Pendo Reviews

Great Tool For Analytics, Gathering User Feedback, and Customer Outreach

Comments: I love Pendo! It's fun to use and I always discover new insights into our users and product.

Pros:

Our organization uses Pendo for a variety of purposes. We use the powerful analytic tools to understand how our users are using our product. This helps our Product Managers make important roadmapping decisions, track feature adoption, and monitor user behavior. The design team gets a lot of benefit from the Funnel and Pathing features, it helps them to study user flows and make design adjustments on the fly. We use guides frequently to announce new features, market events and webinars, collect user feedback, and educate users on how to use our features. I really like the NPS functionality, this allows us to be constantly collecting user feedback that is sampled on a random basis. This has been extremely beneficial for us to track if we are improving our NPS and PMF score quarter by quarter.Nearly ever department in our organization gets some benefit from Pendo, whether its our Product, Customer Success, Marketing, or Sales teams.

Cons:

There is a huge learning curve with Pendo. It can take months to learn all the ins and outs, and it needs to be set up correctly or you will lose all the benefits of the tool. The hardest steps are injecting the Pendo snippet into your codebase, setting up data attributes correctly. tagging the pages/features. creating‹ segments. and excluding testing environments and test orgs. In the past we ran into some troubles with Pendo when we had several people using the tool at once who were not properly trained, this lead to a messy Pendo instance and incorrect/unreliable data. It is best to have one Pendo owner in your organization who is completely familiar with the tool and owns all aspects of Pendo from implementation to maintenance. Once it is set up properly. it is an incredibly powerful and beneficial tool for any organization.

Friendly digital adoption tool

Comments: As a business, we like to see if customers have completed a certain CTA or a process. Pendo does a great job in both these areas. The Funnels and Features tools help us to analyse if a suer has completed a task from beginning to end and if they have clicked on any CTA buttons on a landing page.

Pros:

Pendo provides deep insights into how our customers interact with our product i.e. the pages they visit, the features they interact with and the amount of time they spend on our app.

Cons:

The page URLs tagged by Pendo are case sensitive. So we end up having to tag variations of the URLs that have lowercase/uppercase characters in them

Terrible company w terrible biz practice

Comments: Not that useful as only work for web interface. We have apps so need better tool. And terrible biz practice trying to scam more money from customers...

Pros:

Nothing impressive. Slow responsiveness in generating ui/ux pages

Cons:

Terrible biz practice. After a year of license, suddenly came and say we have to pay more because we are using more features. The features used are what they trained our team to use after the agreement was signed and also we paid for the training.

Great product

Comments: Very good. The team were highly attentive and supportive. Has been a really enjoyable project getting this set up and running with benefits almost immediately.

Pros:

It is a significant investment, but so many benefits, it is worth it. The software is very easy to integrate with (for standard web apps) to start getting analytics immediately but you do need a role that focuses on this as their day job to drive the most value from it. The guides are easy to set up and flexible too with lots of templates to help get you started quickly. Having worked in product management for over 25 years the discovery of Pendo was a godsend! Wish had discovered it years before.

Cons:

Works well for standard web apps. If your app doesn't change URL for each page you visit then there may be issues tracking at volume. Not insurmountable but needs more time, thought.

Love having Pendo for analytics AND product feedback. Game changer

Pros:

I couldn't live without Pendo Feedback now that I've been using it. It makes collecting and organizing product feedback and feature requests so easy and I love how visible it is to the whole organization. I'm the only Product Manager at our company so having tools to help automate and organize product requests for all of our products is a life saver. I also really appreciate how easy it was to setup usage analytics and how little engineering effort it took. Since it has been setup, I haven't needed engineering for anything related Pendo and can do everything on my own.

Cons:

No complaints or major issues with their analytics or feedback products.

Powerful!

Comments: I wasn't initially involved in setting this up, so I was super hesitate when the team said the NPS tool was going to change. I couldn't be happier - this is a powerful tool!

Pros:

I use the NPS feature of Pendo daily. The rest of my team uses this tool for our onboarding. We recently moved from Delighted to Pendo and I couldn't be happier! Easy to see our NPS score change over a set period of time, as well as see users comments and score.

Cons:

So I only use the one feature while my team makes full use of the rest of the tool. There are really no negatives other than it's overwhelming at first as there are so many useful features. Take time to learn so you can get the most from Pendo.

