Pendo Reviews

What's unique and really useful about Pendo is that it combines product analytics, in-app guides & Net Promoter Score tracking, all under one roof. This allows you to show custom messages just to certain audiences (e.g. I see that some customers did not yet try feature ABC, so I show them a Guide to trigger adoption), and see NPS scores for different segments of users (e.g. what's the NPS for customers that never use feature ABC? What's the score for those that use feature ABC all the time?). That provides incredible insights.

First of all let me say that the company has come a long way. Pendo is growing a ton and it shows. They're constantly improving the platform, so we're confident that flaws will be corrected over time. That said, in our experience setting things up takes some time (and the concept of "Feature" is not immediately clear to newcomers: it actually means "UI element"), and until recently there were some annoying productivity issues (e.g. you could not quickly clone a segment, resulting in potentially lots of repeat tasks just to create two similar segment of users: now this has been resolved!). Improvements still need to be made for multi-language applications (e.g. different Guides for different users that speak different languages).

My favorite things about Pendo is creating interactive guides to help people understand how to use our product. This onboarding helps drive a lot of "no touch" sales and the guides are intuitive to create. The NPS is also great to get a status quo on how our users are enjoying the product.

I wish it was a bit easier to navigate the analytics of the guides. It is also tough to keep the guides active and working properly when you are releasing new features in your product, which skews the analytics if one guide step does not show and stops the guide.

The UI is modern and appealing

The software is inconsistent, buggy and unpredictable.

Even before the software, I've been very impressed by Pendo's customer support model. The proactive interaction we received in onboarding and ongoing support has been something I've consistently referred back to our own client services team as a model for how things are done. They have multiple team members accountable to different actions/experiences with us and they do it in a fluid fashion where it never feels like anyone drops the ball.

As for the software, I pull up our dashboard every morning and look at our customer interaction from the day before. Its very simple to follow individual customer behavior as well as overall trends. Per the recommendation of their onboarding team, I and 2 other team members sit down weekly for a Pendo meeting to talk about how we are using the data to further our company and what our next initiatives are

Pendo also integrates well with both Salesforce and Tableau, 2 other platforms we use extensively. Some of the visualizations that lack in the application, we can customize to our needs using Tableau

There are some small quirks that we haven't worked our way around yet. We get a lot of community feedback from the Pendomonium Slack channel, but sometimes us and others in that community feel like we are trying to group solve problems rather than Pendo coming out with a simple solution.

Pendo provides a clean user interface to interact with, mentioning that this ensures that all data can be found quickly and efficiently, in order to reduce performance slowdown within this platform, which is quite essential for a understandable fluency, without excluding that it promotes accurate and up-to-date metrics on all the information we seek in general, for a more alternative benefit, highlighting that creating guides and surveys agrees to keep us closer to the clients that each organization acquires.

The current panel is very easy to use, however, it has a limited customization capacity, which we cannot configure the boards to our scope, much less move functions where it is most relevant, instead of adding them, the which is a quite serious problem, which requires an update for a more flexible platform, especially in terms of adapting the tools to the most conducive environment, for better development.

The ability to collect all kinds of user application data and run reports and visualizations to quickly understand which users are in the platform and exactly what pages they are engaging in on, including duration. I have also leveraged the API connection to tie visitor reporting data to our disparate systems for better automating services. API docs were easy and useful! Account managers and support reps are incredibly amicable as well!

The support and script is very much DIY. They pass you the code and it's up to your team to ensure it's been installed correctly. We had issues with our script at one point and the support was only able to get us so far.

Pendo provides a user-friendly experience that allows us to access comprehensive reports with visually appealing graphs that illustrate all interactions with our website and social media platforms. Pendo's numerous statistics on visit times and days enable us to accurately measure engagement, allowing us to gauge the effectiveness and success of our marketing efforts.

Pendo is a great tool that is easy to use, although it may be a bit complex for beginners. However, it doesn't take much time to understand all of the tools and extract reports effortlessly.

In terms of providing user behavior/engagement data—Pendo is unparalleled. We get so many insights into how our clients use our Product which can be applied during discovery and engineering and factor into our release strategy. It allows us to communicate with our clients in-app in strategic and sophisticated ways and with results far beyond what we get through email. Its NPS tool is worth the cost of the application alone.

While a lot of stuff works intuitively out of the box, there's a slight learning curve with a number of Pendo features. There are many steps to building a guide, and the location of specific features/guide settings within the UI isn't always straightforward (some things a user might think fall under "guide activation", for example, are not set in the "guide activation" section).

Additionally, having a basic knowledge of CSS and JS is beneficial. If you don't have it, you may find you regularly have to engage with engineers at your company to tag features and pages correctly, especially if your app uses unique instances (or sites) per client. Ditto for testing guide activation off of features that don't employ the same CSS across all versions of your app.

If you want to track clicks to a button or link in a guide you've created, this is not tracked automatically— there's kind of a backwards way you have to tag it as a feature. Some data that is tracked (time stamps of when a feature is interacted with) can only be surfaced via the API.

We love all the data we have gained about our users and have a much stronger understanding of what they do within our applications. In addition, Pendo has made communication with our customers really easy, especially in times of crisis. I also feel as though we are arming our ENTIRE organization with information they need to do their job. All functions within our organization derive value from this platform and that isn't easy to achieve! Updates are also released regularly which tells me this is an organization that is dedicated to their customers.

I think with such an amazing platform, it can sometimes feel overwhelming to get up to speed on all the things we could be doing with the software.

I really like that Pendo has great out of the box API integrations that has been helpful for creating and publishing interactive digital guides and materials for our customers, which really enhances the digital content delivery experience and overall web experience.

The process of implementing advanced web analytics tracking and advanced heat map reporting had been initially challenging and time consuming for our team to figure out all of the intricacies and steps involved to set up a deploy from the get go.

Pendo tracks all user events, even if you don't have them tagged. Competitors do not do this. The user interface is very easy to use and customize to meet the needs of different types of users. Very easy, even for non-programming staff to use. The in-app guides are extremely helpful for user guidance and support, company announcements. The NPS poll practically runs itself for us.

Occasional difficulty tagging look-up or drop-down fields, but the support staff is excellent at helping work those things out.

I like there are lots of ways to provide customers using our software more information, alerts, updates, etc. through Pendo. The guides, polls, and NPS are the most useful features for my position with Pendo.

We have changed how our software works a lot over the last few months and as a result, many of our tags have become out of data, the process of updating this is a bit time consuming and more on the complicated side of the tool. Additionally, figuring out how to best use the Trends features has been a bit difficult as the support in setting this up is more generic. We would ideally love to use Pendo to pull more data and information on the usage patterns of our customers but get set up has been preventing that.

There's so much to love about Pendo! Visitor dashboards, robust functionality, user segments, and resource center are just a few of the things we love about Pendo. Additionally, their team is AWESOME and really easy to work with.

You are not able to clone guides across multiple instances, which is a bit of a pain when trying to push the same message to a few audiences. Also, I wish there were more throttling options, specifically, something more than 1/guide per day. Both fairly minor, but would be nice to have!

The software is immensely powerful. I have been able to empower our sales team to in making informed customer decisions with the user adoption data I pull from Pendo reports. The reports are easy to pull and understand, regardless of your Pendo platform experience.

The feature tagging process is tedious, but that is the nature of the game.