7 Best Onboarding Flows & Strategies You Should Know

That first interaction a user has with your product is a make-or-break moment.

A powerful, intuitive onboarding experience can be the single most important factor in converting a curious trial user into a long-term, paying customer. It’s the critical juncture where you demonstrate your product’s value, guide users to their “aha!” moment, and drastically reduce churn before it even starts.

Get it wrong, and even the most groundbreaking SaaS platform will struggle with user abandonment.

This is where a strategically designed onboarding flow becomes your most valuable asset. It’s not just about a product tour; it’s a guided journey that accelerates the Time-to-Value (TTV), ensuring users experience a tangible win as quickly as possible.

A great flow empowers users, builds confidence, and sets the foundation for deep, continued engagement with your product. It’s a core component of sustainable growth, directly impacting activation rates, feature adoption, and ultimately, revenue.

This article dissects some of the best onboarding flow examples and the tools that build them. We’ll move beyond surface-level descriptions to provide a comprehensive analysis of the strategies and tactics that make them so effective.

You will find in-depth breakdowns, complete with screenshots and direct links, that reveal the precise UX/UI design choices and product design philosophies at play.

For each example, we will uncover:

• Actionable Takeaways: Replicable methods you can apply to your own MVP development or existing SaaS product.
• Strategic Insights: The “why” behind their design choices and how they align with user psychology and business goals.
• Common Pitfalls: We’ll also highlight common mistakes that hurt user activation—like front-loading tours with too much information or having too many steps before value is shown—providing a clear roadmap of what to avoid in your own design-driven development process.

1. Appcues

Appcues is a powerful, no-code platform that allows SaaS companies to build, manage, and optimize their user onboarding experiences directly within their product. Instead of relying on engineering resources, product and marketing teams can independently create product tours, tooltips, checklists, and surveys to guide users toward their “aha!” moment faster. This focus on empowering non-technical teams to own the onboarding process is what makes it a staple for product-led growth (PLG) startups.

What makes Appcues a contender for creating the best onboarding flow isn’t just its own onboarding, but its ability to help you create one. It excels at accelerating a user’s Time-to-Value (TTV), a critical metric for reducing churn in any SaaS product. By using Appcues, a startup can quickly deploy an MVP of their onboarding, test what resonates with users, and iterate without a single line of code.

Strategic Breakdown: How Appcues Delivers Value

The core strength of Appcues lies in its mature pattern library and robust targeting capabilities. You can trigger specific onboarding flows based on user properties, events, or segments. For example, a new user who signed up via a “developer” persona form can receive a technical-focused tour, while a “marketer” gets a workflow-oriented guide. This level of personalization prevents the common mistake of delivering a generic, one-size-fits-all tour that users quickly ignore.

Real-World Example: E-learning platform Teachable used Appcues to launch a behavior-driven onboarding flow. By showing tooltips only when users interacted with specific features for the first time, they made guidance feel timely and relevant, not intrusive. This contextual approach boosted feature adoption by 15% and increased their free-to-paid conversion rate.

Actionable Takeaways for Your SaaS

Here’s how you can leverage Appcues’ approach for your own product:

• Implement Onboarding Checklists: Don’t just rely on a linear product tour. Use checklists to guide users through the 2-3 key activation events. For an analytics MVP, this might be “Install tracking script,” “Create first dashboard,” and “Invite a team member.”
• Segment Your Welcome Flows: Greet new users with a modal asking their primary goal or role. Use their answer to trigger a tailored onboarding path, dramatically improving relevance and completion rates.
• Use Tooltips for Contextual Guidance: Instead of a front-loaded tour, use subtle tooltips that appear when a user first interacts with a complex feature. This “just-in-time” guidance is less intrusive and more effective.

Pros and Cons

Appcues offers a free trial and has three main pricing tiers: Essentials, Growth, and Enterprise, with costs scaling based on your MAU count. It is an excellent choice for SaaS development teams focused on rapid iteration and data-driven product design.

Website: https://www.appcues.com

2. Pendo

Pendo is an all-in-one product experience platform that combines deep product analytics with powerful in-app guidance tools. It allows product teams to understand user behavior and then directly act on those insights by creating guides, surveys, and polls without writing code. This integrated approach of “analyze and act” positions Pendo as a comprehensive solution for companies aiming to design and measure a data-informed onboarding flow.

What makes Pendo a powerhouse for creating the best onboarding flow is its retroactive analytics. Once the Pendo snippet is installed, it begins collecting data on every click, page view, and event, even before you’ve specifically tagged them. This means you can retroactively analyze user paths to identify where they drop off in your MVP and then immediately deploy a targeted guide to fix the friction point, a crucial capability for agile SaaS development.

