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Appcues vs Walkme: Choose The Better One In 2022

First impressions are crucial exceptionally accurate when it comes to onboarding new users. Your new sign-ups will not remain if you don’t provide a quality user onboarding experience. As a result, you may face churn. It’s critical to optimize your onboarding flow frequently basis in various instances.

User onboarding is your chance to develop the habits and patterns of use that will lead to long-term retention and actual development for your business.

This article will compare two well-known Digital Adaption solutions, Appcues and Walkme. But first, it’s essential to comprehend why your SaaS needs Product Adaption.

What Makes A Good User Onboarding Process?

In the Flywheel structure, onboarding is one of the primary levers for converting your product’s evaluators into starters. On average, a good user onboarding experience shortens your new users’ time to value, gets them to their aha moment, and brings them to engage sooner. As a consequence of your outstanding onboarding, your new users will rapidly become your advocates, attracting other evaluators. The flywheel accelerates dramatically at that point.

Welcoming the User

When a visitor visits your site, you should be able to greet them as if they were a natural person. Because this is the user’s first visit to your product, there may not be much action. Without condemning the users, you should manage the problem professionally.

You can take advantage of this chance to request that the user invite others if they feel like they see the benefit from your product. Another strategy, similar to Basecamp’s, is “content-as-tutorial,” in which material exists not just to be viewed but to actively teach.

Creating Emotional Bonds

People have a penchant for making decisions based on their feelings. They support their emotional choices with intellectual analysis. Users can form an emotional bond with your product if it’s personality.

MailChimp, Wufoo, and Slack are just a few examples of organizations that have done so. Having a personality across the product, not only on the site, leads to a more attached consumer.

Assist Users in Rationalizing

It is critical to establish an emotional link with people and assist them in comprehending why purchasing your product is a reasonable option. You may demonstrate that your product is as excellent as or better than all of the other alternatives available and that it outperforms them in particular ways, making it the obvious pick.

You may always discuss the advantages of your goods that they may not obtain from others. At this stage, you should be able to readily describe your value to make your clients’ decisions appear more sensible.
Some strategies to persuade your critical consumers include testimonials and recommendations from professionals and social media followers, displaying real-world results, being truthful, and making guarantees such as a 100 percent moneyback guarantee.

Allow the User to Have Their Aha Moment as Soon as Possible

Your objective is to convey the benefits to the consumer and demonstrate how your solution can assist them in getting there as quickly as feasible.

Unfortunately, the “aha-moment” for most products arrives too late, causing customers to leave your site.

Appcues 

Appcues is a digital adoption tool that lets you measure and grow product adoption. It’s a no-code builder, so that you won’t require a developer. It comes with clever tools for creating appealing, customizable experiences that feel right at home in your product. Appcues also includes a sophisticated targeting engine that connects the appropriate user with the right experience at the right time. 

Retrieved from: appcues.com

You can measure product adoption and the impact of your experiences using Appcues’ predefined event visualizations and dashboards. To keep track of and manage events, the platform eliminates the need for a programmer or analyst. Users may create reports to keep track of their key performance indicators, which can then be saved to a dashboard for rapid reporting and analysis.

Appcues are the most popular in most nations, including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, and 93 others. Even while Appcues is a powerful, user-friendly platform for executing onboarding and feature adoption strategies in your SaaS, it may not be the best fit for your business.

Pricing

Essentials, Growth, and Enterprise are the three price options offered by Appcues.

The Essentials package costs $249 per month if paid yearly, while the Growth plan costs $879 per month if paid annually, and the Enterprise plan includes special pricing.

The plans aren’t just based on the quantity of MAUs you have (Monthly Active Users). They are, however, constrained by the features provided in each plan. Users have noted that the limits are so severe that the Essentials plan prevents you from conducting significant product adoption/growth experiences or tests.

Appcues’ Advantages 

Simple UX 

Appcues is easy to use, straightforward, and intuitive, according to several users. Even some stated that it could be challenging to create an interactive product tour with checklists and tooltips, but they addressed the matter when many individuals filed a support case about it.

User journey tracking

Appcues allows you to segment users and even comes with a few pre-defined user segments to get you started. This is crucial for getting the most out of your product usage metrics, which Appcues makes easy to examine and evaluate.

Appcues’ Disadvantages 

Limited Customizing

Their builder has minimal customizing options. You have no control over the strength of a backdrop or your box shadow. You can’t adjust the width of your modals/tooltips or the modal’s location. The Essential plan does not allow you to alter the appearance of experiences (no custom CSS).

Detection of doubtful elements

Appcues is beneficial since you can add multiple onboarding components without code. Unfortunately, Appcues does not always recognize all of your app’s aspects. If you tried to put a tooltip on a dropdown item, Appcues might not remember it. As a result, you may not always have the same experience you desire.

