As more and more companies today are building digital products for their customers, there’s a growing need for help with adoption. Dapps are platforms designed to help: they’re designed to handle everything from the basics like onboarding and helpdesk, to generating reports, analytics and insights.
In this post we’ll compare two of the most popular tools in this space—Userpilot and Appcues—and walk through the features of each one.
Userpilot
Userpilot is a SaaS solution for customer communication and look-and-feel testing. Customer communication includes common use cases like real-time chat, surveys, targeted email campaigns, in-app messaging and personalized social media posts.
The platform offers a drag-and-drop editor for users to create user flows with prebuilt UI components. In addition to creating flows, Userpilot can also be used as an analytics tool that provides insights into interactions between customers and the platform they are using.
In order to activate the platform, an integrated API is used and a private API key is generated. Users then have to integrate the API in the application and create an account in order for it to be used by Userpilot.
Appcues
For Appcues, the core offering is a set of user interfaces for app developers who want improved customer acquisition and retention efforts.
The aim is to replace heat maps, surveys, surveys, etc. with a customer journey-based fit-testing tool that allows the users to find out what their specific customer journey looks like. Appcues collects all the user activity in the form of clickstream data and matches it against patterns of customer behavior.
The benefits come from analyzing what an individual user has done within a product, which is something heat maps fail to do. Heat maps only show how long people spend on specific screens, but none of the other aspects of the design or experience are taken into account.
To get started with Appcues, users need to create an account for the product. After that, they need to sign up for a 14-day trial or purchase a paid plan. A unique app ID is required in order to connect with and integrate the product into any web or mobile application. Once the app has an ID, it can be installed using a code snippet, which is available on Appcues’ website.
Userpilot vs Appcues: Comparison
The core features of the two products are similar, but there are differences in terms of the user experience and which resources can be accessed. Here’s a summary of each one.
Personalization
Both platforms have excellent personalization capabilities. Userpilot allows users to personalize sign-up forms, new user flows and surveys by adding badges or custom images. In addition, users can also add a custom message to the beginning or end of their welcome email.
Appcues, on the other hand, allows users to personalize their product by inserting elements into the user journey. These include messages, modals and alerts that are displayed to users when they reach specific points in the app.
Reporting
Reporting is an important component of any analytics solution. It helps create actionable insights and make decisions based on what has worked or not worked in the past.
Userpilot has many great reports, including ones for user performance, customer on-boarding and surveys. It also has a designer that allows users to create their own reports and dashboards.
Appcues doesn’t offer custom reporting. Instead, it has a feature called data sheets that lets users add and manage their own data. Data sheets are immensely helpful for customizing the product to fit your specific needs, however they don’t provide any way of analyzing that data.
User interface and look-and-feel testing
Userpilot comes bundled with a super easy-to-use drag-and-drop editor that lets users create user flows with prebuilt UI components. In addition, it can also be used as a reporting and analytics tool that provides insights into interactions between users and the customer experience.
Appcues allows for in-app surveys, but it is limited to sending one question per survey. It also can only be used to create a new survey if the user has logged into Appcues. Appcues doesn’t let users create any other elements on the product’s UI or analyze what is working and what is not.
The final verdict
If your primary objective is to collect customer feedback, then Userpilot is a great choice. On the other hand, if the main focus is on analyzing customer behavior and analysis, then Appcues would be a better fit.
