Pendo Platform Reviews

Comments: We now use it across several products in the MailUp Group (https://mailupgroup.com). For example, beyond using it for product analytics, we were able to stop using other applications for both in-app guides and NPS tracking, and we now use Pendo for that both in MailUp (https://www.mailup.com) and BEE Pro (https://beefree.io). It's certainly not inexpensive, but it gives the Product and Product Marketing teams tools that are crucial to their work. So, money well spent in my view.

Pros: What's unique and really useful about Pendo is that it combines product analytics, in-app guides & Net Promoter Score tracking, all under one roof. This allows you to show custom messages just to certain audiences (e.g. I see that some customers did not yet try feature ABC, so I show them a Guide to trigger adoption), and see NPS scores for different segments of users (e.g. what's the NPS for customers that never use feature ABC? What's the score for those that use feature ABC all the time?). That provides incredible insights.

Cons: First of all let me say that the company has come a long way. Pendo is growing a ton and it shows. They're constantly improving the platform, so we're confident that flaws will be corrected over time. That said, in our experience setting things up takes some time (and the concept of "Feature" is not immediately clear to newcomers: it actually means "UI element"), and until recently there were some annoying productivity issues (e.g. you could not quickly clone a segment, resulting in potentially lots of repeat tasks just to create two similar segment of users: now this has been resolved!). Improvements still need to be made for multi-language applications (e.g. different Guides for different users that speak different languages).

Comments: We jumped into investing the use of the Pendo platform believing it would help us better understand our customers and raise our engagement with them. We've been very please with the ability to do that as well as enhance the experience of our application to our customers and customize communications and interactions that have never been possible in our software.

Pros: Even before the software, I've been very impressed by Pendo's customer support model. The proactive interaction we received in onboarding and ongoing support has been something I've consistently referred back to our own client services team as a model for how things are done. They have multiple team members accountable to different actions/experiences with us and they do it in a fluid fashion where it never feels like anyone drops the ball. As for the software, I pull up our dashboard every morning and look at our customer interaction from the day before. Its very simple to follow individual customer behavior as well as overall trends. Per the recommendation of their onboarding team, I and 2 other team members sit down weekly for a Pendo meeting to talk about how we are using the data to further our company and what our next initiatives are Pendo also integrates well with both Salesforce and Tableau, 2 other platforms we use extensively. Some of the visualizations that lack in the application, we can customize to our needs using Tableau

Cons: There are some small quirks that we haven't worked our way around yet. We get a lot of community feedback from the Pendomonium Slack channel, but sometimes us and others in that community feel like we are trying to group solve problems rather than Pendo coming out with a simple solution.

Comments: Insights on our applications on where to invest resources.

Pros: Retroactive analytics is big for me considering I struggle with tagging all products across the enterprise. This feature allows me to tag things on my schedule. In most cases, coding is not required to tag my applications for Pendo to start tracking. I simply use their point and click tagging feature, and tagging can be done in no time. There are times that I need to add custom code due to the framework of my app, but Pendo's support does a great job helping me with that. User Path Analysis gives me insight on where the enduser is going once they enter our application. This helps our Product team focus on enhancements and bugs where our endusers spend most of their time. In-App messaging (Guides) allow me to communicate with my customers, informing them of upcoming code releases or where to find release notes. By leveraging the Guides, I can target certain segmentations and push surveys, polls, or other important information to help provide two way communication with the enduser.

Cons: Even though Pendo provides some great reports, I wish their were more ways to visualize the data that's collected. Cohorts and other analytic reporting is light in the app. I would love to see the ability to give my customers access to Pendo and provision this access to view only their analytics and their guides. I hope to see this soon in the app.

Comments: From a product perspective, we have gained so much insight into our customers and how they are using our products. We can identify at-risk customers easily and work to get them back on track. Additionally, we recently purchased and implemented the new Feedback module which is going to allow us to centralize all enhancement requests and finally have a data informed product roadmap. We derive a ton of value with this product and it is truly changing the way we do business.

Pros: We love all the data we have gained about our users and have a much stronger understanding of what they do within our applications. In addition, Pendo has made communication with our customers really easy, especially in times of crisis. I also feel as though we are arming our ENTIRE organization with information they need to do their job. All functions within our organization derive value from this platform and that isn't easy to achieve! Updates are also released regularly which tells me this is an organization that is dedicated to their customers.

Cons: I think with such an amazing platform, it can sometimes feel overwhelming to get up to speed on all the things we could be doing with the software.

Comments: My experience with Pendo over the past year has been excellent, from initial discussions, implementation and support, Pendo has been great. Big shout out to the team at Pendo all have been very supportive and patient.

