# Candu

> Candu is a no-code in-app experience platform for product and growth teams: after a one-time React or JavaScript snippet, you build modals, popups, hotspots, product tours, onboarding checklists, banners, forms, empty states and entire in-product homepages in a drag-and-drop editor, target them with segments, and ship them without a deploy, with the distinguishing capability being inline experiences that render inside your existing layout rather than as overlays on top of it.

- Category: Product Onboarding & PLG (https://saastracker.org/categories/product-onboarding)
- Website: https://www.candu.ai
- Starting price: $0 (free plan, 3 live overlays), then $199/mo paid annually
- Free plan: Three live overlay experiences (modals, hotspots, product tours), advanced styling, three segments, unlimited team members, and email and chat support.
- Free trial: Self-serve trial available on paid tiers; the free plan needs no credit card
- Founded: 2018, HQ: United States and London, United Kingdom, Ownership: Venture-backed
- Profile last reviewed: 2026-08-22
- Canonical profile: https://saastracker.org/products/candu

## Overview

Candu was founded in 2018 by Jonathan Anderson and Michele Riccardo Esposito, came out of Entrepreneur First, and raised a $5M seed in December 2020 led by Two Sigma Ventures with CRV, Angular Ventures and Haystack participating, alongside angels from Datadog, LaunchDarkly and Sourcegraph. It has offices in the United States and London. The founding pitch was blunt: product teams should be able to build the UI needed to onboard and educate users without an engineering ticket, and that UI should look like it belongs in the product.

That second half is the whole differentiator. Almost every tool in this category is overlay-first: a modal floats above your app, a tooltip points at a button, a checklist docks in a corner. Candu can do all of that, but it can also render inline, meaning a checklist that sits in the empty half of your dashboard, a homepage assembled from Candu blocks, an empty state that Candu owns, or a banner that occupies real layout space rather than covering it. Customers describe the difference as putting content exactly where it belongs instead of just adding popups.

The pricing follows the architecture. There is a genuinely usable free plan (three live overlay experiences, unlimited team members, advanced styling and three segments), Starter at $199 per month paid annually gives unlimited overlays, and inline experiences (checklists, banners, forms, empty states, homepages) are gated to Growth at $799 per month paid annually. That is a hard cliff. If inline rendering is why you are looking at Candu, the price is $799, not $199, and it is worth being honest about that before running a trial on the wrong tier.

Two things about the meter matter. Candu prices on monthly active users with an on-page cost estimator, and it publishes a separate HyperScale tier explicitly for freemium and B2C companies with large user bases and custom MAU pricing. The existence of HyperScale is a tell: the standard tiers are priced for B2B products where MAU is measured in thousands, not hundreds of thousands, and the specific MAU thresholds behind the $199 and $799 figures are not published on the page.

## How it works

1. A developer adds a React or JavaScript snippet to your app once. That snippet does two things: it gives Candu permission to render content, and it carries the user attributes (plan, role, tenure, company, custom fields) that every segment you build afterwards will depend on.

2. You then build in a drag-and-drop editor rather than only by pointing at existing DOM elements. This is the structural difference from a Chrome-extension tour builder: Candu content is composed from blocks, styled to match your design system, and can be placed either as an overlay or, on Growth, inside a named slot in your own layout that your engineers expose once and never touch again.

3. AI assists composition. You describe the experience you want and Candu generates the UI, which you then edit. That is a genuine time saver for the first draft of a homepage or an empty state, and much less useful for the fiddly work of matching your brand exactly, which you will still do by hand in the styling controls.

4. Targeting and measurement run per experience: segments from user attributes, goal tracking on Growth to tie an experience to a downstream action, role-based access controls so a marketer cannot accidentally publish to everyone, and analytics on views and interactions. A/B testing and experimentation are gated to Enterprise, which is a notable omission from the $799 tier.

## Best for

Design-conscious B2B SaaS product and growth teams that want onboarding content to look native rather than bolted on, especially teams that want to own their dashboard homepage, empty states and embedded checklists without shipping a front-end change for every iteration.

