Appcues vs Pendo: A Detailed Comparison For 2022

In this article, I will talk about Appcues and Pendo, their features, differences, and similarities. If you are stuck in choosing between Appcues and Pendo or want to learn more about these two software tools, this article will help you make the right call.

What is Appcues?

Appcues is a software tool that enables users to create a customer onboarding process and edit the existing ones. The onboarding process aims to make your customers aware of your product’s features as much as possible. This onboarding process by Appcues includes in-app welcome messages, product tours, and walkthroughs for your customers.
Appcues was founded by Jonathan Kim and Jackson Noel in 2013. It is based in Boston, Massachusetts, USA.

What is Pendo?

Pendo is a software tool to improve your customers’ overall experience with your product. This tool achieves this by providing you with in-app messages, real-time feedback, and customer surveys. Pendo markets itself as a tool that allows you to save time.
Todd Olson founded Pendo in 2013. It is based in Raleigh, North Carolina, USA. This means that both Appcues and Pendo are based in the USA and were founded around the same time.

Differences between Appcues and Pendo

1. Exporting Data

Although Pendo provides more integrations than Appcues, as mentioned below, Pendo can fail to have certain features for all of its integrations. Multiple customers claim that they have difficulty exporting their data for some integrations. Appcues, on the other hand, despite providing fewer integrations, has no problems in this regard.
If your business strategy relies on interacting with customers from different platforms, you need your data export process to be smooth as possible. This data export grows more important as you gain more customers.

2. Technical Problems

Although conducting simple processes is unproblematic for both of these software tools, Appcues, both according to my experience and customer feedback, tends to crash if required to do extensive tasks.
This shortcoming can be a severe problem if you are a more prominent company that needs to run extensive processes regularly. For this reason, Pendo should be your choice if you are looking for a software tool that needs to conduct more extensive processes.

3. User Interface

Although both software tools do relatively well when it comes to their user interface. There are small differences when you consider that Pendo lacks certain customization options and is generally harder to deal with.
However, that does not mean that Pendo’s interface is terrible. It simply does not have the flexibility Appcues has.

4. Steep Learning Curve

Appcues is considerably hard to grasp. Although this might be due to the plenty of features Appcues has, it is still a problem for newcomers. If you are new to these sorts of software tools, I recommend you steer clear of Appcues and prefer Pendo over it.

Important Point:

• Do not forget to check out HockeyStack articles to make your experience with SaaS software tools easier.

Similarities between Appcues and Pendo

1. Bugs… A lot of them.

Many user reviews agree that both Appcues and Pendo have a lot of bugs in them. Although these are not always big problems that cause you to lose your entire process, it is always better to have software tools without any bugs.
However, consider that these bugs are often updated and fixed so long as you contact their customer service. This sort of flexibility gives assurance that these bugs will be solved by their IT team in due time.

2. Software tools that are to the point

Both Appcues and Pendo are to the point simple software tools, with some exceptions here and there. They are both solid tools that deliver what they promise. Although there are minor differences between Appcues and Pendo, you will get what you desire if you decide to subscribe to either one of them.

3. Good Customer Service

Customer services of both Appcues and Pendo are helpful. They return to your messages quickly enough, send you regular surveys to assess how satisfied you are with their product, and consider your suggestions.
This attitude is only expected considering both Appcues and Pendo specialize in customer onboarding processes. Customer service provided by both of these software tools allows you to learn how they work much more accessible.

4. Expensive

Although one is more expensive compared to the other, it is a fact that both Appcues and Pendo are costly. They do fulfill what they claim to do; that is true. However, it is debatable if the price tag is worth it, even if they achieve what they are supposed to do. So I would recommend considering if you need these tools before purchasing them.
Thankfully Appcues provides a free trial for those that want to try out their product.

Pricing

In this section, I will talk about pricing differences and similarities between Appcues and Pendo.

1. Appcues Pricing:

Here is the pricing list provided by Appcues:

Appcues offers three different packages. These are called “Essentials,” “Growth,” and “Enterprise.” Although these packages, with the exception of the enterprise, have general prices, you can change what kind of service you will get depending on the number of active users you have.
Essentials package also provides a discount if you decide to subscribe annually.

2. Pendo Pricing

Here is the pricing list provided by Pendo:

Pendo provides three different tiers with different packages included in them. For the purposes of this article, the user adoption package is what matters. Pendo claims that their user adoption service provides a “Customizable number of annual users,” “In-app guidance and contextual support,” and “Analytics on application usage.”
However, no information on pricing exists, and you need to get into contact with Pendo customer service to get a price according to your needs.

