10+ Product-Led Growth Tools: Essential Solutions for Every Stage of Your Product
Slack, Zoom, and Canva—what do these unicorns have in common?
Their product powered their growth.
Your product doesn’t just support your growth strategy, it IS your growth strategy.
Product-led growth (PLG) redefines how businesses scale by making the product the central driver of customer acquisition and retention.
Unlike traditional strategies that rely heavily on sales and marketing, PLG focuses on delivering a seamless and intuitive product experience. This approach allows users to discover value independently, fostering loyalty, accelerating adoption, and driving organic word-of-mouth growth.
In this blog, we’ll discover the top PLG tools that can help your product team create a frictionless user experience, drive adoption, and maximize the true potential of your product.
Why are product-led growth tools important?
PLG tools are the backbone of a strategy that drives sustainable, scalable growth. They are essential because they enable companies to seamlessly scale by leveraging the product to drive user engagement and acquisition.
Here’s why they’re crucial:
- Improved customer onboarding: PLG tools make onboarding intuitive, helping users to quickly discover and experience the value of your product independently, without requiring extensive training or support.
- Enhanced user retention: By providing an ongoing, frictionless product experience, these tools ensure users remain engaged and continue finding value in your product, reducing churn.
- Data-driven insights: PLG tools help track user behavior and identify pain points, giving you actionable insights to continuously optimize the product and improve the user experience.
- Lower acquisition costs: Since the product itself attracts and retains users, companies can reduce reliance on expensive sales and marketing campaigns, making growth more cost-effective.
Best product-led growth tools: Quick overview
- VWO Insights
- Hotjar
- Chartmogul
- Mixpanel
- VWO Testing
- A/B Tasty
- Productboard
- Aha
- Userpilot
- Appcues
- Survicate
- Refiner
12 Best product-led growth tools: In-depth review
Product analytics tools
1. VWO Insights
VWO is an all-in-one conversion rate optimization tool that drives product-led growth by integrating behavior analytics, experimentation, and personalization. It empowers businesses to understand user interactions on their websites or apps while providing the tools to design, implement, and evaluate experiments with accuracy. VWO covers every aspect of optimizing the user journey.
VWO Insights is a behavior analytics tool that helps businesses understand user interactions and discover actionable insights by analyzing data from heatmaps, session recordings, and surveys. It provides a deeper understanding of user behavior, enabling teams to optimize website experiences and improve conversions effectively.
Key features include:
Heatmaps
Heatmaps provide a visual representation of where users click, scroll, and engage on a webpage. The heatmap dashboard allows you to enable data collection, view heatmaps for specific URLs, filter results, and analyze data for targeted visitor segments. You can also create customized views and configure heatmap settings for tailored insights and improved usability.
Session recordings
Session recordings track user interactions, highlighting frustration points like rage and dead clicks. Custom filters allow segmentation by funnel stage, test variations, or pages for targeted insights. Flexible tracking and scheduling options enable a focused analysis of specific times or visitor segments.
Funnels
Funnels track user behavior to identify drop-offs and conversion inefficiencies. The visitor journey visualization highlights where users drop off, enabling targeted improvements.
Advanced segmentation by query parameters, devices, or events uncovers patterns to boost product adoption.
On-page surveys
On-page surveys collect visitor insights with AI-powered features, offering targeted feedback and easy analysis. Surveys can be triggered by factors like time, scroll depth, or exit intent, and tailored with conditional branching. Reports with charts and NPS scores highlight trends and areas for improvement.
Leverage VWO Copilot to streamline and accelerate the optimization process. With features like survey automation, behavior insights from heatmaps and session recordings, and AI-driven audience segmentation, it reduces manual effort and increases efficiency.
