Pendo vs WalkMe: Which One Is Better In 2022?

Retention is critical for SaaS companies as most depend on subscription revenue. A good user onboarding experience is a vast retention booster, and there are various tools that a SaaS company can use to create an onboarding process.

If you are a SaaS company and trying to choose between Pendo and WalkMe, then this article will help you make the best decision for your company.

Why Should SaaS Companies Use An Onboarding Tool?

By nature, SaaS companies need to keep user engagement in mind every second because the competition for the service they offer is always very high.

At the same time, there are few barriers to moving from one service to another. Because of that, for SaaS companies, every stage of their relationship with the user is like holding on to a rope that can slip.

• Ensuring the engagement of users

You can promote your service, get the user to sign up for a trial, or even get him to buy. But this is just the beginning.

The following process keeps the user positively engaged with your software from the first to the last. In most cases, a user who has not met your software is better than a user who has abandoned you and decided never to use it again.

For this reason, the first communication with the user is of great importance. Because the short time that elapses after the user meets your software directly affects the user’s decision whether to use your software or not.

• Ensuring rapid adaptation of employees

Tools like Pendo also have an employee onboarding use case. These tools also enable your employees to master every aspect of it.

In this way, the burdens of acquiring a new employee are considerably lightened for both the company and the employee.

Reducing the adaptation process that will take months to days increases your department’s efficiency considerably.

• User onboarding tools reduce the need for additional personnel and time for user support.

In reviews from users for SaaS software, you will often see that user support stands out as an essential pro or con. Users always demand maximum efficiency from your product. They often resort to technical support when they cannot fully receive the promised service.

The reason that creates the majority of these help requests is that the user continues to use the service without fully adapting it. These deficiencies can lead to many problems in the later stages.

Of course, offering strong user support is one way to circumvent these problems. However, good user support requires time, investment, and a customer success team.

If you provide good onboarding, much less user support is needed. You can continue to offer the same efficient service by investing much less in user support.

• User onboarding tools help you to improve your software

You can measure how quickly your users and employees can adapt to your software and its features with these tools. This is a huge advantage because when users quickly understand your tool, they’re more likely to adopt your product. You can make your software user-friendly by working on elements that make the learning curve steeper for users. This will help attract more customers in the later stages of your product adoption curve.

Without regularly obtaining data on this subject, it is difficult to determine which operations the user has difficulty learning to do.

Pendo

Pendo is a tool created in 2014 to facilitate the interaction of its users with software.
While making software simple for users to use without hesitation, it also tries to enable your departments to take control of the employees’ compliance process and manage this process much more efficiently.

WalkMe

WalkMe is a tool created in 2012 with the aim of facilitating the digitization process of companies.
The digitalization process is a two-sided coin, user and company.

While aiming to adapt the user to an environment where more complex operations are presented much simpler than traditional methods, it also supports companies in providing a continuous flow of information and training to their departments.

Pendo Advantages

1. Large integration pool
2. Detailed user segmentation options
3. In-depth analytics and reporting with user onboarding metrics
4. Customer Feedbacks

Large Integration Pool

Pendo is a tool that facilitates every aspect of users’ experience with your software. Therefore, it is sensitive about the platforms where your users can be found, and it supports most of the platforms you need to integrate.

They also don’t want you to be disappointed when you want to integrate a platform but see that it is not supported, and they take action quickly if you reach out to them. Integration capability that supports many platforms such as Jira, Hubspot, Salesforce, Zendesk, Intercom is one of the advantages that brings Pendo to the fore.

Detailed User Segmentation Options

Especially when working on the relationship between the user and the software, it is essential not to put every user in the same basket. Users differ in many ways, and these differences greatly affect their expectations of the software. It’s important to create user onboarding flows that meet these differing expectations.

Therefore, SaaS companies have to evaluate the expectations and habits of their users in detail while creating their marketing strategies. For user onboarding tools, it is vital to analyze who the users are and how they act under what conditions. by doing that, they can offer the most accurate adaptation opportunities. Pendo achieves outstanding success in this regard. It presents essential information about users with aesthetic but straightforward visuals.

In-depth Analytics and Reporting With User Metrics

Pendo spends more of its energy on the relationship between the user and the software. That’s why it offers detailed analytical options. Thanks to the fact that it makes it very easy for you to make evaluations about your product, you can always observe what your product offers to users and improve yourself accordingly.
Analyzing the external and internal factors that the user encounters in accessing your software allows you to quickly realize your mistakes and deficiencies, which prevents your competitors from attracting your potential users by getting ahead of you at the points where you are lacking.

