UserGuiding: No-Code User Onboarding Software Solution

UserGuiding is a no-code platform that enables businesses to create interactive product tours, onboarding experiences, and in-app guidance without requiring technical skills or development resources.

• Service Category: User Onboarding Software / Product Adoption Platform
• Core Functionality: UserGuiding allows businesses to create interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, hotspots, and resource centers to guide users through digital products without writing code.
• Founding Year: 2018
• Service Description: UserGuiding provides a comprehensive solution for improving user onboarding and product adoption through customizable, no-code in-app guidance elements. The platform enables companies to create, deploy, and analyze interactive guides directly within their applications. It offers analytics to track user engagement and conversion rates, while integrating with popular tools like Google Analytics, Segment, and Intercom. The platform targets SaaS companies, digital product teams, and businesses looking to improve user experience and reduce churn.

UserGuiding delivers value by enabling non-technical teams to create sophisticated user onboarding experiences without development resources, thereby improving product adoption metrics and reducing support costs.

• Core Value Proposition: Empower companies to create interactive, personalized user onboarding experiences without coding skills or developer resources, resulting in improved user adoption, reduced churn, and decreased support costs.
• Primary Target Customers: Product teams at SaaS companies, digital product managers, customer success teams, and growth marketers at mid-market companies who need to improve user activation and adoption without heavy technical resources.
• Differentiation Points: UserGuiding stands out with its approachable pricing for smaller companies, intuitive user interface requiring minimal learning curve, rapid implementation without technical dependencies, and comprehensive analytics dashboard for measuring onboarding effectiveness.

The Value Proposition Canvas systematically analyzes customer needs, pain points, and expected gains, and maps how UserGuiding’s features connect with these elements.

The Jobs-to-be-Done framework identifies the fundamental reasons customers “hire” UserGuiding, the situations in which they use it, and their success criteria.

UserGuiding operates in the user onboarding and product adoption software segment, a growing category within the broader customer experience and product analytics market.

• Service Category: Digital Adoption Platforms (DAP) / User Onboarding Software
• Market Maturity: Growth stage – The user onboarding software market is experiencing significant expansion as companies increasingly recognize the importance of structured onboarding for user retention. While not a new concept, the market has seen accelerated growth due to the proliferation of SaaS products, emphasis on product-led growth strategies, and the need to reduce customer acquisition costs through improved conversion.
• Market Trend Relevance: UserGuiding aligns strongly with several key market trends, including the shift toward product-led growth, the democratization of development capabilities through no-code tools, increased focus on reducing customer acquisition costs through improved conversion rates, and growing emphasis on data-driven optimization of user experiences.

The total addressable market for digital adoption platforms is projected to grow from $1.5 billion in 2021 to approximately $4.5 billion by 2028, representing a CAGR of around 15%. UserGuiding positions itself in this expanding market with a focus on serving mid-market companies that need enterprise-level capabilities without enterprise-level complexity or pricing.

UserGuiding competes in a market with both established enterprise players and emerging specialized solutions, with differentiation primarily based on ease of use, pricing, and target customer segments.

• Key Competitors: Appcues, WalkMe, Pendo, Intercom Product Tours, and Userpilot
• Competitive Landscape: The market features a spectrum of solutions ranging from enterprise-focused comprehensive platforms (WalkMe, Pendo) that offer broader functionality beyond onboarding to more specialized tools focused specifically on user onboarding and product adoption (Appcues, Userpilot, UserGuiding). The market is moderately concentrated with a few dominant players at the enterprise level, but more fragmented in the mid-market segment where UserGuiding operates. Competition is primarily based on ease of implementation, pricing structure, feature richness, and integration capabilities.
• Substitutes: Companies may use alternative approaches to solve user onboarding challenges, including custom-built solutions developed in-house, basic tooltip extensions for web applications, video tutorials and documentation, live customer success-led onboarding sessions, or simplified onboarding through improved UI/UX design that minimizes the need for explicit guidance.

While the market continues to grow, we’re seeing increasing feature convergence among competitors, making positioning and target customer focus increasingly important differentiators. UserGuiding sits in a compelling position between basic solutions with limited functionality and enterprise platforms with complex implementation requirements and high costs.

This analysis maps UserGuiding against competitors based on key differentiating factors to understand its relative market position.

UserGuiding employs a tiered subscription model with pricing structured based on product adoption features, usage volume, and service level.