## Not the right fit for

- Anyone whose reason for buying is a cheap tour builder; the free plan is three overlays and the moment you want inline content the price is $799 per month paid annually.
- Growth teams that live on experimentation; A/B testing is Enterprise-only here, which is worse than UserGuiding putting it on a $349 tier.
- Consumer or freemium products at scale on the standard tiers; Candu points those buyers at a separate custom-priced HyperScale plan, which means the published numbers do not apply to you.
- Mobile apps; this is a web React and JavaScript SDK with no native mobile guidance story.
- Teams that need to model exact cost before a conversation; the MAU thresholds attached to the $199 and $799 prices are not published, only an on-page estimator.

## Features

### Inline experiences

The capability nothing else in this category matches, and the reason Growth costs what it costs.

- **In-product homepages**: Assemble an entire dashboard landing surface from Candu blocks so the first screen a user sees can be changed by a PM rather than by a front-end sprint.
- **Embedded checklists**: Onboarding checklists that sit inside the layout rather than docking as a floating widget, which raises completion because the task list is part of the page instead of an interruption to it.
- **Empty states**: Own the screen a user sees before they have any data, which is the highest-leverage and most consistently neglected surface in any B2B product.
- **Inline banners**: Announcements that occupy layout space rather than covering content, so a trial countdown or migration notice does not have to be an interruption.
- **Forms in context**: Data collection rendered inside the product surface, used for onboarding questionnaires and progressive profiling without redirecting the user anywhere.

### Overlay experiences

The standard category toolkit, available from the free plan onward.

- **Modals and popups**: Interruptive dialogs for launches, upgrades and required actions, included in the three live experiences on the free plan.
- **Product tours**: Multi-step walkthroughs anchored to elements in your app, unlimited from the $199 Starter tier.
- **Hotspots**: Persistent contextual markers for feature discovery, unlimited on Starter and above.
- **Advanced styling**: Deep visual control over every experience, available even on the free plan, which is why Candu output tends to look like the product rather than like a vendor template.
- **AI experience generation**: Describe what you want and Candu drafts the UI for you to edit, which meaningfully shortens the blank-canvas phase for homepages and empty states.

### Targeting and governance

Segment control plus the permission model a growing team needs.

- **Segmentation**: Audience targeting from the attributes passed in your snippet. The free plan allows three segments; paid tiers unlock more.
- **Goal tracking**: Attach a downstream event to an experience so you can report whether it moved behavior rather than whether it was seen. Growth tier.
- **Role-based access controls**: Restrict who can publish and to whom, which stops the classic accident of a marketer shipping a modal to your whole customer base. Growth tier.
- **Unlimited workspaces**: Separate environments or product lines under one account on the Growth tier.
- **Unlimited user licenses**: Candu does not meter seats. Even the free plan allows unlimited team members, which is a real contrast with UserGuiding capping Starter at one seat.
- **Integrations and webhooks**: Push experience events outward and pull user data in, available from the $199 Starter tier rather than being reserved for enterprise.

### Measurement, experimentation and scale

Adequate on Growth, with the one gap that will annoy growth teams.

- **Experience analytics**: Views, interactions and completion per experience, available from Starter.
- **A/B testing and experimentation**: Split-testing of experiences is gated to the Enterprise tier, which is the single most disappointing line on Candu's pricing page given that $799 Growth customers are exactly the people who should be testing.
- **Content management system**: Enterprise-tier structured content management for teams running many experiences across product lines.
- **SSO**: Single sign-on on Enterprise, alongside custom contracts and SLAs.
- **HyperScale MAU pricing**: A separate custom tier for freemium and B2C products with large user bases, including event-volume fair use limits, which acknowledges that the standard MAU curve does not work at consumer scale.

