Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Pendo VS Optimizely

Compare Pendo VS Optimizely and see what are their differences

Pendo logo Pendo

Pendo helps product teams understand and guide users to create product experiences that customers love.

Optimizely logo Optimizely

A/B testing you'll actually use.
  • Pendo Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-02
  • Optimizely Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-10-04

Pendo

Website
pendo.io
Pricing URL
-
Release Date
2013 January
Startup details
Country
United States
City
Raleigh
Founder(s)
Eric Boduch
Employees
500 - 999

Pendo features and specs

  • User Analytics
    Pendo provides in-depth user analytics that help businesses understand how users interact with their product. This can be incredibly useful for identifying features that are popular, as well as areas where users may be experiencing difficulties.
  • In-app Guides
    The platform allows for the creation of in-app guides and walkthroughs, which help onboard new users and assist existing users in navigating new features.
  • Customer Feedback
    Pendo includes tools for capturing user feedback directly within the app, providing valuable insights into what customers like and what they think needs improvement.
  • Integration Capabilities
    Pendo integrates well with other tools such as Slack, Salesforce, and Jira, helping to streamline workflows and ensure that important user data is shared across your organization.
  • Product Engagement
    With features designed to increase product engagement, companies can use Pendo to guide users towards more frequent and more meaningful interactions with their software.

Possible disadvantages of Pendo

  • Cost
    Pendo can be expensive, especially for small businesses and startups. The cost increases with the number of users and advanced features required.
  • Complexity
    The platform's rich feature set can make it complex to set up and use, particularly for users who are not familiar with analytics and customer experience tools.
  • Learning Curve
    Even though Pendo offers extensive functionality, this can come with a steep learning curve for new users, requiring time to fully understand and leverage the tool effectively.
  • Performance Impact
    Embedding Pendo in your application can sometimes impact the performance and speed of your app, especially if not implemented correctly.
  • Limited Customization
    While Pendo offers many features, some users find the customization options for in-app guides and analytics to be somewhat limited compared to other tools.

Optimizely features and specs

  • Comprehensive A/B Testing
    Optimizely offers robust A/B testing capabilities, allowing businesses to test various versions of web pages and apps to determine the most effective design.
  • User-Friendly Interface
    The platform provides an intuitive and easy-to-navigate interface, making it accessible even for users who may not have technical expertise.
  • Personalization
    Optimizely's personalization feature tailors user experiences based on behavior, location, and other criteria to maximize engagement.
  • Comprehensive Analytics
    The tool offers detailed analytics and reporting functionalities that help in understanding the performance of experiments and identifying actionable insights.
  • Integration Capabilities
    Optimizely integrates well with other marketing tools and platforms, enhancing its utility and versatility.
  • Enterprise-Grade Features
    It provides enterprise-grade features like advanced targeting, real-time data, and extensive support, making it a suitable option for large businesses.

Possible disadvantages of Optimizely

  • High Cost
    Optimizely can be expensive, especially for small businesses or startups with limited budgets.
  • Steep Learning Curve for Advanced Features
    While the basic features are user-friendly, the more advanced functionalities may require a steep learning curve.
  • Limited Free Plan
    The free plan offers limited features, which might not be sufficient for businesses looking to utilize more advanced testing and personalization capabilities.
  • Resource Intensity
    Running extensive A/B tests can be resource-intensive and may slow down website performance.
  • Data Privacy Concerns
    Due to the extensive data collection, there might be concerns regarding data privacy and compliance with regulations like GDPR.

Analysis of Pendo

Overall verdict

  • Overall, Pendo is a highly recommended tool for companies aiming to gain insights into user interaction with their products. Its comprehensive analytics and user guidance features make it an excellent choice for product managers, UX designers, and customer success teams.

Why this product is good

  • Pendo is considered a good platform due to its robust set of features that help product teams understand user behavior, guide users inside the application, and gather feedback. It provides analytics, in-app messaging, and user surveys that allow companies to enhance their product experience and increase user adoption. Its ability to segment users and customize guidance based on user roles or behaviors is particularly valuable for businesses looking to optimize their products.

Recommended for

  • Product Managers
  • UX/UI Designers
  • Customer Success Teams
  • Marketing Teams
  • Software Development Teams

Pendo videos

Pendo Bootcamp

More videos:

  • Review - Pendo Pad Review
  • Review - Creating a Walkthrough in Pendo

Optimizely videos

Optimizely Review | A/B Testing | Pearl Lemon Reviews

More videos:

  • Tutorial - Optimizely X Tutorial 2019 - How to Use Optimizely for A/B, MVT, Personalization, Program Management
  • Review - A/B Testing with Optimizely

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Pendo and Optimizely)
Analytics
48 48%
52% 52
A/B Testing
0 0%
100% 100
Web Analytics
37 37%
63% 63
User Onboarding And Engagement

User comments

Share your experience with using Pendo and Optimizely. For example, how are they different and which one is better?
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Reviews

These are some of the external sources and on-site user reviews we've used to compare Pendo and Optimizely