• Revenue Structure: Subscription-based SaaS model with annual and monthly billing options. The annual commitment offers a significant discount (approximately 20%) compared to monthly billing, encouraging longer-term contracts and reducing churn risk.
• Pricing Strategy: UserGuiding uses a value-based tiered pricing structure with three primary tiers (Basic, Professional, and Corporate) differentiated by feature access, monthly active user (MAU) limits, and support levels. Pricing scales progressively from approximately $99/month for the Basic plan to $399/month for the Professional plan on annual billing, with Corporate pricing available through custom quotes. This creates clear upgrade paths as customers grow their usage or require advanced features.
• Free Offering Scope: UserGuiding offers a 14-day free trial of their full platform without requiring a credit card, allowing prospects to evaluate the complete product. They also provide a free demo option with guided assistance from their team. Unlike some competitors, they don’t offer a permanent free tier with limited functionality, instead focusing on converting users to paid plans after the trial period.

Each plan tier strategically unlocks features that become increasingly important as companies scale their user onboarding efforts. The Basic plan includes essential onboarding features but limits integrations and customization. The Professional plan adds advanced segmentation, more integration options, and removes UserGuiding branding. The Corporate plan includes priority support, dedicated customer success, and expanded user limits for larger organizations. This approach effectively creates natural expansion opportunities as customers grow their usage and sophistication.

UserGuiding employs a multi-channel acquisition strategy that focuses on inbound marketing, educational content, and product-led conversion paths.

• Core Acquisition Channels: Content marketing (blog, guides, webinars on user onboarding best practices), SEO optimization for onboarding-related search terms, review platforms (G2, Capterra), referral programs, and strategic partnerships with complementary SaaS tools. They also leverage case studies showing measurable improvements in activation and adoption metrics to attract prospects.
• Sales Model: UserGuiding employs a hybrid sales approach. Lower-tier subscriptions use a product-led, self-service model where users can sign up, trial, and purchase without sales interaction. For mid-market and enterprise prospects, they utilize an inside sales team for consultative selling, particularly for Corporate plans requiring custom pricing. The sales process typically includes personalized demos and proof-of-concept implementations.
• User Onboarding: In a meta-application of their own product, UserGuiding uses its platform to onboard new users – creating an experiential demonstration of their value proposition. Their onboarding focuses on quick time-to-value, helping new users create their first guide within minutes. The process includes interactive tutorials, templates for common onboarding scenarios, and milestone celebrations to drive engagement and demonstrate the product’s capabilities.

UserGuiding’s acquisition strategy leverages significant educational content around user onboarding best practices, positioning the company as a thought leader in the space while simultaneously demonstrating their product expertise. The content strategy focuses on addressing common challenges in user activation and adoption, attracting prospects already experiencing these pain points. Once engaged, the frictionless trial process and quick time-to-value focus convert prospects by showing immediate benefits without significant implementation hurdles.

The Business Model Canvas framework systematically analyzes UserGuiding’s comprehensive business structure.

UserGuiding offers a comprehensive suite of onboarding features organized into logical groupings that address different aspects of the user onboarding journey.

• Key Feature Categories: Interactive guide creation tools (tours, hotspots, tooltips), User segmentation and targeting, Analytics and performance measurement, Resource center and self-service help, Integration capabilities, and Customization options
• Key Differentiating Features: No-code guide builder with WYSIWYG interface, User segmentation based on behavior and attributes, Analytics dashboard with onboarding funnel visualization, Multi-language support for international products, and Template library for quick implementation
• Feature Completeness: UserGuiding offers a robust feature set that covers core onboarding needs while maintaining simplicity. Compared to enterprise competitors like WalkMe and Pendo, it lacks some advanced capabilities (extensive workflow automation, deep product analytics) but provides the essential functionality needed by most mid-market customers at a significantly lower complexity and price point.

The product’s feature architecture is organized around the user onboarding journey, starting with user identification and segmentation, continuing through guided experience creation, and concluding with performance measurement and optimization. The guide creation tools are particularly strong, with an intuitive visual editor that requires minimal training. The segmentation engine allows targeting specific user cohorts based on both demographic attributes and behavioral signals, enabling personalized onboarding paths.

UserGuiding’s resource center functionality provides a persistent self-service help option that complements the interactive guides, creating a comprehensive onboarding approach. This allows users to both passively discover features through guides and actively seek specific information through the resource center. The analytics capabilities, while not as extensive as dedicated product analytics platforms, provide focused insights on guide performance, completion rates, and drop-off points – the specific metrics most relevant to measuring and improving onboarding effectiveness.

UserGuiding’s interface and user experience are designed to balance functionality with accessibility for non-technical users, focusing on simplicity and visual workflows.

