29 onboarding tools for delighting new users

Onboarding tools help new users and customers quickly interact with the most important product features, establish regular use habits, and generally help new customers achieve their goals.  

Increasing customer retention rates by just 5% can increase profits by 25% to 75%, so the value of tools to help with the onboarding process can’t be overstated.

When it comes to customer onboarding tools, there’s more to this type of software than meets the eye. Onboarding software can be used by dozens of different people in the company and for many different reasons.

Onboarding self-service customers. Onboarding enterprise customers. Improving the onboarding experience for both customer types. Measuring. Testing. Training. Teaching.

The list goes on.

We’ve put together a list that satisfies these needs. Keep scrolling for a few of the top onboarding tools!

Why are more and more SaaS businesses turning to onboarding tools?

It’s not uncommon for apps to lose 75% of their users within the first week. That means tens of thousands of new users will never become paying customers. For companies without a free trial or freemium plan, user onboarding is just as important. 

Enterprise clients expect an exceptional onboarding experience, both with self-service product tours and hands-on support from customer success. 

SaaS companies typically need to build out some or all of the following to support an onboarding process:

• Data importers

• White-glove customer data onboarding collaboration workflows

• Training libraries

• Email and chat onboarding sequences

• Support documentation

Onboarding is a lot of work. It requires a ton of effort across an organization from developers, product managers, content teams, and customer success representatives. 

It’s no wonder then that more SaaS companies are turning to onboarding tools to help ensure new customers are well taken care of.

Top onboarding tools

Since onboarding can become complicated, there’s a variety of different types of onboarding tools. These different types can overlap in functionality and SaaS companies can end up with double coverage or with a big gap.

But when it comes down to it, there are a few main functions that you should cover, no matter how you make that happen.

• Data onboarding

• User onboarding

• Video onboarding and product trainings

• Email onboarding

• Chat onboarding

• SMS onboarding

• User experience monitoring and testing tools

Data onboarding

Data onboarding tools help customers get value from the product faster by getting their data ready to use as quickly as possible. Customer, business, or product data needs to be onboarded for different types of tools to be usable. Without excellent data onboarding, customers can’t move onto the core functionality of the product.

1. Flatfile Portal 

Best for: a seamless, quality data onboarding experience

Flatfile Portal is a drop-in data importer that implements in hours (as opposed to weeks). With Flatfile Portal, you can save your engineering team serious time and effort as they won't have to manually build a data importer. While CSV is the most common file type, other types are accepted. Flatfile Portal handles column matching, data validation, and more.

2. Flatfile Workspaces

Best for: collaboratively working with customers to onboard their data

Built for customer success teams who want to take the white glove onboarding experience to the next level, Flatfile Workspaces is a collaborative experience for stakeholders involved in the onboarding process. Customer facing teams can invite customer contacts, plan the onboarding schedule, request files, and handle onboarding with a lot less struggle.

User onboarding

Unlike data onboarding tools, user onboarding tools might include data onboarding in their workflows, but they don’t necessarily focus on customer data. Rather, these tools teach new users how to use the product in an active and engaging way. Product tours, checklists, and tooltips are all popular strategies for onboarding.

3. Onboard

Best for: creating personalized customer onboarding experiences

Onboard doesn't believe that one-size-fits-all when it comes to customer onboarding. The company creates dynamic launch plans (aka Maps) that are not only incredibly efficient but customized so that implementing a new customer is an effective - and amazing experience. 

4. Userpilot

Best for: building pathways and onboarding checklists

Userpilot is a tool that sits on top of your product’s native UI to deliver a better user onboarding experience. It helps product teams create pathways and checklists that are specific to user types and identifies drop off.

5. Chameleon

Best for: building product tours

Chameleon is a code-free tool for onboarding new users. You can easily build out product tours, onboarding checklists, tooltips and more.

