WalkMe vs. Whatfix — the Ultimate Comparison Guide + a few alternatives
Choosing a digital adoption platform (DAP) can be tricky. Should you go with big names like WalkMe or Whatfix?
What’s even the difference?
I mean, when I just did an internet search for “WalkMe”, Google gave me an advertisement result for Whatfix above an ad for WalkMe.
But rest assured, the two are not interchangeable, and in this article we’ll clearly lay out what the differences are and how to choose the best DAP for your company’s user onboarding needs.
So let’s get right to it!
TL;DR
- WalkMe and Whatfix are both digital adoption platforms that let you create customizable product walkthroughs and analyze product usage data.
- WalkMe provides better user analytics and customer support. Whatfix is easier to implement, maintain, and integrate with other tools.
- Both platforms can be used without programming knowledge, but coding is necessary to fully customize them.
- WalkMe and Whatfix both market themselves to large companies with employee onboarding and training needs. However, Whatfix is more accessible to SMEs.
- Neither platform publishes its pricing information, but user reviews indicate that WalkMe starts at around $9,000 per year and Whatfix at about $1,200 per month.
- If you’re looking for an affordable, code-free SaaS customer onboarding solution, Userpilot is a terrific alternative to Whatfix and WalkMe.
What is WalkMe?
At its core, WalkMe is an enterprise solution for employee onboarding. The platform lets you create customizable, in-depth product walkthroughs to help users learn your software and track their progress as they go.
WalkMe can also be used for SaaS user onboarding and product adoption, but it’s just not their focus. Instead, they lean more toward servicing large companies that want to reduce IT support tickets by training users to navigate their software more effectively.
So how does WalkMe accomplish this? Let’s take a look at some of their product’s key features:
WalkMe features overview
WalkMe’s two core features — product walkthroughs and user analytics — are quite powerful and versatile for user onboarding.
Having some programming knowledge and technical ability will allow you to make these features even more sophisticated. But for those without coding expertise, WalkMe offers an editor tool that makes its basic functions easy and quick to set up.
With WalkMe, you’ll be able to:
- Set up customizable product tours with on-screen guidance.
- Create basic user segments with branching walkthrough experiences.
- Communicate with users via in-app messages and notifications.
- View analytics on user interactions and engagement with your software.
Coding knowledge will allow you to customize UI elements, onboarding flows, and analytics even further. Or you can hire a WalkMe technician to help you with that.
Either way, WalkMe has considerable depth for user onboarding, particularly in the case of employee training.
Whatfix features overview
In many ways, Whatfix is quite similar to WalkMe. Its typical customers are also large, enterprise-level companies with user onboarding needs.
It also offers the ability to create product tours “code-free”. But like WalkMe, it’ll take some programming ability to actually customize the UI elements and user experience.
So, in a nutshell, Whatfix lets you:
- Create custom product tours for user onboarding and employee training.
- Incorporate additional features like onboarding checklists.
- Set up basic contextual onboarding to differentiate user experience.
- Integrate and connect a variety of tools such as product usage analytics and multiple customer support channels.
At this point, it may still seem difficult to tell the difference between WalkMe and Whatfix. The core features we’ve looked at so far are mostly the same.
So let’s take a more detailed look at how the two digital adoption platforms differ.
WalkMe vs. Whatfix — features
Now as we’ve established, WalkMe and Whatfix offer basically the same features and functionality.
However, it turns out that there are some noteworthy differences in the quality and breadth of these features in each product.
Here’s a rundown of some of the most important differentiating factors:
Implementation
Overall Whatfix is easier to install and implement than WalkMe. You just need to install their Chrome or Firefox extension and copy a few JavaScript snippets to get started.
WalkMe, on the other hand, has a much more involved installation process. It’s an on-premise solution, which means it needs to be implemented locally. This requires quite a bit of technical knowledge and often assistance from a WalkMe certified expert.
Analytics
Here is where Whatfix starts to fall behind.
