# Appcues Alternative: StepsKit · $19 Flat, No Login Meter

> Appcues alternative for web apps: three of four Appcues plans carry no published price, and the meter counts logins. StepsKit is $19/month flat.

*Source: https://stepskit.com/alternatives/appcues · Updated 2026-08-18*

Appcues founded this category in 2013 and ships the widest surface in it: native mobile SDKs, multi-channel workflows, and a polished builder. It publishes no prices, and every plan meters on monthly logins. StepsKit bills one price, and counts nobody. The question is how much breadth you use.

## The verdict

Appcues and StepsKit both ship in-app onboarding, at different scales. Appcues covers native iOS and Android, sends email and push alongside in-app messages, and puts every experience type on every plan. Its meter is the monthly active user, which it defines as any user who signs into your product in a given month. Only the Spark plan publishes a figure: $3,600 a year for up to 1,000 MAUs, for teams of 25 or fewer, plus a $250 implementation fee. Start, Grow, and Enterprise are quote-only. StepsKit is $19 a month, flat, with no MAU ceiling. The gaps run both ways: StepsKit has no mobile SDK, no A/B testing, no localization, and no email or push. The deciding question is whether onboarding lives only in a web app.

- **Stay on Appcues if** — onboarding has to reach native mobile, or travel by email and push as well as in-app.
- **Switch to StepsKit if** — your product is a web app and the meter counts logins from users who never open a flow.

Shortlisting more than two tools? The [seven best Appcues alternatives](/blog/appcues-alternatives.md) covers the wider field, and [StepsKit's feature list](/features.md) sets out what the one plan includes.

## What Appcues does better than StepsKit

Captured from appcues.com, docs.appcues.com, and the Appcues MCP documentation on 18 August 2026.

1. **It reaches native mobile.** Appcues documents SDKs for iOS and Android, so the same onboarding practice covers a native app and a web app. StepsKit has no mobile SDK and no plan that adds one. For a team whose product is an app first, this single line settles the comparison before price enters it.
2. **Onboarding leaves the page.** Workflows carry a sequence beyond the browser, reaching users by email and push when they do not come back on their own. StepsKit renders inside the page its embed is loaded on and sends nothing outside it. Re-engaging a lapsed user is a job it cannot take.
3. **Every plan carries every feature.** Appcues states that every plan includes every experience type, feature, and integration from day one. What varies by tier is volume: published experiences and months of reporting history. Buyers who dislike feature gating get a simpler decision, because the only question left is scale.
4. **Twelve years of category work.** Appcues has been building in-app guidance since 2013, and the depth shows in its documentation, its integration catalogue, and the number of teams who have run it in production. StepsKit is a much younger product with a correspondingly smaller body of prior art to lean on.
5. **An agent can read the results.** The Appcues MCP server lets an AI client ask how specific Flows, Pins, and Launchpads are performing, explore drop-off, and sanity-check targeting before a change ships. StepsKit's MCP exposes no analytics at all, so the same question has to be answered in the dashboard.

## Why teams switch from Appcues

Each friction below comes from Appcues' own published pricing and plan pages, not from third-party reviews.

1. **The meter counts logins.** Appcues defines a monthly active user as any user who signs into your product in a given month. Onboarding reaches a fraction of those people, so the bill tracks total sign-ins while the value tracks the much smaller group who actually open a flow. Those two numbers drift apart as a product matures.
2. **The price arrives by phone.** Start, Grow, and Enterprise publish no figure. A grep of the pricing page for a dollar amount returns nothing, and each tier routes to a booking form. Putting a number in next year's budget therefore requires a call, which is friction at exactly the point a buyer wants to compare quietly.
3. **Three meters, not one.** Appcues states that pricing is based on monthly active users, number of installations, and published experiences. That gives the invoice three independent ways to move. A team that adds a staging install and a few more flows can raise its cost without adding a single new user.
4. **Experience counts are capped.** Published experiences are limited to 10 on Start, 25 on Grow, and 100 on Enterprise. Teams outgrow a tier by shipping more onboarding, not only by growing. Retiring a working flow to publish a new one is a strange constraint to hit while paying an enterprise price.
5. **Spark runs out quickly.** The one published price, $3,600 a year, applies only to teams of 25 or fewer and stops at 1,000 MAUs, with a $250 implementation fee on top. Crossing either limit moves the account to a quote. The transparent option is therefore the one most likely to be temporary.

