Onboarding benchmarks from real data across 464 SaaS products: median tour completion is 29%
I run Produktly, a bootstrapped product adoption tool (tours, checklists, NPS, announcements etc. etc.). Customers kept asking me "is 30% tour completion good?" and all I had was vibes.
So I built a benchmark report from real usage data: anonymized aggregates across the platform for January to June 2026, 464 companies, 15.8 million in-app interactions. Published free.
What surprised me:
- Median tour completion is 29% per company, and the middle half runs 15% to 55%. Most founders assume they're failing at 30%. They're median.
- Length is the biggest lever I found. Tours with 1-2 steps complete at a median of 73%. Tours with 9+ steps: 8%.
- Auto-starting a tour tanks completion: 23% median, vs 69% when the user opens it themselves. People finish the tour they chose to take.
- Median in-app NPS is +30, but only 4.3% of the people who see an NPS survey answer it. Plan your sample sizes accordingly.
- Announcements age fast: a median 43% of all the impressions a post ever gets happen in its first 48 hours.
- Hover tooltips get opened about 1 in 1,000 impressions. Cheap to ship, but they won't carry activation on their own.
Methodology in one line: medians and quartiles across companies (never pooled averages, one whale would dominate), minimum thresholds per metric, my own account excluded, and the sample skews toward small and mid-size SaaS.
Full report, free and ungated: https://produktly.com/research/saas-onboarding-benchmarks-2026
Happy to answer questions about the queries or the numbers. And if you track onboarding in your own product, what does completion look like for you?
This is genuinely useful—especially the choice to report medians and quartiles by company rather than pooled averages. That makes the numbers far more actionable for the typical small SaaS, where a few huge accounts could otherwise distort the benchmark.
The auto-start vs user-initiated finding is the one that should change how most products ship tours by default. A 46-point completion gap isn't a UX detail, it's telling you that autonomy matters more than exposure. People don't abandon because the tour is bad. They abandon because they didn't choose to be in it.
The 9+ steps at 8% completion is brutal but expected. The more interesting question is whether there's a cliff between 4-step and 5-step tours, or if it's a gradual decay. If there's a step-change somewhere in that range, that's where to draw the line.
The 43% of lifetime impressions in 48 hours for announcements changes the sequencing logic entirely. If you're sending emails tied to announcements, the email needs to go out in hour 1, not day 3.
The more interesting benchmark is the gap between tour completion and actual activation. A 73% completion rate for a two-step tour sounds great, but it doesn't necessarily mean the user reached the outcome the tour was meant to create.