Looking for software to help you onboard your customers but need help picking the right tool?
We feel you. There are tons of software options on the market, and they all have different features, strengths, and weaknesses.
Wouldn’t it be nice to have a framework to help you determine whether you need onboarding software and how to evaluate the options available?
Well, you’ve come to the right place!
In this article, we will share all the information we have about customer onboarding software so that you can make the right decision for your business.
Sound good? Then, let’s get right into it.
Key takeaways
- Customer onboarding software is third-party software that will help you make your app more intuitive and easier for your customers.
- It helps reduce churn and unburden support staff, but it is less helpful if you’re pre-revenue or want to build your onboarding in-house.
- To determine whether a particular onboarding tool is right for your business, consider the features it offers and whether you have use cases corresponding to those features.
- The most important elements of any onboarding tool are customization, data security, customer service, integrations, and, of course, price.
- Some of the best customer onboarding software tools include UserGuiding, Appcues, Pendo, and Userflow.
What is customer onboarding software?
The term “customer onboarding software” sounds straightforward enough: it’s software to help you onboard your customers.
But let’s break down each one of those three words to get a more nuanced definition.
Firstly, this is “customer” onboarding software, not “employee” onboarding software. So we’ll strictly discuss tools designed to show customers how to use your product rather than train employees internally.
Secondly, a word about onboarding. When most people hear the word “onboarding,” they think of the first few hours after someone starts to use a product for the first time.
This is, indeed, a critical part of onboarding, but onboarding is a broader term that encompasses product education across the entire customer journey.
And finally: “software.” You could consider building your own internal onboarding software.
But we’re specifically going to discuss the use case where you choose to work with external software instead because it’s almost always faster and cheaper.
So, we’ve agreed on a definition of customer onboarding software. But do you actually need it?
Do you need customer onboarding software?
As with most things in life, the answer is: it depends.
Yes – you need a customer onboarding tool
There are numerous situations in which a SaaS company could make good use of an onboarding tool.
For example, if you’re consistently getting feedback that users need help to understand your app or that they find your UI unintuitive, onboarding software could be a way to educate customers on how to use your core features.
One way to tell if this is the case for your business is to talk with your customer support team.
Are they overwhelmed with tickets? Are they constantly answering the same basic product questions? If so, then you can probably benefit from automating the customer education process with software.
Another good sign that you need help with user onboarding is if your customers are churning left, right, and center.
There’s a perfect chance that at least part of the reason for this churn is that they don’t understand how to get value out of your product. And that’s something that onboarding software can help you with.
Even products that successfully onboard their users in the early stages can often benefit from an onboarding tool when they release new features.
In this instance, the customer onboarding software can help you announce your new feature in-app, highlight it to the right user segment, and make it easier to adopt.
No – you don’t need one
This type of onboarding software isn’t for every business.
For example, investing in customer onboarding software is a poor strategy if you’re pre-launch and have yet to get customers. You’re better off building your core product features and testing them with early adopters in tandem with customer development interviews.
You also don’t need external onboarding software if you’re absolutely set on coding your onboarding UI in-house.
Building in-house onboarding is usually more expensive and time-consuming than plugging in some third-party software. However, there are cases when enterprises decide that the extra control they get from doing everything in-house justifies all that time and expense.
Make sure you have a small army of spare developers on hand if you choose this route.
Finally, you also don’t need onboarding software if all your customers consistently understand how to use your product and get the most out of it without any hand-holding or support at all.
I don’t know of many products like this, but perhaps your UI designer is a total genius!
If you don’t need customer onboarding software, feel free to stop reading now 🙂
But if you do, the next step is to understand what exactly you need it for.
Understanding your requirements
It’s important to reflect on what you want your onboarding process to achieve, what onboarding needs to look like for your specific audience, and how well your current onboarding process is meeting your objectives.
Let’s take each one of those in turn and break it down.
Identify the specific goals of your onboarding process
The majority of the businesses I’ve been involved with have seen onboarding primarily as a way to reduce churn.
No shame in this whatsoever. The better your customers understand your product, the more likely they are to find value in it, stick with you, and not churn.
If you’re more of a glass-half-full sort of person, you might also consider that the value of onboarding lies in getting more users to activate. By activating, I mean experiencing the value of your product first-hand by using at least one of its core features or reaching the so-called “aha moment”.
Beyond activation, you might also want to invest in onboarding as a way to get your users to adopt more features – which is often an excellent way to drive additional revenue through upselling more expensive pricing plans that contain secondary features.
And if you’re thinking in financial terms, you might also be drawn to the idea of improving onboarding as a way to increase the amount of money you can earn over the whole customer lifecycle. This is primarily due to the positive effect that onboarding has on retention.
More generally, you could perceive the value of onboarding as a means of educating your audience and your industry.
