Best Intercom Alternatives: Choosing the Right Solution for Product Tours

Intercom is a renowned customer service solution widely used by businesses to enhance their customer interactions. The platform's flagship solution is an automated in-app chatbot that helps users self-service support and resolve technical issues faster. But among the various features offered by Intercom, Product Tours stand out as a dedicated user onboarding and in-app engagement solution. 

Intercom's Product Tours allow you to build and deploy custom product walkthroughs and onboarding flows with no engineering. However, it comes with certain limitations that may not meet the specific needs of every business. 

In this article, we explore some compelling reasons to consider Intercom alternatives that offer specialized user onboarding solutions, dynamic UX flows, scalable pricing options, and support for mobile app onboarding.

First and foremost, Intercom is a customer service solution. This means that it focuses on use cases like reducing support tickets and increasing customer satisfaction. When it comes to designing product tours that have a deeper impact on metrics like customer retention, time-to-value, and feature adoption, the more comprehensive solutions can be a better choice.

While Intercom provides a comprehensive suite of tools for customer success, it primarily focuses on customer support and engagement. User onboarding is treated as an add-on feature rather than a specialized focus area. If your business requires a platform that is laser-focused on user onboarding and product adoption, you may find Intercom's offerings falling short of your expectations.

Intercom Product Tours, while useful for basic onboarding experiences, are limited to linear flows. If you desire more interactive and dynamic user experiences, Intercom may not provide the necessary flexibility. For example, Intercom lacks various UX patterns like slideouts and banners, which can greatly enhance the user onboarding process. Additionally, customizing the styling of Intercom Product Tours is restricted to importing CSS, which can limit your ability to create visually appealing and branded flows as you build them.

Pricing is an important consideration when evaluating any software solution, and Intercom's pricing structure may not suit all businesses. Based on G2 reviews, if you are already using Intercom for its Chat feature and decide to adopt Product Tours, the pricing can increase significantly. If you are looking for alternatives with more scalable pricing options that align with your business's growth, it may be worth exploring other options.

If you are focused on building user onboarding experiences specifically for mobile applications, Intercom Product Tours will not meet your requirements. These tours are designed to work exclusively on desktop apps, limiting their applicability in the mobile app space. If mobile app onboarding is a priority for your business, you will need to consider alternatives that offer dedicated support for mobile platforms.

If you're looking for a tool built specifically for user onboarding, then you should consider product adoption platforms. Let's understand what these are exactly. 

Product Adoption Platforms (PAPs) specialize in guiding users through the onboarding process and ultimately driving product adoption. PAPs combine in-app messaging, user segmentation, analytics, and other tools to create tailored and effective user onboarding experiences. Here are five top Product Adoption Platforms worth considering:

1. Chameleon

Chameleon offers personalized in-app experiences every step of the way, empowering you  to create interactive and targeted onboarding flows. With Chameleon, you can engage users with interactive product tours, tooltips, checklists, and more, without relying on developers. Its user-friendly interface and powerful segmentation capabilities make it an excellent choice for businesses seeking a comprehensive user onboarding solution. We'll go a little deeper into what Chameleon can do below.

2. Appcues

Appcues is another robust Product Adoption Platform that enables businesses to create personalized onboarding experiences. It provides an intuitive visual editor, pre-built UI components, and advanced targeting options. Appcues empowers product teams to create engaging in-app experiences and measure their impact effectively.

3. Userpilot

Userpilot offers a range of user onboarding tools to help you deliver seamless and personalized experiences. It comes packed with an intuitive interface, codeless editor, and behavior-based triggers.

4. WalkMe

WalkMe focuses on simplifying user experiences with a powerful automation toolset that enables you to create interactive and personalized onboarding experiences at scale. WalkMe is primarily targeted at internal user onboarding, allowing companies to onboard and train their employees.

5. Pendo

Pendo is a comprehensive platform that combines product analytics and in-app guidance to drive user onboarding. Its user behavior tracking, segmentation capabilities, and feature adoption insights make it a popular choice for businesses aiming to enhance their onboarding processes.

The best way to define whether these platforms are the ideal solution for you, is to give them a shot. All of the tools listed above offer free trials where you can put their features and capabilities to the test. We'll explore some of them further below.

User onboarding isn't as simple as Intercom makes it out to be. A linear onboarding flow that simply takes users from one step to the next while signposting features around the app won't take them very far. Having dynamic and varied UX patterns allows you to supercharge your onboarding process, driving users to complete important tasks and have a quicker time-to-value.

