Written by Andrey Kholkin
If you’re struggling to retain users on your app, it's time to level up with user onboarding tools. Appcues and Usetiful offer great features, including user engagement, creative support, digital adoption, product tours, and personalized checklists.
We'll compare them in our latest Appcues vs Usetiful guide to find out which one has the best digital adoption solutions, product line-up, and resources. Let's get started!
About Appcues
This is a user-friendly onboarding software for a small business or a startup company. It provides creative tools for enhancing user onboarding experiences. If you want a no-nonsense builder, Appcues has it covered. Here you can find product-lead growth directives to engage different types of users.
Any non-tech can easily use Appcues to build fascinating product tours. It's a no-code platform where you can set goals to engage users and give them an unforgettable experience.
What We Like about Appcues
- An easy-to-use, code-free builder
- Gives enough scope to personalize interactions
- Effective product launch planners
- Successful UI patterns and checklists
- Audience-targeting or segmentation
- Eye-catching product tours and design elements
- Can import data from other tools used by your company
- Reusable templates
- Data visualization and campaign reports
About Usetiful
Usetiful is another best-rated platform to help out startups and businesses. It's a popular SaaS tool that lets you personalize tours and experiences.
Whether you have simple mobile apps or an elaborate website, Usetiful will rise to the occasion. It can double up client onboarding and increase your user activation rate by 25%.
Usetiful is big on privacy and security. For one, it's based on a zero-knowledge model. Consider Usetiful for building interactive product tours, creating new features, and eliminating user churn the best possible way.
What We Like about Usetiful
- Personalized user onboarding checklists
- A Drag & Drop editor
- Smart Tips to simplify complex forms
- Creates interactive product tours
- Quick and simple product adoption
- You can embed external elements and services
- Feedback collection
- Analytics tools for identifying drop-offs
- Easy audience targeting and segmentation
- GDPR-compliant zero-knowledge model
- A wide range of triggers and delayers
01
User Interface & User Experience (UI/UX)
For beginners, both Appcues and Usetiful are easy to navigate. They have an intuitive UI. Additionally, they provide on-screen instructions to help you get started. You'll be comfortable using either digital adoption platform!
In order to decide which SaaS product has the better UI, we'll compare Appcues with Usetiful in a bit. Make sure to keep reading!
Appcues User Interface and User Experience
If you want a presentable product tour for your company site, Appcues is the way to go. First, you have to create an account. Then, you'll be directed to Appcues Studio.
On the left side of the screen, you have Flows, Checklists, Events Explorer, Dashboard, Themes, Segments, and Goals. We liked how they put everything together on a single screen.
You can track events from the upper-right corner and compare a maximum of four events at a time.
Up next, we have Appcues Builder, the Google Chrome extension by Appcues. You have to log in using your work email and password. You'll see the content creator dashboard along with other tools on the next screen.
It's quite easy to create a new flow and track all your events from here.
Usetiful User Interface & User Experience
Usetiful puts forward similar features. You can dream up a product tour with its different elements. Create on-boarding checklists or collect customer feedback.
On the left side, you have a product tour drop-down that you can follow and edit. The on-screen instructions will give you a lay of the land. You can check out the product tour demo and its features.
Usetiful can add photos, videos, and GIFs to a tour. It gives you an option to edit the content live, preview, and test it step by step. You can change the look of Usetiful by giving it a layout similar to your app's.
You can learn how to edit tours, create a new project with user targeting, discover solutions, publish and get hands-on experience. Startups often have multiple product tours lined up on their Usetiful dashboard.
It's easy to edit content, save it as a draft, and come back to it later on.
Our thoughts on User Interface & User Experience
At first glance, both competitors have impressive UI. Since Usetiful is catered a little towards user engagement, we found its product tours much more appealing and modern.
If you ask what makes Usetiful stand out, we're going to say it's the interactive editor and aesthetic elements. It's full of opportunities to create an outstanding application. So, if you prioritize UI and UX as much as we do, you'll go forward with this software.
Features
Nothing beats a side-by-side features comparison
(Check the table below...)
