What is Pendo?

Pendo is a software experience management (SXM) platform built to elevate the world’s experience with software.

The Pendo SXM platform helps product teams and application owners improve users’ experience with their software (whether those users are customers or their fellow employees) with a premier digital adoption solution. In today’s business world, virtually every company is a software company—including banks, retailers, and other brick-and-mortar businesses that have been around for decades. Customer and employee interactions have dramatically shifted to digital spaces, putting the software experience at the center of the business. And when companies implement new digital tools, HR, IT, internal product managers, and change management leaders need to ensure successful digital adoption of the software.

Pendo exists to make digital experiences better, no matter what you make or sell to customers and no matter what tools you use for your employees.

Who can use the Pendo platform?

Anyone interested in improving the customer or employee experience can use Pendo. Examples of users by role include:

“Improving the world’s experiences with software”

As a user, I always got frustrated if I found myself stuck while using a software product—maybe the page is slow to load, or the button isn’t where I expected it to be, or it’s missing a feature that I thought it had. These small moments can have a big impact on the user experience, and as a product person, I want to avoid my users feeling this type of frustration at all costs. But in order to know how to improve users’ experience with a product, you first need to understand how they’re using it, what they want from it, and which usage patterns lead to success. Not to mention be able to communicate this to them in a way that resonates and empowers customers to use the product to its fullest extent.

— Todd Olson, CEO & Founder of Pendo

How does Pendo work?

Unlike point solutions that address only analytics, or in-app guidance, or feedback, Pendo lets you do all this and more under a unified digital adoption platform. The result is both cost savings and reduced digital friction resulting from toggling back and forth between multiple apps. Pendo’s all-in-one solution also means teams have a unified data set at their fingertips, with no risk of siloed data creating inefficiencies or blockers to driving software experience improvements and change.

The business case for product experience software

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What can you do with Pendo??

Pendo offers a comprehensive set of products for improving product and app experiences and driving better business outcomes in its all-in-one platform. These include:

Analytics: Understand how your software is really used

Pendo's product analytics capabilities help organizations measure product usage, user behavior, and AI agent performance, giving you the insights needed to drive adoption and prove value.

Product Analytics

Our product analytics software reveals how users navigate your products, which features deliver the most value, and where they drop off. Track adoption patterns by account, user role, or sentiment. Leverage AI-powered insights to uncover trends, spot opportunities, and guide decision-making with quantitative and qualitative data in unified dashboards.

Agent Analytics

Pendo Agent Analytics measures how users engage with conversational AI agents and what outcomes they drive. See what users actually ask agents, connect prompts to downstream results like task completion and retention, and prove ROI by identifying which interactions create value. It's the first solution of its kind, giving you visibility to accelerate AI adoption and maximize your investment.

Web Analytics

Unified web and product analytics reveal which campaigns attract highly-engaged users and how visitors convert across your digital properties, all within the context of authenticated user behavior.

In-app guidance: Turn insights into action

You've identified the problem in your analytics: users dropping off, missing features, struggling to find value. Pendo's in-app guidance software delivers the solution at the moment users need it, without waiting on engineering.

Common in-app guides you can create

Onboarding walkthroughs: Guide new users to first-value moments with step-by-step tutorials

Feature announcements: Introduce new capabilities with targeted lightboxes and banners

Contextual tooltips: Provide just-in-time help that appears when users need it most

Self-service support: Answer common questions directly in-app, reducing support tickets by 15% on average

Feedback collection: Capture user sentiment with in-app polls while the experience is fresh

Event promotions: Drive webinar and training attendance with targeted in-app messaging

Turn friction into growth

Deploy an in-app guide when users abandon workflows. Create contextual help where they get stuck. Launch new onboarding flows in minutes and measure what works and fix what doesn’t.

Listen: Build what users want and need

Product teams drown in feedback, scattered across Slack, support tickets, sales calls, and in-app surveys. Pendo Listen centralizes user feedback across your entire ecosystem and uses AI to surface what actually matters.

