Top 8 User Onboarding Software & Tools in 2023

User onboarding is a key stage, where you must provide a seamless experience. You can also integrate extra tools to get the most from that process.

Let’s look at eight of the best pieces of user onboarding software available in 2023.

List of Top Onboarding Software and Tools

• SEON: Best for Fraud Prevention
• Appcues: Best for Code-Free Tooltips and Tutorials
• Proof Pulse: Best for Real-Time Social Proof
• Vero: Best for User Segmentation
• Optimizely: Best for Digital Experimentation
• Heap: Best for Product Analytics
• Hotjar: Best for Heat Maps
• Mixpanel: Best for General Business Analytics

What Is User Onboarding Software?

User onboarding tools are designed to help customers sign up for a service. It is a term preferred in the SaaS (Software as a Service) industry, where a signed-up user becomes a customer. 

Because onboarding means different things to different companies, there are many tools that can help that process. For instance, some will deliver extra information, others will focus on marketing, and some will add a layer of security. 

Generally speaking, however, all user onboarding tools help ensure that you get the most from the stage where a customer creates an account with you. 

Key User Onboarding Software Features

Marketing company WyzOwl reports that 86% of people are more likely to stay loyal to a business that invests in quality onboarding.

Here are points to consider when you plan to integrate tools into your own customer onboarding journey:

• Pricing: Most user onboarding tools operate under the SaaS model, which is great because you can pay more or less depending on your usage. There are often free plans available. Just make sure that you don’t get locked into lengthy contracts that don’t offer flexibility if your onboarding volume is irregular or seasonal.
  
• Friction: Ideally, user onboarding tools should remove friction from the signup journey. It’s a fine line between adding extra features and creating obstacles for your customers. Some tools might give great insights, for instance, but slow down your website at the same time.
  
• Integration: Adding any tool to your arsenal requires careful planning in terms of deployment. Will it cause downtime? Will you have to dedicate too much developer time to get it up and running?
  
• Efficiency and ROI: Last but not least, you should evaluate the efficacy of your user onboarding tools regularly. Do they deliver on their promise? Are you getting your money’s worth?

The Top 8 User Onboarding Software for 2023

Let us now look at the best user onboarding software and tools available on the market today, providing basic features, pricing details and benefits for each.

Disclaimer: Everything in this article was gleaned from online research, including user reviews. We did not have time to manually test all the tools. However, we’ve ensured the information was correct as of Q3 2022. Feel free to contact us to request an update/correction.

SEON – Best for Fraud Prevention

It is no exaggeration to say that every successful online business is now being targeted by fraudsters. It hardly matters what kind of product or service you sell. If you are online and making money, bad agents will look to find a way to exploit you.

The good news is that it’s easier than ever to set up your first risk stack with companies such as SEON. Better still, it also works as an additional layer to gather extra information. 

SEON works by capturing digital footprint data, so you can learn a lot about your users without asking them to fill extra fields. It looks at 50+ social signals and enriches data from devices, email addresses, and phone numbers to spot bots, fraudsters, and people trying to hide something from your analytics.

SEON Pros

• Stop fraudsters: You can immediately spot suspicious devices or IP addresses.
• Leverage social data: SEON uniquely enriches data from 50++ sources in real time to provide each person’s digital footprint. If your users enter an email or phone number, you can also look at their social information, to better gauge if they are legitimate.

SEON Cons

• No IDV: If your mandates require KYC checks, SEON cannot check identity and other documentation.

SEON Pricing

• There is a free 14-day trial. After that, SEON pricing is pay-per-API call.

Choose SEON If:

• You’re in a high-risk industry for fraud or you want frictionless customer segmentation.

Appcues – Best for Code-Free Tooltips and Tutorials

Calling Appcues a user onboarding tool is underselling it: You could build pretty much your entire onboarding process upon its no-code suite of tools. The no-code part is worth stressing. It means marketers and product people can guide new users without bothering developers.