6. Hopscotch

Best for: delivering consistent, transparent, and delightful customer onboarding

Hopscotch isn’t necessarily a tool, but it is a framework that developers can use to build their own in-app onboarding experiences. The framework is designed to make it easy to create product tours such as welcome tours and specific feature tours.

7. Rocketlane

Best for: delivering consistent, transparent, and delightful customer onboarding

Rocketlane is a purpose-built customer onboarding software that helps teams codify their best practices with templates, improve customer accountability, and elevate the customer experience with Client Portal and other customer-focused offerings. It comes with built-in CSAT, Time Tracking, and Resource Management and replaces the bundle of tools you use for project management, communication, and collaboration. Start your free 14-day trial.

Video onboarding and product trainings

Video is becoming an increasingly popular tool in the onboarding process. Customer success managers can use it to both train customers at scale and/or send personalized tips and responses.

8. Vidgrid

Best for: sending back-and-forth videos via chat with customers

Vidgrid is a great option for product teams that want to offer a very personalized experience to their enterprise customers. Here’s how it works: customers can easily send short video questions via chat as they’re learning to use the product and then customer service reps can send back pre-recorded or new videos in response.

9. Skilljar

Best for: designing a comprehensive product LMS with learning pathways

Skilljar is a robust user onboarding and LMS solution. It offers unique learning pathways, live and virtual training management, quizzes, and resource libraries for customers. Skilljar's LMS supports streaming video uploaded directly to their platform as well as video embedded from external hosts (YouTube, Wistia, etc)

10. BombBomb

Best for: embedding video messages in any channel

With Bombbomb, you can add video to messages sent with any platform: Gmail, Zendesk, Active Campaign, and plenty more. You can use it both for personalized video messages and scalable videos that get sent to an entire subset of customers.

11. Loom

Best for: sending quick video responses to customer questions

What started as a tool for QA testers to record bug reproductions has turned out to be one of the best examples of fast freemium growth. Many digital teams use Loom frequently for internal communications, but it can also be used for onboarding. Customer success managers can communicate with customers both reactively and proactively—sending videos to respond to quick questions during the onboarding process (or after!)

Email onboarding

The star of most onboarding conversations, email is not to be ignored. Email can be used to encourage new users or customers to try out core features and go deeper into the product.

12. Autopilot

Best for: engaging with new customers at the right time on the right channel

A favorite with marketers, Autopilot can be used to create automated journeys for new users. Use it to create email onboarding sequences that cater to the user's behavior, including how they became a new user and what onboarding material they’ve interacted with so far.

13. ActiveCampaign

Best for: all-in-one email marketing software for marketing and CS teams

ActiveCampaign is quickly becoming every marketer’s favorite email tool, but it absolutely can be used for product teams as well. With advanced segmenting and deep native integrations, ActiveCampaign can send behavioral and transactional emails during the onboarding process.

14. Drip

Best for: email marketing sequences based on user behavior with previous emails

While Drip targets ecommerce companies, it’s a powerful email tool with tons of behavior-based automations and it’s a great fit for getting new users back in your app. 

15. Keap

Best for: email marketing with a built-in CRM for sales, marketing, and CS teams

Keap (formerly InfusionSoft) is an all-in-one marketing and CRM platform that can be used for onboarding sequences and product-activity-triggered emails.

Chat onboarding

What about chat? With chat, you can send customized messages to new users and customers that are relevant based on the actions they’ve already taken (or haven’t taken).

16. Drift

Best for: chatbots that target individual customer accounts and segments

While largely designed for modern sales teams, Drift can be utilized for customer onboarding as well. After all, converting someone into a customer is only half the battle. You need to retain them. With chatbots and email bots that target individual companies as well as segments, you can make sure that customers are getting the onboarding experience that best fits their needs.

17. GoSquared

Best for: live chat and chat prompts based on real product activity

GoSquared offers chat capabilities in their marketing automation platform. This allows you to customize in-app chat messages, such as welcome messages, re-engagement messages, churn reduction prompts, and more.  