02
Features | Appcues | Usetiful |
|---|---|---|
Code-free content creation
| ||
Easy to install
| ||
Assist-based pricing | ||
Unlimited segmentation | ||
Localization | ||
Product launch planner | ||
Customer self-service | ||
In-app training | ||
Easy targeting | ||
User onboarding cost calculation | ||
Monetization experiments | ||
Result tracking | ||
Tour comparison | ||
Live preview | ||
Feedback collection | ||
SaaS Metrics calculator | ||
Salesforce integration | ||
GDPR-compliant | ||
Live chat |
User Onboarding Checklists
When it comes to user onboarding, both platforms have exclusive features. For example, Usetiful provides free contextual guidance. With its help, you can design your application in a way that customers find the value faster and convert instantly.
Usetiful increases the user retention rate by simplifying complex learning curves. It allows you to segment clients and presents them with a custom onboarding experience.
Appcues also has no-code onboarding platforms. You can generate a quick report to see your progress and make necessary changes in your product tour.
We also found a Product Experience Playbook on Appcues that give you plenty of insights about onboarding and user experience as a whole.
Code-Free Platform
Don't have any experience in coding? No problem! You can advance with a SaaS service without a coding geek. Appcues and Usetiful are no-code SaaS tools. You can use their browser extension for fine-tuning your business website.
As you can see, you only need to copy a piece of code to your application. This way, the software can sync the tour content with your app. Now, Appcues is also a SaaS tool. But its navigation is complex for beginners to move past the coding part.
Interactive Product Tours
Usetiful can help you dream up fascinating product tours. You can build product tours straight from the dashboard. It’s more effective to add images, embed videos, and import trending elements to a product tour after sufficient market research.
Other than creating unique product tours, Appcues also has a Product Launch service that gives you a to-do list based on your company size and product adoption goals.
Digital Adoption Platform
You can build interactive product tours, track progress, and make headway with product adoption using a single SaaS application! However, the software that offers better functionality is Usetiful.
It also has a feature adoption option to introduce new perks and website features to your users. So, if you have a small business and plan to add new services in the future, this software can save your time and effort.
Apps that require product tours can benefit from Usetiful to some extent. Both services now allow product managers to integrate Salesforce, Marketo, Hubspot, Zendec Sell, and Slack into their web app.
Thanks to the advanced onboarding, product adoption with Usetiful is a lot more insightful and fun!
Hosting and Security
Appcues has an industry-leading encryption system. The software undergoes routine pen-tests by independent companies as well as Amazon AWS tests.
Only Usetiful is GDPR compliant. Privacy Shield was made invalid in 2020+ and not reestablished yet, that's why AppCues is not GDPR compliant.
Usetiful is GDPR compliant because of:
- EU-based hosting - all end user data are in EU
- EU-based operations - nobody from Usetiful or its vendors outside of EU have access to end user data
- zero-knowledge design, that reduces or completely removes personal data about end users.
Usetiful, on the other hand, is built on a zero-knowledge design. All information regarding new users is stored within the European Union.
Product Training
Both competitors allow you to train your employees and customers in product adoption through live videos and webinars. On Usetiful, you can introduce your sales team to basic navigation, designing, segmentation, and digital adoption strategies from day one.
In addition to live product training, Appcues offers in-person training, which is hard to beat.
03
Plans and Pricing
Appcues Pricing Overview
Appcues has three pricing plans to turn your app into a serious growth tool. But it's on the expensive side of SaaS applications. For example, it has three different packages. Appcues Essentials starts at $249 a month. It includes 3 user licenses and supports up to 2,500 active users.
With unlimited business integrations and advanced targeting tools, Appcues Growth starts at a whopping $879. They don't disclose the pricing for their Enterprise package. However, they have a 14-day free trial if you're interested!
Usetiful Pricing Overview
Guess what? Usetiful has a free plan for one product tour and one single-page application with Smart Tips.
Usetiful Plus plan is only £29.90 a month. It offers Smart Tips, allows unlimited projects, and accommodates 5,000 monthly active users – twice of what Appcues provides for $249.
On top of that, Usetiful has a 14-day trial period and a 30-day money-back guarantee. Priced at $99 a month, the Usetiful Premium package is ideal for small businesses with seven team members. It features 20,000 assists, Smart Tips, and a dedicated customer care rep!
Battle Decision
If you're eager to try out a digital adoption software that's user-friendly and affordable, Usetiful is hands down the best choice! Many people think that a good-looking website is enough to retain customers. In the real world, onboarding new users is the real recipe for success.
From our Appcues vs Usetiful discussion, Usetiful was the only software that offered monetization tricks, tour comparison, and live onboarding preview to scale a business.
So, what are you waiting for? Sign up for a free trial right now!