# UserGuiding Alternative: StepsKit · $19 Flat, No MAU Meter

> UserGuiding alternative for web apps: the price climbs with monthly logins and the entry plan caps you at 15 active guides. StepsKit is $19/month flat.

*Source: https://stepskit.com/alternatives/userguiding · Updated 2026-08-19*

UserGuiding bundles a knowledge base, session replay, and an AI support assistant into one adoption suite. It meters that suite on logins, then counts how much runs at once: fifteen guides on the entry plan. StepsKit ships fewer surfaces, uncapped, at one price.

## The verdict

UserGuiding and StepsKit both put onboarding inside a web app, and UserGuiding covers far more ground. It ships a hosted knowledge base, session replay, an in-app AI support assistant, A/B testing, and localization. StepsKit ships none of those. UserGuiding publishes a real rate card: $174 a month billed yearly at 2,000 monthly active users, $244 at 9,900, above which both published plans read "Let's Talk". Its entry plan also counts active content, stopping at 15 guides, one checklist, and one survey. StepsKit costs $19 a month with no user meter and no content ceiling. A free Support Essentials tier exists, carrying help content but no guides. Passing the MAU quota costs nothing extra; UserGuiding simply stops showing guides until the count falls back. The trade is breadth against a bill that never moves.

- **Stay on UserGuiding if** — onboarding sits beside a knowledge base, recorded sessions, or an AI assistant fielding support questions.
- **Switch to StepsKit if** — the meter counts every login, and fifteen active guides is a ceiling already in view.

Weighing several tools at once? The [best product tour software](/blog/best-product-tour-software.md) roundup covers the wider field, and [StepsKit's feature list](/features.md) sets out what the single plan includes.

## What UserGuiding does better than StepsKit

Captured from userguiding.com, its pricing table, and the UserGuiding MCP launch post on 19 August 2026.

1. **Support and onboarding share a tool.** A hosted knowledge base, a resource center launcher, and an AI assistant that resolves user questions all sit alongside the tours. StepsKit covers the guidance half and nothing else. For a team that would otherwise buy a help-center product too, one subscription doing both jobs is a real saving of money and integration work.
2. **The prices are on the page, and one plan is free.** Two of three paid plans publish a figure, and a slider moves it as the user count rises, so a buyer can model a bill without booking anything. Below them sits Support Essentials at no cost, carrying a knowledge base, a resource center, and 50 AI resolutions. Most of this category quotes on request and offers nothing free.
3. **Passing the quota does not produce an invoice.** UserGuiding says that when the MAU quota is exceeded it stops showing materials until the quota rises or usage falls back, and it will not charge extra. Plenty of metered vendors bill the overage instead. A finance team gets a hard ceiling on spend, which is often worth more than a soft one.
4. **Experiments and translations are built in.** A/B testing with goal tracking, plus localization with auto-translate, both arrive on the Growth plan. Those are the two capabilities teams most often outgrow a simple tour builder to get. StepsKit offers neither, so a team that has started measuring onboarding variants has already outgrown it.
5. **An agent can reach the underlying data.** The UserGuiding MCP server exposes seventeen tools covering user records, company lookups, event tracking, and knowledge-base articles. An AI client can segment users or file an article without a person opening the panel. StepsKit's MCP does not read analytics and its event tracking call is inert.

## Why teams switch from UserGuiding

Each friction below comes from UserGuiding's own published pricing table and FAQ, not from third-party reviews.

1. **The meter counts logins.** UserGuiding defines a monthly active user as any unique user ID that logged in during the previous 30 days. Onboarding reaches a small slice of those people. The bill tracks everybody who signed in, while the value tracks the few who opened a guide, and those two numbers separate as a product matures.
2. **The published price runs out at 9,900 users.** The slider quotes figures across three bands, ending at 9,900 monthly active users. Cross that and both Starter and Growth stop showing a number. A product growing past ten thousand logins therefore returns to a sales conversation, which is the position the published rate card appeared to have solved.
3. **The entry plan counts your content.** Starter permits 15 active guides, 10 hotspots, one checklist, one survey, one banner, and one resource center. Reaching that ceiling takes no new users at all; it takes one productive quarter of writing guides. Retiring a working guide to publish a new one is an odd constraint on a product built to encourage publishing.
4. **Crossing the quota takes the guides down.** UserGuiding states that exceeding the MAU quota stops users seeing guides and other materials until the quota is raised or usage drops. The spend is capped, which is welcome, but the failure lands on new users during the week the product is growing fastest.
5. **The answers to those objections sit on Growth.** A/B testing, localization, session replay, custom alerts, and the roadmap all begin on the Growth plan at $349 a month billed yearly. Teams that adopt Starter for its price tend to want at least one of those, and reaching them doubles the bill before any user growth.