Strategic Breakdown: How Pendo Delivers Value

Pendo’s core advantage is its closed-loop system of insight and action. While many tools focus on either analytics or in-app guidance, Pendo excels at both. A product manager can create a segment of users who failed to complete a key activation event, analyze their behavior to understand why, and then launch a contextual tooltip or a resource center module targeted specifically at that struggling segment, all within one platform. This seamless workflow is ideal for data-driven product design.

Real-World Example: Digital adoption platform WalkMe (also on this list) uses Pendo internally to optimize its own complex application. They identified that users who completed three core actions within their first week had a much higher retention rate. By using Pendo’s analytics to track this and deploying targeted guides to nudge users toward these actions, they significantly improved their key TTV metric and long-term user retention.

Actionable Takeaways for Your SaaS

Here’s how you can leverage Pendo’s approach for your own product:

• Identify Friction with Path Analysis: Use Pendo’s retroactive analytics to map out the common paths new users take. Identify the exact step where a significant percentage drops off and use that as the primary target for a new in-app guide.
• Build a Contextual Resource Center: Instead of a single product tour, use Pendo to create an in-app resource center. Populate it with short video tutorials, FAQs, and on-demand guides that users can access when they need help, reducing support tickets and improving self-service.
• Measure Onboarding with Funnels and Goals: Define your key activation events (e.g., “Project Created,” “Data Source Connected”) as goals in Pendo. Build a funnel to visualize the conversion rate at each step of your onboarding and A/B test different in-app messages to see what moves the needle.

Pros and Cons

Pendo offers a robust free plan, making it accessible for MVP development, with custom pricing for its Growth, Portfolio, and Premium tiers. It is an excellent fit for data-centric product teams who want to tie every onboarding action directly to a measurable outcome.

Website: https://www.pendo.io/pricing/

3. Userpilot

Userpilot is a product adoption platform specifically designed to help SaaS companies create personalized and contextual in-app experiences without writing any code. It focuses heavily on driving user activation and feature adoption through interactive walkthroughs, tooltips, checklists, and native-looking UI patterns. This makes it a strong choice for SMBs and mid-market companies looking to refine their product-led growth (PLG) engine and improve user retention.

What solidifies Userpilot’s place as a tool for creating the best onboarding flow is its emphasis on behavior-driven triggers and segmentation. Instead of forcing all users through the same generic tour, Userpilot allows product teams to build experiences that adapt to what a user actually does inside the app. This contextual approach is critical for moving the Time-to-Value (TTV) KPI by guiding users to their specific “aha!” moment, not just showing them a map of the interface.

Strategic Breakdown: How Userpilot Delivers Value

Userpilot’s core advantage is its focus on creating interactive, non-linear onboarding experiences. While many tools offer product tours, Userpilot excels at letting users “choose their own adventure.” By combining checklists with in-app surveys and user segmentation, a SaaS company can immediately identify a user’s primary goal and tailor the entire onboarding journey to achieving that specific outcome. For an MVP, this means you can quickly test different value propositions and onboarding paths for different user personas.

Real-World Example: Social media scheduler Socialbakers (now part of Emplifi) used Userpilot to create persona-based onboarding checklists. After a user identified their role in a welcome screen, they received a unique checklist highlighting the most relevant features. This simple personalization led to a 57% increase in checklist completion rates, ensuring more users reached their activation milestones.

Actionable Takeaways for Your SaaS

Here’s how you can apply Userpilot’s philosophy to your own product design:

• Create Role-Based Onboarding Paths: Use a welcome screen modal to ask new users their role (e.g., “Manager,” “Analyst,” “Admin”). Trigger a unique checklist for each role that highlights the most relevant features for their job-to-be-done.
• Use Hotspots for Feature Discovery: Avoid overwhelming users with pop-ups. Instead, place subtle, pulsating hotspots on new or underutilized features. This encourages exploration without interrupting the user’s workflow, a key principle of good UX/UI design.
• Combine NPS Surveys with In-App Guidance: Use Userpilot’s NPS feature to identify detractors. You can then trigger a targeted in-app message or a short walkthrough for these users, showing them a feature they may have missed that could solve their frustration.

Pros and Cons

Userpilot offers a demo and multiple pricing tiers, generally starting with a “Traction” plan for startups and scaling up to “Growth” and “Enterprise” plans. Pricing is primarily based on Monthly Active Users (MAUs), making it a scalable solution as your SaaS product grows.

