Over the past few years, Walnut has created the product demonstration landscape, by launching a platform that helps tech businesses show & sell their products better. They’ve become known for their interactive demos that can be personalized and data-driven insights that help sellers understand their buyers’ intent and drive sales.
With more people than ever before turning to tech solutions during the economic situation of the past few years, the ability to showcase a product via personalized demos has become extremely crucial.
But although Walnut is the most established product demo platform currently available in this market, it’s not alone – much like every other competitive vertical.
In this article, we’ll explore several other options, comparing their features and how they stack up against Walnut.
The follow-up products we’ll cover:
- Reprise
- Demostack
- Navattic
Reprise
Reprise is a demo platform that’s split into four core segments, each providing utility to a core group: solutions engineers, product marketers, sales leaders, and marketing leaders. The platform allows users to create a copy of their product, and then modify what they include for the demo.
Once you’ve crafted your demo, you’re able to add guides, modify elements, or focus on creating a unique experience for each customer. Each demo comes with a range of real-time insights that you can integrate into other business intelligence tools that you use.
We would also mention that Reprise focuses heavily on being enterprise-ready, so that’s something to consider as well.
Yet, despite being codeless, many reviewers of Reprise say that it is far from an easy-to-use solution. Reprise has quite a steep learning curve for the average non-technically advanced user, which means that users are in for a few training sessions before being able to utilize the software.
What’s more, the personalization features on Reprise are rudimentary, often leaving customers wanting more. Considering that the vast majority of consumers expect personalization, this could reduce the impact of your product demos over time.
Although the closest to Walnut in many ways, the lack of personalization features and the learning curve are where the differences start to materialize.
Demostack
Demostack focuses on the art of storytelling, allowing sales enablement teams to convey their product in the light that they would like. This product lets you create several different showcase demos, allowing you to personalize them for different markets and consumer types.
It seems that the company originally aimed to develop a technology that could automatically create demos, but due to scalability issues, they have recently pivoted to a “live overlay” set of features. This means that they have shifted their focus to developing a technology that can overlay content in real-time, possibly during a live demo or presentation.
Until then, If you want your demo to update with your product over time, then you’ll need to give Demostack access to your software back-end, which can be an issue for some businesses.
Finally, the analytics that Demostack offers is lacking, not giving as much information as Walnut and Reprise do. Especially considering the importance of data-driven sales, this can lead to stagnation with A/B testing demos and improving upon the final client-facing versions.
The effectiveness of the company’s new technology will be determined over time, as it is put to the test and evaluated for its ability to meet customer needs and expectations.
Navattic
Navatiic is the youngest company on this list, arriving in the industry after the spike in product demo usage over the pandemic. Navattic is a no-code demo builder that caters primarily to product marketers who are looking to embed product tours on their websites.
They also provide analytics, which is a good way of optimizing the quality of your embedded product demos over time.
Navattic offers integrations with a number of the leading marketing and CRM tools, like HubSpot, SalesForce, Marketo, Segment, Google Analytics, and Zapier. For marketing teams that already have a tech stack, this is good news.
Although Navattic has had an impressive start, its freshness in the world of product demos has also led to a much smaller batch of features than offered by all others on this list. As they’re much behind in terms of product readiness and funding, we would place our bets on the other major platforms for now.
Final Thoughts
Across distinct features, smart applications, and many UX design choices, all of the demonstration platforms on this list have proven valuable to this market.
That said, we couldn’t find many improvements and differentiation over what Walnut has built and brought to market in early 2020. We will keep updating this list in the next months as 2023 pans out for the various demo platforms.