Stop guessing, start building with confidence

Listen automatically analyzes feedback alongside product usage data to show which feature requests come from your most engaged users, which ideas solve real problems vs. one-off asks, and what will drive adoption vs. wasted R&D spend.

How product teams use Listen

Centralize feedback: Capture user input in-app and pull feedback from Salesforce, Zendesk, and other tools into one place

AI-powered analysis: Automatically summarize themes, surface trends, and flag duplicate requests across thousands of feedback items

Validate before building: Enrich feedback with user behavior data to prioritize ideas based on actual impact, not loudest voices

Build better roadmaps: Connect validated ideas to Jira and share roadmaps that align teams around features users will actually use

Validate: A component of Pendo Listen, Pendo Validate helps teams build digital experiences they know customers will love and pay for. Not only can they add ideas to Pendo and set impact and effort ratings, they can also share up to three of those ideas with a segment of customers, in-app in order to get feedback on them. Pendo lets product teams conduct in-depth analysis of ideas based on votes, accounts, ARR, impact, and effort. The result is a streamlined discovery process that puts product teams in a position to drive wins for the business.

Session replay: See the behavior behind the data

Your analytics show a 40% drop-off on a critical page. Users are complaining, but you can't pinpoint why. NPS scores are tanking for a specific segment. What actually happened?

Pendo's session replay software shows you. Watch video playbacks of real user sessions across web and mobile: every click, scroll, rage click, and abandoned workflow. See exactly what users experience in the moments before they churn, submit negative feedback, or contact support. It's visual proof that validates your next steps.

Unlimited replays, zero blind spots: Unlike session replay tools that cap recordings or charge per replay, Pendo captures every user interaction. Filter by segment, NPS response, guide click, or let AI surface "Suggested Replays" that reveal hidden friction patterns like rage clicks and declining usage trends.

Privacy-first by design: Three out-of-the-box privacy settings automatically mask sensitive data—passwords, PII, form inputs—applied on the client side before anything reaches Pendo. Fully customizable to your compliance needs (GDPR, CCPA, SOC 2).

One platform, complete context: Session replay lives inside Pendo alongside analytics, feedback, and sentiment data and it works across web and mobile. Spot a drop-off in your funnel? Click "Watch replay" and see exactly what broke. No context-switching, no blind spots. Just the full story of what users actually experience.

Data Sync: Make product data a first-class citizen in your data warehouse

Product usage lives in Pendo.

Revenue data lives in Salesforce. Support tickets live in Zendesk. Your executive dashboard needs all three, but data engineering is backlogged for months. How do you connect product behavior to business outcomes without custom pipelines?

Pendo's Data Sync

tool brings product data to where business decisions happen, feeding into your BI platforms and cloud data warehouses like Snowflake without overloading data engineering teams. Export and blend all product usage data with business metrics to create a centralized source of truth.

Connect insights to outcomes

Join Pendo's product analytics with revenue, support tickets, and customer health scores. See which features drive retention, which behaviors predict churn, and how product engagement correlates with expansion revenue. Get deeper, more holistic insights into both customers and product motions by combining product data with the full breadth of your key business data.

No engineering bottlenecks

Schedule automated syncs, transform data as needed, and let analysts build their own reports. With Data Sync, every department from product to finance to the C-suite speaks the same universal language of the business.

Roadmaps: Communicate your product priorities

Product ships features. Sales asks "why this?" Customers ask "when will X be ready?" Executives want to know which initiatives will drive revenue. Everyone has different priorities, and roadmap meetings turn into debates instead of decisions.

Pendo Roadmaps—part of Pendo Listen—helps product teams align internal stakeholders and bring data into product planning. Share the "why" behind roadmap decisions to keep teams aligned and motivated.

Build roadmaps backed by data

Link specific customer feedback requests and Idea Tests from Listen directly to initiatives and features. Show total votes and dollar values associated with each item on your roadmap. Validate and visualize the impact of every feature and initiative to prove the value of product teams' work with quantitative evidence, not just opinions.