All of these objectives are valid, but which ones you focus on will depend on how your senior management thinks about onboarding.
Classify your target audience and their needs
Next, consider your target audience. What needs do they have in your onboarding process?
One of the biggest mistakes I see companies making in their onboarding is delivering the same generic experience to all their users.
This is a great way to turn people off. Rather than bombarding users with onboarding that isn’t relevant to their individual use case, people much prefer when you personalize their product experience to their specific needs.
Amazon has made a fortune by offering a personalized shopping experience.
For example, let’s imagine that you have three user segments:
- one with a beginner level of knowledge about your industry
- one with a medium level
- and one with an advanced level.
Does it make sense to deliver the same onboarding to each of your users? If you did this, the advanced users would feel patronized, while the beginner users would feel confused.
Far better to tailor your onboarding to the knowledge level of the individual user.
Alternatively, consider which features your segments need. Not every feature is relevant for every customer.
For example, if you run a CRM company, some of your users will be employees in sales and marketing, some will be business owners, and some (especially at the enterprise level) will be finance people whose job it is to oversee spending on software.
So, if you release a new feature that makes the billing system more efficient, it makes no sense to onboard regular employee users in that feature. You’d want to promote it to the finance users – and perhaps any small business owners.
Evaluate your current onboarding process
Once you know what your objectives are for your onboarding and what needs your different customer segments have in the onboarding process, it makes sense to evaluate your existing onboarding process before diving into investing into external onboarding software.
Ask yourself the following questions:
- Are you currently doing any onboarding?
- Do you do onboarding using software, or do you do it manually?
- Are you doing onboarding in-house, or do you already use another external onboarding tool?
- Given the business objectives you and your customers have for onboarding, how is your onboarding going?
Answering these questions honestly will help you gauge to what extent what you’re already doing is working and where you’re falling short.
In turn, this will help you work out how important it is (or isn’t) to invest in improving onboarding by purchasing third-party software.
But assuming you want to pay for external onboarding software, which features should you look for?
Key features to consider when choosing customer onboarding software
Have a read through these features and see if their use cases make sense for your business.
User segmentation and personalization
We already mentioned the value of delivering a personalized onboarding experience to users that matches their individual needs instead of providing generic onboarding to all users equally.
Since it’s impractical to deliver a 100% personalized experience to thousands of individual users at scale, it’s more scalable to use software that will let you divide your users into segments.
For example, you can use Encharge’s segmentation feature to segment your users by live marketing stack data, in-app behavior, and/or page visits on your website.
Then, you can provide customized onboarding for each segment. For example, you could:
- Launch a new feature and only promote it to a particular segment
- Analyze the in-app behavior of a specific segment to see how you can improve their in-app experience.
- Customize the text on elements like tooltips so that the language used speaks to the pain points of a particular segment.
- Provide a different checklist during the initial product tour according to the features that the segment needs in order to activate.
Interactive guides and walkthroughs
You can also use customer onboarding software to build guides for some of your product features or groups of features.
Guides commonly use hotspots, tooltips, and modals to make using particular features more intuitive for your users.
The most popular place to create a guide is when the customer first starts using your product. Such guides are often referred to as “walkthroughs.”
Guides and walkthroughs will help you if:
- Too many of your customers are churning on day one of using your product because they don’t understand how to get value out of it
- You want to increase your activation rate
- You have a new feature that you want to launch, and you want to make it easy for users to understand that feature.
Checklists and progress tracking
Following on from the previous feature, onboarding tools commonly let you create checklists of tasks that are important for your users.
At first glance, this might seem like a nice-to-have rather than an essential.
But I like the fact that checklists show users how much they’ve done already and how much they still have to do. There’s something motivating about that.
You can use checklists to:
- Tell users how many actions in your product tour they’ve completed
- Reward users for actions they’ve already taken, by giving them credit for those actions on the checklist
- Tell customers the percentage of necessary actions that have been taken already
In-app messaging and notifications
There’s something to be said for being able to exchange messages with your users in-app.
It looks professional, and it’s much more convenient than requiring them to switch between your app and email. (Although, if you want to send onboarding emails, Encharge can certainly help with that!)
One of my favorite use cases for in-app messaging is sending surveys to your customers.
You might also consider embedding a support widget into your app that allows users to reach out to support agents if they get stuck:
Alternatively, use your onboarding tool’s in-app messaging function to announce new features to your users.
The options are really endless with this one.
Analytics and reporting
Onboarding software isn’t just there for building onboarding elements: you can also use it to measure the in-app behavior of your users.
This is incredibly useful because you won’t get your onboarding right the first time. Your analytics will give you the data you need to make the right tweaks to get the desired results.
