Appcues vs Chameleon: Which is Better for Interactive User Guides?

Is Appcues or Chameleon the best tool for interactive user guides? Is there a better in-app onboarding software that would better fit your needs?

With so many alternatives on review sites, it’s a bit tricky to choose one.

You need to consider your priorities and what functionality you’ll need from the tool to get the job done. Then there’s also the price that needs to match your budget. Right?

In this post, we’ll discuss exactly that – what the perfect tool for creating interactive user guides should deliver and which will be the best choice for your company’s needs.

Let’s dive in!

TL;DR

• Let’s explore how Appcues and Chameleon compare when it comes to creating interactive user guides.
  • Appcues is a robust product adoption and user onboarding platform for web and mobile apps. It enables product teams to create, implement, and test personalized in-app onboarding experiences. The platform also helps you announce new product features and collect customer feedback.
  • Chameleon is a product adoption platform. It enables SaaS teams to leverage real-time user data to build beautiful on-brand experiences, improve user onboarding, and drive product-led growth.
• If you’re looking for a better option for creating interactive user guides, Userpilot exceeds both functionality and value for money compared to other tools on the list.
• Userpilot is a product growth platform that drives user activation, feature adoption, and expansion revenue. It also helps product teams collect user feedback, streamline onboarding, and gather actionable insights from analytics. Get a Userpilot demo and drive your product growth code-free.

Userpilot – A Better Alternative for Building Interactive User Guides

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What is an interactive user guide?

An interactive user guide is a set of UI patterns designed to work together and help customers understand how to use your product.

There are two main types of user guides: full product tours (which tend to be more detailed and time-consuming), and interactive manuals (using tooltips and real-time guidance to provide more contextual help to your customers).

Interactive user manuals are an excellent way of engaging and educating your users, helping them to get the most out of your product, and improving user onboarding and feature adoption.

Must have features for interactive user guide tools

Not all tools are built the same. Some offer different advantages over others while some will simply get you basic functionality but at a low price. It depends on your budget and needs which will be the best tool to build interactive user guides.

Here’s what to look for as the main functionalities when picking a tool to build in-app guides:

• Good range of UI patterns to use for building your guides.
• Ability to customize each interactive guide to fit your brand and style.
• Segmentation so you can trigger the guides to the right audience at the right time. A one-size-fits-all approach won’t bring you the desired results.
• The ability to trigger the user guides when specific in-app events happen is nice to have and will help you build more contextual in-app experiences.
• Minimum product usage analytics, to be able to track how users engage with the product, and where they get stuck so you can build relevant user guides to help them.

The above list is not exhaustive but it’s a starting point. Depending on your product, you might also need automated localization, A/B testing capabilities, advanced analytics or security, and more.

Appcues for creating interactive user guides

User guides are an integral part of creating frictionless in-app experiences and maximizing product adoption. As a user onboarding platform, Appcues offers various tools to help users understand how to navigate your product.

• Modals, tooltips, slideouts, and hotspots to help users take the right actions.
• Launchpad for giving users access to all the flows they’ve engaged with (available on the Growth plan – $879/mo, paid annually).
• Checklists for guiding users through a series of tasks to complete a goal (also available on the Growth plan).
• Target these to specific user audiences you can build based on specific criteria such as in-app engagement or events.
• To trigger your guides when an event occurs, you’ll need to ask for a custom quote for the Enterprise plan, as this option is not available on the Essentials or Growth plans.
• Appcues supports localization of your walkthroughs only on their Growth plan and up.

Overall, Appcues is a good option for building in-app guidance, but it can get quite expensive fast if you need more than just some simple tooltip guides.

No-code product tours in Appcues

The drag-and-drop Appcues Builder is a useful tool for creating personalized product tours without engineering support.

Other features that facilitate product guides and tours include:

• Appcues Flows to create customized user onboarding journeys and welcome new users.
• UI patterns, such as modals, tooltips, and slideouts, to convey crucial information about different product features at the right time.
• Checklists to help new users monitor their progress as they get the hang of your app.
• Segmentation and event tracking to take each user on a personalized journey based on how they interact with your product.

It’s worth noting that the no-code Appcues Builder lets you customize icons, text, and other elements to match your brand identity. However, you’ll have to use CSS to unlock advanced customization capabilities. If you’re looking for a more customizable and flexible alternative, Userpilot might be a better option.

In-app messaging in Appcues

Appcues is primarily designed to facilitate user onboarding, meaning it features that let you provide seamless in-app support.

