Best PLG Software (Product-Led Growth)

The best PLG tools make sure users experience value fast and can easily expand their use over time:

• Digital Adoption Platforms: Tools like Appcues and Pendo help with onboarding, allowing users to see the product’s value from the start. With Appcues, you can create in-app guides and personalized experiences without code—no need to wait for a dev sprint.
• Marketing Chatbots: Intercom and Qualified are great for capturing leads while users explore your product. Real-time chat helps answer questions and move people towards conversion.
• Subscription Analytics: Baremetrics and ChartMogul provide insights into metrics like MRR, ARPU, and churn—helping you understand how users interact with your product and where to focus next. It’s critical for optimizing growth once users are onboarded.
• Interactive Product Demos: Walnut and Navattic let users get hands-on with the product earlier in the buying journey, offering interactive demos without a developer needed. It’s all about getting prospects hooked by showcasing the product experience.

The key is removing friction—getting users in the door, guiding them, and analyzing how they use the product so you can improve and expand.

The big benefit? PLG scales itself.

Instead of pushing or pulling customers to speak to your team about your product, you let prospects “pull” themselves in toward the product and try it.

Appcues helps onboard users smoothly, so they’re seeing value right away. Pendo gives data-driven insights into how users are interacting, helping you remove roadblocks and boost adoption. Plus, tools like Baremetrics give real-time analytics so you know exactly what’s working and where there’s room for improvement.

The beauty of PLG is that users guide themselves to value, making it easier to convert and retain.

SaaS companies of all sizes lean on PLG tools, especially those with freemium or trial offerings.

Early-stage startups use Glide and Softr to quickly build no-code apps that users can explore, getting the product in front of people fast. Growth teams at larger organizations use Pendo to analyze user engagement and Intercom to improve conversions from in-app chat.

Product managers and customer success teams are also heavy users, focused on improving the onboarding flow and ensuring users continue to see value.

Setting up PLG tools takes collaboration. Implementing Appcues or Pendo requires planning out the onboarding journey—working closely with product and engineering to understand key touchpoints. Tools like ChartMogul also need CRM integration to track subscription metrics accurately. It’s kind of like laying train tracks—each piece needs to connect smoothly to ensure the user journey is seamless. Once the setup is done, you can focus on optimizing and improving, but getting there involves aligning multiple teams.

Different tools solve different PLG needs:

• Onboarding & Adoption: Appcues vs. Pendo—Appcues is great for getting started quickly without code, while Pendo is known for deeper product analytics and insights alongside onboarding.
• Chatbots for Engagement: Intercom vs. Qualified—Intercom offers a more general engagement platform, whereas Qualified is tightly focused on pipeline generation for Salesforce users, making it perfect for PLG teams that want to qualify leads in real-time.
• Interactive Demos: Navattic vs. TestBox—Navattic is all about no-code interactive demos that prospects can explore on their own, while TestBox goes a step further by providing a sandbox environment that feels like a live trial, helping prospects understand the product deeply before purchasing.

Choosing the right tool depends on where you need the most help—whether it’s onboarding, analyzing usage, or giving prospects that hands-on feel earlier in the journey.

Pricing can vary significantly depending on what stage you’re at:

• Onboarding Tools like Appcues or Pendo typically start around $500/month, with pricing scaling based on active users and advanced features.
• Interactive Product Demo Tools like Navattic can range from a few hundred dollars to several thousand per month, depending on how many demos you need and how in-depth you want those demos to be.
• Subscription Analytics like Baremetrics often start in the low hundreds per month, scaling with features and the number of subscribers tracked.

Most PLG software follows a similar pattern—cost grows with user adoption and engagement, but if implemented well, so does the ROI.