## UserGuiding pricing

| Vendor | Plan | Price | Cap | Includes |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| UserGuiding | Support Essentials | $0 | 1 resource center, 1 banner, knowledge base and 50 AI resolutions, but no guides | Knowledge Base and Product Updates<br>1 active resource center and 1 active banner<br>AI Assistant with 50 free resolutions<br>Material engagement analytics and weekly performance reports<br>1 seat, e-mail support, UserGuiding University<br>No guides, hotspots, checklists, surveys, NPS, or segmentation |
| UserGuiding | Starter | $174/month | Starting from 2,000 MAU | Billed yearly; $249/month billed monthly<br>MAU range 0-10K<br>15 active guides, 10 hotspots, 1 checklist, 1 survey, 1 banner<br>1 resource center and 1 customizable theme<br>All in-app onboarding experiences + AI Assistant<br>Surveys & NPS with AI Insights<br>Analytics reporting and segmentation up to 10 audiences<br>Knowledge Base & Product Updates |
| UserGuiding | Growth | $349/month | Starting from 2,000 MAU | Billed yearly; $499/month billed monthly<br>MAU range 0-100K<br>40 active guides, 40 hotspots, 5 checklists, 5 surveys, 5 banners<br>A/B Testing & Goal Tracking<br>Localization & Auto-Translate (1+3 languages)<br>Session Replay, quoted at 3,000 recordings<br>Feature Request & Roadmap<br>No-code event tracking and custom alerts |
| UserGuiding | Enterprise | Contact sales | Custom MAU | Unlimited onboarding experiences<br>Unlimited localization and customizable themes<br>SAML SSO and team member activity logs<br>SOC2, GDPR, HIPAA compliance<br>Migration support and a custom contract with an SLA |
| 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 |

The $174 headline is the yearly rate at 2,000 monthly active users. It reaches $244 at 9,900, and past that the pricing page quotes no figure for either published plan.

*Pricing sources:*

- **UserGuiding · Support Essentials** — verified 2026-08-19 · [source](https://userguiding.com/pricing)
- **UserGuiding · Starter** — verified 2026-08-19 · [source](https://userguiding.com/pricing)
- **UserGuiding · Growth** — verified 2026-08-19 · [source](https://userguiding.com/pricing)
- **UserGuiding · Enterprise** — verified 2026-08-19 · [source](https://userguiding.com/pricing)
- **StepsKit · Everything, one plan** — verified 2026-07-06 · [source](https://stepskit.com/pricing)

## StepsKit vs UserGuiding

| Feature | StepsKit | UserGuiding | Notes |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Hosted knowledge base | No | Yes | UserGuiding stores help articles inside the product and its MCP can create and update them; StepsKit has no article store and points at whichever help site a team already runs. |
| In-app AI support assistant | No | Yes | UserGuiding's AI Assistant answers end-user questions with no person involved, metered in resolutions; StepsKit's AI writes step copy for the author and never faces the end user. |
| Session replay | No | Yes | UserGuiding records sessions from the Growth plan, quoted at 3,000 recordings; StepsKit reports step-level engagement and drop-off but cannot replay what a user did. |
| A/B testing onboarding | No | Yes | UserGuiding pairs A/B testing with goal tracking from Growth upward; StepsKit has no variant mechanism, so two onboarding approaches have to ship one after the other. |
| Localized content | No | Yes | UserGuiding's Growth plan carries one base language plus three translations with auto-translate, and Enterprise lifts the limit; StepsKit renders each tour in the language it was written in. |
| Onboarding checklists | No | Yes | UserGuiding ships a persistent checklist widget that marks tasks complete, capped at one active on Starter and five on Growth; StepsKit has no checklist surface at all. |
| Resource center launcher | No | Yes | UserGuiding's Resource Centers open a launcher holding guides and links, one active on Starter; StepsKit anchors tooltips to elements and offers no central launcher. |
| Feature requests and a public roadmap | No | Yes | UserGuiding collects feature requests and publishes a roadmap from the Growth plan; StepsKit covers announcements and NPS surveys but has no voting board. |
| User and event data through an AI client | No | Yes | UserGuiding's MCP exposes 17 tools spanning user lookup, event tracking, companies and knowledge-base articles; StepsKit's MCP lists analytics as unsupported and its track call does nothing today. |
| An AI agent authors guides from your codebase | Yes | No | StepsKit's MCP builds and revises onboarding content straight against the selectors in a codebase; UserGuiding's MCP exposes no tool that builds a guide, checklist or hotspot. |
| Unlimited active content | Yes | No | UserGuiding counts what runs at once, stopping Starter at 15 guides, 10 hotspots, one checklist and one survey; StepsKit sets no ceiling on how many experiences are live. |
| Guides keep rendering past the plan's user limit | Yes | No | UserGuiding charges no overage, and instead stops showing materials until the quota rises or the count falls back; StepsKit has no user quota to cross. |

