are mostly demoware. But "AI that writes tours" is the wrong frontier. The right frontier is "AI that *replaces* tours."
Think about what an onboarding tour is actually trying to do. It is trying to get the user from confused to capable. A tour does that by walking them through the UI step by step. An autonomous agent can do the same job by *being* the user's first session: it watches what they are trying to do, navigates the product on their behalf, fills the forms, clicks the buttons, and answers questions when they get stuck.
That is the shift. Onboarding becomes assistance, assistance becomes conversational, and conversational becomes autonomous. We are in the middle of it now and most DAPs are not going to make the jump cleanly because their entire architecture is "author a flow, render the flow." An autonomous agent has no flows to author.
This is the gap [the Frigade Assistant](https://frigade.com) was built for. It is an AI agent that learns a product by using it the way a real user would, then operates in two modes:
- **On demand.** When a user asks "how do I do X," the Assistant walks them through the workflow, fills forms on their behalf, navigates to the right page, or escalates to support with full context attached.
- **Proactive (Frigade Suggestions).** The Assistant also delivers AI-driven tours and contextual nudges on its own, surfaced at the right moment for each individual user. Personalized per user, not authored once for everyone, and they re-adapt automatically as the product evolves.
There are no decision trees to maintain, no docs to keep current, no selector-based step targeting that breaks when the CSS changes. Setup looks like adding a new user, not configuring a content management system.
**2. Code-first alternatives are eating into the developer-led tier.**
Five years ago, "code-first onboarding" was a curiosity. Now there is a real category of teams who explicitly do not want a WYSIWYG, who want React components in their codebase under version control, with TypeScript types and design system integration. Frigade is in that category too. So is the more general "headless component" trend.
If your team's bottleneck is engineering capacity, a DAP is the right tool. If your team's bottleneck is design-system fidelity, control over state, or the ability to ship onboarding alongside the rest of the product, a code-first tool is the right tool. The market is finally accepting that these are different jobs.
**3. The "everything platform" pitch is getting tired.**
Pendo wants to be your DAP, your analytics, your in-app feedback, your roadmap, and now your AI. WalkMe wants to be your DAP and your enterprise change management suite. Userpilot wants to be your DAP and your retention tool. None of them are best-in-class at any of the adjacent categories. Teams are increasingly buying focused tools for each job and integrating them, rather than betting on one suite that covers everything badly.
## How to actually evaluate a DAP (or its replacement)
If you are genuinely shopping, four questions will sort the wheat from the chaff faster than any RFP:
1. **Does the vendor's own product use the tool?** If the answer is no, ask why. Often it is because the WYSIWYG outputs do not meet their own design bar.
2. **Can I see analytics on a real customer's flow, not a sandbox?** Most vendor sandboxes have suspiciously perfect activation curves.
3. **What happens when our CSS changes?** Selector-based DAPs break the moment you ship a frontend refactor. Ask for the exact failure mode and the recovery path. (For an autonomous agent that learns the product semantically rather than by selector, this question becomes "what happens when we ship a major UX change," and the answer is usually "the agent re-learns within a few sessions.")
4. **What is the configuration burden?** Count the steps to onboard a new flow. With a DAP, that is "author the flow, configure the targeting, set up the analytics." With the Frigade Assistant, there is no flow to configure: the Assistant guides users through whatever they ask about *and* delivers proactive AI tours on its own, personalized per user. Different shape entirely.
If the answers are honest, it tells you whether you are buying a tool or a story.
## What we recommend
Most teams over-buy in this category. The right answer for a lot of them is:
- An autonomous AI assistant for the bulk of "help users get stuff done in product," because no-flow architectures scale where flow-builder architectures do not. (We obviously think that is the Frigade Assistant. We also think you should compare it against actually using the alternatives, not against the marketing pages.)
- A code-first onboarding library for the few in-product surfaces you do want to author by hand: feature announcements, billing banners, the occasional checklist for a major new flow.
- A focused DAP only for the use cases above (internal tools, marketing experiments, migration band-aid).
- A separate analytics tool, because the DAP's analytics will not be best-in-class.
- A separate feedback tool, because the DAP's feedback will not be best-in-class.
Treating onboarding, analytics, and feedback as one unified buy is how you end up paying for the suite without using most of it. Treating them as separate jobs to be done lets you pick the right tool for each.
The DAP category is not dying. It is just getting smaller, more honest about what it is for, and ceding the largest use case (helping users do things in your product) to a new category that does not need flows at all.
---
# Why Most Product Tours Get Skipped (and the One Pattern That Does Not)
Source: https://productonboarding.com/articles/why-product-tours-get-skipped
Author: Eric Brownrout
Published: 2026-05-04
> Most users dismiss the first step of a product tour within seconds. Here is why that happens, what users do instead, and the one pattern that actually drives activation.
Open any SaaS product, sign up with a fresh email, and count how long the first product tour modal stays on screen before you instinctively close it.
For most people, the answer is somewhere between two and five seconds. Industry data backs this up: dismissal rates on the first step of a modal tour routinely sit between 60 and 80 percent. By step three, you are talking about single digits of survivors.
This is not a UX problem you can fix by writing better tour copy.
## What the user is actually doing
The user just gave you their email. They are looking for the answer to a single question: *did this product give me what I came for?*
The product tour is in the way of that answer. The tour is your onboarding team's mental model of the product, presented as obstacle. The user does not want a map. They want to do the thing.
So they close the tour. Then they look at the actual UI, scan for whatever button looks like it does the thing they came for, and click it. If they cannot find it in about thirty seconds, they leave.
This is not laziness. It is the rational behavior of someone who has been trained by a thousand products that the tour will not actually help them.
## Why teams keep building tours anyway
Three reasons, in roughly the order they tend to come up in planning meetings:
1. **It feels comprehensive.** A tour covers everything. Shipping one feels like onboarding has been "addressed."
2. **The vendor demo looked good.** Onboarding tools demo their tour authoring UI, because the WYSIWYG is the part that sells. The tour is the path of least resistance for proving you used the tool.
3. **No one is measuring whether it works.** Tour completion rate is a vanity metric. If you only measure that, every tour looks like a success.
There is a real difference between a product tour and an interactive walkthrough, and we [wrote a whole guide on building tours that do not suck](/articles/how-to-build-product-tours). The short version: a tour describes, a walkthrough requires the user to act. Activation requires the user to act, which is why the walkthrough shape is the one that moves the metric.
## The pattern that does work
The pattern that consistently survives the "skip rate" filter is what you would call an embedded checklist with opt-in steps. Here is the shape:
1. The checklist sits *in* the product, usually as a card or sidebar widget. Not on top, blocking the UI.
2. The first item is something the user can complete in under thirty seconds, often something they would do anyway.
3. Each subsequent item is a real action, not a "view the dashboard" type filler.
4. Steps complete based on actual product events, not based on the user clicking a "mark complete" button.
5. The user can dismiss the whole thing without consequence.
[Cal.com](/examples/cal-product-checklist-and-feature-promos) is one of the best examples in the wild. The checklist sits inline in their product, the steps are concrete, and each step links directly to the action you would take to complete it.
[Loom](/examples/loom-onboarding-checklist) uses the same shape. So does [Mercury](/examples/mercury-product-adoption).
The reason this pattern works where the modal tour does not is that the user retains agency. They can ignore the checklist, do their own thing, and come back to it later. They are not trapped behind a slideshow.
## A small experiment you can run
If you currently have a modal product tour in your product, the simplest A/B test you can run is:
- **Variant A**: The current tour.
- **Variant B**: Skip the tour entirely. Render an embedded checklist in the dashboard with the same content broken into actions.
Measure the same activation event on both arms. In our experience watching teams run this exact test, B almost always wins, often by a lot, and the gap widens at day-7 retention rather than narrowing.
If your team is reluctant to ship Variant B because "we need to onboard the user somehow," that is the conversation worth having.
## When tours are still the right call
To be fair, there is a class of problem where a tour is genuinely the right pattern. Specifically: when you are introducing a *change* to users who already know the product. A redesign tour, a new section announcement, a "we moved this menu" callout. In those cases, the user already has goals in the product. They are not trying to figure out what the product does. They just need the new map.
[Slack's redesign tour](/examples/slack-redesign-tour) and [Figma's redesign tour](/examples/figma-redesign-tour) are both well-executed examples of this narrower use case.
But for first-time users? The tour is in the way of the thing they came to do. Get out of the way.
## What we are building
The reason the tour-skipping pattern is so consistent is that the *static authored tour* is the wrong primitive entirely. A static tour assumes every user wants the same lesson at the same moment. Almost no one does.
That is the design principle behind [the Frigade Assistant](https://frigade.com). Instead of authoring a static tour once and shipping the same sequence to everyone, you connect the Assistant to your product and it learns the product by using it the way a real user would. From there it works in two modes:
- **On demand.** When a user gets stuck, they can ask "how do I do X" and the Assistant walks them through the workflow, fills forms on their behalf, navigates to the right page, or escalates to support with full context already attached.
- **Proactive (Frigade Suggestions).** The Assistant also delivers AI-driven tours and contextual nudges on its own, surfaced at the moment they are actually relevant to *that* user. A user who just connected an integration gets a different next-step suggestion than a user who just invited a teammate. These are personalized per user instead of authored once for everyone, and they re-adapt automatically as the product evolves.
The user does not have to ask, and the user does not get the same generic checklist as everyone else. The Assistant figures out the right intervention for each person.
This is the shape we think onboarding is moving toward. Less static tour, more adaptive assistant.
---
# Build vs. Buy: How to Choose for Your Product Onboarding
Source: https://productonboarding.com/articles/build-vs-buy-product-onboarding
Author: Frigade Team
Published: 2025-08-15
> Learn when to build in-house vs. buy software for product onboarding. Save resources, move faster, and make the right call with this proven framework.
# The Build vs Buy Debate is Dead: An Onboarding Playbook for Modern SaaS Teams
Sooner or later, every product leader has to form a perspective on product onboarding and decide whether to buy a third-party tool or build a custom framework in-house.
Maybe churn is creeping up because your onboarding experience confuses new users. Maybe activation rates are stalling, or your support queue is filled with tickets about the same “getting started” issues.
At this point, you know you need a fix and probably some new software to do it.
Now comes the tricky part. Do you build that solution in-house? Or do you buy it off the shelf? How do you decide?
Most teams start with the wrong question: Can we build this?
A better one is: _Should_ we build this?
And more specifically: Is building this solution from scratch the best use of our time and resources right now?
In the past, building meant control whereas buying meant speed. But modern platforms have changed the equation. Flexible APIs, design system integration, and even self-hosting options mean you can often get the best of both worlds, if you choose wisely.
This guide will help you make that call using a modern, variable-based framework designed for product teams who want speed and quality without sacrificing security or flexibility.
## Our Verdict Upfront
We’ve seen hundreds of companies tackle onboarding challenges. While every situation is different, there’s a few indicators on when a team should buy or build in-house.
**You should probably buy if any or all of these are true:**
- You need to move fast and test onboarding changes quickly.
- Your team is already overloaded or under-resourced.
- You don’t have in-house onboarding expertise.
- The problem is common and well-defined.
- You want AI-powered insights without building them yourself.
**You should probably build if any or all of these are true:**
- Your onboarding needs are highly custom or tightly regulated.
- Your product logic is deeply complex or non-standard.
- You can dedicate long-term engineering support to it.
- You view onboarding as a core differentiator.
## Understand What’s Really at Stake
The build vs. buy decision isn’t just about cost. It’s about how you spend scarce resources to solve a problem.
Two economic truths apply:
- **Your problem is already costing you.** Churn, confusion, delayed activation. Whatever it is, your onboarding problem is bleeding money, customers, time, or opportunity.
- **Fixing it will also cost you.** Whether you build or buy, you’ll spend something like cash, engineering bandwidth, roadmap attention, or even team morale.
Since you have to spend, the core questions become:
1. How much is this problem costing us?
2. Which resources can we afford to spend, and which are in short supply?
3. Is there an existing solution that actually solves the problem?
Unfortunately, there’s no solution to your problem that doesn’t involve spending resources. The best choice isn’t necessarily the cheapest in dollars…it’s the one that lets you conserve your scarcest resource and solve the problem efficiently.
## Step 1: Quantify the Cost of the Problem
Before debating solutions, align on the exact problem you’re trying to fix. This can be eye-opening, as different teams often have different definitions of successful onboarding.
Then, translate it into real numbers. This is particularly helpful for gaining buy-in from your finance stakeholders. For example:
- **Onboarding churn:** % of users dropping before activation × customer lifetime value (LTV).
- **Support load:** Extra tickets caused by onboarding confusion × average cost per ticket.
- **Lost revenue:** Missed upsell or expansion opportunities due to incomplete activation.
- **Delay costs:** Opportunity cost of roadmap delays while onboarding issues linger.
- **Reputation damage:** Negative reviews or public complaints about onboarding.
- **Team impact:** Burnout from firefighting avoidable onboarding issues.
**Bottom line:** This problem is not free. You’re paying for it through churn, lost expansion revenue, support load, slower sales cycles, and team fatigue, whether or not you’ve budgeted for the fix.
## Step 2: Identify Your Bottleneck Resource
It’s tempting to assume money is the biggest constraint. However, in many cases it’s developer capacity, focus, and time that are scarcer and harder to replace.
Building in-house requires engineering bandwidth that can:
- Pull engineers away from core roadmap work
- Slow your product velocity
- Incur ongoing maintenance costs
- Warrant additional headcount
Buying a solution may _feel_ more expensive, but the above aren’t abstract costs. Buying can conserve development cycles, allowing the team to focus on differential work only they can do. An out-of-the-box solution can also be up and running within _days_, instead of months.
**In terms of net cash:**
- A SaaS onboarding tool might cost $25K/year all-in. Minimal effort to rollout and maintain.
- Building something equivalent could require $150K+ in engineering time upfront, plus maintenance before you see results.
Our advice? **Spend the resources you can replenish, and conserve the ones you can’t.**
When cash is more plentiful than developer bandwidth, buying is usually the smarter choice.
When both are scarce, the decision gets harder, but remember, **developer time is money.**
## Step 3: Confirm an Existing Solution Can Solve It
If you’re leaning towards buying, you want a solution that will solve your problem. Think about your non-negotiable needs for a positive onboarding experience and ensure the solution you purchase actually solves that problem.
