Pendo alternatives for B2B SaaS

What you are replacing

Pendo's pricing page splits its offer into three plans. Base covers product analytics and in-app guides. Core adds session replay. Ultimate adds sentiment surveys (NPS, PMF and CSAT), Orchestrate, Listen and Data Sync. The page says that when you buy a Pendo module you get full functionality with no gated features, and that the incremental cost of adding more Pendo decreases as you upgrade or add usage. It also advertises retroactive analytics, access to your product's data history from the day you install Pendo, and a free Novus beta with no MAU limit while it lasts.

Before choosing, write down which of those pieces your team opens weekly. A team that only builds onboarding checklists is paying for analytics it may not use. A team that lives in funnels and rarely ships a guide has the opposite problem. The five alternatives below split along that line.

Userpilot: the best pick for guides plus analytics

Userpilot bills on monthly active users and prints two prices. The pricing page lists Starter at $299 a month for up to 2,000 monthly active users, with in-app engagement, user segmentation and an NPS survey. Growth is listed from $849 a month and adds advanced product analytics, event autocapture, a resource center and 100k free emails a month. Enterprise is "Let's Talk" and carries mobile engagement, premium CRM integrations, data warehouse sync, a security audit and a custom contract and SLA. The page also lists SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA and GDPR compliance.

What the two plans cost over a year

• Starter: $299 x 12 = $3,588 a year, for a product with up to 2,000 monthly active users.
• Growth: $849 x 12 = $10,188 a year at the listed starting price. The page calls it a "from" price, so a larger user count raises it.
• The gap: $10,188 - $3,588 = $6,600 a year is the price of moving from guides and basic segmentation to the analytics and autocapture tier.

One wrinkle: the Starter button reads "Get Started Free" even though the plan is listed at $299 a month, so ask what the free start covers before you plan on it.

How its data model compares with Pendo's

Userpilot's autocapture documentation says it records clicks, text inputs and form submissions once the setting is on. You then label a raw event, by pointing and clicking or with a CSS selector, and it appears next to your tracked and custom events. Labeling is available on Growth and Enterprise only. History is partly retroactive: data from before you label an event shows up in Event Overview and Analytics, but segments and content triggering only use data collected after the label exists. Pendo's tagging works differently here, because its Pages and Features apply to everything collected since install.

Switching from Pendo to Userpilot

1. Install Userpilot beside the Pendo snippet. Its docs describe installation by snippet, Segment or Google Tag Manager, and flows are built in a Chrome extension without code.
2. Send the same visitor and account IDs Pendo gets in its initialize call as Userpilot's user and company identifiers. Pendo's own planning guide tells teams not to change those IDs after the initial implementation, so they are the natural identifiers to carry over.
3. Turn each Pendo Page and Feature that drives a report into a labeled event. Pendo Track Events, the ones your developers send in code, become tracked events in Userpilot.
4. Rebuild live guides in the Userpilot builder, starting with the three your support team gets asked about most.
5. To bring history across, Userpilot's Import API accepts users, companies, page views and custom events as CSV or NDJSON files up to 1 GB, but it is limited to Enterprise or sold as a Growth add-on, runs one job at a time, and does not merge with live data. Import before installing the SDK.

Appcues: onboarding flows without the analytics suite

Appcues is the narrow option. It sells in-app experiences (flows, checklists, announcements), targeting and reporting, and its pricing page shows plan sizes but no dollar prices. The page says pricing is based on monthly active users, the number of installations and published experiences, and that a free trial starts with a call to the sales team. Pricing on request (quote-based) is the only honest label until you have that call.

Read the table against your own inventory. Suppose you have 18 live Pendo guides today: Start's 10 published experiences will not hold them, Grow's 25 will, and the cost driver then becomes the MAU count. The pricing page defines MAUs as the total number of users who sign into your platform in any given month, and its developer docs add that every user you identify in a rolling 30-day period counts, whether or not they see an experience. Appcues also says every plan includes every experience type, feature and integration from day one, so the limits are volume, not capability.

