11 Best Digital Adoption Platforms (DAP) for 2023

A digital adoption platform (DAP) is no longer nice to have in a new era of hybrid work. These platforms enable time, location, and learning flexibility and are essential to onboarding users and facilitating software adoption.

Despite user adoption solutions gaining traction, as of 2020, 30% of companies were still considered laggards in technology adoption.

But regardless of where you are in your technology adoption journey, it's never too late (or early) to seek solutions that can help you improve onboarding, learning, and adoption.

This post breaks down the 11 best digital adoption platforms to help you make the right decision for your needs and organization.

What is digital adoption?

Digital adoption refers to how quickly and easily your employees can leverage the technology you have in place. The idea behind investing in new technology is to enable your employees to be more successful in their roles and, ultimately, drive your business's bottom line.

Without focusing on digital adoption, you risk investing heavily in tools and processes your employees don't use. To stay competitive, research the following digital adoption platforms and design a platform adoption strategy to maximize your tool investments.

What is a digital adoption platform?

A digital adoption platform (dap) simplifies technology adoption by seamlessly connecting with applications users already know and use. For example, Spekit, a just-in-time learning digital adoption platform, integrates with Salesforce and Slack. It serves up relevant information straight in those apps without disrupting employee workflows.

How do the best digital adoption platforms work? Most offer the following:

• Dynamic walkthroughs
• In-app guidance and team spaces
• Smart notifications
• Self-help features
• Analytics & dashboards

Digital adoption platforms enable organizations to achieve digital transformation and enhance their employee experience. The market is growing rapidly, with the digital adoption platform market size expected to reach $3011.8 billion USD by 2030 .

The best-in-class solutions deliver an intuitive experience that meets employees where they are and helps them learn, adapt, and grow with the least friction.

While there are multiple niches within the Digital Adoption Platform Software category, they primarily focus on two use cases:

Digital adoption platforms for product users:

These platforms help product teams (also marketers and designers) understand how product users are experiencing their products. Product teams can use a digital adoption platform to see where users get stuck, bouncing, converting, and gain other critical insights to measure and modify their user experience and app interface.

Digital adoption platforms for internal employees:

These platforms aid technology adoption and enablement teams to enhance employee onboarding, learning, adoption, and retention.

Rather than bombard employees with lots of information at once or have them sit through training sessions, the best digital adoption platforms offer self-paced learning and content formats that employees can go through with little to no help.

With self-guided just-in-time training, professionals can adopt technology more effectively and learn how to do critical job functions as needs come up without disrupting their workflows.

How can digital adoption platform software help your business?

Digital adoption platforms can help your organization improve onboarding, training, adoption, engagement, and employee retention. The best digital adoption platforms can:

Reduce ramp time

Gallup research found that new employees typically take about 12 months to reach their full potential. With hybrid work models and sales cycles getting shorter, a digital adoption platform can support employees throughout their learning lifecycle and get them up to speed faster.

Provide self-guided learning and recall opportunities

The best digital adoption platforms have built-in tools that reinforce knowledge gained through experience, and longer-format training. For example, if a sales rep learned how to change an opportunity stage in an onboarding session, the digital adoption platform would walk them through the entire process using video, walkthroughs, or embedded hints and prompts when needed.

Improve the employee experience

Gallup research shows that only 12% of employees strongly agree that their organization does a great job onboarding. That means a whopping 88% see room for improvement.

Spekit’s digital adoption platform is contextualized, enabling you to design an employee learning experience that maximizes individual and team performance by serving up knowledge whenever and wherever needed.

Step-by-step guides, in-app notifications, knowledge bases , microlearning , and team spaces work together to support employees' different ways of searching, consuming, and recalling information.

Pro tip: Get the guide to building a successful onboarding program .

Give adoption and enablement teams visibility

Analytics and dashboards give technology adoption champions insights into how their teams are doing. Look for a digital adoption platform with built-in analytics to help you track employee performance, user adoption success, content usefulness, sales metrics, and other adoption KPIs.

Now, let's dig into the top digital adoption platforms.

11 best digital adoption platforms

1) Spekit

Best for: Digital adoption, just-in-time learning, and sales enablement

Notable brands: Southwest, Uber Freight, Invesco, Copado, Equifax

Salesforce AppExchange rating: 5/5

Capterra rating: 5/5

G2 rating: 4.5/5

Spekit is an enterprise-grade just-in-time learning, sales enablement and digital adoption platform. It helps revenue teams ramp up on tools like Salesforce and other technologies they use every day without disrupting their day-to-day workflows.

In-app training, intuitive self-paced learning, and dynamic walkthroughs automate user onboarding and streamline user adoption.

In addition, Spekit has built-in analytics and dashboards that help sales enablement, revenue operations managers, and business leaders assess the effectiveness of their technology adoption programs.

Spekit ranked #1 and best ROI on G2, with 98% of existing customers stating that they would recommend the platform to a colleague.

