Imagine this: You’re three months into your Appcues subscription. You’ve spent weeks building product tours, duplicating flows for mobile and desktop, wrestling with technical setup, and watching your bill climb as your MAUs grow. You hit “publish” on your carefully crafted onboarding sequence…and activation barely budges. Support tickets keep flooding in. Your VP asks, “What’s our ROI on this?”
You’re not alone. Many product teams find themselves stuck in this loop—investing heavily in digital adoption tools that promise transformation but deliver incremental results at premium prices. The problem isn’t your strategy. It’s the platform.
Let me show you exactly what’s going wrong with Appcues, what makes Product Fruits different, and—most importantly—whether switching will actually move your metrics.
Before we tear into the problems, let’s acknowledge where Appcues genuinely delivers:
Appcues pioneered the digital adoption category. They’ve been around since 2013, serving thousands of SaaS companies. That longevity means battle-tested infrastructure and a robust feature set that covers the fundamentals.
Appcues offers the core suite you’d expect from a DAP:
For teams focused purely on basic onboarding flows, Appcues checks the boxes.
You can segment users based on behavior, attributes, and events. This means you can theoretically personalize experiences—though as we’ll see, the execution has gaps.
Appcues provides flow completion rates, engagement metrics, and goal tracking. You can see how many users started a tour, how many completed it, and where they dropped off.
Appcues integrates with major tools like Segment, Salesforce, HubSpot, Slack, and Amplitude. If you’re already using these platforms, connecting data flows is straightforward.
Now let’s get honest. Here’s why so many product teams struggle to see ROI with Appcues:
The Problem: “Appcues require technical expertise for setup, which can limit their accessibility for non-technical teams.”
Despite marketing claims of “no-code,” getting Appcues properly installed and configured often requires engineering support. Installing the SDK, configuring event tracking, and debugging implementation issues eat up dev cycles—time your team doesn’t have.
Real Impact: Delayed time-to-value. What should take days stretches into weeks. Your onboarding initiative stalls before it starts.
The Problem: “As the number of monthly active users (MAUs) increases, so does the cost of Appcues, which can be expensive for businesses that are starting up.”
Appcues pricing climbs steeply as you grow. Hit 10K MAUs? Expect costs that make your CFO raise eyebrows. Scale to 50K? You might be looking at five figures monthly—just for onboarding tooling.
Real Impact: Your adoption success becomes a budget problem. Ironically, the more users you successfully activate, the more you pay. That’s not aligned incentive design.
The Problem: “Onboarding flows had to be duplicated for mobile and desktop user. Which means double the work.”
Every tour you build for desktop? You’re rebuilding it for mobile. Different screen sizes, different interaction patterns, double the maintenance burden. Product changes mean updating flows in two places—or risk delivering outdated guidance.
Real Impact: Massive time sink for product marketers and PMs. What should be a 2-hour update becomes a 2-day project. This inefficiency compounds across every feature release.
The Problem: “Appcues sometimes lacks easy personalization and customization in content and images.”
You can segment users, but actually tailoring the content, visuals, and flow logic to match individual user needs? Clunky at best, impossible at worst. Your “personalized” onboarding ends up feeling generic.
Real Impact: Lower completion rates. Users drop off when they hit irrelevant steps or generic guidance that doesn’t match their use case. You’re guiding everyone down the same path, regardless of role, goals, or context.
The Problem: “Appcues is primarily designed for product teams and customer-facing applications. As a result, it may not be suitable for internal employee onboarding.”
Need to onboard internal users, train your CS team, or guide employees through admin tools? Appcues isn’t built for that. You’re paying for a tool that only solves half your adoption problems.
Real Impact: You end up buying multiple platforms—one for customers, another for employees. Fragmented data, duplicated effort, bloated stack.
The Problem: “Users have reported delays in customer support responses and additional fees for personalized onboarding and dedicated support services.”
When your launch is 48 hours away and something breaks, slow support kills momentum. Worse, Appcues charges extra for dedicated support and personalized onboarding. You’re already paying premium pricing—and support costs more?
