What is Pendo and Who is it for? The 2024 Review

✨ Looking for a more affordable solution? Check out Featurebase →

Countless SaaS companies are launched monthly, hoping to become the next Slack. But on the way to the IPO (or acquisition by Salesforce), there are many pitfalls. Battling churn, navigating pricing, and, most importantly, collecting customer feedback.

The Pendo platform promises to help you understand user behavior, improve product adoption, and investigate how users interact with your product. Today, we look at Pendo to determine if it's the best choice for your team. 👇

What is Pendo?

Pendo.io is a product analytics platform built for SaaS businesses. This tool allows software companies to understand how users interact with their platforms. Pendo gives insights into user behavior, onboarding, product adoption, customer satisfaction, and more.

Pendo.io helps software companies collect quantitative and qualitative feedback on how people interact with their software. It has a market reputation as an all-in-one platform for product management, product analytics, and generally achieving business outcomes.

Also see: Top 12 Pendo Alternatives in 2024 →

Top features and use cases in Pendo

Pendo is a very powerful product, with customers often complaining that they barely scratch the surface of all the features offered. Here are the most important use cases for this tool.

1. Product analytics

Understand what your customers are doing within your app to help you guide future development. Pendo Product analytics lets you know which pages your customers visit, what they do on them, how much time they spend on each one, and more.

Besides the raw metrics, you can visualize user paths to discover on which pages users drop off. On top of that, you can gather user feedback through in-app messaging and NPS surveys.

Having all of this information in one place is immensely helpful. You can get a more accurate overview of the customer journey, discover who your power users are, and use the feedback to increase customer loyalty and satisfaction.

2. In-app guides

Sometimes, you have the best idea for a feature, but your customers won't know what to do with it. You can use Pendo's in-app guides to create personalized onboarding pathways for each customer. Instead of wandering aimlessly, they'll get messages and subtle nudges about what to do next.

Product managers can use Pendo's AI features to build in app guides quickly from scratch if you want to kickstart your product adoption. Alternatively, you can split up your customers into segments so that each of them gets the right message at the right time.

Pendo offers an easy in-app message builder so that everyone in your team can find ways to meet user needs and guide new users through dedicated onboarding flows.

3. Session replays

Use Pendo to watch replays of what customers do in your app, click by click. This is a fairly common feature offered by tools such as Hotjar or Fullstory, but in Pendo, product teams can easily tie it to other data they collect.

You can segment session replays by specific pages, user groups, accounts and even individual users. This can help you tailor a better customer experience just by looking at user actions - you won't have to nudge your users and ask for feedback.

4. Customer feedback collection

Product managers and owners experts can collect customer feedback where it counts: directly in the app. Collect feedback from specific pages, user groups and accounts, in both qualitative and quantitative ways.

Pendo makes it easy to review many feedback items simultaneously with AI. It summarizes qualitative insights to give you a breakdown of the most important items you should focus on.

5. Product validation

Pendo helps product teams even with features that have not yet been built. If you want to test the waters and see if customers would want certain features, simply validate with Pendo.

The platform allows you to ask specific user segments what they think about certain product ideas. You get quantitative and qualitative feedback about new features before you launch them.

6. Pendo roadmaps

Companies can become more transparent by communicating what they're going to build through product roadmaps. With Pendo, you can control your backlog and create a roadmap based on cold, hard data.

You can share the roadmaps either internally or with your customer communities.

7. Pendo AI

It's not one specific feature; it's rather a set of AI tools that span across different features in Pendo.

For example, you can use AI to analyze and group customer feedback. Let's say you have a large number of customers requesting a dashboard in your product. Instead of looking at tools such as Google Analytics, various survey tools, etc., Pendo tells you how many customers talk about dashboards and the sentiment behind the feedback.

Pendo also gives AI-backed suggestions on improvements you can make to improve feature adoption and onboarding. For example, if users frequently repeat one step or get stuck on a page, Pendo recognizes it and suggests changes.

Last but not least, AI helps you create in-app guides. You can choose the number of steps and the tone for the guide and Pendo does the rest.