Key features:

• The only digital adoption platform with a one-click Salesforce integration
• No-code setup
• Compatible with apps, platforms, and browsers (no extensions needed)
• Training content in multiple formats, including PDFs, videos, and GIFs
• Spekit Search is a collapsible sidebar that centralizes information and allows employees to search for what they need in their workflows.
• Spotlights notify users about process changes, company announcements, and when new fields are available. They allow you to trigger real-time communication with your employees, notifying them of crucial updates or changes.
• Speks integrate knowledge into Salesforce-defined fields, terms, and picklist values.
• Spekit Flows are guided walkthroughs that require no coding.
• Team Spaces allow users to access topics and Speks by department, tool, process, and more.
• Built-in analytics and dashboards to track content and employee performance
• Out-of-the-box training content for Salesforce CPQ , Salesforce Lightning , LinkedIn Sales Navigator , Outreach , Seismic Onboarding, and more
• Knowledge management and real-time remote sharing

Pricing:

Pricing is completely customizable based on your organization and use case. Chat with Spekit for the best options for your team.

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2) Pendo

Best for: Product analytics, experience, and road mapping

Notable brands: UserTesting, Okta, WebPT, IHS Markit

Salesforce AppExchange rating: N/A

Capterra rating: 4.5/5

G2 rating: 4.5/5

Pendo is a product experience platform ideal for B2B product teams. It helps organizational teams understand how customers are using their software products. It also gives teams insight into which features customers use and where they get stuck.

Using Pendo, you can set up in-app messages, instructions, and walkthroughs to help users navigate your products, discover and adopt new features, and (eventually) become product evangelists.

Key features:

• In-app guidance, including alerts and walkthroughs
• Account- and user-level product analytics
• Segment comparisons
• Centralized product feedback for road mapping and prioritization

Pricing:

Pendo has four pricing tiers. To learn more about pricing for your specific use case, contact them.

• Free
• Team
• Pro (most popular option)
• Enterprise

3) Appcues

Best for: User segmentation and survey implementation

Notable brands: GoToWebinar, PatientSky, Freshworks, Litmus

Salesforce AppExchange rating: N/A

Capterra rating: 4.8/5

G2 rating: 4.7/5

Appcues is a no-code product adoption platform. Among its features are its user segmentation capabilities and walkthroughs using text bubbles. Appcues is designed primarily for product teams who own the customer satisfaction journey.

The platform gives product teams insight into how customers use features and experience their software. That data can then be applied to expand, upsell, cross-sell, and retain customers.

Key features:

• User onboarding: segment and target users by persona, account owner, lifecycle stage
• Feature adoption: templates to announce new features; no-code design
• NPS & surveys: custom surveys and strategic follow-ups
• Announcements: customizable templates for notifications with page targeting

Pricing:

• Essentials: Starting at $249/month; ideal for startups and small businesses
• Growth: Starting at $879/month; ideal for high-growth companies
• Enterprise: varies based on the enterprise

4) UserIQ

Best for: customer service

Notable brands: Cox Automotive, Reveal Mobile, Manheim

Salesforce AppExchange rating: N/A

Capterra rating: 4.0/5

G2 rating: 4.4/5

UserIQ’s primary application is in customer service. Its Play feature helps employees take action to provide a consistent and relevant customer experience. The platform’s built-in analytics give insight into what Plays are working and what needs improvement.

With UserIQ, teams drive customer engagement by identifying churn risks and growth opportunities. The platform has a health score dashboard, reporting, visual insights, and in-app messaging.

Key features:

• Customer health scores
• Customer monitoring
• Plays: automated tasks, insights into which tactics work, and repeatable formulas
• Integrates with HubSpot, Stripe, Slack, Zoho, JIRA, Outlook, and Google Workspace

Pricing:

Available upon request

5) WalkMe

Best for: enterprises seeking customization

Notable brands: Adobe, IBM, Nestle, Walgreens

Salesforce AppExchange rating: N/A

Capterra rating: 4.4/5

G2 rating: 4.5/5

WalkMe is a digital adoption platform for employee onboarding and training, product adoption, customer journey analysis, and change management.

WalkMe has self-guided learning features but does not have ""learn everywhere"" features like some of its competitors. The platform is ideal for enterprises with several thousand customers and can provide visibility to CIOs and other business leaders.

Although WalkMe can be customized, dependencies include the need for development team to implement code to reap the most benefits.

Key features:

• User journey analytics
• Productivity and performance tracking
• API support (custom plans only)
• Unlimited walkthroughs (custom plans only)
• Advanced API support (custom plan only)
• Unlimited Walk-Thrus (custom plan only)
• Search and knowledge base

Pricing:

Available upon request

For an in-depth look at how WalkMe stacks up, read our WalkMe review . Or, check out our Guru vs. WalkMe vs. Lessonly vs. Whatfix vs. Spekit comparison guide .