Pricing
VWO Insights offers three plans:
- Growth: $139/month, billed annually
- Pro: $329/month, billed annually
- Enterprise: $775/month, billed annually
Free trial
VWO offers a 30-day, all-inclusive free trial
How VWO fueled WorkZone’s product-led growth
WorkZone, a SaaS project management and collaboration tool, leveraged VWO Testing and VWO Insights (Behavior Analytics) to optimize its lead generation page and significantly improve conversions.
Approach:
- Challenge: The lead generation page featured colored customer logos in the testimonials section, which drew attention away from the form and appeared clickable.
- Hypothesis: Replacing the colored logos with black-and-white versions would reduce distractions and improve focus on the form.
- Execution: WorkZone identified distractions on the page through heatmaps and clickmaps, revealing that users were engaging more with the colorful logos than the form. Based on these insights, they refined their hypothesis. WorkZone ran an A/B test to compare the original page against a variation with black-and-white logos. The test ran for 22 days, targeting new visitors through behavioral targeting.
Results:
The variation outperformed the original, achieving:
- 34% increase in form submissions
- 99% statistical significance, validating the hypothesis
By improving its lead generation page, WorkZone successfully drove more demo requests, increasing the number of potential customers entering the product funnel. This experiment demonstrates how VWO Testing and Behavior Analytics can work together to:
- Enhance user experience
- Drive key business outcomes
- Build a sustainable, product-led growth strategy
Feedback from a VWO client
I really like that we can use VWO across every department. It’s pretty easy to use and straightforward. Test results are easy to read also for people who don’t have testing experience. Testing experience with VWO was quite intuitive for all. UX of the tool was quite accessible as well.
March Sandifer
Senior Product Manager, Contorion
2. Hotjar
Hotjar is a user behavior analytics tool that provides insights into how visitors interact with a website or product. By providing insights into user actions, feedback, and pain points, Hotjar helps product-led growth companies to make data-driven decisions that enhance user experiences and drive product improvements.
Features
1. Session recordings: You can replay users’ browsing behavior to spot bugs, understand user pain points, and analyze key cohorts like churning customers. Use these insights to optimize product flows and gain stakeholder alignment.
2. Heatmaps: You can visualize user interactions with your website to identify popular areas, discover usability issues, and optimize layouts for better engagement.
3. Surveys: You can collect user feedback through targeted on-site or standalone surveys and then leverage these insights to understand customer needs, track NPS, and improve product experiences.
4. Funnel analysis: You can track drop-offs at each stage of the user journey to pinpoint barriers and improve conversion rates through data-driven optimizations.
5. Feedback widgets: You can embed customizable feedback widgets on your website to capture real-time user input, enabling continuous product refinement.
Limitations
- Limited integration options compared to more advanced analytics platforms
- Lack of advanced reporting customization for detailed analysis
- Real-time support options are limited and rely primarily on email assistance and documentation
Pricing
Hotjar offers three plans:
1. Observe (heatmaps & recordings)
2. Ask (surveys & feedback)
3. Engage (user interviews), each with four tiers (Basic, Plus, Business, and Scale).
Prices range from $0 to custom pricing, with limits increasing at higher tiers for recordings, responses, and interview capacities.
Free trial
Hotjar offers a 15-day free trial
Ratings and reviews
- G2 rating: 4.3/5
- Capterra rating: 4.7/5
3. ChartMogul
ChartMogul is a subscription analytics platform that enables SaaS businesses to track, analyze, and optimize their recurring revenue. It empowers product-led teams to make data-driven decisions by providing detailed insights into customer behavior and subscription trends.
Features
1. Subscription analytics: It helps track key metrics like Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR), Annual Recurring Revenue (ARR), churn rates, and Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
2. Customer segmentation: It enables businesses to segment customers by revenue, behavior, and lifecycle stage.
3. Revenue insights: It provides cohort analysis and segmentation, helping teams understand revenue trends and customer retention.
4. Integrations: It seamlessly connects with payment processors like Stripe, PayPal, and Chargebee, simplifying data aggregation.
