6 Best Angular Product Tour Libraries For User Onboarding

If you’re using Angular to develop your web applications, you’re already familiar with its robust features and ease of use. Developed and maintained by Google, Angular is known for its ability to create Single Page Applications (SPAs), which helps you offer a seamless user experience and faster loading times.

Additionally, Angular has a large and active community of developers, which means that there is a wealth of resources and support available to you. This community-driven support also ensures that Angular is continuously updated with new features and security patches, making it a reliable and secure framework for building web apps.

And if you’re looking to build product tours on Angular, you’re in luck. It offers a wide range of tools and features that make it easier to build user onboarding tours. For example, you can use Angular's built-in support for animations and dynamic components to create engaging and interactive tours that guide users through your key features.

The best place to start with building your own Angular product tours is to find an open-source library that gives you all the tools you need to get started. 

Building effective onboarding tours doesn’t have to be time-consuming when you use the right user onboarding tools. For Angular applications, several open-source libraries can help you streamline the process. Here are six libraries worth checking out for building your Angular product tour.

We’ve picked them out based on their ease of use as well as their reliability and how they are being looked after by the team that made them. For instance, we’ve omitted libraries that are not being maintained anymore. 

Good old Intro.js. We’ve talked about it in our previous articles on JavaScript tours, React tours, and Vue.js tours. Of course, Intro.js also works with Angular. 

Intro.js is a well-known library for creating step-by-step introductions and guided tours on web applications. There are other features such as various customization options, controlling the order of the steps, as well as tooltips and highlighting elements. 

It is used by major companies like Amazon and SAP, so it is quite reliable and trusted. Unlike various other open-source libraries, Intro.js has a commercial license that starts at a one-time purchase of $9.99. 

If you decide to get Intro.js, make sure to get the Angular wrapper, which allows Intro.js to work inside an Angular app. 

Shepherd is another onboarding library that pretty much works for all JavaScript-based frameworks. Angular as well.

Like Intro.js, Shepherd allows you to define a sequence of steps that guide users through your application's interface, highlighting key elements and providing descriptive tooltips. The library provides a flexible API for customizing the behavior, appearance, and position of each step, as well as the ability to add event handlers for user interactions.

Shepherd provides a wrapper for Angular so you can get started with it on your Angular product right away. 

To use Angular Shepherd, you need to install and import the angular-shepherd package in your Angular application. You can then define the steps of the tour using the ShepherdService, and customize each step's content, position, and styling using HTML and CSS.

Angular UI Tour is a plugin that uses popovers from Angular UI Bootstrap to display a guided tour. It was originally created as Angular Bootstrap Tour, inspired by Bootstrap Tour, but then they tweaked it so that it doesn’t have any dependency on Twitter Bootstrap or JQuery. 

Angular UI Tour gives you the ability to create tours with multiple steps that can be customized with HTML and CSS. Each step can include a title, a description, and a template with custom content. You can also highlight elements on the page and add tooltips or popovers to provide additional information.

Angular UI Tour also supports multiple positioning options, such as left, right, top, and bottom, and allows you to control the size and position of the highlighted elements. Additionally, you can add event handlers to respond to user interactions, such as clicking or hovering on an element.

To use Angular UI Tour, you need to install and import the angular-ui-tour package and add the ui-tour directive to your Angular app. You can then define the steps of the tour using a configuration object and start the tour by calling the start() method. 

Inspired by Angular UI Tour, Ngx UI Tour is a product tour library that uses Angular Material MatMenu to display tours. So before you use this, you’ll have to make sure Angular Material is installed properly. Originally, this was Ngx Tour, but that library is not being maintained and it has been replaced by Ngx UI Tour. 

It allows you to create customizable steps that guide users through your application's interface and provides various features such as tooltips, popovers, and highlight elements.

With Ngx Tour, you can define each step of the tour using an HTML template, add event handlers to respond to user interactions, and customize the content, placement, and styling of tooltips and popovers. Ngx Tour also supports multiple positioning options, such as top, bottom, left, and right, and provides flexibility to adjust the step's size and position.

It’s also super well-maintained. Since 2021, it has had releases with new features and fixes like clockwork, right up to 2023. Considering that Angular UI Tour’s last release was in 2017, this might be a better option. 

To use Ngx Tour, you need to install and import the ngx-tour-core package and the specific ngx-tour-ngx-bootstrap or ngx-tour-md-menu package for the styling library of your choice. You can then add tour steps to your Angular app using the TourService and TourStep classes, and customize their appearance and behavior using CSS.

Angular Popper is a library that simplifies creating onboarding tours in Angular applications. It is built on top of Popper.js, which is a lightweight tooltip and popover library itself. 

As such, its focus is on creating tooltips. You can position them, arrange them in order, point them to certain elements. If all you need are great tooltips to give in-app guidance, Angular Popper may be the best fit for you. 

To use it, you need to install and import the NgxPopperModule and use the ngx-popper directive with a configuration object to create tooltips. You can define the content of each step using Angular components, choose from various placement options, and customize the styling of the popovers using CSS. 

Angular Joyride is a product tour library built entirely in Angular with no external dependencies. As with other Angular-based libraries, you can take advantage of the various UI components offered by Angular when creating your tours.  

Aside from the usual ability to create tour steps and style them, you can use custom HTML content, pass parameters to your templates, set up multi pages navigation, and do everything you need to easily guide users through your site. 

It’s also fairly well maintained. New releases are not as frequent as NgX UI Tour, but the last release was in January 2022. Still fairly recent when compared to some other libraries on this list. 

To use Angular Joyride, install and import the ngx-joyride package and add the joyride directive to your Angular app. You can then define the steps of the tour using a configuration object and start the tour by calling the startTour() method. 

Open-source libraries are great when you are looking to make user onboarding a DIY project for your in-house team. 

But if you think about the opportunity cost, knowing that building takes time and resources away from other mission-critical tasks you should be doing, consider using a product adoption platform as a no-code solution for onboarding.

In this case, Chameleon could be the right fit for your needs. You can use it to create customizable, on-brand Tours, Tooltips, Microsurveys, and Launchers. Try it for free and get into the sandbox environment to play with it, or book a personalized demo with our product experts.  

👉 Check out this interactive demo on building an onboarding Launcher in Chameleon.