In 2023, if your product still hasn’t adopted PLG, you are running a race with your hands tied behind your back—and a sack over your head.
Openview Partners, one of the most active Venture Capitalists and an early backer of companies like Datadog, Calendly, Expensify, and UserTesting, are known for their expertise in Product-led Growth (PLG)
They define PLG as,
“A growth strategy where the product itself acts as the primary driver of acquisition, retention and expansion.”
And it simply means that in all three phases, your product should do the talking and advocate for itself.
Now, if you’ve made a great product that satisfies some pressing pain points, retention and expansion become easy as your users experience it first-hand. However, for acquisition via your website, getting your product to convince visitors to sign up is difficult.
Many Companies Still Rely on Videos to Drive Their PLG
And that has some limitations, like
- Updating videos with new features is painful and costly
- Videos are a one-way communication asset, belonging to the “tell, don’t show” category
- They aren’t ideal for talking about complex products/ features, as you’d want to keep your videos short
- Lacks the actual product experience
And That’s Where Interactive Demos Steps in
Interactive Demos have changed the entire landscape of PLG. They are extremely easy to create, so much so that some providers claim that the demos can be created in 10 minutes. By embedding one on your website, you can,
- Get prospects to interact with even the most subtle aspects of your product
- Convey a clear first-hand understanding of how your product functions
- Identify and qualify the most high-intent visitors right through the demo
It’s worth noting, however, that not all the interactive demo tools cater to marketing use cases. Some also purely cater to sales use cases with basic marketing support, while a selected few cater to both.
Let’s look at the top 5 interactive demo tools out there
1. Storylane
Storylane is rated 4.8/ 5 on G2 on 150+ reviews.
Storylane is an interactive demo platform to create and share compelling product demos with prospects as well as customers. The company claims to have over 750 customers and features as a leader on G2 Crowd in the Demo Automation category, along with a few other players. They cater to both marketing and sales use cases, targeting product marketers, growth marketers, and demand gen specialists on the marketing side and solution engineers, presales and sales teams.
What we liked about Storylane is it has a free trial option, which one can access by simply signing up on their website. Buyers who are still on the fringes can use this trial version to test out the product for an extended period before upgrading.
Popular use cases include
- Product Tours: Embed interactive product tours on your website to drive PLG and capture qualified leads to boost your sales pipeline.
- Email Campaigns: Add product tours into your email campaigns to make it easier to showcase new features or specific product flows for your SDR reachouts.
- Blogs/Landing pages: Embed small, quick guided tours of your product features in your blogs, resources, or landing pages to drive engagement.
- Efficient Demo Creation: Enable product marketing and pre-sales teams to create new demos rapidly. This will help sales to deliver personalized demo experiences to every buyer.
- Demo Leave-Behinds: Create personalized, clickable product demos customized for prospects, perfect as leave-behinds. This approach helps your champion buyers grasp your product and speed up deal closures.
Top Features
- Custom lead capture forms
- AI assistance for creating demo tooltips
- Demo reveal to identify anonymous demo visitors
- Video and GIF exports of demos
- Direct integration with the best CRMs and Marketing Automation tools
Limitations
- The free plan has a one user restriction and also offers limited features when compared to the paid plans
- 250 demo visitor accounts can be identified per month in the starter plan
Pricing
Storylane has a publicly visible pricing page and is priced on a per-seat/ user basis. They have four different plans, and all the paid plans include unlimited demos and views.
- Solo – Free plan with the limitation of 1 user and one published demo
- Starter – $40 per user
- Growth – $100 per user
- Enterprise – Custom pricing
2. Reprise
Reprise is rated 4.3/ 5 on G2 on 120+ reviews.
Reprise empowers sales and marketing teams to build personalized, interactive demos that lead to greater conversions, shorter sales cycles, and more revenue. For sales and marketing leaders who strive to showcase their products expertly, Reprise fully integrates live demos, guided demos, and product tours to show the value of your product seamlessly at every phase of the buyer’s journey.
Popular use cases include
- Product Tours: Drive engagement and conversions on your website by embedding interactive demos and sharing guided demos with your prospects.
- Live Demos: With Reprise live demos, save time and valuable resources by giving your sales team a secure, repeatable demo environment with anonymized, customized, and verticalized data.
- Sandbox Environments: Clone your full product into a secure demo environment and give your buyers the full features and interactivity of your application while curating a customized, anonymized product experience.
Top Features
- Global search and replace
- Image blurring
- Tethered and floating guides
- Variables tokens
- Full demo replays
Limitations
- They’re geared more towards sales than marketing use cases
- Does not support mobile demos
- Their demo editor is not the most user-friendly, and people have complained about it being quite cumbersome to use (as per some of their G2 reviews)
Pricing
Reprise doesn’t have a publicly visible pricing page. They don’t have either a freemium or even a trial version, and you’ll need to speak to their sales to see or try the platform. Also, from what we learned during our research, they only cater to the higher end of the market, that is, only enterprise customers. A company needs to have a strength of 300+ employees to speak to Reprise.
3. Demoboost
Demoboost is rated 4.8/ 5 on G2 on 30+ reviews.