Real Impact: Missed launch deadlines, frustrated teams, and escalating costs just to get basic help.
The Critical Gap: Appcues doesn’t offer an AI copilot or intelligent assistant to deflect support tickets before they happen.
Users hit a snag, can’t find answers in your tours, and immediately ping support. You’re building onboarding experiences manually—when AI could be generating personalized guidance, answering questions in real-time, and continuously learning from user behavior.
Real Impact: Support ticket volume stays high. Time-to-value suffers. Your CS team drowns in “how do I…?” questions that an AI assistant would instantly resolve.
Here’s what makes Product Fruits fundamentally different—and why teams see measurable adoption lifts within weeks:
The Game-Changer: Product Fruits is built around Elvin AI, an intelligent assistant that doesn’t just execute tours—it creates them, personalizes them, and updates them automatically.
Real Results:
Product Fruits installs via a simple tag manager snippet. No SDK installation. No engineering dependencies. Your PM or product marketer can have tours live in hours, not weeks.
Real Impact: Immediate time-to-value. You start seeing adoption lift in Week 1, not Month 3.
Product Fruits pricing scales predictably and costs a fraction of Appcues:
| MAUs | Product Fruits (Yearly) | Appcues (Estimated) |
|---|---|---|
| 1,500 | $129-$199/month | $300-$500+/month |
| 5,000 | $249-$349/month | $600-$900+/month |
| 10,000 | $339-$499/month | $1,200-$2,000+/month |
| 20,000 | $449-$599/month | $2,500-$4,000+/month |
Yearly billing saves 25%, and there’s no pricing opacity—everything is public.
Real Impact: You get enterprise features at startup-friendly pricing. As you scale, costs stay manageable.
Unlike Appcues, Product Fruits automatically adapts tours to screen sizes. Build once, deploy everywhere. Updates happen in one place.
Real Impact: Cut flow maintenance time in half. Ship faster. Keep content consistent across devices.
Elvin doesn’t just segment users—it generates personalized variations of tours based on individual context, behavior, and goals. No manual duplication. No generic “one-size-fits-all” paths.
Real Impact: Higher completion rates. Users get guidance that feels tailored to their workflow, not a template.
Product Fruits handles both external product onboarding and internal employee training. One platform, unified data, consistent experience.
Real Impact: Simplify your stack. Train employees 30 hours faster per month (Direct Insurance case study).
Product Fruits provides priority support on Pro plans (their most popular tier) with no extra fees. You get real humans who respond fast—because they know your success drives their growth.
Real Impact: Launches stay on schedule. Problems get solved in hours, not days.
Unlike Appcues, Product Fruits includes a full Knowledge Base that powers Elvin Copilot. Users ask questions, Elvin retrieves answers from your docs, and resolves queries in seconds—without opening a ticket.
Real Impact: Support deflection that actually works. 66% of questions resolved automatically.
No platform is perfect. Here’s where Product Fruits makes deliberate trade-offs:
Product Fruits launched more recently than Appcues (founded 2013). If “longest track record” is your primary criterion, Appcues wins on tenure.
Reality Check: Product Fruits serves 1,300+ organizations including KPMG, Rakuten, and DocPlanner. The platform is mature, enterprise-ready, and proven—it just hasn’t been around for a decade.
On the Starter plan, you get 20 Elvin AI resolutions per month (Pro gives 40, Enterprise is unlimited). Additional resolutions cost $0.69 each.
Reality Check: This isn’t a limitation—it’s cost control. You want caps when testing AI ROI. Most teams start with Starter, validate value, then upgrade. And $0.69 per resolved ticket is far cheaper than a $50 support interaction.
Appcues has been building integrations for 12 years. Product Fruits’ integration library is robust but smaller.
Reality Check: Product Fruits covers the essentials—Segment, Zapier, webhooks, API access. For 90% of teams, you’ll have what you need. Custom integrations are available on Enterprise plans.
Let’s be objective. Appcues makes sense if:
If those criteria fit, Appcues can deliver baseline results.
Product Fruits is the right choice if:
If these align with your goals, Product Fruits will outperform Appcues on both speed and ROI.