As for what you can do with Appcues, it includes the ability to add tutorials, slideouts, tooltips, and hotspots. You can also segment users and use the in-app surveys to get feedback on your product!

Appcues Pros

• Intuitive: Appcues gives you all the tools you need to guide users through their first use of your product in an unobtrusive, friendly way.
• Allows for feedback: This solution also allows you to gain insight into user preferences to improve upon your product and customer experience.

Appcues Cons

• Some missing features: Existing users point out that they would prefer checklists to be easier to manage, as well as allow for user exclusion based on their previous actions.

Appcues Pricing

• After a free trial, Appcues now offers packages ranging from basic (1000 unique visitors) starting at $29 per month, to platinum (300k visitors) at $299 monthly. Enterprise businesses with workloads beyond that can arrange a bespoke contract.

Choose Appcues If:

• You want to craft an intuitive, easy self-onboarding journey for your customers.

Proof Pulse – Best for Real-Time Social Proof

Seeing other people purchase something is a strong psychological driver that you should do it too. And when it comes to online social proof of this, no other tools do it better than Proof. In simple words, it adds small banners on your site that shows whenever someone performs a certain action, or how many visitors there currently are.

The real-time notifications are unobtrusive and it is up to the merchant to decide what triggers them. This can be a strong signal that your onboarding journey is great, which in turn may inspire more people to sign up for your product or service.

Proof Pulse Pros

• Leverages consumer psychology: Proof displays real-time notifications of visitor and shopper activity, a powerful psychological tool to show that your product or service is popular and encourage more people to buy or commit.
• Affordable: The solution is affordable enough for smaller online shops to also try out, if not use.

Proof Pulse Cons

• Charges could be more transparent: Reviewers have pointed out that they were charged without expecting it following the conclusion of a free trial.

Proof Pulse Pricing 

• Free 14-day trial and paid plans starting at $29/month.

Choose Proof Pulse If:

• You want to show you are trustworthy and nudge prospective customers to take action.

Vero Workflows – Best for User Segmentation

There is no shortage of user segmentation tools on the market (how to target the right group of people), but few of them do it as elegantly as Vero. This sleek marketing software connects directly to your data, so you can send targeted newsletters or create automated workflows.

The latter is particularly useful during the onboarding phase. You can create activity streams with clear visualization and simple if/then logic. It’s all designed perfectly even for non-technical marketers. No wonder companies like Monzo love it.

Vero Workflows Pros

• Granular solution: Vero lets you build simple and complex segmentation to tailor your message to the right users.
• Powerful integrations: The API allows you to integrate this wealth of data with Zapier, Webhooks, Stitch, etc.

Vero Workflows Cons

• Limited segmentation: The software’s focus on customer actions rather than characteristics seems to make reporting and segmentation more limited than some reviewers expect.

Vero Workflows Pricing

• 30-day free trial. The Starter plan is $49/month. 

Choose Vero Workflows If:

• You want to empower your marketing team to create onboarding activity streams.

Optimizely – Best for Digital Experimentation

The user onboarding process can require a lot of guesswork. Optimizely, a company trusted by eBay, Dolby, and Pizza Hut, among others, aims to reduce that guesswork so you can get clear results on what works and what doesn’t. 

It’s more than a simple A/B testing platform for your landing pages. Optimizely gives you a complete digital playground so you can experiment with different CTA placement, colors and any parameter you want to tweak. 

Optimizely Pros

• Make more confident decisions: Optimizely takes away the guesswork when you’re trying to learn what converts and what doesn’t.
• Experiment and measure: It also allows for experimentation, enabling results-focused improvements.

Optimizely Cons

• Pricing: Though it’s a powerful tool, Optimizely tends to be a significant investment and is thus not often deployed by SMEs.

Optimizely Pricing

• Unfortunately, this is more of an enterprise solution, so you’ll need to jump on a sales call to get a quote.

Choose Optimizely If:

• You’re an enterprise ready to boost your onboarding A/B testing to the next level.

