Pendo

Combines good product analytics with in-app guides and NPS tracking. And that's killer.

Comments: We now use it across several products in the MailUp Group (https://mailupgroup.com). For example, beyond using it for product analytics, we were able to stop using other applications for both in-app guides and NPS tracking, and we now use Pendo for that both in MailUp (https://www.mailup.com) and BEE Pro (https://beefree.io). It's certainly not inexpensive, but it gives the Product and Product Marketing teams tools that are crucial to their work. So, money well spent in my view.

Pros:

What's unique and really useful about Pendo is that it combines product analytics, in-app guides & Net Promoter Score tracking, all under one roof. This allows you to show custom messages just to certain audiences (e.g. I see that some customers did not yet try feature ABC, so I show them a Guide to trigger adoption), and see NPS scores for different segments of users (e.g. what's the NPS for customers that never use feature ABC? What's the score for those that use feature ABC all the time?). That provides incredible insights.

Cons:

First of all let me say that the company has come a long way. Pendo is growing a ton and it shows. They're constantly improving the platform, so we're confident that flaws will be corrected over time. That said, in our experience setting things up takes some time (and the concept of "Feature" is not immediately clear to newcomers: it actually means "UI element"), and until recently there were some annoying productivity issues (e.g. you could not quickly clone a segment, resulting in potentially lots of repeat tasks just to create two similar segment of users: now this has been resolved!). Improvements still need to be made for multi-language applications (e.g. different Guides for different users that speak different languages).

Great product

Comments: Very good. The team were highly attentive and supportive. Has been a really enjoyable project getting this set up and running with benefits almost immediately.

Pros:

It is a significant investment, but so many benefits, it is worth it. The software is very easy to integrate with (for standard web apps) to start getting analytics immediately but you do need a role that focuses on this as their day job to drive the most value from it. The guides are easy to set up and flexible too with lots of templates to help get you started quickly. Having worked in product management for over 25 years the discovery of Pendo was a godsend! Wish had discovered it years before.

Cons:

Works well for standard web apps. If your app doesn't change URL for each page you visit then there may be issues tracking at volume. Not insurmountable but needs more time, thought.

Alternatives Considered: WalkMe and Gainsight PX

Reasons for Switching to Pendo: Better interface, so easy to get up and running. Seemed to give us out of the box what we were looking for. Price - still more than we'd expected but competitive against others.

The best tool to collect feedback and product usage details

Pros:

It's very easy to configure, you can be live in minutes and the reporting capabilities are fantastic. We use it for clients communications and feedback, in addition to NPS score collection. It perfectly does the job.

Cons:

The integrations with other tools can be a bit complicated to manage because Pendo is very powerful and offers multiple ways to do it. Sometimes the reporting capabilities are even too granular (which is a plus) but that makes the job longer in terms of report configuration and checking.

Shop around

Comments: I've used Pendo a couple times over the period of roughly a year. Both of the time that we tried to deploy an NPS survey on our product we had some significant bugs. The first, we had a Opt Out list that some of our admins requested to be on (they didn't want to receive the survey). Pendo experienced a bug in which our survey in fact was seen by some of those accounts. This most recent time I've run across some significant bugs and pretty fundamental considerations in UI. Take for instance that Pendo provides no help in the UI to help guide you in whether you are actually selecting the right account to pool into a segment to target or exclude. You have to pretty much get the account character for character exact to how Pendo has in the system. When I try to export the list of accounts from Pendo, modify the list to remove or add accounts and reimport, Pendo fails on any accounts that have a comma in the title (like Company, LLC or Org, Inc.). Also our survey just decided to not appear out of the blue. Luckily I've jumped in to check our survey frequently and discovered this was the case. I can't be confident that when I deploy something to our end users that Pendo will behave appropriately. Consider another solution with better history and size.

Pros:

The UI is modern and appealing

Cons:

The software is inconsistent, buggy and unpredictable.

Great Tool For Analytics, Gathering User Feedback, and Customer Outreach

Comments: I love Pendo! It's fun to use and I always discover new insights into our users and product.

Pros:

Our organization uses Pendo for a variety of purposes. We use the powerful analytic tools to understand how our users are using our product. This helps our Product Managers make important roadmapping decisions, track feature adoption, and monitor user behavior. The design team gets a lot of benefit from the Funnel and Pathing features, it helps them to study user flows and make design adjustments on the fly. We use guides frequently to announce new features, market events and webinars, collect user feedback, and educate users on how to use our features. I really like the NPS functionality, this allows us to be constantly collecting user feedback that is sampled on a random basis. This has been extremely beneficial for us to track if we are improving our NPS and PMF score quarter by quarter.Nearly ever department in our organization gets some benefit from Pendo, whether its our Product, Customer Success, Marketing, or Sales teams.

Cons:

There is a huge learning curve with Pendo. It can take months to learn all the ins and outs, and it needs to be set up correctly or you will lose all the benefits of the tool. The hardest steps are injecting the Pendo snippet into your codebase, setting up data attributes correctly. tagging the pages/features. creating‹ segments. and excluding testing environments and test orgs. In the past we ran into some troubles with Pendo when we had several people using the tool at once who were not properly trained, this lead to a messy Pendo instance and incorrect/unreliable data. It is best to have one Pendo owner in your organization who is completely familiar with the tool and owns all aspects of Pendo from implementation to maintenance. Once it is set up properly. it is an incredibly powerful and beneficial tool for any organization.