G2, TrustRadius, Gartner, Capterra, and every other review aggregation website will lead you to believe that there are dozens of Saleo competitors out there to consider.
The reality: if you're looking for a tool that will help you show off your live product during SaaS demos, there are only five options on the market: Saleo, TestBox, Reprise Reveal, Olto, and Coast.
That's it. That's the whole market of tools that cater to that specific use case.
There are lots of other tools that claim space in the demo automation software category — like Consensus, Demostack, Walnut, Navattic, Storylane, and Vivun — but they all make videos or clones of your product; they can't be used to demo your live product.
Sites that are lumping all of these tools together are creating a lot of confusion in the demo automation market and making it difficult for people to find the right tools for their needs. So for our list, we're not going to give a bunch of options that probably won't satisfy your requirements — just the shortlist that will.
If you're dissatisfied with Saleo and looking for an alternative, these Saleo competitors are the only four options you should compare.
1. TestBox
One of the primary reasons that Saleo fails to meet customers' needs is that it requires maintenance every time your product changes.
Because Saleo works by mapping your product's datapoints to data inside of Saleo, those mappings can break when your product changes. After that, you have to wait for Saleo's engineering team to re-map the fields before your demo environment is usable again.
So if your product changes a lot, Saleo is probably not the right solution for your team. You need a platform that works perfectly every time you need to demo your product.
TestBox doesn't suffer from this issue because it's fully integrated with your product. When you demo with TestBox, you're demoing your live product — a production account just like a customer would use — so it's always up to date and requires no ongoing maintenance.
Like Saleo, TestBox also adds PII-free data to your platform. However, instead of your team having to create custom data, TestBox works with your team during implementation to create a dataset template. That template is then used to create realistic, custom data with GPT-4 that's uploaded to each demo account when the account is created.
This saves your team the time and hassle of having to create and manage demo environment data. TestBox's data infusion process is fully automated, and datasets can also be personalized to tell the right data stories to different roles, industries, and verticals.
TestBox is also unique in this list of Saleo competitors in that it's the only tool that can also be used to send prospects a fully functional product sandbox/POC.
It's essentially an all-in-one tool for automating the most repetitive tasks solutions teams are responsible for so the presales process can be more effective and presales professionals can spend their time closing deals instead of managing sales demo environments and building sales POCs.
Related Reading: Saleo vs. TestBox
Want to learn more? Schedule a demo to see how TestBox can help you create on-demand, personalized demo environments and POCs for every lead.
2. Reprise Reveal
While Reprise is best known for its flagship product tour software, the company also has a tool called Reveal that's basically identical to Saleo's offering.
Like Saleo, Reprise Reveal uses a browser extension to overlay data onto your existing demo environment. Your team creates the data you want to map to your demo environment for different types of demos or personas, then you flip on the browser extension before a call to show your demo environment with custom data overlaid on top of it.
This makes Reveal is good option to consider if the reason you're moving away from Saleo is unrelated to problems with the technology (e.g., pricing or support).
However, the fact that Reveal works identically to Saleo means you'll encounter the same problems with the technology. Ongoing maintenance will be required when your product's UI or features are updated, and that may lock your team out of using the extension until that maintenance is complete.
Related Reading: The Best Reprise Competitors and Alternatives
3. Olto
Olto, which is still in early access, is the third and final Saleo competitor that lets teams demo their live products.
Olto is an overlay product like Saleo, but rather than injecting data that your team created into the front-end of your demo environment, it uses AI to highlight data in your product and then anonymize that data with the click of a button.
Olto can be a good solution if your primary goal is to remove all PII from your existing demo environment. However, for more solving more complex needs — like your team doesn't have an existing demo environment or you need a solution for demo environments and POCs — Olto may be too simple of a solution.
4. Coast
If you’re selling an API product that doesn’t have its own user interface, Coast might be a great option for demoing your product experience. It connects your API to a functional UI template that you can personalize for each lead you talk to and show off your product in its best light.
When you demo, you can show different things based on who you’re demoing to. For less technical stakeholders, you can show the sample UI so the buyer can see how your API will work with the front end of their system. But when you’re demoing to engineering teams, you can show the back-end code utilizing your API. This ensures a great demo experience for all buyers and helps you close deals.
After the demo, the Coast demo environment can be sent to leads as a leave-behind POC, helping your first contact at the company get other decision-makers on board easily. Each Coast instance is on a custom link so that every lead gets their own experience, and each spins up a local database to ensure that the changes leads make in the workflows are saved.
Choosing the right Saleo alternative for your team
If you've struggled to make Saleo work for your team, you might be skeptical about the demo automation market as a whole. But it's important to keep in mind that the technology used varies wildly across the different tools in the space, so failure with one product doesn't mean none of these products will work for you.
We recommend asking each vendor you're considering the following questions to determine if the platform is right for your needs and will work alongside other things that are happening in your business, such as regular product updates:
- Does marketing or sales engineering typically manage this product? The answer to this question will help you determine if the product is designed for the marketing use case or the sales use case. This is important because tools built for marketing teams typically do not satisfy the sales use case.
- What does implementation look like? Which roles are involved from both organizations? The answer to this question will set you up for success before the purchase because you can ensure you have alignment across your organization to do the work needed to implement the product and get it launched.
- What happens when we update our product? If the vendor says maintenance is required after product updates and you have an engineering team that releases updates frequently, you may end up in an endless cycle of maintenance that prevents you from using the product.
- In what situations does your product not work? Ask early on if there are scenarios or use cases that the platform simply isn't a good fit for. The answer might help you rule out a platform you're considering before getting too deep into the purchasing process.
- Can you share your churn percentage? A high churn percentage suggests that the product may not have worked well for other companies that purchased it.
Ensuring you're buying a product that's built specifically for sales and solutions teams and digging deep into the ongoing maintenance requirements for each tool should help you find a great Saleo alternative that's perfect for your showing off your product and delivering ROI.
