Appcues

Avantages

Appcues easily allows us to add in-app messaging to our customers for onboarding, new feature announcements, outage reporting and surveys/feedback. Their interface lays over our app, so we can add various flows and cues without having to bug (pun intended) our engineering team. There's some great reporting features and a good amount of customization through their API and their new integration with Salesforce.

Inconvénients

The tool can be a bit buggy at times. If I'm working on a flow, sometimes it won't save my work or may get stuck, so I'll have to refresh the flow builder and pickup where I left off. Also, I can understand how it's challenging to build a UI to do what they do, but I do think there could be some improvements without their builder that would make it a bit more intuitive. I was also very surprised that Appcues didn't use their own product for walking a new user through using their flow builder.

Avantages

We discovered AppCues after making the decision to go with a third-party onboarding software instead of writing it ourselves. This gave us more flexibility in terms of who could control and publish the content (it did not have to be someone on the dev side). We did have some dev and UX involvement initially, but we are pretty much up and running independently now that we have some published flows under out belt. We've used this for onboarding trial users/new customers, feature releases, training notificaitons, and scheduled maintenance notifications so far, but the possibilities seem endless. We do plan to utilize the platform for NPS surveys in the future, but haven't tried it out yet. We have come across a bug or two along the way, but the support team has always been responsive. They have a great trial option as well when evaluating the service. For the price, it was a no brainer for us compared to their competitors and we've been very happy so far.

Inconvénients

Would be great if they offered an "opt-out" or unsubscribe option. I do worry about users getting annoyed of seeing certain message groups, like training notifications, etc. It would also be great to have a better format for exports, especially when survey results are involved. Right now they are dumped to an excel spreadsheet which we can further manipulate, but it would be great if it were quicker and easier to get to that data.

Avantages

We use AppCues to help on-board new customers and essentially walk them through their account setup. We've seen a major increase in customers getting up and running much faster on their own. This has reduced the load on our account managers and tech support who previously spent much of their time doing live on-boarding wit new customers - sometimes multiple times per customer when customer had multiple uses who each had different questions at different times.

Inconvénients

The onboarding of AppCues itself was difficult. It took me a lot of sessions with the AppCues staff to get it setup properly on our site. The tool is so robust that I frequently found myself down rabbit holes just trying to get one element set up. They did offer a lot of live support - but I wish it was more intuitive and easy to use on my own.

Avantages

Appcues is a great tool. It is extremely user-friendly, allowing you to create impactful flows that help deliver messages, info and helpful tips directly to your customers. The people at Appcues have been amazing since day 1, always checking in to ensure we found success with their product. I have nothing but good thing to say about Appcues!

Inconvénients

There are one or two UX improvements I would make but overall I can't say there is much I dislike!

Avantages

Appcues is great, offering a simple, effective and easily set-up method to provide in-system guidance and advice. While some small developer effort is required to ensure that Appcues has the data on which you want to base showing cues, the flexibilty of the flows and the granularity with which you can control who seems them is fantastic.

Inconvénients

That it requires any developer effort. But the amount is minimised. You're not going to get away with a highly configurable solution that doesn't require some data to be sent to customise it.
And getting data out. It's limited to relatively basic exports. This is particularly annoying when it comes to surveys done through Appcues.

Avantages

Appcues has been a great resource to our organization in engaging and teaching our customers! It has helped to grow our product adoption metrics and the new improvements make it easy for us to create campaigns on the fly!

Inconvénients

In the beginning, there were features that were missing such as highlighting options and segmentation, but they have continuously improved the product over time.

Avantages

Appcues is amazingly well designed for any user. It's intuitive and simple to set up. It's data and record keeping make it a breeze to maintain and manage. Their customer success team is very friendly and truly desires to see your business succeed. By using Appcues, we've almost completely eliminated new user support inquiries. It provides us a way to proactively communicate how to use our software and where to begin.

Inconvénients

Software updates are sometimes poorly communicated. But they're quick to educate and catch you up to speed when you're in need!

Avantages

Feature Updates - updates that add depth but keep ease of use are great. Everytime I log in I feel like I can do more, but the design/setup is very intuitive.
Ease of Use (non-technical) - Super easy for my busy dev team to do the one time set up and I have been able to do the complete customization from there.
Support is great - Help resources and the people that answer questions/reach out are really helpful
I looked into a log of "app walk through" options at first, but this was definitely the best value and I am so pleasantly surprised how much the Appcues resources have helped me come up with new ideas to engage clients.

