9 powerful product adoption tools to engage and retain users

This article is your guide to the best product adoption tools out there today to help you drive adoption and customer satisfaction.

9 best product adoption software 

Product adoption software helps you move users through each stage of the product adoption process by helping you continuously discover more about their pain points, needs, and questions. 

But how do you decide on the right tool for your business and customers? The software you choose depends on your user profiles and business needs, which we cover below.

Let’s take a look at the tools:

Product experience insights tools 

Product experience (PX) insights tools tell you how customers interact with your website and digital products. This lets you make changes to your product, marketing content, onboarding, and customer support—leading to happier customers and better product-market fit.

1. Hotjar 

Hotjar (that's us👋) is an intuitive, no-code digital and PX insights platform for product teams and any business with a website, web app, or digital product. The user-friendly interface makes it easy to quickly go beyond traditional web and product analytics and gather valuable insights from users in the wild. 

Key features 

Hotjar comes in three packages: Observe tools (Heatmaps and Session Recordings), Ask tools ​(Surveys and Feedback), and Engage (User interviews). 

• Session Recordings reveal how individual users scroll, move, u-turn, or rage-click on your site, so you can identify barriers to adoption

• Heatmaps show which areas of your site get the most attention, and which get overlooked

• Surveys let you collect users’ suggestions and validate assumptions about your product

• The Feedback widget lets users rate areas or features they like or dislike, and provides in-context feedback

• Funnels help you understand where and why users drop off your most important flows

• Engage lets you conduct interviews and usability tests to gather insights on what works and what doesn’t with your product, directly from your users, with automated recording and transcription of your calls

• The 'User Attributes' filter identifies different audience segments by a user's location, when they signed up, how much time they spent on your pages, and more, so you can get in-depth insights into their adoption stage, profile, and needs

• Integrations with thousands of popular tools like Google Analytics, Slack, Microsoft Teams, Mixpanel, Unbounce, Optimizely, Hubspot CRM, and others let you automate work and share data visualizations and insights on the fly, so you can keep your entire team and stakeholders in the loop

💡Didn’t find your tools among our integrations? No worries: you can also connect Hotjar to your tech stack via the Hotjar API!

How Hotjar helps with product adoption 

Hotjar helps you understand the customer journey and see what users struggle with during onboarding and beyond. This lets you make small changes—like fixing bugs or improving onboarding flows—to help users realize value sooner. Connecting the dots between what's happening and why it happens helps you improve the user experience (UX) and create customer delight. 

You can also gather feedback to prioritize product features according to user demand and pain points, and align cross-functional teams like UX design, UI, product, developers, marketing, and sales. 

2. SurveyMonkey 

SurveyMonkey is a customer satisfaction tool that helps you collect, analyze, and share survey responses from users and employees. 

Key features 

• A large library of customizable survey templates lets you create surveys, quizzes, and polls for any user persona and share them via weblink, email, mobile chat, or social media

• SurveyMonkey Genius uses AI, survey experts, and machine learning to automate and help you create better surveys, and predict performance

• Automatically analyze results, get data visualizations, and analyze text responses with the Word Cloud and Sentiment Analysis features

• Export results or integrate data with a range of commonly used tools like Salesforce, MS Teams, and others

How SurveyMonkey helps with product adoption 

SurveyMonkey makes it easy to gather qualitative insights about different aspects of the user experience and journey. These help you make informed decisions on how to improve your product, website, user flows, onboarding, etc. to drive adoption and loyalty. You can also use it to get feedback on new features by including screenshots in your survey and asking users to indicate what they like and don’t like. 

Drawbacks 

SurveyMonkey's sole focus is gathering qualitative user feedback, so it can’t provide quantitative insights into exactly what your users are doing when they answer your survey.  

3. Crazy Egg

Founded by SEO guru Neil Patel, Crazy Egg is a website optimization, heatmaps, and A/B testing tool. It’s designed to let you test variations of different web pages and measure how they perform with heatmaps and recordings, making it easy to analyze website performance and track, evaluate, and improve conversion rates. 