8. Pendo Mobile

If you have a mobile app, Pendo can connect the experiences between platforms to give you insights on how customers interact with them. Just like the web app, you can create tailored in-app messaging for mobile users.

On top of that, you'll get mobile-specific insights, e.g. which operating systems and devices are used the most to access your app(s).

Who is Pendo for?

Wondering if Pendo is right for you? These user groups will benefit the most from purchasing Pendo:

• Product teams - to better communicate customers' needs to the development teams and build the kind of product that solves users' actual pain points.
• Customer success teams - to gain insights from self-service support and find out where customers need help to get the most out of a product.
• IT and business operations teams - to get product intelligence and find the exact path to building breakthrough digital experiences for end-users.
• Sales teams - to determine the most valuable features in the app and know what to sell to which user group. To find champion users and pitch to the right person in an organization.
• Marketing teams - to find the most impactful features to promote to a group of customers. Also helps with product marketing efforts by having a transparent public roadmap, etc.
• Finance teams - to learn which features drive product success and increased revenue.

Pendo pricing: how much does it cost?

Pendo has four pricing plans:

• Base
• Core
• Pulse
• Ultimate

Unfortunately, pricing is not available publicly for any of these plans and you'll have to reach out to get a quote for your specific software product.

However, some basic research showed us that the minimum you can expect to pay for Pendo is about $24,000 per year, with higher-tier plans going well over $100,000 annually.

The Base plan has all the main features for product teams, including product analytics, in-app guides, and just one integration. The Core plan has just one upgrade: the added session replays.

The real value begins with Pulse, which has NPS surveys and product discovery features. Ultimate tops it off with the Pro version of in-app guides and data sync features.

The pros and cons of using Pendo

There are thousands of reviews on Pendo online from software companies using it in various ways. Let's cut through the noise and sum it up for you.

Pendo pros

1. Easy to use for enterprise software
   Pendo customers agree that the platform is fairly easy to get around and has a solid user experience. There are a lot of features, which means a steep learning curve. However, after a few days spent on user onboarding in Pendo, you'll be able to find what you need quite easily.
2. Helps make data-driven decisions
   You can use Pendo to gather user feedback quickly, learn usage patterns, find where feature adoption is stuck, and much more. Thanks to Pendo analytics, you can inform your decisions with data, making it ideal for customer success, sales, or product teams that need to pitch ideas to management.
3. A centralized way to collect user feedback
   Besides usage data, you can also gauge how customers feel through a range of surveys and in app messaging features in the Pendo app. You can communicate with users one by one, which helps you close the feedback loop fairly easily.

Pendo cons

1. Pricing
   Pendo is definitely aimed at large enterprises. You can expect to pay at least $2,000 monthly for the basic subscription, meaning Pendo is not accessible to smaller startups with a tight budget.
2. Lack of customization
   Whether it's product guides, in-app messages, chats, or something else, Pendo enables customers to launch design elements for their users. The customization options are fairly limited, and you need a solid grasp of Javascript to customize anything beyond changing fonts
3. Buggy integrations
   Many Pendo customers complain that the third-party integrations don't function as intended. When data is moved from Pendo to an integration app such as CRM, it can often be inaccurate, which can cause issues for sales and customer success teams.

Featurebase: the better Pendo alternative

Pendo is an incredible tool for sales, customer success, and product teams. But at the same time, it may be a bit much, especially if you're just a startup trying to collect customer feedback.

It's prohibitively expensive, requires lots of learning just to get the basics set up and chances are that you may not even use most of the features offered in the app.

Instead, why not try Featurebase?

We integrate with your software so customers can leave feedback directly in your product. Featurebase then uses the power of AI to organize and summarize your most important feedback items. All of the feedback is organized in a centralized feedback hub, and customers get notified if their ideas are implemented. This way, you can close the feedback loop on autopilot.

Unlike Pendo, Featurebase has affordable pricing with a free plan and trial.

Start collecting feedback from your customers with Featurebase for Free today →