All four tools build product tours, onboarding checklists and tooltips inside your SaaS product. The real difference is not the tour builder — it is the billing meter. Each vendor defines a billable user differently, gates different features behind higher plans, and handles overages differently. This guide compares those mechanics first, and the features second.
Starter, up to 2,000 MAUs. Growth starts at $849/mo. No free plan.
Grow, per Appcues' current official pricing page. Enterprise is custom-priced.
Starter, billed annually, for 2,000 MAUs. Monthly billing is $249/mo. Growth is $349/mo billed annually.
Startup, for 2,000 MTUs (monthly tracked users — not MAUs). Pro starts at $750/mo.
| Userpilot | Appcues | UserGuiding | Chameleon | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Best for | Product teams that want guidance and analytics together | Teams that want the full platform without feature gates, at annual-contract scale | Smaller SaaS teams that need published, self-serve pricing | Web SaaS teams that care most about how native an experience looks |
| Billing meter | MAU — an identified user who takes a tracked action (page view, custom event or autocaptured interaction) in a calendar month | MAU — per Appcues, only users who sign in during a given month count | MAU — a unique signed-in user ID in the previous 30 days | MTU, not MAU — a unique user profile sent to Chameleon from any source in the last 30 days, whether or not they ever saw a tour |
| Free option | No free plan; trial available | No free plan on current pricing; sales-led evaluation | Support Essentials is free forever, but it is knowledge base / AI assistant / resource centre only — no guides | No free plan for tours; HelpBar is free; 14-day trial |
| Published starting price | Starter $299/mo for up to 2,000 MAUs | Grow from $9,000/year (up to 50,000 MAUs) | Starter $174/mo billed annually for 2,000 MAUs ($249/mo monthly) | Startup $279/mo for 2,000 MTUs |
| Next tier up | Growth from $849/mo; Enterprise custom | Enterprise custom (100 published experiences, 36 months of history) | Growth $349/mo billed annually for 2,000 MAUs; Enterprise custom | Pro from $750/mo; Growth from $1,250/mo billed annually (see pricing note); Enterprise custom |
| What the tier jump buys | Advanced analytics (funnels, paths, retention), resource centre, A/B testing, session replay, localisation | More MAUs, more published experiences (25 → 100) and longer reporting history — features are not gated | A/B testing, goal tracking, custom CSS, localisation and premium integrations | More live experiences (10 → 20 → unlimited), A/B testing and governance tools on higher plans |
| Published-experience caps | Not the headline limit; plan limits centre on seats, segments and data retention | Yes — 25 on Grow, 100 on Enterprise (smaller Start / Spark variants cap at 10) | Guide and content limits apply on lower plans; exact counts vary by source — confirm on the pricing page | Yes — 10 live on Startup, up to 20 on Pro, unlimited on Growth |
| If you go over your user limit | Not clearly stated on the pricing page — ask before signing | Per Appcues, experiences keep running and the plan is discussed at the next billing cycle | Third-party summaries say content stops showing until the quota is raised rather than overage fees applying — confirm in contract | Billed on the maximum MTU count in the billing period, per Chameleon's help centre |
| Platforms | Web and native mobile | Web and mobile (mobile terms may differ — confirm) | Web apps | Web apps; no native iOS / Android SDKs |
| Trade-off to know | Starter is capped at 2,000 MAUs and the analytics depth most teams want sits on Growth at $849/mo+ | Current official pricing starts at $9,000/year — many third-party articles still quote an old $249/mo plan that the current official page does not show | Cheapest entry here, but A/B testing and advanced analytics require Growth, and the free tier does not include guides | The MTU meter can count users who never saw any guidance, and extras such as SSO have been reported as paid add-ons |
Prices are USD, before tax, as published in November 2026. Appcues: the $9,000/year Grow figure is from Appcues' own current pricing page; a separate small-team Spark variant ($3,600/year for up to 1,000 MAUs, for teams of 25 or fewer, plus an implementation fee) is described on Appcues' own comparison pages. Chameleon Growth: most checks in August–September 2026 read $1,250/mo billed annually at 5,000 MTUs, while a detailed October 2026 read of the same page put Growth at $1,750/mo — treat the exact Growth price as slider- and quote-dependent and confirm it live. Plans change — always confirm the current price, the billing period and what counts as a billable user on the vendor's site before you buy.
Arithmetic on the published starting prices above — nothing more. At the same headline size of 2,000 billable users, the annual totals are: UserGuiding Starter $174 × 12 = $2,088/year (about $0.087 per MAU per month), Chameleon Startup $279 × 12 = $3,348/year (about $0.14 per MTU — and an MTU is a broader count than an MAU), and Userpilot Starter $299 × 12 = $3,588/year (about $0.15 per MAU). Appcues Grow is published as $9,000/year and up, scaling with MAUs up to 50,000, so a per-MAU figure at 2,000 users would be misleading and we do not calculate one.
The second jump matters more than the first. If you need the features gated behind the next tier at the same user count, the published floors become roughly: UserGuiding Growth $4,188/year, Userpilot Growth $10,188/year, and Chameleon Growth $15,000–$21,000/year depending on which recent read of its pricing page applies. In other words, for small SaaS products the feature gate usually moves the bill before MAU growth does. At around 10,000 MAUs, only some vendors publish enough slider detail to total the cost publicly — for the rest, the honest answer is that you need a quote, and getting that quote in writing, with the MAU definition attached, is part of the comparison.