## Appcues pricing

| Vendor | Plan | Price | Cap | Includes |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Appcues | Spark | $3,600/year | For up to 1,000 MAUs | For teams of 25 or fewer<br>The full Appcues platform — every experience type and integration<br>Up to 10 published experiences<br>Try email free (up to 1,000 emails)<br>12 months of reporting history<br>Guided onboarding to get your first flow live |
| Appcues | Start | Contact sales | For up to 3,000 MAUs | 10 published experiences<br>12 months of reporting history<br>Every experience type, feature, and integration from day one |
| Appcues | Grow | Contact sales | Starting at 3,000 MAUs | 25 published experiences<br>24 months of reporting history<br>Every experience type, feature, and integration from day one |
| Appcues | Enterprise | Contact sales | For custom MAU volumes | 100 published experiences<br>36 months of reporting history<br>Priority support and services support |
| StepsKit | Everything, one plan | $19/month | Unlimited tours, unlimited MAU — free plan to start, no credit card | Unlimited tours, tooltips, announcements, and surveys<br>Unlimited monthly active users<br>AI content assistant<br>Analytics dashboard with step-level engagement<br>Custom theming to match your brand<br>Audience targeting & segmentation<br>Page-level visibility rules<br>Email support |

Three of the four plans carry no published figure. Spark is the exception at $3,600 a year, which works out to $300 a month for a 1,000-MAU ceiling and a team under 26.

*Pricing sources:*

- **Appcues · Spark** — verified 2026-08-18 · [source](https://www.appcues.com/spark-plan)
- **Appcues · Start** — verified 2026-08-18 · [source](https://www.appcues.com/pricing)
- **Appcues · Grow** — verified 2026-08-18 · [source](https://www.appcues.com/pricing)
- **Appcues · Enterprise** — verified 2026-08-18 · [source](https://www.appcues.com/pricing)
- **StepsKit · Everything, one plan** — verified 2026-07-06 · [source](https://stepskit.com/pricing)

## StepsKit vs Appcues

| Feature | StepsKit | Appcues | Notes |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Native mobile apps | No | Yes | Appcues delivers experiences inside native iOS, Android, React Native, and Flutter apps through its mobile SDK; StepsKit runs from a web embed and cannot reach a native app. |
| Email and push in the same sequence | No | Yes | An Appcues Workflow chains in-product experiences, emails, mobile push, branches, and delays; StepsKit renders inside the page its embed loads on and sends nothing externally. |
| Checklists, Launchpads, and Pins | Partial | Yes | Appcues ships persistent widgets for onboarding task lists, a resource-centre launcher, and anchored beacons; StepsKit has tooltip badges but no checklist or launcher surface. |
| A/B testing experiences | No | Yes | Appcues runs two or more versions of an experience at once to compare which performs better; StepsKit has no variant mechanism, so weighing two onboarding approaches means shipping them sequentially. |
| Localized experiences | No | Yes | Appcues shows custom content based on a user's language; StepsKit renders every step in the single language it was authored in, with no per-locale variant of a tour. |
| Analytics an AI client can query | No | Yes | The Appcues MCP server answers questions about how Flows, Pins, and Launchpads are performing; StepsKit's MCP exposes no analytics and reports engagement in the dashboard only. |
| Publish an experience from an AI client | No | Yes | Appcues' MCP can publish and unpublish an existing experience; StepsKit keeps publishing a manual dashboard action by design, so an agent can draft a tour but not ship it. |
| Unlimited published experiences | Yes | No | Appcues caps published experiences by plan at 10, 25, and 100; StepsKit sets no ceiling on how many tours, tooltips, announcements, or surveys run at once. |
| AI agent authors experiences from your codebase | Yes | No | StepsKit's MCP creates and edits tours, tooltips, surveys, and themes against selectors in your repo; the Appcues MCP exposes no tools that create or edit content. |
| Extra domains at no extra cost | Yes | No | Appcues prices on installations as well as MAUs, so each additional install is a pricing input; StepsKit covers production, staging, and marketing sites on one plan. |
| Anchored and modal onboarding steps | Yes | Yes | Both build multi-step guided tours from anchored and centered steps; Appcues calls them Flows and StepsKit calls them callout and modal steps. |
| NPS surveys | Yes | Yes | Appcues documents NPS and surveys as a first-class use case; StepsKit ships an NPS card with selectable rating scales, a follow-up question, and a re-survey window. |