Likewise, choose a solution that not only solves your problem, but doesn’t create more problems than it solves. This is unfortunately trickier than it sounds. We’ve seen many teams jump on no-code tools that look easy to set up but end up burning more time fighting with limitations, hacks, or unreliable integrations.
We’ve already assessed some of the [most popular product onboarding tools](https://productonboarding.com/articles/best-product-onboarding-software), so depending on your unique needs, we have some recommendations.
At the end of the day, be ready to invest some time upfront in setup and testing so that you save more time (and developer sanity) down the line.
## Build vs. Buy Cheat Sheet
Need to convince your CTO, or yourself to buy instead of build? Instead of starting with a “gut feel,” evaluate your position across these core decision variables:
| Variable | Build-Leaning Indicators | Buy-Leaning Indicators |
|--------------------|----------------------------------------------------------|----------------------------------------------------------|
| Timeline | Flexible, multi-quarter runway for implementation | Immediate need or go-live within weeks |
| Engineering Capacity | Dedicated, available in-house team with relevant expertise | Engineering resources fully committed elsewhere |
| Customization Needs| Highly unique workflows, designs, or business logic | Mostly standard onboarding flows that follow best practices|
| Budget Structure | Ability to absorb large upfront development costs | Preference for predictable monthly/annual costs |
| Maintenance Appetite| Willingness to own ongoing updates, bug fixes, and scaling| Desire to offload maintenance to a vendor |
| Security & Compliance| Specialized in-house security expertise with relevant certifications | Vendor has stronger compliance posture than your internal team |
| Integration Depth | Requires deep, complex integrations with proprietary systems | Needs light to moderate integrations with common SaaS tools |
If most of your variables skew toward **build**, in-house development might be right. If most fall under **buy**, a third-party platform will likely save you time, reduce risk, and future-proof your onboarding.
If it’s a mix, consider a **hybrid approach** — buy for the common infrastructure, build for the unique parts.
## But Wait! There’s AI!
AI is reshaping the build vs. buy equation.
In the past, “buying” often meant locking yourself into a rigid, one-size-fits-all system. Now, AI-powered onboarding platforms can adapt, optimize, and scale with you, blurring the line between “off the shelf” and “custom build.”
The right AI onboarding solution can offer:
- Real-time personalization based on user behavior
- Automated improvement suggestions for onboarding flows
- Deeper insights into where and why users get stuck
In other words, you can buy software that feels like it was built for you without the engineering debt.
Full disclosure, this is _exactly_ the problem we've solved with [**the Frigade Assistant**](https://frigade.com), our in-app AI agent that experiences your product the way a real user would. It works both on demand (the user asks for help) and proactively via Frigade Suggestions (AI-driven tours and contextual nudges surfaced at the right moment for each user, without anyone authoring them). The Assistant adapts to your product as it changes (no flow library to maintain) and adapts to each individual user (no one-size-fits-all checklist).
## The Takeaway
There’s no free fix. Solving onboarding challenges always costs something. The smartest choice:
- **Build** when onboarding is a true differentiator, your needs are highly unique, and you have the long-term resources to support it.
- **Buy** when speed, proven results, and conservation of scarce resources matter most.
- And if AI is part of the picture, “buy” might deliver the best of both worlds: adaptability and speed.
If you want a deeper dive into how AI onboarding works, and why it can pay for itself, [book a quick demo.](https://cal.com/forms/ed0e923f-6f00-4191-a08f-7bebba6636b6) You’ll see firsthand how quickly the build vs. buy decision can tip in your favor.
---
# Pendo Alternatives | Which One’s Right For You
Source: https://productonboarding.com/articles/pendo-alternatives
Author: Eric Brownrout
Published: 2025-08-01
> We reviewed five Pendo alternatives to help your team find the best fit, assessing each for functionality, flexibility, and effectiveness.
# The 5 Best Pendo Alternatives for User Onboarding and Product Tours
If you’ve landed here searching for Pendo alternatives, congratulations, you’ve found the right place.
Below, I’ll walk you through five alternatives, giving the high points alongside my expert opinion, without a bunch of fluff that wastes your time. No affiliate links, no paid promos, just a genuinely useful roundup.
I will mention Frigade, our own onboarding platform, but only because it’s relevant and solves this _exact_ problem.
## There’s a big need for a code-based Pendo alternative
Over the years, I’ve watched countless friends and colleagues wrestle with tools that promise frictionless onboarding… but just end up feeling like brittle overlays glued onto your product.
Don’t get me wrong—Pendo isn’t a bad platform. It works at scale, its analytics are slick, and some teams swear by it.
But when you believe that **product onboarding should be built in code,** with full control and seamless integration into your product, you start asking if there’s a better way.
**Spoiler alert:** There is! My team and I built it. More on that later.
Plus, it’s just so expensive for what it is. And you don’t find out until after the demo, since their pricing is gated.
With that in mind, let’s look at the five top alternatives to Pendo, based on _my_ experience, and what kinds of teams I think they’re best for.
## Pendo alternatives
Here’s an overview of 5 popular alternatives and their features, or lack thereof...
| **Feature** | **Chameleon** | **Appcues** | **Userpilot** | **Intro.js** | **Frigade** |
|------------------|-----------|---------|-----------|----------|---------|
| Onboarding Flows | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes | ⚠️ Limited | ✅ Yes |
| Code-based | ❌ No | ❌ No | ❌ No | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Product Analytics| ⚠️ Limited| ⚠️ Limited | ✅ Yes | ❌ No | ✅ Yes |
| Feedback / NPS | ⚠️ Limited| ✅ Yes | ⚠️ Limited| ❌ No | ✅ Yes |
| Self-hosting | ❌ No | ❌ No | ❌ No | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Intelligent in-app assistant | ❌ No | ❌ No | ❌ No | ❌ No | ✅ Yes |
Here’s who, in my opinion, would benefit most from each of these alternatives to Pendo:
- **[The Frigade Assistant](https://frigade.com):** Teams that want to stop authoring tours and let an AI agent guide users through real workflows on demand
- **Chameleon.io:** Teams who don’t need deep customization and require a low-engineering lift
- **Appcues:** Mid-market SaaS teams that prefer a no-code approach
- **UserPilot:** Growth teams that prefer a no-code approach
- **Intro.js:** Indie businesses, startups, and small businesses that have limited resources but have engineering support
### The Frigade Assistant
We built **[the Frigade Assistant](https://frigade.com)** because, after years of helping teams ship product onboarding, we kept watching the same pattern: a team would author a tour in Pendo or Userpilot, the tour would work for a quarter, the product would change, and the tour would silently rot. The flow-builder generation is fundamentally about *static* onboarding that someone on your team has to keep authoring and maintaining forever. None of them solve the rot, because the rot is the architecture.
The Frigade Assistant is a different shape. It is an AI agent that learns your product the way a real user would, then operates in two modes you cannot get from a flow-builder:
- **On demand.** A user asks "how do I do X" and the Assistant walks them through the workflow, fills forms on their behalf, and escalates to support with full context attached if needed.
- **Proactive (Frigade Suggestions).** The Assistant also delivers AI-driven tours and contextual nudges on its own, surfaced at the right moment for each user. Personalized per user instead of authored once for everyone, and they re-adapt automatically as your product changes.
It also adapts on two axes that flow-builders cannot:
- **Adapts to the product.** When you ship a UX change, the Assistant re-learns the new flow on its own. There is no flow for your team to update. There is no selector to fix when your CSS changes.
- **Adapts to the user.** Each user gets guidance tailored to what *they* are trying to do right now, based on their behavior and intent, instead of the same generic checklist everyone else got.
**Why teams pick it as a Pendo alternative:**
- **No flows to author or maintain.** Pendo and Userpilot are static-flow factories. The Assistant is autonomous; the maintenance burden goes to zero.
- **Both reactive and proactive.** It guides users on demand *and* surfaces suggestions on its own. You do not have to choose between "tour everyone" and "wait until they ask."
- **Multi-step workflows, not just static tooltips.** The Assistant can guide a user through "create a project, invite a teammate, set up a webhook" as a single conversational flow, filling forms and clicking buttons on their behalf. A flow-builder cannot do this without a fragile cascade of authored steps that breaks the moment any of them changes.
- **Detects friction in real time.** The Assistant watches user behavior, identifies where users are getting stuck, and intervenes inline. It also escalates to support (Zendesk, Intercom, etc.) with full context attached when it cannot resolve an issue, which collapses your support volume.
- **Adapts as the product changes.** Authored tours rot the moment your UX evolves. The Assistant re-learns the product on its own, so guidance stays current without anyone editing a flow.
- **Self-hostable.** Unlike Pendo's closed-source overlay, Frigade can run entirely on your infrastructure if your security posture requires it.
If you have a healthy product and want to stop authoring (and maintaining) static flows that go stale every time your product evolves, this is the modern Pendo alternative.
For teams who *do* still need authored surfaces (a billing banner, a one-time launch announcement), Frigade also ships a code-first React component library you can use alongside the Assistant. But the Assistant is the headline.
Take a look at some real onboarding patterns in the [Product Onboarding Example Library](https://productonboarding.com).
### Chameleon
Chameleon lets you get simple tours up and running without writing a line of code, which can be handy when time and engineering resources are tight.
However, you’ll trade off deep customization, self‑hosting, and advanced analytics for that convenience.
One [G2 reviewer ](https://www.g2.com/products/chameleon/reviews/chameleon-review-9413842)noted that:
> “There is also limited control over the UI, so things like the ‘dismiss icon’ button look kind of janky, positioning is limited, and to do anything more complicated with targeting or behavior you will still need an engineer to help you.”
📚 **Read more**: [Build Product Tours That Don’t Suck](https://productonboarding.com/articles/how-to-build-product-tours)
**Teams that Chameleon could be good for:**
- Product teams that need a no‑code or low‑code solution and don’t require advanced analytics.
- Companies willing to trade off deep customization for implementation speed.
**Why I included it in this list of Pendo alternatives:**
- The visual, drag‑and‑drop editor gets you live without involving engineering.
- The built-in templating library does include the most basic onboarding patterns.
While some teams may find Chameleon the right fit, others could find it falling short. It has **4.2 out of 5 stars on G2**, which is the lowest star rating out of this group.
And another[ G2 reviewer](https://www.g2.com/products/chameleon/reviews/chameleon-review-9936348) reports that:
> “Sometimes, I find the design customisations to be a bit lacking – there are no options to adjust the distance between text and padding or the button padding. That might be to keep it easy-entry for some people.”
But it’s still a Pendo alternative that should be mentioned here.
### Appcues
Appcues delivers no‑code onboarding flows that are easy to set up, but don’t expect powerful analytics or self‑hosting flexibility.
Marianna N. notes the following in [her recent feedback](https://www.g2.com/products/appcues/reviews/appcues-review-11090714) of the software:
> “A couple of things I’d love to see improved: Right now, all the flows are a bit scattered—having folders or a better way to organize them would make a huge difference… Also, adding sentiment‑based triggers would put it even more on par with some competitors.”
**Teams that Appcues could be best for:**
- Mid‑market SaaS vendors who need solid in‑app guidance with some basic analytics.
- Teams that prioritize ease‑of‑use over deep technical control.
**Why I included it in this list of Pendo alternatives:**
- Intuitive flow builder with a range of pre‑built templates.
- Native support for in‑app announcements, tooltips, and hotspots.
Overall, as of the date of this writing, **Appcues has 4.6 out of 5 stars on G2**.
But Luiza V. mentions:
> “Actually, my dev team hates Appcues,”
…and if you've been in the product world for a while… well, you don’t want to upset the devs.
🧠 **Learn more**: [Iterating Your User Onboarding Flow: A Practical Guide For Better Results](https://productonboarding.com/articles/iterating-your-user-onboarding-flow)
### Userpilot
Userpilot strikes a balance between no‑code simplicity and developer‑friendly flexibility, but it still can’t truly match Pendo’s depth when it comes to built‑in NPS and feedback surveys.
And, full disclosure, **[the Frigade Assistant](https://frigade.com) still outperforms** when it comes to actually getting users to value, because it does not require anyone to author a flow in the first place.
One reviewer notes that Userpilot’s:
> “Editor for building flows is really difficult to use”
> and that, frequently,
> “Changes are lost and have to be redone.”
**UserPilot could be best for teams that need:**
- Both onboarding flows and reasonable product analytics without self‑hosting
- To experiment quickly with in‑app experiences
- Minimal engineering overhead
**Why I included it in this list of Pendo alternatives:**
- Good hybrid of no‑code flow builder plus tag‑based analytics
- Resource center and NPS capabilities built in
📚 **Read more**: [How to Build Effective Product Checklists](https://productonboarding.com/articles/design-kickass-checklists)
**UserPilot has 4.6 out of 5 stars on G2**, so many people find it a good fit.
But [marketing manager Erica G.](https://www.g2.com/products/userpilot/reviews/userpilot-review-7377437) shares that:
> “UserPilot is a bit time-consuming. We have to test it thoroughly because it does not always work perfectly,”
…which kind of defeats a bit of the point of low-to-no code onboarding tools.
### Intro.js
If you’re comfortable coding your own tours, Intro.js offers a no‑frills, self‑hosted solution, but don’t expect the bells and whistles of a full digital adoption platform.
**Intro.js could be best for teams that:**
- Are indie/startups or small businesses with in‑house developers
- Need ultra‑lightweight, self‑hosted tutorials without any analytics
- Have limited budget for an investment in a platform
**Why I included it in this list of Pendo alternatives:**
- Open‑source, with zero vendor lock‑in. Love it, because I love code-based onboarding flows
- Simple API for crafting step‑by‑step guides directly in your code
As a code-based tool option, I’d argue it’s a better way to do in-app product onboarding.
💡 **Pro-tip**: If you’re on a team with limited resources, sometimes during the initial building stages, open source is the smart first step. Check out our guide on [best tools for building product onboarding](https://productonboarding.com/articles/best-product-onboarding-software) for a couple open-sourced React library recommendations.
## The problem with Pendo
I’m not here to throw shade at Pendo.
They’ve built a fantastic product that scales and works for many teams.
But it isn’t the best fit for every organization, especially if you believe, as I do, that code‑based onboarding flows that look and feel native are better.
### Here’s what Pendo doesn’t do well
- **Static flows that go stale.** Every tour, checklist, and tooltip is authored manually and stays exactly that way until someone on your team rewrites it. When your product changes, the flows do not. They quietly rot.