If that's what you're looking for, you should consider the following alternatives. 👇

If you prefer building your own UX flows in-house using JavaScript, Intro.JS is an excellent choice. It is a lightweight and flexible JavaScript library that allows your engineers to create interactive step-by-step user guides. With Intro.JS, you can customize the flow, incorporate advanced button actions, and style the guides to align with your branding.

Pricing: Starting at $9.99 for a lifetime license

Key advantage over Intercom Product Tours:

As mentioned earlier, Appcues not only specializes in user onboarding but also provides the flexibility to build dynamic UX patterns. Its visual editor and extensive library of UI components allow you to create interactive flows, modals, slideouts, checklists, and more. Unlike Intro.JS, Appcues empowers product teams to design engaging experiences without relying heavily on developers.

Pricing: Plans start at $249/month

Key advantages over Intercom Product Tours:

• Appcues specializes in user onboarding and other use cases for Product Teams, unlike Intercom's focus on Customer Service

Chameleon goes beyond the limitations of Intercom Product Tours and offers a comprehensive platform for building dynamic UX patterns. With Chameleon, you can create interactive product tours, onboarding checklists, modals, slideouts, and various other highly engaging elements. 

The platform can also integrate with several other tools in your stack to understand and target patterns in user behavior that can have major impact on your product adoption metrics.

If you don't trust us when we say that Chameleon's powerful personalization and segmentation capabilities will enable you to deliver value at every step of your users' journeys, then you should trust what our customers have to say.

(Source)

Pricing: Plans start at $249/month

Key advantages over Intercom Product Tours:

• Chameleon has the best combination of ease-of-use with a wide range of features that turn product tours into real engines of product-led growth for SaaS businesses.

Most of the solutions being outlined here are priced based on either Monthly Tracked Users (MTUs) or Monthly Active Users (MAUs). This means that spikes in usage or rapid growth can have a significant impact on your costs. If this concerns you, then more affordable solutions might be a safer bet.

UserGuiding stands out as an affordable alternative for businesses seeking scalable pricing options. It provides a user-friendly interface and offers a wide range of user onboarding features, including product tours, checklists, and in-app messages. With UserGuiding, you can create engaging experiences without breaking the bank.

Pricing: Plans start at $89/month

Key advantages over Intercom Product Tours:

• Userguiding is a safer investment if all you need is to build product tours. You won't be paying for Intercom's full roster of customer service solutions, and you'll get a more flexible builder for a fraction of the cost.

Dopt is more similar to Intro.JS than to the other tools we've listed so far, which are primarily Product Adoption Platforms. Dopt is built for developers and it offers a component library and SDKs that help them design and build in-product experiences. It offers a free plan for startups and small businesses, making it an attractive option for those looking to get started without any upfront costs. However, you should bear in mind that engineering time is money, so while you may be saving up on the software, building product tours will still cost you pipeline.

Pricing: Free for up to 1,000 MTUs, then $199/month 

Key advantages over Intercom Product Tours:

• With Dopt you're essentially building in-house, so it brings you the flexibility to design flows that fit your exact needs.

Mobile app onboarding is a whole different beast to web-first user onboarding. We're talking about different patterns of user behavior, different design requirements, and different forms of communication. If you're building product tours for a mobile-native app, consider a solution specialized in your framework.

Airship is a comprehensive app experience platform that enables businesses to build engaging onboarding experiences for mobile applications. It provides tools for in-app messaging, push notifications, and personalized content delivery, helping businesses create seamless user onboarding experiences.

Pricing: Starts at $25K/year for the Enterprise plan

Key advantages over Intercom Product Tours:

• Airship will work with your mobile app, while Intercom can only work on desktop.

Braze specializes in customer engagement across various channels, including mobile apps. With its powerful mobile SDKs and extensive personalization capabilities, Braze enables you to deliver highly targeted and effective product tours in your mobile application.

Pricing: Undisclosed

Key advantages over Intercom Product Tours:

• Braze lets you engage with users across multiple channels, connecting your mobile product tours to other moments in the user journey, like automated emails or text messages.

While Intercom's Product Tours feature offers a solid foundation for user onboarding, it may not fulfill all the requirements of businesses seeking specialized onboarding solutions, dynamic UX flows, scalable pricing, or mobile app onboarding capabilities. 

By exploring alternatives you can find the right solution to meet their specific needs. Remember, user onboarding is a crucial element in driving product adoption and ensuring a positive user experience. Choose a solution that goes beyond the shiny feature and empowers your business to create meaningful and engaging onboarding experiences for your users.