Pendo Brings the Insights

Comments: Pendo has been fantastic for us. Within just a few months from implementation, we've been able to gather information on our users' behavior that we've never had before. Gaining this insight has opened our eyes to so many more questions and opportunities for our company to grow and thrive.

Pros:

This software is incredibly robust and easy to use. Usually you have to trade one for the other, but not with Pendo. I am able to easily get behavioral analytics as well as launch in-app guidance with the click of a button!

Cons:

We are a multi-app/single platform company, so some of the features that are geared towards single-app don't work out of the box for us. However, Pendo support and Pendo pro-services teams have been AMAZING and have found ways to accommodate my needs every time.

NPS, Guides, Feature Releases

Comments: I have enjoyed it a lot, very useful onboarding process by their CS team, the guides are intuitive to create, and we have seen a real improvement in adaption, lowering churn and increasing "no touch" sales

Pros:

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.

Cons:

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.

Good tracking, but you get what you set up

Comments: Outputs depend greatly on the familiarity of those setting up the page/feature tags and segments. It can be cleaned up later, but it's not a trivial effort to set up, and little happens automatically.

Pros:

Tracking snippet is fast to install. For a SaaS solution, it starts logging events right away, regardless of whether a page or feature is tagged. This helps later, new tags retroactively apply based on logs.

Cons:

Setup was very tedious, each page and feature needed to be tagged individually. Some features like app filters or groups didn't work for all of our solutions, leading to redundant naming conventions.

Needs Work

Pros:

Pendo integrates really well into a lot of software which is very helpful when the integrations work.

Cons:

Data points that we set up change regularly from what we set, so it's hard to trust the data integrations.

Useful tool, definitely has room for improvment

Comments: Useful, could be better overall with functionality, and the ease of use could be improved upon.

Pros:

It has great web analytics to be able to see stats on visits to pages, I also really enjoy the ability to build out little informational tools like pop-ups when you enter a page for users without having to code/develop for that. Also the help question mark where we can link out to all our knowledgebase articles.

Cons:

I wish it had some more functionality to actually see users sessions and track like rage clicks, or be more pro-active about when things aren't working and not have to tag EVERY single little thing, but let it auto-generate tags somehow?

This powerful analysis tool suitable for all types of businesses

Comments: With Pendo's powerful search and data collection options, operations are faster, improving our team's performance.

Pros:

With Pendo we have carefully followed how and to what extent our advertisements on social media can win customers' trust. The speed with which we can Pendo go from raw data to actionable insights is a crucial feature, and the quick search feature integrated with all platform options is excellent. Pendo will provide numerous opportunities to sort results based on product type, target groups, and customer behavior, displayed on customized dashboards and easy-to-understand reports. I enjoy that every minor change can be discussed with my colleagues, which helps us find answers and set accurate timelines for implementing required corrective actions.

Cons:

Mastering the platform takes a lot of effort. For example, sometimes you notice an error in the collected data or do not receive what you're looking for, perhaps because the user wasn't able to set it up properly, which throws data off.

I've been looking for a real solution to my User Behavior Analytics Problem

Comments: My experience with Pendo over the past year has been excellent, from initial discussions, implementation and support, Pendo has been great. Big shout out to the team at Pendo all have been very supportive and patient.

Pros:

Pendo is built for product teams and provides a real solution to what I consider User Behavior Analytics, Qualitative + Quantitative Insights. The best part its super easy to get up and going, minimizes my development and implementation efforts. I have been able to train my Product Managers and UX Designers/Researchers in how to Tag, Generate Reports in less then 1 hour. Pendo makes Analytics easy + fun which is perfect in keeping my teams engaged and using analytics to measure success with each release. Also Pendo helps us now connect a complete user journey cross devices from desktop to mobile, it has helped us drive engagement into new areas of our applications through what they call Guides, and has allowed us to easily and quickly identify problem areas by looking into the analytics and using in-app surveys to collect additional in the momement feedback.

Cons:

I must say not much I do not like about the software. The pricing model which is based on monthly active users can get costly if you have millions of users, so it's not ideal for putting Pendo on your marketing or lead pages, its best used within your application after users sign in.

The best tool to collect feedback and product usage details

Pros:

It's very easy to configure, you can be live in minutes and the reporting capabilities are fantastic. We use it for clients communications and feedback, in addition to NPS score collection. It perfectly does the job.

Cons:

The integrations with other tools can be a bit complicated to manage because Pendo is very powerful and offers multiple ways to do it. Sometimes the reporting capabilities are even too granular (which is a plus) but that makes the job longer in terms of report configuration and checking.