Key features 

• Snapshots (aka heatmaps) take an image of a point in time on your web pages and generate different reports to help you understand where users click on your site

• Recordings show you how users navigate your site, and where they get stuck or drop off

• A/B testing lets you experiment with headlines, copy, or product descriptions, and see which ones convert best

• Traffic Analysis lets you compare website traffic and referral sources to each other and see how specific target audiences behave on your site

• Error Tracking reveals Javascript errors that are frustrating visitors or preventing them from converting, so you can prioritize fixes

How Crazy Egg helps with product adoption 

Like Hotjar, Crazy Egg complements Google Analytics to reveal how and why people use your website or digital product. When you know what’s working and what’s not, you can tweak content, fix issues, and test new ideas.

Drawbacks 

Crazy Egg is a useful behavior analytics tool but it has quite a broad audience. This can mean it’s a better fit for lead generation websites than product teams. It also only offers a 30-day free trial, which doesn’t give you much time to collect historical data. Discover how Hotjar and Crazy Egg compare.

4. Mixpanel

Mixpanel is a product and web analytics tool that tracks customer behavior and key performance indicators (KPIs) across websites and mobile apps. It’s designed to help SaaS companies and website owners get real-time data and insights into how users engage with their product. 

Key features 

• Interactive Reports let you query and visualize data on user actions and behavior, conversions, engagement, user flows, retention, A/B variants, revenue, and product adoption metrics

• Segmentation lets you uncover hidden patterns and engagement trends and perform cohort analysis

• Customizable Dashboards and real-time Alerts let you and your teams stay on top of changing trends in your data

• Integrations with popular tools like AWS, Appcues, Hubspot, and…

How Mixpanel helps with product adoption

Mixpanel’s actionable insights help you figure out how to improve the customer experience (CX) to boost adoption and reduce churn. For example, retention analyses let you identify early signs of customer churn and fix customer experience issues before it’s too late. 

Drawbacks 

Mixpanel offers in-depth quantitative insights but it lacks surveys and feedback tools to complement these insights with qualitative data—it tells you a lot about the ‘what’ but less about the ‘why.’  A pain point easily solved by the Hotjar integration. 😉

User onboarding tools 

User onboarding tools guide new users during the first steps of product and feature adoption to ensure a smooth learning experience by providing in-app help, tooltips, product walkthroughs, and other support.  

5. Userpilot 

Userpilot is a no-code product growth platform that helps you deliver in-app onboarding experiences to boost activation and adoption. The software lets you create a personalized onboarding process  with tips and hints to track user progress and collect in-app feedback to learn how they feel about your product.

Key features 

• Personalized user onboarding flows (based on user personas) group users with similar goals into segments and trigger relevant onboarding experiences

• Sequential product tours for progressive onboarding

• Contextual hints, tooltips, and hotspots 

• In-app messaging to communicate new features, updates, etc.   

• Onboarding checklists 

• Goal completion tracking 

• On-demand, in-app support, and resource center 

• In-app surveys for collecting user feedback 

• Detailed analytics to understand the triggers that lead to activation and unlock growth opportunities 

How Userpilot helps with product adoption 

Creating user flows based on personas lets you cater to different adopter profiles, rather than a one-size-fits-all approach that can confuse your less tech-savvy customers while frustrating others. Userpilot also reduces time-to-value by drawing your users' attention to your product's key features and actions to help them reach their ‘aha moment’ and find value at every stage of their journey. 

Drawbacks 

Userpilot’s reporting and customization options are a bit more limited compared to other tools, and it can be tricky to configure for non-technical users. It also focuses on persona-based user flows, which is great if you have a lot of data about your users. However, this isn’t always the case when launching a new product or dealing with new users.

6. Appcues 

Appcues is a no-code user onboarding tool that comes as a Chrome extension, making it easy to build personalized customer experiences, like interactive in-app walkthroughs and feature announcements. 

Key features 

• Appcues Builder lets you create welcome and onboarding flows to guide users through your product and features, and track new events

• Appcues Studio is where you’ll manage flows and events, target experiences, and measure in-app behaviors

• Forms and Surveys let you gather qualitative insights from users

• Create and target user segments based on behavior, attributes, or events

• Events Explorer lets you measure product usage and adoption over time and create charts based on tracked events   

How Appcues helps with product adoption 

Appcues lets your customers get personalized assistance and messaging at the right time, which helps them get activated sooner. It also boosts adoption by making it easy to let power users know about new features and provides insights, so you can measure the effectiveness of your product adoption strategies. 