- **Pricey and opaque:** Pricing isn’t transparent and many people are frustrated with the pricing. Just take a look at this discussion in r/SaaS to see what’s up.
- **Closed‑source:** No self‑hosting or full data control, which raises privacy concerns.
- **Performance hit:** Extra JS payload can slow down your app, especially on mobile or slower connections.
- **“Low‑code” ≠ no‑code:** Still requires significant dev support and tagging maintenance. That’s not cool if you’re expecting a lighter lift on your dev team.
- **Brittle guides:** Minor UI changes can break your flows overnight. No thanks.
- **One-size-fits-all for users:** Every user gets the same authored flow, regardless of intent. There is no per-user adaptation.
This comment in a [r/UXResearch discussion](https://www.reddit.com/r/UXResearch/comments/1gefjnc/do_you_use_pendo/) brings out some of my concerns on the functions of the platform:
And it also seems consistent over time in discussion forums that, despite its user-loved analytics, there are some concerns about data accuracy.
## The modern Pendo alternative
If you are tired of authoring tours that rot the moment your product changes, [the Frigade Assistant](https://frigade.com) is the modern alternative you’ve been searching for.
The Frigade Assistant is an intelligent in-app agent designed to support users from the moment they sign in. Instead of authoring flows in a dashboard, you connect the Assistant to your product and it learns the product by using it the way a real user would. From there it can:
- **Generate personalized step-by-step guides** for any workflow, on demand.
- **Deliver proactive AI tours and Frigade Suggestions** on its own, surfaced at the right moment per user instead of authored once for everyone.
- **Take actions directly on your users’ behalf** (form fills, navigation, feature activation) for a frictionless experience.
- **Answer open-ended questions** about your product in plain language.
- **Integrate with Zendesk, Intercom, and more** for handoff to live support with full context attached.
- **Requires little to no engineering setup** to install and train.
- **Adapts automatically** to product changes, with no flow maintenance burden.
It is the next best thing to sitting beside each user as they try your product and guiding them in person, and unlike a static authored tour, it works whether the user thinks to ask or not.
Nicu says "This product is a game-changer… it truly understands and eases the often tricky challenges of onboarding and [feature adoption.](https://frigade.com/use-cases/feature-adoption)"
Thanks for your kind review, Nicu!
So, yeah, I think it makes a great Pendo alternative.
---
# Manual vs. Automated Onboarding: Designing for Impact
Source: https://productonboarding.com/articles/manual-vs-automated-onboarding
Author: Eric Brownrout
Published: 2025-07-18
# Manual vs. Automated Onboarding: Designing for Impact
Product onboarding is an ongoing experience that shapes if and how users value and adopt your product. And while some companies may rely heavily on human-led onboarding, growth demands scale. That means making deliberate decisions about how much of your onboarding should be **manual, automated,** or a **hybrid of both.**
The right mix depends on product complexity, customer segmentations, and team capacity. Increasingly, the most effective strategies blend **self-serve automation with targeted human support,** enabling speed and scale without sacrificing personalization.
This guide breaks down the three core onboarding approaches, compares their tradeoffs, and offers insight to help you transition toward scalable, high-impact onboarding.
## What is Product Onboarding?
Let’s start with the basics. [Product onboarding](https://productonboarding.com/articles/what-is-product-onboarding) is the guided process that helps new users quickly discover and experience a product’s core value. It encompasses strategies designed to educate users about key features, drive critical _aha!_ moments, and set the stage for successful retention and growth. Product onboarding can take place in multiple forms:
- **Manual onboarding**: Human-led guidance from Customer Success, onboarding specialists, or Sales, typically geared towards complex setups or high-value customers.
- **Automated onboarding**: Self-serve flows that are built directly in the product to educate users on key features and workflows.
- **Hybrid onboarding**: A mix of automation plus selective human touch points to reinforce in-app experiences, tailored to account size, user role, or behavior signals.
## Why Product Onboarding Matters
Effective product onboarding isn’t just a nice-to-have. It’s a core growth lever. When done correctly, it can drive positive experiences across the user lifecycle and:
### 1. Reduce Time to Value (TTV)
One of the clearest signs of a good onboarding experience is how quickly a user reaches their first _aha!_ moment, the point where they understand and experience the value of your product. Fast TTV correlates strongly with user satisfaction, activation, and retention. The longer it takes to reach that moment, the more likely users are to churn or disengage.
### 2. Increase Activation and Feature Adoption
Onboarding guides users to perform the key actions that unlock the utility of your product. This includes helping them set up integrations, complete initial configurations, or explore key features. Without onboarding, users are more likely to stall out before they ever reach meaningful engagement.
### 3. Improve Retention and Expansion
Users who see early success are significantly more likely to stick around. A well-designed onboarding experience builds trust and confidence, which are essential for long-term retention. It also sets the foundation for future expansion, whether that’s deeper product usage, seat growth, or upgrading to a higher-tier plan.
### 4. Reduce Support Burden
By proactively guiding users through setup and education, onboarding deflects common support requests. Rather than spending time answering the same questions repeatedly, Customer Success (CS) and Support teams can focus on strategic conversations that drive more value.
### 5. Drive Revenue in Product-Led Growth (PLG) Models
For companies using a PLG strategy, where the product is the main driver of acquisition and monetization, onboarding is critical. If users don’t activate and see value, they won’t convert. Onboarding is the engine that turns free users into paying customers and new customers into power users.
## Understand the Three Approaches: Manual, Automated, and Hybrid Onboarding
Companies can opt for a manual, automated, or hybrid approach to onboarding depending on what their primary goals are. Let’s take a look at what each of these approaches entail.
| Approach | Description | Common Mechanisms | Ideal Contexts |
|----------|---------------------------------------------------------------------|--------------------------------------------------|-------------------------------------|
| Manual | Human-led onboarding, often via customer success (CS), onboarding, or sales teams | Live demos, kickoff calls, personalized emails | Enterprise accounts, complex integrations |
| Automated| Self-serve onboarding embedded directly into the product | Checklists, tooltips, product tours | High-volume signups, product-led SaaS |
| Hybrid | Automation layered with conditional human support | Flow-based onboarding + CS triggers | Tiered onboarding by plan, role, or behavior |
Manual onboarding offers depth but becomes harder to maintain at scale, whereas pure automation scales efficiently but may sacrifice important context or opportunities for relationship building. Today, we see more companies adopting a hybrid approach to deliver both:
- Speed and repeatability through automation
- Precision and trust through human support
## When Does Manual Onboarding Still Make Sense?
While automated onboarding has become increasingly popular, manual onboarding remains valuable in high-touch, complex environments:
- **Complex products** that have a steep learning curve
- **Cross-functional implementations** that require integration with other systems or teams
- **Enterprise-level deals** where relationship building is key and contracts include onboarding SLAs
- **Strategic customers** with expansion potential
- **Trial users at risk of churn,** who need a nudge to succeed early
- **Early-stage startups** that need more product signal before scaling up onboarding
In these instances, Customer Success teams will often act as strategic advisors, ensuring that users not only understand the product but embed it into their daily workflows.
### The Hidden Costs of Manual Onboarding
Manual onboarding is an effective way to establish rapport with prospective customers, but it can introduce hidden costs and pull resources away from strategic work.
Customer Success and Sales teams burn time repeating the same steps tasks across accounts, when that could easily be handled by the product. The scalability of this approach also depends directly on headcount, so a growth in users requires proportional growth in onboarding support staff.
Likewise, while manual onboarding may _feel_ more personal, it generates a ton of inconsistency. A user’s onboarding experience, and therefore initial perception of your product, will vary depending on who delivers it.
These costs become especially problematic as your user base scales. High-growth teams will quickly hit operational ceilings where manual processes no longer keep up.
## Why Automated Onboarding is Critical for Scale
Well-designed automated onboarding can be a valuable tool to reduce support load and drive user activation, enabling:
- **Consistency**: Every user gets the same high-quality experience
- **Efficiency**: Setup flows are fast and available 24/7
- **Experimentation**: PMs can ship improvements without waiting on CS
- **Scalability**: Onboarding thousands of users doesn’t require a headcount increase
Automated onboarding offers speed that manual onboarding can’t mirror with flows triggering as soon as a user is created. Likewise, carefully curated workflows can lead new users directly to an aha moment, reducing the **time to value** (TTV), or the time between signup and when a user experiences meaningful product value.
In practice, this can directly improve:
- Feature adoption
- Trial-to-paid conversion
- Support ticket deflection
- Expansion readiness
This is a great approach for companies pursuing a **product-led growth (PLG)** model, where the product itself is the primary driver of user acquisition, retention, and expansion. For PLG companies, onboarding must be both efficient and deeply contextual.
## When a Hybrid Approach Might Be the Best Fit
Most mature SaaS companies move to a hybrid approach that offers automated onboarding for _most_ and supplements with manual onboarding for higher touch accounts.
This tiered approach enables self-service for customers with lower lifetime value, such as direct consumers or smaller early-stage companies, so that you can invest the expensive white-glove support in higher value, enterprise accounts.
| Customer Segment | Strategy | Typical Tactics |
|------------------|-----------------------|----------------------------------------------|
| Self-serve | Fully automated | In-app flows, docs, videos, checklists |
| Mid-market | Light-touch hybrid | Automated flows with optional CS follow-up |
| Enterprise | High-touch + automation | Manual setup paired with targeted in-app experiences |
User traits, including role and company size, and behaviors, such as a dropoff, can also dynamically shape onboarding paths.
## How to Know It’s Time to Start Utilizing Automated Onboarding
If you’re not already integrating _some_ automation into your onboarding workflow, now’s a great time to start.
Your company would likely benefit from automated onboarding if:
- **CS bandwidth is maxed out** by repeat onboarding
- **Support tickets spike** for common setup issues
- **Onboarding success varies** widely by account
- **Time to value (TTV) is increasing** and users aren’t activating quickly
- **Low conversion of trial to premium users** despite growth in initial sign-ups
As you evaluate your onboarding approach, monitor metrics like:
- **Activation rate:** % of users reaching key milestones
- **TTFA/TTV:** Time to first action or value
- **Step drop-off:** Where users abandon flows
- **Support burden:** Tickets or time per new account
Together, these signals can help us understand _where_ and _why_ users are getting stuck so that we can design onboarding flows that actually unblock them.
Investing in automated onboarding can be overwhelming with sizable upfront costs and time to activate, but the return on investment is clear. Your teams can save thousands of dollars spent on manual onboarding interventions, not to mention countless hours spent explaining the same concept.
### Calculating the ROI on Automated Onboarding
A simple model for calculating the ROI of automated onboarding in your company:
- **Formula:**
Total savings = (Manual onboarding cost per user – Automated onboarding cost per user) × Number of users`
- **Add:**
Revenue gained from higher activation or conversion
- **Subtract:**
Tooling cost (e.g. subscriptions to onboarding platforms) and implementation time
**Example**:
Manual = $150/user → Automated = $30/user → 1,000 users
Savings = $120,000 before accounting for retention gains and costs for tooling / research and development
### Where Do I Start?
Automated product onboarding starts with designing cohesive, thoughtful learning journeys that introduce users to the right tasks and surface relevant features at the right time. In general, focus on mapping short, actionable flows that _quickly_ help users accomplish something in-app.
Depending on your in-house capabilities, no-code and code-based tools exist to help you build these automated workflows. The best onboarding platforms are:
- **Flexible** enough to handle different user journeys
- **Maintainable** without constant engineering time
- **Measurable** so product teams can improve outcomes over time
There are _hundreds _of tools out there. Luckily, we already evaluated [nine of the most popular.](https://productonboarding.com/articles/best-product-onboarding-software)
We’re obviously biased toward **[the Frigade Assistant](https://frigade.com)**, the AI agent we built to solve this exact problem. Instead of authoring static flows that you maintain forever, the Assistant learns your product and adapts to each user automatically. Regardless of which path you pick (DAP, code-first library, or AI agent), your onboarding tooling should offer flexible templates or autonomous adaptation, reusable channels for customer communications, and intuitive UI to drive key feature discovery so you can implement an impactful onboarding journey for your users.
## How AI is Changing Product Onboarding
AI is rapidly reshaping the user onboarding experience, but it’s not a silver bullet. Used well, it can accelerate setup, personalize onboarding flows, and proactively guide users toward activation.
The real opportunity lies in _augmenting_ onboarding, not replacing it.
### Where AI Delivers the Most Value in Onboarding
- **Surfacing smart insights**:
AI can synthesize patterns from user analytics in seconds to pinpoint high-friction drop-off points, detect anomalies in user activation, and suggest potential root causes.
- **Personalizing the experience at scale**:
Static flows from Pendo, Userpilot, and other DAPs treat every user the same. AI agents like **[the Frigade Assistant](https://frigade.com)** adapt dynamically to each user's role, intent signals, and behavioral context, generating personalized guidance based on real usage instead of predefined logic. The Assistant works in two modes: on demand when a user asks, and proactively via Frigade Suggestions (AI-driven tours and contextual nudges that surface at the right moment per user, without anyone authoring them). The agent also re-learns the product on its own as you ship changes, so the experience does not rot.
- **Replacing rigid logic with real-time responsiveness**:
Most onboarding systems still operate on static rules or basic event triggers. AI unlocks far more proactive support with predictive assistance, e.g. triggering help before a user gets stuck, adaptive flows that evolve based on users’ in-app behavior, and contextual nudges.
- **Automating experimentation and optimization**:
Testing onboarding variants manually is time-consuming and often under-resourced. AI can dramatically lighten that load by suggesting new variations, running experiments automatically, and monitoring what works.
## Final Thoughts
Onboarding design isn’t one-size-fits-all. Architecting the optimal strategy depends on your users, product complexity, and growth model.
More often than not, this looks like a hybrid approach that:
- Automates workflows to scale consistency and reduce costs
- Uses manual interventions selectively where it drives retention or expansion
- Leverages data to guide the mix, and iterate continuously
The most effective onboarding strategies are iterative by design, adapting alongside product evolution and shifting user needs. When executed well, onboarding helps turn new users into long-term adopters.
---
# Iterating Your User Onboarding Flow: A Practical Guide For Better Results
Source: https://productonboarding.com/articles/iterating-your-user-onboarding-flow
Author: Frigade Team
Published: 2025-07-11
> User onboarding needs to be iterative in order to evolve with your product. This practical guide introduces the SAIL framework: a clear, repeatable process to help you identify friction, run smarter experiments, and drive stronger user activation.