Stay flexible as priorities shift

Easily drag and drop items as you gather customer feedback and validate ideas. Build private and team roadmaps to communicate the right information at the right time. Adjust your roadmap as new learnings emerge, ensuring everyone from sales to success knows what's shipping and why it matters.

Orchestrate: Message automation made easy

Users skip onboarding steps in your product, but you can't reach them until they log back in. Usage drops, and you need to re-engage before they churn. You launch a new feature, but half your users never see the in-app announcement. Not every important moment happens when users are logged in.

Pendo Orchestrate is a user engagement platform that empowers product teams to create customer journey mapping through cross-channel communications—combining in-app guides with email—to reach users whether they're logged in or not, no marketing support needed.

Right message, right user, every time

Seamlessly integrated with Pendo's rich segmentation capabilities, this customer engagement platform lets you build personalized messaging sequences for different user roles, jobs to be done, or regions. Behavior-based triggers automatically send the right messages at the right moments based on in-app actions: send onboarding emails when users skip critical steps, launch re-engagement campaigns when usage drops, or announce features to targeted segments.

Understand impact and drive growth

Connect message metrics with in-app behaviors like feature adoption to measure impact. With intuitive no-code email tools, product, marketing, customer education, HR, and other teams can build automated journeys that extend influence beyond the application while driving feature adoption and user engagement.

AI: Prepare for the agentic era

Pendo AI helps you do more with less—and prepares your company for the new world of agentic software. The power of Pendo AI stems from a massive dataset based on trillions of data points and billions of daily interactions—clicks, swipes, poll responses, feedback requests, and guide views—collected across 10,000+ companies.

AI across the platform

Pendo AI powers personalization throughout the platform, delivering automated, customized content at the right time. In Listen, Copilot acts as your virtual Product Operations manager, organizing and triaging feedback in real-time to accelerate product discovery. Generate in-app guides using simple prompts. Get AI-powered insights that surface trends and patterns that would take analysts weeks to find manually.

Agent Analytics: Measure AI agent performance. Whether you're building or deploying AI agents, Pendo Agent Analytics gives you usage insights to see how agents are performing and how to improve them. See which agents are gaining traction, what users are trying to achieve, where drop-offs occur, and how usage varies by role and workflow. Quantify how agents impact conversion, task completion, and churn to prioritize improvements and justify AI investments.

Agent Mode: Your conversational, strategic partner. Ask questions and gain instant insights without manual analysis in Pendo. Agent Mode proactively flags issues, recommends next steps, and takes actions to help you fight churn, find revenue opportunities, and avoid risk. Always on, always monitoring usage trends, sentiment shifts, and success signals at scale—even while you're talking to customers.

Pendo MCP: Make product signals actionable everywhere. Pendo's Model Context Protocol (MCP) server makes product data accessible outside Pendo—from usage events and feature adoption to guide metrics and metadata. Wire Pendo product signals into AI tools and workflows to ground LLMs in factual behavior data. The result: AI that stops guessing and starts acting with precise recommendations, personalized experiences, and credible outputs based on how people actually use your product.

Pendo Predict: Identify what matters before it's too late with this churn prediction software. Use machine learning to spot users and accounts that matter most—whether they're at risk of churn, primed for conversion, or ready for expansion. Pendo Predict analyzes product usage signals to identify early warning signs and growth opportunities. Turn behavioral data into clear, actionable insights for product, sales, and marketing teams—based on real user behavior, not just firmographics.

Mobile: Seamless experiences across every screen

Users don't think in terms of "web app" versus "mobile app"—they expect consistent, high-quality experiences everywhere. But mobile behavior is fundamentally different than web, and bugs are twice as hard to reproduce without seeing what actually happened.

Pendo's mobile platform helps product teams create user experiences that engage customers across all screens. Build a seamless customer journey across mobile and desktop applications by tracking how users navigate iOS and Android apps, deploying in-app guides and walkthroughs without releasing new app versions, replaying user sessions to get context behind friction points, and getting the data teams need to improve the mobile experience.