Pros: Pendo is built for product teams and provides a real solution to what I consider User Behavior Analytics, Qualitative + Quantitative Insights. The best part its super easy to get up and going, minimizes my development and implementation efforts. I have been able to train my Product Managers and UX Designers/Researchers in how to Tag, Generate Reports in less then 1 hour. Pendo makes Analytics easy + fun which is perfect in keeping my teams engaged and using analytics to measure success with each release. Also Pendo helps us now connect a complete user journey cross devices from desktop to mobile, it has helped us drive engagement into new areas of our applications through what they call Guides, and has allowed us to easily and quickly identify problem areas by looking into the analytics and using in-app surveys to collect additional in the momement feedback.

Cons: I must say not much I do not like about the software. The pricing model which is based on monthly active users can get costly if you have millions of users, so it's not ideal for putting Pendo on your marketing or lead pages, its best used within your application after users sign in.

Comments: Fantastic sales cycle, great CSM team and communication. We were pretty much completely onboarded (self-onboarded) when we finally signed and were given an Onboarding coordinator. His sessions were useful and still added value even though we'd figured the majority of it out on our own during the sales trial period. We're full steam ahead and looking for more and more way Pendo can help us know what we didn't know.

Pros: I love Pendo. I love it so much, I asked Capterra to add it to their software list just so I could review it (and no, I don't work there). We've used Pendo for the last 10 months and it couldn't be going better. We are a SaaS company and Pendo is giving our Product, Analytics, Customer Success and Onboarding Teams insights that were not previously possible. We leverage Pendo for user engagement, onboarding (tool tips, guides, popups etc.) and analytics. It is a smooth platform with great support and it works great. Couldn't recommend it more.

Cons: It's not necessarily a knock on Pendo so much as it is a knock on the quality of the development of your own site that Pendo sits on top of. If you have some questionable code, you may have a tricky time getting the rules and feature tagging completed exactly as you'd like. It helps if you have a knowledge of HTML and CSS to get around any of these pitfalls, otherwise you'll have to work with your Dev teams to get your internal code issues sorted out so that Pendo can work properly.

Pros: The granularity of data that Pendo surfaces, and the actionability it presents to its users, is among the best I've seen in this space. It's only for lack of time that I haven't dug more into the features we have available to us. I particularly like the ability to great guided experiences that vary based on the segment the user is in. As a product manager, I often log in just to poke around the usage numbers to see if I am taken down any interesting usage paths that cause me to think more critically about why certain behaviors are being exhibited, and Pendo makes that data very accessible.

Cons: I think Pendo's usability / user interface could use some work. It has a very hierarchical UI, and it's often easy to get confused about where you are within a particular workflow and how to navigate one layer back. The guided experience creation and testing is getting better, but still has a ways to go in terms of a clean user experience. Feature tagging and page creation often takes a long time to process, and it can stall out your workflow.

Comments: I have truly enjoyed working with Pendo, not just the Platform, but the company. Excellent, friendly, approachable communications. Quarterly forums to share what is going on. There are so many resources to use. We have actually tried to model some of our onboarding behaviors after Pendo's onboarding process, it was that good. I have always had great experiences with asking questions of the support staff. No complaints at all.

Pros: Pendo tracks all user events, even if you don't have them tagged. Competitors do not do this. The user interface is very easy to use and customize to meet the needs of different types of users. Very easy, even for non-programming staff to use. The in-app guides are extremely helpful for user guidance and support, company announcements. The NPS poll practically runs itself for us.

Cons: Occasional difficulty tagging look-up or drop-down fields, but the support staff is excellent at helping work those things out.

Pros: Pendo is a great tool. It is easy to use and helps executives start tracking the right metrics (instead of guessing at what is important). It also scales your support organization with automated onboarding and educational opportunities for users.

Cons: Sometimes the reports bug-out, but the support team is quick to respond. Additionally, there is no way to communicate with users OUTSIDE your application ecosystem (i.e. email). If a user isn't engaged with your software, you have to go into a different system in order to get re-engagement.

Comments: First time visitors are easily highlighted and the ability to report on various aspects is easy and intuitive. We get the added benefit of having analytics of our users , from first visit all the way through platform adoption.

Pros: The ability to collect all kinds of user application data and run reports and visualizations to quickly understand which users are in the platform and exactly what pages they are engaging in on, including duration. I have also leveraged the API connection to tie visitor reporting data to our disparate systems for better automating services. API docs were easy and useful! Account managers and support reps are incredibly amicable as well!

Cons: The support and script is very much DIY. They pass you the code and it's up to your team to ensure it's been installed correctly. We had issues with our script at one point and the support was only able to get us so far.

Comments: Pendo has made my job as a product manager much easier because it helps lead with data, understand user journey through our platform and guide users in-app with minimal efforts!