These include:

• Launchpads: These let users access all Appcues flows from a dropdown menu within your app. It acts as a handy resource center that users can reference whenever they get stuck. The downside is it offers no categorization or search functionality, so it might get a bit tricky to find resources. You also can’t integrate your chat or KB docs inside.

• Tooltips: These are useful for walking users through various product features and changes.
• Modals and screens: They come in handy to notify users about new features that might be useful for them. You can also use them to share inspiration, suggestions, and tips.

Chameleon for creating interactive user guides

An interactive user guide is a combination of prompts used when onboarding users in order to help them understand how to use your product. Users learn and build habits by interacting, so here’s how to make that happen with Chameleon:

• Hotspots: Hotspot is a beacon or a pulsating dot that can be attached to any element on your product’s interface. A hotspot captures a user’s attention without breaking their flow or current intention. By clicking (or hovering) on the hotspot, a user can get more details on that feature and begin to engage better.
• Launchers: Launchers function based on customizable widgets that can be used as checklists or help menus (more like manuals) to deepen user engagement and feature discovery. With these checklists, you can motivate and guide users to complete key setup or activation tasks. These self-help menus provide searchable interactive guidance for key workflows, pro tips, or common questions.
• Tours: Tours help you guide, successfully onboard, support, or celebrate your users’ journey, from discovery to mastery of your product. Chameleon’s tour is not very interactive, and Chameleon doesn’t offer interactive guides unlike other tools (Userpilot).

Offering interactive self-service support with a resource center feature is very important, but Chameleon falls short of this. For now, Hotspots and launchers are the most beneficial features for interactive user guides. Aside from being able to do all these on Userpilot, you can also track and analyze the efficiency of your interactive guides on user behavior.

No-code product tours in Chameleon

Product tours are an essential tool for a product manager in guiding users toward their “Aha!” moment or showcasing high-value features that are being underused.

Below is a range of features that are accessible for use when creating product tours with Chameleon:

• Partially no-code editor: Product tour software with little development support is essential. Therefore, creating an effective interactive product tour should require minute coding knowledge. However, Chameleon has a steeper learning curve and is not entirely a no-code tool.
• Fully customizable styling: From simple things like fonts, colors, and button shapes to custom CSS, you should be able to tailor every single in-product tour to look 100% on-brand.

• Native A/B testing: Chameleon helps you create variations of in-app flows until you find what users engage with the most. Let’s say you create a segment for an e-commerce product campaign, you can test the flow of in-app messages repetitively using different copies and designs.
• Contextual targeting: One of the most powerful capabilities of Chameleon is the ability to show in-product experiences to the most relevant users. All you need to do is define specific user groups and create segments that you use to target your experiences. Chameleon offers a few basic pre-configured audiences, which you can use without sending any custom data to Chameleon. This is set automatically.

In-app messaging in Chameleon

In-app messages are timely, relevant, and contextual notifications your users see while interacting with your product or app. The common use cases are improving onboarding flows, offering self-serve support, and getting relevant user feedback.

How can Chameleon help you create effective in-app messages? These features are in your arsenal.

• Modals: Modals are used to grab the user’s attention. For example, you can use modals for your in-app tutorials and anchor them to specific elements on the page. Or you can add a pop-up with an animated confetti effect to celebrate once the user successfully completes onboarding.
• Tooltips: Tooltips are short messages related to specific UI elements that provide additional explanations and guide users toward taking specific actions. They often help users discover the product value and quickly reach their “Aha!” moment.

Pros and cons of Appcues

Are you wondering if Appcues is the right fit for your user onboarding needs or if you should check out other options?

Here are a few reasons why using an Appcues alternative makes sense:

• You want more customizability. Customization options on Appcues are limited to color, size, and style. Advanced customization will require you to work with CSS code. It can be a roadblock when your team members lack technical expertise, leaving you dependent on developers.
• You’re on a budget. With Appcues, you’ll have to pay more to access advanced features like custom CSS, localization, or even simple checklists. If you’re a startup or small business with a limited budget, you might benefit from using a tool like Userpilot that offers more value for money.
• You want to collect detailed customer feedback. Appcues offers limited functionality in terms of surveys. If you want to explore other survey and feedback collection formats apart from NPS, Appcues may not be an ideal choice.