Integrations with Pendo

Pendo makes it easy to connect the power of its platform with the other tools you use every day, including CRM apps (Pendo for Salesforce, HubSpot), collaboration tools (Okta, Slack), product tools (Figma, G2), business intelligence (BI) tools (Looker, Domo), and a host of other apps.

Is there a free version of Pendo

Yes — Pendo for Free. It’s purpose-built for early-stage and fast-growing teams that need product signal and in-app engagement without adding burn. You get up to 500 MAU, one year of data visibility in the UI, and core capabilities to validate PMF and drive activation: retroactive product analytics, unlimited page/feature tagging, segmentation, retention, plus in-app guides, surveys/polls, NPS (Pendo-branded), and roadmaps (Pendo-branded).

Why it’s great for startups and growth teams

Zero cost to instrument the funnel. Ship a lightweight install and immediately see where users convert, stall, or churn—then fix it with targeted, in-app guidance.

All-in-one vs. tool sprawl. Analytics + in-app communication + feedback in one platform reduces overhead and speeds iteration.

Board-ready insights, fast. Out-of-the-box dashboards and retention views help you report progress on activation, adoption, and stickiness without a data team.

Clean upgrade path. When you outgrow Free, you can unlock advanced modules (for example, replay, discovery, orchestration) and higher MAU thresholds as you scale.

Plan parameters to know before you launch

MAU limit: 500 monthly active users on a rolling 30-day basis; crossing the threshold may limit certain access until you’re back under or you upgrade.

Data retention: Your raw event data is retained long-term by Pendo, but Free includes 1 year of access in the UI. Upgrading extends UI access windows.

How much does Pendo cost?

Pendo pricing combines two things: the number of Monthly Active Users (MAUs) you track and the functionality you choose as part of your plan. As you add more MAUs, your overall price increases, but the cost per MAU goes down.

This model makes it simple to start small and expand as your needs grow. You only pay for the scale and functionality that create value for your business, and you can add more at any time. Our focus is helping you grow adoption and realize greater value from Pendo, so our priorities remain directly tied to the outcomes that matter most to you.

How to install Pendo

Implementation is flexible and fast, with three primary paths:

Direct web (JavaScript install script): Add a lightweight snippet, pass visitor/account IDs, verify, then start tagging features and publishing guides—analytics populate retroactively. Deploy via your codebase, Google Tag Manager, or Segment.

Browser extension (Pendo Launcher) for third-party/internal apps: Roll out the extension to users and configure centrally—ideal for employee apps where you don’t control the code.

Mobile apps: Use native SDKs and follow the mobile planning guides for frameworks and OS support.

If you want a single linkable overview for onboarding stakeholders, the Getting Started with Pendo guide covers install basics and common technical FAQs.

Does Pendo use AI in its platform?

Yes. Pendo AI augments the platform with capabilities like Agent Analytics (to measure AI agent adoption and outcomes), AI-ready behavioral data, and emerging Pendo Agents that help interpret data and take action. Security and privacy are first-order: no customer data is shared or used to train Pendo-specific models, and the platform is SOC 2 (with HIPAA readiness) aligned for AI use cases.

What are some ways in which businesses use Pendo?

Businesses leverage Pendo for myriad use cases to drive a variety of outcomes. These include:

