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Userpilot vs Appcues: Two Onboarding Tools, Two Ways to Price Them
Userpilot and Appcues both ship in-app flows, checklists and surveys without code. Compare how their plans are packaged, analytics and replay, email, push and mobile, experiments and how to get started.
Userpilot and Appcues are closer to each other than either is to Pendo.
Both started with in-app onboarding. Both let a growth or product team build flows, checklists, tooltips and surveys over the live product without an engineering ticket. Both have added analytics, email and mobile since.
So the feature lists look alike. The difference is in how each one packages them, and that decides what you pay as you grow.
Userpilot gates features by plan and publishes its entry price. Appcues includes every feature on every plan, limits scale instead, and doesn't publish prices.
This guide compares the two on packaging, analytics, channels, experiments and getting started. Details come from each vendor's own site, last checked on October 30 and 31, 2026.
The Difference In One Line
With Userpilot, a higher plan unlocks features. With Appcues, a higher plan unlocks more users, more live experiences and longer reporting history.
Side By Side
| Detail | Userpilot | Appcues |
|---|---|---|
| Entry plan | Starter, $299/month for up to 2,000 MAU | Start, up to 3,000 MAU; price on request |
| Next plan | Growth, from $849/month | Grow, from 3,000 MAU; price on request |
| What a higher plan adds | Features: funnels and paths, email, A/B tests, more replays | Scale: MAU, published experiences, reporting history |
| Live experience limit | Not listed | 10 on Start, 25 on Grow, 100 on Enterprise |
| Data or reporting history | 1 year on Starter, 3 years on Growth | 12, 24 or 36 months by plan |
| Session replay | Every plan; Growth includes 5,000 replays a month | Not listed |
| Growth includes 100,000 emails a month | Email and push workflows | |
| Native mobile | Add-on on Growth, included on Enterprise | iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter and Ionic |
| Tests against a no-show group | Growth and up | Control experiments on every plan |
| Trial | 14 days, self-serve, no card | Free trial after a call, no card |
| Stripe | Not listed | One way, through Zapier |
What A Higher Plan Buys
Userpilot's Starter plan covers the core of onboarding: flows, spotlights, banners, embeds, checklists, up to 10 user segments, usage trends and NPS surveys. Growth is where much of the rest lives: event autocapture, funnel, path and retention reports, a resource center, advanced surveys, A/B testing, email and 5,000 session replays a month. Enterprise adds mobile, premium CRM integrations and data warehouse sync.
Appcues says every plan includes every experience type, feature and integration. Start covers up to 3,000 monthly active users, 10 published experiences and 12 months of reporting history. Grow starts at 3,000 MAU with 25 experiences and 24 months. Enterprise has custom MAU, 100 experiences, 36 months and priority support. Pricing is based on monthly active users, installations and published experiences.
Each model has a cost you should plan for.
On Userpilot, the trap is needing one Growth feature, such as funnels or A/B tests, and moving from $299 to at least $849 a month to get it.
On Appcues, the trap is the experience count. Count the onboarding flows, checklists, announcements and surveys you expect to run at once, by segment. If that number is close to 10, price Grow as well as Start.
Building Onboarding
Day to day, the two are similar. Both build experiences visually over your product, target them by segment and publish without a deploy.
The differences are at the edges. Userpilot puts a resource center on Growth. Appcues lists launchpads alongside tours and checklists, and every customer gets implementation services, onboarding support and a dedicated experience manager, according to its pricing page.
If your onboarding problem is less about the tool and more about what the first session should achieve, settle that first. A clear time-to-value target makes either tool easier to use well.
Analytics And Replay
Both have product analytics now.
Userpilot's funnels, paths, retention reports and event autocapture start on Growth; Starter gives you usage trends. Session replay is listed on every plan, and Growth includes 5,000 replays a month.
Appcues lists trends, funnels, paths, retention curves, segments, dashboards, and measures like active users, stickiness and sessions. Its analytics page doesn't mention session replay.
If you want to watch the sessions behind a drop-off without adding another tool, Userpilot covers it.
Email, Push And Mobile
Appcues runs email and push workflows next to in-app experiences, and has mobile SDKs for iOS, Android, React Native, Flutter and Ionic. Because Appcues includes every feature on every plan, those channels aren't an upgrade.
Userpilot includes 100,000 emails a month on Growth. Native iOS and Android support, including mobile push, is an add-on on Growth and included on Enterprise.
For a web-only product, this rarely decides it. For a product with a real mobile app, Appcues gets you there on its entry plan.
Testing What A Flow Changed
Both can hold back a group that sees nothing, which is the honest way to tell whether onboarding helped.
Appcues runs control experiments on Flows. It splits newly eligible users into a group that sees the Flow and a control group, 50/50 by default, and compares goal conversions within 7 days of assignment.
Userpilot includes A/B testing and experimentation from Growth.
Both measure a product goal you choose. That fits adoption work. For trial conversion, it's worth tracking the outcome that pays, not only the click: a user who pressed "Upgrade" hasn't converted until the billing system confirms it. The free trial conversion rate guide covers how to define that event.
Getting Started
Userpilot lets you start a 14-day trial yourself, with no credit card, and see the Starter and Growth prices before you talk to anyone.
Appcues starts with a call to confirm fit, then gives you a free trial with no credit card. Small teams shipping their first in-app experiences can look at its Spark program.
Three Questions To Decide
- Do you need a price before the first call? Userpilot publishes one; Appcues doesn't.
- Do you have a mobile app, or want push next to in-app and email? Appcues includes them on every plan; Userpilot sells mobile as an add-on.
- How many experiences will run at once, and which features do you need on day one? If it's a handful of flows and Starter's features, Userpilot is the lower published entry. If it's many features but few experiences, Appcues' all-features packaging may fit better. Get both quotes at your real MAU count.
After The Onboarding Flow
Neither tool changes a subscription. Userpilot doesn't list Stripe among its integrations, and Appcues connects to Stripe one way, through Zapier, so a Stripe event can trigger a message but not a plan change.
That last step is what SaaSFunnels handles for teams on Stripe: Funnels for trial conversion, upgrades and cancellations that sell your real plans and prices, apply the change in Stripe and count a result only when Stripe confirms it. It doesn't replace tours or checklists, so it runs next to either tool. The comparisons with Userpilot and Appcues go through it row by row.
If Pendo is also on your list, see Userpilot vs Pendo and Appcues vs Pendo.
Sources And Further Reading
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