Limitations
- Limited mobile app reporting
- Inaccurate metrics for adjusted customer data
- Challenges with large datasets lacking a data lake infrastructure
Pricing
- Free – Free (for less than $120K ARR)
- Pro – $99/month (for more than $10M in ARR)
- Enterprise – $19,900 / year ($100M ARR and beyond)
Ratings and reviews
- G2: 4.6/5
- Capterra: 4.7/5
4. Mixpanel
Mixpanel is a product analytics tool designed for product-led growth companies to gain deep insights into user behavior on both web and mobile apps. By tracking user interactions and analyzing data across these channels, Mixpanel helps teams to optimize product experiences and build features that resonate with their audience, driving meaningful growth.
Features
- Track key metrics: You can monitor critical events like sign-ups, feature usage, and in-app behavior to measure the success of your PLG initiatives, across both web and mobile apps.
- Optimize onboarding: With funnel analysis, you can spot friction points in the onboarding process and improve conversion rates.
- Boost retention: With retention analysis, you can understand what keeps users coming back, whether they’re engaging through mobile apps or on your website.
- Personalize user journeys: Cohort analysis helps segment users by behavior, enabling personalized product improvements across both web and mobile channels.
- Data-driven experiments: You can also leverage A/B testing to iterate and refine product features based on real user feedback, ensuring optimal experiences on mobile and web.
Limitations
- Limited support for real-time data visualization compared to some competitors
- Requires technical expertise for advanced event setup and custom implementation
- Pricing is expensive for large teams or heavy usage
Pricing
Mixpanel offers three plans:
- Free plan
- Growth plan: Starts at $24/month for 10,000 events (scales with event volume)
- Enterprise plan: Contact for pricing
Ratings and reviews
- G2 rating: 4.6/5
- Capterra rating: 4.5/5
Growth experimentation tools
5. VWO Testing
VWO Testing is a robust platform that enables businesses to run data-driven A/B tests, multivariate tests, and split URL tests to optimize user experiences and increase conversions. Trusted by leading brands worldwide, it helps teams make confident, evidence-based decisions that drive sustainable growth.
With its intuitive interface and advanced capabilities, VWO empowers marketers, product managers, and developers to effortlessly run experiments across websites, mobile apps, and server-side environments.
Key features include:
Web testing
Test various design elements and content to identify changes that enhance conversion rates. Customize your test audience using parameters such as visitor type, operating system, behavioral data, or third-party integrations, with the flexibility to use logical operators like AND/OR for precise segmentation. By iterating on user preferences and optimizing design or content, it ensures continuous improvement in user engagement and conversion metrics.
Mobile app testing
Improve mobile experiences across iOS and Android through A/B testing, focusing on key areas like performance, usability, and responsiveness. You can quickly set up tests using plug-and-play SDKs to refine features such as onboarding, search functionality, and in-app purchases. Target specific user segments and allocate traffic with precision to maximize outcomes. By enhancing user satisfaction and optimizing app features, mobile app testing drives better retention, increased usage, and higher revenue.
Server-side testing
Conduct complex tests on the backend for elements like pricing models and subscription workflows without impacting the user experience. Use feature flags to control the rollout of new features to specific user groups, enabling targeted experiments and seamless deployments.
Server-side testing ensures scalable and data-driven feature development, reducing risks and enhancing key business metrics like customer lifetime value and conversion rates.
Pricing
VWO Testing offers three plans:
- Growth: $275/month, billed annually
- Pro: $633/month, billed annually
- Enterprise: $1,107/month, billed annually
6. AB Tasty
AB Tasty is an experimentation and personalization platform that helps businesses to run A/B tests, optimize user experiences, and personalize content across websites and apps. It’s designed to help product and marketing teams enhance conversion rates by making data-driven decisions.
Features
- A/B testing: You can run controlled experiments on your website and app to test different versions and determine which one drives better user engagement and conversions.
- Personalization: You can deliver personalized experiences to your users based on their behavior, preferences, and demographic data.