Hard to navigate

It might be challenging to browse around Appcues because it is such a large site. If you want to construct a new experience, for example, you must exit builder mode, go to navigation, pick up the element, and then return to builder mode.

Use Cases

Appcues is best for;

  • Companies aim to enroll SaaS customers for their products.
  • Large enterprises that can afford the growth plan’s $10,000 yearly fee but don’t have a lot of technical skills to spare for setup and deployment.
  • Small businesses that are interested in experimenting with product walkthroughs.
  • Companies that require a large number of integrations. Salesforce, Hubspot, Marketo, Slack, Intercom, Heap, and Mixpanel are among the roughly 20 connectors offered by Appcues.

WalkMe

WalkMe is also used as a Digital Adoption Platform. Users benefit from proactive coaching, solution analyses, and automated procedures that make it easier to execute their work. WalkMe provides smooth software implementation, the automation of complicated business procedures, and increased staff productivity. 

Retrieved from: walkme.com

The platform, on the other hand, facilitates a positive client experience, supports self-service, and ensures customer satisfaction. It enables effective digital transformation by empowering workers, overcoming change, and boosting usability in large-scale disruptive transformations.

By collecting and analyzing user data and gaining visibility into the customers’ journey, users also can make data-driven decisions and implement revolutionary change. 

WalkMe focuses on employee onboarding for enterprise-level firms, whereas Appcues promotes itself as a scalable mid-market onboarding solution. In the Netherlands, China, Israel, Hong Kong, and 16 other countries, WalkMe is the most popular app.

Pricing

The pricing approach of WalkMe is founded on the idea that the needs of small to medium-sized organizations, corporate, and enterprises are distinct. They charge more the more intricate the program is. While WalkMe may charge a lot for internal proprietary software maintenance. They charge a lot less for more common platforms like Salesforce.
Because WalkMe doesn’t explicitly specify their costs, I’ve included several reviews below that cover a range of prices.

According to a verified reviewer from G2, WalkMe estimated its 130-employee firm a cost of $20,000 per year for Salesforce training.

Similarly, Disqus discussion has multiple references to the pricing of their standard package, which ranges from $10,000 to $20,000 each year.

WalkMe’s Advantages 

Customization

Both the appearance of WalkMe and the walkthrough experiences you may build are very customizable. High-level customization of WalkMe features, on the other hand, is only possible if you have appropriate coding and technical knowledge. Although WalkMe has a code-free Editor app, utilizing their creation tool, like Appcues, restricts the amount of customization you can perform.

Onboarding

New recruit retention and morale are aided by effective onboarding. Users may utilize Walkme to construct seamless onboarding procedures and streamline the user experience.

Accessibility and Support

Consumer service personnel are increasingly asked to give quick answers to customer issues. Creating walkthroughs may help you minimize support tickets improve response times. It can also provide your support staff with the knowledge they need.

WalkMe’s Disadvantages 

Difficulty & Complexity

It takes a lot of effort to set up and generate walkthroughs. For each procedure, you’ll need a new walkthrough for each app. They won’t automatically update as your processes change. So, If you’re going to employ a solution like this, it’s a good idea to engage consultants or purchase their implementation packages.

Furthermore, while the fundamentals of WalkMe, such as producing walkthroughs, are straightforward, the more complex functions are harder to grasp. As you go deeper into the program, a severe learning curve emerges.

Lack of tracking analysis

The absence of internal tracking and analytics is one of WalkMe’s main flaws. You can’t see which accounts aren’t utilizing the product; therefore, you can’t go out of your way to encourage them to do so.

Affordability

It’s not cheap to use WalkMe. Customer evaluations indicate that the Basic plan starts at $9,000 per year, even though it does not provide pricing information openly. Custom plans can cost upwards of $20,000 per year, not including the cost of hiring technical help to get the program up and operating.

WalkMe may work well for a large organization with a significant budget, but it may be a problematic alternative for smaller SaaS companies’ user onboarding or product adoption use cases.

Use Cases

WalkMe is best for;

  • Companies that want to use third-party products for staff onboarding.
  • Firms at the enterprise level that can afford the bespoke plan and want extensive API support.
  • Firms that want a highly scalable onboarding tool and are willing to pay a premium.
  • Businesses’ that seek to integrate additional communications and analytics tools, such as Amazon Web Services, Google Analytics, Slack, and Pure Chat, among others.

Which one is better for your SaaS?

When comparing Appcues with WalkMe, it’s simple to see how Appcues can help you improve your customer experience and UX by allowing you to develop incredible user onboarding sequences. WalkMe is a bit more extensive than Appcues in that it assists with digital adoption of any kind, whether for your consumers, platform users, or workers.

