18 Must-use Product-led Growth Tools in 2022

Are you currently building your product-led growth strategy? Wondering what product-led growth tools to use?

Let’s not beat around the bush here – There is no better way to build a SaaS business than by using the product as the main vehicle for growth. 

The problem? Well, you can’t do it without using dedicated tools. But with so many options on the market, it’s hard to figure out which ones to use. 

Hence this guide. Below, you’ll find a list of 18 must-use product-led growth tools to add to your stack.

Before we get to that, though, let’s see what you’ll be using those tools for.

What is Product-led Growth?

Product-led growth (PLG) is a business strategy that places the product at the center of your organizational objectives. 

Your product becomes the channel that drives acquisition, engagement, conversion, and referrals. You are moving from a sales-led approach to a product-led focus that facilitates efficiency and scalability.

In product-led companies, the growth of a product and its user adoption can impact the company’s growth. This is a big opportunity for SaaS businesses to adopt a PLG strategy to scale.

Using your product to solve a problem can make it easier to grow your business while listening to your customers’ needs. 

You are not just product-centric, you are also customer-centric.

But product-led strategy requires more than just the product. You need data, customer feedback, and the ability to put your product at the customer’s focus. And for that, you need tools.

What to Look For a Product-led Growth Stack

In order to make your product-led growth strategy work, you need the right stack of tools to run various aspects of your strategy.

Here is everything you need to consider when choosing your tools.

#1. Every product should contribute to your PLG strategy

Start by setting clear objectives. What do you want to get out of each tool?

Every product should contribute one way or another to your PLG strategy. If it’s not part of your strategy, then you are only using it for the sake of it.

#2. Use products that different teams can use

It’s easy to fall into the trap of using different tools among various teams. 

The sales team may be having their own tech stack while the product teams need a different set of tools.

Meanwhile, sales and marketing may have tools that overlap but they could still be working in silos without realizing it.

Stop complicating your business operations.

Bring all teams together to decide on the tools that work best for everyone. 

#3. Categorize the tools in your stack

There is always the risk of using multiple tools for similar uses. Whether it’s because teams work in silos or simply because you haven’t reviewed a tool’s features, it’s easy to end up paying for multiple similar tools.

Before you invest in new tools, review your existing stack.

Once you set the objectives for each tool you need, categorize the tools in your stack.

Think about what your ideal toolstack looks like.

Now it’s time to fill in the gaps.

#4. Review where the tools fit in the stages of the lifecycle

You should be able to have a balanced toolstack across all stages of the lifecycle.

You don’t want to use too many tools during the onboarding stage and forget engagement or conversion.

Make sure you pick the tools that make both your work and the user journey for your customers easier.

#5. Go niche if needed rather than investing only in all-in-one tools

It’s tempting to go for a suite of tools that offer multiple features.

You don’t need 20 tools if you can buy 5 that can still offer similar features, right?

This is not always the case.

If you’re serious about scaling your SaaS company with your PLG strategy, go niche with the products that you’ll use.

All-in-one tools can be handy if you’re just getting started but they don’t necessarily provide the same level of expertise and features in every area of focus.

Even better, aim for tools that are made for SaaS businesses. There is a different set of features on SaaS-focused tools and they can make your work more efficient.

#6. Map out your company’s needs before you invest in tools

Bring the teams together and map out everyone’s needs and what they want to get out of each tool.

Instead of saying “I’ll use Intercom because the X company is also using it”, write down the reasons you want to use the tool.

Top 18 Product-led Growth Tools For Saas

Note – Following my advice above, I organized the tools below by category. Hopefully, this will make it easier for you to decide which tools you need, and what to use them for.

Customer feedback 

#1. Refiner – The No.1 Customer Feedback and Survey Solution for SaaS

Refiner (disclaimer: this is our tool) is customer feedback and survey platform built specifically for SaaS companies. It allows you to survey users and collect customer feedback with a range of features that can support your SaaS company’s product-led growth strategy.

With Refiner, you can:

• Collect customer feedback with NPS surveys, CSAT, and CES surveys
• Build and send surveys via email, in-app widget, or survey pages
• Collect data to drive your product roadmap
• Run product-market fit surveys
• Track and improve customer success
• Analyze survey results in-dept using Refiner’s reporting and segmentation features
• Integrate Refiner with Zapier, MixPanel, Google Sheets, AirTable, Hubspot, and more.

Pricing: There is a 14-day free trial while the pricing depends on the number of features your company needs. Essentials plan starts from $99/month, Growth starts from $239/month, and there is also a custom Enterprise package.