## Use cases

- **Head of product at a 40-person B2B SaaS**: The dashboard homepage is hardcoded, changing it takes a front-end sprint, and every experiment about what new users should see first dies in backlog triage. Outcome: Engineering exposes one Candu slot on the dashboard, and from then on the homepage is composed and rewritten by the product team without a deploy, with goal tracking reporting whether the new layout moved activation.
- **Growth marketer tired of popup fatigue**: The product already fires three modals at new users and the team knows adding a fourth will make things worse, but there is still a message that needs delivering. Outcome: Inline banners and an embedded checklist put the message into the page itself rather than over it, and the interruption budget stays intact.
- **Design lead at a company with strong brand standards**: Every onboarding tool the team has tried produces content that looks like a third-party widget, and design keeps vetoing the rollout. Outcome: Advanced styling available even on the free plan lets design match the component library before anyone commits budget, and the AI generator drafts new surfaces that start from the right visual language.
- **Product-led team owning empty states**: New accounts land on a blank projects list with no guidance, and support fields the same 'what do I do now' question every week. Outcome: Candu owns the empty state as an inline experience, turning the blank screen into the first step of onboarding, and iterating on the copy takes minutes rather than a release cycle.

## Pricing

Freemium, priced per monthly active user with an on-page cost estimator, tiered primarily by whether you need inline experiences alongside overlays. Seats are unlimited on every tier.

- **Free**: $0 per month. 3 live overlay experiences; Modals, hotspots and product tours; Advanced styling; 3 segments; Unlimited team members, email and chat support. Unusually capable for a free tier: advanced styling and unlimited seats are not normally free anywhere in this category.
- **Starter**: $199 per month, paid annually. Unlimited modals, hotspots and product tours; Overlay experiences only; Advanced styling and segmentation; Analytics; Integrations and webhooks, unlimited user licenses. Overlays only. No checklists, banners, forms, empty states or homepages at this price.
- **Growth**: $799 per month, paid annually. Everything in Starter plus unlimited inline experiences; Banners, checklists, forms, empty states and homepages; Goal tracking; Role-based access controls and unlimited workspaces; Dedicated CSM and Slack support. The real Candu. If inline rendering is why you are here, this is your price.
- **Enterprise**: Custom quoted annually. Everything in Growth plus A/B testing and experimentation; Content management system; SSO; Custom contracts and SLAs; 10 service hours per quarter, premium support, volume discounts.
- **HyperScale**: Custom quoted annually. Designed for freemium and B2C products with large user bases; Custom MAU pricing; Event-volume fair use limits; Flexible plan construction for consumer-scale delivery. Its existence tells you the standard tiers are priced for B2B MAU counts, not consumer ones.

Billing notes:

- Starter and Growth prices are quoted as monthly figures paid annually, so the real commitment is $2,388 and $9,588 per year respectively. Monthly billing is not advertised on the page.
- Candu meters by monthly active users and provides an on-page cost estimator, but the specific MAU thresholds attached to $199 and $799 are not printed, so both figures are entry points rather than fixed prices.
- Modelled bill at 2,000 MAU: Starter at $199 per month or Growth at $799 per month paid annually, assuming 2,000 sits within the entry band, which the site does not confirm in print. Run the estimator and get the band in writing.
- Modelled bill at 20,000 MAU: not published. At that volume you are into estimator territory on Growth or into a custom quote, and if your product is freemium or B2C, Candu will route you to HyperScale, where the published prices do not apply at all.
- Seats are genuinely unlimited on every tier including free, which offsets some of the MAU cost and is a real differentiator against per-seat-capped competitors.
- The Starter to Growth gap is $600 per month for one capability class (inline experiences). There is no middle tier, so a team that needs one embedded checklist pays the full Growth price for it.
- A/B testing sits on Enterprise, so the highest published tier does not include experimentation.

Value assessment: Candu's free plan is one of the most useful in this category: three live overlays with advanced styling and unlimited seats is enough to run a real onboarding modal and a real tour, permanently, for nothing. Starter at $199 is unremarkable, roughly Userpilot's territory for a narrower feature set, and hard to justify unless the styling control specifically matters to you. Growth at $799 is where the value judgement gets interesting: you are paying roughly UserGuiding Growth times two and a half for a capability nobody else sells, which is content that renders inside your product rather than over it. If owning your homepage, empty states and embedded checklists without engineering time is worth $9,588 a year, that is a defensible trade for a company where a front-end sprint costs more than that. If you just want tours and checklists floating on top of your app, Candu is expensive and you should be looking at UserGuiding or Product Fruits.

