Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Intro.js VS ShepherdJS

Compare Intro.js VS ShepherdJS and see what are their differences

Intro.js logo Intro.js

Simple Javascript framework for adding screen tips

ShepherdJS logo ShepherdJS

Guide your users through a tour of your app.
  • Intro.js Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-03-29
  • ShepherdJS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-29

Intro.js features and specs

  • User-Friendly Interface
    Intro.js provides an intuitive and easy-to-use interface for creating guided tours on websites, making it accessible for users with varying technical skills.
  • Customizable
    Intro.js is highly customizable, allowing developers to tailor the look and feel of the tour to match the existing design of their website.
  • Lightweight
    The library is lightweight, ensuring that adding it to a website does not significantly increase load times or affect performance.
  • Cross-Browser Support
    Intro.js supports all major browsers, ensuring a consistent experience for users regardless of their browser choice.
  • Rich API
    It offers a rich API, enabling developers to integrate the tool into their applications seamlessly and extend its functionality as needed.

Possible disadvantages of Intro.js

  • Limited Interactivity
    While Intro.js provides basic guided tours, it lacks advanced interactive features that might be needed for more complex walkthroughs.
  • Dependency on JavaScript
    As a JavaScript library, Intro.js requires users to have JavaScript enabled in their browsers, which might not be the case for all users.
  • Potential for User Overload
    Overusing or poorly implementing Intro.js guides can overwhelm users, leading to reduced engagement or missed information.
  • Limited Free Version
    The free version of Intro.js offers limited features compared to the paid plans, which may restrict use for developers not willing to pay for premium features.
  • Learning Curve
    While it is user-friendly, new users may encounter a learning curve when trying to implement advanced customizations or complex tours.

ShepherdJS features and specs

  • User Guidance
    ShepherdJS allows for creating guided tours and feature introductions, which can help in onboarding new users or guiding existing users through new features effectively.
  • Customizability
    The library provides a wide range of customization options for the appearance of the tour steps as well as their behavior, allowing developers to tailor the user experience to meet specific application needs.
  • Ease of Integration
    ShepherdJS is designed to be easy to integrate with modern JavaScript applications and supports various JavaScript frameworks such as Angular, React, and Vue.
  • Accessibility
    It includes built-in features to enhance accessibility, ensuring that tours can be experienced by all users, including those with disabilities.
  • Community and Support
    ShepherdJS has an active community and is backed by frequent updates and bug fixes, which can be valuable for developers seeking support and reliability.

Possible disadvantages of ShepherdJS

  • Learning Curve
    Despite its ease of integration, there can still be a learning curve associated with understanding and implementing the full range of features ShepherdJS offers, especially for new developers.
  • Dependencies
    ShepherdJS has dependencies that need to be managed, which can sometimes lead to conflicts or increase the difficulty of the setup process in certain environments.
  • Performance Overhead
    Implementing tours in a web application may introduce additional DOM elements and require JavaScript execution, potentially impacting performance, especially on resource-constrained devices.
  • Limited Offline Capability
    Like many web-based libraries, ShepherdJS requires a browser environment to function, which can limit its effectiveness in offline scenarios or in cases where network connections are unstable.

Intro.js videos

Intro.js: Onboard New Users with a Quick Wizard

More videos:

  • Review - Add a Step-by-Step guide to your Website with intro.js

ShepherdJS videos

No ShepherdJS videos yet. You could help us improve this page by suggesting one.

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Intro.js and ShepherdJS)
User Engagement
44 44%
56% 56
User Onboarding And Engagement
User Experience
57 57%
43% 43
Digital Adoption
51 51%
49% 49

User comments

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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Intro.js and ShepherdJS

Intro.js Reviews

15 best user onboarding software you need to try in 2023
The free version offers tooltips and screen portion highlights, which might suffice if your app is relatively straightforward. However, Intro.js is designed to be cut and pasted into your appโ€™s code to create onboarding functions it wouldnโ€™t otherwise have. Therefore, youโ€™ll still need to have built a basic onboarding workflow ready.
8 Best Usetiful Alternatives and Competitors That Are More Professional
The onboarding elements are very limited, so any user onboarding designed with Intro.js will not be likely to satisfy every need of a user.
Source: userguiding.com

ShepherdJS Reviews

8 Best Usetiful Alternatives and Competitors That Are More Professional
Shepherd.js is not a fully developed 3rd party tool like most of the other alternatives that I listed. It is an open-source library to make it easier to create simple product tours.
Source: userguiding.com

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Intro.js should be more popular than ShepherdJS. It has been mentiond 15 times since March 2021. We are tracking product recommendations and mentions on various public social media platforms and blogs. They can help you identify which product is more popular and what people think of it.

