The preferences of software buyers have undergone a significant transformation in recent years. One major shift is the preference for self-service methods of purchasing software over lengthy product demonstrations.
To accommodate this change in buyer behavior, it's crucial for software companies to provide a means for buyers to try out their products without the need for scheduling a demo, which has led to the creation of interactive demo software.
To help you decide which tool to buy for your business, we have pulled together a list of the best options to choose from.
Below, you'll find the nine best interactive demo software platforms in the market in 2023. Although there is some overlap in features, where possible, we have tried to list the specific things that make each tool unique.
Best product demo software for generating instant proof of concepts.
TestBox sits on top of a live instance of your product, so it not only includes 100% of your product's features and functionality, but it also always reflects the most up-to-date version of your product. That means that when your product changes, there's no work for your team to do to get those changes to show up in your TestBox demos.
Each instance is preconfigured with sample data, so prospects and leads don't have to enter PII or connect critical company systems to fully experience your product — it feels as though they've already been using it for months.
Additionally, a quick links menu lists your top features, enabling prospects to quickly navigate to the features they care about testing the most. There's no more sending them into an empty free trial and hoping they'll access your knowledge base or ask you a question if they run into an issue. Everything they want to test is quickly and easily accessible to them right away.
And while all of the other interactive demo tools on this list are built for a narrow portion of the purchasing funnel, TestBox can be used at all stages:
Finally, because TestBox generates a new product account for each playground your team creates, there's never a reason to worry about PII appearing in your demo playgrounds. This is a significant advantage over other demo tools that require sales engineers to create new data or scrub PII from existing demo accounts or product tours on a regular basis.
Want to learn more? Schedule a demo to see how TestBox can help you TestBox can help you create on-demand, personalized demo experiences for every lead.
Best interactive demo software for creating product tours quickly with AI help.
Walnut is the first of several product tour tools in the interactive demo software category. Product tour tools work by capturing your product's front-end code, which makes your captures more dynamic than a traditional screenshot because it allows you to do things like add hyperlinks and change copy after the screen is captured.
These tools use a browser extension to capture editable screenshots of your product. Then, you tie those screengrabs together using a no-code editor, adding tooltips, steps, and callouts that guide prospects through a tour of your product. This makes these tools great for marketing teams who are looking for ways to better highlight the breadth of what their products can do.
Walnut is unique among product tour tools because of its AI features. It can take a while to write all of the copy for a product tour, but Walnut helps speed that up with embedded AI features available directly within Walnut's interface that can assist you in writing the copy for your tours.
Related Reading: The Best Walnut.io Alternatives and Competitors
Best interactive demo software for marketing teams looking to save on costs.
Navattic is another product tour tool that works exactly the same way as Walnut — you capture screengrabs of your product's front-end code with a browser extension and then link them together using a no-code editor to create product walkthroughs. Your marketing team can embed these tours on your website, and your sales team can send them to leads.
Navattic tours can be gated or ungated, so teams can use them to capture lead contact info or to move leads further down the purchasing funnel. Teams can also use Navattic’s analytics to measure the impact of your product tours, such as demo completion and drop-off rates.
Price is really the big differentiator between Navattic and many of the other product tour tools on this list. It's one of the most affordable tools of its type in the space.
Related Reading: The Best Navattic Competitors and Alternatives
Best product demo software for catering to multiple GTM use cases.
Reprise is unique on this list because it offers multiple tools that each cater to different aspects of the purchasing journey. Reprise Replay is a product tour builder like Walnut and Navattic, but in addition to letting you capture screengrabs of your product one screen at a time, you can also use its application capture feature to grab all of the screens you need in one go.
Another product, Reprise Replicate, can be used to capture both the front- and back-end code of your product. It works well for creating functional clones of your product that can be used by sales teams during live demos or sent to leads after demo calls as leave-behinds.
Finally, Reprise Reveal uses a browser plugin to inject custom data into your existing demo environment, allowing your AEs to show personalized data to leads during live demos without the need for a sales engineer to build out custom demo environments for every industry or use case.
Related Reading: The Best Reprise Competitors and Alternatives
Best interactive demo software for creating personalized video demos.
Consensus is one of the more unique tools on this list. With it, teams can create interactive video demos for prospects and leads, stitching different videos together based on how a prospect answers questions.
You can start the demo with a question about the buyer's role, then serve different videos based on the option they choose. After that video, you can ask another question about the features they're interested in and show them only videos related to those specific features.
