Last updated: May 7, 2026
The Bottom Line
Both UserGuiding and Glitter AI try to shorten the time it takes for people to get productive. The difference is the where, and that’s usually what decides which one you actually need.
UserGuiding is a no-code digital adoption platform aimed at SaaS companies. Drop a snippet into your web app and you can build interactive product tours, tooltips, hotspots, checklists, resource centers, and NPS surveys that sit on top of your live UI. The point is to nudge users through your product in the moment so they activate, pick up features, and stick around. It’s pitched at product, customer success, and onboarding teams who carry activation numbers.
Glitter AI is a recording-first SOP and training tool. Hit record, walk through whatever you’re doing, and the AI hands you back a publish-ready written guide with screenshots, plus the original video. What you get is a standalone artifact you can drop into Slack, embed in Notion or Confluence, attach to an LMS, or hand to a new hire. Nothing ever lands inside your product UI.
The cleanest mental model: UserGuiding lives inside your product to onboard users in-app. Glitter lives outside your product to capture how things actually get done. Teams that evaluate both usually end up needing different things, or both at once.
Platform Overview
Same goal - faster onboarding - but two very different products.
With Glitter AI, you record once and get a publish-ready guide instantly.
Open the desktop app or browser extension, talk through your process, and the AI picks up every click, screenshot, and spoken word, then stitches together a clean step-by-step guide next to the original video. From there you can tweak the text, blur sensitive data, reorder steps, or translate into 99 languages with a single click.
Best for internal SOPs, employee training, customer support docs, and how-to articles that live in a knowledge base, LMS, or shared link. Not the tool for in-product tooltip overlays.
UserGuiding is a no-code in-app onboarding builder for web SaaS products.
You install their JavaScript snippet, then use a Chrome extension to point-and-click your way to product tours, tooltips, hotspots, checklists, resource centers, NPS surveys, and announcement modals, all rendered live on top of your product. Targeting and segmentation rules let you show different experiences to different user cohorts.
One caveat: UserGuiding only runs on web apps you control (since you need to install their snippet). It doesn't produce written documentation, SOPs, or shareable video, and there's no desktop or mobile-app capture.
At a Glance
Quick comparison of the key differences between UserGuiding and Glitter AI.
Starting paid plan
Creation method
Output: written SOP/guide
Output: video documentation
Captures desktop apps
Captures mobile workflows
Requires installing a snippet on your site
Multi-language support
Free tier
AI-generated content
SOC 2 Type II
Two Different Jobs, Two Different Tools
The reason these tools end up in the same search is that both promise “faster onboarding”. They’re solving very different versions of that problem, though.
UserGuiding is built for product-led activation. New user just signed up for your SaaS? UserGuiding walks them through the app the first time they log in: a welcome modal, a checklist of things to try, a tooltip on the button you want them to click, a survey at the right moment. Success looks like feature adoption, time-to-value, and fewer support tickets from confused users.
Glitter is built for process documentation and human onboarding. A new hire starts on Monday, and your team needs to capture “here’s how we run the weekly close in QuickBooks” or “here’s how to triage an Intercom conversation”. Success looks like fewer Slack messages asking “how do I…?”, quicker ramp for new people, and SOPs that don’t go stale a month later.
If you’re onboarding external users to your SaaS product, UserGuiding is the right shape of tool. If you’re documenting how your team gets work done across whatever apps they touch, Glitter is the right shape. Plenty of companies end up buying both for different jobs.
Creation & Output
How you make a guide, and what you actually end up with.
How do you create a guide?
Record your screen and talk. AI does the rest.
Open the desktop app or browser extension, hit record, walk through the process while talking. Glitter picks up every click, grabs a screenshot at each step, transcribes your voice, and puts together a structured written guide on its own. Usually in under a minute.
Point-and-click builder. Manual.
Install the Chrome extension, navigate to a screen in your product, and drop tooltips, modals, and hotspots in one element at a time. You write the copy, pick the trigger logic, set the targeting rules, and preview the flow. Capable, but the time it takes to build a single tour is real.
What does the final output look like?
A standalone written guide + the original video.
You get a shareable URL with a step-by-step guide (text and screenshots) and the original recording embedded right there. Export to PDF, embed in Notion or Confluence, or paste the link in Slack. Documentation that doesn't depend on any one product.