The Challenge: Appcues pricing becomes prohibitive. You’re paying $2K-$5K/month just for onboarding tooling.
Product Fruits Advantage: Stay under $600/month even at 20K MAUs. Redirect savings to experimentation, content, or headcount.
Real Example: A B2B SaaS company switched from Appcues to Product Fruits at 12K MAUs, cut costs by 60%, and saw 35% adoption increase in Month 1 using Elvin-generated tours.
The Challenge: You’ve built beautiful onboarding flows, but users still spam support with “how do I…?” questions. Appcues can’t deflect tickets—it only guides users through pre-built flows.
Product Fruits Advantage: Elvin Copilot resolves 66% of questions automatically by pulling answers from your knowledge base. Users get instant help without opening tickets.
Real Results:
The Challenge: Every Appcues change requires dev support. Installing the SDK, debugging tracking, configuring events—it all burns engineering cycles.
Product Fruits Advantage: True no-code setup via tag manager. PMs and PMMs launch tours in hours, iterate daily, and never block on engineering.
Real Impact: Ship 3x faster. Your team controls the adoption roadmap, not the eng backlog.
The Challenge: Appcues is built for customer-facing products. Need to onboard employees, train your CS team, or guide admins? You’re buying a second platform.
Product Fruits Advantage: One platform handles both. Onboard customers and train employees with unified analytics, consistent UX, and shared knowledge base.
Real Result: Direct Insurance saved 30 hours/month training employees using Product Fruits.
The Challenge: Appcues requires separate flows for desktop and mobile. Every product update means updating tours in two places. This gets unmanageable fast.
Product Fruits Advantage: Build once, deploy everywhere. Tours automatically adapt to screen sizes. Updates happen in one place.
Real Impact: Cut maintenance time in half. Ship updates in minutes, not hours.
The Challenge: Appcues is manual-first. You build every tour, write every step, maintain every flow. AI isn’t part of the core architecture.
Product Fruits Advantage: Elvin generates, personalizes, updates, and optimizes tours automatically. It learns your product once, then continuously improves guidance based on user behavior.
Real Result: 35% adoption jump in Month 1 after switching to Elvin AI.
| Feature | Appcues | Product Fruits |
|---|---|---|
| AI-Powered Tour Generation | ❌ Manual only | ✅ Elvin generates tours automatically |
| AI Copilot for Support Deflection | ❌ Not available | ✅ Resolves 66% of questions automatically |
| No-Code Setup | ⚠️ Requires dev support | ✅ Tag manager install—live in hours |
| Single Flow for Mobile + Desktop | ❌ Must duplicate | ✅ Auto-adapts to screen size |
| Pricing Transparency | ❌ Hidden pricing | ✅ Public pricing—no sales calls |
| Cost at 10K MAUs | ~$1,500-$2,000/month | $339-$499/month |
| Employee Onboarding | ❌ Not designed for it | ✅ Fully supported |
| Knowledge Base Included | ❌ Separate tool needed | ✅ Built-in, AI-powered |
| Priority Support Included | ❌ Extra cost | ✅ Included in Pro plan |
| Personalization | ⚠️ Segmentation only | ✅ AI-driven adaptive flows |
| Analytics Dashboard | ✅ Comprehensive | ✅ Comprehensive + AI insights |
| Onboarding Checklists | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Product Tours | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes (AI-generated) |
| Tooltips & Hints | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Announcement Center | ✅ Yes | ✅ Yes |
| Integrations | ✅ Extensive (12 years) | ✅ Core integrations + API |
| Time to First Tour Live | 2-4 weeks (needs dev) | 1-2 days (no-code) |
| Support Response Time | ⚠️ Reported delays | ✅ Priority support, fast response |
| Free Trial | ✅ Available | ✅ 14 days, no credit card |
On AI-Powered Tours:
“We saw a 35 percent jump in adoption in the first month after switching to Elvin. The AI-generated tours adapt to each user’s role and behavior. We couldn’t achieve that level of personalization manually.” (Product Tours – Product Fruits)
On Support Deflection:
“Elvin Copilot now handles 50-60% of customer queries without human intervention. We’re delivering 24/7 support at a fraction of the cost.” – Adeus (Case Studies – Product Fruits)
On Ticket Reduction:
“We reduced support tickets by 30% using Product Fruits’ integrated knowledge base and AI Copilot. Our CS team can finally focus on high-value conversations.” – Chemsoft (Case Studies – Product Fruits)
On Faster Onboarding:
“Product Fruits accelerated our onboarding by 29%. New users hit their ‘aha moment’ in days, not weeks.” – Keboola (Case Studies – Product Fruits)
On Churn Reduction:
“We saw a 70% churn reduction within 90 days of deploying Product Fruits. Users who complete onboarding now stick around.” – FitnessPlayer (Case Studies – Product Fruits)
If you’re reading this, you already know Appcues isn’t delivering the results you need. Here’s the decision framework:
Switching platforms feels daunting. Here’s how to de-risk the migration:
Risk Mitigation: You’re not burning bridges. Run both platforms in parallel for 2-4 weeks, measure impact, then decide based on data—not vendor promises.
