Pendo vs. Whatfix: Why customers choose Pendo’s data-driven digital adoption platform

No matter what industry a company is in, no matter which products it builds or services it provides, you can be sure of one thing: Its employees depend on software to realize goals. From real estate to retail, fintech to pharma, software is critical to planning, executing, and collaborating on key business outcomes. 

Digital adoption platforms (DAPs) exist to help people become more proficient in the software they use. For employees, DAPs make it easier to execute key tasks and provide contextual information as they navigate workflows. These platforms also help scale onboarding for new hires and provide ongoing education to drive the adoption of new features and functionality.

A strong DAP is key to driving digital transformation. Multiple digital adoption platforms available in the market. Whatfix, for example, positions itself as a leading DAP and “Pendo alternative.” But how do you know which is the right solution to pick? Here’s why customers consistently choose Pendo’s data-driven digital adoption platform. 

The most powerful insights come from the most powerful analytics

If you want to improve employee productivity, compliance, and satisfaction, you need to have a clear understanding of how work currently happens. Whatfix’s surface-level product analytics only stores data for up to 90 days and relies on cookies for user identification, making it harder to spot longer-term behavioral patterns or issues and the employees they’re affecting. 

Pendo’s in-depth product analytics, in contrast, retain data for as long as you’re a customer—up to a maximum of seven years. What’s more, features like workflows and workflow journeys let you dig into the data to answer key contextual questions, including: 

• How long does it take employees to complete a workflow on average?
• What’s the average time that individual steps take? 
• Do employees complete the process in the most efficient way? If not, what other steps are they taking? 
• What are employees doing before and after they engage in the workflow? 
• Is there a common point where employees drop off the workflow to seek assistance? If so, where? 

Pendo’s rich behavioral analytics are purpose-built to provide actionable insights that help teams elevate employee performance and satisfaction. 

A siloed vs. portfolio-level view into product usage and behavior

When choosing a digital adoption solution, it’s also important to consider the greater context of a company’s app portfolio. Key workflows rarely take place only within one app. Instead, they happen across apps, and across time. The right digital adoption solution should provide analytics that reflect that reality. 

Whatfix’s product analytics are siloed by application, making it difficult to get a holistic view into how software is being used. Pendo, in contrast, provides robust portfolio-level analytics like portfolio overview and license utilization. 

Portfolio overview gives you full visibility into the apps in your company’s portfolio, allowing IT and ops teams to understand where users spend their time across these apps and how their usage changes over time. They may discover that employees use a particular app much more or much less than expected, drop off after initial high uptake, or are slow to start using it. Depending on what they see, they may decide to expand or modify training around a particular app or apps, or decide that a given app is not worth paying for given the low usage. 

License utilization gives teams a view into ROI on their portfolio, specifically into how many of the licenses they’re paying for are actually being used. They can also segment the data by role or function to better understand specific user groups’ behavior. Depending on what they see, IT can either expand or shrink the number of licenses, ensuring that what they’re spending aligns with what the business needs. 

When it comes to choosing the right DAP, companies should look for what provides the most powerful, actionable insights. And to understand and improve user behavior and app usage, Pendo’s data-driven digital adoption solution is unmatched.

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In Part 2 of this blog series, we’ll look at how Whatfix compares to Pendo when it comes to driving effective change management. 

Want to see Pendo’s data-driven digital adoption platform in action? Take a self-guided product tour here.