Intro.js is a lightweight JavaScript library for step-by-step product tours and hints. It highlights elements on your page and walks users through them, and hints point out features in place. It runs with any framework and has wrappers for React, AngularJS, Ember, Rails, WordPress and more. It’s free under the AGPLv3 licence, and commercial projects buy a one-time lifetime licence.
Cueston is a different kind of tool. Your product or customer success team builds tours, tooltips, banners, checklists and surveys in a Chrome extension, and changes them without a release. Targeting, guide analytics, goals and AI answers come with it. The trade-off is a monthly bill and less control over every line.
| Feature | Cueston | Intro.js |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | Free plan; paid from $39/month | Free for non-commercial use; commercial from $9.99 one-time |
| Priced by | Monthly active users | Projects (1, 5 or unlimited) |
| Step-by-step tours | Yes | Yes |
| Hints and tooltips | Yes | Yes |
| How tours are built | No-code Chrome extension | JavaScript code |
| How a tour is changed | In the editor, live without a deploy | A code change |
| Source code in your repo | No | Yes |
When Intro.js is the better fit
- Your engineers want full control of the tour code and styling inside your own repo.
- You need a few static tours and hints that rarely change, so editing them in code is no burden.
- You want the lowest possible cost. A commercial licence for one project is $9.99, paid once.
- You can’t load a third-party script or send data to another service.
When Cueston is the better fit
- Product or CS people should change copy, steps and targeting without filing a ticket and waiting for a deploy.
- You want to show guides to the right people: by URL, user traits, events in the last 90 days, other guides seen or finished, or segments.
- You want to know if a guide works. Set a goal, hold back a control group of up to 50% on Ascent and Orbit, and read results at 95% confidence.
- You want more than tours: checklists, banners, surveys with NPS, announcements, AI answers from your help docs and help offered on rage clicks or long pauses.
What each costs
Intro.js: free for open-source, personal and non-commercial projects under AGPLv3. Commercial lifetime licences: Starter at $9.99 (one project), Business at $49.99 (5 projects, 1 month of support) and Premium at $299.99 (unlimited projects, 6 months of support). Each is paid once, with no renewal. The developer time to build and maintain tours is on top. See Intro.js and our build vs buy calculator.
Cueston: a free plan (3 live guides, 1,000 monthly active users, 50 AI answers a month), then Launch at $39 a month billed yearly (15 live guides, 2,500 users, 500 AI answers), Ascent at $79 (unlimited guides, 10,000 users, 2,000 AI answers) and Orbit at $199 (50,000 users, 10,000 AI answers). See Cueston pricing.
Moving from Intro.js to Cueston
- Install the Cueston snippet and identify users with an ID and the traits you want to target on.
- Rebuild tours as Cueston tours and hints as tooltips in the Cueston Chrome extension, or reuse the CSS selectors from your Intro.js steps. There’s no import.
- Remove each Intro.js tour from your code once its Cueston version is live.
Frequently asked questions
Is Intro.js free?▾
For open-source, personal and non-commercial projects, yes, under AGPLv3. A commercial product needs a commercial licence, from $9.99 one-time.
Is Cueston cheaper than Intro.js?▾
Not on licence cost: Intro.js licences are one-time payments from $9.99 to $299.99. The real cost of a library is developer time to build, change and measure tours. Our build vs buy page lets you put in your own numbers.
Does Cueston have something like Intro.js hints?▾
Yes. Cueston tooltips sit on an element and can be shown on their own, outside a tour, to the users you target.