Tooltips and modals overlaid on your live product.
The output isn't a document. It's an in-app experience. Users see your tour while they're using your app. There's no shareable artifact to send to someone without a login.
Can it document workflows in desktop apps?
Yes. Native Mac and Windows desktop capture.
Record any desktop app: Excel, Photoshop, your accounting software, that internal Electron tool nobody else can install. Glitter picks up everything you do regardless of which app you're in, and the output is the same clean step-by-step guide.
No.
UserGuiding is web-only. It works by injecting JavaScript into web pages, so there's no way to use it inside a desktop app, an Excel workflow, or anything outside a browser.
Does it work on apps you don't own?
Yes. Document any app, anywhere.
Glitter records your screen, so it doesn't care whose product you're in. Document a Salesforce process, a HubSpot workflow, an internal admin tool, a third-party SaaS. Same workflow, same output.
No. It requires installing a snippet on your own domain.
UserGuiding only works on web apps where you can install their JavaScript snippet. So it won't help you document a workflow inside Salesforce, your CRM, or any third-party tool you don't control.
How fast can a non-technical person ship something?
Minutes.
Record once, the AI writes the guide, you publish. No setup, no install, no targeting rules. Customer-success folks routinely knock out an SOP between two meetings.
Hours to days for a polished tour.
Even with the no-code builder, building a flow that targets the right users at the right moment with clean copy and tested triggers takes real effort. Most teams find that initial setup eats developer time for snippet installation, plus ongoing PM/CS time for tour authoring.
AI assistance during creation
Core to the product.
AI does the actual work here: transcribing your voice, identifying steps, writing the instructions, picking screenshots, suggesting edits, translating into 99 languages. You're editing AI output, not building from scratch.
AI assists with copy.
UserGuiding has AI features for writing or rewriting tooltip and modal copy inside the builder, plus AI translation. Useful, but you're still building each tour by hand.
Try Glitter AI for Free
Create up to 10 guides for free - no credit card required. Turn any workflow into searchable, step-by-step documentation. Fast, accurate, and yours to try today.
Where UserGuiding Genuinely Shines
To be fair: if your actual job is driving in-product activation for a B2B SaaS app you control, UserGuiding does things Glitter doesn’t.
- In-app targeting and segmentation. Show a different welcome flow to a Free user versus a Pro user, fire a tooltip only for accounts that haven’t created a project yet, run an NPS survey 30 days after signup. Behavioral targeting like this is really the point of a digital adoption platform.
- Resource centers. A persistent in-app help widget that surfaces tours, articles, and a knowledge base, without bouncing users out to a separate help site.
- NPS, CES, and product surveys. Native survey tools tied to user attributes and feature usage.
- Checklists and progress tracking. Gamified onboarding checklists that follow the user across sessions until they finish.
- Product analytics. Funnel and feature-usage tracking, often used as a lighter-weight Pendo alternative.
If those are the problems on your plate, Glitter isn’t competing. Glitter doesn’t render anything inside your product, doesn’t track per-user behavior, doesn’t run surveys. And it’s not pretending to.
What Glitter does compete on is the adjacent problem most product teams also have: documenting how internal teams use the rest of the SaaS stack, training new hires, and producing how-to content for customer onboarding outside the app. Things like onboarding emails, help articles, and Loom-style walkthroughs that don’t need an in-app overlay.
Languages, Sharing & Security
Multi-language support
99 languages, one-click AI translation, on every plan.
Pick a language and Glitter translates the entire guide automatically: text, captions, voiceover transcript. No manual element-by-element slog.
Localization available, but element-by-element.
UserGuiding supports localization across many languages, though each tooltip, modal, and checklist item is translated as its own string. AI translation helps. Larger flows still need review across the full set of elements, though.
How do you share the output?
Public URL, embed code, PDF, video file.
Every guide gets a shareable link. Embed it in Notion, Confluence, Intercom articles, or your LMS. Export to PDF for offline use. Send the original video as an MP4. Viewers don't need a login.
It only renders inside your product.
A UserGuiding tour has no standalone shareable form. It's an experience that only exists when a user is logged into your app and the snippet fires. There's no URL or PDF to hand to someone without an account.
