Appcues vs Stonly

Appcues is a product adoption platform from a Boston-based company founded in 2013, and one of the tools that defined the in-app onboarding category. Product and growth teams use it to build onboarding flows, tooltips, modals, checklists, banners, launchpads and NPS surveys on top of a web or mobile app without asking engineers to ship each change.

Experiences are created in a Chrome-based builder for web and through SDKs for iOS, Android, React Native and Flutter on mobile. Targeting uses user properties and tracked events, goals measure whether a flow actually moved people to the next step, and integrations with Segment, HubSpot, Salesforce, Amplitude and Mixpanel push and pull data both ways. Newer workflow features add email and push so one journey can reach users inside and outside the product. Pricing is annual and scales with monthly active users; there is no free plan, and the Start tier covers web flows while multichannel, surveys and deeper integrations sit on Grow and Enterprise.

Appcues fits growth-stage SaaS companies that have an activation problem, a budget for tooling and a mobile app to cover. Early-stage teams usually find it expensive: UserGuiding and Product Fruits cover web onboarding for far less, Userpilot adds stronger built-in analytics, and Pendo bundles adoption with full product analytics for larger organizations. Design customization also has limits that teams with strict brand systems sometimes hit.

Stonly is a knowledge and guidance platform for customer service, founded in 2018 in the Paris area and co-founded by Alexis Fogel, who previously co-founded Dashlane. It raised a $22 million Series A in January 2022 led by Northzone with Accel. Its core job is turning support knowledge into interactive step-by-step guides and decision trees that customers follow on their own and agents follow inside the help desk.

The product combines guides, product tours through an embeddable widget, checklists, a knowledge base with versioning and review flows, contact forms and surveys. AI features include AI Answers, a conversational bot, AI Agent Assist for ticket summaries and draft replies, Knowledge Agents and Business Process Agents. The free Basic plan allows 400 guide views a month and five guides; Small Business, for companies under 100 employees, adds 4,000 views and five seats at a quoted price; Enterprise unlocks help desk integrations, AI Agents, SSO and auto-translation. Small Business has a 14-day trial.

Stonly fits support-heavy SaaS, fintech and hardware companies that want to deflect tickets and standardize agent troubleshooting. It is less suited to product teams focused on onboarding analytics. Whatfix goes deeper on enterprise digital adoption, Userpilot and Appcues are stronger for product-led onboarding, and Chameleon gives more design control over in-app tours.

Buying tip: paid prices are not published and guide views drive the bill; exceeding your limit two months in a row moves you to a higher plan automatically. Measure help-center traffic before talking to sales.