Inconvénients

Cannot really think of any cons. Appcues lets you have custom events and fields, but its not the one click integration yet. The day I can just put in my Hubspot code and be able to automatically choose which fields/events I want to see will be amazing.

Avantages

It's incredibly easy to use, the interface is nice and simple - they've prioritised this over just making it look impressive. It doesn't take much time to build impressive and effective experiences for customers. Best of all it allows me to provide the right assistance to my customers at the right time.

Inconvénients

The installation is difficult/impossible without the intervention of a developer. It seems to be a very 'American' business in that there's an assumption that creating experiences in English is enough for most people, support for multilingual flows/checklists/NPS is an enterprise feature - which I find bizarre.

Avantages

The granular targeting of users is fantastic. You can specify messaging to appear to customers according to a wide variety of parameters, allowing you to tailor a communication for almost any situation your user encounters while using your application.

Inconvénients

The Reporting still leaves a bit to be desired, being, at time of writing, limited to a CSV of user interactions with a given message flow. The data is there, but it's up to you to ingest it into your BI software and slice and dice the data to get insights.

Avantages

I have enjoyed the experience with Appcues from the start. First, their Academy is very insightful and gave me many ideas to use in our own Onboarding flow. Second, I really liked that I was able to create our own flows into our system during the free trial which meant that I was able to see how it would work for our customers. Third, the ability to customise the tutorial to visually match our brand identity was very important to me. In general, the experience for me as has been basically frictionless.

Inconvénients

It's missing a way to easily analyse your data and to see where your users drop off (only available through third-party integration). It can be done via a csv export but is not as user-friendly as the whole other experience with the system.

Avantages

I love that things are always improving. The product updates and new features released are always relevant and well thought out. When we first starting using the system the functionality was good, but over the past year they have continued to make things easier.

Inconvénients

Not sure I have an answer for this. Maybe some more robust reporting could be developed, but what is there now is more than adequate.

Avantages

Appcues' Chrome extension is far and above one of it's most useful features. We are able to construct and visualize flows where it matters, within our app. Being able to quickly enable and disable it makes a huge difference in our workflow.

Inconvénients

Occasionally, the Chrome extension can be buggy. This has led to some frustrating moments or awkward presentations where I've struggled to get the app to behave. Overall, this hasn't been a large blocker to seeing success with the app.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pendo

Pourquoi passer à Appcues

Members of our Product team had previous experience with Appcues. This allowed us to quickly implement and begin creating flows in Appcues.

Avantages

I'm especially fond of how easy the AppCues interface is to use. It makes executing upon in-app messaging programs (via slide-outs and modals) a breeze, and adding training elements (hover-overs and tool-tips) can be done in a snap.

Inconvénients

Occasionally the app will "stick" and metrics will be slow to populate - but that's probably due to user impatience more than anything else.

Avantages

Ease of set up, analytics, educational content, ability to quickly iterate and experiment

Inconvénients

Chrome extension is sometimes buggy but it's gotten much better as of late. Additionally, there are no integrations out for email providers.

Avantages

1) The Ease of building and launching
2) Can execute with a lean team
3) Has a great customer success and support team that you can rely on

Inconvénients

I would like a more indepth analytical Insights displayed within the Appcues UI itself. Currently we get a high-level view within Appcues and for a more detailed view, we require to download a .csv or excel file which is a bit cumbersome.

Additionally, Appcues isn't optimized for localization and that is something we would love to have as we are in the global market space.

Avantages

Ease of use, very intuitive, but if I run into any issues the support is top notch and very responsive.

Inconvénients

The document library can be difficult to find what I need at times, I usually like to find the answers myself.

Avantages

AppCues is so easy to use! This tool has had a huge impact in our ability to improve and experiment with our app experience without waiting on dev teams.

Inconvénients

Load time could be faster, but its qualities override this negative.

Avantages

Appcues lets you implement user onboarding features (i.e. help tooltips, feature tours, announcements, etc.) into your application, on-the-fly, without the need to implement those features directly into your code, thus no dev, QA, to prod traversal. Simply open the Appcues console, create a new appcue (e.g. modal, tooltip, etc.) or modify an existing one, choose where to deploy it to, and you're done.

Inconvénients

There's very little NOT to like about Appcues, but the fact that you're relying on a 3rd party is about the only thing that I don't like, but that's a very VERY small price to pay in order to implement user onboarding features.

Avantages

Appcues is pretty easy to learn and use and very flexible and powerful. It's easy to customize for our tool and brand, and provides a way to onboard our users in a scalable way without taking up precious developer time.

Inconvénients

It can be a little tricky to use, especially when we get into more complicated use cases. There are occasional bugs (although they are typically fixed quickly).