Comparison:

The most striking difference between Pendo and Appcues is that Pendo needs you to contact them to get a price estimation. Although this might not be a big problem if money is a secondary factor to you, it makes making comparisons between software tools much harder.
When it comes to pricing, Appcues has much more flexibility compared to Pendo. This advantage of Appcues is because it offers different types of packages for you to consider. Appcues offering a free version for you to consider is another advantage over Pendo.
One of the things that could be deducted from Pendos’ features is that no matter which package you buy, you will get access to in-app customer support, while this feature is limited to higher packages with Appcues.
While Pendo provides the foundation for conducting surveys, this is not the case for Appcues. Getting feedback from your customers and feasibly adjusting them is important for marketing. This is an important shortcoming of Appcues.

Integrations

In this section, I will talk about integrations both Appcues, and Pendo have. Here is a shortlist of them:

1. Appcues Integrations:

• Salesforce
• Marketo
• HubSpot
• Intercom
• Woopra

If you want to learn more about the integrations Appcues has, you can always check out their integrations web page.

2. Pendo Integrations

• Algolia
• Domo
• Fivetran
• G2
• Looker

To learn more about the integrations of Pendo, you might want to check out their integrations page on their website.

3. What is the difference?

The most striking difference between Appcues’ and Pendos’ integrations is their difference in quantity. While Appcues lists 18 different integrations on their website, Pendo provides its users with 37 different integrations. These numbers mean that Appcues has less than half of the number of integrations Pendo has.
The Google brand is an important part of our daily lives, no matter what you do or where you are. Appcues provides integrations with multiple Google products, including but not limited to Google Analytics. Pendo, on the other hand, does not offer any integration options for Google products.
Appcues also provides premium integrations, not simply providing integrations but also more customization options for you to use. These premium integrations are Salesforce, Marketo, Hubspot, Zendesk Support, Zendesk Sell, and Slack. Unfortunately, Pendo does not offer any sort of premium integrations.

Although both have their advantages, I would say that Pendo is slightly better in the matter of integrations due to the sheer number of integrations it provides. However, I would recommend you keep in mind which integrations are important for you. If you have no use for integrations provided by Pendo, the number of integrations means little to none.

Reviews

In this section, I will put forward some reviews made for Appcues and Pendo.

1. Appcues Reviews:

Here are some reviews for Appcues.

“From a design standpoint, the builder is still a little elementary – many times to make something look how we want it we have to go into the CSS and figure out how to cobble it together. Specifically around sizing things like the modals or buttons. The other small con we have is that it doesn’t work for native mobile – would love to see that come in later on. There is a small learning curve – mostly around setting up segments and making sure your flows are linked to the correct URLs so that it’s showing to the right people.”

“Some technical moments really pissed me off and that was the only reason I marked the whole product 8 instead of 10. During building the flow, Appcues tried to show you it’s smarter than you again and again, adding connection block each time some of conditions of any part of the flow don’t met… but pardonne-moi, I am able to fix everything myself without necessity to create everything in waterfall methodology. Using wildcards ( * in any part of URL, e.g. www.site.com/* ) sometimes can be pain in the A too.”

“Appcues has been instrumental for our engagement results in the Open LMS trial. We measure activation and engagement metrics in our application using different experiment cohorts, and the ones for which we have introduced Appcues flows have had significantly better results.”

“It’s so robust that it’s hard to get momentum going; there’s a lot to learn before you can really build anything worth showing off. I had a few initial issues that eventually required a video call with an Appcues dev team member. It seemed like I had question after question and issue after issue before I was able to go off and use it myself.”

2. Pendo Reviews:

Here are some reviews for Pendo:

“While the depth of knowledge and insight provided through Pendo is a huge help, the area that can be improved is the ability to export some of that data in easy-to-read reports. There are several areas in the application where there is valuable information but no ability export the data or associated graphs.”

“When creating guides, I wish the UI was a little faster. For example, when fixing a simple typo, you still have to launch the full designer versus being able to just edit the text. If you are releasing several similar guides (say a series of tooltips or banners) there are few bulk edit/apply segments/publish features. If you are working in multiple tabs at once, you can sometimes lose the changes you saved in one tab. Lastly, spell check would be amazing.”

“Before Pendo, we had to rely on e-mail communication with our customers to deliver an important message. Or we had to add information in the web app, which would involve the engineering team and their work would need requirements and testing and it would need to be tied to a new release of our web app.”

