10 Best Customer Onboarding Software
Our one-on-one guidance will help you find the perfect fit.
Everybody knows that it’s difficult to acquire customers. But here’s the thing, convincing prospects to try out your solution is only part of the job. Once users sign up for your solution, you also have to show them how to make the most of the new tool at their disposal.
This is where customer onboarding software comes in. Also called client onboarding software, they are tools that use advanced features to simplify the customer journey and help users get familiar with your app or service.
Customer onboarding software helps you offer a great customer experience from day one, so you can increase your customer retention rates, decrease your churn rate, and expand your user base.
Read my review to discover the best customer onboarding software to help users enter your ecosystem smoothly. My review includes a short description and screenshot of each solution and a comparison chart so you can decide which tool would help you the most.
Comparison Criteria
What do I look for when I select the best customer onboarding platform? Here’s a summary of my evaluation criteria:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- Value for Pricing: I look for reasonably priced software so you get a nice return on your investment.
Customer Onboarding App: Key Features
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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Overviews Of The 17 Best Customer Onboarding Software Solutions
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.
UserGuiding
Best for personalized user onboarding
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.
Churn360
Best for managing the complete customer lifecycle
Churn360 is a customer success software that helps you not just onboard new users, but improve product adoption and reduce churn. It covers the complete customer lifecycle to provide a holistic solution to set new customers up for success, and keep them around once you do. The platform works by providing a 360-degree overview of your customers by pulling data from your CRM, communication channels, financial platforms, and other sources.
You can set up a unique customer journey in the platform to then track new users through. From there, you can segment users and automate aspects of your customer onboarding or customer success efforts. For example, you can create campaigns and targeted communications based on specific behavioural triggers. Meanwhile, the software calculates a user's health score to help you monitor engagement and spot churn risk.
Some of the specific features of Churn360 are customer data profiles, customer journey mapping, segmentation, campaign management, automated tasks, push notifications, and analytics and reporting tools. It integrates with other platforms including Intercom, Pipedrive, HubSpot, Chargebee, Freshdesk, Jira, Gmail, Outlook, Zoho CRM, Stripe, Zendesk, and Segment, among others.
Pricing starts from $299 per month, and a free demo is available upon request.
Document360
Best for managing a self-serve knowledge base
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.
Whatfix
Improve your onboarding experience with integrated feedback
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.
WalkMe
Code-free solution that helps you create customer activity heatmaps
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
Intercom
Improve user experience with automation
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.
Pendo
Drive user engagement with data
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.
ProductFruits
Guide your users with a flexible solution
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.
Stonly
Build complex self-serve help centers with a no-code solution
Stonly is a client onboarding software that helps SaaS product and sales teams create superior customer experiences for their users. The solution enables you to build complex knowledge bases, product tours, checklists, and self-serve help centers that enable your users to find information with ease.
Stonly is very easy to implement, and thanks to its free-forever version, it’s a good solution for lean startups that want to improve their customer experience on a budget. The platform has a simple interface, making it suitable for non-technical staff members. One of the good things about using this app is that it offers a lot of options to build your onboarding flows.
You can choose your own adventure and build the best information resource for your users – product tours, self-serve help centers, or something else.
Stonly integrates with multiple apps, including Zendesh, Front, Freshdesk, and Segment. Stonly costs from $49/month.
The platform offers a free-forever version for up to 1,000 guide views per month and a free 14-day trial.
Hopscotch
Send in-app messages with a no-code solution
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.
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The Best Customer Onboarding Software Solutions Summary Table
Tool | Trial Info | Price | ||
---|---|---|---|---|
1 | UserGuiding Best for personalized user onboarding | 14-day free trial | From $89/month (billed annually) | Website |
2 | Churn360 Best for managing the complete customer lifecycle | Free demo available | From $299/month | Website |
3 | Document360 Best for managing a self-serve knowledge base | 14-day free trial | From $119/user/month | Website |
4 | Whatfix Improve your onboarding experience with integrated feedback | Free Trial | Pricing Upon Request | Website |
5 | WalkMe Code-free solution that helps you create customer activity heatmaps | Free demo | From $2-3000/annually | Website |
6 | Intercom Improve user experience with automation | 14-day free trial | From $74/month (billed annually) | Website |
7 | Pendo Drive user engagement with data | 14-day free trial + free plan available | Pricing upon request | Website |
8 | ProductFruits Guide your users with a flexible solution | 14 Days Free Trial | From $59/month | Website |
9 | Stonly Build complex self-serve help centers with a no-code solution | 14 days free trial. | From $99/month (billed annually) | Website |
10 | Hopscotch Send in-app messages with a no-code solution | Not available | From $99/month | Website |
Other Options
Here are a few more that didn’t make the top list.
- Guide CX
Build onboarding roadmaps with custom notifications
- Userflow
Track how users interact with your solution in real-time
- Rocketlane
Create customer onboarding processes with ready-made templates
- LiveAgent
Manage your help desk, ticketing, and knowledge base in one place
- Drip
Flexible solution that enables you to segment your audience and build customized walkthroughs.
- Skilljar
Customer education platform that helps you reduce customer support calls with automated step-by-step guides.
- ServiceBell
Client success software that helps you monitor user experience and interact with your clients in real-time.
- Userpilot
Customer success platform that helps teams increase user adoption with behavior-driven experiences.
- Nickelled
Code-free solution that enables you to create walkthroughs and step-by-step guides.
- Appcues
Cloud-based software that helps you track, analyze, and optimize your onboarding tours without code.
- Precursive OBX
Flexible customer support solution that enables you to map out your user journey.
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.