Avantages

I liked that they made it very easy for a non-developer to build and release guides in our app. This saved us time and energy in the dev department, which is invaluable.

Inconvénients

They used a chrome extension as the builder to create the guides, which could be a bit finicky. At the same time, it gave them the ability to update and make fixes very quickly. I also didn't like that we had to integrate with a third party to get deeper analytics about our users.

Alternatives envisagées 

Pendo

Pourquoi passer à Appcues

We went from Pendo to Appcues to back to Pendo because as we grew as a company, we needed deeper analytics and insight into our users.

Avantages

Appcues' simple and intuitive design makes it easy to implement and use! We were able to get up and running quickly, with little support and immediate saw results. The Appcues team is super helpful, outgoing and committed to each customer's success.

Inconvénients

I don't dislike anything about Appcues. The product could use some enhancements to expand its functionality, such as: adding a scheduling tool, more criteria for establishing / tracking goals, and easier integration with APIs.

Alternatives envisagées 

WalkMe

Pourquoi passer à Appcues

Their team took the time to understand our business, and provided excellent customer service from the moment we were engaged with them. Cost was also a highly weighted decision factor.

Avantages

Do not buy this if you aren't part of the [SENSITIVE CONTENT] team, they will say it can all be done without [SENSITIVE CONTENT] when being sold to you, but it can often require development of the product to meet what Appcues needs. If you're in the UK DO NOT purchase, support is only in the US so be prepared for late night emails and waiting for complicated email responses.

Inconvénients

The troubleshooting
The UI
The overcomplicate set-up

Avantages

Easy to setup and use, with a variety of options ie. modals, slideouts, NPS, tooltips, blinkers

Inconvénients

It would be great if there was a way to preview how the flows appear in different browsers. I once went to visit a user and the flow looked stretched in

Avantages

Appcues has helped our team quickly role out in-product communication that drastically improve our users experience and impact key business metrics across our funnel. It's beautifully designed, easy-to-use and excellent for empowering more of our team to run experiments without having to use dev resources - which saves us time and money. Definitely recommend. Every product team should have this tool in their belt.

Inconvénients

Would definitely love it if Appcues supported mobile apps. Doesn't seem to be an undo option (or at least I can't find) when creating flows.

Avantages

It's an extremely powerful set of tools to message our users without relying on engineering changes.

Inconvénients

The learning curve for me has been steep. I wish there were branching logic based on whether certain page elements appear or even the ability for flows to skip steps if a page element required for that step is absent.

Avantages

AppCues is very intuitive to learn how to use - minimal training was required the online resources are a great asset.

Inconvénients

Nothing! The software is fantastic, nothing I don't like about it.

Avantages

1. Robust product tour designer has many customization options
2. Quickly create and manage user segments to ensure correct flow targeting
3. Organize flows and access data regarding how they are used by customers

Inconvénients

1. No integration with MadCap Flare
2. Occasional interface problems results in lost work

Avantages

Appcues is really easy to use and makes creating flows to onboard users very engaging and pleasurable. I also enjoy the fact that I can customize the experience to match our brand design.

Inconvénients

Steep price hike last year that made us evaluate whether to continue using the service. But the value we get from using the software outweighed the price hike.

Avantages

The ease of use of the campaign editor, allows our marketing team to create content when new features are released, the tools to track the success of the campaign and measure customer engagement.

Inconvénients

We experienced a couple of technical setbacks with the product. Thankfully the support team helped us resolve them fast.

Avantages

It’s ease of use in getting customers on board, and data it provides back to us

Inconvénients

Sometimes the plugin is clunky, would like to be able to generate more reports in app rather than exporting to csv

Avantages

Appcues makes it extremely easy to engage with customers. The variety of message types they offer, along with capabilities like personalized content and message flows (where you string together multiple messages to create a guided tour of your product) make it the best way I've found to welcome new users, announce new products, and encourage adoption of existing features.

Beyond the product itself, I've been very impressed with the customer experience. Support is quick to respond and the product folks I've spoken with are very receptive to feedback. They also are constantly releasing updates and new features.

Inconvénients

Honestly I have to get fairly nit picky here as the overall product is very strong. Reporting could be stronger, but I've seen improvements over the past few months and I would expect that to continue. I'd also like to see improvements to their integration with other vendors. Right now they have strong capabilities at exporting data from Appcues to other platforms, but like another reviewer mentioned, if I could configure an integration to upload event data that's been tagged using other platforms (so that I don't have to double-tag things), then it would take Appcues to the next level.

