Frigade vs Intro.js

Frigade is a developer-first platform for building in-app onboarding and user engagement experiences. Instead of injecting an overlay script that sits on top of your interface, as traditional digital adoption tools do, Frigade provides a React SDK and components (checklists, product tours, announcements, banners, forms and surveys) that render inside your application and inherit your design system, so onboarding looks native rather than bolted on.

Engineers place components in the codebase once, and product or growth teams then manage content, targeting and sequencing from the Frigade dashboard without new deployments. Flows can be targeted by user properties, events and lifecycle stage, chained together into collections, and measured with completion analytics. A headless mode and APIs let teams build fully custom UI while still using Frigade for state, targeting and tracking, and events can be sent to the analytics stack the team already uses. Frigade no longer lists a free tier: the Growth plan starts at $1,000 a month and Enterprise pricing is quoted.

Frigade suits product-led SaaS companies with React front ends and engineers willing to own the integration, especially those who dislike how overlay-based tours look and break. It is not designed for teams that want marketers to build tours visually on any page without code; Appcues, Userpilot and Pendo serve that no-code use case, with Pendo adding product analytics at enterprise scale.

Intro.js is a lightweight JavaScript library for building step-by-step product tours, feature hints and onboarding walkthroughs directly in a web application. Created by Afshin Mehrabani and maintained as an open-source project for more than a decade, it highlights elements on the page with an overlay and a tooltip, guides users through steps in sequence and works with any front-end framework, with community wrappers for React, Angular and Vue.

Developers define steps in HTML data attributes or JavaScript, choose positions, add progress bars and buttons, theme the tooltips with CSS and trigger tours based on their own logic. Hints show small hotspots next to features without a full tour. The code is published under the AGPL, which is free for open-source and personal projects, while businesses buy a one-time commercial licence in tiers based on the number of projects instead of paying a monthly SaaS fee.

Intro.js fits developers who want a simple, fast tour that lives in their own codebase, with no external scripts, no per-user pricing and full control over behaviour. Non-technical teams cannot edit tours without a deployment, and there is no analytics, targeting, A/B testing or checklist builder. Shepherd.js and Driver.js are popular open-source alternatives, while no-code platforms such as UserGuiding, Appcues, Userpilot and Pendo add visual editors, segmentation and analytics at a much higher monthly cost.