Identity. Appcues's identify guide requires an identify call with a unique, opaque user ID before it will show anything, an optional group call for the account a user belongs to, and a track call for custom events that trigger flows and complete checklist items. Pendo's visitor and account IDs map directly onto the user and group IDs.

What you lose. Appcues has no analytics suite to replace Pendo's funnels and paths, only reporting tied to its own experiences. If you move, keep a separate analytics tool (Amplitude below, or Mixpanel at $120 a month billed annually or $140 on a monthly plan, see Mixpanel vs Amplitude) and send the same events to both.

WalkMe: for employee and enterprise estates

WalkMe's pricing page has one call to action, "Request a quote", and two offerings: WalkMe for employees, aimed at adoption of applications and workflows, and WalkMe for customers, aimed at product experiences in customer-facing applications and websites. There are no dollar amounts and no plan names, so the label is pricing on request (quote-based).

What the page does describe is breadth: in-app guides, tooltips and notifications, onboarding tours, targeted surveys with AI features, flow analytics that compare end-to-end journeys with funnel and paths views, workflow automation, white-labeling and multi-language support. It lists data centers in the US and EU, each supporting different features. That last line is the one to read twice if you have a residency requirement, because it says the regions do not match feature for feature.

Questions to bring to the quote call

1. Which of the two offerings applies, and is the customer-facing one priced by users, by applications or by traffic?
2. Which features are missing in the EU data center compared with the US one?
3. What does Pendo-style product analytics look like here, and is it the flow analytics the page describes or something else?
4. What does the contract say about the number of applications you can add later?

Switching effort. The honest answer is that WalkMe is rarely a like-for-like swap for Pendo. Pendo is installed in a product you build and tags it from the inside. WalkMe's own pricing page leads with employee adoption across applications you may not control. Move to it from Pendo only if your guidance problem has grown beyond your own product.

Whatfix: guidance across many applications

Whatfix's pricing page names three plans for web and desktop apps: Standard and Premium, each with a "Get a Demo" button, and Enterprise, described as multi-app plans for employee or customer-facing applications, with "Talk to Sales". Whatfix publishes no dollar amounts, so the label is pricing on request (quote-based). The facts below are the ones the page prints, and they are mostly limits.

• Guidance types: Self Help (an embedded wiki), Task List, Smart Tips (tooltips), Flows, Beacons, Pop-Ups and Launchers.
• Integrations: Standard is limited to 2 integrations.
• Knowledge base import: the cap varies by plan, from 2000 articles up to unlimited, with a maximum cap of 50,000 articles.
• Analytics: a Standard product analytics plan is included for free, but only with a DAP Web and Desktop plan. Guidance analytics covers content engagement, weak points and completion rate.
• Mobile: a separate mobile plan lists Mixpanel, Amplitude and Segment based integrations, so it expects you to keep an analytics tool rather than replace one.
• Deployment: cloud and self-hosted, which is the distinguishing line for regulated buyers.

Switching effort from Pendo. The pricing page talks about exporting content as videos, slide decks and articles for training and your LMS, which points at a learning-and-development audience, so the people who own your Pendo guides today may not be the ones who run Whatfix. The practical sequence is to export a list of your live Pendo guides, map each to a Flow, Smart Tip or Pop-Up, and decide on the analytics tool separately, since the free Standard analytics comes only with a web or desktop plan and the page itself points mobile teams at Mixpanel or Amplitude.

Amplitude: replace only the analytics half

If your team uses Pendo mainly for funnels, paths and retention, Amplitude is the cheapest honest swap. Its pricing page lists a free plan with 2M events a month with no time limit, 10K monthly session replays and limited experiments, guides and surveys. Plus starts at $0 with the first 2M events free and scales to 70M events, with 20 behavioral cohorts, alerts, heatmaps and 2-year data retention. Growth and Enterprise are custom, event-based pricing. Every plan includes unlimited seats, which matters when many non-analysts need to read the charts. Startups with under $10M in funding and fewer than 20 employees get one free year on Growth.

