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With so many different customer onboarding software solutions available, finding the right fit for your needs is tough. You know you want software to help your new customers get acquainted with your products or services to ensure they have a positive experience, but you need to figure out which system is best. In this article, I'll help you make this choice easier by sharing my insights on the best customer onboarding software to help your customers navigate your products or services.

What is Customer Onboarding Software?

Customer onboarding software are tools designed to guide new customers through the initial stages of using a product or service. They offer structured pathways to help customers gradually become proficient at using the product, with links to additional resources in case they need more support. They achieve this through automated workflows that you can customize and personalize as needed.

Customer onboarding software offers numerous benefits to product teams, including a better understanding of customer needs, behaviors, and preferences, and increased operational efficiency since you will require fewer staff hours to train customers manually. These software systems also create a better first impression for your customers, improving their satisfaction, loyalty, and retention rates.

Overviews of the 10 Best Customer Onboarding Software

Here’s a brief description of each customer onboarding tool to showcase each tool’s best use case, some noteworthy features, and screenshots to give a snapshot of the user interface.

Best for personalized user onboarding

  • 14-day free trial
  • From $89/month (billed annually)
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Rating: 4.7/5

UserGuiding is a digital adoption platform that enables organizations to create interactive and customizable onboarding flows for their software applications. The platform is designed to assist companies in improving user onboarding, feature adoption, and overall user experience, with the goal of increasing user retention and reducing support queries.

UserGuiding provides a platform that allows the creation of interactive guides, tooltips, and hotspots to facilitate user learning and engagement. These features help new users navigate through the software's functionalities, promoting a better understanding of the product. The tool also offers personalized onboarding checklists and in-app messages to ensure users complete essential steps, enhancing their initial experience with the software. 

The tool also offer user segmentation tools, which allow businesses to deliver even more personalized onboarding experiences. Guides and messages can be targeted to specific user groups based on behavior, characteristics, or other criteria.

UserGuiding integrates with Segment, Woopra, Slack, Google Analytics, Intercom, HubSpot, Mixpanel, and Google Tag Manager.

UserGuiding costs from $89/month (billed annually). A 14-day free trial is also available.

Best for managing a self-serve knowledge base

  • 14-day free trial
  • From $119/user/month
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Rating: 4.8/5

Document360 is a knowledge base management software your customer support team can use to create and publish self-service content for customers. It has a 'what you see is what you get' (WYSIWYG) editor for crafting product documentation, and you can add images and videos, tables, links, and callouts to your content. You can also maintain multiple versions of an article, create or draw from existing article templates, and work collaboratively on articles.

The category manager helps keep your product documentation organized and structured in a hierarchical manner. You can add new sub-categories, update existing ones, and archive ones that are no longer relevant. Tagging is another way to keep documentation organized, and helps your customers find what they're looking for.

When it comes to onboarding new customers, you can use the platform to develop self-serve documents that will help get them up and running quickly. How-tos, FAQs, and more can be provided through your knowledge base.

Integrations include Intercom, Segment, Google Analytics, Disqus, HTML 5, Olark, Zendesk, Freshdesk, Hotjar, Freshmarketer, and Drift. Paid plans start from $119 per user per month, and a 14-day free trial is available.

Improve your onboarding experience with integrated feedback

  • Free Trial
  • 14-day free trial + Demo available
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Rating: 4.6/5

Whatfix is a customer success tool that simplifies user onboarding and drives digital adoption. The software is simple to learn, so your team can start creating content after going through the platform’s onboarding process.

I like the fact that Whatfix enables you to segment your audience based on their location in your app. This helps you create contextualized walkthroughs for your users, reducing churn and customer support calls. Another good thing about this tool is that it enables you to incorporate feedback into your customer onboarding process.

This creates an opportunity to collect valuable data about your customers’ experiences while using certain aspects of your solution.

Whatfix integrates with most of the apps you use on a day-to-day basis, such as Slack, Google Sheets, Google Analytics, Workday, Amplitude, and Salesforce.

Whatfix offers customized pricing upon request. You can access a free trial.

Code-free solution that helps you create customer activity heatmaps

  • Free demo
  • From $2-3000/annually
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Rating: 4.5/5

WalkMe is a cloud-based user onboarding software that helps you make informed decisions in order to accelerate the learning experience of your customers. The code-free platform helps your team build product adoption flows to showcase your product’s features and capabilities.

One of the great things about WalkMe is that it enables you to put the right lesson in front of each new customer at exactly the right time. This takes the pressure off the users, as they don’t have to search for the information in your knowledge base, so it can help boost your product adoption rates.