## Choose Appcues if

- Onboarding has to run inside native iOS and Android apps, not only the web app.
- The same sequence needs to reach users by email and push, not only in-app.
- You test onboarding variants against each other before rolling one out.
- Onboarding copy has to appear in each user's own language.
- A persistent checklist or resource-centre launcher is how users find help.
- An AI client should answer questions about how live experiences are performing.

## Choose StepsKit if

- Your product is a web app, so native mobile SDKs would go unused.
- The meter counts logins from users who never open an onboarding flow.
- Ten published experiences on the entry plan is a ceiling you can already see.
- You want the price before the call, not after it.
- Your coding agent should write tours against the selectors already in the repo.

## Frequently asked questions

### How much does Appcues cost?

Appcues publishes one price. The Spark plan is $3,600 a year for up to 1,000 MAUs, limited to teams of 25 or fewer, with a $250 one-time implementation fee. Start, Grow, and Enterprise carry no figure at all: the pricing page lists caps of 3,000 MAUs, 3,000-plus MAUs, and custom volumes, and routes each tier to a booking form. Pricing is based on monthly active users, installations, and published experiences, so any quote moves on three axes.

### Is there a cheaper Appcues alternative?

StepsKit costs $19 a month at any volume, and the tour count is uncapped. Against Spark's $3,600 a year, which is $300 a month before the implementation fee, that is roughly 6% of the cost for a web app. A free plan covers one tour, one tooltip group, and one announcement without a card. The trade is reach: no native mobile, no email, and no push.

### What counts as a monthly active user in Appcues?

Appcues calculates MAUs as the total number of users who sign into your platform in any given month, and its Spark page adds that dormant users in your database do not count. The meter is therefore sign-ins, not engagement with a flow. A product where most people log in weekly and see onboarding once will pay for the whole logged-in population while a small slice of it sees a tour.

### Does Appcues offer a free plan?

No. Appcues offers a free trial rather than a free tier, states that no credit card is required to start one, and publishes no trial length on either its pricing page or its Spark page. The trial itself begins with a call to check fit. That is a different shape from a free plan you can sign up for and keep using indefinitely at a reduced scope.

### Can an AI coding agent build experiences in Appcues?

Not build them. Appcues ships an MCP server that an AI client can connect to, and its documentation states that access is read-only with one exception: the client can publish and unpublish experiences. It exposes no tools that create, edit, or delete content. So an agent can report on performance and flip an existing experience live, while authoring still happens in the Appcues builder.

### Which teams should stay on Appcues?

Teams whose onboarding has to leave the browser, or has more than one language to serve. Native mobile SDKs, email and push in one sequence, A/B testing, localization, and persistent checklists are all things StepsKit does not build. No price difference substitutes for a capability you need, and for a team already running experiments against onboarding, the gap is the whole decision.

### What happens to existing flows when you leave Appcues?

They stay where they are. In-app guidance vendors share no export format, so step copy, targeting rules, and event names are rebuilt in whichever tool comes next. Accounts that lean on Workflows have more to unpick, because the email and push legs land nowhere in a browser-only tool and need a separate lifecycle messaging plan.