While WalkMe has a user-friendly dashboard for viewing onboarding data and analytics, Whatfix has quite limited analytic capabilities.
Whatfix does allow you to integrate Google Analytics or other similar tools for tracking and measuring user behavior data, but this doesn’t match the power and convenience of the analytics that WalkMe supports.
It also means that getting truly robust product usage analytics with Whatfix will require purchasing an additional tool.
Integration
Although user analytics with Whatfix is limited, its capacity for integration turns out to be an advantage.
Whatfix is designed to provide easy integration with analytics tools, LMSs, and customer support channels. So instead of having multiple external tools or separate, potentially confusing support channels, Whatfix connects them all together to make for a smoother user experience.
WalkMe offers a more robust system overall, but doesn’t support the same level of integration that Whatifx does.
Support
The relatively technical nature of both WalkMe and Whatfix means that support is a key issue.
WalkMe may be harder to set up, but it tends to offer better support. For elements of personalization or customized implementation you may have to pay for this support, but WalkMe has a reputation for delivering when it comes to technical assistance.
In contrast, Whatfix users report that it’s not always fully compatible with their product, and the support they receive can be lacking. In fact, Whatfix’s largest resource for self-serve support is their forum, and even there it’s often other Whatfix users who answer questions.
Conclusion: Whatfix is easier to implement and integrate with other tools. WalkMe has more robust user analytics and better customer support.
A third option for great digital adoption: Userpilot
Now, perhaps you’d like a platform that offers powerful, easy-to-implement features and in-depth analytics. If that’s the case, Userpilot makes a great alternative to Whatfix and WalkMe.
Like WalkMe and Whatfix, Userpilot lets you create customizable, interactive walkthroughs.
These user guides and product tours can be branched based on user segments. This allows you to create tailored experiences for users based on their use case or job-to-be-done with your product.
Userpilot also provides a robust collection of features like onboarding checklists, customizable microsurveys, NPS surveys, and self-serve customer support resources to help you optimize the success of your onboarding flows and provide valuable data for customer success.
Of course, there’s a powerful user analytics dashboard as well so that you can segment and track user progress throughout the onboarding process.
Taken together, these features make Userpilot an effective product growth platform that will help you increase product adoption, improve customer retention, and reduce user churn rates.
On top of that, it takes just minutes to install and requires no coding at all.
If your priorities are ease of implementation, robust customizable walkthroughs, and powerful user analytics rather than employee onboarding — checking out Userpilot is definitely worth your while.
WalkMe vs. Whatfix — use cases
The most significant point to consider here is that both WalkMe and Whatfix are enterprise solutions designed for big companies with large user bases.
As such, one of their main use cases is employee onboarding and training. Their walkthroughs and product tours do a great job of helping employees learn the software necessary to do their job effectively and reducing the number of support tickets generated during use of the software.
WalkMe in particular is known for being able to significantly reduce support ticket loads for a company’s IT department.
Employee onboarding vs. SaaS user onboarding
Does this mean that WalkMe and Whatfix can’t be used for SaaS customer onboarding? Not at all.
It’s just that user training is more in their wheelhouse than customer onboarding for increased user activation and product adoption.
The distinction here is important. In employee onboarding, there’s no need to drive a user to the “AHA moment” where they discover value in the product. For SaaS businesses, this moment is critical for product adoption and keeping users subscribed.
Employees don’t have a choice — they have to use the product or online tool. This means the use case that WalkMe and Whatfix prioritize is centered on helping users become more productive with a piece of software, but not necessarily deriving more value from it.
SaaS businesses need to be able to motivate activation and fight churn. WalkMe and Whatfix both have the functionality to do this in a limited way, but not to the extent that solutions focused on customer onboarding use cases can.
Conclusion: WalkMe and Whatfix share the same primary use case — employee onboarding for enterprise-level businesses.
An alternative to SaaS customer onboarding
To be clear, Userpilot isn’t for employee onboarding and training. Rather, it’s designed especially for mid-market SaaS companies who want to do top-quality customer onboarding.
