What user onboarding tools cost in 2026 — and how they charge

1. By monthly active users (MAU)

The most common model. You pay by how many people load your product with the vendor’s script in a month, in tiers such as “up to 2,000 MAU”. It is simple to start, and the price tracks the vendor’s own cost of serving you. The catch is that your bill grows with your user base, not with how much onboarding you run. A tour shown to 50 new users a month is priced by all the users who merely logged in.

2. Tiered by features

Usually combined with MAU. The entry tier has tours and tooltips; checklists, surveys, a resource center, audience targeting, A/B tests, SSO or mobile sit in higher tiers. Read the tier table against your own feature list, not the headline price. The feature you need most often decides the tier.

3. By seats

You pay per team member who uses the tool. It is rare among pure onboarding tools and common when tours are an add-on to a bigger platform, such as a customer-service suite. It is predictable, but it gets expensive when the platform itself is priced per agent and the tours cost extra on top.

4. Sales-quoted

Enterprise digital adoption platforms, and the upper tiers of most onboarding tools, have no public price. You get a quote after a discovery call, usually for an annual contract. That is not a problem in itself, since large contracts are negotiated anyway. But you can’t compare tools before talking to sales, and the first number is rarely the last.

A fifth, less common model is a <b>one-time licence</b>: you pay once for a version, sometimes with a year of updates, and run it on your own servers or keep a cloud account without a subscription.

• Your MAU, and how the vendor counts it. Anyone who loads a page with the script, or only identified, signed-in users? Does the marketing site count if the script is there too?
• Published experiences. Some plans cap how many tours, checklists or flows can be live at once.
• Add-ons. Surveys and NPS, session replay, a resource center, mobile SDKs, localization, extra environments.
• Security and compliance. SSO, audit logs, custom data retention, EU data residency and a signed DPA often sit in the top tier.
• Seats, when the tool or the platform around it is priced per user.
• Billing period. Annual prepayment is often the only option on higher tiers; monthly, where offered, usually costs more.
• Overages. What happens when you cross your MAU tier in the middle of a contract: an automatic upgrade, a surcharge, or a conversation at renewal.

Below is what each vendor showed on its own website when we last checked. We only list prices the vendor publishes, and we don’t estimate quotes.

Prices as published on each vendor’s website in September 2026. They change often — check the vendor’s pricing page before deciding, and email hello@getclew.io if something here is out of date.

• What does the plan cost at our MAU today, and at two and three times that number?
• How exactly is a monthly active user counted, and over what period?
• Which of the features we listed are included, and which are add-ons with their own price?
• Is there a monthly option, or only annual? Is the price locked at renewal?
• What happens if we exceed the tier during the contract?
• How many tours, checklists or flows can be published at once?
• Where is user data stored, can it stay in the EU, and can we self-host?
• Can we export our content if we leave?

• Install the script only where onboarding happens — usually the signed-in app, not the marketing site — when you pay by MAU.
• Start with the formats you need now. A tour and a checklist cover most first-session onboarding; surveys and resource centers can wait.
• Compare the price at your expected MAU in a year, not today.
• Check whether a free plan lets you publish, or only build and preview.
• If you only need web onboarding, don’t pay for mobile SDKs or product-wide analytics you already have elsewhere.

We make Clew, so here are our own prices, from the same data as our pricing page. Plans differ by sites, team seats and published tours — never by monthly active users. Visitors and tooltip views are not capped.

Free forever · Pro and Business — 14-day trial, no card. Prices in US dollars.

Clew is web-only: tours, tooltips, modals and onboarding checklists, with A/B tests from Pro. It has no native mobile SDKs, session replay or surveys. If you need those, the tools above are the better buy. Full details are on the pricing section, and the self-hosted edition is described on self-hosted user onboarding.