Feedback

The Feedback feature that Pendo offers in its advanced plans allows you to collect user feedback and improvement requests from the user through many channels regarding the product. With this customer feedback feature, which is shown as one of the most critical features of the tool, you can get qualitative analysis directly from the user as well as quantitative analysis.
In line with the user feedback you collect, you can optimize your product, take steps to improve the user experience, and directly know what improvements you need to make.

WalkMe Advantages

1. Customization options
2. In-depth analytics and reporting with employee metrics
3. Advanced automation of the training process

Customization Options

Although detailed customization requires time and technical knowledge, WalkMe provides satisfactory customization. Thus, if you want to make the necessary arrangements for your company and the structure of your brand, it is not impossible to do it with WalkMe.

The wide optimization opportunity can remove you from many patterns that make you similar to other companies, in line with the identity you want to create. While this may not seem like a big deal at first glance, every software has its own spirit, and an onboarding process that matches that spirit always makes the difference.

In-depth Analytics and Reporting With Employee Metrics

WalkMe is a tool that focuses more on the relationship between the product and employees. Its analytics capabilities are also more profound and more detailed in this regard. It also offers advanced opportunities that cannot be underestimated regarding the relationship between the user and the software.

Thanks to these reporting opportunities, many factors can be easily evaluated in terms of the adaptation of the employees to the product and their contribution to the product development process. Regulations can be made in line with the internal and external factors that affect the employees in every process.

Advanced Automation Of the Training Process

A detailed training process is required for both users and employees to master the software fully. In the absence of the necessary tools, this process requires bringing together many resources, such as “training environment, instructor, tools and time.”

WalkMe offers detailed personalized guidance options. Achieving high compatibility with your product with planned steps is WalkMe’s most ambitious subject. It’s almost like you are writing a user manual for each product.
This means you can train more people with far fewer resources.

Moreover, this process does not need much monitoring to work. Therefore, it saves you from a severe burden.

Pendo Disadvantages

1. Functional deficiencies in the guide creation process
2. You can’t always rely on integrations.
3. Lack of coverage of paid packages

Functional Deficiencies In the Guide Creation Process

Pendo has functional deficiencies in design and editing processes. While creating guides with minor differences but broadly similar, it is a tiring and time-consuming process to go through the whole process separately for each guide.

In addition to the creation phase, making great efforts for minor adjustments is necessary. Since the creation studio doesn’t run too fast, you’re likely to spend a lot of time making tiny changes.

You Can’t Always Rely On Integrations.

Pendo team is constantly working to increase Integration options. However, existing integrations can give buggy reactions at unexpected times. Although such problems are not common, they can be pretty annoying when they occur at vital moments. Therefore, it is necessary not to rely on integrations all the time and be ready to do manual operations.

Lack Of Coverage Of Paid Packages

Pendo offers many service packages at different prices, allowing you to chart your own path according to your company’s needs and budget. However, the content of these packages is very limited quantitatively.

For this reason, even an extra small action you want to do turns into a fee to be paid. Since the fee policy is not very transparent, you cannot determine when and what kind of additional payment you will encounter.

WalkMe Disadvantages

1. Technical knowledge requirement
2. Limited use for small and medium-sized businesses
3. Difficulty in terminating the contract.

Technical Knowledge Requirement

WalkMe can demand a lot of technical information from the implementation stage to the detailed customization process.

Ironically, a certain number of users say that Walkme is not user-friendly enough. For this reason, WalkMe’s user experience team is actively engaged in resolving these issues.

Although user support seems sufficient, it creates a negative image for a tool that aims to facilitate the software for the user.

Limited Use For Small and Medium-sized Businesses

WalkMe A tool focused on providing more effective solutions for large companies. This does not seem very abnormal, as it concentrates on employee segmentation. However, small and medium-sized businesses may also need onboarding tools for their users, and they have a hard time finding the answer to this need within WalkMe.

WalkMe’s focus on large companies is reflected in its pricing policy and features it offers for large businesses. The tool does not provide any free plans but also offers only two separate package offers. The low number of packages also makes it challenging to purchase packages according to the budget.

Difficulty In Terminating the Contract.

If you decide to stop using the product after not being satisfied with it, it is tough to terminate your subscription. Many users state that the team works very slowly and ineffectively in terms of subscription termination. Therefore, if you do not use it for a long time without any problems, it can turn into a bad experience for you.

