Userpilot vs Pendo vs Appcues pricing: pendo pricing and pendo cost per MAU, appcues pricing without a published number, and userpilot pricing at $299 a month

Pendo does not publish a price for any paid plan. Its pricing page shows Base, Core and Ultimate, each marked custom pricing with a request a demo button, and each with a custom MAU volume. The comparison table below the cards repeats request pricing for all three.

What Pendo does publish is the shape of the bill. Its FAQ states that pricing combines two things: the number of monthly active users you track, and the functionality bundle you choose. It also states that as you add more MAU the total rises but the cost per MAU falls, so the rate card is a volume curve rather than a flat rate.

There is a free plan, and it is more generous than its position on the page suggests. Pendo Free covers up to 500 monthly active users, supports unlimited web and mobile app keys, and includes product analytics, in-app guides, Pendo-branded roadmaps and Pendo-branded NPS surveys. Read the comparison table closely and an oddity appears: sentiment, which covers NPS and survey collection, is bundled on Free and marked as a paid add-on on Base, the first paid tier. Session replay and journey orchestration are also add-ons on Base rather than included. In practice a company upgrading from Free to Base can find it is paying for something it had for nothing, unless it buys the add-on as well.

Separately, Pendo runs a free open beta called Novus, aimed at teams shipping with AI coding agents. It connects to a GitHub repo, auto-instruments the product in about 30 minutes, and carries no MAU limit during the beta.

Appcues publishes no price on its pricing page. The page shows three plans, Start, Grow and Enterprise, each described by allowances rather than dollars: Start is for up to 3,000 MAU with 10 published experiences and 12 months of reporting history, Grow starts at 3,000 MAU with 25 published experiences and 24 months of history, and Enterprise covers custom MAU volumes with 100 published experiences and 36 months of history.

There is one real published US price, and it is not on that page. Under the plan cards a short line asks whether your team is under 25 people and links to a separate Spark plan page. That page prices it: $3,600 a year for up to 1,000 monthly active users, plus a $250 one-time implementation fee. It includes the full platform, every experience type and every integration, 10 published experiences, 12 months of reporting history, guided onboarding and free email to 1,000 sends.

Worth knowing before you quote that figure back to a sales rep: the Spark page contradicts itself. It sells the plan "for up to 1,000 MAUs" in the price block, then answers the question "What if we exceed 3,000 MAUs?" in its own FAQ, which is the Start plan allowance rather than the Spark one. Get your actual ceiling written into the order form.

On overage the answer is unusually soft. Appcues says it keeps your experiences running and contacts you about moving to Grow at your next billing cycle, with no surprise overage charges.

Put the published entry prices on one unit and the ranking flips from what the headline numbers suggest.

Userpilot Starter is $299 a month, which is $3,588 a year, for 2,000 MAU. That is $1.79 per monthly active user per year, or about 15 cents a month.

Appcues Spark is $3,600 a year for 1,000 MAU. That is $3.60 per monthly active user per year, or 30 cents a month. Add the one-time $250 implementation fee and year one is $3,850, or $3.85 per MAU.

So the two published entry plans are $12 a year apart in total price, and Userpilot includes twice the users. On a per-user basis Appcues Spark costs almost exactly double. That comparison does not appear anywhere else, because the Appcues number sits on a page the ranking guides do not cite and the Userpilot number changed recently enough that most of them still quote the old one.

Pendo cannot be placed on this scale, because it publishes nothing. Its free tier is $0 for 500 MAU, which beats both on price and loses on everything else, including support, which the comparison table shows only on the three paid bundles.

This is the part that breaks naive comparisons, and every one of these vendors defines the meter differently in its own words.

Appcues says an MAU is any user who signs into your product in a given month, and that dormant users sitting in your database do not count.

Pendo says monthly active users are unique visitors who were active in your app over the last 30 calendar days, and that a visitor counts as active if they engage with your app at least once in the period.

Userpilot says its pricing is based on monthly active users and leaves the definition at that on the pricing page.

A sign-in is not the same event as an engagement. If a meaningful share of your usage happens before a login, on a logged-out marketing surface, or inside a session that persists through SSO without a fresh sign-in, the Pendo number and the Appcues number for the same product will not match. Run your own count both ways, on sign-in events and on any-interaction events, before you take three quotes to a finance team. The gap between those two counts is the size of the mistake you are about to make.

There is a second axis to check. Appcues states plainly that its price is based on monthly active users, number of installations and published experiences, so it is a three meter product. Pendo states the direct opposite on the applications question: the number of applications you track does not affect your price, you can run Pendo across multiple applications at no extra cost per application, and sessions do not affect price either. If you run a portfolio of products, that is not a detail, it is the whole comparison.

Published entry prices describe the smallest possible customer. Procurement data describes the typical one, and the gap is large.

