Storylane vs Walnut: Which is the better interactive demo tool?

Storylane or Walnut? Walnut or Storylane? Which one should we choose? If that’s the question, you are in the right place.

Here, we give you an unbiased comparison between Storylane and Walnut, two well-known tools in the interactive demo software category. 

We compare them based on key parameters like demo capture methods, pricing, demo editing capabilities, demo analytics, integrations, ease of use and implementation, and star features.

Before we zero in, here’s the TL;DR version you wanted but never asked for:

Storylane vs Walnut: Which is the Best Demo Automation Tool for You?

The key difference between Storylane and Walnut is in the audience they primarily cater to. Storylane caters to the needs of marketing, sales, and pre-sales teams alike. On the other hand, Walnut calls itself a sales experience platform that aids sales teams in selling better through a personalized and customer-centric approach.

Here are some of the other notable differences:

Storylane	Walnut
Offers a Free Trial	Doesn’t offer a free trial
Captures screenshots and HTML demos	Captures only HTML demos
Has a “Demo Reveal’ feature to collect details of your demo visitors	Has a ‘Funnel Analysis’ feature to identify why and when visitors drop off during a demo.
Offers AI assistance to edit guides in demos	Offers collaboration features in demos

Without further ado, let’s address the elephant in the room,

Storylane or Walnut, Which is Better?: A Detailed Breakdown

Both Storylane and Walnut are no-code platforms that let you build interactive product demos quickly. In this section, we give you a detailed breakdown of both these tools based on the following parameters:

1. Demo Capture Methods

With Storylane, you can capture two types of demos:

1. Screenshot demos (Non-editable): Best suited for marketing teams to create self-guided demos that can be embedded on the website, email campaigns, or support guides.
2. HTML demos (Editable): Ideal for sales teams creating personalized live sales demos or demo leave-behinds and pre-sales team building multi-flow product tours. Since HTML demos are clickable and customizable, they mirror the look and feel of the actual product, giving prospects a more personalized experience.

Walnut only supports HTML demos as the tool is tailored for sales teams. It offers 3 modes of capture:

1. Single Capture: Captures the screen as it is.

2. Timed Capture: Useful to capture pull-down menus, pop-ups, etc.

3. Continuous Capture: Automatically captures the screen as you move from one screen to another.

These capture modes are also available in Storylane with HTML captures.

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2. Pricing

Storylane offers a free plan but with limited features. There’s also the limitation of the free plan housing only a single user who can only publish one screenshot demo and gain insights into its analytics. 

Other than the free trial, it offers 3 plans:

• Starter Plan starting at $40 per user/month
• Growth Plan starting at $100 per user/month
• Enterprise available at custom pricing

Walnut’s pricing details are only available on request. Like Storylane, Walnut’s pricing is based on the number of users. However, you’ll have to contact their sales team for pricing details.

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3. Demo Editing Capabilities

Storylane’s Demo Editing Capabilities

Storylane offers 4 types of guides – Hotspot, Tooltip, Text, and Media Modals, to add more context to your demos. Other than these, you can add video clips and native or custom lead capture forms to your demos.

Some other notable features include personalization tokens, multiple demos presented as a checklist, themes, blur, zoom-in, and more. 

Storylane also offers AI assistance for writing, refining, translating guides, and adding voiceovers to your demos. We’ll talk more about the AI-assistance feature in the Star Features section at the bottom.

Walnut’s Demo Editing Capabilities

Walnut provides demo templates called ‘Storylines’ to create similar demos faster without compromising on personalization. This feature allows you to edit pre-existing templates or add new ones to a shared library, allowing your whole team to reuse them. Storylane has a similar feature, ‘Themes,’ that lets you apply design changes to all steps in the demo in one click.

Walnut offers Guides (Hotspot, Tooltip, and Modal) to educate demo visitors on the steps in demos. But to add video clips to Walnut demos, you should first host them externally and embed the video URL instead of directly adding the video clips. This creates unnecessary friction while adding videos.