Pros of Appcues

As a first-comer in the no-code product adoption landscape, Appcues offers several valuable features. It’s suitable for mid-market SaaS businesses looking for a simple, easy-to-use tool that enhances user onboarding, retention, and the overall customer experience.

Let’s take a closer look at the benefits of Appcues:

• Intuitive UI and UX: Appcues offers a straightforward interface that’s easy to navigate and use. Users with non-technical backgrounds can design captivating in-app flows and onboarding journeys with its simple drag-and-drop builder. You can tailor user journeys with various UI patterns, from modals and hotspots to tooltips, slideouts, and banners.
• Simple setup: You can get started with Appcues in minutes by adding the SDK to your app’s source code or integrating Appcues with Segment or Google Tag Manager. Then, add a Chrome extension to launch the Appcues Builder in a few quick clicks and start creating in-app flows.
• Feedback options: Create Net Promoter Score (NPS) surveys to collect actionable user feedback. You can even check and analyze NPS analytics on your Appcues dashboard.
• Mobile onboarding: Besides web apps, you can use Appcues to create end-to-end experiences for mobile apps. It supports various mobile environments, including Native Android, Native iOS, React Native, Flutter, and Iconic.
• Extensive integrations: Appcues integrates with 20+ email automation, CRM, and analytics tools, including Heap, Zapier, HubSpot, Google Analytics, and Google Tag Manager. Many of these include two-way integrations.

Cons of Appcues

Appcues comes with a ton of useful features you’d expect from a leading product adoption platform, but it does have a few shortcomings.

Let’s look at a few drawbacks of Appcues:

• Poor element detection: The Appcues algorithm occasionally struggles to detect in-app elements, unlike some of its competitors like Userpilot. It’s particularly limiting when you want to add tooltips to individual options in a dropdown menu.
• Limited customization capabilities: While Appcues lets you customize pre-designed templates, you’re limited to basic options like font style, size, color, and padding. Advanced customization requires working with CSS code, which can be challenging for non-technical teams.
• Basic analytics: Appcues provides insights into product usage and customer behavior. However, you can’t access in-depth analytics without connecting to a third-party tool like Amplitude or Google Analytics.
• Limited survey options: Appcues lacks variety in feedback collection and survey options and doesn’t offer integrations with other platforms like Google Forms and Typeform. You can only build NPS surveys. This is in contrast to some of its competitors, like Userpilot, which offers an extensive library of customizable survey templates.
• Higher pricing: Starting at $249 per month, the Appcues Essential tier has several constraints, such as limited UI patterns and no custom CSS support. Moreover, localization support is only available in the Enterprise tier. If your app is multilingual, you’ll have to shell out a ton of money to make the most of Appcues.
• No live chat: While Appcues offers educational resources and a help center (Help Docs), customer support is limited to email and phone.

Userpilot – A Better Alternative for Building Interactive User Guides

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Pros and cons of Chameleon

Despite its strong performance when it comes to creating personalized and highly customized user experiences, Chameleon is not the most competitive tool when compared to similar products.

Here are three reasons why you might need to look elsewhere:

• You are on a budget: To get access to all the needed tools for proper onboarding and adoption, you need to pay for the higher plans that can get expensive.
• Requires CSS knowledge: Custom CSS works by targeting specific elements of Chameleon Experiences to change their styling. However not all users have an idea what CSS is all about, so, you need to be technically savvy.
• Analytics are not advanced: Chameleon doesn’t possess robust analytics features like Userpilot does. You might want to consider another tool if you need accurate product and user analytics, without paying for additional tools.

Pros of Chameleon

From a wide array of features to aesthetic UI patterns that can create any flow no matter how customized they need to be, Chameleon is no doubt a powerful tool for scaling product adoption.

It works in a similar way to Userpilot and offers similar features: styling, analytics, templates, goals, A/B testing, and checklists.

Let’s look at the pros of using Chameleon:

• Intuitive no-code builder: Chameleon comes with an easy-to-use Chrome Extension builder.
• Engaging tour guides: Build interactive tours to onboard users, announce features, and create other customer in-product experiences using simple steps.
• Good range of in-app messaging and UI patterns: Easy to create custom modals, slide-outs, tooltips, hotspots, launchers (checklists or resource hub), and more.
• Full two-way and deep analytics integrations: Chameleon fits into your stack, and easily connects with your favorite tools to send data to, and from Chameleon. It offers the deepest integrations, with analytics tools, CRMs, and more.
• Effective segmentation and targeting system: Leverage user data and experiences to structure effective marketing messages and tour guides for a specific target audience.
• Advanced A/B testing: Drive continuous improvement of in-app messages and define the ideal user experience with precise A/B testing.
• Rate limiting: No user wants to be overwhelmed with multiple product tours, in-app messages, and tasks. With rate limiting, you can reduce the number of user experiences — one step at a time, with clarity over speed.