Avantages

Being able to maintain our workflows using the Chrome Browser extension

Inconvénients

Setting it up in all of our environments. But we understand it is necessary for them to understand what app is being accessed.

Avantages

Appcues is a fantastic tool to target users in your Webapp/mobile app and notify them and/or train them. I like that it takes less than 5 minutes to get the hang of using the chrome extension and you are building complex flows and targeting users. The reporting is great as well, and allows you to make easy business decisions.

Inconvénients

I wish there was a bit more customization options for look and feel of the modals. I'm not always content with the look without quite a bit of tweaking.

Avantages

Saves us tons of development time. With constantly evolving onboarding flows, we needed a way to me more efficient. Appcues was the answer.

Inconvénients

Performance of builder could be better- it can be quite slow.

Avantages

Easy to get started and easy to edit along the way. You're not stuck with anything you create and can continually inetrate based on user interactions with your product.

Inconvénients

Difficult to use the checklist due to changing URLs within an application.

Avantages

Ease of use, design customization options, segments and checklist features

Inconvénients

Sometimes impressions and completion rates are inconsistent with the data we see in Heap

Avantages

So simple to use but it looks amazing and the customer service is 5*

Inconvénients

Nothing.

Avantages

It is easy to use and simple to understand. I started to work with it in one day and in the other i was super used to already. Great ux, you can customize it a lot and work with the html and css.

Inconvénients

There are a few bugs during the flow building, and its a bit slow somethimes. What i really dont like is that i cant open the flows in other tabs (with the right button of the mouse), it has to be in one tab only (or launch in mutiple tabs the appcues site).

Avantages

Appcues provides a simple solution to display messages to your users at the right time. It gives a variety of ways to gather insights and their new "flywheel" gives good education on product adoption.

Inconvénients

Appcues helps with the majority of our flows but there are some challenges with customizing some flows to work correctly. There is also an issue between our platforms which prevents us from using the checklist feature.

Avantages

Works great to highlight new features and new app store apps.

Inconvénients

Cost per user is prohibitive when implementing at large enterprises.

Avantages

As a fairly non-technical product designer, Appcues is like wizardry to me. It gives me the powers to create wonderful user experiences with limited code knowledge.

Inconvénients

Sometimes the extension is a little buggy and crashes. I also wish that there were an easier way to test out flows that are only meant to show once. Also, since my platform is a fairly complex app, I often need the help of a frontend engineer to troubleshoot flows.

Avantages

Appcues does a great job of making their tool accessible. I love being able to build flows inside my app, it helps me step into my users' shoes.

Inconvénients

The only thing I don't like about Appcues is that my team doesn't use it as much as they should.

Avantages

The product is easy to use and you can create several tutorials in few hours.

Inconvénients

They increased the price of the lower plan by 256% last winter.

That is not sustainable for start-ups and we invested time and money to use that product and build good tutorials. Less than 6 months after the start, prices are going out crazy and it makes no sense to use that provider.

I can't have any thrust for the long-term use since they do this type of action for existing customers.
Yes, when they announced that, they offered to get 3 month at previous price before getting hijacked prices... What a deal.
We have quitted like many others.

Avantages

The Chrome extensions makes it to easy to create new flows.

Inconvénients

Would love a deeper integration with Intercom.

Avantages

-Extremely easy to implement
-Segmenting by any type of user
-Looks beautiful
-Easy analytics

Inconvénients

Everything is element driven (e.g. show a call-out next to this H1 heading when user is on this page). However, our site has many "hidden" elements on a page, which only display when the user interacts with the page in a certain way. It'd be nice if you could somehow detect these clicks/interactions, and then display tutorials based on that (e.g. on click of this button, show this alert)

Avantages

The UI and ease to create new flows as well as the ability to fine tune and customize.

Inconvénients

The user reporting is a little weak, definitely more focus is on the design and building side (for good reason)

Avantages

I really like the kind of modals we can use to communicate with our users and clients.

Inconvénients

Import and export solutions to create segments and make some analysis is not so efficient

Avantages

We recently got our Appcues onboarding survey to create tags on our intercom users, in order to use their feedback for email campaign customization. This is a really helpful feature that we needed and couldn't get from other solutions.

Inconvénients

We wish that we could have more in-app dashboard visibility of the analytics. Right now it's mostly limited to CSV exports.

Avantages

Ease of use, distributed responsibility where literally anyone on our product or marketing team can launch a new flow.

Inconvénients

Responsive is not their strong suit (yet - we are told it's in process). We have to duplicate our flows on mobile and desktop and adjust accordingly.