## Strengths

- Inline experiences are a genuine architectural differentiator: no other tool in this comparison set lets a product team own the homepage, empty states and embedded checklists as first-class layout content.
- Advanced styling on every tier including free, which is why Candu output reads as native rather than as a third-party widget, and why design teams tend to approve it.
- Unlimited user licenses on every plan, including free, which is a real contrast with competitors that cap the entry tier at one or three seats.
- The free plan is permanently useful rather than a disguised trial: three live overlays with full styling covers a small team's actual onboarding modal and tour.
- AI experience generation shortens the blank-canvas problem for homepages and empty states, where composing from scratch is the slowest part of the job.
- A React SDK alongside the plain JavaScript snippet, which suits engineering teams that would rather mount a component than trust a DOM-scanning overlay.
- Integrations and webhooks available from the $199 tier rather than reserved for enterprise contracts.
- Role-based access controls on Growth, which matters as soon as more than two people can publish to your users.

## Limitations

- The Starter to Growth jump is $600 per month with no middle tier, and inline experiences (the actual reason to buy Candu) sit entirely on the far side of it.
- A/B testing and experimentation are Enterprise-only, so even $9,588 a year of Growth does not buy you the ability to split-test an onboarding flow.
- MAU thresholds behind the published prices are not printed, only estimated on-page, which makes precise budgeting impossible without a conversation.
- Consumer and freemium products are explicitly routed to a separate custom HyperScale tier, so the published pricing is only real for B2B-shaped user counts.
- No native mobile SDK; this is a web React and JavaScript product.
- Inline experiences require a one-time engineering commitment to expose layout slots, so the no-code promise has a code-shaped prerequisite that overlay-only competitors do not.
- Analytics are experience-level rather than product analytics, so a separate tool is still required for funnels and retention.
- The company has been quiet on funding since its $5M seed in 2020, and public headcount and revenue signal is thin relative to better-covered competitors.

## Comparisons

- **Candu vs UserGuiding**: UserGuiding costs $174 per month at 2,000 MAU for a broad overlay suite plus a knowledge base and changelog; Candu costs $799 for the inline experiences that are its actual reason to exist. Take UserGuiding if you want the widest overlay toolkit for the least money and floating content is acceptable. Take Candu if the onboarding content must look like part of the product and you want to own your homepage and empty states without a front-end sprint.
- **Candu vs Inline Manual**: Both are priced above the budget tier but for opposite reasons. Inline Manual charges $158 for 250 MAU and buys you version control, release management and an offline player for governed internal rollouts. Candu charges $799 for inline rendering and design fidelity in a customer-facing product. Pick Inline Manual for compliance and control over a small internal population; pick Candu for design quality in front of paying customers.
- **Candu vs Userpilot**: Userpilot's $299 entry tier gives you the overlay suite and pushes analytics, session replay and the resource center to $849 Growth. Candu is free for three overlays, $199 for unlimited overlays, and $799 for inline. Choose Userpilot if you want onboarding plus a product analytics replacement in one bill; choose Candu if you want fewer analytics and much better-looking in-product content, and start on Candu's free plan since it costs nothing to find out.
- **Candu vs Chameleon**: Chameleon is the other design-serious option, with strong styling control, sophisticated targeting and automated detection of broken flows. Candu goes further on rendering (inline content Chameleon does not do) but does not match Chameleon on flow-health monitoring, and it gates A/B testing to Enterprise where Chameleon treats experimentation as core. Choose Chameleon if flow maintenance and testing matter most; choose Candu if native-looking inline surfaces matter most.
- **Candu vs Appcues**: Appcues is the incumbent with an implementation fee, a service-heavy relationship and no published prices above its entry plan. Candu publishes a free plan, a $199 tier and a $799 tier, and you can be building inside an hour without a call. Pick Appcues if you want a vendor running the program alongside you at scale; pick Candu if you would rather see the price, start free, and judge the output on how it looks in your own product.