Userpilot combines a no-code experience builder (flows, checklists, resource centre, surveys including NPS) with its own product analytics: usage trends on Starter, and on Growth (from $849/mo) funnels, paths, retention analysis, event autocapture, A/B testing, localisation and session replay. Starter ($299/mo, up to 2,000 MAUs, 3 seats) covers core in-app engagement and segmentation. Enterprise is custom-priced from around 10,000 MAUs and adds controls such as SAML SSO and warehouse sync. Its MAU definition is activity-based — an identified user who takes a tracked action in your product in the month — so how you instrument events shapes the count.
Appcues is the tool most "alternative" searches start from, and its current model is easy to misread because so many articles describe its old packaging. On Appcues' current official pricing page, Grow starts at $9,000/year, scales with MAUs up to 50,000, allows 25 published experiences and keeps 24 months of reporting history; Enterprise is custom, with 100 experiences and 36 months of history. The differentiator is packaging: every plan includes every experience type, feature and integration, with unlimited seats — plans scale by volume and history, not by unlocking features. Appcues states that only users who sign in during a month count toward MAU, and that experiences keep running if you exceed your volume, with the plan revisited at the next billing cycle.
UserGuiding is the most straightforwardly priced tool here. Starter ($174/mo billed annually, $249/mo monthly) covers product tours, checklists, tooltips, hotspots, surveys and segmentation for 2,000 MAUs with 5 seats. Growth ($349/mo billed annually, $499/mo monthly) adds A/B testing, goal tracking, custom CSS, localisation, premium integrations and session replay, with 15 seats. Enterprise is custom. The free Support Essentials tier is genuinely free but easy to misread: it covers a knowledge base, product updates page, AI assistant and resource centre — the onboarding guides themselves are a paid feature. Its MAU is a unique signed-in user ID in the previous 30 days, so dormant accounts do not inflate the count.
Chameleon focuses on how in-app experiences look and behave inside web products: tours, tooltips, launchers, banners, microsurveys and an in-app HelpBar (free as a standalone). Startup ($279/mo) covers 2,000 MTUs and 10 live experiences. Pro (from $750/mo) raises that to 5,000 MTUs and up to 20 experiences, adding A/B testing. Growth (from $1,250/mo billed annually in most recent checks — see the pricing note above) unlocks unlimited live experiences. The critical difference is the meter: an MTU is any unique user profile sent to Chameleon from any source — snippet, Segment, API or manual update — in the last 30 days, including people who never saw an experience, and billing is based on the maximum count in the period.
Your analytics "monthly active users" is not any vendor's billing number. Userpilot counts tracked actions, Appcues counts sign-ins, UserGuiding counts signed-in IDs in 30 days, and Chameleon counts every identified profile sent to it from any source. Recalculate your number under each definition before comparing any prices — the same product can legitimately produce four different billable counts.
A/B testing, a resource centre, advanced analytics, localisation or unlimited experiences each sit on different tiers across these tools. Price the plan that contains your must-haves, not the entry plan — at small scale, the feature gate usually costs more than MAU growth does.
"No-code" describes building guides, not installing them. Use the trial to check: who installs the snippet and identify calls, what happens to your MTU/MAU count the moment Segment or your API starts syncing users, which custom events you must define, and how staging environments and multiple products are counted. This is engineering time you pay for whether or not it appears on the invoice.
The four vendors handle excess users differently — experiences keep running, content may pause, or billing follows your peak count. Whichever applies, get the rule, the next tier's price and any add-on fees (such as SSO) in the quote itself, then run one real onboarding flow to your largest segment and watch the billable-user counter for a full week before you sign an annual contract.
It means the subscription scales with a monthly count of users, but the count is defined by each vendor. Depending on the tool it can mean users who signed in, users who took a tracked action, or — in Chameleon's case, where the unit is called an MTU — every unique profile identified to the tool from any source. Two tools quoting the same "price per 2,000 MAUs" can therefore be pricing different populations. Always read the definition next to the price.
That figure comes from Appcues' older packaging (an Essentials plan at $249/mo and Growth at $879/mo for 2,500 MAUs), which many third-party articles still repeat. Appcues' current official pricing page, checked in November 2026, instead shows Grow from $9,000/year with all features included and plans separated by MAU scale, experience caps and reporting history. If you are budgeting today, use the official page — and if a quote differs, ask the vendor to confirm which packaging it follows.
On published starting prices, UserGuiding Starter is the lowest at $174/mo billed annually ($2,088/year), followed by Chameleon Startup at $279/mo and Userpilot Starter at $299/mo, with Appcues Grow published from $9,000/year. That ranking only holds if the entry plan contains what you need: A/B testing or a resource centre pushes UserGuiding to $349/mo and Userpilot to $849/mo+, and Chameleon's MTU count may be higher than your MAU count for the same product.
Building tours is no-code in all four, but installation is not zero-code: a JavaScript snippet or SDK, user identification calls, and usually some event instrumentation need engineering time, and connecting tools like Segment can change your billable-user count. Budget implementation as part of the total cost and test it during the trial, rather than assuming the builder experience is the whole job.
No vendor here can guarantee that, and this guide makes no such claim. These tools let you build guidance, target it and measure what users do next; whether that improves activation for your product depends on your product, your users and the flows you build. Treat any tool as an experiment with its own analytics attached, not as a promised outcome.
Because this guide is compiled from publicly available vendor information, not hands-on testing. Where a judgment appears — for example, that a feature gate matters more than MAU growth at small scale — it is arithmetic on the published prices and definitions shown next to it, so you can check the reasoning yourself.