User onboarding: Pendo lets you personalize user onboarding and training by leaning on your product to educate new users and guide them to success. Doing so allows onboarding teams to create a great first impression and delight new users with an intuitive digital experience from the very first login. It also lets them guide users to value, fast. In-app guides steer new users to—and enable them on—the features that will benefit them most. Segmentation and personalization capabilities can improve training and help users build proficiency and gain confidence.
In-app support: The Pendo digital adoption platform helps users help themselves by providing them support in-app, when and where they need it. This kind of self-service support delivers better customer service solutions without human intervention, and thereby helps reduce support ticket backlogs. It also increases customer satisfaction. In-app walkthroughs and an always-on Resource Center allow solutions to be accessed on-demand. This allows teams to create more efficient users by better understanding their behavior and then delivering guidance that helps them learn faster.
User experience: Pendo gives companies instant insights into user behavior and provides the quantitative and qualitative data you need to design experiences that wow. It also lets teams personalize the customer journey via segmented, customized in-app onboarding and support. The result? Improved user satisfaction and experiences thanks to timely, always-on assistance. The Pendo platform also lets you capture feedback and sentiment in-app, and easily communicate back so users feel heard.
Governance & compliance: Pendo makes it easy for employees to comply with what’s expected of them. The platform lets IT teams bring rigor to their policies and ensure that tech usage and process completion comply with corporate or regulatory requirements. It also allows you to audit in real time to reduce risk and improve data integrity. The power of Pendo helps support procedural changes, increasing confidence and reinforcing mission-critical processes with in-app support.
Employee productivity: The Pendo platform accelerates proficiency and reinforces ideal journeys based on the behaviors of power users. Using KPIs such as average time to complete a workflow and process adoption, teams can set benchmarks to improve performance. They can also shorten ramp time with personalized onboarding to help employees understand cross-app processes. In terms of the processes themselves, Pendo makes it easy to fix what’s broken, identify areas for improvement, and reduce friction points.
Change management: Pendo lets change management teams guide employees through new ways of working and standardize workflows with data-informed insights. Using analytics, they can understand how work happens today in order to plan the right change for tomorrow. Pendo also helps change leaders establish best practices, creating consistency and predictability in how they manage change in their organizations. For example, the platform’s rich analytics makes it easy to learn from the behavior of employees. By identifying and leveraging super users as change champions, teams can inform their support and guidance strategy based on how work actually happens among high performers.
Product-led growth: Pendo lets you drive growth and expand your product’s potential, at scale. Product teams can create a clear path to paid conversions by putting their product at the heart of go-to-market efforts. Making your product its own sales and marketing channel helps gain efficiency and build virality. The Pendo platform helps PLG teams reach the right audience by meeting users with personalized in-app communication, tailored to their needs.
Product planning: Pendo helps product teams understand what customers do—and why. With powerful analytics, they can get a clear line of sight into how users navigate and engage with features in order to best prioritize their resources. Pendo also lets teams better understand customer needs by collecting feedback at scale and segmenting it based on customer profile, revenue, and more. By understanding how users interact with freemium and paid products, product teams can know what to build next with Pendo data to back up their decisions.
Product discovery: Product discovery is the foundation for building successful products. It’s an iterative process where teams research and validate their ideas before diving into development. By understanding user needs and challenges through techniques like interviews and testing, product discovery ensures the right features are built to solve real problems. This reduces risk, saves resources, and ultimately leads to products that users love.
Revenue growth: The power of the Pendo platform helps attract, retain, and nurture your customers. Companies can use Pendo data to understand their users, expand their usage, and increase deal size. One key way they can do so is to get a clear view into what constitutes revenue-driving activities. Teams can see what successful customers do, for example, and use those insights to guide others to desired actions. This makes it possible, for example, to guide trial users to the features and behaviors that correlate with purchase or expansion. What’s more, with Pendo feedback data, teams can know with confidence which features will generate the biggest return and build what customers want to pay for.

What do Pendo customers say about the platform?

Customers are overwhelmingly positive about their experiences with Pendo. Here are some examples of customer quotes about the platform and the value it adds to their business:

RedHat: “Our sellers want to be out making more sales for Red Hat as a whole. [With Pendo], we’re reducing the sales cycle time—and that’s a win.”
Essity: “We feel that [Pendo] is helping us turn our software into something that our users can really value and that can really help them to do their job on a daily basis—not just another tool that they have to use.”
Global Payments: “We equate Pendo’ing with driving business decisions. We no longer have to rely on gut instinct, and we can use Pendo data to answer a lot of key questions about our users.”
JLL: “We didn’t have the feature usage data we wanted in our existing database, but with Pendo, we suddenly had insights we never had before.”
Cox Automotive: “The most exciting thing for us is the speed at which we can get information. I can be in a meeting with product and engineering and within fifteen minutes, we get data from Pendo to answer our question and help us make a decision.”

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