The demo customization features offered by Walnut are similar to that of Storylane. You can edit text, images, and charts, add variables, and even perform edits in a batch. But it doesn’t offer AI assistance for creating demos.

As a demo automation tool primarily designed for salespeople, Walnut offers some collaboration features for sales teams. It allows multiple users to work on the same template simultaneously and lets demo presenters add notes to demos only they can see. Storylane doesn’t offer these features.

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4. Demo Analytics

Storylane and Walnut offer similar demo analytics. They give you insights about:

• Demo visitors
• Their engagement with the demo
• Completion rate
• Last views
• Most engaged parts of the demo
  
  
  

Additionally, Storylane offers ‘Demo Reveal’ feature to help you gain more visibility into your demo visitors. It gives information on visitors, like their company name, email IDs, locations, and tech stack, when they engage with your demo. This essentially eliminates the need for adding lead forms to your demos and creating that unnecessary friction.

Walnut gives you visibility into how visitors interact with your demos with its ‘Funnel Analysis’ feature. You get a graphical representation of how visitors reach a particular step. This data is useful to identify why and when visitors are dropping off. Storylane also offers this feature.

5. Integrations

Both Storylane and Walnut integrate natively with the following tools:

• Hubspot: To send and track demos directly from Hubspot CRM.
• Slack: To get notified when a known lead views the demo.
• Salesforce: To send and track demos directly from Salesforce CRM.
• Marketo: To send demos and track analytics from Marketo
• Webhooks: To send demo analytics cross-frame to hosting websites.
• G2: To directly add demos to your G2 profile

Additionally, Storylane integrates with:

• Pardot: To send and track demos directly from Pardot
• Clearbit: To gather details of your demo visitors
• Zapier: To seamlessly integrate with over 5000 third-party tools
• Segment: To send demo analytics to Segment
• Intercom: To push the leads captured in the demo and their corresponding events to your Intercom.
• Google Analytics: To send demo analytics to Google Analytics

Walnut, on the other hand, integrates with Highspot to send demos to leads in Highspot and track demo analytics, something that’s missing in Storylane.

6. Ease of Use and Implementation

In terms of ease of use and implementation, Storylane tops the list, according to reviews from G2. It is ranked the 2nd ‘Easiest to Use’ tool in the demo automation category, while Walnut is ranked 16th in the list, according to G2.

Source

7. Star Features

There are some features that are exclusive to Storylane and Walnut. And we would like to call them ‘Star Features.’

Storylane’s Star Features

1. AI-powered Assistance: Storylane provides a couple of AI-powered features to speed up the process of creating engaging and personalized demos.

• AI Voice Generator: Converts your written text to audio recordings that can be added to the guided content in demos. Only English voiceovers are available now, but according to Storylane’s website, they’ll add more language options soon.

• AI Translate: Translates any content into 27+ languages in seconds.
• AI-Guide Write: Writes engaging copy for your guides for better conversion.
• AI-Guide Improve: Refines your guided content to make it more compelling.

2. Video Exports: Allows you to download your demos as videos.

Walnut’s Star Features

1. Smart Objects: Walnut’s ‘Smart Objects’ feature lets you apply a particular edit to all screens in the demo. Once you set a specific element as ‘smart object’, any change you make to it will automatically reflect on all screens with that element. 

This feature comes in handy when you want to hide, edit, or remove specific elements from multi-step or multi-flow demos with over 50 screens.

2. Commenting on a Demo: Walnut allows prospects to raise their queries or share feedback as comments in demos. You get notified every time a comment gets added. This is a great way to avoid unwanted back-and-forths and ensure your prospects get value faster.

Final Thoughts

Both are great tools that let you build compelling product demos in no time. Storylane is a good option if you are looking for a tool that is easy to set up and can be used across marketing, sales, and pre-sales teams. On the other hand, Walnut is a better option if you are looking for a demo creation tool specifically designed for salespeople, as it comes with various collaboration features.