WalkMe is often the first name that comes to mind when people hear “Digital Adoption Platform.” It overlays interactive prompts, bubbles, and walkthroughs directly on top of applications, showing employees exactly where to click.
ScreenSteps takes a different approach. It’s a Knowledge Operations Platform designed to deliver in-app guidance without overlays or automation. Instead of showing where to click, ScreenSteps helps employees follow business processes with clear, visual, step-by-step guides.
Both tools aim to make employees more independent, but ScreenSteps was intentionally designed to address several weaknesses that DAPs like WalkMe create: lack of agility, single-application limitations, and dependence on technical specialists.
Quick Summary
Use WalkMe if you need interactive overlays to guide users through stable, single-application workflows and have a dedicated team to manage updates.
Use ScreenSteps if you want fast, scalable, multi-system process guidance that’s easy to maintain without technical support. It’s ideal for teams that:
- Need guidance across multiple systems
- Want faster onboarding and fewer escalations
- Are tired of relying on memory or tribal knowledge
- Want employees to perform with accuracy and confidence every time
WalkMe does a good job helping users navigate complex interfaces. It creates guided workflows that tell employees what to do next, field by field. When configured well, it reduces support tickets and helps new users learn faster.
But it’s a heavy system to build and maintain. Every new walkthrough requires configuration. When software updates, those walkthroughs often break and need to be rebuilt. That “fix” work usually falls to a small, specialized digital adoption team that spends most of its time maintaining flows instead of improving them.
WalkMe works best in stable environments with predictable workflows and a dedicated team to manage it. It struggles when organizations need to move fast or guide employees across multiple systems.
ScreenSteps was built to eliminate those pain points. Instead of coding overlays, teams create visual digital guides that walk employees through processes in plain language with screenshots, images, and links right inside their applications.
There are no click bubbles to maintain. Because ScreenSteps is built on the Find & Follow Framework, it doesn’t just tell employees how to do something. It helps them understand what they’re doing and why. That context turns training into capability and makes it easier to roll out process changes.
When something changes—whether it’s a policy, software update, or new process—you update the guide once, and everyone has the latest version instantly.
WalkMe requires developers or trained admins to update every affected flow when an application changes. Even small UI adjustments can break multiple guides and take days to fix.
ScreenSteps was designed to remove that bottleneck. The people who own the process can make updates themselves in minutes. A supervisor can add a new step, update a screenshot, or edit text and publish instantly.
ScreenSteps Customer Success
One ScreenSteps customer recently proved what that agility looks like in practice. With just one content author, they created 230 digital guides in a week.
In WalkMe, producing that much content would have taken a team of specialists several months.
The difference comes down to accessibility—anyone can create or update guides in ScreenSteps without needing technical training.
WalkMe is great at helping someone click through one system, but most business processes cross multiple applications.
For example, a contact center agent handling a refund might need to move between a CRM, payment portal, and policy database. WalkMe can guide them through one of those systems, but not across all of them in context.
ScreenSteps was built for that exact challenge. It connects multiple systems into a single guide, helping employees understand what to do across applications and why each step matters. That process-level guidance makes it far more effective for real-world operations.
WalkMe content is created by a small group of trained specialists. If you want to add or change something, you submit a ticket and wait for that team to have time.
ScreenSteps opens the door to broad participation. Subject matter experts, supervisors, and trainers can capture and update their own guides directly, with AI assistance making it even easier. There’s no need to go through a development team. Knowledge capture scales naturally as more people contribute.
WalkMe flows often break silently when UI elements change. Employees click through, and nothing happens. Fixes require redevelopment and retesting.
In ScreenSteps, updates are simple text and images. When a shared step or screenshot is updated, it automatically refreshes everywhere it’s used. That design makes process documentation resilient instead of brittle.
WalkMe provides helpful prompts, but those prompts can also lead to dependency. Employees learn to follow bubbles rather than understanding the process.
ScreenSteps builds independence by teaching employees to find and follow guides on their own. Over time, they gain confidence, reduce questions to supervisors, and perform consistently even when processes evolve.
WalkMe requires specialized training, technical setup, and a dedicated team to build and maintain flows. Each change consumes development time and coordination effort.
ScreenSteps dramatically lowers those people costs. There’s no coding, no tagging of UI elements, and no reliance on a digital adoption team. The same people who perform the work can maintain the guides. That eliminates the lag between when a process changes and when guidance gets updated.
ScreenSteps delivers:
Both WalkMe and ScreenSteps aim to help employees work independently and confidently.
WalkMe guides users through interfaces, but it’s fragile, centralized, and limited to a single application at a time.
ScreenSteps was built to solve those problems. It’s agile, multi-system, and easy for subject matter experts to maintain. It delivers the same outcome as a DAP—faster onboarding, fewer questions, better performance—but with less complexity and more scalability.
ScreenSteps turns process knowledge into a living system that grows and adapts with your business.
Schedule a demo with ScreenSteps to explore how teams clarify complexity and empower expert employees with trusted answers at their fingertips.