WalkMe also helps your team build heat maps of your system, showing where your customers spend their time, how long it takes them to complete certain tasks, and where they encounter roadblocks and ask your team for guidance. As a result, you can create targeted guides that help your users navigate the trickier aspects of your solution.

WalkMe integrates with dozens of your favorite solutions, including Salesforce, Google Analytics, Slack, Azure Active Directory, LiveChat, and Zendesk.

WalkMe offers customized pricing upon request. You can see the solution in action with a free

Improve user experience with automation

  • 14-day free trial
  • From $74/month (billed annually)
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Rating: 4.4/5

Intercom is a digital adoption platform that makes it easy for teams to map out customer journeys, track product usage, and connect users to your customer success team. This is a code-free solution that helps you use data to improve user adoption. Intercom has a minimalist layout that’s simple to navigate.

Your team members can collaborate on customer issues, make notes on different tasks, and set up filters to segment users in any way you want. The highlight of using this platform is how easy it is to leverage its automation features. You can set up automations with custom triggers without developers, so you can create tailored onboarding content for targeted elements in your app.

Intercom integrates with over 300 apps, including Hubspot, Stripe, Salesforce, Jira, Slack, Microsoft Outlook, Google Analytics, and Instagram.

Intercom costs from $74/month. You can access a free 14-day trial.

Drive user engagement with data

  • 14-day free trial + free plan available
  • Pricing upon request
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Rating: 4.4/5

Pendo is a customer onboarding solution that helps product teams reduce churn and increase customer satisfaction. The platform has strong analytical capabilities, allowing you to collect and interpret data on product adoption. Thanks to all the data it collects, Pendo makes it easy to spot roadblocks and understand why your users are not using your app.

The platform then helps you guide your customers with the help of walkthroughs, in-app pop-ups, tool tips, and messages, so you can improve the onboarding experience and reduce customer service calls. While Pendo does a lot of things right, its analytics are amazing.

The platform collects a lot of data, and you can segment it in whatever way you want to make better decisions about your solution and onboarding process.

Pendo integrates with a variety of apps, including Hubspot, Jira, BigQuery, Calendly, Drift, HelpDocs, Microsoft Teams, and Optimizely. Pendo offers customized pricing upon request.

The platform offers a free-forever version for up to 1,000 monthly active users.

You can also book a demo.

Send in-app messages with a no-code solution

  • From $99/month

Hopscotch is a no-code client success software that enables teams to implement in-app messaging and collect data about user experience. The platform helps you create interactive product guides to encourage your customers’ progress through your app.

One of the good things about this app is that it uses conditional logic to segment your users based on their activity. The app’s automation features serve the right message for each user based on their in-app location and previous actions, so each experience is tailored to the audience.

Another good thing about this platform is that is easy to use. Its interface enables you to customize the look and feel of your client journey to match your brand, and the data it collects helps you understand how users interact with your solution.

Hopscotch costs from $99/month.

You can access a free 60-day trial and a demo.

Track how users interact with your solution in real-time

  • 14 Days Free Trial
  • From $20/month (billed annually)

Userflow is a customer success software that enables your team to create sophisticated user flows without writing a single line of code. The platform is flexible, and it allows you to use a variety of onboarding tools, such as an onboarding checklist, product tour, resource center, or surveys. Userflow has a clean interface that makes it ideal for non-technical teams.

Thanks to the platform’s simple but thorough onboarding process, you can create a basic user flow shortly after. One of the highlights of using this solution is that it enables you to track how your users interact with your app in real-time.

This helps you understand where your users get stuck and how they navigate roadblocks, so you can improve your processes based on customer engagement.

Userflow integrates with many popular apps, including Zapier, Segment, HubSpot, Amplitude, Mixpanel, and Heap. Userflow costs from $200/month.

You can access a free 14-day trial and a demo.

Build onboarding roadmaps with custom notifications

  • 14 Days Free Trial
  • Pricing Upon Request

Guide CX is a client success and onboarding platform that helps you guide your users through their onboarding journey with automated tasks. The platform has an intuitive layout, so even non-technical members of your team can plan out and build training materials and knowledge bases.

With Guide CX, you can build user roadmaps, create dependencies for tasks, assign onboarding tasks to team members, and keep your team informed with custom notifications.

The highlight of this platform is that it enables users to create their own updates and notifications as they use your solution. This helps the users navigate your features and remember where they left off in previous sessions.

Guide CX integrates with dozens of apps, including Jira, Salesforce, Zapier, Slack, and HubSpot.

Guide CX offers customized pricing upon request. You can access a free 14-day trial and schedule a demo.