Website: https://userpilot.com/

4. Chameleon

Chameleon is a digital adoption platform that empowers SaaS companies to create deeply native and highly customizable in-app experiences. It goes beyond simple product tours, offering a suite of tools including interactive demos, tooltips, microsurveys, and a unique “HelpBar” feature. This allows product teams to build contextual guidance that feels like a core part of their application, rather than an overlay, making it a top choice for brands focused on a seamless UX/UI design.

What makes Chameleon a powerful contender for the best onboarding flow is its emphasis on deep customization and user-centric discovery. Instead of forcing a linear path, Chameleon enables a more self-directed and supportive environment. This is crucial for complex SaaS products where users have diverse goals. Its tools are designed to reduce Time-to-Value (TTV) by providing help exactly when and where it’s needed, preventing the frustration that leads to user churn.

Strategic Breakdown: How Chameleon Delivers Value

Chameleon’s strength lies in its “natively-designed” approach and its versatile toolkit. The platform allows for extensive CSS styling, ensuring that every tooltip and modal perfectly matches your brand’s product design. Its unique HelpBar acts as a self-serve command center, letting users search for help, launch product tours on-demand, or access external resources. This transforms onboarding from a one-time event into an ongoing, user-initiated support system.

Key Insight: A common onboarding mistake is assuming all users learn the same way. Some prefer guided tours, while others want to explore freely. Chameleon’s strength is enabling both. You can create a structured path for new users while simultaneously offering a self-serve HelpBar for power users, catering to multiple learning styles.

Actionable Takeaways for Your SaaS

Here’s how you can leverage Chameleon’s approach for your own product:

• Launch a Self-Serve HelpBar: Integrate a central, searchable help widget within your app. Populate it with links to key product tours, help docs, and support channels. This empowers proactive users and reduces support tickets.
• Create Role-Based Interactive Demos: Instead of a generic tour, use Chameleon’s demo functionality to build interactive, sandboxed experiences for specific personas. A “Marketing Manager” can learn to build a campaign, while a “Developer” can explore API integrations, all in a risk-free environment.
• Use Microsurveys to Trigger Contextual Help: After a user completes a key action for the first time, trigger a one-question microsurvey like, “How easy was that to complete?” If they rate it as difficult, you can immediately trigger a tooltip or a short tour offering advanced tips for that feature.

Pros and Cons

Chameleon offers Startup, Growth, and Enterprise plans, with pricing based on Monthly Tracked Users (MTUs). It is an excellent platform for SaaS development teams who prioritize a deeply integrated, brand-consistent user experience and want to provide both guided and self-serve onboarding options.

Website: https://www.chameleon.io/plans

5. WalkMe

WalkMe is an enterprise-grade Digital Adoption Platform (DAP) engineered for guiding users through complex, large-scale software environments. Unlike tools focused primarily on initial product tours for new SaaS customers, WalkMe specializes in driving proficiency and process adherence across an organization’s entire tech stack, including both internal-facing systems and customer-facing applications. Its power lies in its ability to layer interactive guidance and automation on top of third-party software without altering the underlying code.

WalkMe earns its spot as a provider of the best onboarding flow solutions by tackling the monumental challenge of digital adoption at the enterprise level. While an MVP might use a simpler tool, a Fortune 500 company deploying a new CRM to 10,000 employees needs a more robust system. WalkMe ensures that complex workflows are completed correctly, reducing support tickets, minimizing human error, and accelerating the Time-to-Value (TTV) for massive software investments.

Strategic Breakdown: How WalkMe Delivers Value

WalkMe’s core advantage is its deep integration and contextual awareness across multiple applications. It can create guided workflows that span different platforms, such as starting a task in Salesforce and finishing it in an ERP system. This cross-application capability is critical for large organizations where business processes are rarely confined to a single piece of software. Its robust analytics engine provides deep insights into where users are struggling, allowing operations and IT teams to proactively address friction points.

Key Insight: Enterprise-level onboarding is less about feature discovery and more about process compliance and task completion. WalkMe excels by embedding guidance directly into complex, multi-step business workflows, ensuring tasks are done right the first time.