- Advanced analytics: Analyze test results in real time with built-in reporting and statistical significance tools to ensure reliable insights.
- User segmentation: Target specific user segments for personalized experiences or testing, increasing the precision of your experiments.
- Dynamic content: You can easily test and personalize dynamic content on your website or app for different user groups.
Limitations
- Challenging to create complex tests without JavaScript expertise
- Slowdowns when handling large deployments
- Difficulty in selecting specific elements for tests, often requiring additional tools or plugins
Pricing
AB Tasty’s pricing is not publicly available and is typically provided upon request, based on the specific needs and scale of your business
Ratings and reviews
- G2 rating: 4.5/5
- Capterra rating: 4.6/5
Product management tools
7. Productboard
Productboard is a complete product management platform designed to help teams prioritize features, align stakeholders, and deliver customer-centric products. It empowers product-led companies by offering tools to collect, organize, and act on customer feedback, ensuring that product decisions align with business goals and user needs.
Features
1. Centralized feedback collection: It can gather feedback from multiple sources, including customers, teams, and stakeholders, in one place. Its AI-powered feature turns feedback into actionable insights to support informed decision-making.
2. Feature prioritization frameworks: You can use scoring systems to prioritize features based on customer needs and business impact.
3. Roadmapping Tools: You can create and share visual product roadmaps to align stakeholders and communicate plans effectively.
4. Customer segmentation: You can identify and prioritize feedback from specific user segments, ensuring product updates target the right audiences.
Limitations
- Lack of analytics and customization options for deeper data analysis
- Manual adjustments are often needed, adding extra steps to workflows
- Complex features require training, impacting productivity during implementation
Pricing
Productboard provides flexible pricing options to suit various team sizes and requirements:
- Starter plan: Free (includes a single roadmap)
- Essential plan: $19/ month
- Pro plan: $59/month
- Enterprise plan: Custom pricing based on specific needs
Ratings and Reviews
- G2 Rating: 4.3/5
- Capterra Rating: 4.7/5
8. Aha!
Aha! is a comprehensive product management tool designed to help teams build customer-driven roadmaps, prioritize features, and align product strategies with business goals. It’s particularly valuable for product-led growth companies aiming to deliver value-driven solutions to their users.
Features
1. Roadmap planning: You can create visual and interactive product roadmaps to align teams and stakeholders.
2. Ideas portal: Customers and stakeholders can submit ideas for new features or products, helping product managers identify growth opportunities and align with customer needs.
3. Customer feedback management: It lets you collect and organize customer feedback to inform product decisions and innovations.
4. Scenario planning: You can build different scenarios for the product roadmap to prepare for various outcomes and inform strategic decision-making.
5. Product value scoring: It enables product managers to score features based on business value, customer impact, and technical feasibility, helping them prioritize effectively and make informed decisions about what to develop.
Limitations
- High licensing fees, which limit broader adoption across teams and organizations
- Challenges connecting with tools like Azure DevOps
- Extensive dropdowns and navigation structure confuse users
Pricing and plans
The pricing for Aha! plans is as follows:
- Roadmaps: $59/month
- Ideas: $39/month
- Whiteboards: $9/month
- Knowledge: $18/month
- Develop: $9/month
Ratings and reviews
- G2 Rating: 4.4/5
- Capterra Rating: 4.7/5
User onboarding tools
9. Userpilot
Userpilot is a product adoption platform designed to help SaaS companies build personalized, flexible, and contextually relevant in-app experiences without needing to write any code. It focuses on improving user onboarding, boosting product engagement, and driving user activation.
Features
- No-code builder: Userpilot offers a Chrome extension-based no-code builder that allows product teams to design onboarding flows, product tours, and more without any developer involvement.
- Customizable UI patterns: With a variety of UI options such as modals, slideouts, tooltips, hotspots, and banners, Userpilot enables teams to create tailored user experiences.