SOC 2 Type II
Yes, SOC 2 Type II compliant.
Full security details on our trust center.
Yes, SOC 2 Type II compliant.
UserGuiding maintains SOC 2 Type II compliance and GDPR alignment.
AI training on customer data
Never. Your content is yours.
Glitter doesn't use your recordings, transcripts, or guide content to train AI models, and we don't let third parties do it either. See our AI security and privacy policy.
Standard SaaS data handling.
UserGuiding processes user-event data per its DPA and privacy policy. Customers should read the terms directly for specifics on how AI features handle inputs.
Pricing & Plans
Different products, different pricing models. UserGuiding charges by MAU; Glitter charges by seat.
Glitter AI – Pricing Takeaways:
- A real forever-free plan with desktop capture included. No trial countdown.
- $16/mo per seat annually. No MAU caps, no surprise overages.
- Pricing scales by how many people make guides, not how many users see them.
- All AI features (transcription, translation, video-to-guide) on the free plan.
- Standard contract even at the enterprise tier. No procurement gauntlet.
Predictable per-seat pricing with a real free tier.
UserGuiding – Pricing Takeaways:
- Pricing is tied to monthly active users, so costs grow as your product grows.
- No permanent free plan. Only a time-limited trial.
- Jump from Basic to Professional is roughly 4× in price.
- Annual billing is required to get the published rates.
- Designed to be a line item for product/CS teams, not an individual purchase.
MAU-based pricing typical of digital adoption platforms. Predictable for SaaS with stable user counts, harder to model for fast-growing or seasonal products.
Glitter AI – Pricing Takeaways:
- A real forever-free plan with desktop capture included. No trial countdown.
- $16/mo per seat annually. No MAU caps, no surprise overages.
- Pricing scales by how many people make guides, not how many users see them.
- All AI features (transcription, translation, video-to-guide) on the free plan.
- Standard contract even at the enterprise tier. No procurement gauntlet.
Predictable per-seat pricing with a real free tier.
UserGuiding – Pricing Takeaways:
- Pricing is tied to monthly active users, so costs grow as your product grows.
- No permanent free plan. Only a time-limited trial.
- Jump from Basic to Professional is roughly 4× in price.
- Annual billing is required to get the published rates.
- Designed to be a line item for product/CS teams, not an individual purchase.
MAU-based pricing typical of digital adoption platforms. Predictable for SaaS with stable user counts, harder to model for fast-growing or seasonal products.
Try Glitter AI for Free
Create up to 10 guides for free, no credit card. Record any web, desktop, or mobile process and turn it into a publish-ready SOP in seconds.
A Decision Tree
If you’re staring at both pricing pages trying to make a call, here’s the shortest path to an answer.
Pick UserGuiding if you can say “yes” to all three:
- You’re shipping a B2B SaaS web app that you control (i.e. you can install a snippet on your domain).
- The problem you’re solving is in-product activation, feature adoption, or NPS, not internal documentation.
- You’re fine with manual tour-building work, and your team has the bandwidth to maintain those flows as the UI changes.
Pick Glitter AI if you can say “yes” to any of these:
- You need documentation that lives outside your product: SOPs, training docs, help center articles, Loom-style walkthroughs.
- You document workflows across multiple tools (Salesforce, HubSpot, Excel, your internal admin), not just inside one app.
- You want a non-technical teammate to ship polished documentation in minutes, without a builder.
- You need a real free tier and per-seat pricing instead of MAU-based billing.
Pick both if you’re a SaaS company that needs to onboard external users in your product (UserGuiding) AND document internal workflows or produce help-center content outside your product (Glitter). They aren’t really competitors. They live next to each other in most growing product/CS stacks.
So... which one should you choose?
Two different products. The honest version of when each one is right:
Choose Glitter AI if you...
Choose Glitter AI if you need to document how work gets done: internal SOPs, employee training, help-center articles, customer support docs, knowledge-base content. Glitter records any process across web, desktop, or mobile and turns it into a written guide plus video automatically. Real free tier with desktop capture. $16/mo per seat. 99 languages. Best fit for ops, IT, customer success, HR, agencies, and anyone whose job is shrinking the pile of 'how do I…?' questions.
Don't choose Glitter AI if you...
