The Affordable Appcues Alternative

18 December, 2023

Providing outstanding user experiences is more important than ever. With today’s easy access to information and often numerous alternatives, making your customers happy, looking after them and providing exceptional in-app experiences is crucial for the long-term success of your business.

The fact that you’re here means you probably already know this - or at least have a suspicion – and have decided to invest some resources into improving your user experience. That is awesome, go you!

In-app tours and user support guides are a great way to not only help new users get started and see the value quickly, but it’s also a great way to introduce new features, draw attention to certain aspects of your application or website, ask for user feedback and engage with your users on an ongoing basis.

If you’re looking for a tool that makes it super easy for you to create powerful, interactive in-app guides and tours, you’ve probably come across both Appcues and HelpHero (that’s us 😊), and you might be wondering which one is better for you. We thought we’d help you out by providing a bit of an overview of how the two compares.

Trial and Setup

Let’s start at the beginning. The first thing you have to do is set things up. Both Appcues and HelpHero offer a free, unlimited use, 14-day trial, and a Chrome Extension that makes it easy to get started and create some tours and guides without having to install any code. However, for your tours to go live in your app, you will have to add a bit of JavaScript to your app or webpage. This is pretty simple, and both Appcues and HelpHero provide easy to follow instructions on how to do this.

Ease of Use

Both Appcues and HelpHero are super easy to use. You don’t need to know any code or be overly tech-savvy to create powerful tours and guides, and it won’t take a lot of time either. Both provide support documentation to help you get started and also have support teams where real people can answer any questions you have. In addition, Appcues offer templates that you can use to build your tours and guides. If you think you will be creating very complex tours, you might find Appcues slightly more intuitive. On the other hand, if most of your tours will be shorter and simpler, you might find HelpHero a bit easier to use.

Features

There certainly is no shortage of impressive functionality in either of these two product tour applications. Here are some of the key features that both Appcues and HelpHero offer:

• You can customize the themes and look and feel of the tours to make sure they align with your brand and product.
• You can format the text in your tours and add images and videos.
• You can share links to your tours in your email, chat or support documentation to further maximize the value of your tours and improve user engagement.
• Checklists provide a quick and easy way for your users to learn how to get started with your app.
• Analytics help you understand how users are engaging with your tours and enable you to identify opportunities for improvement.
• Advanced personalization and targeting functionality give you the ability to configure tours and guides for specific user groups and create more personal and engaging experiences for your users.
• You can add surveys to your tours to gain valuable insights from your users.
• You can A/B split test your tours to find out which version works better.
• Plus many more awesome features that help you create better user experiences.

At this point, you might start to wonder if there even is a real difference between Appcues and HelpHero. Well, while they do have a lot in common, there are a few differences. Let’s take a look at those.

Track Specific Goals for your Tours

Both Appcues and HelpHero provide detailed analytics on how your tours are performing. However Appcues offers more advanced analytics like the ability to set goals based on user actions. HelpHero doesn’t provide this out of the box, however you can integrate with your favorite analytics provider like google analytics or mixpanel to enable more advanced analytics.

NPS Surveys

While you can use NPS surveys in both applications, Appcues does offer a specific NPS survey feature which makes it just a little bit easier to run them. You can use the embed feature in HelpHero to include NPS surveys from your favorite NPS provider. It just involves a few extra steps to setup. So, if this is something that’s really important to you and that you do a lot of, you might want to consider it in your decision.

Intercom Messenger Integration

If you’re an Intercom user or think you might become one in the future, this should be of interest to you. With the HelpHero Intercom Messenger Integration, you can add your HelpHero tours directly to you Intercom Messenger. That way, your users can get interactive help even when you’re offline. Here is how that can help you improve your customer experience:

• Better support conversations
  Send your customers interactive tours directly from your Intercom Messenger. Everyone knows that interactive content is much more powerful and engaging than text, so sending a link to a tour will be much more valuable to your users than a written response.
• Improve your self-service help experience
  Not all users like to deal with real people. Some prefer finding the answers themselves. Integrating HelpHero directly into your Intercom Messenger home screen makes it easy to provide customers with an intuitive self-service help experience.

Integrations

Appcues offers several existing integrations, including Google Analytics, Mixpanel, and more. HelpHero currently does not have any out of the box integrations beyond the Intercom one mentioned above. However, with a little bit of work you can integrate with third party software applications using the HelpHero API. We are more than happy to provide examples to help you get started, so if this is something that’s important to you, have a chat with us.

Performance

Appcues is built with all the bells and whistles, but this comes at the cost of a larger download size in terms of the Appcues script which you will need to install on your website. This could result in your application taking longer to load, in addition it may not work as well on mobile or for users who have a slower internet connection. On the other hand, because HelpHero’s feature set is more focused, the HelpHero script you add to your website is significantly lighter weight and therefore the performance of your website is less likely to be affected.

Pricing

Time to talk about the money. In terms of pricing, things are pretty clear: HelpHero offers a significantly lower price regardless of plan and number of users.

In addition, the HelpHero pricing model is simple and straightforward. All of our plans include all of our features so there is no need for you to worry about missing out on any functionality.

With Appcues, popular advanced features like checklists, segmentation and custom CSS to name a few, are only available if you sign up to their more expensive plans which start from US$899 per month. On the other hand, HelpHero lets you access all standard and advanced features from as little as US$55 per month. With this in mind, HelpHero offers even better value as you may get a more comprehensive feature set for a lower price.

But don’t just take our word for it. Have a look at the pricing comparison below.

The HelpHero Advantage

Given all of this, we think HelpHero is an excellent choice for most people who are looking for an easy and affordable way to create powerful product tours and guides. Of course, we might be a bit biased, we built the software after all.

We think Appcues is a great product but it may be better suited for enterprise or companies that require a comprehensive solution, and that also have the budget and technical resources to implement and use the tool.

HelpHero is perfect for those wanting an easy-to-use, cost-effective way to improve their user experience and to reduce support costs. It comes at a significantly lower price point and offers a ton of value for a product tour software tool. What’s not to love about that.