## Implementation

- Setup time: Overlays are same-day: one React or JavaScript snippet, a populated user attribute payload, and you can publish a modal within the hour. Inline experiences take longer, because your engineers have to expose the layout slots where Candu content will render. That is a one-time task per surface, but it is a real ticket and it should be scoped before you buy Growth.
- Learning curve: Low for the drag-and-drop editor, moderate for the design work. Because Candu gives you deep styling control rather than a fixed template, the output is only as good as the effort you put into matching your design system, and the AI generator gets you a first draft rather than a finished surface.
- Onboarding: Self-serve on the free and Starter tiers. Growth includes a dedicated customer success manager and Slack support, which is unusually hands-on for a published price point. Enterprise adds 10 service hours per quarter.
- Migration: No automated importer from other platforms; overlays are rebuilt by hand. The inline half has no equivalent to migrate from, since it is content your engineers previously hardcoded, so the migration there is really a handover: identify which parts of your homepage and empty states should stop living in your repository and start living in Candu, and agree that boundary with engineering before you start moving things.

## Platform, API & security

- Platforms: Web applications, React SDK, JavaScript snippet
- API: Integrations and webhooks are available from the $199 Starter tier, covering event push and user data ingestion; a content management system for structured content sits on Enterprise.
- Compliance: GDPR, SOC 2 posture handled through Enterprise security review
- Data residency: Not published as a self-serve option; raise during an Enterprise security review.
- SSO: Single sign-on on the Enterprise tier only.
- Security notes: Candu runs inside your authenticated application and, in the inline case, renders into slots your own components expose, which is a tighter and more predictable integration than a DOM-scanning overlay that attaches itself wherever it can. That is a genuine argument in a security review: inline content lives where you told it to live. The plain overlay path carries the same third-party script considerations as every competitor and should be measured against your content security policy and performance budget during the trial.

## Support

- Channels: Email support, Chat support, Dedicated CSM and Slack channel on Growth, Premium support and 10 service hours per quarter on Enterprise
- Documentation: Product documentation covering the React and JavaScript snippet, the editor, segments, goal tracking and inline slot configuration.
- Community: No large public user forum; support runs through email, chat and the Growth-tier Slack channel.

## Company

- Founded: 2018
- Founders: Jonathan Anderson, Michele Riccardo Esposito
- Headquarters: United States and London, United Kingdom
- Ownership: Venture-backed
- Employees: Not disclosed
- Funding: Roughly $6M raised. A $5M seed round closed in December 2020 led by Two Sigma Ventures with CRV participating, on top of earlier backing from Angular Ventures, Entrepreneur First and Haystack, plus angels from Datadog, LaunchDarkly and Sourcegraph. No growth round has been publicly reported since.

Funding history:

- Pre-seed (2018): Not disclosed. Backed by Entrepreneur First, Angular Ventures and Haystack following the company's founding.
- Seed (2020): $5M. Led by Two Sigma Ventures with CRV participating, plus angels from Datadog, LaunchDarkly and Sourcegraph.

Timeline:

- 2018: Founded by Jonathan Anderson and Michele Riccardo Esposito out of Entrepreneur First, with the premise that product teams should build their own in-app UI without engineering tickets.
- 2020: Raises a $5M seed led by Two Sigma Ventures with CRV, positioning the product as a native no-code web builder for SaaS applications rather than a tour tool.
- 2022: Inline experiences become the defining capability: checklists, banners, empty states and full in-product homepages rendered inside the customer's own layout.
- 2024: Adds AI experience generation so a described experience is drafted as editable UI, shortening the blank-canvas phase for homepages and empty states.
- 2025: Introduces the HyperScale tier with custom MAU pricing for freemium and B2C products, acknowledging that the standard curve does not fit consumer-scale user counts.
- 2026: Sells a free plan with three live overlays, Starter at $199 per month paid annually for unlimited overlays, and Growth at $799 for inline experiences, goal tracking and role-based access controls.

## Integrations

React SDK, JavaScript snippet, Webhooks, Analytics platform integrations, CRM integrations, Segment-style user attribute ingestion

## FAQ

### What is Candu?

Candu is a no-code in-app experience platform. After a one-time React or JavaScript snippet, product and growth teams build modals, popups, hotspots, tours, checklists, banners, forms, empty states and entire in-product homepages in a drag-and-drop editor and ship them without a deploy. Its distinguishing capability is inline experiences: content that renders inside your existing layout rather than floating on top of it.