Don't choose Glitter AI if you need to render onboarding experiences inside your own SaaS product: interactive tooltips, feature-tour overlays, in-app NPS surveys, behavioral targeting based on user properties. Glitter doesn't inject anything into your product UI.
Choose UserGuiding if you...
Choose UserGuiding if you're a B2B SaaS company driving in-product activation. You want to overlay tooltips, modals, checklists, hotspots, and resource centers on top of your live web app to onboard new users, push feature adoption, and reduce churn. UserGuiding's segmentation, NPS surveys, and in-app analytics are built for exactly this job. Strong fit for product, growth, and customer-success teams who own activation metrics for a web SaaS product they control.
Don't choose UserGuiding if you...
Don't choose UserGuiding if you need standalone documentation: SOPs, training guides, video walkthroughs, or how-to docs that live in a knowledge base, an LMS, Notion, or a shared link. UserGuiding only renders inside web apps where you can install its snippet, which means it can't help you document workflows in desktop apps, mobile, or third-party SaaS tools. Also reconsider if MAU-based pricing is hard to budget against, or if you need a real free tier.
Choose Glitter AI if you...
Choose Glitter AI if you need to document how work gets done: internal SOPs, employee training, help-center articles, customer support docs, knowledge-base content. Glitter records any process across web, desktop, or mobile and turns it into a written guide plus video automatically. Real free tier with desktop capture. $16/mo per seat. 99 languages. Best fit for ops, IT, customer success, HR, agencies, and anyone whose job is shrinking the pile of 'how do I…?' questions.
Don't choose Glitter AI if you...
Don't choose Glitter AI if you need to render onboarding experiences inside your own SaaS product: interactive tooltips, feature-tour overlays, in-app NPS surveys, behavioral targeting based on user properties. Glitter doesn't inject anything into your product UI.
Choose UserGuiding if you...
Choose UserGuiding if you're a B2B SaaS company driving in-product activation. You want to overlay tooltips, modals, checklists, hotspots, and resource centers on top of your live web app to onboard new users, push feature adoption, and reduce churn. UserGuiding's segmentation, NPS surveys, and in-app analytics are built for exactly this job. Strong fit for product, growth, and customer-success teams who own activation metrics for a web SaaS product they control.
Don't choose UserGuiding if you...
Don't choose UserGuiding if you need standalone documentation: SOPs, training guides, video walkthroughs, or how-to docs that live in a knowledge base, an LMS, Notion, or a shared link. UserGuiding only renders inside web apps where you can install its snippet, which means it can't help you document workflows in desktop apps, mobile, or third-party SaaS tools. Also reconsider if MAU-based pricing is hard to budget against, or if you need a real free tier.
Real customer reviews
Genuine feedback from real customers ❤️
“This software is mind-blowing! After 2+ months, it's an invaluable asset to my company. The transcription quality is out of this world, and the new image editing tools are so fluid and better than [competitor name redacted]. ...you've saved me so much time; I'm elated and highly anticipate subscribing for another year!”
Tim M.
May 3, 2025
“Our company has asked each department to use AI tools to increase productivity, and this has made a huge difference. One of our leaders had originally sent a link to check out Glitter AI, and we love it! We're now using it for clients as well as internal staff.”
Kim W.
December 18, 2024
“This is exactly the documentation solution that we've been looking for. Every software system requires operating instructions, and you make them so easy to create! It's perfect for employee training purposes.”
Erez A.
January 9, 2025
“Glitter is really cool! The step-by-step guide it created was exactly what we needed for our corporate Salesforce setup, which was a literal mess. Just having a video isn't great because it's a nightmare to update all the fields for billing. This tool is saving us so much time!”
Dustin R.
March 8, 2025
“This is amazing! I just used the desktop app to make a quick guide for a Photoshop tool that I can use in my class. It would have taken me at least 30 minutes before and I just did it in about 5 minutes. Thanks for such a great tool!”
Sarah
January 28, 2025
“I tested 2 products today to solve the problem of rapidly creating 60+ articles to onboard our customers, and Glitter AI is excellent! It's really easy to use and edit. The output is so easy to import into our CMS for our Knowledge Hub; it's fantastic.”
Emily W.