Want to see how Refiner can help you collect incredible customer feedback and deliver insights to power your product-led strategy? Check out the live demo or sign up for a free trial. 

Customer service 

#2. Social Intents 

Social Intents is a live chat tool that can boost your customer service. It allows you to chat with your website visitors directly from Microsoft Teams, Slack, and Webex to facilitate better communication and improved responsiveness.

You can use it to:

• Improve internal collaboration among your agents
• Customize your chat widgets to your branding
• Create pre-written replies to make your live chatting more efficient 
• Set up chatbots to engage with your customers and share your FAQs

Pricing: The pricing depends on the number of chat widgets, the chat conversations per month, the website domains, and the additional features you need. The starter plan starts from $39/month.

#3. CloudTalk

CloudTalk is a call center software that makes it easier to grow your business globally. It can help you engage with customers all over the world to support your growth.

Its key features include:

• Voice features such as call recording, toll-free numbers, and personalized greetings
• Call routing features to direct the calls to the right agents through predefined criteria, assigned skills and client preferences
• Integrations with CRM tools and help desks to improve your efficiency
• Smart features that enhance productivity such as click to call, call tagging, or real-time customer cards so that your agents can access a customer’s history

Pricing: The Starter plan starts from $30/month while you can access more features with the Essential plan at $40/month or the Expert plan from $60/month.

Product adoption and user onboarding

#4. Userflow

Userflow helps you improve your onboarding experience. You can build customized in-app tours, checklists, surveys without code or any installation.

It integrates with any other web app and works as an add-on layer to make the user journey smoother. The resource center helps users access all resources, search your existing knowledge base while you can even link it to your live-chat provider. 

It’s ideal for non-technical team members to create engaging flows for your users.

Pricing: The Startup plan starts from $250/month while you can access more features with the Pro plan from $750/month.

#5. Appcues

Appcues is a great addition to your PLG stack to improve your product experience. It helps you build personalized product experiences that improve user activation, feature adoption, and user retention.

It’s easy to use and it doesn’t need any coding to work.

It can help you:

• Target experiences to the right users at the right time
• Move users to their “aha” moments faster through welcome flows and guided tours 
• Drive awareness and adoption of new features through announcements, slide outs, and hotspots
• Collect feedback and insights to improve your product

Pricing: The Essentials plan starts from $299/month while the popular Growth plan starts from $879/month

Customer success 

#6. Zendesk

Zendesk is a popular customer service tool that helps you meet your customers where they are. With the use of text, mobile, phone, email, live chat, and social media, you provide seamless support through all channels to build stronger relationships with your users.

The key features include:

• Respond to all customers from one unified place
• Personalize the customer experience with the use of automation and AI-powered bots 
• Improve collaboration between agents with a range of tools 
• Help customers with integrated help centers and community forums
• Create a unified view of your customer to understand how your users experience your product

Pricing: There is a range of plans to fit businesses of all sizes with the Suite Team plan starting from $50/month.

#7. Calixa

Calixa helps product-led teams understand their customers to provide the right message at the right time. It’s a customer operations platform that helps you spot your top customers, act when it matters to increase conversions and get a 360-view of your users.

You can use it for your SaaS business to track segments, automate alerts and scale your growth with insights and customer KPIs.

Pricing: There is a free Startup plan for up to 10,000 users and 10 members while the Growth plan starts from $499/month.

#8. Intercom

Everyone knows Intercom’s live chat tool. But it’s way more than that. It’s a complete communications platform with bots, apps, product tours, email messages, and a help center to help you strengthen your customer relationships.

You can use Intercom to:

• Interact with your customers at all stages of their journey
• Manage all your interactions in one place
• Re-engage your customers
• Personalize interactions 
• Integrate with 300+ apps

Pricing: The pricing depends on the solutions you need and the number of people using it. Small businesses can access a basic plan from $67/month.

Customer relationship management (CRM)

#9. HubSpot

HubSpot is a CRM powerhouse with a range of tools to blend marketing, sales, CMS, and operations. You can use each tool on its own or you can create bundles based on your product needs.

It’s a useful tool to improve your customer journey across all stages – whether it’s about new customers or engaging existing ones and building a relationship with them. It is not a dedicated SaaS tool but it still makes a great addition to your stack.

Pricing: There are several free tools to try out for Marketing, Sales, and Operations while the paid plans start from $45/month. You can also create bundles based on the tools you need.

