Product demos have been a staple of the sales industry for decades. What started as a live demonstration has now gravitated into the realm of digital sales, with online companies being able to generate effective product demos on their websites. Especially with the rise of industries like Software-as-a-Service (SaaS), the need to show customers a glimpse of the product or service has become even more integral to the sales process.
With an estimated $700 billion in the SaaS industry alone, businesses around the globe are all trying to one-up each other when it comes to the style, accuracy, and capabilities of their sales demos. From this desire, several online demo products have come out of the woodwork.
Out of these, the main competitors are:
- Reprise
- Walnut
- Demostack
- Navattic
- Storylane
In this article, we’ll explore each of the sales demonstration platforms, exploring how effective, and user-friendly they are, and diving into the range of capabilities they offer. Let’s dive right in.
Reprise
Reprise offers a dynamic sales demo platform. Users can generate a new sales demo of their product, offering a no-code approach for sales teams. Once created, users can move around features, customize text, and personalize their demos to any extent they would like.
Reprise also offers analytics, allowing sales teams to trace data from each of the demos they send out. They split demo analytics into three core sections, My Replays, My Team, and My Customers, giving you a broad insight into usage and interactions. That said, their app capture analytics is still in Beta, meaning they have a way to go before they reach the analytical capabilities of other names on this list. Customers also say that their UI is a bit more “tech-oriented” than its competitors, and it takes more time to adopt their technology.
Walnut
Walnut is the household name when it comes to product demo platforms. From “Top Startup” to “Leading Performer in the Industry”, they’ve spent years snapping up awards for their product offering. Walnut is an accessible option, allowing business managers and sales teams to generate new demos in a matter of seconds.
Within the demo editing suite, Walnut has a large amount of customization options available, allowing sales teams to personalize everything about their demos, run A/B tests, and continually improve their offering. Alongside the demo platform itself, Walnut’s analytics are unbeatable, providing a comprehensive and extensive overview of every element of interaction with the demo.
Walnut is also adapting alongside modern technology, having already integrated AI into its most recent launch, helping companies to create and distribute world-class demos faster than ever before.
Demostack
Demostack focuses on bridging the gap between the technical know-how and the creative side of demo creation. Demostack focuses on storytelling, wanting its audience to fall in love with the products they help show. But the storytelling capabilities are actually more limited in Demostack than some of the other names on this list, with an inability to demo integrations or use the platform throughout the sales funnel.
Demostack also names itself for forming a core part of your sales stack, providing businesses with an all-in-one platform that integrates with other tools and analytics suites. Due to this connection, Demostrack helps to remove data silos and keep your product data flowing freely through your organization.
Navattic
Navattic is a more basic and simplistic solution that allows small businesses to quickly create product demos and send them out to customers. They take a four-step approach, using screen captures of your product to create a mapped product that customers can then walk through. With theme customization and options to personalize content, this is a very user-friendly approach. That said, Navattic has fewer feature sets compared to its competitors. They support top-of-funnel embeds, which can limit their application.
Storylane
Storylane allows small businesses to capture their product and create basic demos.
In five steps, you’re able to capture and begin to edit your Storylane demo, send it to customers and then monitor their progress through the demo. They’re the least funded team on the list and clients say the technology has a long way to go in order to scale.
While intuitive, the vast majority of features do take some learning, so prepare for a curve if you want to bring yourself up to speed with Storylane. They are also relatively new in the space, so may be suitable for small startups, but not ideal for larger enterprises.
Final Thoughts
While many of the services on this list offer a competitive and dynamic sales demonstration platform, not all of them contain the same richness when it comes to the features and integrations they provide. Especially as the sales tech stack becomes more complicated, moving toward platforms that integrate other applications and analytics suites will help to streamline the industry and provide productive insight.
Walnut remains the market leader of all of the sales demo platforms on this list. As one of the oldest and more well-known of the group, Walnut has used its time advantage in the field to build up a considerable and impressive lead. With a broad range of features, dynamic integrations, and a rich personalization system, Walnut remains our go-to sales demo platform.
