UserGuiding deserves credit before any criticism. In a category where WalkMe, Whatfix, Pendo and Appcues all make you book a call before seeing a number, UserGuiding publishes dollar figures, seat counts and feature limits on a public page. That is a real advantage and it is why it lands on most SMB shortlists.
It is also why the discrepancy on that page matters. The plan table and the fine print underneath it do not describe the same product.
The short answer
UserGuiding publishes three plans. Starter is From $174/Mo and Growth is From $349/Mo, both BILLED YEARLY, with Enterprise at custom pricing.
The plan table includes an MAU Range row. It reads 0-10K for Starter and 0-100K for Growth.
Underneath each of those plans, the page also prints this: This price covers up to 2,000 MAU. Above that, book a demo for a custom quote.
So the Starter column advertises a plan spanning up to 10,000 monthly active users, while the published $174 price covers up to 2,000 of them. The advertised ceiling is 5.00x the priced ceiling. For Growth the table says 0-100K against the same 2,000-MAU price coverage, which makes the advertised ceiling 50.00x the priced ceiling.
Both statements are on the same page, under the same plan. This is not a third-party misquote, which is the usual failure mode in this category. It is the vendor's own rate card disagreeing with its own footnote, and the practical consequence is that if you are above 2,000 MAU, UserGuiding is a book-a-demo product like everything else on your shortlist. The transparency is real; the band it applies to is small.
How UserGuiding pricing actually works
Here is the published structure, plan by plan.
Starter, From $174/Mo BILLED YEARLY. Seats: 1. Environments (Staging, Live etc): 1. Guides: 15 Active, Hotspots: 10 Active, Checklists: 1 Active, Surveys: 1 Active, Audience Segmentation: Up to 10, Customizable Themes: 1, Session Replay: 3,000 Recordings. The page also shows a SAVE $900 annual incentive.
Growth, From $349/Mo BILLED YEARLY. Seats: 3. Environments (Staging, Live etc): 2. Guides: 40 Active, Hotspots: 40 Active, Checklists: 5 Active, Surveys: 5 Active, Audience Segmentation: Up to 25, Customizable Themes: 5. Annual incentive SAVE $1,800.
Enterprise, custom. Seats: Unlimited, Environments: Unlimited, Guides: Unlimited, Customizable Themes: Unlimited, Audience Segmentation: Unlimited.
The meter is defined precisely, and the definition is worth reading: Monthly Active User (MAU) is the total number of unique user IDs that have logged in to your platform in the previous 30 days.
That is everyone who logs into your product, not everyone who is shown a UserGuiding tour. You are billed on your own login volume, so narrowing which users see a guide does not reduce your bill. This is the same meter shape as Appcues, which defines MAU as the total number of unique users who sign in to your platform in any given month, and we covered its consequences in the Appcues alternatives guide.
Two other things follow directly from the published table.
Starter is a single-seat product. Seats: 1. Onboarding is not a one-person job in most companies; a PM defines the flow, a designer reviews the copy, support reads the drop-off, marketing wants the announcement. On Starter, one of those people has an account and the rest ask for screenshots. Getting a second and third person in costs $349 against $174, or 2.01x, and the seat count is the main thing that changes.
One environment on Starter means testing in production. Environments (Staging, Live etc): 1. If you want a staging environment to check a flow before real users see it, that is Growth. For a tool whose output is injected into your live product, a single environment is a meaningful constraint rather than a nice-to-have.
The rate card that prices 20% of the plan it advertises
Let us do this carefully, because the arithmetic is the whole point and it should be checkable.
Starter's table row reads 0-10K MAU. The footnote under Starter reads This price covers up to 2,000 MAU. Above that, book a demo for a custom quote. 10,000 divided by 2,000 is 5.00. The plan as advertised is five times the plan as priced.
Growth's table row reads 0-100K MAU, with the same footnote. 100,000 divided by 2,000 is 50.00. The Growth column advertises a capacity fifty times the volume its $349 price covers.
A reasonable reading is that the MAU Range row describes the span the plan can be sold across, with the price scaling inside it, and that the footnote gives the entry point. The word From in From $174/Mo supports that. But note what this means in practice: neither the scaling rate nor the price at 10,000 MAU is published anywhere. So the useful information, what UserGuiding costs for a product with real traffic, is exactly the information that is not on the page.
Why this matters more than it looks. 2,000 monthly active users is a small product. A B2B SaaS company with 200 paying accounts and ten seats each is at 2,000. A consumer app with 2,000 monthly logins is pre-traction. The overwhelming majority of companies that would benefit from an onboarding tool are above the line where UserGuiding's published price stops applying, which means the published price is a starting anchor rather than a quote, and you should not build a budget from it.