Let's be honest. User onboarding flows often don't get the attention they deserve. They're thrown together last minute just before a product launch, or cobbled together over time. And sometimes they only get development time when things break or something big changes.
But product onboarding strategy isn't an afterthought. It's an evolving part of your user experience and one of your biggest churn risks if you don't give it the investment it needs.
Of course, that means you've got some big questions to answer:
- **How do you and your team know when it’s time to update your onboarding?**
- **How do you actually iterate efficiently, especially if your team is under-resourced?**
- And maybe even more importantly: **How do you make onboarding changes without introducing new friction, confusing users, or breaking the parts that do work?**
These are sticky questions that waylay many product teams. The good news? There’s a clear way through the chaos, and it starts with having a repeatable process. One that helps you navigate iteration without getting lost in opinion battles or burning hours debating what’s working (and what’s not).
In this guide, we'll walk you through a repeatable, scientific method for iteration, grounded in real user behavior and driven by small, smart experiments. Whether you're a growth-minded product manager or a UX lead looking to optimize the experience, this article is for you.
## When do you iterate your user onboarding flow?
There are three main triggers for iterating your onboarding experience.
### 1. When your product changes in a meaningful way
This is the easy one. When your product evolves—maybe you add a new core feature, overhaul the dashboard, or update a key interaction—the onboarding flow needs to evolve with it. Which is obvious, right? Your users need guidance that matches the reality of what they’re seeing.
We won’t dive too deeply into this kind of iteration here, but it’s worth noting. If your team doesn’t already have a workflow in place to handle onboarding updates as part of major product changes, it’s worth taking the time to create one.
### 2. When the data (or your gut) tell you something's wrong
If your onboarding experience is underperforming, if users are stalling, bouncing, or skipping critical steps, those are pretty clear signs that something in your flow isn’t working.
Of course, this means you have to be actually monitoring the data on a regular basis, whether it be weekly, biweekly, or monthly, depending on your team size and stage.
If even the idea of a monthly check-in sounds stressful, don't panic! Start small with what you can do. Regular quarterly check-ins on funnel completion, time to value, or user sentiment can help you catch degradation early before it costs you real conversions.
This brings up a key question, especially if you're new to the product, or the product is new to the market: How do you know what a meaningful problem is?
This can look a lot of things, but here are some common red flags:
- A consistent drop-off at the account setup stage, indicating users aren't finding the value quickly enough to continue
- A spike in support tickets around the same step, which probably means something in the flow isn’t clicking for people
- A flatline in activation metrics whereby users are signing up, but they’re not sticking around to explore the key features that make your product valuable
These aren’t just numbers, they’re signals. When taken seriously, they’re early warnings that your onboarding isn’t bridging the gap between user intent and product value.
The good news is that these can also be opportunities. Each signal gives you a chance to learn what your users are really experiencing…and to respond with a sharper, more supportive product journey.
### 3. Constantly, if you can!
The best product teams don’t just react to obvious friction (or, you know, dumpster fires). Instead, they go looking for the quiet drop-offs, the subtle points of confusion, the users who ghost after one session.
The sooner you find those patterns, the faster you can fix them and build a better product in the process. A big bonus with this approach: When emergencies do happen, you and your team will be so familiar with the nuances of your onboarding that you’ll be much better and more creative at finding solutions.
**TL;DR? Don’t wait for an emergency to iterate.** Instead, build iteration into your culture. Onboarding is a living system and it needs regular maintenance to stay healthy and high-performing.
## How to iterate user onboarding in 4 steps
**Here's the key idea that will save your sanity when it comes to iterating your onboarding strategy:**
At all costs, avoid throwing best practices at the wall to see what sticks.
Instead, implement a process. Stay organized. Do things step-by-step.
Here's a four-step process of onboarding design and iteration. It's based on the scientific method and the process of scientific web design from our friends in the CRO world, and it breaks down into the neat acronym **SAIL.**
- Survey the journey
- Articulate the problem
- Iterate to solve
- Learn and expand
Follow these steps in order and product iteration will get a whole lot easier. Let’s look at each step one by one.
### 1. You SURVEY the journey
Before you make any sudden moves or assumptions, you need to ensure you’re really looking at the data and comprehending the situation.
That means conducting in-depth research to understand how your users behave, what they’re thinking, and where they’re struggling. Your goal here is to identify the places where the onboarding flow feels broken, ineffective, or invisible to users.
Importantly, this step is about the user’s experience, not the team’s expectations. What feels clear to someone who’s worked on the product for two years may be totally confusing to someone seeing it for the first time. That’s why you need both qualitative and quantitative data to get the full picture.
Some tools & techniques that can help:
- **Drop-off and activation funnel data:** Where exactly are users abandoning the process?
- **Time to value (TTV) metrics:** How long does it take for a new user to get to their first win?
- **Support tickets and live chat logs:** What are users asking for help with? What questions come up over and over?
- **Session replays:** What does it look like when a user gets confused or stuck?
- **First-time user testing:** Watch someone go through the process from scratch. What makes them hesitate? What do they miss entirely?
- **In-app surveys:** Ask directly: Was this helpful? Was anything confusing?
- **Friction audits:** Walk through the flow yourself—ideally on a new device, with a fresh account, and a beginner’s mindset.
You don’t need to use every single method on this list, but the more signals you gather, the more clearly the problem areas will come into focus.
**Key principles:**
- **If you don’t have good tracking in place, make that your first priority.** Quite simply, you can’t iterate on what you can’t see.
- **Segment your findings.** Your users aren’t all the same. What’s intuitive to a technical user might be utterly baffling to someone from a non-technical background. Group users by role, experience level, or entry point and look for patterns within those groups.
- **Watch for invisible blockers.** Sometimes the biggest problems aren’t the ones users complain about, they’re the ones that cause silent churn. That’s why session replays and first-time user tests are so valuable: they show you what users _do_, not just what they say.
Done well, this step gives you a clear map of where your onboarding is leaking energy or creating friction. And with that map in hand, you're ready for the next step: figuring out exactly what the problem is and how to fix it.
### 2. You ARTICULATE the real problem
This is one that tons of teams skip. It's also one of the most important.
Before you move on to solutions, you must translate your observations into a concrete diagnosis. You’re not just describing friction. Instead, you’re identifying exactly what’s keeping users from reaching value, building confidence, or making progress.
This step is where things often fall apart for teams. The temptation is to jump straight to “solutions.” But if you skip the work of clearly articulating the problem, you risk solving the wrong thing…or making things worse.
So what does a meaningful onboarding problem actually look like?
It could be:
- **Unclear next steps:** Users don’t know what to do after they sign up.
- **Low motivation:** They don’t see the payoff. Behavioral science shows that a lack of perceived progress is a core blocker to motivation (hat tip, Susan Weinschenk).
- **Overwhelm and cognitive overload:** Too many asks, too much information. Human brains can only hold so much at once. If you see a lot of panicked clicking or scrolling on your screen recordings, take heed!
- **Cognitive friction:** The language or UI patterns don’t match what users expect or understand.
- **Lack of personalization:** The flow feels generic, irrelevant, or not tailored to the user’s context.
If you’re getting stuck at this point, go back to the core principle from Steve Krug’s _Don’t Make Me Think:_ If users have to stop and figure something out, you’ve already lost them. Look for the spots where your onboarding is asking users to feel uncomfortable or work too hard.
**Key principles:**
- **Take the time to get this right.** The more precisely you can define the problem, the more focused and effective your solution will be.
- **Avoid generic best practices.** A vague diagnosis like "users get confused" doesn’t help. What kind of confusion? Where? What’s the result?
- **Remember: good onboarding doesn’t just get users through the flow.** It shapes how they think, feel, and behave in your product long-term.
If you do this part well, your “fixes” won’t just patch things up. They’ll set the stage for better patterns, faster value recognition, and stronger user confidence. And that’s where iteration starts to pay real dividends.
### 3. You ITERATE to find the solution
This is the experiment and test stage, the part where ideas turn into action. It’s also the part where some teams go wrong.
Instead of running focused, low-risk experiments, teams often launch a full redesign. It’s understandable! When something’s broken, you want to fix it. But in onboarding, sometimes less is more. But if you’ve taken the time to truly articulate and understand the problem, **the key to smart iteration is usually to start small.**
Think like a scientist. Change one thing at a time:
- The copy on a tooltip
- The order of steps in a checklist
- A new microinteraction at a known hesitation point
If you have the tools, run an A/B test. If you don’t, time-box your change and compare before-and-after data. AI agents like [the Frigade Assistant](https://frigade.com) make this kind of targeted testing easier than ever, because the agent itself surfaces friction points in real time instead of waiting for you to instrument them.
Some example problems and how to iterate:
- **Users keep getting overwhelmed at a settings step?** → Test progressive disclosure or move that step later.
- **They skip a key task?** → Introduce a well-placed nudge or adjust your checklist priority.
- **They don’t understand the benefit of doing a step?** → Reframe your messaging in outcome-oriented language.
Whatever you do, track everything. Use A/B tests, phased rollouts, or even manual version tracking. But keep your scope small. That’s the only way you’ll know what actually moved the needle.
**Key principles:**
- **Stay focused.** Your goal here isn’t to fix everything. It’s to learn what really matters and test one meaningful hypothesis at a time.
- **Don’t reinvent the wheel.** Look at how others have solved similar problems. The [Product Onboarding Example Library](https://productonboarding.com/) is full of proven patterns from real products if you need inspiration.
### 4. You LEARN and evolve
The last step is often where the biggest growth opportunities live.
Once you've been running experiments, it’s time to zoom out. Step back and look at what you’ve learned. Then use those insights to evolve your product, systematize what works, and avoid repeating what doesn’t.
That means:
- **Documenting your hypotheses and outcomes,** and looking for patterns across experiments.
- **Communicating your findings** with other teams (like growth, product, and support) so those learnings can compound across the org.
- **Scaling what works** because a friction fix in one part of onboarding might be helpful elsewhere.
- **Retiring what doesn’t** — if the same approach fails in multiple places, it may be time to let it go.
This is also where you start building a culture of iteration:
- Create templates for testing and measurement.
- Revisit your onboarding loop regularly (quarterly is a good baseline cadence).
- Encourage everyone on the team to bring forward observations and test ideas.
Finally, don’t be afraid to take a bigger step back.
And, yep! There's a bit of a paradox here. Tweaking one variable at a time is the heart of iteration. But if your team has been doing its due diligence re: iteration for a while, sometimes what you need isn’t a nudge. It’s a rethink. If your tests are hitting diminishing returns, it could be a sign you’ve hit a local maximum. In that case, it might be time to zoom all the way out and ask: _What if we started fresh? What if we reimagined this onboarding flow from a first-principles perspective?_
In short, you want to be careful to avoid what conversion folks call “meek tweaking.” Changing copy and color schemes won’t save a fundamentally broken flow. Sometimes, the boldest move is the most effective one.
**Key principles:**
- **Good solutions never exist in a vacuum.** If you’re paying attention to what’s working, and sharing that knowledge, you can speed up the SAIL process in the future.
- **Build learning into the product culture.** Your onboarding flow is a window into your user’s mindset. Studying it over time helps refine not just the first-time experience, but the entire customer journey.
- **Don’t let iteration stall out.** Schedule regular reviews of onboarding performance and experiment outcomes. Every win (or failure) is a step toward a better, more effective product.
## How AI can help you iterate your onboarding strategy
Let’s talk about the not-so-silent game-changer: AI.
If you’re already using the SAIL framework, you’re ahead of the curve. But thanks to AI tools, we’re entering a whole new era. What used to take hours or days or weeks of digging through data can now happen instantly. And that’s just the beginning.
Here’s what AI is especially good at when it comes to onboarding:
### Surfacing smart insights, fast
AI tools can process huge volumes of user behavior data in seconds. Way faster than any human could, frankly. Instead of manually watching session replays or sifting through chat logs, you can get instant high-quality insights into where users are dropping off, stalling, or getting confused.
What’s even handier is that these tools don’t just tell you what’s happening, they help explain why, and suggest the kinds of fixes most likely to make a difference.
### Personalizing the onboarding experience (at scale)
The flow-builder generation of tools (Pendo, Userpilot, Chameleon) gives you static, one-size-fits-all flows that you have to keep authoring and maintaining as your product changes. AI agents like [the Frigade Assistant](https://frigade.com) flip this on its head: the experience adapts to each user's role, behavior, and goals automatically, *and* re-learns the product on its own when you ship changes. The Assistant works in two modes: on demand when a user asks for help, and proactively via Frigade Suggestions, which surface AI-driven tours and contextual nudges personalized for each user without anyone authoring them. Every user gets a different path through the product, with no flow library for your team to maintain.
That changes what’s possible, but keep it mind that it also significantly raises the bar for what users will start to expect.
### Ditching rigid flows for smart, responsive ones
Traditional onboarding logic tends to rely on static flowcharts and logic trees, but these dynamic AI tools make it possible to design experiences that respond in _real time_ with intelligent nudges and predictive assistance. Think: noticing when someone’s stuck and offering help before they even ask.
These are incredible capabilities that keep users moving and significantly reduce churn.
### Automating experiments
AI can drastically reduce your testing lift by suggesting new variations, running experiments automatically, and surfacing what works. Even better? It can keep this experimentation going in the background while the rest of your team does something else.
Basically, if you get the right tool, it’ll be like having a 24/7 optimization teammate that’s always finding opportunities, always taking action, and never needs a coffee break.
The bottom line here is that, while AI isn’t a replacement for strategic thinking, it is a serious amplifier that can get serious results. It can help you spot what’s not working, deliver more relevant experiences, act at the right time, and iterate—faster than ever.
TL;DR: When you combine a strategic approach like SAIL with the power of AI? Your onboarding can go from “pretty good” to best-in-class.
---
# We Tested 9 Product Onboarding Tools So You Don't Have To
Source: https://productonboarding.com/articles/best-product-onboarding-software
Author: Christian Mathiesen
Published: 2025-07-03
> We reviewed the top code-based and no-code product onboarding software and tools to help your team find the best fit.
Product onboarding is one of the most powerful growth levers a product team can have control over, yet most onboarding tools don’t _actually_ give you much control at all.
Oh, the irony.
