Appcues
A tool that lets product teams add pop-up tips, tours, and checklists inside their own app to teach new users how to use it — without asking an engineer to build that UI from scratch.
🔗 Visit Appcues
Description
When a new user signs up for a piece of software, the gap between "created an account" and "actually understands how to use this" is where most people quietly give up. Appcues lets a product or marketing person — not an engineer — build the guided tours, tooltips, checklists, and in-app messages that close that gap, using a visual builder and increasingly an AI assistant that can draft the flow from a prompt.
Technically, it's a digital adoption platform that layers on top of an existing web app via a script snippet, then targets specific messages to specific user segments at specific moments (e.g., "show this tooltip the first time a free-plan user opens the reports page"). Pricing is based on Monthly Active Users rather than seats, which is standard for this category but means cost scales automatically as your own product grows — the Start tier covers up to 3,000 MAUs with 10 published experiences, Grow removes that MAU ceiling as a hard cutoff and expands to 25 experiences, and Enterprise adds custom volumes with 36 months of historical data and priority support.
💬 Our review
The short version: Appcues is a mature, reliable pick in the crowded in-app onboarding space — its segmentation and analytics are genuinely strong across every tier — but MAU-based pricing means your bill grows automatically as your product succeeds, which is worth modeling before you commit.
Against UserGuiding or Produktly, which are priced lower and marketed as "no-code first," Appcues holds an edge in analytics depth and integration breadth — it's been in this market longer and it shows in the reporting. Against Pendo, which competes at the high end on similar terms, Appcues is generally the more approachable and faster-to-implement option, though Pendo pulls ahead on deep product-analytics correlation. The core limitation across the whole category, Appcues included, is that it only handles in-app experiences — it won't help with email onboarding sequences or a dedicated docs site, so most teams end up pairing it with something else anyway. The free trial requiring a sales consultation call rather than instant self-serve access is a minor but real friction point for a team that just wants to poke around first. Solid choice for a mid-market SaaS company with a real activation problem and budget to match; probably overkill for an early-stage product still figuring out its onboarding flow from scratch.
💰 Pricing
📊 Global score
🤖 AI-enriched data
Start : jusqu'à 3 000 MAU, 10 expériences publiées, 12 mois d'historique. Grow : à partir de 3 000 MAU, 25 expériences, 24 mois d'historique. Enterprise : volumes MAU sur mesure, 100 expériences, 36 mois d'historique, support prioritaire. Essai gratuit avec appel commercial requis, sans carte bancaire.
Pros
Constructeur d'expérience assisté par IA, prompt-driven
Segmentation utilisateur précise et personnalisation contextuelle
Analytics et suivi comportemental complets dès le premier palier
Large écosystème d'intégrations
Cons
Tarification basée sur les MAU qui augmente avec la croissance du produit
Limité aux expériences in-app uniquement
Essai gratuit nécessitant un appel commercial plutôt qu'un accès instantané