### How much does Candu cost?

There is a free plan with three live overlay experiences, advanced styling, three segments and unlimited team members. Starter is $199 per month paid annually for unlimited overlays. Growth is $799 per month paid annually and is the tier that unlocks inline experiences, goal tracking and role-based access controls. Enterprise and HyperScale are custom-quoted. Pricing is metered by monthly active users with an on-page estimator.

### What does Candu cost at 2,000 or 20,000 monthly active users?

The published $199 and $799 figures are entry prices, and Candu does not print the MAU thresholds behind them, only an estimator. At 2,000 MAU you are most likely inside the entry band on Starter or Growth, but confirm it in writing. At 20,000 MAU the price is not published at all, and if your product is freemium or B2C, Candu will route you to its custom HyperScale tier, where the standard numbers do not apply. Do the estimator before you plan a budget.

### What is the difference between inline and overlay experiences?

Overlays float above your app: modals, tooltips, hotspots, docked checklists. Inline experiences render inside your layout as if they were part of the product: an embedded checklist in the empty half of your dashboard, an empty state Candu owns, a homepage assembled from Candu blocks. Inline is the reason Candu exists and it is gated entirely to the $799 Growth tier, so know which one you are buying before you start a trial.

### Do I need a developer, and how often?

For overlays, once: a developer adds the React or JavaScript snippet and passes user attributes, after which every experience ships without a deploy. For inline experiences, slightly more: your engineers have to expose the layout slots where Candu content will render. That is a one-time task per surface, not per flow, but it is a real ticket and it means Candu's no-code promise has a code-shaped prerequisite that pure overlay competitors do not.

### Does Candu survive a front-end redesign?

Better than most, and worse than you would hope. Inline content is mounted into slots your own components expose, so a redesign that keeps the slot keeps the content, which is far more robust than DOM selector matching. Overlay content is anchored to elements the same way every competitor does it, and will break silently when class names or structure change. The practical guidance is the same as for the whole category: re-audit active overlays after every significant UI ship, because nothing here tells you an anchor died.

### Can I A/B test experiences in Candu?

Only on Enterprise. Experimentation is not included in Growth at $799 per month, which is the most awkward line on the pricing page, because a team paying nearly $10,000 a year to own its homepage is exactly the team that should be testing two versions of it. If flow experimentation is a requirement, UserGuiding includes A/B testing on a $349 tier.

### Does Candu work on mobile apps?

No. Candu is a web product with a React SDK and a JavaScript snippet, and there is no native iOS or Android guidance capability. A mobile-first product should look elsewhere.

### How many seats do I get?

Unlimited, on every tier including the free one. This is genuinely unusual: several competitors cap their entry plans at a single seat, which quietly forces an upgrade the moment a second person wants to build something. Candu meters monthly active users instead, so your whole team can be in the editor without changing the bill.

### Who owns Candu and how well funded is it?

Candu is an independent venture-backed company founded in 2018 by Jonathan Anderson and Michele Riccardo Esposito, with offices in the United States and London. It raised a $5M seed in December 2020 led by Two Sigma Ventures with CRV, following early backing from Entrepreneur First, Angular Ventures and Haystack. No growth round has been publicly reported since, so total disclosed funding is around $6M and public signal on headcount and revenue is thin.

## Editorial verdict

Candu is the only tool in this category that lets a product team own real layout instead of just the space above it, and that single architectural choice is what you are paying for. The free plan is unusually generous and worth running regardless: three live overlays with full styling control and unlimited seats costs nothing and will tell you within a week whether Candu's output looks like your product. The hard part is the $600 jump from Starter to Growth, because inline experiences (the actual reason to be here) live entirely on the Growth side, and A/B testing does not appear until Enterprise. Buy Growth if replacing hardcoded homepages, empty states and embedded checklists with something a PM can edit is worth roughly ten thousand dollars a year against what a front-end sprint costs you. If you only want tours and floating checklists, this is an expensive way to get them and UserGuiding does it for a quarter of the price.

---

Source: SaaSTracker (https://saastracker.org), an independent editorial project. This profile is compiled from public information, carries no peer reviews or paid placement, and was last reviewed 2026-08-22. Awards are judged on published criteria: https://saastracker.org/methodology