Credit where it is due: UserGuiding still tells you more than its competitors. Appcues publishes no dollar figures at all. Whatfix publishes its pricing model but no numbers. WalkMe publishes neither. A From price plus full feature and seat limits is genuinely more useful than a Get a Demo button, and we would rather have this page with its inconsistency than the blank pages elsewhere in the category.
On third-party UserGuiding prices: be careful. Figures circulating in comparison articles, including in UserGuiding's own competitor roundups about other vendors, frequently disagree with the vendor pages they describe. We found this exact pattern when researching Appcues, where UserGuiding's roundup printed MAU bands that contradicted Appcues' own published bands. Price this category from the vendor's live page, and treat comparison content, including competitor-written content, as historical.
What the published limits tell you about the real constraint
Look at the Starter allowances again: Guides: 15 Active, Hotspots: 10 Active, Checklists: 1 Active, Surveys: 1 Active.
One active survey. One active checklist. For a team trying to diagnose why onboarding fails, one active survey is the entire research capacity of the plan, and an in-product survey is the weakest instrument available for the job anyway, for a reason that has nothing to do with UserGuiding.
An in-product survey can only reach people who are in your product. The users you most need to hear from, the ones who signed up, hit a wall and never came back, are by definition not there. Every response you collect comes from someone who stayed. That is a survivorship problem, not a sample-size problem, and adding more survey slots does not fix it. Our guide to onboarding drop-off works through the mechanism, and dormant user reactivation research covers reaching users who are still subscribed but have gone quiet.
The evidence on how teams are coping is consistent across three independent surveys. Condens asked 332 research practitioners and found 71% saying AI made analysis faster while 71% also said validating the output still took significant time. In the same study 52% said the output was too generic, 42% said it lost context, only 21% trusted it with minimal review, and 81% planned to increase use anyway. Lyssna's survey of 300 professionals found 54.7% using AI in synthesis while 60.3% still reported time-consuming manual work. Maze's survey of roughly 500 practitioners put AI adoption at 69%, up 19 percentage points year over year.
The consistent picture is that AI has been added to analysis while collection stayed manual. Koji moves the AI to the collection step: the interview itself is AI-moderated, so you can run 50 conversations in the time a survey takes to write, and the thematic analysis falls out of it automatically.
The 7 best UserGuiding alternatives in 2026
1. Koji, best for finding out why onboarding fails. Koji does not build tours. It runs AI-moderated voice and text interviews at scale, including with the users who dropped off and will never see an in-product survey, and returns automatic thematic analysis, verbatim quotes and a one-click report in hours. Structured questions cover all six types, open ended, scale, single choice, multiple choice, ranking and yes/no, so one study produces both a chartable distribution and the reasons behind it. No moderator bias, because there is no moderator, and no research expertise required. Pricing is fully published with no 2,000-user footnote: Insights at EUR 29 per month for 29 credits, Interviews at EUR 79 per month for 79 credits, overage at a flat EUR 1 per credit. A text interview costs 1 credit, a voice interview 3, a report refresh 5, and only conversations scoring 3 or above consume credits. Koji does not meter your MAU at all, so growing your product does not reprice your research.
2. Chameleon, best for published pricing that keeps applying. The other tool in this category that publishes real numbers, from $279 per month. Its meter counts profiles you send rather than users who log in, which is a genuinely different and sometimes cheaper shape. It also has a tier quirk worth knowing: see the Chameleon alternatives guide.
3. Appcues, best for product-led SaaS at scale. More mature product, every plan includes every experience type, and the MAU meter counts sign-ins like UserGuiding's. The catch is that the meter has no ceiling and no off switch. Full detail in the Appcues alternatives guide.
4. Userpilot, best for mid-market teams needing analytics too. Bundles onboarding, surveys and product analytics, which suits teams that would otherwise buy two tools. See Koji vs Userpilot for where guidance ends and research begins.
5. Pendo, best when analytics is the primary need. The strongest analytics in the group with guides layered on top. Same blind spot as the rest on why. See Koji vs Pendo.
6. Whatfix, best for employee-facing rollouts. A different job from UserGuiding: internal application adoption at enterprise scale. Note that its employee-facing meter counts every user with access rather than every user who logs in, which is the opposite direction from UserGuiding's definition. See the Whatfix alternatives guide.
7. WalkMe, best for SAP-centric enterprise estates. The enterprise end of the category, now an SAP product, and the least transparent on price of anything here. See the WalkMe alternatives guide.