Cons of Chameleon

While Chameleon is a deep production adoption tool with an array of great features, there are still some downsides. Here are the main cons of the tool:

• Not entirely no-code: Early on, we stated that Chameleon can be used without code. True. But it is not a completely no-code tool. You’ll need the help of a technical-savvy employee in your team to sort out some build-up as the learning curve is steeper.
• Hard-to-use interface: The new UI is a bit harder to use (a lot of clicking), and there can be minor bugs here and there.
• Limited experiences: There are some limitations to the user onboarding flows. For instance, you can’t run multiple in-app experiences at the same time, as you can in Userpilot.
• Pricey: The Startup plan is quite expensive (starts at $349/mo for 2500 MAU and includes just one launcher). This means you need to go for the Growth plan, where you pay more but save more at the same time.

Appcues vs Chameleon: Which one fits your budget?

Understanding the cost implications is paramount when selecting the right solution for creating interactive user guides, so here’s a detailed pricing comparison of Appcues and Chameleon.

Pricing of Appcues

Pricing for Appcues starts at $249 per month, with the platform offering three distinct tiers – Essentials, Growth, and Enterprise.

The total cost can vary depending on the number of monthly active users (MAU). For instance, the Essential plan starts at $249 per month for 2500 MAU but jumps to $299 for 5000 MAU.

Here’s a detailed glimpse of the different pricing tiers:

• Essentials: It’s the basic tier that starts at $249 per month. It includes 3 user licenses and lets you add up to 5 audience segments. Some UI patterns, such as checklists, launchpads, and custom CSS support, aren’t available. Customer support is only available through email.
• Growth: This tier starts at $879 per month (for 2500 monthly active users) and includes 10 user licenses. You can target unlimited audience segments and use the full spectrum of UI patterns. Additionally, you can access the Premium Integrations package, which includes integrations with Slack, Salesforce, Marketo, and Zendesk.
• Enterprise: This is the most feature-packed tier and includes robust security controls like role-based access and activity logs. It’s also the only tier that comes with multi-account and localization support. Besides email and phone support, you also get a dedicated Customer Success Manager and Technical Implementation Manager. Pricing is available on request.

All three plans come with a 14-day free trial, where you can test unlimited flows and track up to 5 events. You can extend the trial by another 14 days by installing the Appcues SDK in your app. Additionally, you don’t need a credit card to sign up for the free trial.

Keep in mind that the above pricing plans are applicable to web apps. Pricing for Appcues Mobile is available on request.

It’s also worth noting that Appcues is pricier than some of the other product adoption tools available in the market, including Userpilot. For instance, Userpilot’s basic tier (Starter) lets you add up to 10 audience segments and includes the complete set of UI patterns.

Pricing of Chameleon

Chameleon’s pricing is based on your product’s monthly users. From the Startup plan (for small companies to get started and save) to the Growth and Enterprise plans (for larger organizations with advanced requirements) billed via invoice.

Here’s an overview of the pricing plans, and features of each plan:

• Help Bar: This is a standalone search function on top of your product, allowing users to search your knowledge base articles.
• Startup plan: For small companies to get started. Fee: $354/month, billed Monthly, usage-based, Unlimited Tours and tooltips, 5 microsurveys, 1 Launcher, Custom CSS.
• Growth plan: For growing businesses to drive returns quickly, from $1350/month. Everything in the startup plan, plus: unlimited microsurveys & launchers, A/B testing, and rate limiting is paid annually with bulk pricing.
• Enterprise plan: For larger organizations with advanced requirements. The fee for this plan is not stated on the website rather, you get to talk to the team. You get everything in the growth plan, multi-product account, user permissions, localizations, and SSO/enhanced security.

The Growth plan seems to be the real deal because of the exciting features that can boost your product marketing. For example, you can’t get the rate limiting feature on the Startup plan, including A/B testing. These are relevant and powerful product adoption weapons that should be in your arsenal if you truly want to win more users.

Is the startup plan expensive?

Yes, compared to Userpilot, about a $170 difference. It’s best to opt in for the Growth plan for the juicy benefits, where you pay $1350 annually rather than paying a whopping $5000+ yearly for the startup plan.