Invaluable Resource

Comments: Fantastic overall-- Product is a good example of useful out of the box, but rewards time and effort you spend fitting to your company's needs.

Pros:

It's incredible how useful and predictive usage metrics can be if you build your own benchmarks and follow carefully. Extremely useful for knowing which accounts/segments my team should prioritize. I can spend 5 minutes in Pendo and see which of my large Customers are not adopting a Feature I know makes them sticky/happy. From there, it's just a matter of what form my outreach takes. NPS is also slick, simple, intuitive, yet you can also customize and ensure a laser focus. Guides are awesome. They do take time to learn and get efficient at, but you get out of it what you put into it. We're seeing very good usage and feedback is extremely positive. I've met and worked with ~5 Pendo Team members and they've all been awesome! They're passionate about the Product-- when I ask a difficult or unusual question, you can tell they're curious and they care-- they don't try to give me a cookie-cutter answer-- they're thoughtful and they take the time to think it through.

Cons:

There is a bit of trial and error with filters. It's easy to think you've included/excluded a segment-- careful to double check and be extremely diligent.

Great potential as long as you know how to manage the data

Comments: We do like Pendo and can see it has great potential, but I don’t think we are utilizing it to maximize that potential...yet. We are using it primarily to walk users through new tools and features, make announcements and gauge general user activity and engagement. This is great for improving user satisfaction at a base level and understanding how the user is using our product, but I think we’ve only scratched the surface. There are advanced segmentation tools used to determine how and when content is served, and reports can be grouped by these same segmentations. I’m excited to see how we can build on what we’ve created to really put those segmentations to use and learn even more about our users’ behavior.

Pros:

Pendo has allowed us to gain deeper insight into our users’ workflows within our applications without having to disrupt those workflows. Usage data is captured as users navigate the site/app/platform and that data is made available to our team to analyze in real-time. This has significantly improved how we interact with users and what content we serve them at every touchpoint.

Cons:

Creating the “guides” can be a cumbersome process. There are templates, but these are fairly basic and do not cover every use case. It would be amazing if there was an advanced/expanded library (even at cost) that would allow us to ramp up more quickly. We also felt the implementation team at Pendo could have been a little more hands-on. The weekly/biweekly check-in calls are nice, but we could have really used some deep-dive/consultative help when we were new to the platform and still trying to find our bearings.

Good analytics but some leg lifting required

Comments: Overall we found Pendo to have a great feature set for the price. When set up properly, which admittedly did take some work, we found it produced really great, actual operational insights about our software.

Pros:

Implementation was very easy, Pendo provides you with a javascript snippit which a developer inserts into an existing web app, typically in the header or footer. Extra data can be added just by modifying some code. We had a proof of concept up and running within hours and deployed to production within weeks. Once up and running, Pendo provides a large number of ways to slice and dice data and it's all very self explanatory, for the most part.

Cons:

Like many of these products, the data that comes out of it is only as good as what goes in.. i.e. don't just think you will install the snippit and call it a day. On the Pendo portal, customization is required, such as "tagging" pages, grouping pages together (i.e. a series of pages that may have different parameters or query strings will appear to Pendo as different pages, and this grouping needs to happen before data can be interpreted correctly. The original thought was that the end user (product manager) would do this customization but ultimately developers did it.

It just works - Provides amazing insights

Comments: We understood our adoption issues and could apply data to our hypothesis on how to address them. Our customer success team now has strong visibility into their customers usage or lack thereof so we can get ahead of any issues. Our Pendo data is synced into Salesforce so our sales team can find references or up-sell opps easily. Our engineering team appreciates Pendo guides so they don't have to continually update modals and text as we roll-out new features or want to solicit feedback. Can't recommend the product and the team behind the product enough.

Pros:

Pendo is easy to set up and quickly get value from. Our entire company is now using Pendo for different things - whether it be understanding adoption at an account level or putting marketing event invitations to selected customers in the app, Pendo is our go-to tool.

Cons:

The dashboards and "groupings" leave a bit to be desired. There's so much data in the platform, I want it be as easy as possible to share with the team or put up on a TV . Everything is there, it just takes a bit of massaging and exporting to make it really shine.

Useful Add-On For our Website

Comments: Great product layer to help give you objective details about the end user usage of your product.

Pros:

We really love the usage data we get from Pendo. It helps to identify sore spots in our interface that may incite frustration from our clients, and is also equally useful in setting up reviews, announcements, and alerts.