Demoboost helps software companies deliver demo experiences that sell. Presales, sales, marketing and customer success teams use Demoboost to easily and quickly prepare, share, and track product demos with their customers. They avoid spending a lot of time preparing demos or relying on generic ones, frustrating customers with long wait times and stressing about unstable infrastructure. Instead, they use Demoboost and enjoy more effective teams, happier customers, and a better bottom line.
Popular use cases include,
- Guided Product Tours: Enable buyers with sheer clarity, help them understand product value, remove misconceptions, and strengthen the impression of your product at every stage.
- Demo Gallery: Unleash the power of an automated demo library with minimal effort. Demoboost supports you with all the hard work, allowing you to quickly capitalize on automated demo platforms and increase your long-term value.
- Live Demos: Hide all on-demand narratives during your live demo presentation to use the same demo in unassisted use cases, live sessions, and follow-up demos.
- Closing Demos: Execute your sales strategies with progressive technology and efficiency to influence all the stakeholders with a single demo, avoiding back-and-forth conversations.
- Interactive Tutorial: Supercharge your adoption with on-demand interactive tutorials. Optimize onboarding and adoption processes to effectively showcase the value your product brings, ensuring long-term customer satisfaction and success.
Top Features
- No-code demo editor
- Live demo assist
- Personalization
- Variables tokens
- Demo analytics
Limitations
- They’ve very limited integration capabilities
- Sometimes the tool faces issues while capturing products on the Safari browser
- Learning the product interface could take time and the response could also be slower sometimes
Pricing
Demoboost doesn’t have a publicly visible pricing page. They don’t have either a freemium or even a trial version and you’ll need to speak to their sales to see or try the platform. From their G2 reviews, it’s apparent that most of their customers are in the small business segment.
4. Tourial
Tourial is rated 4.5/ 5 on G2 on 50+ reviews.
Tourial enables go-to-market teams to create interactive demos and demo centers and distribute them anywhere. Demo centers empower you to educate your buyers faster and better than ever — from the very top of the funnel all the way down. It’s a personalized content hub for your prospects to find the most important info they need, share with their team, and provide you with data on what they care about. Embed or share your interactive demos across any channel and convert prospects faster, influence pipeline, and accelerate deal cycles.
Tourial only offers screenshot-based demos and it claims that its interactive demos can be added at multiple places like websites, outbound, leave-behinds, events, marketplaces, product launches and paid media, all for a better experience.
Top Features
- No-code demo editor
- Multi-team
- Templates
- Customizable slugs for demo URLs
- A separate styling and configuration menu
Limitations
- The demo editor has quite a few limitations in terms of the design elements available and adjusting the ordering of the screenshots
- The mobile experience can be better
- The tool has a bit of a learning curve for new users
Pricing
While Tourial does have a publicly visible pricing page, it only details the features available with the different pricing options and doesn’t give any information on the actual pricing. They don’t have either a freemium or even a trial version and you’ll need to speak to their sales to see or try the platform.
5. Walnut
Walnut is rated 4.4/ 5 on G2 on 70+ reviews.
Walnut enables B2B companies to fully customize, manage, and optimize their sales demos. By using Walnut to create personalized and failure-free demos for their clients, sales professionals can increase their conversion rate while collecting valuable insights to improve their sales process. Walnut integrates with a company’s CRMs and data sources, making the process of creating sales demos both automated and customizable.
Popular use cases include,
- Sales Demos: Create sales demo environments that improve your buyers’ experience with tailor-made sales demos. Add guides so they can walk through your product by themselves.
- Product Tours: Increase conversions by embedding a product tour on your website or in your marketing materials and let visitors interact with your product early on through an interactive marketing demo.
- User Onboarding: Simplify your customers’ onboarding experience through client onboarding software that allows you to share interactive tutorials that train them to use your platform.
Top Features
- Annotations
- Tags
- Team collaboration
- Hide elements
- Presenter notes
Limitations
- Has a rather steep learning curve as its interface is not the most user-friendly as compared to some of the other tools listed here
- Walnut also lacks apt documentation support to help new users get started
- Limited direct integrations
Pricing
Walnut’s pricing isn’t publicly available. They don’t have either a freemium or even a trial version, and you’ll need to speak to their sales to see or try the platform.
Verdict
A major difference we found is that the majority of the tools specialize in solving for either sales or marketing use cases, even when they claim that they can solve for both. Hence, from the above list, we found only Storylane and Tourial to predominantly cater to the marketing use cases, while others leaned more toward the sales use cases.
That being said, it’s good to do your own research before zeroing in on one. The reason is, while the outcome for all the tools would look the same, your evaluation criteria should include,
- How easy is it to capture your product
- How easy is it to get started and edit the demos
- How seamlessly it integrates with your current tools (CRM and Marketing Automation)
- The comparative costing
About the Author
Anand Vatsya is a Storylaner with 7+ years of experience in Product Marketing. As the Product Marketing Manager at Storylane, he’s shaping the narrative of Demo Automation for modern SaaS companies. Storylane is an interactive demo software used by SaaS sales and marketing teams to close deals faster.