6) Whatfix

Best for: Employee onboarding

Notable brands: PlayOJO, Hays, Riversand, Cardinal Health

Salesforce AppExchange rating: N/A

Capterra rating: 4.7/5

G2 rating: 4.6/5

Whatfix is a digital adoption platform for internal employees and end-user customers. Whatfix has a chat feature that enables real-time help and is repeatedly noted for its support team's quality and quick response times on G2.

However, some reviewers like this executive in enterprise banking say, ""It would be great if we could encourage more of our customers to give the Whatfix self-help tool a try instead of immediately reaching out for help."" ( source )

Key features:

• Audience targeting
• In app-training and contextual guidance
• Survey and feedback
• User onboarding
• Multi-language support

Pricing:

Available upon request.

7) Userlane

Best for: simple product walkthroughs

Notable brands: Forto, Sabio, The Linde Group, Celonis

Salesforce AppExchange rating: N/A

Capterra rating: 4.5/5

G2 rating: 4.7/5

Userlane is a digital adoption platform that’s ideal for companies that are new to this technology. It’s easy to implement and use but doesn’t offer as robust features as some of the alternatives covered in this post.

With Userlane, creating guides is fast and can easily be scaled with its multi-language capabilities.

Key features:

• Self-guided learning
• Easy content creation and sharing
• Document management
• Multi-language data collection and support

Pricing: Available upon request.

8) Userguiding

Best for: SaaS companies within limited training resources

Notable brands: IATA, OLX, Mazards, canopy

Salesforce AppExchange rating: N/A

Capterra rating: 4.7/5

G2 rating: 4.7/5

UserGuiding is a digital onboarding platform that helps users master software with its no-code and drag-and-drop features. It's a good option for non-technical users or SaaS companies without training or enablement resources.

Hotspots and static information boxes offer users quick tips as they move through your product. Content creators can also add guides to Hotspots for a more in-depth onboarding experience.

Key features:

• Customer support via email and chat
• NPS surveys
• Customizable onboarding checklists and guides
• Segmentation
• Google Analytics integration

Pricing:

Basic Plan: $99/month

Professional Plan: $399/month

Corporate Plan: Starts at $699/month

9) Apty

Best for: enterprise companies driving business strategy

Notable brands: Hitachi, Mattel, TDBank, AgileCRM

Salesforce AppExchange rating: N/A

Capterra rating: 5/5

G2 rating: 4.8/5

Apty is a digital adoption platform for enterprise companies that want to drive business strategy and scalable adoption. The platform is particularly notable for survey implementation, user segmentation, and multi-language support.

Apty also integrates with Mixpanel, Qualtrics, Google Forms, Microsoft Forms, and other platforms to streamline survey data collection and analysis. Its dynamic guidance tools show users how to complete tasks, fix errors, and help ensure they comply with your business requirements.

Key features:

• Code-free editor
• User analytics and tracking
• On-screen guidance, including tooltips and walkthroughs
• Customer support
• Supports users on Oracle, MS Dynamics, Workday, ServiceNow, and others

Pricing:

Available upon request.

10) Chameleon

Best for: teams with limited design and development resources

Notable brands: Mixpanel, Highspot, Fleetio, Moz

Capterra rating: 4.1/5

G2 rating: 4.4/5

Chameleon is a digital adoption platform for teams with limited design resources that need to scale quickly. However, G2 users note issues with the interface design and slow load speeds .

Its micro surveys allow users to get insights from targeted audiences, but some claim that the segmentation setup is tricky. Additionally, some users express concern about the lack of granular insights, which may be an issue for larger organizations. Still, its codeless features make it easy to alert customers to new features.

Key features:

• Responsive customer support team
• No-code/plus customizable options
• In-app walkthroughs and prompts
• Chrome plugin

Pricing:

Startup: $279/month

Growth: From $849/month

Enterprise: Pricing based on the organization's needs

11) MyGuide by Edcast

Best for: employee learning and career development

Notable brands: WorldBank, Spark Accenture, RELX, Blue Shield of California

Salesforce AppExchange rating: 5/5

Capterra rating: 5/5

G2 rating: 4.6/5

EdCast is a learning experience platform that helps organizations address discovery and problem-solving through knowledge creation, management, and sharing. Its personalized learning capabilities help enhance the employee experience by making knowledge digestible and accessible based on their skills and capabilities.

Some G2 reviewers note that EdCast could enhance its user interface for a better experience.

Key features:

• Self-service learning
• Gamification
• Real-time chat
• Certification and licensing
• Integrates with Google, Slack, Salesforce, ServiceNow, and others

Pricing:

Available upon request.

Which digital adoption platform is right for your business?

With digital adoption, onboarding, and retention being top-of-mind for most companies, the digital adoption platform you choose is increasingly critical to employee productivity, scalability, and your ability to keep top talent in a competitive market.

Ultimately, your choice will depend on the platform’s features, the amount of maintenance required for setup and managing, and whether the digital adoption solution is product - or employee-focused.

See for yourself: Learn why leading organizations trust Spekit for their digital adoption needs. Get a live demo today .