For example, you could use the analytics feature to:
- Analyze the in-app behavior of one particular user segment
- See how many users finish your product tour and activate
- Find common drop-off points in your product flows
- Send analytics reports to senior management
Integrations with other tools
Some onboarding tools also integrate seamlessly with the rest of your tech stack.
We’re not talking about your product itself here; that’s taken as a given.
Some common integrations include with your CRM and your help desk software.
You might think that integrations are another nice-to-have, but consider the following benefits:
- It’s much, much faster to pass data between your onboarding software and your other tools automatically than to do that manually.
- If your CRM integrates with your onboarding tool, that means you have all the data about an individual customer (both pre-sale and in-app) in one place.
- Do you use Google Analytics or Mixpanel? Would it be interesting to enrich that data with in-app data? If so, integrations are for you.
Let’s assume you’ve worked out which features you need and have drawn up a few tools to choose between. How should you choose which tool is best?
How to evaluate software options
You should consider some specific factors when choosing between different customer onboarding software options.
Note that exactly how you weigh these factors will depend on the individual needs of your business.
Customization
There are three different schools of thought when customizing your onboarding elements.
The first school says that absolutely everything should be custom-built in-house. This gives you the maximum level of control over your UI but is also time and resource-intensive.
Alternatively, you could take the view that your onboarding software of choice should allow you to build and customize absolutely everything without code. This is the most scalable option, but also quite hard to implement – what do you do if you can’t get the custom look that you want?
The third school is the one I recommend. Here, you can build and customize almost everything without code, but you can still use code for the most complex use cases.
Security
Consider that your onboarding tool will likely have access to all of your users’ behavioral data. If you have thousands of users, that’s a LOT of data.
If you work in banking or the medical field, the chances are high that this data is very sensitive, as well.
So it’s in your interests to ensure that your chosen onboarding tool protects your data responsibly and prevents it from falling into the wrong hands.
In a US context, the certification you want to look out for here is SOC 2. This is a rigorous regulation that companies must comply with if they want to show that they adhere to the latest data protection standards.
In an EU context, there’s also something to be said for your chosen software being GDPR-compliant as well.
Also, remember to look for two-factor (2FA) logins to make it harder for hackers to access your account.
Ultimately, you can’t put a price on peace of mind.
Integrations
The key thing to watch for here is whether your chosen onboarding tool can integrate with the rest of the tools in your stack.
Most onboarding tools worth their salt have an integrations page where you can clearly see which software they integrate with.
If your chosen tool doesn’t have the integrations you want, consider that you could always cobble together an integration using something like Zapier or an iPaaS.
If you’re unsure at this stage which integrations you need, it might be best to prioritize the tools offering the highest number of native integrations.
Customer service
Onboarding is complicated, and you’re bound to run into challenges with even the best-designed onboarding software. It makes sense to look into your chosen tool’s level of customer service.
To some extent, you can gauge this by browsing the tool’s website. Don’t necessarily take them at their word, but have a look at the language they use and see how clear and user-friendly it seems.
For a less biased customer service analysis, read your tool’s testimonials – especially those that aren’t 100% positive about everything. You can visit SaaS review platforms like G2 and Capterra to see what users say about customer service there.
The overall rating on these platforms (often out of five stars) also indicates how much tools care about their user base.
For the deepest insights, look to interview some of your chosen tool’s past or present customers. They will give you a first-hand account of what it’s like to use the tool you’re researching – without needing to be biased to sell.
Pricing
The cheapest onboarding software is automatically the best for a certain type of company. This reasoning is most appropriate if you’re a start-up with limited funds available.
In most cases, a better way to think about pricing is in terms of value for money. Put another way: which features does your chosen tool offer you for what you’re paying?
I’ve seen tools in this space charge thousands of dollars per month for minimal functionality, so caveat emptor!
It’s helpful when the tools you use grow with you as your business scales, so look for software that has pricing that scales by the number of monthly active users (MAUs) you have.
Note that we’re saying “active” users here, not just users – you don’t want to be paying to onboard users who never log in to your tool.
Additionally, watch out for any hidden costs. Some tools only offer onboarding features if you purchase an additional add-on or might gate some of the functionality you need behind higher plan levels.
It’s also wise to work with an onboarding tool that offers a free trial, allowing you to try before buying. This gives you an added degree of security before making an investment into your onboarding.
With all these features in mind, here are the best onboarding software options on the market right now.
The best customer onboarding tools
UserGuiding
UserGuiding is an all-around onboarding tool that will cover just about all of your product education needs in one place.
You can use it to create all the onboarding elements we’ve discussed in this article so far, including checklists, tooltips, walkthroughs, hotspots, and more.
Unlike some of the other onboarding options on the market, UserGuiding also offers in-app surveys and product updates. These are helpful if you ever want to gauge customer sentiment or announce a new feature.
UserGuiding’s product analytics can help you understand your customers’ in-app behavior, such as which features are the most popular and where users drop off in product flows.