Many companies spend significant time and money to build growth platforms from scratch in house, but that’s not feasible for every team.
Along with my team, I have gone through _hundreds_ of product flows to analyze them for best practices. And in the process of building Frigade, while helping hundreds of teams implement, analyze, and iterate on their own onboarding flows, we’ve tried just about every tool out there.
So yes, I have strong opinions about product onboarding software, including which ones are the best.
Here’s what I’ll cover today:
- Where other “best product onboarding software” lists fall short
- How I evaluated this group of tools
- Code-based tools for building product onboarding
- No-code product onboarding software (aka, digital adoption platforms)
- Emerging in-app product assistance tools
- Common questions that I get about product onboarding tools
## The problem with other typical “best product onboarding software” lists
It’s incredibly challenging to find unbiased reviews of these types of tools because most of the search results are filled with affiliate links.
**But not this list.** My goal is to give you a no-BS, practical comparison of the best onboarding tools available today, not affiliate links.
We received $0 dollars for any links or reviews of the tools below, and I’m not attempting to hard-sell you on anything.
But I do mention Frigade, a platform we created ourselves. Although for good reason, which I’ll get to later. (And I wouldn’t be a good CTO if I _didn’t_ mention Frigade in this list.)
Before you dig in, here’s what we considered during our evaluation.
## How my team and I evaluated these product onboarding tools
Below, I’ve separated each tool by type of product onboarding software: code-based and no-code.
Each tool was evaluated using four main criteria listed in the chart below. I included some questions about each of the evaluation criteria that I have for each tool.
| Category | Considerations |
|-----------------------|----------------|
| **Flexibility** | - Can developers customize the experience to match your product’s UI, logic, and user segmentation needs?
- Can PMs and non-technical teams (like product marketing or UX copywriters) contribute without friction?
- Can designers ensure it doesn’t feel like a bolt-on experience?
|
| **Control** | - Can your team use SDKs or APIs to manage targeting, logic, and flow state behind the scenes?
- Can you version onboarding flows and release updates without disrupting user experience?
- Can you self-host for security reasons?
|
| **Performance Tracking** | - Can you measure what’s working and what’s not?
- Does the tool offer meaningful analytics or just vanity metrics?
- Can it plug into your data stack, product analytics platform, or event tracking system?
|
| **Business Impact** | - How long does it take to implement or update onboarding flows?
- Does the tool reduce or increase dev and design burden over time?
- Does it help your team activate more users, faster?
|
But here’s the thing:
We don’t half-ass anything around here on our team, so this guide is incredibly comprehensive… which means it’s long and contains a lot of information.
I promise you it’s _good_ information that you can use to make an excellent decision for you and your team, but if you need to skip around, use the table of contents on the righthand side.
## AI-native onboarding
### The Frigade Assistant
I’ll mention the one we built first. **[The Frigade Assistant](https://frigade.com)** is an AI agent that learns your product and helps users in two complementary modes:
- **On demand.** A user asks "how do I do X" and the Assistant walks them through it, fills forms on their behalf, and escalates to support with full context if needed.
- **Proactive (Frigade Suggestions).** The Assistant also delivers AI-driven tours and contextual nudges on its own, personalized per user. Think of it as a tour that is dynamically generated for each individual based on what they are actually trying to do, not a static one authored once and shown to everyone.
It adapts on two axes that flow-builder DAPs cannot:
- **Adapts to the product.** When you ship a UX change, the Assistant re-learns the new flow on its own. Authored tours rot the moment your product evolves; the Assistant updates itself.
- **Adapts to the user.** Each user gets guidance tailored to what they are trying to do right now, based on their behavior and intent. No more "every user sees the same generic checklist."
This is the architecture difference that matters. Pendo, Userpilot, Chameleon, and Whatfix all give you a dashboard for authoring static onboarding flows that you have to keep updating forever. The Assistant is autonomous: maintenance burden goes to zero, and the experience gets *better* as your product evolves rather than worse.
Used in production by SaaS teams who want autonomous in-product guidance instead of a maintenance-heavy library of authored flows.
- **Code or no-code?** Connect once, no flows to author. The Assistant learns the product autonomously.
- **Price/cost:** See [Frigade’s pricing](https://frigade.com/pricing) for current Engage and Assistant plans.
- **Best for:** Product, support, and growth teams who are tired of authoring tours that go stale. Teams trying to deflect support tickets. Teams who want to give every user a personalized path through the product without authoring it by hand.
What the Assistant gives you, in plain terms:
- A user can ask "how do I do X" and the Assistant walks them through it, filling forms and clicking buttons on their behalf.
- The Assistant proactively surfaces Frigade Suggestions and AI tours, personalized per user and timed to the right moment, so the user does not have to think to ask.
- The Assistant detects when a user is friction-ing on a specific step and intervenes inline before they file a ticket.
- When the Assistant cannot resolve something, it escalates to your support stack (Zendesk, Intercom) with the full context attached.
- It adapts as the product changes. There is no flow library to keep updating.
| Evaluation Criteria | Considerations |
|-----------------------|----------------|
| **Flexibility** | ✅ Adapts to any product workflow without authored configuration
✅ Per-user personalization based on behavior and intent
✅ Adapts automatically as the product evolves |
| **Control** | ✅ Self-hostable
✅ White-label / theming so it feels native
✅ Audit trail of agent actions for compliance |
| **Performance Tracking** | ✅ Surfaces friction points in real time
✅ Integrates with your analytics stack (Segment, Mixpanel, etc.)
✅ Tracks intents, completions, escalations |
| **Business Impact** | ✅ Zero flow-maintenance burden compared to flow-builder DAPs
✅ Replaces a chunk of authored support hours with autonomous resolution
✅ Adapts as the product changes, so guidance does not rot |
If you also need authored surfaces for the small set of cases where they make sense (a billing banner, a one-time launch announcement), Frigade ships a code-first React component library you can use alongside the Assistant. But for the bulk of "help users get value from the product," the Assistant is the headline.
## Code-based
### Chameleon
Chameleon.io is what I’d considered a low-code product onboarding software platform, and not a fully code-based flexible solution.
It offers product tours, tooltips, surveys, and launchers, and allows your team to guide users without extensive engineering effort.
- **Code or no-code?** Low-code.
- **Price/cost:** Chameleon's pricing is based on Monthly Tracked Users (MTUs) and starts at $279 per month. For fuller features (like A/B testing), you likely will spend $18K a year. Check [Chameleon’s pricing page](https://www.chameleon.io/plans) for the most current info.
- **Best for:** Mid-sized to large companies who want to improve adoption with in-app experiences.
While some public product reviews note “there is limited control over the UI” and “setting up segments is very difficult,” Chameleon has [4.4 out of 5 stars via G2](https://www.g2.com/products/chameleon/reviews#reviews) and [4.5 out of 5 stars with Product Hunt.](https://www.producthunt.com/products/chameleon/reviews)
Based on my own product onboarding software criteria, here’s Chameleon’s scorecard:
| Evaluation Criteria | Considerations |
|-----------------------|----------------|
| **Flexibility** | ✅ Devs can lightly customize to align with the product's UI
✅ Non-tech teams can create and manage in-app experiences
❌ Full customization not possible; some elements seem non-native |
| **Control** | ✅ Offers control over styling and layout, including custom CSS
✅ Versioning of flows to update without disrupting user experience
❌ Does not support self-hosting |
| **Performance Tracking** | ✅ Includes analytics of in-app experiences
✅ Integrates with analytics platforms
❌ Issues with integrations, like Mixpanel, Hubspot |
| **Business Impact** | ✅ Efficient implementation time due to low-code
✅ Reports of significantly reduced support tickets ([source](https://www.chameleon.io/use-cases/reduce-support-tickets))
❌ Requires dev support but doesn’t offer flexible customization of other code-based platforms |
### Open-source Libraries: Reactour and React Joyride
It would be a miss on my part, especially in the code-based product onboarding software portion of this list, if I didn’t mention a few open-source libraries.
Both [Reactour](https://github.com/elrumordelaluz/reactour) and [React Joyride ](https://github.com/gilbarbara/react-joyride)are open-source, code-based libraries designed to help you create guided tours and walkthroughs within React applications.
- **Code or no-code?** It’s code-based and requires heavy dev support.
- **Price/Cost:** Free and open-source under the MIT license.
- **Best for:** Teams looking for a fully customizable and dev-friendly solution for product tours within React applications.
Both Reactour and React Joyride are strong options in a few ways:
As open-source libraries, they allow for extensive customization options, including the ability to tailor the appearance and behavior of tours to match the application's design. And for me, that’s paramount.
Both libraries are also actively maintained, so I’m willing to recommend them.
There are a few cons, though, including the fact that going this route means your team will rely on heavy internal dev maintenance. Plus, they offer less guidance and support than an out-of-the-box option.
And as one [Redditor](https://www.reddit.com/r/reactjs/comments/vyftdx/library_that_highlights_different_buttons_and/) mentioned regarding Reactour, “It worked well but the API to use it is a bit cumbersome—felt like a weird mix of class-based and FP.” While one [React Joyride user on Reddit](https://www.reddit.com/r/react/comments/1jwrmaa/react_joyride_made_my_app_more_fun_and_kept_users/?utm_source=chatgpt.com) shared it increased their user engagement time. This is to be expected, as going from zero onboarding flows to any is always a smart idea.
Here’s my scorecard for open-source library options like Reactour and React Joyride:
| Evaluation Criteria | Considerations |
|-----------------------|----------------|
| **Flexibility** | ✅ Devs can customize tours to align with the product's UI
✅ Designers can ensure the onboarding elements integrate with existing design
❌ Non-technical teams will require dev assistance and iterations on copy require dev support |
| **Control** | ✅ Full control over styles and layout via your design system
❌ No hosted platform; Requires custom backend
❌ Built-in version control to safely launch updates |
| **Performance Tracking** | ❌ Native analytics in the dashboard
❌ Offers custom event tracking
❌ Tracks completions, conversions, step-level performance |
| **Business Impact** | ✅ Implementation time is relatively short for teams familiar with React with reusable components.
❌ Low long-term dev maintenance compared to fully building in-house
❌ Non-tech teams can manage copy or targeting via the dashboard |
## No-code digital adoption platforms
Ready to tackle the best tools for product onboarding that don’t require any code?
**First, I need to be honest with you:** I’m biased in that I believe code-based tools are the way to go.
However, I’ve used no-code tools in the past myself, and there are some instances where it might be the best fit for a particular team or product.
I’m covering the following six tools, in no certain order:
- UserGuiding
- Whatfix
- Userpilot
- Pendo
- Appcues
- Userflow
Also, keep in mind this class of tools are digital adoption platforms which can be used to develop product onboarding flows, but specific product onboarding software tools do exist and can better serve that use case. (You know, like [Frigade.](https://frigade.com/) Hint, hint.)
### UserGuiding
It’s likely you’ve heard of UserGuiding before, and perhaps you’ve even checked it out yourself. It’s a popular one.
It’s a digital adoption platform built for product teams who want to ship onboarding flows fast without touching code. This platform is a popular choice for teams looking to launch onboarding quickly without relying on engineering.
- **Code or No Code?** No-code
- **Price/Cost:** Plans are based on the number of MAUs. Starter plans begin at $174 month for up to 2,000 MAUs. However, check the pricing page for the most current information.
- **Best for:** Startups and small to mid-sized businesses that needs a solution that requires no developer involvement.
Overall, fans of UserGuiding find it easy to use and affordable. It also includes a fairly comprehensive feature set to encourage product adoption.
But the customization is limited. It sits on top of your product interface, so it can feel disjointed or annoying to users. And it doesn’t support native mobile apps.
ProductHunt reviewers give the platform [4.5/5 stars,](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1za3KSXOKD80INqDJjVGTCr4IkcXhRLk3/view?usp=drive_link) while G2 reviews come in at [4.7/5 stars,](https://www.g2.com/products/userguiding/reviews#reviews) but some reviewers caution the product isn’t as practical as it seems and they have to rely on manual workarounds on occasion.
| Evaluation Criteria | Considerations |
|-----------------------|----------------|
| **Flexibility** | ❌ Developers can fully customize the experience
❌ Design feels seamless and natural inside the app, not like an overlay
✅ Not tied to specific coding frameworks and requires little dev support |
| **Control** | ❌ Supports optional self-hosting in your own secure cloud or data center
❌ Full control over styles and layout via your design system (although available on higher tiered plans)
❌ Built-in version control to safely launch updates |
| **Performance Tracking** | ✅ Includes built-in analytics in the dashboard
✅ Supports integration with analytics platforms for performance tracking
⚠️ Advanced funnel tracking might require other tools |
| **Business Impact** | ✅ Low long-term dev maintenance compared to fully building in-house; fast to implement
✅ Non-tech teams can manage copy or targeting
✅ Enhances user activation and retention through onboarding experiences |
### Whatfix
Whatfix is a digital adoption and product onboarding platform that is positioned to serve enterprise-level organizations.
It does your standard in-app guidance and self-help resources for users, while equipping your team to create interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, and task lists without coding. And it offers a robust analytics dashboard.
- **Code or No Code?** Primarily no-code, with options for custom code to extend functionality.
- **Price/Cost:** Whatfix [pricing estimates](https://whatfix.com/pricing/) are gated by a demo. And to be honest, the pricing page is a bit unclear. However, [Vendr](https://www.vendr.com/marketplace/whatfix) estimates an average annual cost of $23,750.
- **Best For:** Overall, in my opinion, Whatfix might be a good choice for mid to large enterprise orgs that need a low-code to no-code solution for both employee and customer onboarding across software ecosystems.
As far as how users feel about Whatfix, ProductHunt reviewers give [5/5 stars](https://www.producthunt.com/products/whatfix/reviews) and G2 reviews come in at [4.6/5 stars.](https://www.g2.com/products/whatfix/reviews#reviews)
One of Whatfix’s biggest strengths is the analytics platform and that it’s compatible across web, desktop, and mobile applications. But it has its limitations.
