The top 5 client onboarding software solutions to reduce support costs and boost retention

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TL;DR

• Client onboarding software helps you ramp up new customers faster, cut support costs, and reduce churn. Clients who get a proactive onboarding experience are 50-150% more likely to renew.
• We compared 5 popular platforms (Inline Manual, Userpilot, Dock, ChurnZero, and Pendo) on pros, cons, pricing, and who each one fits best.
• If you need full control over the onboarding experience, or want to combine onboarding with a client portal, CRM, or knowledge base, you can build a custom solution with Softr instead of paying for a dedicated tool. [.blog-callout]

Client onboarding is the first and most powerful step on the road toward customer success. It's the best way to ramp up new users, reduce churn, and keep client satisfaction high.

Research shows that clients who receive a proactive onboarding experience are between 50-150% more likely to renew or maintain their services. So if you want to reduce churn and increase retention, client onboarding software deserves a spot in your tech stack.

Customer onboarding platforms let you automate the repetitive parts of onboarding and build a customer success program your team can rely on. There are several paid and free client onboarding tools on the market. We dug into the five most popular platforms to find:

• The best user onboarding software for different businesses and industries.
• Successful client onboarding examples from real users.
• The benefits of using customer onboarding platforms.

What is client onboarding software?

Client (or customer) onboarding software is designed to manage all the steps involved in bringing new customers into your business.

There are various types of client onboarding software depending on different phases of the customer lifecycle. When thinking about the software we want to use, let's take into consideration how we want to support our customer onboarding process. That way, user onboarding solutions can incorporate data and automation to help us:

• Manage the client onboarding process
• Educate our users for a speedy ramp-up time
• Incorporate and execute on client feedback
• Empower our customer support teams with common user questions

What are the benefits of client onboarding software?

As I mentioned above, client onboarding tools offer a number of benefits, depending on the problems we want to solve.

Here are some of the ways that different client onboarding software solutions can strengthen the client experience.

Reduce manual work with automation

Client onboarding software lets you set automated actions or use customer onboarding templates to free your team up from administrative work and reduce human errors or missed steps. Some examples of actions you can automate are:

1. Client segmentation based on data demographics
2. On-screen video tutorials
3. Payment collection
4. Pre-recorded comprehensive demos

Or you might use a SaaS onboarding software to manage emails and online communication with clients like:

1. Welcoming new clients
2. Promoting discounts
3. Sharing tutorials
4. Providing updates on delivery status
5. Resetting passwords

Impress new clients

An efficient onboarding process starts with identifying client needs and pain points in order to come up with effective solutions and strengthen customer support.

Client onboarding software gives you the chance to:

1. Centralize and analyze customer feedback
2. Manage and resolve customer support tickets
3. Create a unique client experience

Managed systems and data analytics help you champion your clients by anticipating and responding to their needs.

Tip: Here are some other ways you can impress your clients:

1. Being consistent in your client messaging and response times
2. Researching your competitors and establishing your own unique value proposition
3. Being respectful, responsive, and proactive
4. Optimizing your loading times

Grow your business

Client onboarding software makes it easier to scale your operations. By automating customer onboarding processes, you can easily:

1. Build and share a client portal that’s specific to each customer
2. Share async demos or tutorials
3. Collect and manage payments

… all without any manual work.

In that way, onboarding software can help our client-facing teams handle anywhere from one to a thousand clients without direct involvement.

Reduce pain points

Once you understand your customers’ journeys, you can list and resolve common pain points to enrich the user experience.

Anticipating client pain points also increases user adoption and overall product experience.

For example, imagine your product is an automated time tracker that syncs to your payroll service. For your HR team to pay staff members on time, managers need to approve the whole team's tracked hours.

In this case, one of your biggest customer pain points would be how long it takes managers to approve team hours due to lengthy and hard-to-read reports. That means the payroll team would end up working late to avoid any payment delays, causing dissatisfaction.

Taking customer pain points into account is the only way to make your app an optimal solution for users.

Stay compliant with GDPR regulations

Client onboarding software guarantees data protection and compliance with GDPR regulations.

Under GDPR regulations along with other data privacy compliance such as the 'cookie' law, companies will need to receive consent from users before setting cookies or collecting any personal data.

In addition to client onboarding software, cookie consent tools can aid in developing an in-depth policy while tracking users' cookies with their consent.

Client onboarding software helps you secure customer information so it doesn’t get stolen and protects all parties involved in case of any future mishaps.

5 best client onboarding software

Now that we’ve run through the different types of client onboarding software, let’s review the most popular solutions for pros and cons to find the right tool for your business.

Here’s an at-a-glance comparison table:

The top customer onboarding platforms in 2026 are:

1. Inline Manual: Best for established small businesses

Inline Manual is a digital adoption platform that helps improve the client onboarding experience by guiding them through the product. This includes direct walkthroughs, tool tips and customer support articles.