Actionable Takeaways for Your SaaS

While you might not need WalkMe’s enterprise power for an early-stage MVP, its strategic principles are highly valuable:

• Focus on Critical Workflows, Not Just Features: Map out the most important, multi-step jobs-to-be-done in your application. Build your onboarding flow to guide users through completing one of these entire workflows, rather than just showing them disconnected UI elements.
• Use Data to Identify Friction: Implement analytics to see where users drop off or make repeated errors. Deploy contextual tooltips or short guides at these specific friction points to provide “just-in-time” assistance, a core tenet of WalkMe’s approach.
• Guide Users Toward Compliance: If your SaaS product has critical setup steps for security or integration (like setting up SSO or API keys), use a checklist or a forced step-by-step guide to ensure these tasks are completed correctly before the user can proceed.

Pros and Cons

WalkMe’s pricing is customized for enterprise clients and requires a consultation; it is not suited for early-stage SaaS development. However, for large corporations managing digital transformation, it is a category leader in ensuring software ROI.

Website: https://www.walkme.com/pricing/

6. Amazon (Books)

While not a software platform, Amazon’s marketplace for books is an indispensable resource for anyone serious about mastering user onboarding. It provides access to the foundational knowledge, strategic playbooks, and in-depth UX research required to design an effective onboarding flow from first principles. For founders and product teams, this is where the theoretical groundwork is laid before a single line of code is written or a SaaS tool is purchased.

What makes Amazon a unique entry for the best onboarding flow is its role as an educational launchpad. It allows you to learn from the successes and failures of others, offering comprehensive guides on everything from customer psychology to product-led growth. Accessing this collective wisdom helps you avoid common mistakes, such as front-loading tours with every feature or failing to connect onboarding actions to the user’s core motivation.

Strategic Breakdown: How Amazon (Books) Delivers Value

The core value of Amazon in this context lies in its vast and accessible library of expert knowledge. You can find tactical guides on creating checklists and contextual tooltips, as well as high-level strategic books on how to design for user activation and reduce Time-to-Value (TTV). With features like reader reviews, ratings, and “Look Inside” previews, teams can efficiently vet resources and invest in high-quality, actionable content. This allows for a much deeper, more strategic approach to MVP development and UX/UI design.

Key Insight: A great onboarding flow isn’t just about the tools you use; it’s about the psychological and strategic principles you apply. Amazon provides direct access to the minds of experts who have already solved the problems you’re facing.

Actionable Takeaways for Your SaaS

Here’s how you can leverage Amazon’s resources for your own product:

• Build a Knowledge Foundation: Start with seminal works like “Hooked” by Nir Eyal to understand user habits and “The Elements of User Onboarding” by Samuel Hulick for a tactical playbook. This knowledge informs every decision in your design-driven development process.
• Solve Specific Onboarding Problems: Facing high drop-off rates after the initial product tour? Search for books on user engagement and retention. This targeted research can provide specific solutions that a generic SaaS tool cannot.
• Educate Your Entire Team: Use Amazon’s fast shipping or Kindle’s instant delivery to get key books into the hands of your product managers, designers, and even engineers. A shared understanding of onboarding principles leads to a more cohesive and effective final product.

Pros and Cons

Amazon offers a massive selection of books with prices set by publishers and sellers. Many titles are available for immediate download on Kindle or through an Audible subscription, making it a fast and efficient way to level up your team’s expertise.

Website: https://www.amazon.com/

7. Figma Community (Templates)

Figma Community is not an onboarding tool itself but rather a treasure trove of resources for planning, designing, and prototyping your user onboarding experience. It offers a vast library of free and paid templates for both Figma and its whiteboarding counterpart, FigJam. This allows product teams to rapidly visualize user journey maps, create high-fidelity UI kits for onboarding screens, and collaborate on the entire flow before a single line of code is written, making it an indispensable part of modern product design.

What makes Figma Community a unique entry for the best onboarding flow is its role in the pre-development phase. It empowers teams to align on strategy and execute on design with unparalleled speed. Instead of starting from a blank canvas, a startup can grab a proven customer journey map template, adapt it to their SaaS product, and immediately begin mapping out the critical steps to reduce a user’s Time-to-Value (TTV). This design-driven development approach helps prevent costly engineering mistakes rooted in poor initial planning.

Strategic Breakdown: How Figma Community Delivers Value

The platform’s core strength is its ability to centralize and accelerate the entire onboarding design process. Cross-functional teams (product, design, marketing, and engineering) can use a FigJam template to collaboratively brainstorm the ideal user path, identify potential friction points, and define key activation events. This shared understanding can then be translated directly into a polished UI using one of the many available onboarding screen kits in Figma, ensuring a seamless handoff from design to development.