Some folks report some trouble with [ease of customization](https://www.infotech.com/software-reviews/products/whatfix) and that the integrations [can be buggy.](https://www.g2.com/products/whatfix/reviews/whatfix-review-9968775)
And despite Whatfix being in the no-code family of product onboarding software and adoption tools, [one G2 reviewer](https://www.g2.com/products/whatfix/reviews/whatfix-review-4197957) explains “the tool itself is challenging for the less technical people to use, as you need to know the CSS classes to show flows and steps.”
| Evaluation Criteria | Considerations |
|-----------------------|----------------|
| **Flexibility** | ❌ Developers can fully customize the experience
✅ Designers can ensure the onboarding elements align with the existing design
✅ Not tied to specific coding frameworks and requires little dev support |
| **Control** | ❌ Supports optional self-hosting in your own secure cloud or data center
❌ Full control over styles and layout via your design system (although available on higher tiered plans)
❌ Built-in version control to safely launch updates |
| **Performance Tracking** | ✅ Includes built-in analytics in the dashboard
✅ Supports integration with analytics platforms for performance tracking
⚠️ Advanced funnel tracking might require other tools |
| **Business Impact** | ✅ Low long-term dev maintenance compared to fully building in-house; fast to implement
✅ Non-tech teams can manage copy or targeting
✅ Enhances user activation and retention through onboarding experiences |
### UserPilot
If you’ve been in the product world for any length of time, it’s likely you’ve heard of UserPilot.
Similar to UserGuiding, it enables product teams to create interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, checklists, and surveys without relying on engineering resources.
- **Code or no-code?** No-code
- **Price/cost:** Plans start at $249/month for up to 2,000 monthly active users (MAUs). The growth plan starts at $799/month and includes additional features like product analytics and in-app surveys. But check the [pricing page](https://userpilot.com/pricing/) to see current costs.
- **Best for:** Small to mid-size SaaS companies that need a no-code option for user onboarding, analytics, and feedback.
Overall, ProductHunt reviewers give it a [4.8/5 stars,](https://www.producthunt.com/products/userpilot-analytics/reviews) while G2 reviewers give it [4.6/5 stars.](https://www.g2.com/products/userpilot/reviews#reviews)
Userpilot is strong in offering onboarding flows, product analytics, session replays, and user feedback tools in _one_ platform that doesn’t require extensive engineering support.
However, some users report that certain features, like event tracking filters, can be confusing and may require time to master.
And customization options are limited, especially for the price point.
As Heather F. pointed out in [her G2 review,](https://www.g2.com/products/userpilot/reviews/userpilot-review-10923423) “I wish [it had] more customization options to better align with our brand's design system.”
But lack of customization is to be expected with no-code tools, unfortunately.
| Evaluation Criteria | Considerations |
|-----------------------|----------------|
| **Flexibility** | ❌ Developers can fully customize the experience
❌ Design feels seamless and natural inside the app, not like an overlay
✅ Not tied to specific coding frameworks and requires little dev support |
| **Control** | ❌ Supports optional self-hosting in your own secure cloud or data center
❌ Full control over styles and layout via your design system (although available on higher tiered plans)
❌ Built-in version control to safely launch updates |
| **Performance Tracking** | ✅ Includes built-in analytics in the dashboard
✅ Supports integration with analytics platforms for performance tracking
⚠️ Advanced funnel tracking might require other tools |
| **Business Impact** | ✅ Low long-term dev maintenance compared to fully building in-house; fast to implement
✅ Non-tech teams can manage copy or targeting
✅ Enhances user activation and retention through onboarding experiences |
### Pendo
Another classic of the product world, Pendo is a platform that combines in-app guidance, user feedback, and product analytics to help with product adoption.
- **Code or no-code?** Primarily no-code, with options for custom code to extend functionality.
- **Price/cost:** Unfortunately, Pendo’s pricing isn’t shared publicly. But as Reddit rumors would have it, even their starter plan pricing can be prohibitive for smaller orgs, with one user noting their plan was increasing from [$7K to $35K](https://www.reddit.com/r/UXDesign/comments/1agxrvz/alternatives_to_pendo/) per year.
- Best for: Mid-sized to large enterprises seeking a no-code all-in-one for user onboarding, product analytics, and user feedback across larger software ecosystems.
Some users report that the platform can be complex to set up, requires time to master advanced features, and still requires technical expertise when you need more customization.
Which isn’t exactly ideal in a product onboarding software application… especially one that you likely chose for less internal maintenance.
As Sam B. put it in his review, “I have a love/hate relationship with Pendo. It's neither an analytics tool nor a walkthrough tool, it's a hybrid. That's a cool idea in theory and I really like it, but it makes everything significantly more expensive out of the gate.”
G2 reviewers score Pendo at[ 4.4/5 stars,](https://www.g2.com/products/pendo-io-pendo/reviews#reviews) while ProductHunt reviews give the platform [4.9/5 stars,](https://www.producthunt.com/products/pendo-platform/reviews) which is unusual as many of the Pendo ProductHunt reviews available did not provide a star rating at all.
Here’s the thing: Pendo has been strong for years in offering robust product analytics, and that’s why it’s well-known.
It also offers support for both mobile and desktop applications and doesn’t require much engineering support.
However, there are plenty of Pendo alternatives now that offer more inclusive pricing or better experiences overall.
| Evaluation Criteria | Considerations |
|-----------------------|----------------|
| **Flexibility** | ❌ Developers can fully customize the experience (but some customization is possible on higher tiered plans)
❌ Design feels seamless and natural inside the app, not like an overlay
✅ Not tied to specific coding frameworks and can require little dev support, based on use case |
| **Control** | ❌ Supports optional self-hosting in your own secure cloud or data center
❌ Full control over styles and layout via your design system (although available on higher tiered plans)
❌ Built-in version control to safely launch updates |
| **Performance Tracking** | ✅ Includes built-in analytics in the dashboard
✅ Supports integration with analytics platforms for performance tracking
⚠️ Advanced funnel tracking might require other tools, but basic tracking is offered |
| **Business Impact** | ✅ Lower long-term dev maintenance compared to fully building in-house; fast to implement
⚠️ Non-tech teams can manage copy or targeting; but users complain about complexity
✅ Enhances user activation and retention through onboarding experiences |
### Appcues
While users often stick with Pendo for the robust product analytics, [Appcues](https://www.appcues.com/home) is all about no-code onboarding flows, modals, and checklists that you can implement quickly.
- **Code or no-code?** No-code.
- **Price/cost:** The starter plan begins at $300 per month for up to 1,000 MAUs. If you want access to premium integrations and support, you’ll start at $750 per month for up to 1,000 MAUs.
- **Best for:** SaaS companies seeking a no-code solution for user onboarding and feedback and a clean, simple UI.
Most reviews note Appcues offers a fairly intuitive interface, allowing product teams to create and manage in-app experiences without coding.
However, customization is limited. And one [G2 reviewer](https://www.g2.com/products/appcues/reviews/appcues-review-9093675) notes that Appcues “doesn't always work great, and we have to get creative to update flows and information to customers,” while Eirik F. on [ProductHunt](https://www.producthunt.com/products/appcues/reviews?rating=4) says it’s “a bit messy for simple usage.” which takes a bit of the ease out of the tool, for sure.
Overall, reviewers on ProductHunt note [4.8/5 stars,](https://www.producthunt.com/products/appcues/reviews) while G2 reviews show [4.6/5 stars.](https://www.g2.com/products/appcues/reviews#reviews)
Here’s how Appcues scores, based on my own criteria:
| Evaluation Criteria | Considerations |
|-----------------------|----------------|
| **Flexibility** | ❌ Developers can fully customize the experience (but some customization is possible on higher tiered plans)
❌ Design feels seamless and natural inside the app, not like an overlay
✅ Not tied to specific coding frameworks and can require little dev support, based on use case |
| **Control** | ❌ Supports optional self-hosting in your own secure cloud or data center
❌ Full control over styles and layout via your design system (although CSS customization on higher tiered plans)
❌ Built-in version control to safely launch updates |
| **Performance Tracking** | ✅ Includes built-in analytics in the dashboard
✅ Supports integration with analytics platforms for performance tracking
⚠️ Advanced funnel tracking might require other tools, but basic tracking is offered |
| **Business Impact** | ✅ Lower long-term dev maintenance compared to fully building in-house; fast to implement
✅ Non-tech teams can manage copy or targeting; users like the interface
✅ Enhances user activation and retention through onboarding experiences |
### UserFlow
UserFlow is another option that’s similar to Appcues in that it has a clean, straightforward interface that feels user friendly.
- **Code or no-code?** No-code
- **Price/cost:** One of the more price-friendly options, when billed annually, UserFlow’s basic plan starts at $240/month for up to 3,000 MAUs and $650/month for up to 10,000 MAUs and more advanced features and integrations. But check the [pricing page](https://www.userflow.com/pricing) for the most current information.
- **Best for:** Similar to Appcues, UserFlow might be a good fit for SaaS companies seeking a no-code solution for user onboarding and feedback and a clean, simple UI and good integration options.
Some of the stand-out strengths for UserFlow include a kanban-style builder that allows non-technical users to create and manage onboarding flows. It also offers access to a solid amount of integrations for the price point.
However, people love Userflow, and the reviews say as much. G2 reviews show [4.8/5 stars,](https://www.g2.com/products/userflow/reviews#reviews) while ProductHunt gives a [5/5 star rating.](https://www.producthunt.com/products/userflow-2/reviews)
But, again, these no-code options are limited in their customization abilities.
UserFlow might offer a few more customizations than most, but it’s still not going to feel native to your product, as it sits on top of your platform.
Juanita S. shared on G2 that “When creating flows, there are only 3 ways to personalize the experience: tool tip, bubble, and message. I want to find other ways to activate flows.”
Since that review UserFlow has offered more features, but there are still reviews noting the need for increased product analytic capabilities.
Here’s how they stack up overall:
| Evaluation Criteria | Considerations |
|-----------------------|----------------|
| **Flexibility** | ❌ Developers can fully customize the experience (but some customization is possible with CSS)
❌ Design feels seamless and natural inside the app, not like an overlay
✅ Not tied to specific coding frameworks and can require little dev support, based on use case |
| **Control** | ❌ Supports optional self-hosting in your own secure cloud or data center
❌ Full control over styles and layout via your design system (although CSS customization on higher tiered plans)
❌ Built-in version control to safely launch updates |
| **Performance Tracking** | ⚠️ Includes built-in lightweight analytics, with reviews noting a weak spot
✅ Supports integration with analytics platforms for performance tracking
⚠️ Advanced funnel tracking requires other tools |
| **Business Impact** | ✅ Lower long-term dev maintenance compared to fully building in-house; fast to implement
✅ Non-tech teams can manage copy or targeting; users like the interface
✅ Enhances user activation and retention through onboarding experiences |
## Emerging in-app product assistance tools
If you made it this far in this guide, congratulations, you win the prize. 🏆
And your prize?
A quick snapshot of the category that is quietly replacing the flow-builder DAPs we covered above: in-app AI agents.
The flow-builder generation (Pendo, Userpilot, Chameleon, Whatfix) is fundamentally about *static* onboarding that someone on your team has to keep authoring and maintaining as the product evolves. AI agents are a different shape entirely. They learn your product autonomously and adapt to each individual user, so the experience gets better as your product changes instead of staling.
A few worth keeping an eye on:
- [the Frigade Assistant](https://frigade.com): My team and I built this one. It learns your product landscape and guides each user through whatever they are trying to do, in real time, with no authored flows to maintain. Adapts to product changes automatically and tailors guidance per user.
- [Intercom’s AI agent:](https://www.intercom.com/drlp/ai-agent) Fin is Intercom’s AI agent, focused on frontline support deflection rather than in-product workflow guidance.
- [Command.ai:](https://www.command.ai/) AI-guided nudges and support inside your product.
The pattern across all of these is the same: the system learns the product instead of waiting for your team to author another tour. That is the meaningful architectural shift.
## Common questions about product onboarding tools
If you're new to shopping around for product onboarding software, you might have some more questions after initially scanning this list.
When I meet with other SMB leaders, here are some of the most frequently asked questions re: product onboarding tools:
- What is the best onboarding software?
- What does user onboarding software do?
- What types of orgs need or benefit from product onboarding tools?
- What are the pros of investing in user onboarding software?
### What’s the best onboarding software?
The best product onboarding software isn’t one-size-fits-all. It’s the one that helps your team actually reduce churn and deliver real-time value to new users without a mountain of custom code… but with the control and flexibility of code.
But whether you go no-code or code-based, a top user onboarding software solution should offer you flexible templates, in-app messages, and onboarding checklists so you can build personalized onboarding experiences faster than your product manager or CTO can say MVP.
Overall, the best user onboarding tools let you automate onboarding steps, segment users based on behavior, and trigger relevant pop-ups, notifications, or even SMS nudges _without_ bugging your devs every 5 minutes.
They shouldn’t feel clunky, unnatural, or disjointed on top of your product. And they shouldn’t feel clunky or unnatural to your engineering and dev, design, or product marketing teams either.
### What does user onboarding software do?
User onboarding software helps you welcome new users like a pro, minus the extra calendar time from your sales or support team.
Product onboarding software guides your clients through their onboarding journey with step-by-step tutorials and interactives that respond to user behavior. Think of it as a GPS for your software, showing new customers exactly where to go and what to do next to get the most out of a software product.
And if your user loses their way? That GPS system should naturally guide them back.
A good onboarding tool should do more than show a few pop-ups. It should automate workflows, trigger smart in-app messages, and provide the analytics needed to help your team iterate.
### What types of orgs need or benefit from product onboarding tools?
If your product has users, you probably need product onboarding tools.
But if we’re getting specific: SaaS companies, especially those offering free plans, self-serve onboarding, or are low on internal team support, benefit the most.
Buried tickets from support teams? Onboarding software helps you help users faster.
Plus, if you and your product manager have goals to increase time to value and new feature adoption, all while reducing churn, proper onboarding flows aren’t just an added benefit… **they’re essential.**
Releasing new features often? Onboarding checklists and in-app messages allow your team to highlight what’s new _without_ relying on a customer success team to hold everyone’s hand or unread product announcement notifications clogging up your users’ inbox.
### What are the pros of investing in user onboarding software?
The benefits? Where do I even start?
Here’s the quick version:
- **Reduce churn:** Help new users reach that “aha” moment before they ghost you.
- **Streamline the onboarding process:** Use templates, automation, and personalized content to accelerate time to value.
- **Boost customer engagement:** Leverage tutorials, onboarding checklists, and in-app messages to keep users moving.
- **Enable self-service:** From knowledge base links to interactive widgets, make it easy for users to find value and adopt features faster.