With Inline Manual, you can onboard new users, explain how new features work, and market other services in your app without writing a single line of code.

Pros

• Enhance user onboarding by creating in-app walkthroughs, announcements, tool-tips, hot spots and help centers.
• Collect user feedback directly from the app.
• Fosters team collaboration with real-time edits, customization and team permissions

Cons

• It looks like pricing increases according to active user count.
• Users need to pay extra for pretty useful add-ons like iFrames support.

Best for:

Inline Manual is a great choice for creating in-app walkthroughs and sending announcements to a segmented audience. Their software would work well for small SaaS businesses that aren’t likely to have a dramatic increase in users.

Pricing

Inline Manual offers a free trial. Then, prices start at $158/month for 250 monthly active users (MAUs). An Enterprise plan is available with a custom quote.

2. Userpilot: Best for medium-to-large businesses

Userpilot is a no-code software that lets you create user behavior-triggered experiences. That is, it analyzes customer actions within the app and uses that data to send teams segmented information.

This helps you quickly introduce users to your most valuable features and thoroughly target clients based on their feedback and actions.

Pros

• Allows A/B testing to experiment with different customer onboarding flows.
• Collects customer feedback to increase your Net Promoter Score (NPS).
• Shares hints and tips to alert users about new features when navigating through the app for the first time.
• Shows in-app pop-ups to drive upsells and conversions.

Cons

• Phone and mobile support is only available on their Medium plan.
• There’s a steep learning curve to build complex flows.

Best for:

Userpilot is an excellent user onboarding tool if you want to educate users on key features and help them adopt your product in a short period of time. Customers also use Userpilot to test out different onboarding flows and get feedback in real-time. Due to its pricing, this software is most popular with medium to large companies.

Pricing

Prices start at $249 per month for up to 2,500 monthly active users (MAU). Prices vary depending on your plan and how many MAUs you have.

3. Dock: Best for companies with complex onboarding and implementation

Dock is a client-facing workspace that helps revenue teams close deals, onboard customers, and manage renewals. With Dock, your Customer Success team can create a personalized onboarding or implementation hub for each customer, all in a single platform. Use Dock to strengthen the customer experience through each phase of the customer lifecycle, including prospecting and sales.

Pros

• Dock lets you share and brand project plans, onboarding content, and forms in one collaborative workspace.
• Onboarding templates give everyone on your team a pre-made blueprint for onboarding a new customer.
• Embed checklists and product education to give customers one self-serve help center.
• Track onboarding engagement and stakeholder activity to predict and win more renewals.

Cons

• Dock requires some initial setup time to build your company's onboarding and implementation templates.
• Dock is still a relatively new company, so it doesn't have some more advanced features like an API. (That said, they have weekly product releases so the product is improving quickly.)

Best for:

Dock helps Customer Success teams provide a smooth customer onboarding experience and win more customer renewals.

Pricing

Dock has a free trial for up to 5 workspaces. Their business plan starts at $49 per person per month. Their enterprise pricing is available upon request.

4. ChurnZero: Best for mid-sized SaaS businesses

Churn rate is closely entangled with how well you understand your customers. ChurnZero is a customer onboarding platform that helps you gather data about customers throughout their lifecycle and share it with your team.

The customer success tool uses AI, in-app communications, and automation to increase customer retention and prevent churn.

Pros

• Gives you access to the command center with customer information, real-time alerts, and automations.
• Ensures personalization at every stage of the user journey.
• Creates content for different segments and adds user names into all in-app communications and walkthroughs.
• Helps you become a data-driven product owner.
• Gives you access to health scores, reports, and survey data to adjust your onboarding checklist as needed.

Cons

• It can be messy to build different journeys and timelines simultaneously.
• Lacks customization options for different personas.
• Has a steep learning curve and isn’t as intuitive as other similar platforms.

Best for:

Users go for ChurnZero to have access to customer data in real-time as they go through each step of their onboarding journey. They then use those insights to reorganize their onboarding process.

Mid-sized companies find ChurnZero useful because it’s not as expensive when compared with other similar tools on the market.

Pricing

ChurnZero’s pricing isn’t disclosed on their website. You need to fill out a form to get a custom quote based on your in-app requirements.

5. Pendo: Best for enterprise-level companies

Pendo is a user onboarding tool that helps you build and customize the product experience to increase value and simplify the onboarding process.

This all-in-one platform is designed to increase product adoption and customer satisfaction with a variety of different tools and solutions.

The software gives users access to analytics, includes in-app guides, and gathers user feedback.

Pros

• Tracks how clients use your product and key features, as well as when and how often.
• Lets you roadmap your customer journey and share your insights with key stakeholders to guarantee team alignment.
• Integrates seamlessly with a large list of tools like Salesforce, Hubspot, Looker, and Tableau.

Cons

• Steep learning curve for specific features like integrations and setup.
• Customization isn’t granular. For example, if you need to change your branding, you’ll need to start again from scratch.