• UI/UX Characteristics: Clean, modern interface with visual guide builder, drag-and-drop functionality for element placement, contextual settings panels, and preview capabilities. The design emphasizes visual representation over technical configuration, making it accessible to marketing, product, and customer success teams without technical expertise.
• User Journey: The core user journey begins with installing the UserGuiding script on the target application, followed by creating segmentation rules for audience targeting, designing guides using the visual editor, setting trigger conditions, previewing and testing the experience, and finally publishing and analyzing performance. The interface walks users through these steps in a logical progression with clear navigation paths.
• Accessibility and Ease of Use: UserGuiding scores highly on ease of use, with most users able to create basic guides within minutes of initial setup. The learning curve is intentionally shallow, with templates and examples accelerating implementation. While the tool offers considerable depth for advanced customization, these options are progressively disclosed to avoid overwhelming new users.

The platform effectively uses its own technology to guide users through its features, creating a meta-demonstration of the product’s capabilities. This self-referential approach both delivers practical onboarding and showcases what users can implement in their own products.

A particularly effective aspect of UserGuiding’s user experience is the immediate feedback loop built into the creation process. Users can instantly preview guides as they build them, seeing exactly how end-users will experience the onboarding flow. This real-time visualization significantly reduces the learning curve and helps non-technical users create professional-looking guides without requiring design skills.

While the platform excels in simplicity for basic use cases, some advanced customization options require deeper exploration of the interface. UserGuiding addresses this through a tiered learning approach, where users can start with templates and gradually advance to more sophisticated implementations as they become comfortable with the platform.

This analysis maps UserGuiding’s key features to specific customer value delivery and assesses their differentiation level compared to competitors.

UserGuiding is currently in an active growth phase, with significant room for expansion in both product capabilities and market penetration.

• Growth Stage: Early Growth/Scale-up Phase – UserGuiding has established product-market fit and a functional business model, and is now focused on scaling customer acquisition and expanding market share. The company has moved beyond initial validation stages but has not yet reached market maturity or dominance.
• Expansion Direction: UserGuiding is pursuing a two-pronged expansion strategy that includes both product expansion (adding deeper functionality and adjacent capabilities) and market expansion (targeting new vertical markets and moving gradually upmarket from their initial mid-market focus).
• Growth Drivers: Several factors are facilitating UserGuiding’s growth trajectory, including: increasing market awareness of user onboarding importance, the growing gap between user expectations and actual software usability, the widespread adoption of product-led growth strategies requiring effective onboarding, constraints on engineering resources driving demand for no-code solutions, and the competitive advantage gained by companies that successfully activate new users.

UserGuiding’s growth is occurring within a market that itself is expanding rapidly. As more companies adopt digital transformation initiatives and develop customer-facing software products, the need for effective onboarding becomes increasingly critical. Additionally, rising customer acquisition costs across the SaaS industry are forcing companies to focus more on successful activation and retention of users they’ve already acquired, directly increasing demand for UserGuiding’s solution.

The company appears to be focusing on sustainable growth rather than blitzscaling, with strategic expansion of their team and capabilities as revenue allows. This measured approach allows them to maintain quality while gradually expanding market presence. Based on their pricing model evolution and feature expansion, UserGuiding is likely experiencing healthy unit economics with the potential for increasing average contract values as they add more sophisticated capabilities that justify higher price points.

UserGuiding has multiple paths for growth across product, market, and revenue dimensions, each offering unique opportunities to increase market share and customer value.

• Product Expansion Opportunities: UserGuiding can enhance their offering by developing deeper product analytics capabilities to provide more comprehensive insights on user behavior beyond just guide interaction, expanding their template library to cover more specific use cases and industries, adding more sophisticated personalization options based on user behavior patterns, and potentially developing adjacent capabilities like in-app messaging or feedback collection to create a more complete user engagement platform.
• Market Expansion Opportunities: Potential market growth paths include targeting enterprise customers with more robust security, compliance, and scalability features; developing specialized solutions for high-potential verticals like fintech, healthcare, or education; expanding geographic focus with localized marketing and sales efforts in new regions; and addressing internal employee onboarding use cases in addition to their current focus on end-user onboarding.
• Revenue Expansion Opportunities: UserGuiding can increase revenue by developing additional service offerings like onboarding strategy consulting or implementation services, creating premium add-on modules for specialized functionality, establishing partnership programs with implementation agencies and consultants to extend market reach, and potentially offering a marketplace for third-party templates and extensions.

A particularly promising expansion opportunity lies in leveraging the data UserGuiding collects on successful onboarding patterns. By anonymizing and analyzing this cross-customer data, they could develop industry benchmarks and best practice recommendations that would further cement their position as thought leaders while providing additional value to customers.