Intro.js mentions (15)

  • 7 best product tour JavaScript libraries for frontend apps
    Intro.js is an open source JavaScript library that provides an easy way to create simple and effective product tours. It has an approximate file size of 12.5 KB, so itโ€™s a lightweight library that makes building simple walkthroughs easy: One of the key features of Intro.js is its customizability. It allows you to tailor your tours to align with your application's branding by offering various themes and... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Guided Tours Solution for Your Web Application
    Intro.js like the others offers a rich set of features such as customizable steps and tooltips, keyboard navigation, theming, progress indicators and more. Like others, this library also has extensive documentation. Intro.js has open source licence under AGPL v3 and a commercial licence with different price plans. - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Need Help With Website Guide
    Intro.js might be what youโ€™re looking for. Source: about 2 years ago
  • Button pop up with Java and CSS
    Everything in the browser works with just CSS, JavaScript and HTML. There are JavaScript libraries for things like you are describing, if you are able to customize your site with JS - you should be able to use some of them. For example this one: https://introjs.com/. Source: over 2 years ago
  • How come 1 cookie expires and the other one is not?
    For context, I'm using introjs to make a small tour in my website in 2 different pages. I'm making a cookie wheather a user has visited the page so I can only show the tour only once. My issue is that one cookie sets up with an expiration of 400 days as its supposed to be and the other one stays Session only but both are made from the exact same function with the exacth same parameters. Source: almost 3 years ago
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ShepherdJS mentions (10)

  • 7 best product tour JavaScript libraries for frontend apps
    Shepherd.js is a simple JavaScript library aimed at easing the process of making user tours in web applications. It has a clear, intuitive interface wherein you describe your tour step-by-step, which helps improve the tour UX and enhance user understanding: Shepherd.js offers extensive customization options and seamless integration with your application. It prioritizes accessibility with full keyboard navigation.... - Source: dev.to / about 1 year ago
  • Using React Shepherd to build a site tour
    In this tutorial, I will show you how to use React Shepherd to easily implement a site tour on your website. React Shepherd is a lightweight wrapper library for Shepherd.js that allows us to create a walkthrough of a website โ€” either parts of the site or the whole application โ€” by using dialogs that represent steps that you create. At the end of this article, we will have a functioning site tour as shown in this... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Guided Tours Solution for Your Web Application
    Shepherd is a powerful and customizable open source JavaScript library for creating interactive tours and onboarding experiences in web applications. It uses another open source library Floating UI to render the dialog tours. It offers a simple setup process, dynamic content support, the ability to create custom actions and events, and theming and styling too. More importantly, it is responsive too and never goes... - Source: dev.to / over 1 year ago
  • Reddit: Help us design more content to onboard users
    Using/building something like this would go a long way (https://shepherdjs.dev/) and could also have the benefit of keeping the tours in parity with the current L2 UI. Source: over 2 years ago
  • What is the UX term for those pop-up boxes which helps users with their first few tasks after finishing onboarding?
    Weโ€™ve called them Product Tours https://shepherdjs.dev is good. Source: over 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Intro.js and ShepherdJS, you can also consider the following products

UserGuiding - Create in-app experiences with the most straightforward product adoption platform โ€” quick implementation, lasting user engagement.

Appcues - Improve user onboarding, feature activation & more โ€” no code required! Stop waiting on dev and start increasing customer engagement today. Try it for free.

TourGuideJS - Intuitive and customisable tours for user onboarding. A free and complete alternative to IntroJS, Sheperd and the rest.

Usetiful - Fight user churn with great user onboarding. Interactive product tours and smart tips significantly improve your user retention.

Bootstrap Tour - The easiest way to show people how to use your website.

Userpilot - Product user experience software for product & UX teams