Pendo Reviews

10 Best Canny Alternatives and Competitors in 2025
Pendo is a customer experience solution that simplifies how you collect user feedback. Built right into your app or website, users can request key features, report issues with the product, and get the support they need. 🙌
Source: clickup.com
7 best Mixpanel alternatives to understand your users
While both Pendo and Mixpanel offer analytics functionality, their primary purposes and use cases differ. Mixpanel enables you to conduct a granular analysis of user behavior, track users' progression through a funnel, and segment users based on their properties and events. However, it does not provide options for collecting user feedback or executing in-app experiences.
Source: www.hotjar.com
The best Hotjar alternatives & competitors, compared
Customer support and feedback: Users value Pendo as a useful tool for customer support and feedback collection. They use Pendo's feedback features to gather qualitative data and feed that into Pendo's validation and roadmap features.
Source: posthog.com
Top 10 FeatureBase alternatives you should evaluate in 2024
If you own a medium or large scale business and are looking for an alternative to Featurebase, then Pendo.io (opens in new tab) will suit you. Pendo is one of the best alternatives for Featurebase in the market. With all the updated features, Pendo is expensive than other feedback softwares.
Source: featureos.app
15 best user onboarding software you need to try in 2023
Pendo.io is designed to reduce the time taken to onboard new users, and 82% of customers have seen a minimum of 10% reduction in time and effort since implementing it. Guided tours can be built with sophisticated segmentation allowing you to drive users quickly to features they’ll love.

Optimizely Reviews

  1. Deepak Kumar
    · Technical Writer at Einsstark ·
    Good A/B and multivariate testing tool

    Optimizely is a lower cost entry tool for anyone looking to do website testing. While their pricing structure has changed over the years it still is a pretty cost effective solution. It is easy to get tests up and running within 5 minutes once you have code placed on your site.

    I love the drag and drop features of Optimizely. It makes it very easy to make simple changes to do landing page testing for my paid search campaigns. It also frees up dev time for our web team. Also, The findings from Optimizely tests are so valuable for an end customer experience.

    🏁 Competitors: VWO

15 Best A/B Testing Tools And Software (2021 List)
Optimizely is more of a personalization tool but you cannot ignore its A/B testing superiority. It helps you put the face of the most appealing site in front of customers. There’s a lot of things that are good in this software such as the ability to set up a quick test, and a real-time statistical dashboard. No programming prerequisite needed but front-end development and...
Top Mobile Feature Flag Tools
Optimizely is a well known A/B testing and experimentation tool for both web and mobile. It claims to be built for the enterprise with features like roles, permissions, and two-factor authentication while still maintaining excellent usability. Along with user targeting, remote configuration, and instant rollbacks, Optimizely offers advanced A/B testing and experimentation...
Source: instabug.com
18 Top A/B Testing Tools Reviewed by CRO Experts
“Convert is a fantastic tool that should be considered and evaluated by any CRO agency or end-user client that also evaluates Optimizely and VWO. They offer a level of functionality that is globally on par with them for testing, but at a lower price level once you go above the free level offered by Optimizely.
Top 5 A/B Testing Tools List
All in all, Optimizely is the complete package: if you want to get started with A/B testing, it’s definitely worth trying out, considering the pricing and trial plans. If you are a more of a power user with the budget to support the top tiers, Optimizely’s advanced features might also be for you.
How to Choose the Right Testing Software For Your Business
“Overall, Visual Website Optimizer has the slight edge for casual A/B testers, but it’s more expensive than the basic version of Optimizely. For serious A/B testers, I definitely recommend Optimizely – more comprehensive offering, even though you have to pay extra for premium features.” – Rich Page, Website Optimization Consultant

Social recommendations and mentions

Based on our record, Pendo seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 1 time 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.

Pendo mentions (1)

  • Recommendations for best product analytics tools?
    Just to clarify - are you looking for something that will gather platform usage data for later analysis, or you have a dataset and want to know how to analyze it? If it's the former - give Pendo a look. My company doesn't use it (because we're 100% on-prem software, so in-product telemetry isn't a thing for us) but I know of companies who are using and loving Pendo for gathering metrics. It's supposed to be the... Source: about 2 years ago

Optimizely mentions (0)

We have not tracked any mentions of Optimizely yet. Tracking of Optimizely recommendations started around Mar 2021.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Pendo and Optimizely, you can also consider the following products

Google Analytics - Improve your website to increase conversions, improve the user experience, and make more money using Google Analytics. Measure, understand and quantify engagement on your site with customized and in-depth reports.

VWO - Use VWO to tweak, optimize & personalize your website with minimal IT help.

Adobe Analytics - Adobe Analytics is an industry-leading solution that empowers you to understand your customers as people and steer your business with customer intelligence.

AB Tasty - AB Tasty is an all-inclusive platform for conversion rate optimization, personalization, customer activation, and testing.

Heap - Analytics for web and iOS. Heap automatically captures every user action in your app and lets you measure it all. Clicks, taps, swipes, form submissions, page views, and more.

Mixpanel - Mixpanel is the most advanced analytics platform in the world for mobile & web.