As we mentioned, not all onboarding use cases are created equal, and Userpilot aims to help you make product tours that optimize user activation and product adoption, increase customer retention, and decrease churn.
With powerful user analytics, segmentation, and feedback features like NPS surveys, Userpilot helps you pinpoint sources of friction and nudge your NPS detractors toward becoming promoters.
Naturally, many of these features aren’t especially relevant for employee onboarding. But they are absolutely critical for SaaS user onboarding, and so Userpilot makes a great alternative for companies looking to boost their product growth.
WalkMe vs. Whatfix — ideal customer persona
We just saw that the use case for both WalkMe and Whatfix is primarily employee onboarding for large companies.
In terms of customer persona, these solutions work best for clients with an onboarding use case on platforms like Salesforce or Hubspot.
But that’s not the end of the story.
The easier implementation with Whatfix means that it is also more accessible to SMEs. While it may market itself to larger enterprises, a company doesn’t need to hire a dedicated technician to install and maintain Whatfix like it may need to do with WalkMe.
Conclusion: WalkMe is best suited for user onboarding at enterprise-level businesses, while Whatfix is a bit more versatile in terms of client size.
Alternative options for SMEs
Whatfix may be more accessible to SMEs than WalkMe, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best option for mid-market companies.
Userpilot, on the other hand, has made itself affordable, easy-to-use, and simple-to-maintain so that SMEs get the onboarding value and functionality they need without needing to hire a whole new team of experts.
With that in mind, it may offer a bit more than a small, brand new startup needs. And it may not fit all the needs of a massive, enterprise level company. But if your company is somewhere in the middle, Userpilot is a strong alternative Whatfix and WalkMe.
WalkMe vs. Whatfix — pricing
Neither WalkMe nor Whatfix publishing their exact pricing information. However, there are some clues we can use to make an estimate.
Both platforms require users to request a quote before any price information is available. Whatfix states that “Our pricing is completely on the basis of customer’s requirement and usage,” while WalkMe offers Basic and Custom plans.
Typically, if a company avoids publishing pricing information, it means that their services aren’t going to come cheap.
Based on user reviews, it appears that WalkMe’s Basic plan starts at around $9,000 per year. Whatfix reviews indicate that their services begin at $1,200 — $2,000 per month.
We can’t directly compare these prices, though. WalkMe’s Basic plan is far more limited than the general features that Whatfix offers.
But then again, we don’t know exactly what features Whatfix customers get for $1,200 per month.
Conclusion: It’s likely that equivalent feature sets are roughly similar in price for both companies. However, to know for sure you’ll have to contact them and get a quote.
A more affordable alternative
What if your company doesn’t have $9,000 — $15,000 laying around to spend on user onboarding? Well fear not, there’s an alternative.
Userpilot aims not to break your budget with pricing that starts at just $249 per month for unlimited feature use, unlimited customer segments, and up to 2,500 monthly active users.
Again, this might be a bit more than a freshly hatched startup is ready to spend, but for mid-market companies Userpilot offers unbeatable value for digital adoption platforms in its class.
WalkMe vs. Whatfix — which is right for you?
In the end, WalkMe and Whatfix are more alike than they are different. But let’s summarize a few key points where they do differ:
- Whatfix is easier to implement and maintain than WalkMe.
- Whatfix is more accessible to SMEs, but both target themselves to enterprise-level businesses.
- WalkMe has much more powerful built-in user analytics than Whatfix.
- WalkMe’s customer support has a significantly better reputation than Whatfix’s for delivering effective assistance.
- The exact pricing of each is unknown, but if you can get by with WalkMe’s Basic plan it’s probably cheaper than Whatfix.
On the other hand, remember: If your use case is not employee onboarding and you’re looking for a more user-friendly, affordable onboarding solution, Userpilot might be just what you need! It won’t set fire to your finances, and you’ll be able to start creating quality, tailored user onboarding experiences within minutes.
Interested in setting up a great onboarding experience for your customers? Check out a Userpilot demo today!