While many onboarding tools will let you segment your analytics data by user or user group, UserGuiding is unusual because it also allows you to filter by company.
You can extend UserGuiding’s analytics by harnessing one of the numerous analytics tools that it integrates with, such as Mixpanel or GA4.
UserGuiding is fully compliant with the latest SOC 2, type 2 data protection in the US, so you can be confident that your user data is in safe hands.
And, at prices starting from a mere $89 per month, UserGuiding is also cheaper than most of the other onboarding apps on the market, meaning that it offers great value for money with all the extra functionality we outlined above.
This pricing is shared transparently on the UserGuiding website and scales by MAUs, meaning that UserGuiding will scale with your business as your number of users fluctuates.
Appcues
As the oldest onboarding software on the market, Appcues have had time to perfect their software – and it shows.
The company offers powerful guides, hotspots, surveys and checklists, all of which function extremely well.
Unlike almost every other player in this industry, Appcues supports these features on mobile and desktop as well. This makes it a solid choice for companies that want to provide cross-platform onboarding to their customers.
Without a doubt, Appcues’s best feature is its analytics. You can analyze the performance of individual features, segment customers, analyze different groups, and work out where in user flows people are dropping off – all without having to write a single line of code.
So what’s the catch?
The only problem with Appcues is that you’ll need a developer on hand to get the most value from it. The customization options without code aren’t that great.
This isn’t necessarily a dealbreaker, but you should include the cost of that developer when considering how much you’ll need to invest in Appcues.
And speaking of investment, Appcues comes in at $249 per month. Much better than some of the more expensive players in the market, but it’s still almost three times the cost of UserGuiding.
Pendo
While both UserGuiding and Appcues have excellent analytics, this next onboarding tool has the best in the industry.
As well as all the analytics features offered by the other tools in this article, Pendo’s analytics allow you to visualize key user actions.
You might have considered using Hotjar to supplement your onboarding tool, but if you use Pendo, it comes with its own heat maps – so no need for that!
You can use Pendo to detect underused features – as well as the reasons why users aren’t adopting them. That’s powerful.
Pendo’s reporting suite is powerful, making it easy for you to send analytics reports to senior management.
Here’s the thing though: Pendo has put so much effort into creating industry-leading onboarding analytics that the rest of their tool is quite mediocre.
Pendo has the same guides, checklists, and hotspots as the other tools in this article, but they’re a bit clunky and not especially easy to use. Worse, if you get lost, Pendo’s support is also pretty average – look up their support ratings online if you don’t believe us.
And even their biggest strength is, in some ways, a weakness: Pendo pulls product data from so many places that it’s quite technical to set up and maintain.
Pendo don’t share their pricing openly, so we can’t tell you exactly how much they cost.
We do know that they offer a free plan for up to 500 MAUs, which is quite neat.
But for more users than that, which is where epic data analytics really starts to pay for itself, Pendo gets expensive. Reports online suggest that their packages start from $7,000 a year.
Definitely worth considering if you’re an enterprise, even just for the analytics suite, but not such a good bet for SMEs.
Userflow
If you’re looking for fast, intuitive onboarding, Userflow might be a good tool to check out.
It comes with most of the features you would expect from customer onboarding software, such as checklists, hotspots, modals, and product tours.
Those features are intuitive and easy to use, and in fact, Userflow’s entire website loads extremely quickly.
You can even speed up your response time to support queries, thanks to an AI chatbot that’s powered by GPT and programmed to answer simple questions based on crawling your support resources.
The drawback of Userflow is its analytics. It only covers basic material interaction metrics, and the reporting function is not up to par. A workaround to track events using code is available, but you can’t track goals.
Pricing starts from $240 per month for 3000 MAUs, paid annually, which is roughly average for this market.
Bonus tool: Encharge for email onboarding
Encharge is a marketing automation platform that allows you to segment your contacts and create personalized onboarding emails. With Encharge, you can create a hyper-tailored customer journey with email marketing automation.
Encharge and email onboarding serve as powerful complements to in-app onboarding, enhancing user experience by providing a multi-channel approach. While in-app onboarding offers immediate guidance and context within the product, Encharge’s email onboarding allows for continued user engagement outside the app and nudges inactive people back to the product.
This combination ensures that users receive timely and personalized communication, reinforcing key product features, addressing potential friction points, and nurturing long-term user success. Together, they create a seamless onboarding journey that boosts product adoption and retention.
Wrapping it up
After reading this article, you should now be in a position to understand:
- What customer onboarding software is.
- Whether you need it.
- What to look for in software.
- What are the four best options on the market are.
If you’re looking for software to turbocharge your customer onboarding, consider trying UserGuiding. It offers features that the other options lack (notably surveys, product updates, and per-company analytics) for a much lower price.