A worked example at 12,000 monthly users

• Assume 220 events per user per month, which is our assumption and not Amplitude's figure. 12,000 x 220 = 2,640,000 events a month.
• The free plan covers the first 2M, which leaves 640,000 events (2,640,000 - 2,000,000) on Plus. Amplitude does not print a per-event rate on the page, so the bill for those events comes from a quote or its calculator.
• At 6,000 users and the same 220 events, 6,000 x 220 = 1,320,000 events, which sits inside the free plan.

Identity and capture

Amplitude tracks three signals: a device ID, an Amplitude ID it computes to stitch devices together, and a user ID you set, described in its identify-users documentation. The user ID cannot be changed once set, so reuse your internal ID, the one you already pass to Pendo as the visitor ID, and avoid email addresses. The Browser SDK can autocapture from version 2.10.0 when you enable it: page views, sessions and form interactions are on by default, while element clicks are off until you set that option, per Amplitude's Browser SDK documentation. That is a partial equivalent to Pendo's Feature clicks, so the clicks you tag as Pendo Features need that option or explicit events.

What you give up

Amplitude Guides and Surveys covers tours, checklists, announcements, tooltips, banners and modals plus NPS and microsurveys, targeted with behavioral cohorts. Its pricing is based on the number of guides and surveys you create, and the page describes it as an add-on for Plus or bundled with Growth and Enterprise. If your guide library is the heart of your use, rebuild your three hardest guides in Amplitude and in Userpilot before committing to either. For autocapture-first analytics, our Mixpanel vs Heap and Amplitude vs Heap pages cover the third option.

Which one for which situation

Moving off Pendo: the parts that are Pendo-specific

• Installation: Pendo's install script has three parts, a call for the web SDK, the public app ID and the initialize method that defines visitor and account IDs and metadata, and it must be on every page you collect from. Leave it running until the replacement is validated.
• Retroactive tags: Pendo Pages and Features are collected retroactively, but Track Events are not. When you rebuild, tags will work on history in Pendo and may not in the new tool, so count the Track Events first, since those are the ones that need developer time.
• Plan structure: Pendo's Ultimate adds Sentiment, Orchestrate, Listen and Data Sync. If you use any of those, name the replacement before you cancel, because only some of the alternatives have a counterpart.
• Contract timing: because Pendo prices by custom MAU volume and gives no list price, the renewal date is the one number you control. Build the parallel run so it ends before that date.

Mixpanel's migration guide, written for analytics moves, puts the technical piece for one engineer at one to three weeks and recommends loading a year of history or less. Guide rebuilds are separate work, and they scale with the number of live guides you have.

FAQ

How much does Pendo cost?

Pendo's pricing page shows no dollar amounts. It lists Base, Core and Ultimate with a custom MAU volume on each, and offers a free Novus beta and a "Try for free" link. A written quote is the only way to get a number.

Is there a free Pendo alternative?

Amplitude's free plan covers 2M events a month with no time limit. That replaces Pendo's analytics, not its guides, and the free plan includes only limited guides and surveys.

Can I replace only Pendo's guides and keep the analytics?

Yes. Appcues is built for exactly that split, and Userpilot's Starter plan does guides, segmentation and an NPS survey without the Growth analytics tier. Keep sending events to Pendo in parallel until the guides are rebuilt.

Which alternatives publish prices?

Userpilot ($299 and $849 a month) and Amplitude (free, with Plus starting at $0) do. Appcues, WalkMe and Whatfix are quote-based, and Pendo is too.

Where do I go next?

Our digital adoption tools list and customer onboarding tools list cover the guide side in depth, and B2B product analytics covers the measurement side.