An additional standout feature for Consensus is their “Buyer Board,” which allows your champion at the prospect’s company to see which of their colleagues have viewed the demo and how they have interacted with it.
Best interactive demo software for quickly creating product tours.
Storylane is another no-code product tour tool, similar to Walnut and Navattic. And while it's priced similarly to Navattic on the lower-cost end of the product tour subscription costs scale, it has a couple of features that make it a more compelling choice.
First, Storylane uses application capture to collect the screens you'll use to build your tour. Instead of collecting screens one by one, you can start the capture and click through your product naturally, and Storylane will collect all of the screens you viewed into its editor. This makes it faster to build new product tours.
Additionally, Storylane has collaboration features that let multiple teams and individuals collaborate on building tours at the same time.
Best product demo software for leave-behind product tours.
Demostack is a product cloning tool that can be used to create more fully interactive demos and tours of your product. Product cloning tools are different from product tour tools in that they use a browser extension to capture both the front-end and back-end code for your product, which means elements like reports, filters, and drop-downs will work inside of the clone.
This makes Demostack a bit more useful for the sales use case than product tour tools that are more catered to marketing. Sales teams can close their existing demo environment, then use that close as a base to build their own custom demos off of. Those demos can then be used for guided demos or sent to leads as leave-behinds.
Related Reading: The Best Demostack Competitors and Alternatives
Best product demo software for personalized live demos.
Saleo is built for a very specific use case: live demo personalization. It works via a browser extension that you turn on while viewing your existing demo environment to personalize what leads see in your product while you demo to them.
Within the Saleo application, you can create custom datasets for as many use cases and verticals as you need. Then, you turn on the browser extension, select the dataset you want to display, and Saleo shows that data in your demo environment.
While you're demoing with the Saleo extension, you can change any of the data shown without impacting the core dataset, so AEs and sales engineers no longer have to go into the demo environment to clean it up before a demo call.
Best interactive demo software for teams on tight budgets.
Arcade is another product tour tool that lets you record your screen and walk prospective customers through your product. Then, you can use its embed feature to attach the recording to an email follow-up or add it to your website so visitors can get a sneak peek of your tool.
While Arcade is not the most feature-rich interactive demo tool, it is the lowest-cost option, which makes it good for teams on a tight budget that need to prove the value of investing in demo software before purchasing a more fully featured tool with a higher price tag.
Interactive demo software is a tool that enables software buyers to fully experience a product by navigating through its key features and functionalities on their own. This self-guided approach allows prospective buyers to explore the product and evaluate its value at their own pace.
Businesses are always searching for ways to land more deals.
With increasing noise from businesses in the form of cold emails, calls, and direct messages on social media platforms, it becomes difficult for buyers to adequately assess which platform is the best fit for them.
Using interactive demo software quiets this noise, while also driving increased conversions. By allowing customers to experience the software on their own terms — and at their own pace — it makes them more likely to buy your product.
Additionally, having these demos tailored to the user ensures they learn how to use the product before they purchase, leading to better eventual product adoption. Customers understand the value and what the software will bring them through the use of interactive demo software and thus feel confident in purchasing and then using the software.
There are a number of different types of interactive demo software that exist today, and it is worth exploring them and explaining the differences between them.
In the linear adventure style of interactive demo software, prospects are able to take part in a simple walkthrough of your product in a linear, step-by-step process that guides them through your product.
In this type of interactive demo software, prospects are given a number of different linear adventures, allowing them to choose which product path they would like to explore.
For example, one prospect might want to explore the product as the admin to see what the product looks like from that experience, while another prospect might want to view how the product behaves from the end-user perspective.
The self-serve model enables prospects to explore the entirety of the product. The product interface is clickable, allowing prospects to check out all of the parts of the app that they might find interesting.
With sandbox demo software, prospects can jump into a real replica of the tool, complete with a robust data set. This allows them to really try the software out, digging into all of the features and functionality inside of your software and experiencing it as though it was already fully implemented at their companies.
There are a lot of options when it comes to interactive demo software. The information in this article has gone some way in detailing the list of tools and some of the associated pros and cons with each one.
Before making a decision to purchase a tool in this category, make sure you get hands on with the ones that best fit your needs in order to fully experience how it’s going to work for you and your unique use cases.
From there, build consensus with key stakeholders across your organization to ensure that everyone is on board before you make the decision to buy.
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