Another strategic opportunity is expanding beyond initial onboarding to cover the entire user lifecycle with contextual guidance during feature launches, major updates, or when users encounter complexity. This would transform UserGuiding from an onboarding tool to a comprehensive product adoption platform, significantly expanding their value proposition and potential contract values.

The SaaS Expansion Matrix systematically analyzes UserGuiding’s growth paths and prioritizes the most promising directions.

We analyze how well UserGuiding aligns with its target market’s needs from multiple perspectives.

• Problem-Solution Fit: UserGuiding addresses a critical problem with high impact and provides an effective solution. Poor user onboarding directly affects product adoption, user retention, and ultimately revenue for software companies. The significance of this problem has grown as software has become more complex and user expectations for intuitive experiences have increased. UserGuiding’s solution effectively addresses this pain point by enabling non-technical teams to create professional onboarding experiences without development resources – a compelling value proposition for resource-constrained companies.
• Target Market Fit: UserGuiding has selected an appropriate target market with the mid-market SaaS segment. These companies typically have sophisticated enough products to require structured onboarding but lack the extensive resources of enterprise organizations to build custom solutions or afford high-priced enterprise platforms. This segment represents a large and growing market as more industries adopt SaaS delivery models.
• Market Timing: UserGuiding’s market entry and positioning show excellent timing. The platform emerged as product-led growth strategies were gaining prominence (requiring effective onboarding), as no-code tools were becoming increasingly accepted for business applications, and as companies were focusing more on user experience as a competitive differentiator. Additionally, the ongoing shift toward digital transformation across industries continues to expand the potential customer base.

UserGuiding demonstrates strong product-market fit through several indicators: their rapid customer acquisition despite limited marketing resources, their ability to serve diverse industries (indicating a universal problem being solved), and their successful expansion of features based on market feedback. The company appears to have found the right balance between simplicity and functionality – sophisticated enough to solve real problems while remaining accessible to their target users.

One potential area to strengthen product-market fit further would be developing more industry-specific templates and best practices, as onboarding needs can vary significantly across different types of applications and user bases. This customization would reinforce their value proposition for specific market segments while maintaining the core platform advantages.

We analyze the key operational metrics that determine success for UserGuiding as a SaaS business.

• Customer Acquisition Efficiency: UserGuiding’s acquisition approach appears efficient, leveraging content marketing, SEO, and product-led conversion paths that align well with their target market’s discovery and evaluation processes. Their focus on educational content positions them as thought leaders while simultaneously demonstrating their expertise, creating organic acquisition channels that should yield relatively lower CAC compared to heavy advertising-based approaches. The free trial model without requiring credit cards reduces friction in the evaluation process, enabling higher conversion rates from prospect to trial user.
• Customer Retention Factors: UserGuiding benefits from several stickiness factors that promote retention. Once implemented, their product becomes embedded in the customer’s user onboarding process, creating switching costs. The analytics data collected becomes more valuable over time as customers accumulate historical performance data. Additionally, the no-code approach encourages wider adoption across teams, increasing organizational dependency. These factors combined with the ongoing need for user onboarding (not a one-time project) create strong retention dynamics.
• Revenue Expansion Potential: UserGuiding has designed several effective paths for expanding revenue within existing accounts. Their tiered pricing model creates natural upgrade triggers as customers grow (based on MAU limits). Feature-based differentiation between tiers encourages upgrades as customers’ sophistication increases. The potential to expand beyond initial onboarding to ongoing user education and feature adoption also presents significant opportunities for increasing contract values over time.

UserGuiding’s operational metrics benefit from the recurring nature of user onboarding needs. As products evolve and new features are released, customers continually need to update their onboarding flows, creating ongoing engagement with the platform. This persistent usage pattern supports strong retention and expansion metrics.

Their focus on quick time-to-value in their own onboarding process helps address a common SaaS challenge: ensuring customers actually implement and use the product. By enabling customers to create their first guide within minutes, UserGuiding increases the likelihood of successful adoption, directly impacting retention rates and reducing early churn.

This analysis estimates and evaluates key SaaS business metrics to assess UserGuiding’s economic viability.

UserGuiding faces several significant risk factors across different dimensions that could impact its long-term success in the no-code user onboarding market.