- **Improve customer success outcomes:** Support teams can focus on escalations, not hand-holding every onboarding step.
- **Drive feature adoption:** Highlight new features in real-time with contextual nudges.
- **Better analytics:** Use heatmaps, user behavior tracking, and drop off metrics to optimize your onboarding journey.
Interested in seeing how an AI agent that adapts to your product (instead of an authored flow you have to maintain) works in practice? [Book a Frigade demo](https://frigade.com/).
---
# What Is Product Onboarding? (And Why It Matters More Than You Think)
Source: https://productonboarding.com/articles/what-is-product-onboarding
Author: Frigade Team
Published: 2025-06-27
> Crafting good product onboarding is key to helping new users discover your product's core functionality and value proposition. In this article, we explore what product onboarding is and methods for designing impactful experiences.
## Intro to Product Onboarding
Imagine being dropped off in a brand new city in a foreign country with no map or navigation. You’re hopeful for what’s to come, but as soon as you step out of the taxi, uncertainty begins to set in. The signs are in another language. You’re not sure where to go first. Everything smells weird. After a few false starts in the wrong direction, you’re starting to forget why you decided to fly here in the first place.
That’s the situation a new user might be in when they first sign into your product.
They show up at your door with a problem, a job they need to get done, and they’re _really_ hoping that your product can help them do it. Your marketing convinces them. They sign up for your trial. They click the button to _Get Started._
But now they’re staring at the initial screen, and _everything is new._ Nothing looks familiar. Where do they go? What should they do next? Discomfort begins to build, and all the enthusiasm they developed while researching and signing up for your product is draining away in the face of a cold, hard question: _How the hell am I supposed to use this thing?_
**This is a critical moment.** And the steps you take to address this moment are make-or-break. If you can get your new user past this initial discomfort and build some confidence, the odds of them coming back to use your product are much higher.
If you can’t get them past it? You’re going to lose them, probably forever.
So what do you do? How do you get a new user up to speed quickly enough to keep them excited about working with you?
That’s where **product onboarding** strategies come in, which is our focus of research at Frigade—and something I’ve been pretty obsessed with for a while.
In this guide, we’ll explore:
- What product onboarding is
- What good product onboarding does
- What good product onboarding shouldn’t do
- The role of AI in product onboarding
### What is product onboarding, anyway?
**Product onboarding** is the process of guiding new users to effectively use a product and ensure that they realize its value quickly. This process can include in-product features (like checklists and guided tours), educational content, customer support touchpoints, and setup workflows to help your new users adapt to your product.
No matter the format, though, the goal of strategic product onboarding is the same: get users “up to speed” with enough confidence, momentum, and reward to want to keep going.
Product onboarding is often treated like a quick introduction or a splashy welcome tour—something for the team to think about briefly just before the product launches. But product onboarding is much more than a welcome tour, and it deserves your team’s full attention.
Why? Put simply, onboarding is the bridge between a curious user and a committed one. Research shows that the biggest drop-off in product usage often happens within the **first week,** with about 75% of new users churning after just one session. _One session._
If you’re getting that kind of immediate turnover, know that this kind of churn probably isn’t because those folks didn’t need your product. The product likely didn’t work for them, or more accurately, it wasn’t obvious to your user how to make it work _for them._
And once those users leave, you’ll likely never get them to come back. In their heads, your product will go firmly into the graveyard of _Nice Idea, but Didn’t Really Work for Me._ They’ll move on.
In short, **it doesn’t matter how great your product is if your user doesn’t know how to use it.** Product onboarding is a critical investment for your company and deserves your team’s full attention. You need to get it right.
### Let’s talk about what good product onboarding does
Done right, product onboarding doesn’t just explain your product. It transforms your product experience.
Keep in mind that new users are in a delicate position. Sure, they have a problem to solve and are looking for some reasons to say yes to your product. Otherwise they wouldn’t be here. But it’s important to realize that your user is just as likely to be looking for a reason to say no and walk away.
Maybe they have another product in their back pocket. Maybe they’re not convinced the problem needs to be solved right now. Maybe it’s Friday at 3:30 and they don’t have any brainpower left.
Whatever the factors, you need to take seriously the fact that your user is probably at least somewhat skeptical of your product.
Here’s how good product onboarding can help build trust in and excitement around your product:
#### 1. Provides a thoughtful, stabilizing first impression
First impressions matter. A good onboarding flow makes users feel like they’re in the right place and that someone’s thought about what they need. The goal is to immediately _reduce uncertainty._
You want your user to feel like they’re in great hands with you and something good and valuable is about to happen.
#### 2. Eases points of friction
Every product has moments of difficulty, places where it’s easy to get confused or where your user has to think a little bit harder.
Good product onboarding preps the user for those moments in advance. It acknowledges the points of friction that are most likely to create churn and scaffolds that journey so users don’t give up before the reward.
#### 3. Builds momentum by making goals feel achievable
Users aren’t here to “use your product”—they’re here to solve a problem. Show that you understand their objective. Demonstrate value early, and make progress feel doable.
#### 4. Helps users know what cues to pay attention to
When a user first steps through your door, it can be super difficult for them to know what’s actually important. After all, they’re bombarded with signals. Buttons. Interactions. Text. Sounds. Which of those signals matter? What do they need to pay attention to in order to do their job?
Signal Detection Theory tells us that human brains are always filtering these signals to understand what they should pay attention to. When making these decisions, [the strength of the signal](https://www.keiseruniversity.edu/signal-detection-theory/), or how loud/bright/big/colorful it is, matters a lot. But the situation matters, too, because human brains miss important signals when they’re distracted or overwhelmed (Source: Weinschenk).
Good onboarding strategies help your user know what signals matter and what can be safely ignored.
#### 5. Loads critical information strategically, without causing cognitive overload
When a new friend steps into your apartment for the first time, do you immediately greet them with a glass of water? Or do you dump a bottle of water, two bags of chips, a canned G&T, and instructions for how to get to every bathroom in the apartment complex?
The human brain only has so much capacity, and it’s important you don’t throw too much at the user right away.
A good product onboarding journey gives the user just enough to navigate the space and feel confident. Give a user too much information and they’ll likely begin to feel overwhelmed and frustrated.
#### 6. Helps set useful decision-making patterns
As the authors of _Designing for Behavior Change_ put it, “cognitive limitations mean that sometimes our users don’t make the best choices, even when something is in their best interest.”
Good onboarding sets people up to win by nudging users toward better initial choices. It also builds the internal logic they’ll need later. These early decisions compound over time.
#### 7. Creates early wins and the feeling of forward progress!
Behavioral scientist Susan Weinschenk reminds us that people are motivated by progress, control, and mastery (Source: Weinschenk).
That means that even small victories like completing a setup, seeing data populate, or receiving a confirmation, can spark motivation. Neuroscience shows that the feeling of progress creates a dopamine loop that drives people to keep going.
This means that one of the most powerful things onboarding can do is shorten the gap between signup and that first ping of progress, that ‘aha’ moment. The faster a user feels the payoff, the more likely they are to return.
#### 9. Reduces time to value (TTV)
Your user needs to feel like the time they’re spending learning your product is worthwhile and that the value of the tool will be worth it. Every moment between signup and payoff is a moment when skepticism can creep in. Good onboarding shrinks that gap by quickly connecting the user's actions to meaningful results.
That means the goal isn't just to explain features; it's to help users _experience success_ early and often. The faster users feel real value, the more likely they are to trust your product. And the less likely they are to walk away.
#### 10. Gets them motivated to come back
Ultimately, onboarding’s first and most important job is to bring people back for Session Two. That second visit is where habits begin and where long-term commitment starts to form.
Want to see this in action? Keep reading.
### Case Study 1: What great product onboarding can look like
Here’s a standout example of great product onboarding from our **Product Onboarding Library:**
[dropbox-onboard-forms-getting-started-checklist-announcment.mp4](/uploads/dropbox_onboard_forms_getting_started_checklist_announcment_59e678bc8b.mp4)
**Here’s some of what’s going right with this product onboarding flow:**
- **Lowers friction** by using short, skippable forms
- **Builds early momentum** with an immediate first win (file upload)
- **Reduces cognitive load** with a default-open checklist that clearly guides users toward key actions
- **Smooths the user path** with deep links to key actions
- **Adds optional depth** through “Learn more” links, which keeps the user in control
- **Boosts long-term retention** with an early, dismissible app prompt
- **Personalized to users** based on the persona they choose
That’s only the tip of the iceberg, of course. You can read the [full breakdown of this flow from Dropbox here.](https://productonboarding.com/examples/dropbox-new-user-onboarding)
### What product onboarding definitely shouldn’t do
Great product onboarding can be transformative, but that means the flip side is also true…
If the onboarding process is confusing, patronizing, or simply ineffective, **even the best product won’t save the user from dropping off.**
Here are the biggest mistakes to avoid:
#### 1. Don’t frustrate or disempower users
Yes, people are motivated by progress and mastery, but they’re also motivated by _control._ Dumping them into a learning experience with no perceivable point and no exit door is a bad look that creates bad feelings.
That means you need to respect your user’s time and agency. Don’t make them feel powerless by forcing them into the UI equivalent of mandatory driver’s ed.
Instead, design your educational flows with a clear purpose, a clear sense of progression, and, perhaps most importantly, a _clear way out._
#### 2. Don’t over-explain
If you’ve built your product well, or even if you haven’t, some elements should be pretty intuitive. If you’re 100% sure something is obvious, don’t waste your time and your user’s goodwill by over-explaining it.
Explaining obvious features wastes your user’s attention and brainpower and creates doubt in the product’s overall usability.
#### 3. Don’t eliminate friction so thoroughly that users learn nothing
There’s a lot of industry talk about a frictionless process, but friction is not always your enemy, especially if you’re trying to educate your user on an involved process.
In fact, sometimes you need to _create_ a bit of friction to slow down the process and ensure a user dials in on a bit of signal that they’ll need later to successfully meet their goal.
#### 4. Don’t try to do everything at once (or ask your user to do multiple things)
No one likes to be talked at, especially when they’re trying to solve a problem. Prioritize clarity over completeness. Build trust, not fatigue. Don’t overwhelm your user with multiple asks, goals, tasks, and CTAs.
Ask yourself, what are the top three things your user needs to know to achieve their first success? Then use product onboarding strategies to get them there.
#### 5. Don’t oversimplify the product during onboarding
Sometimes product teams get so excited about “making product onboarding easy” that they go a bit overboard. They’ll make certain buttons easier to find, but only during onboarding. They’ll make the first task much more obvious, but only during onboarding. They’ll hide core functions to simplify the interface, but, again, only during onboarding.
The intentions here are often good, but there’s a big problem here: All of this ease is _only during onboarding._ Once the user leaves the onboarding process, they have to deal with the actual product, which now might feel completely different.
You’ve essentially set your user up to use the wrong product, which means your churn rates have been set up to spike.
You can see an example of this on our Product Onboarding Library, where an [artificially simplified UI](https://productonboarding.com/examples/loom-onboarding-checklist) caused me to churn right to a competitor.
In short, simplicity is important, but don’t simplify at the cost of accuracy. Teach users the _real_ product they’ll be using.
#### 6. Don’t make the product the star of the show
No product manager puts “Use Jira for 90 minutes” on their to-do list, right?
Remember: Using your product is not what your user came to do. They’re using your product to _achieve something important to them_ (also known as their JTBD, or Jobs to Be Done).
The lesson here: Your user’s JTBD should be front and center. Everything about your product onboarding strategy should be about helping your user do what they came to do, not showing off your product.
### Case Study 2: When product onboarding goes wrong
If you’re not careful with your product onboarding strategies, good intentions can lead to mixed results. For example, here’s a screenshot from Apollo.ai’s product onboarding flow. I’m a big fan of Apollo’s sales intelligence, but their onboarding is pretty overwhelming.
Take a look…
**Here’s where this onboarding flow goes wrong:**
- **Overwhelms the user** by hitting them with multiple overlapping promotions, upsells, and CTAs at once
- **Creates frustration and disempowerment** by bombarding users before they can even start their intended task
- **Floods the experience with noise** instead of strategically guiding attention to what matters
- **Prioritizes the company’s goals over the user’s goals,** making the product experience feel self-serving rather than helpful
- **Introduces cognitive overload** by asking the user to process too much information at the wrong moment
- **Disrupts forward momentum** by forcing users to sift through distractions instead of progressing smoothly toward their own objectives
The moral of the story here: It’s not enough to just have product onboarding. Your onboarding needs to be carefully strategized, based on best practices, and iterative.
### What role does AI have in product onboarding?
It’s no surprise to anyone that we’re in the midst of a revolution. AI is changing the product onboarding game in a big way by unlocking a new set of tools, tools that understand not just _what_ your product does, but _what your user is trying to do._ And that changes everything.
Here’s what AI-powered onboarding can unlock:
#### Hyper-personalization
No more one-size-fits-all walkthroughs. AI can tailor the onboarding journey based on who the user is, what they’ve done, and what they still need to do.
#### Proactive support
AI doesn’t have to wait for users to get stuck. It can _anticipate_ roadblocks and offer the right help at the right time, noticing you hesitating before you even ask a question.
#### Real-time assistance
AI can respond to what’s actually happening in the moment, showing tooltips, nudges, or instructions when they’re needed most.
#### Continuous learning and optimization
AI tools learn from every user interaction, constantly improving the experience and identifying new friction points without manual analysis.
In short, we think there’s _huge_ upside to integrating AI into your product onboarding process.
To that end, we’ve been building our own solution over here: **[the Frigade Assistant](https://frigade.com)**, an in-app AI agent designed to support users from the moment they sign in.
The flow-builder generation of onboarding tools (Pendo, Userpilot, Chameleon) is fundamentally about *static* onboarding that someone on your team has to keep authoring and maintaining as the product changes. The Frigade Assistant is a different shape. It learns your product the way a real user would, then adapts on two axes that flow-builders cannot:
- **Adapts to the product.** When you ship a UX change, the Assistant re-learns the new flow on its own. Tours rot. Agents update themselves.
- **Adapts to the user.** Each user gets guidance tailored to what they are trying to do right now, based on their behavior and intent, instead of the same authored checklist everyone else got.
