Have you found onboarding your SaaS customers to be a tricky process? Ensuring that your customers quickly understand the value of your SaaS product is crucial, as it can be the difference between them staying with you or bouncing off. But, you don’t have to worry! There are a variety of SaaS onboarding software options available that can make the process much smoother.
We’ve compiled a list of the best SaaS onboarding software to help you find the perfect fit for your product. Whether you’re just starting out or you’re a scaling SaaS business, there’s something for everyone on our list. When choosing SaaS onboarding software, it’s important to consider whether it’s tailored towards early-stage or scaling SaaS companies. You’ll also need to decide which onboarding methods will work best for your business, whether it’s in-app onboarding, email onboarding, help docs, or a combination of all three. Let’s look at some of the critical criteria to be considered in choosing the right SaaS onboarding software.
Factors for choosing your SaaS onboarding Software:
When selecting a SaaS onboarding software, there are six crucial factors to consider to ensure that you get the most value out of your investment. These factors include:
User-Friendliness: The onboarding software you choose should have a user-friendly interface that is easy to use and understand. This will help reduce the learning curve for your users and increase user adoption.
User Segmentation: It’s important to make sure your onboarding process has an automated tool to divide users into segments. This ensures that each user receives a personalized onboarding experience, rather than a generic one that risks alienating your customer base. For instance, a segment of advanced users might be shown more complex features from the start, while a segment of beginners might receive more basic instructions.
User Behavior Analysis: Your onboarding software should have analytics capabilities, including A/B testing, to measure the results of your onboarding efforts and product experiments. For example, if a significant number of users drop off during a certain tutorial, the software can provide suggestions on how to make that tutorial more engaging.
Interactive Walkthroughs: Look for a tool that allows you to create genuinely interactive walkthroughs that are responsive to customer input. For example, a social media scheduling tool might offer a walkthrough that guides users through the process of scheduling a post, with options to connect their social media accounts, select the best posting times, and preview the post before publishing.
In-App Communication: Instead of spamming your customers’ inboxes with email notifications and surveys, use software that allows you to communicate with them inside your app itself. Microsurveys are a great way to do this, and you can use them to ask users why they signed up for the product or to gauge their satisfaction with the onboarding process.
Code-Free Onboarding: Before selecting an onboarding software, make sure that it delivers on its promise of being code-free. It should offer a template for a product tour that can be customized with your own branding and messaging. You should be able to drag and drop different components, such as text boxes or images, to create a tour that suits your needs.
By considering these six factors when selecting your SaaS onboarding software, you can ensure that you provide your users with a seamless and personalized onboarding experience, leading to increased user adoption and customer satisfaction.
Best SaaS onboarding Software tools:
Let’s explore the leading SaaS onboarding software solutions to determine the most suitable option for your product.
Compass
Compass is a cloud-based SaaS product designed to streamline the customer onboarding process and provide a unified platform for adopting and training users. Here are some of the benefits and drawbacks of using Compass:
pros:
- In-App Guides: Compass offers users to built extensive in-app guides, making the onboarding process simple and easy for users.
- Knowledge Articles: Compass provides in-depth knowledge articles with step-by-step explanations or demo videos to help users execute critical processes.
- Easy Learning Curve: Compass is easy to use, and users can quickly get familiar with its features and set up the platform.
- Customization: Companies can customize their onboarding process by using Compass’s templates and workflows, matching their branding and requirements.
- Collaboration: The platform enables team members to collaborate on a project, improving teamwork and efficiency.
Cons:
- Feedback Collection: At present, Compass lacks a feedback collection feature, but it is expected to be rolled out in the near future.
Pendo
Pendo started as a platform to help software developers understand how users interacted with their products. Over time, Pendo evolved into a complete onboarding solution with powerful analytics features. Pendo’s user base includes over 1,500 companies, including large enterprises like IBM and Salesforce as well as smaller startups. Its software is widely used in the SaaS industry to improve user adoption and engagement.
Pros:
- Pendo is well-known for its powerful analytics features, which enable SaaS companies to gain deep insights into user behavior and identify areas for improvement.
- The Paths feature is particularly impressive as it allows for a visual representation of all the possible routes in and out of a specific custom event.
- Funnels provide a great way to track the progress of users toward a pre-specified sequence of steps.
- Reports are helpful in graphing out various adoption metrics, such as page views.
- The code-free product tour creation feature, including elements like tooltips and welcome screens, is a great addition to guiding users through the onboarding process.
Cons:
- The sheer number of graphs and data points provided by Pendo can be overwhelming, making it difficult for users to see the bigger picture amidst the details.
