The 10 most popular DAPs for 2024

The Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) market or category is relatively crowded, and differentiation takes time. We’ll try to help map out the players and offer some insights about each of these tools (in alphabetical order):

Now let's dig into who they are and what they do a little bit more:

Appcues

Founded in 2014, Appcues has been a regular on the list of top platforms evaluated by SMB and MM teams that wanted something more nimble than Pendo or WalkMe (the original incumbents). More recently, Appcues invested in offering basic product analytics and native mobile support. With great marketing and brand presence, Appcues has established itself as one of the more popular DAP solutions. 

Candu

Originally designed to build core UI without code, Candu has recently expanded to offer more traditional user onboarding and digital adoption patterns, such as tooltips and product tours. Customers may still pair Candu with another DAP solution for those use cases but find value in building more customized screens, which are great for in-app resource hubs, empty states, or homepages. 

Chameleon

Chameleon’s popularity has grown over time, and its focus on design/UX, innovation, and depth of functionality has meant teams switch from a first-generation solution, especially when pairing alongside a dedicated product analytics solution (like Amplitude and Mixpanel). Having recently launched its HelpBar product and with more native embedded options, Chameleon offers a wide range of patterns for web-based solutions. 

CommandBar

Initially trying to capitalize on the growing popularity of the CMD+K search and navigation pattern, CommandBar has broadened its functionality to include product tours, chat, checklists, etc., and made a push around its AI features. Now, with its new ShipLog release notes product, CommandBar offers a broad suite of patterns but is not as deep or feature-rich as some of the more focused solutions. 

Gainsight PX

Gainsight PX came about after Gainsight acquired Aptrinsic, an early Pendo competitor, offering both in-app guides and product analytics. Considering that Gainsight’s main audience is the Customer Success persona, which is also incentivized to drive more product engagement, sometimes in a tech-touch manner, Gainsight can be a great extension for teams already deeply entrenched in Gainsight, starting with in-app experiences. 

Intercom Product Tours

Intercom, famous for its chat messenger, entered into the Product Tours category in 2019 with a relatively simple offering, but one that worked well with the rest of its platform. If you’re already using Intercom for emails and support, it can be a straightforward option to use Intercom for Product Tours, especially if you’re focused on reducing support tickets or most experiences are expected to be the traditional “walkthrough” style. 

Pendo Guides

Pendo’s vision is to be the go-to platform for PMs for many of their use cases, including product analytics, in-product guidance, feedback collection and management, roadmapping, etc. This approach often competes with dedicated players in each of these categories, but Pendo Guides is still a robust offering for teams using Pendo Analytics. 

Userflow

Userflow has had glowing reviews around its ease of use. It has focused on letting customers build their in-app experiences via a more traditional dashboard rather than the Chrome Extension editor that most others use. Recently acquired by Beamer, we’d expect to see a more solid integration between in-app experiences built with Userflow and public release notes managed within Beamer. 

Userpilot

A fast-following, lower-cost European alternative to Appcues and Pendo, Userpilot has become a more popular player over time. It offers a wide range of functionality at competitive prices for growing startups. Most recently, Userpilot has moved into the product analytics category too with no-code event auto-capture and tracking—and now competing with other "all-in-one" product growth tools.

WalkMe

The original player and one that coined the DAP term, WalkMe, first began by solving the employee training use case. Mostly selling to large enterprises to help train their teams on internal software, such as Salesforce, Oracle, etc. WalkMe has branched out to a composite suite of products and solutions, including data/analytics, bots, session replay, automation, etc. SAP recently acquired it and will be incorporated into SAP’s software offerings. 

And the best of the rest

There are others in the category that we haven’t listed here, including Whatfix, Product Fruits, ChurnZero, UserGuiding, Spekit, and others, but mostly because their main use cases are slightly different from the ones above or they don’t yet have sufficient market penetration to be considered amongst the top players. 

Adjacent and overlapping product categories

The DAP category overlaps with some others or may be confused with others with a slightly different onboarding use case, so here we laid out some of these other categories and examples of tools within them.

1. Employee onboarding

Examples: WalkMe and Whatfix

As mentioned above, if you’re looking primarily for internal training or want to offer coaching for third-party software solutions that your company has purchased, WalkMe, Whatfix, Pendo, or Spekit are likely the best bets. This falls outside new-age DAPs because features necessary for “learning & development” differ from those required for “end-users.” 