- In-app onboarding: You can easily create interactive walkthroughs and onboarding flows that can be targeted to specific user segments to boost product adoption.
- Event tracking and feature tagging: You can track in-app events like clicks, hovers, and form fills, then group them into custom events to measure user interactions and optimize product experiences.
Limitations
- Userpilot is designed for web applications and doesn’t support mobile apps
- It’s mainly focused on customer onboarding and doesn’t support building in-app guides for third-party tools
- It may be too expensive for small startups with limited budgets
Pricing
- Starter: $249/month
- Growth: $799/month
- Enterprise: Custom pricing
Ratings and reviews
- G2 rating: 4.6/5
- Capterra rating: 4.6/5
10. Appcues
Appcues is a no-code user onboarding platform designed to help non-technical teams track, analyze, and optimize product usage. It allows you to create in-app onboarding tours, announcements, and surveys, enabling smoother product adoption.
Features
- Product tour creation: Building a product tour in Appcues is relatively easy. You simply select a UI pattern and customize it ‘live’, or point to the elements you want.
- Event tracking: You can track UI engagement with Events Explorer, which allows you to tag elements without coding.
- Custom segmentation: You can build custom user segments based on user properties, flows, interactions, or events you set up in the events explorer.
- In-app surveys: You can build in-app surveys using modals or the integrated NPS tool.
- Checklists: You can create checklists to prompt users to take action
- Designing onboarding flows: It is ideal for designing customer onboarding flows to reduce time to value (TTV) for new users, ensuring they can quickly understand and start utilizing the product’s core features.
Limitations
- Appcues lacks a resource center feature, which means you can’t offer self-service support to your users
- Lacks certain transition actions like driven actions, scroll position, or page change, making product tours less interactive
- It can be more expensive compared to other alternatives
Ratings and reviews
- G2 Rating: 4.6/5
- Capterra Rating: 4.8/5
Customer feedback tools
11. Survicate
Survicate is a customer feedback platform designed to gather insights directly from users on both web and mobile platforms. Through customizable surveys and feedback tools, Survicate helps teams to prioritize product improvements based on real customer input.
Features
- Targeted Surveys: Deploy surveys to specific user cohorts across both web and mobile AI-powered survey creator: You can create surveys in seconds with an AI-driven survey generator and customize it further to suit your needs.
- In-product micro surveys: You can display pop-up surveys within your app or website, targeting the right users at the right time for valuable, contextual insights.
- Advanced targeting and triggering: Set precise survey triggers and target specific user segments based on response attributes to gather highly contextual feedback.
- Multiple survey types: Survicate offers various survey options, including in-product surveys for web and mobile, email surveys, link surveys, and a Feedback Button for easy feedback collection.
- Real-time analytics dashboard: You can track responses and performance with an analytics dashboard that provides insights in real time and supports actionable reporting.
Limitations
- Lack of advanced analytics for complex surveys
- Difficulty in launching surveys or needing at least one answer to display them
- Limited customization options for pre-set surveys like C-SAT
Pricing
- Good – $99/mo
- Better – $149/mo
- Best – $249/mo
- Better Than The Rest – From $299/mo
Free trial
Survicate provides a 10-day free trial, limited to 25 survey responses
Ratings and reviews
- G2 rating: 4.6/5
- Capterra rating: 4.6/5
12. Refiner
Refiner is a customer feedback and survey tool designed specifically for SaaS and product-led companies. It helps businesses collect qualitative and quantitative feedback directly from users, enabling teams to make informed product decisions.
Features
1. Diverse survey types: It lets you collect customer feedback with NPS surveys, CSAT, CES surveys, and product-market fit surveys.
2. Survey distribution: You can launch surveys via email, in-app widgets, or dedicated survey pages to reach customers effectively.
3. Customer success tracking: You can monitor and improve customer satisfaction and loyalty through consistent feedback loops.