Real-World Example: Rather than a single company, the power of Figma is seen across thousands of startups. A common success pattern is using a journey map template to identify a “golden path”—the shortest sequence of actions a user can take to get value. By designing the onboarding UI specifically to guide users down this path, teams can significantly improve activation rates. This pre-planning prevents the common mistake of building a beautiful but ineffective onboarding flow.

Actionable Takeaways for Your SaaS

Here’s how you can leverage Figma Community’s resources for your own product:

• Map the Journey First: Before designing any screens, use a “Customer Journey Map” template from the Community. Map out every touchpoint a new user has, from the initial signup email to their first “aha!” moment. This helps identify and eliminate potential drop-off points.
• Prototype with UI Kits: Don’t reinvent the wheel. Search for “onboarding UI kit” to find pre-built components like progress bars, modals, tooltips, and checklist elements. This dramatically speeds up the UX/UI design phase of your MVP.
• Collaborate on a Whiteboard: Use a FigJam template to run a workshop with your entire team. Define user personas, their primary goals, and the top three actions they must complete to become activated. This alignment is critical for success.

Pros and Cons

Access to the Figma Community is free, with designers and agencies offering both free and paid templates. It is an essential starting point for any SaaS development team focused on creating a thoughtful, user-centric onboarding experience from the ground up.

Website: https://www.figma.com/templates/

Best Onboarding Flow: Top 7 Solutions Comparison

Final Thoughts

We’ve journeyed through some of the most effective and innovative onboarding tools and strategies, from the granular personalization of Appcues to the comprehensive analytics of Pendo and the creative, community-driven approach of Figma. The key takeaway is clear: the best onboarding flow is not a one-size-fits-all solution. It’s a dynamic, user-centric system meticulously designed to guide users to their “aha!” moment as swiftly and seamlessly as possible.

Creating this experience requires a strategic blend of psychology, data, and design-driven development. It’s about understanding that users sign up to solve a problem, not to learn your software. Your onboarding must be the bridge that connects their problem to your solution, minimizing friction and maximizing value at every step.

Key Takeaways: From Theory to Action

Reflecting on the examples we’ve analyzed, several core principles emerge as non-negotiable for building a successful SaaS onboarding experience:

• Personalization is Paramount: Generic tours are dead. As seen with Userpilot and Chameleon, segmenting users and tailoring their initial experience based on their role, goals, or skill level dramatically increases relevance and engagement. This is crucial for reducing early-stage churn.
• Action Over Explanation: The most effective onboarding flows, like those powered by WalkMe, encourage users to learn by doing. Instead of just showing features, prompt users to complete a critical task that delivers immediate value. This hands-on approach solidifies learning and builds user confidence.
• Focus on the “Aha!” Moment: Your primary goal is to accelerate Time-to-Value (TTV). Identify the one or two key actions that make a user truly understand your product’s benefit. Build your entire onboarding process around guiding them to that specific moment of insight as quickly as you can.
• Data is Your North Star: Tools like Pendo highlight the importance of analytics. You cannot improve what you don’t measure. Track completion rates, drop-off points, feature adoption, and TTV to identify friction points and continuously iterate on your flow.

Choosing the Right Tool for Your MVP and Beyond

For early-stage startup founders and product managers, selecting the right onboarding tool is a critical decision that impacts your MVP’s success and long-term growth. Your choice should align with your technical resources, business goals, and product maturity.

• For Non-Technical Teams: If you’re a non-technical founder aiming for speed and ease of use, tools like Appcues or Userpilot are excellent choices. They offer no-code editors that empower your product and marketing teams to build and deploy onboarding flows without relying on engineering resources.
• For Data-Driven Product Teams: If your strategy hinges on deep user analytics and understanding behavior, Pendo is a powerful contender. It combines in-app guidance with robust product analytics, giving you a holistic view of the user journey.
• For Highly Customized UX/UI Design: When you need deep customization to match a unique brand identity or complex user interface, Chameleon offers the flexibility and powerful APIs required for a truly bespoke experience that feels native to your application.
• For Enterprise-Level Complexity: For complex SaaS platforms targeting large enterprises, WalkMe excels at handling intricate workflows and driving adoption across multifaceted digital ecosystems.

Implementing any of these tools requires a clear strategy. Start by mapping your ideal user journey, defining key activation metrics, and understanding common friction points. Don’t try to onboard users to every single feature. Instead, focus on the core workflow that will make them successful. Remember, a well-executed onboarding flow built with the right tool is one of the most powerful levers you have for turning new sign-ups into lifelong, loyal customers.

Ready to design and build a product with an unforgettable onboarding experience? Let’s talk about how we can bring your vision to life.