Best Pendo Alternatives for User Behavior Insights

What is Pendo?

Pendo is a robust, all-in-one product adoption platform that allows SaaS companies to automate in-app user onboarding via step-by-step tutorials, product tours, user feedback, and new feature validation. It also offers session replays, templates, product analytics, roadmaps for product managers, AI-powered personalization and product discovery, and more. 

Some product teams might want their digital insights solution under the same hood as all these other helpful tools—we get that!—and Pendo is great as a one-stop shop DAP. It’s a no-code solution that can help SaaS companies increase user engagement, drive feature adoption for web and mobile apps, and even collect NPS surveys/ratings and new tool ideas from users. It can also integrate with Salesforce, Hubspot, ZenDesk, and other leading platforms your teams might regularly use. 

Given that Pendo is a powerful tool for enhancing your customer experience, why would you want to look at alternatives for gaining insights through product analytics? Well, apart from its steep pricing, there are a few key shortcomings we’ll outline below.

How Pendo Falls Short as a Digital Insights Solution

While Pendo is a great product experience platform, it falls short as a SaaS product analytics platform in a few key areas. Here’s why: 

• Shallow quantitative insights. Pendo can do a lot, but its ability to deep dive into user data—something all SaaS companies need to succeed—is limited compared to competitors. This makes it one of the lesser choices available for an analytics solution.

• Lacks analytics guidance. Customers complain that Pendo’s user analytics often aren’t actionable, and it doesn’t allow them to target specific user cohorts based on the data it collects.

• Limited qualitative analytics. While Pendo’s qualitative session replays come as an add-on tool, it doesn’t offer the type of qualitative behavioral analysis data-driven teams often need.

• Lacks granular insights into user friction. Because Pendo automatically tracks only a specific list of user events without further customization, it's not as granular when it comes to identifying users’ pain points. 

• Lacks built-in data governance or event management at any scale. The best product analytics tools have a data governance layer built on top of the collected raw data, which allows you to define, track, and analyze any type of event. Pendo’s toolset will leave you wanting more in this department.

• Challenges with session replays. Pendo recently rolled out session replays, but as currently built, they’re plagued with problems. These include a 14-day data retention period, separate tabs being treated as separate sessions, and weak privacy controls.

Alternative Solutions to Pendo for a Digital Insights Platform

There are many Pendo competitors out there, but only a few really get the data analytics process right, whether for a startup or an established company. The best Pendo alternatives, particularly for product analytics, have 100% automatic data capture—something very few tools have.

#1. Heap

As one of the main analytics alternatives to Pendo (and one that is leaps and bounds more robust than Google Analytics), Heap is the only digital experience analytics solution that gives you complete understanding of your customers’ digital journeys so you can quickly improve conversion, retention, product engagement, and customer satisfaction. Heap tracks every single user action in real time, letting you view all the different journeys customers take through your product. It can also pinpoint hidden friction points, let you instantly visualize user behavior with heatmaps, help you use cohorts to gain actionable insights, and integrate with your other tools.

Interested in seeing what Heap can do for you? Request a personalized demo!

Heap Pros and Cons

As always, pros and cons depend on your workflow needs. G2 gives Heap 4.4/5 stars, with the following pros and cons: 

Top Features of Heap

Heap is a product analytics platform that gives you complete quantitative insights with qualitative confirmation via heatmaps and integrated session replays, which help you track the details of all user behavior. It integrates with digital adoption platforms, including WalkMe and Chameleon, and its data science layer will also help you uncover hidden insights. 

Gathers Quantitative User Behavior Insights

With Heap’s session replays, you can see every single action your users take, including mouse movements, scrolling, clicks, and keyboard strokes. By seeing what your customers see, you get to see product usage firsthand, which gives you a window into how you can improve your platform. Furthermore, Heap’s data science layer can uncover unforeseen user pathways, which can open up new trajectories on product roadmaps.

Because Heap operates in full compliance with GDPR regulations, it is also one of the few data analytics platforms that allows for the collection of personal identifiable information (PII) for fine-grain analysis. Product teams can track users by name and company, which can help build cohorts, define use cases, and present clearer metrics (when applicable). 