2. Client/customer onboarding

Examples: Rocketlane and GUIDEcx

That this category references “client” or “customer” onboarding vs. “user” onboarding is quite telling; it’s intended to help facilitate the project management required when working with customers in a human-assisted fashion and is not about UX patterns that are deployed inside your product to drive engagement and conversion. The functionality here includes tracking progress, task management, tagging and commenting, etc. and is a better fit for service providers (e.g. agencies, consultancies) than SaaS. 

3. Interactive demo software

Examples: Navattic, Arcade, Reprise, Walnut, Chameleon

As the name suggests, interactive demo software allows pre-sales, sales, and marketing teams to create embeddable product demos by taking a snapshot of your UX and overlaying it with annotations or animations. This enables these demo clips to be shared outside of your product (e.g., on a marketing site or via the link in an email) without the user accessing your product. 

These solutions also work well alongside Chameleon if you want to showcase these demos from inside your product to showcase value in the following ways:

• Showing what a fully implemented solution looks like to a new user that has not yet implemented

• Showing what a locked or upcoming feature or capability looks like to users who don’t have access yet

• Showing prototypes or upcoming changes to collect user feedback and facilitate changes

Chameleon recently announced a new product line for Interactive Demos. You will be able to create these within Chameleon in a similar style to your in-app product experiences and cohesively manage all your in-app and out-of-app interactive user onboarding and product engagement experiences in one place! Sign up here to get early access.

4. Product analytics software

Examples: Mixpanel and Amplitude

Product adoption is built for collecting large amounts of product data, slicing and dicing that data in many ways, creating easy-to-set-up dashboards, and generally providing better insight into what users are doing. It often now also allows you to create groups (“cohorts”) of users for analysis and sync these to products through which you might communicate with these users (including DAPs but also email marketing and other notifications tooling). 

Pendo is somewhat unique in attempting to compete as product analytics software and a DAP solution, but this means it has a wide surface area to cover and may not be able to offer the depth that sophisticated teams need. 

These solutions integrate well with Chameleon in a bi-directional manner: all the data tracked by Chameleon is automatically sent to your product analytics solution, and user cohorts and other data can be sent from your analytics solution to Chameleon for targeting with in-app experiences. 

5. Product building software

Examples: Retool and Thunkable

As part of the low-/no-code movement, some solutions enable you to build product UIs without engineering resources. These are adjacent to DAPs but typically are for companies to build internal or secondary products from scratch rather than as a supplement to their existing products. 

6. Help desk software

Examples: Zendesk and HelpScout

Help desk tools allow you to create an external repository of support content (a knowledge base or docs hub) and serve as a broader support ticket collection and management solution. You will likely need something for this; ideally, it will integrate with your DAP solution. 

You can typically integrate these solutions with a DAP in the following ways:

• Add links to start walkthroughs in your help content

• Allow searching your existing help content from within an in-product experience (Chameleon offers this via the HelpBar interface)

• Open a ticket from an in-product experience (e.g., clicking a button on a Step opens the Support bot)

Some additional ways that Chameleon integrates directly with Zendesk, Help Scout, and Intercom include opening up help articles inside in-app modals, summarizing help article text (with AI) for use in a tooltip, and offering AI-generated answers based on help articles (within the HelpBar). 

7. Live Chat software

Examples: Intercom and Drift

Live chat is often used for support use cases (e.g., Intercom is help desk software, but a key component is the Messenger bot and their new AI-based support bot product, Fin) and also in more marketing/website conversion-oriented use cases (e.g., Drift). 

Some DAP solutions, like Userflow and CommandBar, have started offering a basic version of chat or AI responses, which may sufficiently replace a dedicated chat solution. However, in most cases, DAPs will integrate with your existing support or chat solution. 

For example, Chameleon customers can launch live chat using any service by clicking a button within a Product Tour, Tooltip, etc., or even from HelpBar search results.

8. Online survey tool

Examples: SurveyMonkey and Typeform

Most DAP solutions offer in-product NPS and potentially other microsurvey types. These are usually restricted to short surveys without sophisticated logic and are not available to send via email. For longer-form surveys or more sophisticated routing and configuration options, you may choose to use a dedicated survey tool. 

In some cases (e.g., Chameleon with Typeform), you can integrate this survey tool into your DAP to launch in-app surveys from in-product experiences. The benefit of this is more control over who is shown the survey (due to your ability to configure the audience within the DAP) and a more native-looking prompt to launch the survey. All the survey results would still be within your survey platform (e.g., Typeform), but you may get some analytics within the DAP on how many users launched the survey or dismissed the prompt. 

DAP by use case