Software Alternatives, Accelerators & Startups

Usetiful VS ShepherdJS

Compare Usetiful VS ShepherdJS and see what are their differences

Usetiful logo Usetiful

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

ShepherdJS logo ShepherdJS

Guide your users through a tour of your app.
  • Usetiful Landing page
    Landing page //
    2022-03-20

Usetiful bridges the gap between users and digital systems. Guided tours and smart tips allow users to master any software system from day one.

Usetiful provides interactive product tours and smart tips into your application, improving user adoption and conversions instantly.

  • ShepherdJS Landing page
    Landing page //
    2023-08-29

Usetiful features and specs

  • Product Tours
    interactive guided tours
  • Checklists
    user onboarding checklists
  • Hotspot beacons
    pulsating elements to draw user's attention without being intrusive
  • Microsurveys
    gather user feedback seamlessly
  • Smart Tips
    contextual guidance and validation
  • Assistant widget
    customer self help
  • Easy to Set-up and use
    less than 5 min setup
  • Employee onboarding
    employee tutorials and checklist
  • Knowledge Base portal
    public self-help portal
  • Native mobile guides
    support for native mobile
  • Feature tracking
    tracking of feature adoption by user segments or individual users
  • Integrations
    connect onboarding flows to wider company operations

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.

Analysis of Usetiful

Overall verdict

  • Usetiful is considered a good solution for businesses looking to optimize user onboarding and enhance the customer experience. Its features cater well to both small startups and larger organizations needing to provide seamless user guidance.

Why this product is good

  • Usetiful is a digital adoption platform designed to help users onboard, train, and guide through applications with ease. It is known for its intuitive interface, customizable onboarding flows, and interactive product tours. This tool can enhance user engagement, reduce churn, and improve the learning curve for new software users.

Recommended for

    Usetiful is recommended for product managers, customer success teams, and training departments in companies that deploy software applications and seek to improve user onboarding, reduce support requests, or boost user satisfaction and retention.

Usetiful videos

Embedded Banners

More videos:

  • Demo - Create product tours without coding with Usetiful
  • Tutorial - User Onboarding Checklists by Usetiful
  • Demo - Usetiful - Visual Editor Demo
  • Demo - Usetiful Introduction Video

ShepherdJS videos

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

Add video

Category Popularity

0-100% (relative to Usetiful and ShepherdJS)
Digital Adoption
96 96%
4% 4
User Onboarding And Engagement
User Engagement
81 81%
19% 19
User Experience
86 86%
14% 14

Questions and Answers

As answered by people managing Usetiful and ShepherdJS.

What makes your product unique?

Usetiful's answer

  • Usetiful works with native mobile - serving clients on all of their platforms
  • Usetiful is affordable - offering a free-forever plan and scalable business offerings
  • Usetiful "just works" - supporting wide range of corner cases, including exotic Single Page Applications or iFrames
  • Usetiful is secure - not only ISO27001 certified, HIPAA and GDPR compliant. But also able to run on-premise for security-intense clients

Who are some of the biggest customers of your product?

Usetiful's answer

-Audi -DHL -DPD -Konica Minolta -Foodora -e27 -Nanyang Technological University -iChef

User comments

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Reviews

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

Usetiful Reviews

  1. Marek Albrecht
    · Portal Admin at LARP Slovakia ·
    Convenient and free

    It was easy to get started - I have registered the free plan and created the first tour in approximately 15 minutes. Since then I have been improving on the experience.

    Part of my application is a single-page app. It was quite techy to get this part running. Kudos for the customer support that walked me through!

    🏁 Competitors: WalkMe
    👍 Pros:    Free basic plan|Easy to use|Great customer support
    👎 Cons:    Single page app support
  2. Martin Novak
    · Front end manager at Netwits Company ·
    A nice simple tool for user onboarding

    I use Usetiful for various clients' projects that require product tours. Everyone was satisfied so far. Web editor allows me to quickly update the content and browser extension to preview the tours. Reports provide enough detail.

    🏁 Competitors: Appcues
    👍 Pros:    Easy to use|Easy user interface|Preview function|Good price
    👎 Cons:    Nothing, so far

15 best user onboarding software you need to try in 2023
Usetiful is one of the best-value onboarding tools we’ve found — it’s premium version is just $99/month for up to 20,000 users.
8 Best Usetiful Alternatives and Competitors That Are More Professional
For non-technical people, Usetiful’s integration and setup can be extremely confusing. While it’s still possible for a person who doesn’t know how to code to integrate the tool into their website, figuring out how to do it will be difficult for sure. In order to get to the required information, the user needs to dig deep into help center articles and cherry-pick the...
Source: userguiding.com
The 7 Best WalkMe Alternatives in 2023
Its customizable onboarding solutions make it a strong contender for organizations focused on data-driven decision-making. If you're looking for an easy-to-use platform with robust analytics capabilities, Usetiful is worth considering.
Source: helpjuice.com
Top alternatives to UserGuiding
If you are looking for high customizability and excellent customer service all while maintaining a reasonable pricing - Usetiful is the best alternative. At the same time, no onboarding software works exactly the same in every use case. Also make sure to consider the other two alternatives to make an educated decision.
3 free tools for Product Managers to improve product adoption
Product Tours by Usetiful allow you to guide users within your product. You can for example point out interesting parts by well placed smart tips or guide new users with end-to-end walkthrough. Keeping users in direct conversation allows you to get more feedback.
Source: medium.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, ShepherdJS seems to be more popular. It has been mentiond 10 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.

Usetiful mentions (0)

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

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 / 10 months 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 — either parts of the site or the whole application — 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 / about 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 / about 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?
    We’ve called them Product Tours https://shepherdjs.dev is good. Source: over 2 years ago
View more

What are some alternatives?

When comparing Usetiful and ShepherdJS, you can also consider the following products

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

Intro.js - Simple Javascript framework for adding screen tips

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

Userlane - Digital adoption platform with interactive guidance for software applications allowing anyone to understand and master any software from the get-go.

Stonly - Create interactive step-by-step guides

Flows.sh - Product adoption platform for modern software companies.