Guide your users with a flexible solution

  • 14 Days Free Trial
  • From $59/month

Product Fruits is an onboarding tool that helps teams create interactive onboarding tours, walkthroughs, and in-tool tips based on customer feedback. The software has a good interface, and its no-code editor makes it easy to highlight your app’s new features, provide contextual support, and deliver important announcements.

I like the fact that Product Fruits enables you to segment your users and create custom glows for each segment. This helps you provide a better user experience and helps reduce churn. Even though Product Fruits helps with a lot of onboarding processes, its flexibility makes the platform shine.

Every onboarding step you create is customizable. You can use text, videos, GIFs, surveys, or other content in every step of your guide. You can create guides that cover multiple pages, connect crossroads between individual pages for a better experience, or create automatic triggers based on the user’s behavior and in-app time. This helps you improve customer satisfaction and reduce customer service calls.

Product Fruits integrates with a variety of solutions, including HubSpot, Heap, Slack, Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and Customer.io.

Product Fruits costs from $59/month.

You can access a free 14-day trial and book a demo.

The Best Customer Onboarding Software Solutions Summary Table

Tools Price
UserGuiding From $89/month (billed annually)
Document360 From $119/user/month
Whatfix 14-day free trial + Demo available
WalkMe From $2-3000/annually
Intercom From $74/month (billed annually)
Pendo Pricing upon request
Hopscotch From $99/month
Userflow From $20/month (billed annually)
Guide CX Pricing Upon Request
ProductFruits From $59/month
Preview Image - <h2 class="c-block__title b-summary-table__title c-listicle__title h3" > Compare Software Specs Side by Side</h2>

Compare Software Specs Side by Side

Use our comparison chart to review and evaluate software specs side-by-side.

Compare Software

Other Options

Here are a few more that didn’t make the top list.

  1. Stonly

    Build complex self-serve help centers with a no-code solution

  2. Rocketlane

    Create customer onboarding processes with ready-made templates

  3. LiveAgent

    Manage your help desk, ticketing, and knowledge base in one place

  4. Churn360

    Best for managing the complete customer lifecycle

  5. Issuetrak

    Best for omnichannel ticket submission and support

  6. MyHub

    Best for remote work document access

  7. Skilljar

    Customer education platform that helps you reduce customer support calls with automated step-by-step guides.

  8. Drip

    Flexible solution that enables you to segment your audience and build customized walkthroughs.

  9. Appcues

    Cloud-based software that helps you track, analyze, and optimize your onboarding tours without code.

  10. ServiceBell

    Client success software that helps you monitor user experience and interact with your clients in real-time.

Comparison Criteria

What do I look for when I select the best customer onboarding platform? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria: 

  1. User Interface (UI): I look for software that has clean designs, so your team doesn’t have to waste time learning how to navigate them.  
  2. Usability: I look for tools that are easy to implement so your team can set them up quickly and your users can leverage them to understand how to use your solution. 
  3. Integrations: I look for software that integrates with other solutions in your tech stack so you can get the most out of what they offer. Examples of integrations you might need include user research tools, UX/UI design, customer journey software, and design experience platforms.
  4. Value for Pricing: I look for reasonably priced software so you get a nice return on your investment. 

Customer Onboarding App: Key Features

  1. Simple Deployment: The client onboarding software should enable your team to map out the customer journey and advise your audience on the actions they should take without writing code. 
  2. Multiple UI Capabilities: Onboarding software allows you to engage your audience with the help of product tours, hotspots, modal elements, checklists, or driven actions. A good solution gives you the freedom to choose between multiple options. 
  3. User Tracking & Analytics: Data is everything in today’s business environment, so the onboarding software should help you measure the success of your onboarding process. It should also help you determine which changes in your process move the needle for customer retention. 
  4. Customer Segmentation: People who use your solution have different needs, so being able to segment your customers and create a tailored onboarding flow for each new user segment can help reduce churn. 
  5. Reporting: The customer onboarding software should help you create eye-catching reports so you can present your findings to the product team, management, investors, or stakeholders.

The importance of customer onboarding 

Customer onboarding helps your company succeed in the long term. As Uriel Barillas, CTO of STRATAFOLIO, an automation and analytics company, said

“If your goal is to improve conversion, homing in on the perfect onboarding process can help. In one survey, 63% of customers reported that they consider the company’s onboarding program when making a purchasing decision. People want to know that there are resources available to help them get started with a new product or service — they don’t want you to leave them high and dry.

Plus, onboarding plays a significant role in creating your customer experience. It helps eliminate frustration starting from the very first time new customers experience your product. Issues that may have prevented them from using your product can be solved quickly.

You can find out more about the different aspects of client onboarding on our blog. Subscribe to the CX Lead newsletter to receive tips from leading experts in the industry directly in your inbox.