4. In-depth reporting: It lets you analyze survey results using advanced segmentation and reporting tools for actionable insights.
Limitations
- Limited content customization options
- Occasional delays or limitations when resolving issues
- Limited number of live surveys, requires upgrades for broader use
Pricing
- Essentials Plan: $99/month (basic survey features and limited responses)
- Growth Plan: $239/month (advanced targeting, reporting, and integrations)
- Enterprise Plan: Custom pricing (tailored for larger teams with additional features)
Free trial
It offers a 14-day free trial
Ratings and reviews
- G2 Rating: 4.6/5
- Capterra Rating: 4.7/5
Comparison of product-led growth tools
Here’s a comparison table for the top 5 product-led growth tools, based on features and pricing:
Tool | Category | Starting price |
VWO | All-in-one CRO tool with behavior analytics and experimentation | Insights: $139/month (Growth plan) Testing: $275/month (Growth plan) |
ChartMogul | Subscription analytics | Free plan (for < $120K ARR); $99/month (Pro) |
Mixpanel | Product analytics | Paid plans start at $24/month |
AB Tasty | Experimentation and personalization | Custom pricing |
Productboard | Product management and feedback | Essential plan start at $19/ month |
How to choose the right product-led growth tools
Choosing the right product-led growth (PLG) tools is crucial for driving growth and improving user experience. When evaluating PLG tools, consider the following:
1. Alignment with goals
Ensure the tool helps meet your business objectives, whether it’s increasing user engagement, improving onboarding, or boosting retention.
2. Ease of integration
Choose tools that integrate seamlessly with your existing tech stack to avoid disruption.
3. Scalability
Look for tools that can grow with your business as user demands and product complexity evolve.
4. User-friendliness
Opt for tools with intuitive interfaces to streamline adoption for both your team and users.
5. Data-driven insights
Select tools that provide actionable data to guide decisions and optimize the user experience.
Wrapping up
In a product-led growth strategy, the right tools can make all the difference. By selecting tools that align with your goals, integrate smoothly, scale with your business, and offer valuable insights, you can set your product-led strategy for success.
VWO is a comprehensive tool that integrates behavior analytics and experimentation, helping you optimize every step of the user journey. Experience the impact of product-led growth with VWO. Start your free trial today!
Frequently asked questions (FAQs)
PLG stands for product-led growth, a business strategy where the product itself is the primary driver of customer acquisition, retention, and expansion in SaaS companies.
PLG software refers to tools and platforms that help businesses implement a product-led growth strategy. These tools often include features for user behavior analytics, experimentation, onboarding optimization, and self-service capabilities to enhance the product and customer experience.
PLG is crucial because it places the product at the center of growth efforts. This strategy helps users to experience the value of the product directly, which can lead to faster adoption, higher retention rates, and organic growth through word-of-mouth.
Product growth can be ensured by:
a. Continuously gathering and acting on user feedback
b. Running A/B tests to optimize the user experience
c. Tracking engagement and retention metrics
d. Improving onboarding experiences to help users quickly see value
Product growth can be tracked by monitoring key metrics, such as:
a. Monthly active users (MAUs)
b. Customer lifetime value (CLV)
c. Churn rate
d. Conversion rates across the user journey
Behavior analytics tools like VWO or Mixpanel can provide actionable insights.
Tracking a product life cycle involves analyzing its performance during different stages – introduction, growth, maturity, and decline. Key metrics include adoption rates, revenue trends, and customer feedback, often supported by tools for analytics and lifecycle management.
To implement PLG:
a. Start with a product that delivers clear value independently
b. Make onboarding seamless and self-serve
c. Use data to improve and personalize the user experience
d. Encourage free trials or freemium models to lower the barrier to entry
Invest in tools like VWO for experimentation and analytics.
Slack is a great example of product-led growth. Its freemium model allows teams to use its core features for free, showcasing value upfront. As teams grow, many transition to paid plans for advanced features, driving organic growth.