February 15, 2025
“Really love this product! We use Guru for documentation at our company. With Glitter, I can do a quick walkthrough, and it creates a guide that can be pasted right into Guru, which saves us from undocumented tasks.”
Jens A.
April 12, 2025
“So far, I'm liking Glitter a great deal; it's very intuitive and useful. Our school district has an old method for online help for our student information system. Glitter is a great way to save many, MANY, person-hours of work, and our IT person is excited about it too!”
John
January 9, 2025
“This software is mind-blowing! After 2+ months, it's an invaluable asset to my company. The transcription quality is out of this world, and the new image editing tools are so fluid and better than [competitor name redacted]. ...you've saved me so much time; I'm elated and highly anticipate subscribing for another year!”
Tim M.
May 3, 2025
“Our company has asked each department to use AI tools to increase productivity, and this has made a huge difference. One of our leaders had originally sent a link to check out Glitter AI, and we love it! We're now using it for clients as well as internal staff.”
Kim W.
December 18, 2024
“This is exactly the documentation solution that we've been looking for. Every software system requires operating instructions, and you make them so easy to create! It's perfect for employee training purposes.”
Erez A.
January 9, 2025
“Glitter is really cool! The step-by-step guide it created was exactly what we needed for our corporate Salesforce setup, which was a literal mess. Just having a video isn't great because it's a nightmare to update all the fields for billing. This tool is saving us so much time!”
Dustin R.
March 8, 2025
“This is amazing! I just used the desktop app to make a quick guide for a Photoshop tool that I can use in my class. It would have taken me at least 30 minutes before and I just did it in about 5 minutes. Thanks for such a great tool!”
Sarah
January 28, 2025
“I tested 2 products today to solve the problem of rapidly creating 60+ articles to onboard our customers, and Glitter AI is excellent! It's really easy to use and edit. The output is so easy to import into our CMS for our Knowledge Hub; it's fantastic.”
Emily W.
February 15, 2025
“Really love this product! We use Guru for documentation at our company. With Glitter, I can do a quick walkthrough, and it creates a guide that can be pasted right into Guru, which saves us from undocumented tasks.”
Jens A.
April 12, 2025
“So far, I'm liking Glitter a great deal; it's very intuitive and useful. Our school district has an old method for online help for our student information system. Glitter is a great way to save many, MANY, person-hours of work, and our IT person is excited about it too!”
John
January 9, 2025
“This software is mind-blowing! After 2+ months, it's an invaluable asset to my company. The transcription quality is out of this world, and the new image editing tools are so fluid and better than [competitor name redacted]. ...you've saved me so much time; I'm elated and highly anticipate subscribing for another year!”
Tim M.
May 3, 2025
“Our company has asked each department to use AI tools to increase productivity, and this has made a huge difference. One of our leaders had originally sent a link to check out Glitter AI, and we love it! We're now using it for clients as well as internal staff.”
Kim W.
December 18, 2024
“This is exactly the documentation solution that we've been looking for. Every software system requires operating instructions, and you make them so easy to create! It's perfect for employee training purposes.”
Erez A.
January 9, 2025
“Glitter is really cool! The step-by-step guide it created was exactly what we needed for our corporate Salesforce setup, which was a literal mess. Just having a video isn't great because it's a nightmare to update all the fields for billing. This tool is saving us so much time!”
Dustin R.
March 8, 2025
“This is amazing! I just used the desktop app to make a quick guide for a Photoshop tool that I can use in my class. It would have taken me at least 30 minutes before and I just did it in about 5 minutes. Thanks for such a great tool!”
Sarah
January 28, 2025
“I tested 2 products today to solve the problem of rapidly creating 60+ articles to onboard our customers, and Glitter AI is excellent! It's really easy to use and edit. The output is so easy to import into our CMS for our Knowledge Hub; it's fantastic.”
Emily W.
February 15, 2025
“Really love this product! We use Guru for documentation at our company. With Glitter, I can do a quick walkthrough, and it creates a guide that can be pasted right into Guru, which saves us from undocumented tasks.”
Jens A.
April 12, 2025
“So far, I'm liking Glitter a great deal; it's very intuitive and useful. Our school district has an old method for online help for our student information system. Glitter is a great way to save many, MANY, person-hours of work, and our IT person is excited about it too!”
John
January 9, 2025
