I have a love/hate relationship with Pendo. It's neither an analytics tool nor a walkthrough tool, it's a hybrid. That's a cool idea in theory and I really like it, but it makes everything significantly more expensive out of the gate. Real world implications are that you now have to get people from multiple departments on board and willing to sign off and then coordinate how to work together to ensure data integrity.
A good analytics tool for SaaS should make it easy to address AARRR/pirate metrics, and Pendo is off to a good start there. It understands the importance of both users AND accounts, makes it easy to see MAU, and can quickly provide a feature usage audit (what pages are getting viewed, what objects are being clicked). You can also easily connect Salesforce and NPS data to your product usage which is a dream come true.
Tracking retention is another story. For example, we have a goal to improve our 30d retention rate. The data is there, but no report. To build it yourself externally, you need be willing to roll up your sleeves and delve into the API. Oh, and API access will cost extra. ("It's not a lot more" translates to more than all of Intercom Pro for the same period.)
Want to track multiple products? "Oh, that'll cost extra." (To be fair, after lots of back and forth and two calls with multiple stakeholders from both sides they clarified that pricing was really based on MAUs and they could let us track multiple products. But so difficult to figure out something that is so straightforward in every other product we have used.)
Figuring out if we could track non-click events like in other tools was also surprisingly difficult. It's not described in the getting started/installation documentation, not referenced in the UI, and support doesn't seem to know about it. But it's there. Oh, and you'll need to contact your account manager to have it enabled.
So overall compared to tools like Intercom and Mixpanel where plan usage is clear, manual event tracking is straightforward, multiple products are easy to track, and API access/integrations are free, there are still a lot of rough spots despite what I love. That would be understandable in an inexpensive tool, but is harder to overlook in something as expensive as Pendo.
Pros:Low learning curve, Salesforce sync, integrated NPS, powerful segmentation.
Cons:Pricing: expensive and not transparent. No retention reports.
Pendo was built by Product people for product people, the ability to have one platform that collects quantitative and qualitative data insights then aggregates all the data collected into a seamless complete user journey is priceless.
4 Things Pendo Offers That I Love
1) Simplicity & Speed to capture the data insights your product team needs to make better decisions during planning, pre/post release.
2) Analysis of Data - The what? When? Why? & How? users/clients are using your application.
3) Data Privacy & Security - they take it seriously and are on top of making sure your data stays secure and in your control.
4) Did I mention? It's a Complete User Behavior Analytics Platform - just 1 single JS Code Snippet added to your application collects all events. Non-tech person is able to easily Tag pages or features without any additional development support. You are able to easily Segment your data insights and identify top/low engaging clients/users and take action with something they call Guides.
Quantitative + Qualitative = User Behavior Analytics
Plus 'Guides' allowing you to take action with walk-thru, announcements, upsells, etc.
Pros:
Pendo is a Complete User Behavior Analytics solution built for Product Teams
Cons:With great power comes greater responsibility. Knowing how to interpert the data insights correctly is vital. Pendo is not built for inbound
The Matt & Adam Show [Ep. 9] Aaron White - The Unicorn Wrangler