Heap – Best for Product Analytics

A complete digital experience optimization tool, Heap helps highlight hidden user actions and behavior that could point towards better results. Used by Nielsen, Walmart Labs and Logitech, among others, the solution is designed to put an end to assumptions about how users engage with your product or website.

It’s especially well-suited to user onboarding journeys with a lot of churn or poor conversion rates. If you’ve ever wondered why people don’t complete your signup process, Heap could be one of the best solutions for you. 

Heap Pros

• Minimize churn: Uncover hidden user behavior patterns that could help you understand where there is too much friction, or what leads to churn. 
• Product-led growth: Enables a company to move to a PLG model, getting users to value more quickly.

Heap Cons

• Steep learning curve: Existing users tend to comment on Heap being rather on the unintuitive side when it comes to using it to its full potential or even finding what you are looking for.

Heap Pricing

• It’s completely free if you are gathering data on fewer than 10,000 users – pretty generous. Premium plans, however, have been reported to be quite expensive. 

Choose Heap If:

• You want to see for yourself exactly how people engage with your website and services.

Hotjar – Best for Heat Maps

Another great tool to help you understand the root cause of churn. Hotjar is probably the best visualization tool to let you directly see where users click, where they hover, and where they skip content during the onboarding process.

You can do more than see mouse patterns during recorded sessions, though. Hotjar also lets you gather user feedback from users on specific page elements. This makes it a complete solution to tweak, optimize, and measure the success of your onboarding pages. 

Just a heads up, though: Hotjar can be quite memory-intensive. Some users report that it slows down their website drastically, so better to use it sparingly. 

Hotjar Pros

• Visualization: Visualize user interactions by checking where visitors’ mouse cursors point.
• A wealth of features: Extensive insights, including feedback from users on specific page elements.

Hotjar Cons

• Page load speed: Despite the useful intel, Hotjar tends to increase loading time for web pages, which is something the brand’s customer need to keep an eye on.

Hotjar Pricing

• There is a free plan with 35 daily sessions, then it’s $31/month for the least costly of the paid plans.

Choose Hotjar If:

• You’re a marketer looking to finetune your website pages to serve visitors better.

Mixpanel – Best for General Business Analytics 

Last but not least, we have Mixpanel, the business analytics tool of choice for startups and bootstrapped companies. The freemium model has a lot to do with it, but the quality of the features also speaks for itself. There’s a reason everyone from Uber to GoDaddy and Yelp uses it.

With Mixpanel, you can gather insights about your product, create flows, look at retention rates and impact, and even perform A/B tests. In short, it’s all about letting you understand how your product is used by gathering relevant data. In terms of onboarding, it’s a fantastic tool to learn where and why users drop off and what kind of users retain best.

Mixpanel Pros

• Make informed decisions: Collect data and create reports to help you understand how people use your website product or mobile app – and how to improve on this. 
• Freemium model: Worth a try by any company looking to grow, as limited use is free of charge.

Mixpanel Cons

• Customer support: There is not much consensus in the Mixpanel pool of users in terms of how they rank customer support, with reviews often pointing out they’re waiting for responses longer than they were hoping for.

Mixpanel Pricing

• It’s free for tracking up to 100K monthly users! The Growth plan is also surprisingly affordable, starting at $25 per month. 

Choose Mixpanel If:

• You’re looking for customer-focused, use case-driven growth for your startup.

How to Choose the Best User Onboarding Software

Luckily for online businesses, there is no shortage of onboarding tools you can add to your stack to reduce risk, gain better insights, and increase your conversion rates. 

However, remember that the onboarding stage is at its best when it is frictionless. Adding too many bells and whistles could detract from a clean UX and even potentially cause churn.

We hope this list of user onboarding tools will give you a better idea of what works and what kind of experience you can create for your users.

User Onboarding Tools FAQ

Sources
WyzOwl: How Onboarding Optimizes User Retention