Pendo and Rocketlane Split the Onboarding Job

A revealing question in a software demo is sometimes the one nobody asks: where is the customer when the problem happens? They might be in a kickoff call, waiting for a data file, an approval or an implementation consultant. Or they might be alone inside the product, clicking past the useful feature and missing the habit that makes the subscription worthwhile. Both situations are called onboarding. They do not require the same machine.

That is a clear way to understand Pendo and Rocketlane. Search for customer-onboarding software and both names can appear. Put them into a feature-by-feature cage match, however, and the comparison gets silly fast. Pendo is an analytics and digital-adoption platform. It observes what users do in software and lets teams respond with guides, messages, feedback and product decisions. Rocketlane is an implementation and professional-services platform. It coordinates plans, people, documents, customer communication, capacity, time and money around client-facing delivery.

The shared objective is time to value. The clocks are different. Rocketlane's clock often begins when a deal closes and a delivery team must make the promise real. Pendo's clock becomes useful when someone can enter the product and the company needs to know whether that person is finding, understanding and repeatedly using what matters.

Two origin stories, two blind spots

Pendo was founded in Raleigh, North Carolina, in 2013 by product and technology operators. The company describes its platform as a combination of software-usage analytics, in-app guidance and feedback. Its founding premise was familiar to product managers: teams ship software, but often lack a direct view of what customers want, what keeps them returning or what drives them away. A small code installation gave those teams a layer for observation and action without putting every guide request into an engineering queue.

The company expanded with the product-led movement. In 2019, Pendo announced a $100 million Series E at a $1 billion valuation. In March 2024, it said annual recurring revenue had passed $200 million and that it had reached its first quarter of positive cash generation. Pendo's current company page says more than 14,000 companies use the platform, which processes more than 20 billion events a day. Those are company-reported figures, but they show the scale of the problem Pendo chose: software behavior produces a great deal of evidence.

Rocketlane began with a different frustration. Its three founders, Srikrishnan Ganesan, Vignesh Girishankar and Deepak Bala, had built the messaging startup Konotor, which Freshworks acquired in 2015. As their product became part of larger enterprise deals, they saw how exposed customers and vendors felt during implementation. Important work lived across spreadsheets, project tools, documents and email. Status was performed in meetings because it could not be trusted at a glance.

Founded in 2020 and launched publicly in 2021, Rocketlane bundled that work into a customer-facing project environment. The product grew toward professional-services automation, adding resource management, time tracking, portfolio views, budgeting and business intelligence. When Rocketlane announced a $24 million Series B in June 2024, it said it had more than 500 customer logos and had grown more than threefold each year following its Series A. Its ambition had moved beyond a tidy onboarding portal toward an operating system for post-sales delivery.

The category mistake is buying for “onboarding” before locating the delay.YesPress analysis

What each product can actually do

Pendo can show product teams which features are used, by whom and in what sequence. Teams can segment users, build funnels, review sessions, collect NPS or other feedback, and place targeted guidance in web or mobile applications. The practical move is a loop: observe a point of friction, guide the relevant group, then measure whether behavior changes. Pendo's free plan currently includes analytics, in-app guides, Pendo-branded roadmaps and NPS surveys for up to 500 monthly active users. Paid pricing combines monthly active users with selected functionality.

This makes Pendo useful after access exists. A software company can guide a new administrator through configuration, show a contextual prompt when an account ignores a valuable feature, or compare the behavior of retained and departing cohorts. An IT team can use similar mechanics for employee adoption of internal software. Product people gain evidence; users gain help at the moment of action.

Rocketlane gives implementation leaders a repeatable delivery system. A team can turn a standard methodology into project templates, assign internal and customer owners, expose a shared plan through a branded portal, manage documents, track time, plan capacity and watch budget or margin. Portfolio views help a leader find stalled work without asking every project manager to rebuild the truth in a slide.

That matters when onboarding is not a tour but a program: integrations, data migration, security review, training, configuration and executive signoff. Rocketlane can make dependencies and accountability visible to both sides. It can also help a services leader answer operational questions that an in-app tool cannot: Who is overbooked next month? Which projects are drifting? Where is non-billable effort eating the plan?

The handoff is the product

A mature B2B company can need both platforms because go-live is not the end of onboarding. Imagine a payroll product. Rocketlane coordinates data import, permissions, integrations, testing and training across the vendor and customer. The implementation closes on schedule. Pendo then reveals that regional managers still avoid a new reporting workflow. A targeted guide helps them complete it, while analytics show whether the behavior sticks.

The risk is allowing two systems to produce two versions of success. An implementation dashboard can turn green while actual use remains thin. An adoption dashboard can show active clicks while a costly rollout runs late. Teams need an explicit handoff event and a shared outcome. “Project complete” is an operational statement. “Customer receives value” is a behavioral and business statement. They may occur days or months apart.

A useful operating design assigns each fact a home. Milestones, owners, effort, delivery risk and budget belong with the implementation record. Product events, user segments, guides, sentiment and feature adoption belong with the product record. CRM can hold the commercial account context. Then select a small set of signals that cross the boundaries: expected go-live, actual go-live, first key action, time to first key action and repeated use.

How to buy without wasting a quarter

Start with three failed or delayed onboardings. Write each failure in plain language. “The customer did not send the data.” “Our consultant was assigned to six projects.” “Administrators completed training but never created the first report.” Tag each as outside the product, inside the product or at the handoff. The pattern will narrow the evaluation before a salesperson shares a screen.

Next, ask vendors to demonstrate your evidence, not their tour. For Rocketlane, bring a sample plan with customer-owned tasks and a resource conflict. Ask how a leader sees risk, how the customer experiences accountability and how the team tracks unplanned work. For Pendo, bring a precise adoption question. Ask how an event is defined, how identity and segmentation work, how a guide is governed, and how the team can tell whether intervention changed behavior.

Finally, price the operating change. Pendo needs clean instrumentation, ownership and restraint; too many tooltips can make a product feel like an airport covered in signs. Rocketlane needs templates, delivery discipline and reliable time or project data; a beautiful portal cannot compensate for nobody updating the plan. In each case, software magnifies the method already underneath it.

The final decision can be pleasantly unglamorous. Buy Rocketlane when the customer journey is being delayed by the work around the product. Buy Pendo when value is being lost in the experience of using it. Buy both only when the organization is prepared to connect delivery and behavior into one definition of success. The vendors share a keyword. Your customer lives through the whole sentence.