## Choose UserGuiding if

- Support content and onboarding should live in one tool with a hosted knowledge base.
- An AI assistant should answer user questions in-app with no person involved.
- You test onboarding variants and track goals before rolling a change out.
- Onboarding copy has to appear in more than one language.
- Watching recorded sessions is how the team finds where users stall.

## Choose StepsKit if

- Most people who log in never open a guide, yet every one of them meters.
- Fifteen active guides is a ceiling your team would reach this quarter.
- Onboarding should keep rendering no matter how many people signed in.
- Your coding agent should build the tours, not only query user records.
- A knowledge base, replay, and experiments are things you already buy elsewhere.

## Frequently asked questions

### How much does UserGuiding cost?

UserGuiding publishes a sliding rate card. Starter is $174 a month billed yearly at 2,000 monthly active users, $209 at 5,000, and $244 at 9,900; billed monthly those become $249, $299, and $349. Growth is $349, $419, and $489 billed yearly, or $499, $599, and $699 monthly. Above 9,900 monthly active users both plans read "Let's Talk", and Enterprise is quoted individually. Starter's CTA is a free trial, while Growth and Enterprise route to a demo booking.

### Is there a cheaper UserGuiding alternative?

StepsKit is $19 a month regardless of user count, and nothing limits how much onboarding stays live at once. Against Starter's $174 a month at 2,000 monthly active users, that is roughly a ninth of the cost, and the gap widens as the user count climbs. The free tier runs a single tour, tooltip group, and announcement, with no card required. The trade is scope: no knowledge base, no session replay, no A/B testing, and no localization.

### How does UserGuiding count monthly active users?

UserGuiding counts the unique user IDs that logged in to your platform during the previous 30 days. Dormant users sitting in the database without activity are not charged. The meter therefore tracks sign-ins, while engagement with a guide goes uncounted. A product whose users sign in often but finish onboarding once is billed against the entire account base, when in practice only new arrivals ever open a guide.

### What happens if you exceed the UserGuiding MAU quota?

UserGuiding does not bill an overage. It states that when the quota is exceeded, users stop seeing your guides and other UserGuiding materials until the quota is increased or the monthly active user count drops back under the existing limit. Spending is capped, which many metered vendors do not offer. The cost lands instead on delivery: onboarding goes dark for new users during exactly the period when signups are running ahead of the plan.

### Does UserGuiding have a free plan?

Yes, but it does not include product tours. The free tier is called Support Essentials, and its feature table grants a knowledge base, product updates, one resource center, one banner, 50 AI Assistant resolutions, and a single seat. Guides, hotspots, checklists, surveys, NPS, and audience segmentation are all excluded, so a team wanting a guided tour starts at Starter. UserGuiding also runs a 14-day trial of the paid features with no credit card, and a 30-day money-back guarantee.

### Can an AI agent build guides in UserGuiding?

Not build them. UserGuiding runs an MCP server with seventeen tools, covering user lookup and updates, event tracking, company records, user search and attribute discovery, and creating, updating or deleting knowledge-base articles. None of those tools authors a product tour, checklist, survey, or hotspot. An agent can therefore segment users, log events, and write help articles, while the guides themselves are still built in the UserGuiding panel.

### Which teams should stay on UserGuiding?

Teams whose onboarding sits next to a support practice, and teams already measuring it. A hosted knowledge base, a resource center, an AI assistant that resolves user questions, session replay, A/B testing, and localization are all outside what StepsKit builds. No price difference substitutes for a capability that is load-bearing, and a team running onboarding experiments today would be giving up its method to move.