“Pendo is easy to use, and pulling reports is intuitive and quick. As a CS Ops team member, tracking product engagement and the in-app guides have been the most beneficial product features. The guides are easy to create, and any time I’ve had a question about creation, the Support team is quick to respond. The integration with Salesforce has enabled us to pull data fields into Pendo that are quite helpful with our reporting and segmenting data.”

3. What is the Difference Between Reviews?

Overall reviews for Appcues and Pendo are both good. Most reviews talk about the functionality of the tools and how good they are at solving their existing problems. These positive reviews are why Pendo gets a 4.5 out of 5, and Appcues receives a 4.7 out of 5 in G2.

Reviews for both Appcues and Pendo talk about how good customer support is. This is especially useful for small companies that do not have a dedicated team for marketing analysis. If you do not have a solid SaaS marketing plan, utilizing these tools can create a foundation for you.

Top Factors to Consider Before Choosing One

The main factor before considering whether you want to use Appcues or Pendo is the price. Appcues is relatively expensive compared to Pendo and other software tools in the field. If you are a more prominent company that can afford higher prices, this is not a big problem, but paying around 3000 dollars a year can be a problem for many businesses.

Appcues also tend to crash if it is required to do extensive tasks that contain multiple conditions. This shortcoming is something that will mainly affect more prominent companies. However, combined with the higher price of the Appcues, the overall state of Appcues does not sound appealing.

The number of integrations is also something you should consider before deciding on your final product. Pendo provides more than double the number of integrations Appcues has. This aspect is vital for more prominent companies with a bigger customer base.

Considering the price of Appcues is relatively higher than that of Pendo, the price is not justified. However, it could be said that there is not a significant difference between these software tools besides the pricing. So long as you are a more prominent company, there is not that much difference between the two.

Utilizing these tools will also allow you to increase your average revenue per user (ARPU) either way, so the point of your comparison should be which one best suits your needs.

The bottom of the line is that both of these software tools allow you to track your top adoption metrics without hassle.

Here is a little chart explaining the main aspects of Pendo and Appcues:

Pendo:	Appcues:
37 Individual Integrations	18 Individual Integrations
Price Depends on Your Package	Relatively Expensive
4.5 Out of 5 İn G2	4.7 Out of 5 İn G2

Are there any better options?

Both Appcues and Pendo have several features that make them a good choice, but users often complain of limitations in reporting, the lack of A/B testing in Appcues, and even Pendo’s pricing structure.

Not sure if either of these tools is right for you?

Try Hockeystack!

HockeyStack is a no-code end-to-end analytics tool for SaaS companies. With HockeyStack, you can answer cross-departmental questions that you cannot answer with any other tool on the market, such as:

• How many users has each blog series brought us?
• At what point do the most users drop off?
• What is the activation rate of users from LinkedIn ads?

and more.

HockeyStack allows you to consolidate data from product, sales, and even marketing, giving you granular insights into everything from the customer journey to the channels through which the most users churn.

Some of the most prominent features of Hockeystack are as follows:

Easy-to-Use Dashboards

HockeyStack lets you track every metric you need with easy-to-use and easy-to-understand dashboards. It also makes your work much more manageable with dashboard categories and clear visualizations, making it easy for you to analyze metrics that will create more value when analyzed together. This gives you a comprehensive view of your onboarding process and the rest of your funnel.

You can visit the live demo here to examine see how Hockeystack works for yourself.

Surveys and A/B tests

Tracking users’ behavior and interactions with dashboards are excellent for generating meaningful insights. However, sometimes it is necessary to get the opinion of users who have already gone through the entire onboarding process to uncover just how effective it really was and identify key areas of improovement.

Well, how are you going to do that? With surveys and A/B testing, of course!

Surveys are one of the best ways to get feedback from your users as you communicate directly with them. Likewise, A/B testing is excellent for getting your users’ response on any changes you’re going to make.

HockeyStack makes the survey creation process incredibly easy for you. You can choose from a number of templates and define question types that will help you get detailed responses from your users.

HockeyStack Integrations

Hockeystack offers integration with many different tools you use. Here are some of the tools that you can integrate with HockeyStack:

• Paddle
• Stripe
• Hubspot
• Crisp Chat
• Mailchimp
• Salesforce

HockeyStack Pricing

HockeyStack has 2 paid plans: Boost and Dominate. These plans have a 14-day trial with a 30-day refund guarantee.

You can check out the pricing page here.

In this article, I have analyzed the differences and similarities between Appcues and Pendo so that you can understand which tool will be right for you. The essence of this article is that improving your customers’ customer adoption process can be hard, but having the right tool in your arsenal can simplify the entire process considerably. 

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