Drawbacks 

Appcues is a good point solution to drive product adoption and learn more about your users. However, it doesn’t offer product analytics so it’s best used in combination with a third-party PX tool to get the full picture of how you can increase product adoption rates.

7. Whatfix

Whatfix is a digital adoption platform (DAP) that helps end-users and employees increase their productivity by providing step-by-step guidance within your product or app.

Key features

• Flows: tailor experiences to specific user segments, and improve them as you learn more about their needs

• Self-help: build in-app knowledge bases, putting each user in charge of their own development

• Task lists: create effective roadmaps to map out progress, and monitor their efficiency in real time

• Pop-ups: conduct interactive surveys, send friendly reminders, or make organization-wide announcements in a few simple steps

• Beacon: communicate feature updates and process changes to every user with ease, improving speed to productivity across all applications

How Whatfix helps with product adoption 

Whatfix’s Digital Adoption Platform helps you get higher ROI on your product through context-sensitive onboarding for your users and personalized training for your employees.

Drawbacks 

Because it comes with a lot of features, Whatfix can be a little daunting and overwhelming for some Product teams, especially if you do not have a developer available.

8. WalkMe 

WalkMe is a business-to-business (B2B) employee onboarding solution for companies looking to drive digital transformation and manage organizational change. It helps businesses identify gaps in digital knowledge and assets while helping them increase employee efficiency by improving software adoption.  

 Key features 

• No-code editor with best-practice templates and pre-built solutions that help you save time

• Data-based insights that reveal friction points, so you can improve and personalize user experiences

• Conversational interface with tooltips and on-screen guidance 

• AI-powered visibility of company systems and workflows 

• Workflow analytics provide visibility on user experiences across different applications

• KPI tracking and reporting

How WalkMe helps with product adoption 

By providing visibility across your organization's digital tools, WalkMe lets you see how you can improve onboarding flows and drive adoption to maximize ROI on digital tools. And because it’s no-code, you can act fast to fix issues, without waiting for developers or updates. 

Drawbacks 

WalkMe is designed for B2B employee onboarding, so it’s not suitable for B2C business models looking to drive customer adoption. It also has many different features, which means there’s a bit of a learning curve. 

9. Loom 

Loom is an easy-to-use video and screen recording platform that lets you record and share instructional or educational videos.  

Key features 

• Screen, video, and scrolling capture 

• Simple editing process 

• Text extraction and transcripts 

• File and link sharing 

• Reactions and comments tools, like reaction emojis 

• Recipient and views tracking 

• Downloadable videos 

• Customizable CTAs

• Drawing tools 

• Comes as an easy-to-install Chrome, web, desktop, or smartphone extension 

How Loom helps with product adoption 

Loom helps you cater to different adopter profiles and learning styles by supplementing or replacing written instructions with visual walkthroughs. You can record a video of yourself demonstrating how to use your product and then share it over any communications channel. You can also embed or upload the video to your help center or record personalized videos on the fly for individual users. This can make the difference between them remaining free trial users or upgrading to the premium version of your product.

Drawbacks 

Loom is a single-use solution, so it won’t help you understand the bigger product adoption picture—like which features users struggle to learn, and where they get stuck during onboarding. 

How to choose the right product adoption software for your tech stack

When choosing product adoption software, look for a tool that caters to different adopter profiles and provides insights at multiple adoption stages. It should be engaging and easy to use—for your users and teams—and integrate with your existing tech stack.

When choosing product adoption software, ask yourself: 

• Does this tool actually drive adoption by converting new users and engaging existing users? 

• Does it cater to different stages of the adoption process, and to different adopter profiles?

• Does it provide the specific actionable, data-based insights that your company needs? For example, real-time, and qualitative and quantitative insights?

• Does it integrate with your existing tech stack? 

• Does it fit your processes and your team’s level of technical skill?  

• Does it fit your budget, and is it scalable enough to grow as you do? 

Get users to adopt your solution with product adoption tools

Product adoption tools yield valuable insights about your users’ pain points, goals, and what drives them to adopt. This lets you improve your product, content, and onboarding experience to help them realize value sooner. You can also create personalized onboarding and feature discovery experiences for different user profiles, which boosts customer satisfaction, adoption, and retention.