Userpilot – A better alternative for building interactive user guides

Userpilot is a product growth platform that drives user activation, feature adoption, and expansion revenue. It also helps product teams collect user feedback, streamline onboarding, and gather actionable insights from analytics.

With Userpilot, you’ll be able to track both product usage and user behavior to get a holistic view of how customers use your product — which will guide future development, improve the user experience, and inform your growth efforts.

No-code product tours in Userpilot

Product tours are an effective way to show new users what a product can do and reduce the time-to-value (TTV) for them. Userpilot lets you build advanced product tours, set contextual triggers, and target specific audiences, all without writing a single line of code.

Here are the Userpilot features that you can use to build a product tour for your users:

• Flow builder: Userpilot’s no-code flow builder has a variety of UI patterns to choose from, such as modals, slideouts, tooltips, and driven actions. All UI patterns are available for use regardless of which Userpilot plan you’re on. All you need to do is install the Chrome extension.

• Contextual triggers: Userpilot lets you set triggers for your flows to ensure that they appear at the most contextual moments. Flows could be triggered when users land on a specific page or when a tracked event occurs. There are also manual triggering options that you can tinker with.

• Audience targeting: Userpilot’s audience targeting setting lets you set the conditions needed for a flow to show up for a specific user. You can use these settings to create flows that target a specific segment or exclude certain users from seeing a flow if certain conditions are met.

In-app messaging in Userpilot

In-app messaging enables communication within your product to onboard new users or drive feature adoption among existing customers.

Here are a few ways you can send in-app messages using Userpilot:

• Modals: Userpilot lets you use modals to send unmissable in-app messages to your users. Simply choose from one of the six templates or create a new modal from scratch. You’ll be able to use text, emojis, images, and videos to help your modals get the message across to users.

• Banners: Userpilot banners can be used to send in-app messages that are urgent but don’t need to take up the entire screen. You can also add blocks with text, emojis, images, videos, forms, custom JavaScript functions, and more to style banners to your liking.

• Tooltips: They are the least intrusive form of in-app messaging as they only show up when users hover over an element or click on an info icon. You’ll be able to adjust the height, shape, color, and placement of tooltips to make them native-like.

Pricing of Userpilot

Userpilot’s transparent pricing ranges from $249/month on the entry-level end to an Enterprise tier for larger companies.

Furthermore, Userpilot’s entry-level plan includes access to all UI patterns and should include everything that most mid-market SaaS businesses need to get started.

Userpilot has three paid plans to choose from:

• Starter: The entry-level Starter plan starts at $249/month and includes features like segmentation, product analytics, reporting, user engagement, NPS feedback, and customization.
• Growth: The Growth plan starts at $749/month and includes features like resource centers, advanced event-based triggers, unlimited feature tagging, AI-powered content localization, EU hosting options, and a dedicated customer success manager.
• Enterprise: The Enterprise plan uses custom pricing and includes all the features from Starter + Growth plus custom roles/permissions, access to premium integrations, priority support, custom contract, SLA, SAML SSO, activity logs, security audit, and compliance (SOC 2/GDPR).

What do users say about Userpilot?

Most users laud Userpilot for its versatile feature set, ease of use, and responsive support team:

I recently had the pleasure of using Userpilot, and I must say it exceeded all my expectations. As a product manager, I’m always on the lookout for tools that can enhance user onboarding and improve overall user experience. Userpilot not only delivered on these fronts but also went above and beyond with its impressive new features, unparalleled ease of use, and truly exceptional customer support.

What truly sets Userpilot apart is its outstanding customer support. Throughout my journey with Userpilot, the support team has been responsive, knowledgeable, and genuinely dedicated to helping me succeed. Whenever I had a question or encountered an issue, their support team was always there to assist promptly, going above and beyond to ensure my concerns were addressed effectively.

Source: G2.

Of course, other users are also kind enough to share constructive criticism regarding specific features like event tracking filters:

“The filtration while analyzing specific events is a little confusing. Understanding of custom properties and data management configuration could have been more organised.”

Source: G2.

Conclusion

This is the end of our thorough comparison between Appcues and Chameleon. You should be able to make a confident decision by now. If you’re looking for a solid tool for building interactive user guides that promises great value for money, give Userpilot a go. Book a demo today.

Userpilot – A Better Alternative for Building Interactive User Guides

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• 14 Day Trial
• No Credit Card Required