Pros: Pendo has been incredibly helpful in uncovering insights regarding our platform users. The best things about Pendo has been -
1. Ease of implementation - It was very simple to deploy Pendo on our platform and start using the product
2. Ease of use - the application is super easy to understand and use
3. Features - the features that Pendo offers - user analytics, easy to build guides for users, NPS management - are the best tools for a product manager to really understand user behavior
4. Support - Pendo provides great support for any questions/issues with a good turnaround time.

Cons: The new visual designer is awesome but can be a little glitchy.

Pros: I really like the way it seamlessly integrates with our applications. Once integrated, it can pull analytics even if you do tag the pages/features at a later date, back in time to the original point of integration. I also find the segmentation framework where one can enhance the user identification data, integrate with salesforce information and more very valuable and insightful. Really very useful to be able to track usage and non-usage by persona and push out guides and surveys too.

Cons: Limited configurability and customization for personalization across multiple product managers who track and manage a software multiple modules.

Comments: For a product manager audience, Pendo is an excellent tool. Great for tracking product engagement, new feature adoption, and understanding overall behavior of your customer base.

Pros: Lots of potential for segmentation and reporting, allows for in-app messaging and guides to communicate information to customers, which has been great for launching new features or announcements. NPS automation has been really useful as well. Customer support has been great the couple times it's been needed. Overall very instrumental to our team in tracking engagement and customer health.

Cons: I believe Salesforce integration is an additional cost which is not ideal. Individual user data showing in-app activity doesn't have the best visual presentation, a bit clunky to interpret. App layout could be a bit more intuitive.

Comments: Data is necessary to make any decision. Pendo gives us an insight to our user base and allows us to iterate faster.

Pros: Pendo is an easy app to dive into. There are a lot of great features. I like the in app notifications, NPS and retroactively look at stats on an item I just tagged. What I really like the most is that you can tell Pendo is dedicated to constantly improving the product. They are constantly improving that app and functionality.

Cons: If you are going to use the notification or NPS feature, you need to have some basic HTML/CSS skills to get you notifications to look proper in your app. I have a few other small gripes, but for the most part it is an app that is constantly improving, so most of my minor problems just disappear over time.

Pros: There's a lot to like about Pendo. Currently, we're only using the Guides to let folks know about upcoming maintenance and releases with the occasional marketing guide. That said, we're planning on leveraging Pendo even more to boost our product marketing practices with more feature tips, etc. The usage data is really helpful and being able to automatically run NPS surveys is great. There's also a ton of functionality in terms of Trends, Behaviors, Retention.

Cons: I don't really have many complaints with Pendo. The rollout of the new visual editor hasn't been seamless, but it's a huge change so some bumps are to be expected. I'd like some more options for data visualizations, but it's not a deal breaker.

Comments: In-app help that doesn't require dev team time and includes flexibility when it comes to the look, feel, and experience of the help. User analytics that are easy to set up.

Pros: I love the flexibility of the product combined with the customer support and community that help inspire and create the in-app help I'm working on for my company. Plus, I only had to request a few minutes of my dev team's time to get up and running. From there on out, I'm able to take control of how, when, and where my in-app help displays. The depth and breadth of the user analytics we're able to pull out of Pendo help every team in our company from marketing to design to customer support.

Cons: It's easy to get started, but you realize very quickly that HTML/CSS/Javascript experience is needed to do anything more complex (at least until they come out with new features, which they seem to do very regularly and with customer input).

Pros: I really like all of the data I can get on our users. It helps us make informed decisions about the product. Also I really enjoy being able to survey users in different segments to better understand how different people use our product.

Cons: The software can be clunky and annoying to use at times. If you want to change between multiple menus say from visitor reports and go to a guide you made it requires more than 5 clicks. This is very annoying for people who don't use the software every day. They end up just hunting around for the feature they need.

Comments: We've used it for product analytics which has helped direct investment in the platform. We are beginning to use it more for driving adoption and deflecting cases by offering more contextual information to customers in places where Pendo has helped us determine they get stuck.

Pros: I love that Pendo gives me the opportunity to do so many important tasks that I would otherwise need development resources to accomplish. It helps me make better product decisions and stronger product releases.

Cons: I'd like to see segment management elevated. It's easy to lose track of segments across large teams and it's hard to test what particular users will see. This is important both when you have a lot of potential guides that a given user would see or when you have certain users who you want to make sure are NOT seeing certain guides. I always feel a little unsure what will happen. Additionally, I would like segment rules to be reusable because I sometimes set up the same segment rules over and over again.

Comments: Overall we found Pendo to have a great feature set for the price. When set up properly, which admittedly did take some work, we found it produced really great, actual operational insights about our software.