• Market Risks: The user onboarding software market is becoming increasingly saturated with both specialized tools and broader product experience platforms incorporating onboarding functionality. As market education improves, customers may become more discerning about capabilities, potentially leading to increased commoditization. Additionally, economic downturns could lead to reduced SaaS spending, with onboarding tools being deprioritized in favor of core operational software.
• Competitive Risks: Enterprise UX platforms like Pendo and WalkMe have significantly more resources and can bundle onboarding with broader product analytics and engagement features. These competitors could undercut UserGuiding’s pricing or create simplified versions targeting UserGuiding’s core SMB market. New entrants with more innovative AI-driven onboarding solutions could also leapfrog UserGuiding’s current feature set.
• Business Model Risks: UserGuiding’s tiered pricing model may leave it vulnerable to competitors who offer more generous free tiers to capture the entry-level market. The company’s reliance on web-based solutions may also be challenged as mobile and complex application onboarding demands grow. Additionally, if the company is primarily focused on acquisition over retention, it may face challenges with sustainable growth and high churn rates.

The most significant risk for UserGuiding is likely the potential for larger platforms to make user onboarding just one feature in a more comprehensive product experience suite. This could erode UserGuiding’s value proposition unless they can maintain a significant advantage in ease of use, implementation speed, or specialized capabilities that justify their standalone solution.

Despite the risks, UserGuiding has numerous growth opportunities across different time horizons that could strengthen its market position and expand its business.

• Short-term Opportunities: UserGuiding could quickly expand its integration ecosystem to connect with more analytics platforms, CRMs, and customer success tools, creating a more seamless workflow for customers. Developing targeted solutions for high-growth vertical markets (e.g., fintech, healthtech, edtech) could also yield immediate results. Implementing an AI assistant for onboarding creation could significantly reduce the effort required to create effective user guides.
• Medium to Long-term Opportunities: Expanding beyond initial onboarding into continuous user education and feature adoption tracking represents a natural evolution path. Building a comprehensive customer success platform that includes onboarding as a core component could position UserGuiding against larger competitors. Developing advanced user behavior prediction capabilities to automatically suggest optimal onboarding paths could create significant differentiation in the market.
• Differentiation Opportunities: UserGuiding could position itself as the leading specialist in adaptive, personalized onboarding that dynamically adjusts based on user behavior and characteristics. Focusing on multilingual, globally accessible onboarding with localization capabilities could also capture underserved international markets where competitors may be weaker.

The most promising immediate opportunity for UserGuiding appears to be enhancing their platform with AI-powered capabilities that dramatically reduce the effort required to create effective onboarding experiences. By allowing customers to describe desired outcomes in natural language and automatically generating optimized flows, UserGuiding could maintain its ease-of-use advantage while adding compelling new functionality that larger competitors might take longer to implement effectively.

A systematic SWOT analysis provides a comprehensive view of UserGuiding’s strategic position in the market.

UserGuiding demonstrates a solid foundation as a specialized player in the user onboarding SaaS market, with several notable strengths and challenges.

• Business Model Soundness: UserGuiding’s tiered subscription model aligned with usage limits and features appears sustainable and scalable. The freemium approach serves as an effective customer acquisition channel, while the enterprise tier allows for revenue maximization from larger clients. The focus on simplicity and speed-to-implementation creates attractive unit economics, as customer acquisition costs can potentially be kept lower than more complex enterprise solutions requiring extensive sales cycles.
• Market Competitiveness: In the competitive landscape, UserGuiding occupies a solid middle position between basic tooltip solutions and comprehensive enterprise UX platforms. Their focus on ease of use and accessibility to non-technical users creates a clear differentiation from enterprise alternatives like Pendo and WalkMe, which require more technical resources. However, they face increasing competition from both specialized onboarding tools and larger product experience platforms expanding into this space.
• Growth Potential: UserGuiding has substantial growth opportunities through both market expansion and product development. The increasing recognition of user onboarding’s importance to product success provides an expanding addressable market. The potential to extend beyond basic onboarding into continuous user education, feature adoption, and broader customer success functionality offers natural expansion paths. Their no-code approach is well-aligned with the broader trend toward empowering non-technical business users.

UserGuiding appears to have identified a valuable strategic position in focusing on simplicity and speed while providing sufficient functionality for effective onboarding. This position is defensible if they continue to maintain their ease-of-use advantage while strategically expanding capabilities to address adjacent customer needs. The most significant strategic question is whether to remain focused as an onboarding specialist or expand into a broader product experience platform, with each path offering different risk and reward profiles.

Our analysis of UserGuiding reveals several critical insights about the company’s position and future prospects.

This quantitative assessment on a 1-5 scale evaluates UserGuiding’s overall competitiveness across key success factors for SaaS businesses.

The official website and key pages of UserGuiding.

Major services that compete with or are similar to UserGuiding in the user onboarding space.

Resources that can help in building or understanding a similar SaaS business in the user onboarding space.