The Assistant works in two modes. **On demand**, a user asks "how do I do X" and the agent walks them through it. **Proactively** (Frigade Suggestions), the agent surfaces AI-driven tours and contextual nudges on its own, personalized per user and timed to the right moment, so the user does not have to think to ask. It also performs actions on the user's behalf (form fills, navigation), detects friction in real time, and escalates to your support stack with full context attached when needed. Basically, it's the next best thing to sitting beside your user, helping them click, configure, and succeed.
Used in production by SaaS teams who want autonomous in-product guidance instead of a maintenance-heavy library of authored flows.
If you’re interested in a quick demo, [grab some time here](https://frigade.com).
### Final thoughts on product onboarding
The biggest takeaway: Regardless of the specific tools, strategies, and AI you use, know that **product onboarding is bigger than onboarding.** It’s not just a UX consideration. It’s not just a support tool. It’s a growth strategy that touches every part of your business.
When you get it right, it lifts everything else:
- Marketing lands better, because users actually stick around to see the promise fulfilled
- Product gets better quality feedback, because users know what to do
- Support spends less time answering the same five questions
- And leadership sees the retention curve rise
Essentially, if you invest in great onboarding now and treat it like the ongoing, evolving experience it is, your users will thank you and so will your metrics.
And as always, if you need help: Hit us up over at Frigade. We love this stuff over here.
---
# Build Product Tours That Don't Suck
Source: https://productonboarding.com/articles/how-to-build-product-tours
Author: Eric Brownrout
Published: 2025-01-29
> Product tours, while often controversial, can be powerful tools for guiding users when done right. We cover the best practices for creating effective product tours that drive results without frustrating users.
## What are Product Tours?
Let’s talk about product tours – those little software guides that pop up and give you step-by-step guidance about new features or getting set up. They take multiple forms, but usually they sit above the product UI, anchor to different parts of the UI, and contain multiple sequential steps for users to walk through.
## “Product Tours are Annoying”
It turns out, product tours are quite controversial. That’s because many users get so frustrated by them. And that, in turn, is because many teams build bad product tours.
We’ve all been that user before. You sign in to a web app to quickly get something done, and then – without prompt – you’re met by an obnoxious tooltip that happens to be exactly in the way of the button or UI you need to access. Half the time, these tooltips aren’t even useful. They are attached to the dashboard link and say things like “This is the dashboard link!” Yeah, no kidding. You rush to close it but another pops up, like a frustrating game of whack-a-mole.
## Product Tours Don't Have to Suck
That’s right. Product tours don’t have to suck! When used correctly, they can actually be a great way to teach users complex workflows or tell them about new features. Don’t take our word for it, either. Great companies like [Notion](https://www.productonboarding.com/examples/notion-feature-announcement), [Slack](https://www.productonboarding.com/examples/slack-redesign-tour), and [Figma](https://www.productonboarding.com/examples/figma-redesign-tour) are all building high quality product tours to increase customer success and activation rates.
So what differentiates these product tours from the crappy ones? And how can you build the types of product guides that drive results, not user frustration? Let’s dive in.
## When to use Tours
Tours can be a useful tool when you need to guide users through a specific sequential workflow. Common use cases include:
#### New Feature Launches
Use tours to [tell users about new features](https://www.productonboarding.com/examples/notion-feature-announcement) in the product. Show them what the feature does, where to access it, and how to set it up.
#### New User Tours
Use tours to [welcome new users](https://www.productonboarding.com/examples/framer-new-user-onboarding) and help situate them. Show them what they should do first and what parts of the product will be most essential.
#### Feature Upsells
Use tours to get users to try existing features and upgrade. Once a user tries a related feature, show them how a more advanced capability or adjacent feature will make it even easier for them.
#### Help Center Hub
Use tours to assist users who are lost or stuck. Give users [a way to launch themselves](https://www.productonboarding.com/examples/brex-redesign-announcement) into guided tours through the most common workflows and/or most complex parts of your product.
## Tips for Building Great Tours
1. **Opt-In Design:** Tours should ideally be opt-in. Asking users if they want guidance in the first place results in much higher engagement compared to forcing a tour upon them. Allow users to opt in from a checklist item, a product announcement, an inline card, or a help center.
Dropbox onboarding includes a simple checklist with key steps to get product value
2. **Keep them Short:** Tours should be concise — avoid 16-step tours that cover what every button in the app is for.
3. **Actionable Steps:** Avoid telling users obvious things such as “This is the X page, this is the Y page.” Instead, make tours actionable by connecting them to real in-app actions and states. For instance, a step that completes only when a user enters specific input or successfully finishes a task.
This Slack tour allows users to choose their theme directly from the tour
4. **Make them Dismissible:** Generally, tours should be dismissible. Sometimes you’ll miss the mark, or maybe your user changes their mind. It’s important to give them an escape hatch. Be very cautious about creating a tour that cannot be quit.
5. **Relaunch Hub:** If relevant, consider building a hub where users can launch specific tours, along with other help center content. This is helpful if they are not ready or don’t have time when they are first prompted.
Brex has a help center hub to relaunch tours
6. **Snooze:** Consider adding a snooze function to a tour. This allows users that may be interested but are currently too busy to engage when first prompted to try again at a later date. This is most helpful if the tour was not opted into by the user.
## Use Tours’ Sibling: Hints
One of the best tips for building great product tours is to build something that is actually not a product tour at all. They’re called product hints, and they are similar to product tours but slightly less obtrusive.
Like tours, hints anchor to the product UI and call attention to specific functionality. Unlike tours, product hints are closed by default and can usually be completed in any order. They use small pulsing animations to get users' attention and expand when clicked to reveal more details or a CTA. (Even better than authoring a static set of hints: an AI agent like [the Frigade Assistant](https://frigade.com) delivers proactive Frigade Suggestions, AI-driven nudges and mini-tours surfaced autonomously based on what each user is trying to do, instead of forcing your team to map them out in advance and update them every time the product changes.)
### When to Use Hints
Use hints when you want to more subtly raise awareness of a UI change or new feature without disrupting the user experience. Some examples might be for small UI changes e.g. “This feature you used a lot has moved over here” or for smaller product improvements e.g. “We’ve recently upgraded this feature to be more powerful.” For instance, [Typeform](https://www.productonboarding.com/examples/typeform-new-user-guide) uses opt-in hints in their onboarding to highlight key functionalities for new users.
Typeform using product hints to educate users
---
# How to Build Effective Product Checklists
Source: https://productonboarding.com/articles/design-kickass-checklists
Author: Eric Brownrout
Published: 2025-01-27
> Checklists are synonymous with onboarding. In this article, we explore the art of designing high performing checklists that not only drive activation, but that users love, too.
## Introduction
Getting started checklists are one of the most common patterns in all of software onboarding. Yet, companies still build terrible renditions all the time. So, what actually makes a great getting started checklist? Why are they so effective? Should you create one for your product onboarding?
Let’s get into it.
## Checklist Psychology
#### Checking Things Off Feels Good
One of the primary psychological drivers of checklists’ effectiveness is the intrinsic satisfaction that comes from completing and getting credit for a task. We’re all familiar with this from our own personal todo or grocery shopping lists. Hell, I sometimes create a step on my personal checklists just for making the checklist. An easy win right off the bat, and it just feels soooo productive.
And users are the same way. Each time a user checks off an item, they experience a small dopamine release, reinforcing the behavior and motivating them to continue. These small actions contribute toward a sense of accomplishment that builds and encourages users to keep making progress on the tasks laid out for them.
#### Don’t Make Users Think Too Much
Most modern software products have tons of features and actions you can take. Think about a mature product like Mailchimp, Stripe, or Jira – the choices are limitless. And that’s where checklists can come in. They help reduce cognitive load – breaking down complex software into a few simple first steps, making it easier for users to get started and understand how to use the product.
Dropbox uses a simple onboarding checklist during onboarding
#### North Star
The best checklists provide a clear path to success in your product by outlining the essential steps for users. By structuring set up, users can see and feel their progress and understand how each step contributes to their progress. This fosters a sense of direction and momentum, which tends to reduce confusion (and subsequently churn) and ultimately leads to better activation and retention rates.
## When to Use Checklists
#### New User Onboarding
The most common application of product checklists is during new user onboarding. These popular checklists help guide users through the initial setup process. It usually consists of 3-4 actions that are deemed essential to product activation. For instance, in Loom, those actions are downloading the app, recording a video, sharing the video, and inviting a colleague.
Loom new user onboarding checklist
#### Feature Adoption
As a product evolves, many new features are introduced. Sometimes a feature is advanced enough that it warrants a checklist to provide users with a step-by-step guide on how to use the new functionality. A product checklist may also be used for ongoing product onboarding. For instance, Mercury includes a product checklist in the dashboard of active users to encourage next steps that drive further adoption.
Mercury uses a carousel checklist to highlight more advanced actions existing users can take
#### Enterprise Onboarding
When it comes to onboarding to enterprise software, product implementation can be particularly complex. Oftentimes teams will have entire onboarding hubs outside of the product to track action items and owners. It can also be effective to pair these external onboarding processes with contextual in-app checklists. The in-product checklist can mirror and reinforce the content and messaging.
## Best Practices for Kickass Checklists
#### Keep it Short and Achievable
Checklists need to be concise and focused. Nobody wants to complete a 20-step checklist. What are the three to five most valuable (and achievable) tasks that your users really ought to do to be set up for success in your product? Focus on those.
#### Actionable > Informative
Okay, this one we can’t stress enough. Make. Each. Step. Actionable. Do it! Product checklists do not have to function like their analog counterparts, self reporting and penciling in each task’s bubble as we complete them. They’re digital! That means that we can do digital stuff. Checklists should be intelligent – they should be context aware of the specific task. For instance, if the recommended action is to invite a teammate, then we can automatically mark that step complete when a user invites a teammate. This not only feels intelligent, it also saves the user work and allows the user to make progress on checklist items they may naturally complete while onboarding out of context of the checklist itself.
Check out the Frigade checklist demo for an example of an actionable checklist
#### Personalize the Tasks
We want to focus on the most valuable tasks, but also, every user is unique. So, it follows that one users’ most valuable setup tasks might be different from another user’s based on their role, industry, or use case. To the extent possible, it’s best practice to collect user intent data on signup and use that information to personalize onboarding to different cohorts and personas. For instance, for a technical product that requires setup in the codebase, engineers may be met with an action item to install the SDK where a designer may instead be met with a step to invite an engineer (...to install the SDK).
#### Make it Pretty
A beautifully designed checklist can make a checklist fun to use. A poorly designed checklist widget can feel like Clippy reincarnate. Use clear fonts, colors, and icons to make the checklist easy to read and navigate. Use images, videos, and GIFs to make it more engaging. Check out Attio’s pixel perfect checklist below to see what best-in-class looks like.
[Attio Demo]
#### Show Progress
Checklists are naturally composed of steps, and incorporating explicit progress tracking into checklists is an easy but powerful way to motivate users to complete them. It’s not just progress bars either – percentages, strikethroughs, or counts can all provide users with a sense of accomplishment as they move through the checklist.
#### Don’t Start from Zero!
We’ve covered all the reasons why people are basically obsessed with checklists from a psychological standpoint, but there is also a certain checklist Kryptonite that you need to be wary of. And that’s the empty checklist. The first task is always the hardest to complete from an inertia standpoint.
And it applies to product checklists, too. So, whenever possible, seed your checklists with progress to give the user a sense of momentum. For instance, instead of starting from 0% on your four step checklist, give users credit immediately for something easy like joining a workspace. Great! Now they’re 20% complete on a five step checklist that’s otherwise identical. Doesn’t that feel better already??
#### Incentives and Gamification
Consider implementing points or rewards for completing checklists. Give users $10,000 for finishing a checklist and watch activation rates soar through the roof (but maybe check with finance first). Most often, these incentives take the form of points, credits, and badges. Apollo.io gives out monthly product credits for completing each onboarding step. Others, like LinkedIn, use badges and words of encouragement... You’re only a couple steps away from Superstar status, champ!
#### Sequencing
You can also consider breaking onboarding and checklists into smaller chunks, or even sequential steps. We've seen examples of effective checklists that require a user to finish a task before they unlock the remaining tasks. This can be especially true for tasks that are only possible after completing certain steps (e.g. create a project -> update a project -> share a project).
## Common Mistakes to Avoid
#### Unclear Value
If users do not understand the value of an item on the checklist, then of course they're less likely to engage with it. So, that means it's important that each task is clearly linked to a benefit or outcome that resonates with users – not just your KPIs. Maybe that means reframing: "Invite 5 people to your workspace" can become "Get feedback from your teammates"
#### No Way Out
You might have put a lot of time into crafting your checklist... but it doesn't mean your users will always want to engage with it. And when they don't want to, it's important to be able to get out of their way. It's very frustrating for users when they are [forced to engage or otherwise blocked](https://www.productonboarding.com/examples/loom-onboarding-checklist).
Solving this can take a number of different forms:
- Make the checklist dismissible
- Make the individual steps of a checklist skippable
- Place the checklist somewhere unobstrusive so it's not in the way
- Ensure the user is not blocked by not engaging with the checklist
#### Poor Timing
Timing is important for checklists, too. Presenting a checklist too early or too late in the user journey can be the difference between great engagement and missed opportunities.
## Implementation Tips
#### Technical Considerations
When implementing checklists, consider the technical aspects, such as how you'll incorporate them into your product UI. Will it be directly embedded in the dashboard? Will it be dismissible? Will it live on its own onboarding page? How will users discover it and return to it when needed? These questions can help you ensure that the checklist is easy to use and access.
#### Integration with Other Onboarding Elements
Checklists should not exist in isolation. Find ways to integrate them with other onboarding elements, such as tutorials, videos, or interactive guides, to create a comprehensive onboarding experience. For instance, a checklist task could be to kick off an interactive product tour, or engage with a more in-depth onboarding resource.
#### Measuring Success
Finally, it’s essential to measure the success of your checklists. Use analytics to track completion rates, user engagement, and overall satisfaction. Where and when do your users drop-off? Which steps have the best and worst completion rates? This data helps you iterate and improve your checklists.
## You Did It!
If you've made it this far, you're practically a checklist expert. Now go forth and build the product checklist of your dream! And if you want to skip authoring (and maintaining) the checklist entirely, check out [the Frigade Assistant](https://frigade.com?ref=po), our AI agent that learns your product and helps each user in two modes: on demand when they ask, and proactively via Frigade Suggestions (AI-driven nudges and tours surfaced at the right moment for each user). No static flow for your team to keep updating every time the product changes.
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