18. Intercom

Best for: live chat and chat prompts alongside product LMS

Intercom is a robust solution for user onboarding and has well-known chat features that allow you to send messages and chat prompts to all customers or just a very specific segment. 

19. User.com

Best for: automating the customer journey with a single view of the customer for CS, marketing, and sales teams

User.com is a tool for automating the customer journey and is built to be used by sales teams, customer success, product, and marketing. You can send chat messages to the right person, from the right person at scale.

SMS onboarding

Not every SaaS company sends text messages to their new customers and users. In fact, many don’t. But there are some cases where texts are really important, or where customers might even expect them.

Certain small business apps can be a fit for SMS onboarding, since small business owners might be more likely to engage via text than enterprise customers.

Also, any SaaS product with a valid reason to send transactional updates via SMS might benefit from SMS onboarding sequences as well, just to get customers acquainted with how these text updates and confirmations will work.

20. Customer.io

Best for: automating SMS alongside emails and push notifications

While Customer.io also allows you to send targeted emails and push notifications, one of its top features is undoubtedly the SMS communication, simply because it’s hard to find an SMS platform built for software companies. 

21. Twilio

Best for: adding SMS as a separate onboarding channel

The most well known SMS messaging provider, Twilio is used by businesses large and small from many different industries. With Twilio, you can also manage WhatsApp communication.  

22. Sakari

Best for: bringing in SMS communication to your onboarding and marketing campaigns

Sakari is another great option for an SMS onboarding tool. The platform can send targeted reminders, alerts, confirmations, and marketing campaigns. If you need these sorts of messages for your platform’s service, it can make sense to use the same tool to manage the onboarding SMS sequence.

User experience monitoring and testing tools

You want to know how to onboard your customers better, but first you need to know what THEY want. A critical part of onboarding improvement is understanding user journeys, gathering feedback, identifying problems, and finding solutions. These user experience tools can help with customer onboarding.

23. Hotjar

Best for: shoring up product analytics with behavioral data for a deeper understanding of your users

Hotjar is a well-known tool loved by marketers and ecommerce companies. It’s great for web applications too, because you can use it to watch real user activity recordings, see heatmaps of product engagement, and find funnel drop-offs. 

24. FullStory

Best for: discovering onboarding problems and testing new solutions

FullStory is an enterprise-ready solution for measuring and improving digital experiences. With FullStory, you can capture recordings of user activity and use real product data to find areas of frustration in order to improve user retention.

25. Mixpanel

Best for: capturing product analytics for product, engineering, and onboarding purposes

A popular solution for product analytics, Mixpanel can help you measure user activity to make product-wide improvements and even find users that are at risk of churn. The product is commonly used for analysis and a/b testing and for triggering personalized messages at scale.

26. Mouseflow

Best for: discovering funnel drop offs and popular pathways

Mouseflow offers session replays, heatmaps, and funnel analytics so product and digital teams can continually improve upon the user experience. Use it to identify onboarding problems and measure the success of your updates.

27. Pendo

Best for: collecting user journey analytics and customer feedback

Pendo is a comprehensive onboarding tool that offers user onboarding guidance and tours in addition to user journey analytics, feedback collection, and user experience issue monitoring. 

28. UserIQ

Best for: monitoring individual customer accounts so CS teams can proactively mitigate churn

Designed for customer success professionals, UserIQ helps you gather intelligence on individual accounts and send the right messages at the right time in order to reduce churn and strengthen the relationship. 

29. Usersnap

Best for: collecting feedback and discovering issues with the onboarding experience

Primarily a tool for collecting feedback, Usersnap can be used to discover how effective the onboarding experience truly is. Key features include customer feedback collection and visual QA bug reporting. 

While you might not use tools across every category for your customer onboarding, one thing is clear: there’s not one single, all encompassing tool for onboarding. Your company needs to work to continuously build a better onboarding experience…..and perhaps some of these tools can help!