Vendr, which negotiates software contracts on behalf of buyers and publishes aggregate figures per vendor, reports a median annual Userpilot contract of $18,000, with observed deals ranging from $7,475 to $62,267. For Appcues it reports a median of $15,000 across 135 purchases, a range of $6,213 to $44,200, and an average negotiated saving of 21.07%. For Pendo it reports a median of $48,597 across 276 purchases, a range of $18,475 to $151,286, and an average negotiated saving of 12.1%.

These are third-party figures, not vendor figures, and they describe companies large enough to run a procurement process. Read them that way. But three things fall out that a buyer can use.

The median Userpilot contract is five times its published entry price, and the median Appcues contract is more than four times its published one. Neither entry plan describes a normal customer, because 1,000 and 2,000 MAU are small for a funded product.

Pendo's median is about three times the Appcues median and about 2.7 times the Userpilot median. The absence of a published price is not neutral here; the vendor that hides its numbers is also the expensive one.

And the discount pattern runs the opposite way to what you would expect. Appcues, the cheapest of the three by median, gives up the most in negotiation at 21.07%. Pendo, the most expensive, gives up the least at 12.1%. Budget for less room on the priciest quote, not more.

Two of the three now market the same promise, and one of them means it more literally.

Appcues says every plan includes every experience type, feature and integration from day one, and its plan cards back that up: what changes between Start, Grow and Enterprise is MAU volume, the number of published experiences you can run at once, and how far back your reporting history goes, from 12 to 24 to 36 months. Every Appcues customer also gets implementation services, onboarding support and a dedicated experience manager as standard.

Pendo says that when you buy a module you get full functionality with no gated features and no forced upgrades. That is true inside a module, but the modules themselves are the gate. On Base, session replay, product discovery, sentiment and journey orchestration are all marked as purchasable add-ons rather than included. On Core, session replay becomes included and the other three stay add-ons. Only on Ultimate are all four bundled. So the tier ladder is a bundling ladder, and the practical question is which four of those capabilities you need on day one.

Userpilot is the most conventional of the three and gates the most by plan. Starter has no autocapture, no funnels, no retention or path analysis, no custom dashboards, no A and B testing, no resource center, no email and no workflows, and caps you at ten segments. Session replay is an add-on above Starter. Everything mobile is an add-on, and only on Enterprise. AI runs on credits, with $20 a month of credits included on the higher plans and top-ups sold separately.

The practical read: Appcues charges for scale, Pendo charges for breadth, Userpilot charges for depth.

Under 500 monthly active users, Pendo Free is free and nothing beats it on price. You get analytics, in-app guides and Pendo-branded NPS, with no support and Pendo branding on surveys and roadmaps. The catch is the cliff described below.

Under 1,000 MAU with a team of 25 or fewer, Appcues Spark at $3,600 a year is the only fixed, published, all-inclusive number in the category, and it comes with guided onboarding. If you want certainty about a line item rather than a negotiation, that is its argument.

Between 1,000 and 2,000 MAU, Userpilot Starter at $299 a month is the cheaper of the two published options per user, at roughly half the Appcues Spark rate per head, provided you can live without funnels, autocapture and A and B testing.

Above a few thousand MAU everything becomes a quote, and the procurement medians become the better guide than any published rate. At that point the deciding questions are structural rather than numeric: how many separate applications you need to instrument, which Pendo modules you would actually buy, and whether your MAU definition is closer to sign-ins or to engagements.

And check the overage behavior, because all three differ. Appcues keeps your experiences running and moves you to Grow at the next billing cycle with no surprise charges. Pendo on a paid plan keeps running too, with a rep reaching out about a contract adjustment. Pendo on the free plan stops you creating new guides, NPS surveys or segments until you upgrade, which is the hardest stop of the three and the reason the free tier is a trial rather than a home.

All three of these tools answer the same question well: what users did inside your product, and how a guide or a tooltip changed it. Adoption tooling is genuinely good at behavior.

What none of them does on its own is explain why. A funnel shows you that 40% of new accounts abandon at step three. It does not tell you that the people who abandon are the ones who opened a support ticket about the same screen last week, left a two-star review mentioning it, and said the same thing in an NPS comment. Those four records live in four systems, and behavioral tooling reads one of them.

UserInsight reads product usage, support tickets, reviews, survey answers and feedback together, groups them into named themes with counts, and ranks each theme by how many customers and accounts it touches, with every theme traced back to the evidence behind it. It sits alongside an adoption tool rather than replacing one: the adoption platform tells you where users stall, and the theme ranking tells you what they said about it and how much revenue sits behind the complaint.

If you are already budgeting for one of these three, the useful exercise is to decide which question is currently costing you more: not knowing where users drop off, or not knowing why they do.