Yes—significantly. At 10K MAUs, Product Fruits costs $339-$499/month (yearly billing). Appcues typically charges $1,500-$2,000+/month at that scale. You’ll save 50-70% while gaining AI-powered features Appcues doesn’t offer.
Week 1-2: Setup and initial tours live (Product Fruits is no-code—install via tag manager in hours).
Month 1-2: Measure early lift—teams report 35% adoption jump in Month 1, 29% faster onboarding, and 30% ticket reduction within 60 days.
Month 3+: Compounding gains as Elvin learns user behavior and optimizes guidance continuously.
No. Unlike Appcues (which often requires dev support for SDK installation and event tracking), Product Fruits installs via a simple tag manager snippet. PMs, PMMs, and CS teams can launch tours without blocking on engineering.
You won’t manually rebuild them. Elvin AI generates new tours based on your product structure. Annotate your app once, and Elvin creates personalized onboarding flows automatically. Most teams find AI-generated tours outperform their manually-built Appcues flows.
Absolutely. Many teams de-risk the switch by running Product Fruits alongside Appcues for 2-4 weeks, measuring performance, then migrating 100% once they see lift.
Product Fruits offers API access and webhooks on all plans. Custom integrations are available on Enterprise plans. The core integrations (Segment, Zapier, analytics platforms) are already built.
Elvin is purpose-built for product adoption. It’s not a general support chatbot—it’s a RAG-powered assistant trained on your product docs. It answers “how do I…?” questions instantly, deflecting tickets before they happen. Teams report 66% auto-resolution rates—far higher than generic chatbots.
Elvin automatically switches languages based on user preferences. No manual translation duplication. This alone saves weeks of localization work compared to Appcues.
Yes. Product Fruits serves 1,300+ organizations including KPMG, Rakuten, and DocPlanner. Enterprise plans include unlimited AI resolutions, custom SLAs, dedicated support, and SSO/advanced security controls.
Product Fruits offers monthly and yearly billing (yearly saves 25%). No long-term contracts on Starter and Pro plans. Enterprise plans are custom.
Here’s the reality: Appcues was groundbreaking in 2013. But it’s 2025. AI has fundamentally changed what’s possible in product adoption.
You shouldn’t be manually building tours, duplicating flows for mobile, and watching costs explode as you scale. You shouldn’t be stuck with a platform that requires engineering support for basic changes and charges extra for decent support.
Product Fruits gives you:
The switch isn’t a gamble—it’s a data-driven upgrade.
Try Product Fruits free for 14 days. Run it alongside Appcues. Measure the lift. Then decide based on your metrics, not marketing claims.
If Product Fruits doesn’t outperform Appcues on activation, TTFV, and support deflection, you’ve lost nothing. But if it delivers 29% faster onboarding, 35% adoption lift, and 30% fewer tickets—like it has for 1,300+ companies—you’ll wonder why you didn’t switch sooner.
Check out alternatives to Appcues in more detail in this blog post. ****
👉 Start your free trial of Product Fruits (no credit card required)
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Last Updated: November 2025