AppcuesWalkMe
Code-free design and audience targeting empower non-technical people too.To effectively utilize, developers but also coding is required.
Integrates with your current analytics, CRM, and marketing automation software.There is no plan for analytics or CRM integrations.
Adoption of first-party products is the sole aim.Internal staff training is the primary business.
Follows a product-led growth strategyGrew as a result of a sales-driven, enterprise-based business model.
It’s always been stated as being easy to set up and operate by users.Implementation takes a long time and is inconvenient.
Retrieved from: Appcues.com

Appcues is less complicated than WalkMe; they have an exact price that you can see and a free trial that you can use to evaluate whether it’s right for your company. Appcues also has a better overall rating on Capterra than WalkMe. Appcues have received superior marks for usability, customer service, features and usefulness, and overall value for money.

Appcues, like Pendo, is customer-centric and provides more capabilities for product development and customer onboarding than for employee training.

Both Appcues and Pendo claim to be “code-free,” although this is a little deceptive. You’ll need to know how to code, particularly CSS if you wish to develop anything more involved than a simple UI element. You may need to hire and pay for a licensed WalkMe professional.

And, if you need a real no-code and easy-to-use platform, you have HockeyStack!

What is HockeyStack?

HockeyStack is an analytics and attribution platform used by over 7,000 companies. The tool comes with a code-free interface, numerous integration possibilities, and the freedom to make a practically infinite number of dashboards to track every stage of your onboarding process easily.

Here are some of the most prominent features of HockeyStack:

Easy-to-use dashboards

HockeyStack lets you easily monitor every metric you need to track in your onboarding process with easy-to-understand and easy-to-create dashboards. The tool comes with numerous options for data visualization, making it easier for you to analyze key customer metrics such as feature adoption, activation rates, and even expansions – all of which indicate how much value users find in your product.

The best part about HockeyStack is that it can get set up in just five minutes and can be used by anyone regardless of their technical skills. Therefore, you can make instant decisions and make necessary improvements when you need to tackle problems in the onboarding process quickly.

Surveys

If there’s one group of people who really know what works perfectly and what has a downright negative impact on your onboarding journey, it’s your users. Surveys allow you to communicate directly with your users and understand exactly what they’re thinking about your product and the processes surrounding it.

With HockeyStack, you can create surveys extremely easily. Don’t know where to start? No problem! You can choose from the many available templates and create the survey that best suits your needs.

HockeyStack Pricing

HockeyStack has two pricing plans, both of which have a 14-day trial with a 30-day refund guarantee.

You can check out the pricing page here.

HockeyStack Integrations

Here are some of the platforms that HockeyStack supports:

  • Paddle
  • Stripe
  • Hubspot
  • Crisp Chat
  • Mailchimp
  • Chameleon
  • Intercom
  • Pipedrive
  • Salesforce (coming soon)
  • Zapier (coming soon)

You can check out the complete list of integrations here.

Conclusion

Product adoption may have a massive impact on your business. It might be challenging to convert window shoppers into paying consumers. It would help if you kept these in mind at all times;

  • Determine where your clients are on the product adoption curve and also provide them the help they need.
  • Nurture users as they progress through the product adoption process.
  • Increase the “gravity” of your product and lessen anxiety by using the dynamics that impact new product acceptance.
  • To figure out what’s driving or preventing product uptake, look at important KPIs.
  • Take specific actions to improve your app’s adoption so that it is as painless as possible.

To provide a summary of the main differences between the two tools;

WalkMeAppcues
Integrates with multiple platforms to help with either customer or employee training. Completely integrates with your product so that consumer guidance seems natural and their experience is constant.
Use walkthroughs and task lists to help users navigate the app.To help consumers navigate your product, create walkthroughs and checklists.
Offers a separate analytics platform to track and manage user data. Connects to your existing tech stack, allowing data to be sent straight to your analytics or CRM platform.
Users can be segmented to provide individualized, focused assistance and training.Segment users to provide individualized, targeted advice.

Both Appcues and WalkMe can assist you along the path; nevertheless, you must choose which one will be the ideal fit for your companion. In this article, I tried to highlight some of the essential details that you should think about when deciding which tool you would prefer to use.

FAQ

Is WalkMe easy to use?

WalkMe is easy to use and comprehend. It is also very customizable to make it even more user-friendly.

How do you make a product tour engaging?

If you want to deliver a successful product tour, several factors to consider. Here are several examples:
Your targeting should be improved and detailed.
You should encourage and concentrate on the appropriate users.
You should select the most appropriate user interface pattern for the work.
Design and copy should be improved regularly.

Does Appcues have a free plan?

No, there isn’t a free plan; however, you can try using Appcues without committing to a plan or spending any money.

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