Cons:

It is a large program that will take some tinkering to become anywhere useful let alone proficient, but with such a large platform that is to be expected.

Pendo fits well even in a large organization

Comments: Overall we are VERY satisfied with Pendo. Two items that we spent a lot of time developing on our own we're quickly and easily replaced by Pendo features - inline Help tooltips and custom tutorials. We spent so much time maintaining, testing, and updating these before Pendo! Also, Pendo's usage metrics are SO much easier to access and evaluate than other tools we use at Elsevier. And the ability to view this usage by different segments is a game changer!

Pros:

Before my organization purchased Pendo it was difficult if not impossible to get feedback from our users. After adoption, multiple business units are now using Pendo to survey users, advertise new features and much more. The best part is being able to share techniques across business units so users of our different products get a consistent experience.

Cons:

The ability to create reports on feature, page, or guide usage could be improved. We try to gather info from these elements but the only options seem to be screenshots or accessing the limited info available in CSV download. Also, we have created several Guides that use custom javascript but there's no good documentation to help us get info on guide or step objects. We've figured most of it out on our own but it was difficult.

A Review From A Self-Made Superuser

Pros:

I love that I can accurately track NPS, feedback and ROI from my clients. I can interact with my customers without inundating their through Pendo Guides. I also love that I can create custom segments to target specific clients and isolate individual teams and users. Most of the time, I use this for reporting across individuals within an account or all of my accounts in one place. I can instantly get an accurate representation of how they are using the product and what "Good" usage looks like for a specific client. I also love the support and the interaction we get from our CSM, Mags!

Cons:

I wish it was a little easier to use although I appreciate there are a lot of complex stats which are difficult to simplify. Once I know how to use it and I've grasped it, it's super easy to use but I can spend a week or so going over parts of the platform and reading support articles before I'm able to use. For example, Data Explorer. I would really love it if the support articles had more videos taking you step by step!

Pendo Feedback tool: great way to gather user feedback; allows users to prioritize their wish list

Comments: We needed a place to gather and manage user enhancement requests, and we really wanted a way for users to vote on their favorites. This product - which was Receptive and was purchased by Pendo - met that need in the best possible way. We love it!!

Pros:

I love that we can choose to allow users to see how many other users have voted for their enhancement idea. But my favorite part is the "sliders" that users see when they prioritize their favorite enhancements - if they slide one up, they see the sliders on the others go down. Great way to show users that we can't do everything - we have to prioritize!

Cons:

My only disappointment is that you can't easily just export the entire list of enhancement requests with the # of votes.

A Must Have for Every Software Vendor

Pros:

Pendo really excel at their ability to flexibly tag pages and features to paint a accurate path throughout your application. It's ability to retrospectively do so is a killer feature. Also, the ability to quickly throw up highly customizable notifications/dialogs/information/tooltips has truly changed the way we engage with our users. But I could go on and on - segmentation, the resource center, NPS surveying functionality, Salesforce integration, an API, etc...

Cons:

The built in reporting is a great start and has a lot of features. But improvements could be made. We do find ourselves looking to get data out to do more with it.

Analytics data geared towards product teams

Comments: For a product manager audience, Pendo is an excellent tool. Great for tracking product engagement, new feature adoption, and understanding overall behavior of your customer base.

Pros:

Lots of potential for segmentation and reporting, allows for in-app messaging and guides to communicate information to customers, which has been great for launching new features or announcements. NPS automation has been really useful as well. Customer support has been great the couple times it's been needed. Overall very instrumental to our team in tracking engagement and customer health.

Cons:

I believe Salesforce integration is an additional cost which is not ideal. Individual user data showing in-app activity doesn't have the best visual presentation, a bit clunky to interpret. App layout could be a bit more intuitive.

A nice tool for analytics and in app notification

Comments: Data is necessary to make any decision. Pendo gives us an insight to our user base and allows us to iterate faster.

Pros:

Pendo is an easy app to dive into. There are a lot of great features. I like the in app notifications, NPS and retroactively look at stats on an item I just tagged. What I really like the most is that you can tell Pendo is dedicated to constantly improving the product. They are constantly improving that app and functionality.

Cons:

If you are going to use the notification or NPS feature, you need to have some basic HTML/CSS skills to get you notifications to look proper in your app. I have a few other small gripes, but for the most part it is an app that is constantly improving, so most of my minor problems just disappear over time.