Demostack vs Walnut - A comparison without the jargon

The best way to understand how the tools compare is by looking at how Demostack vs. Walnut perform across a range of use-cases - if you already know what you’re trying to achieve, this should be a pretty fast and painless way to compare the two.

Here’s how we’ll be breaking down the comparison:

1. Effectiveness across common use-cases:
   
   • Live demos - How well suited are the tools in creating clones of your production app that a sales rep can use to give a live demo to a prospect over a screenshare or in-person?
   • Guided demos - How effective are the tools in creating demos with interactive guides that can be shared with prospects or embedded on marketing and support pages?
   • Mobile app demos - Can you use these platforms to demo mobile apps across any of the above use-cases?
2. Pricing: How affordable is each option?
3. User ratings: What positives and negatives do their customers point out on public review sites?

We’re also going to be throwing our very own interactive demo platform HowdyGo into the mix as a better value alternative that is worth considering.

TLDR; Demostack vs Walnut (vs HowdyGo)

Demostack is better if you’re looking to run live sales demos, while Walnut is better for guided demos. If you’re looking for an all-in-one platform that handles both at a more affordable price, then have a look at HowdyGo.

Suitability across different use-cases

Live demos

✅ Demostack

Live demos are where Demostack shines, and they offer 2 different products depending on what problem you’re looking to solve.

“Demostack Live” sits on top of your live product, giving you the ability to edit and personalize it. If you have a stable and reliable demo environment that you’re already using and you just want to personalise the data in it for demo calls, then this is the tool for you. The risk is that this will require inevitable involvement with your engineering team, tighter controls and lengthy onboarding.

So to reduce that onboarding time and complexity, they offer their second product…

“Demostack Environment” on the other hand is a cloned sandbox of your live product. This means that it’s a stable, reliable copy of your SaaS which you can also personalize for prospects. If your live demo environment is not stable, then this is the tool for you.

The downside of the “Demostack Environment” is that in order to clone your product you need to take individual captures of each screen (they take 5-10 seconds each and you’ll want 100s) and then you need to manually link each of those screens together. This can be a very time consuming process that someone needs to perform regularly in order to keep the demos up to date.

❌ Walnut

Walnut is built for guided demos, so it’s not exactly well suited for setting up a live sales demo environment. The main limitation is that it can only be used to create linear demo flows, where you have to click in specific spots in the correct sequence in order to get through a demo. So you can’t just click around the demo as you would in the real product.

✅ HowdyGo

HowdyGo is a platform that lets you build both guided demos and cloned sandboxes of your product. This allows you to create a stable sales demo environment that you can easily personalise for your prospects.

Much like Demostack, HowdyGo’s Sandboxes respond to clicks anywhere in the UI just like your real product would, not forcing you to demo only linear journeys.

Unlike Demostack, HowdyGo’s sandbox building is automated. You simply click through your product with the extension running, and it instantly captures each screen you visit and stitches them together. HowdyGo also detects when multiple buttons or links point to the same pages and automatically links them together across your entire demo.

Guided demos

✅ Demostack

Demostack offers guided demos with some bare-bones features. They are just their live demo sandboxes with the added ability to add tooltips in order to guide a user through them.

While they don’t offer much interactivity beyond the basic tooltips, they do have other useful features like instant alerts when viewers open a demo and they offer logging of this activity into your CRM.

Much like their sandbox offering, you need to manually stitch together screens and capture them one by one in order to build out a demo.

✅ Walnut

Walnut is a pretty flexible guided demo tool. They offer a capable feature-set which includes the ability to edit any captured UI (replace images and edit text), add different style guides over a demo, create demo checklists, monitor analytics to track performance and plug-and-play integrations to ensure your demo data doesn’t live in a silo.

They offer a faster creation experience than Demostack with their continuous capture mode. This lets you capture every page after you perform a click (it still takes 5-10 seconds after each click) but it automatically stitches them together into a single demo.

✅ HowdyGo

HowdyGo offers powerful guided demo creation features focussed on simplicity of creation. It all starts with the recording process, which is just as easy as recording a video. You just click through the app (no need to wait 5-10 seconds per page) and once you’re done, the extension stitches all your screens and clicks into a single HTML demo.

In the editor you can edit the captured UI by replacing images, charts and text or fully removing elements. You can select your interactive tooltips and hotspot styles and even add additional elements like video and voiceovers to help tell your story.

You can break up long demos into chapters which allow users to jump around between different sections in a “choose your own adventure” style demo or you can share multiple demos and videos on a single demo collection page.

Detailed analytics, notifications and integrations are also available.

Check out our list of favourite interactive demo examples if you want a little more inspiration.

Demoing mobile apps

⚠️ Demostack

Demostack offers some support for mobile apps although the offering is limited. They essentially let you access a remote android device (with your app installed on it) via a browser link.

This is handy for screen-sharing on a demo call or as a way to send the app to a prospect, but requires you to have a stable production environment to demo from and a development team ready to set up the remote device.

Since you’re using an actual production app, personalisation, editing of the app and guided demos are also not supported.

❌ Walnut

Walnut only supports demoing of web-based products. As such, there’s no way to create a demo for a mobile app.

✅ HowdyGo

HowdyGo lets you stitch together screenshots from your mobile app into a demo just like this one embedded above. You just take a sequence of screenshots on your device (or export them from Figma), and upload them into HowdyGo. You then add some guides or connect them up into a live demo sandbox and you’re done.

You can also upload screenshots straight into HowdyGo’s free mobile demo creator if you just need to give a live demo and don’t need a guided mobile demo or a branching sandbox.

Pricing

💲💲💲 Demostack

Demostack requires annual contracts, and its pricing starts at $55,000. It’s by far one of the most expensive demo tools out there. If you need more than one of their demo products, you’ll likely see price climb rapidly.

💲💲 Walnut

Walnut also requires an annual contract, but has entry level pricing that is a tad more friendly than Demostack ($9,200 p.a.). That said, it stacks up pretty quick if you want any of their add-ons such as Figma recording.

💲 HowdyGo

HowdyGo is available under both monthly and annual plans and is by far the most affordable interactive demo tool of the three, starting at only $159/month for the annual plan.

Pros and cons from customer reviews

Demostack

Positive reviews mention:

• User friendliness
• Usefulness of realtime alerts

Negative reviews mention:

• The ongoing maintenance required when using Demostack. Any updates or changes made to your app necessitate recreating all existing sandboxes from scratch.
• A few bugs in the product when editing the demos.

Walnut

Positive reviews mention:

• Offline demos
• Customer success team trainings

Negative reviews mention:

• Lack of ability to demo mobile apps
• Takes a while to record a demo.
• Demos don’t save automatically

HowdyGo

Positive reviews mention:

• Hands on support from founding team
• Speed and responsiveness to feedback
• Fast learning curve

Negative reviews mention:

• Limitations when organising large demo libraries between folders and teams

Conclusion

Interactive demo software can be a little overwhelming in terms of how many options are available, but hopefully this breakdown based on your main use-case has been helpful.

Either way, your best bet is to give each platform a shot and see whether it works for you. With HowdyGo, you can just sign up for a 2 week free trial (no credit card required) and see how you go.

If you want to keep digging, you can dive deeper into Walnut alternatives and Demostack alternatives.