#10. Salesforce

Salesforce offers a powerful range of tools to improve your customer relationship management (CRM). You can use it to unify marketing, sales, service, and analytics to meet your PLG objectives.

Customer 360 allows you to plan every stage of your journey to provide the best customer experience. AI intelligence, powerful analytics, digital workflows, and numerous integrations make it easier to get the most out of your team.

Pricing: The pricing depends on the tools you’ll use and the size of your team.

Analytics 

#11. MixPanel

Mixpanel is a popular product analytics tool to support your PLG strategy. Its interactive reports help you understand your users and how they use your product to improve your engagement, conversion, and retention rates.

You can use Mixpanel to:

• Set up interactive reports
• Build funnels reports
• Analyze your retention rates 
• Create workflows 
• Connect your data with numerous integrations
• Segment any attribute, cohort, action 

Pricing: There is a free plan for up to 100k monthly users while the Growth plan starts from $25/month.

#12. ChartMogul

ChartMogul is a subscription analytics platform that helps you measure, understand, and grow your revenue.

It makes it easier to automate the reporting of your key SaaS metrics (MRR, ARR, Churn, LTV, etc) and grow your recurring revenue through data-backed decisions.

Its integration with your existing tech and data stack can make data management and analysis easier.

Pricing: There is a free plan for businesses with less than $10k in MRR while the Scale plan starts from $100/month.

Churn-reduction 

#13. ChurnZero

ChurnZero is a customer success platform that is all about the customer. 

It can be a great asset to your SaaS PLG strategy to reduce customer churn, access insights, and improve onboarding and product adoption. You can segment your customers based on different criteria and you can also monitor your customer health scores to stay on top of your customers’ needs.

Pricing: The pricing is not mentioned on the website but you can book a demo to find out more.

Email marketing 

#14. ActiveCampaign

​​ActiveCampaign blends email marketing with automation and CRM tools to help you improve your customer experience.

Its wide range of email marketing features include personalization, advanced segmentation, email funnels, and autoresponders that you can add to your custom workflows to send the right triggers at the right time. You can also integrate ActiveCampaign with your own CRM to be more efficient and improve your customer insights.

It may not be designed exclusively for SaaS businesses but it still offers a range of features that can be useful to your PLG strategy.

Pricing: The Lite plan starts from $15/month, the Plus plan starts from $70/month while the Professional plan starts from $187/month.

#15. Userlist

Userlist is a SaaS email automation tool that helps product managers reach users with the right content at the right time.

The fact that it’s a dedicated email marketing software for SaaS companies makes it a useful addition to your product marketing stack to engage your audience through all the stages of the funnel.

Its key features include:

• User onboarding messages
• Lifecycle emails 
• Segmentation
• Behavior-based campaigns
• In-app messages
• Company accounts

Pricing: Userlist’s basic plan starts from $99/month for up to 5,000 users.

Data Management

#16. BigQuery

BigQuery is a serverless multi-cloud data warehouse that helps you turn big data into valuable insights for your business.

It allows you to gain insights in real-time with predictive analytics and built-in machine learning. You can perform multicolor data analysis, access and share insights with ease and still protect your data in a safe and agile environment.

Pricing: The charges depend on the data storage, streaming insert, and querying data but you can still try the tool for free for up to 10 GB storage and 1 TB queries/month. The flat-rate pricing in the subscription model starts from $1700/month for 100 slots.

#17. Snowflake

Snowflake is a data warehouse that helps you unify, integrate, and analyze your data in the most effective way.

You can use the platform for data engineering, data lake, data warehouse, data science, data applications while collaborating with your team to make the most of it.

It’s powerful but easy to use and its automation features make scaling easier.

Pricing: The pricing depends on the compute and storage you use and you can customize the plan based on your needs, the platform you use, and your region. 

#18. Segment

Segment is a popular customer data platform that collects events from the web and mobile apps to help you organize and analyze your customer data.

It provides a single view of the customer to unify all touchpoints from all platforms and channels while its product analytics can help your team run A/B tests and get data right for your customers.

The code is clean and easy to use while you can also get personalized and real-time customer experiences.

Pricing: There is a free plan for up to 1,000 visitors/month and data collection from 2 sources while the Team plan starts from $120/month.

And there you have it…

18 product-led growth tools to add to your stack. Map out your needs, try out the tools, and find the ones that work best for your SaaS.

Good luck!
Interested in trying out Refiner to improve the collection of customer feedback for your SaaS? Check out the live demo now. No signup is necessary.