Finally, as mentioned above, Heap automatically captures all user behavior data across web and mobile applications. Unlike Pendo, it doesn’t capture actions from a set list or require manual event setup for more detailed data capture. What makes Heap shine in this regard is the fact that you can set up an event to track after the data has been automatically gathered, then get historical data retroactively. Event tracking often gets very complicated as companies scale, so automatically capturing all data from the beginning can be very helpful.

Powerful and Granular Analytics

Not only can Heap’s data science layer pull out real-time suggestions and next steps to guide data analysis, but it can also send product usage data to your data warehouse so you can analyze it alongside other company data, including that which comes from integrated tools you use for sales, customer support/customer success, purchasing, demographics, marketing, and other functions. For example, integrating Heap with a CRM tool can give teams insights at the account, opportunity, and contact level. This can help reduce or eliminate data silos between teams and democratize data across your company.

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#2. Whatfix

Whatfix is a data-driven digital adoption platform that gives organizations a no-code editor that allows for in-app guidance and self-support on any application. Teams can use it when adopting new software, putting employees through remote training, managing organizational change, and more. Whatfix offers product analytics that lets companies track, analyze, and act on end users’ actions.

G2 gives WhatFix 4.6/5 stars with the following pros and cons: 

#3. WalkMe

WalkMe is a leading AI-powered digital adoption platform that overlays on any application, helping teams identify where workflows break down while offering the possibility for personalized guidance and automation to help teams get their jobs done. WalkMe includes an analytics layer that makes user journeys visible, helping product teams reduce digital friction.

G2 gives WalkMe 4.5/5 stars with the following pros and cons: 

#4. Userlane

Userlane is a digital adoption platform that lets companies automate customer onboarding and employee training with interactive step-by-step guides. It also lets companies discover what apps are used by employees so it can uncover redundant software use and reduce costs. It includes an analytics dashboard that helps you gauge application usage, happiness, engagement, and more.

G2 gives Userlane 4.7/5 stars with the following pros and cons: 

#5. Apty

Apty is a no-code digital adoption platform that assists enterprises in optimizing their business processes for employees. It aims to solve the unique challenges you might face when orchestrating people, processes, and technology by enabling employees to use your chosen tools, enforcing business process compliance, and analyzing user activity to track goals and measure impact.

G2 gives Apty 4.7/5 stars with the following pros and cons:

#6. Appcues

Appcues is a no-code digital adoption platform for product-led businesses that makes it easy to measure and improve adoption on web and mobile apps without a developer. It lets non-technical teams track and analyze product usage and quickly publish beautiful in-app onboarding tours, announcements, and surveys.

G2 gives Appcues 4.6/5 stars with the following pros and cons:

#7. Mixpanel

Mixpanel provides simple and powerful product analytics that capture every moment of the customer experience clearly and visually. While it doesn’t provide automatic data capture, it does allow for A/B testing, retroactive analysis, goal setting/tracking, and other helpful analytics tools.

G2 gives Mixpanel 4.6/5 stars with the following pros and cons:

#8. Amplitude

Amplitude is used across 25 of the Fortune 100 companies and 45,000 products. It helps teams understand and personalize their digital products and innovate their products based on captured mobile and web analytics, experiments, integrations, and data synchronization and management.

G2 gives Amplitude 4.5/5 stars with the following pros and cons:

#9. Smartlook

Smartlook is a digital experience analytics platform that automatically tracks user actions across website and mobile apps, offers session replays and heatmaps, and lets you quickly analyze your user flows. Smarlook also offers behavior flows, retention tables, segmentation, and other capabilities to help you improve your UX.

G2 gives Smartlook 4.6/5 stars with the following pros and cons:

#10. Glassbox

Glassbox is a digital experience analytics platform that helps organizations keep their customers’ digital experiences intuitive through automatic data capture across web and mobile. It is used across all major industries and captures all user behavioral activity, allowing for analysis using tools like session replays, heatmaps, funnel analysis, AI-powered struggle analysis, and more.

G2 gives Glassbox 4.9/5 stars with the following pros and cons:

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As you can see, there are many Pendo alternatives you can explore for user onboarding experiences. Depending on what your teams are hoping to achieve when it comes to digital adoption and user behavior analytics, however, you may find it helpful to consider other options. This can be key for product analytics in particular, because you’ll want to use a platform that makes the process effortless. Why? Because accurate data combined with clear data governance is key to keeping clean insights accessible across all of your teams.