- While the range of UI patterns offered for product tours is impressive, they lack interactivity, and users may become disengaged after seeing the same elements repeatedly.
- Pendo’s onboarding software can be quite expensive for small businesses, and it may not be a feasible option for those with limited budgets.
- Pendo’s software may require a learning curve for new users, particularly those who are not familiar with advanced analytics features.
Rocketlane
The software provides a centralized platform for businesses to manage their onboarding workflows, customer communication, and progress tracking. Its intuitive interface and customizable templates make it easy for teams to collaborate and deliver a personalized onboarding experience.
Rocketlane’s customer base includes companies of all sizes, from startups to enterprises, across a wide range of industries, including technology, finance, and healthcare. Its mission is to help businesses transform their onboarding experience and drive customer success by empowering teams to deliver exceptional customer experiences.
Pros:
- Rocketlane is specifically designed for high-touch customer onboarding, making it a great fit for companies that want to streamline their onboarding process.
- The dashboard is sleek and provides visibility into projects across the organization, making it easier to track progress and identify areas that need improvement.
- The customer portal can be customized to reflect the company’s brand and facilitate the right level of sharing across tasks, documents, and communication.
- Rocketlane is best suited for SaaS companies serving midmarket and enterprise, IT services, system integrators, and marketing agencies.
- The software is affordable, starting at $19 per user per month, and comes with a free 21-day trial.
Cons:
- Rocketlane may not be suitable for companies with a lower budget or smaller teams, as it may be more expensive than other alternatives.
- The software may not be as customizable as some companies may prefer, especially if they have unique onboarding processes.
Helphero
HelpHero is a SaaS onboarding software that provides seamless in-app customer onboarding. Founded in 2016, HelpHero has become a trusted name in the industry, helping businesses of all sizes to create interactive onboarding guides, tooltips, and walkthroughs to improve user engagement and product adoption.
Pros:
- Visual Tour Editor: HelpHero offers a visual tour editor that enables you to see how your product tour will look as you edit it.
- No Code Required: You don’t need coding skills to build product tours with HelpHero, which can save valuable developer time and resources.
- Customizable Look: HelpHero allows you to customize the look of your product tour so that it matches your product’s UI and branding.
- Checklists: You can add checklists to your product with HelpHero, helping users track their progress and adding an element of gamification.
- Segmentation and Triggers: HelpHero enables you to segment your users and add triggers to your product tours, making it easier to implement contextual onboarding.
- Affordable Pricing: HelpHero starts at $25 per month, providing you with all the features for up to 1000 monthly active users.
- User-Friendly: HelpHero is designed to be user-friendly, making it easy for you to add product tours and checklists to your SaaS product without any hassle.
Cons:
- Limited Audience Size: The pricing plans of HelpHero are limited to a certain number of monthly active users. This could be a potential drawback if you have a large user base.
- Limited Features: Although HelpHero offers a range of features, it may not have all the functionality you require for your product tour needs.
- Learning Curve: While HelpHero is user-friendly, it may take some time to learn how to use all of its features effectively.
Tooltip.io
Founded in 2019 by a team of experienced SaaS professionals, Tooltip.io has quickly gained traction among startups and enterprise-level businesses alike. The platform is used by companies across a variety of industries, including software, e-commerce, and healthcare, to provide a seamless and personalized onboarding experience to their customers.
With a focus on simplicity and ease of use, Tooltip.io has become a go-to solution for businesses looking to improve their customer onboarding process.
Pros:
- A wide range of message types is available, including tooltips, popups, slideouts, and banners.
- Chrome Extension allows for easy message creation without requiring any coding skills.
- Custom triggering and segmentation features ensure messages reach the right audience at the right time.
- Custom branding options let you fully match the look and feel of your product.
- Allows for building both simple and complex in-app onboarding flows with full control over how the flow works.
- Pricing includes up to 100,000 monthly active users, which provides a lot of value for larger businesses.
Cons:
- Starting price of $249 per month might be too expensive for very early-stage companies.
- Creating an in-depth product tour might require a bit of work with Tooltip.io.
- Limited information is available on the level of support provided by the company.
- The number of monthly active users included in the pricing may not be sufficient for larger enterprises with higher user volumes.
Conclusion:
Now that you’ve reached the end of this article, you should have a clear grasp of the importance of SaaS onboarding software and its benefits. We’ve provided you with a useful framework to help you choose the most suitable onboarding software for your SaaS product.
Compass, in particular, offers a comprehensive set of features at a competitive price, and we encourage you to consider it as your top choice. We highly recommend signing up for a demo today to see how it can help streamline your onboarding process and improve customer satisfaction.