UserGuiding vs the alternatives at a glance
| Tool | Published entry price | What the meter counts | Seats at entry | Reaches users who dropped off |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| UserGuiding | From $174/Mo billed yearly, covers up to 2,000 MAU | Unique user IDs that logged in | Seats: 1 | No |
| Chameleon | From $279 per month | Profiles sent to Chameleon | Multiple | No |
| Appcues | No dollar figures published | Users who sign in | Not published | No |
| Userpilot | Partially published | MAU | Not published | No |
| Pendo | Not published | MAU | Not published | No |
| Whatfix | Model only, no figures | Entitled users or MAU | Not published | No |
| WalkMe | Not published | Users plus applications | Not published | No |
| Koji | EUR 29 per month, no MAU cap | Interviews you run | Not seat-limited | Yes, including churned users |
How to choose between UserGuiding and the alternatives
Choose UserGuiding if you are genuinely under 2,000 monthly active users, one person will build the flows, and you want to start this week without a sales call. Inside that box it is a good fit and the published price is real.
Get a quote before you commit if you are above 2,000 MAU, and get it for your actual number rather than your current one. The published $174 tells you nothing about what 15,000 MAU costs, and the plan table's 0-10K and 0-100K ranges are not prices.
Choose Chameleon if you want published pricing that still applies at your volume, and check whether the profiles-sent meter works out cheaper for your traffic shape.
Choose Appcues or Userpilot if you have outgrown single-seat tooling and need multiple people building and reading.
Choose Whatfix or WalkMe only if your users are employees rather than customers. They are built for a different problem.
Choose Koji if the real question is why people are not completing onboarding. No tool above can answer it, because all of them can only observe users who are present, and the informative users have left. Start with user onboarding research, then structured questions for how to get numbers and reasons from the same study, and how many interviews are enough for sample size.
The pragmatic combination is a cheap guidance tool plus real research. Guides are how you fix onboarding; interviews are how you learn what to fix. A single-seat tour builder with one active survey is not a research stack, and no number of tooltips substitutes for asking someone what went wrong.
Frequently asked questions
How much does UserGuiding cost?
UserGuiding publishes Starter from $174 per month and Growth from $349 per month, both billed yearly, with Enterprise on custom pricing. Note the footnote on the page: the published price covers up to 2,000 MAU, and above that you are directed to book a demo for a custom quote. So the published figures are entry anchors rather than the price most companies would actually pay.
Why does the UserGuiding plan table show 0-10K MAU if the price only covers 2,000?
Both statements appear on the same page under the same plan. The MAU Range row reads 0-10K for Starter and 0-100K for Growth, while the footnote under each says the price covers up to 2,000 MAU. The most reasonable reading is that the range describes the span a plan can be sold across with the price scaling inside it, and the footnote gives the entry point. The practical problem is that the scaling rate is not published, so the advertised Starter ceiling is five times the priced ceiling and the Growth ceiling is fifty times it.
How does UserGuiding define a monthly active user?
As the total number of unique user IDs that have logged in to your platform in the previous 30 days. That is your product's login volume, not the number of people shown a UserGuiding tour, so restricting which users see a guide does not lower your bill. Appcues uses a comparable sign-in based definition.
How many seats does UserGuiding Starter include?
One. Starter lists Seats: 1 and a single environment, so one person builds the flows and there is no staging environment to test them in before real users see them. Growth lists three seats and two environments at $349 per month against Starter's $174, roughly 2.01 times the price, with the seat and environment counts as the main change.
Is UserGuiding or Chameleon better value?
It depends on your traffic shape, and both publish real prices, which already puts them ahead of the rest of the category on evaluability. UserGuiding has the lower entry point at $174 per month against Chameleon's $279, but UserGuiding's published price stops applying above 2,000 MAU. Chameleon also meters differently, counting profiles sent to it rather than users who log in to you, so model both against your own numbers rather than comparing headline prices.
Can an in-product survey tell me why users abandon onboarding?
Only partially, and the limit is structural rather than a matter of survey design. An in-product survey can only reach people who are still in your product, so the users who signed up, hit a problem and left are never sampled. Every answer comes from someone who stayed. Diagnosing abandonment requires contacting the people who left, which is what Koji's AI-moderated interviews are built to do at scale.
Ask the users your tour builder cannot reach
UserGuiding can show a tooltip to the people who are still here. It cannot ask the ones who left why they went.
Koji can. Launch an AI-moderated voice or text study in minutes, reach churned and dormant users as easily as active ones, and get automatic thematic analysis with verbatim quotes and a one-click report in hours rather than weeks. No moderator bias, no research hire, and no MAU meter that reprices your research every time your product grows. Structured questions cover all six types so one study returns the distribution and the reasons together, and a customizable AI consultant aims the interviewer at your specific onboarding question.
Koji starts at EUR 29 per month, published, with no footnote that stops applying at 2,000 users. Start a free Koji study and find out what your onboarding funnel has never been able to tell you.