Best for:

Users sign up for Pendo with the hopes of reducing churn rate, increasing retention, and providing a great customer experience.

But what I think makes Pendo great is its ability to mix analytics with in-app tutorials. Pendo is an excellent choice for large corporations with over 500 employees because it integrates with a large list of enterprise software solutions.

Pricing

Pendo has a free version with limited capabilities. If you want to upgrade, you can ask for a custom quote based on your company's needs.

Build a custom client portal with Softr

The tools above are all solid options for onboarding customers inside your existing app, but most of them lack full customization. If you need a client onboarding experience that also doubles as a client portal, CRM, or knowledge base, it's often better to build it yourself.

Softr isn't a dedicated client onboarding tool. It's an AI app builder for creating real business software, and client onboarding is one of the most common use cases teams build with it. Describe the portal you need and Softr's AI Co-Builder generates the database, pages, and permissions already connected and ready for real users, or you can start from a template and customize it manually.

With Softr, your data lives in Softr Databases by default, or you can connect existing data from Airtable, Google Sheets, HubSpot, and 17+ other sources. On top of that data layer, Softr Workflows automate the onboarding steps themselves, welcome emails, document requests, task assignments, without needing a separate automation tool.

Instead of stitching together several disconnected products, you can build many different types of business apps on the same platform: B2B or white-label client portals, customer service portals, employee intranets, or a CRM to manage the whole client relationship, not just the first 30 days.

FUGA, a music distribution marketing agency, used Softr (with Airtable and BigQuery) to replace manual PDF reporting and Google Sheets handoffs with a self-serve client portal for 800+ users, cutting reporting time from half a day per week to instant self-service. As one of their team put it: "We really appreciate how we can set user-specific visibility, clients see only what they need to see, nothing more."

Softr: Best for building your own custom client onboarding portal, no code required

Softr gives you the freedom to build exactly the onboarding experience your clients need, without a steep learning curve. You can build a client portal, add in-app alerts, and automate onboarding steps like welcome emails or document collection, all in the same platform.

Pros

1. AI Co-Builder turns a plain-language description into a working app: database, pages, user groups, and navigation included. You can then refine anything manually.
2. Granular permissions through user groups let you show each client only their own data, tasks, and documents, which matters far more for onboarding than a generic pop-up tour.
3. Native integrations for tools you likely already use to support onboarding: Intercom for in-app chat and product tours, Mailchimp and Mailerlite for onboarding email sequences, Hotjar and Google Analytics for usage tracking, and Crisp, Drift, or HubSpot Chat for live support.
4. Softr Workflows let you automate onboarding steps directly: send a welcome email when a client signs up, assign an onboarding task when a document is missing, or notify your team when a step is completed, without a separate automation tool.
5. Lets you build a document portal or knowledge base alongside onboarding, so clients who prefer to self-serve can find answers without opening a support ticket.
6. When a pre-built block isn't enough for a specific onboarding flow (like a multi-step progress tracker), the Vibe Coding block lets you generate a custom component that still connects securely to your data and inherits your app's permissions.

Cons

1. Softr isn't purpose-built for in-app product tours or feature announcements the way Inline Manual or Userpilot are, so those specific patterns take a bit more manual setup.
2. Softr builds responsive web apps rather than native mobile apps. If you need a native iOS or Android app, you'll want a different tool (Softr's PWA builder covers most mobile use cases in the meantime).

Best for:

Teams typically start with Softr to build a client onboarding experience that's part of a bigger app, not a standalone widget. Common use cases include:

• Client portals that combine onboarding, document sharing, and ongoing communication in one place.
• Customer service portals that reduce repetitive support questions with self-serve help centers.
• Vendor and partner portals for onboarding external partners with their own restricted view of the data.
• AI CRM for managing the full client relationship after onboarding is done.

Accounting firm Officeheads built their client portal in under two days using a Softr and Airtable template, and now serves 50+ SMB clients with 8+ automated workflows, from onboarding materials to live financial dashboards, eliminating most of the repetitive email questions that used to eat up their team's time.

Pricing

Softr has a free plan to get started (10 app users, 5,000 database records). Paid plans start at $49/month for Basic and go up to $269/month for Business, with each tier adding more app users, database records, workflow actions, and AI credits. Custom pricing is available for enterprise needs like SSO and dedicated support.

Match the tool to your onboarding goal

Each tool in this article can improve customer onboarding, but the right pick depends on why you're looking for a platform in the first place.

Weigh your industry, user base, and company size before deciding. For example, if you're a small business with under 2,500 MAUs, Userpilot might be your best choice. Its software lets you test different onboarding flows at once, track data in real time, and add in-app interactions like hotspots, hints, and pop-ups.

If you want more control over the entire client experience, not just the onboarding pop-ups, and would rather build one flexible app than pay for several point solutions as you grow, building a client portal with Softr is worth trying first.