Pendo vs WalkMe: Feature Comparison

Both Pendo and WalkMe offer the main customer onboarding features such as product tours, walkthroughs, and user behavior analytics. However, Pendo’s features are focused more on customer onboarding while WalkMe’s are focused on employee onboarding.

Pendo has more advanced user segmentation tools: your onboarding flows can be tailored to the needs of each segment. Also, Pendo has user feedback insights and in-app messaging abilities.

Another factor that you should consider is the complexity of both tools’ features. Unfortunately, both tools’ features require some sort of technical background as they’re complex and case-specific.

Pendo vs WalkMe: Segmentation

When it comes to user segmentation, we see that the factor that determines the difference is the focus of the tools. User segmentation options are also much broader as Pendo approaches the concept of onboarding in terms of user experience. WalkMe also offers opportunities in this regard, but they are not deep and detailed.

Pendo vs WalkMe: Guide Creation

WalkMe allows you to create detailed guides in a much more customizable way and successfully turn them into a step-by-step path. Pendo side, on the other hand, has a more straightforward but more easily applicable guide creation system. Therefore, you can reach the guides you need with much simpler steps.

Pendo vs WalkMe: Integrations

Neither tool keeps their set of integration options too small, but Pendo’s integration pool looks wider. Therefore, it is possible to dominate many more channels through Pendo. However, WalkMe’s Integrations can more efficiently take advantage of narrower integration options. It is stated that Pendo encounters integration-related problems more frequently.

Pendo vs WalkMe: Pricing

WalkMe offers 2, Pendo offers 4 different plans. Neither tool openly announces its pricing policy. That’s why it becomes challenging to make a transparent price comparison. While Pendo provides a free plan with basic features, WalkMe does not offer a free option. In this respect, it is possible to say that WalkMe is less accessible. Although Pendo seems like a more flexible solution, additional fees can change the balance.

Therefore, checking the numerical adequacy of the features offered by the tools, as well as your needs and budget, will be critical in coming to a conclusion for Pendo vs WalkMe. Because the packages offered by both tools contain quantitative limits, whether it is possible to exceed these limits, and if possible, for what fees, is not presented transparently.

What if both these tools don’t seem right to you?

As I mentioned in the previous parts of the article, both of these tools have disadvantages as well as advantages. For this reason, you may have felt that these two platforms do not meet your needs.

Wait, don’t give away to despair! I saved the best for last:

HockeyStack

HockeyStack is an analytics and attribution platform trusted by over 7,000 companies. With its code-free and cookie-free interface, numerous integration possibilities and dozens of customizable dashboards, it allows you to easily monitor every element you need to track in your onboarding process.

Some of the highlights of Hockeystack include:

Detailed and easy-to-use dashboards

HockeyStack lets you monitor every metric you need to follow in your onboarding process with easy-to-use and easy-to-understand dashboards. It also makes your work much more manageable with dashboard categories and clear data visualizations, making it easy for you to analyze metrics and uncover critical insights.

Onboarding is a process where you must make an immediate decision when encountering a problem. For this reason, you should detect a problem in your channels that serve your user onboarding process as soon as possible and take action accordingly. HockeyStack helps you make quick decisions with its user-friendly interface and real-time data analysis.

With HockeyStack, you can track everything from feature adoption to churn rates and even the number of daily signups to understand every minute detail of your progress. HockeyStack allows you to consolidate interdepartmental data from revenue, marketing, product, and sales, giving you the chance to draw actionable insights for each stage of your onboarding process.

Surveys and A/B tests

What’s the best way to find out what’s working in your onboarding process and what you can improve? Of course, asking a user who has been through this onboarding process!

Surveys are one of the best ways to get feedback from your users because you are communicating directly with your users.

HockeyStack makes the survey creation process incredibly easy for you. Don’t know where to start? No problem! You can choose the one that suits your needs from many templates and create the ideal survey to meet your needs. With HockeyStack, you can not only create these surveys and A/B tests but also send and analyze them in tandem with other product-related data.

Pricing

HockeyStack has two pricing plans, both of which come with a free 14-day trial. You can check out the pricing page here.

Key Takeaways

In the SaaS space, many companies lose out on high-quality prospects simply because they could not onboard them properly. Guiding users along each step of the way is crucial if you’re looking to retain your customers. This is best done by not only creating a simple to use product with an effective UI, but also tracking the right metrics to ensure that you can catch churn and low feature adoption rates early on.