Pros: Implementation was very easy, Pendo provides you with a javascript snippit which a developer inserts into an existing web app, typically in the header or footer. Extra data can be added just by modifying some code. We had a proof of concept up and running within hours and deployed to production within weeks. Once up and running, Pendo provides a large number of ways to slice and dice data and it's all very self explanatory, for the most part.

Cons: Like many of these products, the data that comes out of it is only as good as what goes in.. i.e. don't just think you will install the snippit and call it a day. On the Pendo portal, customization is required, such as "tagging" pages, grouping pages together (i.e. a series of pages that may have different parameters or query strings will appear to Pendo as different pages, and this grouping needs to happen before data can be interpreted correctly. The original thought was that the end user (product manager) would do this customization but ultimately developers did it.

Comments: Pendo helps us understand and educate our customers. It helps us analyze our customers better than any analytics platform on the market - it's far superior to Google Analytics or trawling through Kibana logs. It helps us educate our customer and solve the new user experience problem, unlike any other software on the market. It's exactly the right solution for enterprise SaaS products with a free trial.

Pros: Pendo was super-simple to setup, gave us great analytics and data on our customer behavior, confirmed suspicions we had about our product, dispelled myths and tribal knowledge we shouldn't have believed in, and is allowing us to build targeted help within our product that's context sensitive... all without making any code changes whatsoever. It's empowered our product management group and UX group, and I couldn't ask for more. I will use Pendo on every product I ever release from now on. Way to go, team!

Cons: The segmentation features are fantastic, but it'd be nice to have a bit more control over grouping of multiple accounts into customers or "organizations" since we sell enterprise SaaS. It'd be nice also to have more control over filtering out or segmenting internal user activity vs. external - filtering by IP is tricky when staff work from home.

Comments: The platform has been great. While we have experienced a few bumps in the road, theres always been workarounds and solutions that solve our problems.

Pros: Pendo allows me to easily set up guides or walkthroughs in my product. The best part is that it leaves a lot of room to start small and grow.

Cons: One of our selling points was that it required low development effort and could be managed by a non-developer. While yes, this is true, it can require someone with front-end experience to code a few walk through steps and someone with back-end experience to send additional data to pendo for use with segmentation and analytics.

Comments: Insights, Data, Client Outreach, Client Interaction!! You name it, it's probably improved since pendo! We've started implementing our direct NPS scores and we've been able to integrate it with our CRM.

Pros: Implementation was simple, they were spot on for that! On the backend, it wasn't a crazy project, which for the results is outstanding. Once you learn the ropes it is easy to navigate, locate, search, and extract the metrics you need.

Cons: There are some integration related issues that are a little more complicated to tell 'what went wrong' especially if you aren't code/integration savvy. I wish there was a way to implement team based dashboards, standard company based dashboard (or higher level overview), and then custom dashboards which you can save and name instantly. Ideally, I'd like to be able to have numerous dashboards for specific goals(NPS)/insights(Usage)

Pros: This is such an easy to use application it makes most other software look and feel unwieldy. Implementation is quick, as far as the software side goes. Tagging and naming pages and features is simple. Mapping funnels and paths is simple. Following individual user behavior or account behavior is simple.

Cons: It can still be a little tricky to test Guides (their engineering-less pop ups that anybody can design and implement) in sandbox environments, at least in my experience. Depending on how your dummy data is set up, it can be difficult to actually test targeted guides to be sure they're going to show up to specific audience.

Comments: It was easy to instrument our application via a code snippet in the header and we were up and running very quickly.

Pros: It provides in-depth information about how users are using our software as well as NPS information and guides. Information for newly tagged pages/features is available retroactively even for the time when the tagging took place.

Cons: The dashboard is great, but lacking the ability to drill into the information. Blacklisted servers still ask users for NPS ratings.

Comments: We understood our adoption issues and could apply data to our hypothesis on how to address them. Our customer success team now has strong visibility into their customers usage or lack thereof so we can get ahead of any issues. Our Pendo data is synced into Salesforce so our sales team can find references or up-sell opps easily. Our engineering team appreciates Pendo guides so they don't have to continually update modals and text as we roll-out new features or want to solicit feedback. Can't recommend the product and the team behind the product enough.

Pros: Pendo is easy to set up and quickly get value from. Our entire company is now using Pendo for different things - whether it be understanding adoption at an account level or putting marketing event invitations to selected customers in the app, Pendo is our go-to tool.

Cons: The dashboards and "groupings" leave a bit to be desired. There's so much data in the platform, I want it be as easy as possible to share with the team or put up on a TV . Everything is there, it just takes a bit of massaging and exporting to make it really shine.