What is wrong with using Intro.js?

Nothing, until the tour needs maintaining. Selectors break when the UI changes and the tour fails silently, only developers can edit the copy, and there are no analytics unless someone builds them. For a stable internal flow it remains the right choice.

What replaces an open-source tour library?

It depends which problem you actually have. For in-product guidance without the maintenance, an onboarding platform lets non-developers edit flows. For showing the product to people who are not inside it, a recorded interactive demo is the only option a library was never going to cover.

Can a recorded demo replace an in-app tour?

Not for signed-in users, because it cannot react to who they are or what they have done. It replaces the tour only if the real goal was reaching people outside the product — prospects, a colleague being forwarded a link, a website visitor.

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Intro.js Alternatives: When to Stop Maintaining Your Own Tour

September 9, 2026

Intro.js, Shepherd and Driver.js all do the same honest thing: give a developer a way to highlight elements and step a user through them, in code, for free.

They are excellent until the tour becomes somebody’s recurring job, which is the point at which "free" stops describing it.

No selectors to break — this is a recording, not a tour bound to your DOM.

What the libraries are genuinely good for

A tour that lives inside your product, is version-controlled with it, and is written by the people who wrote the UI. No vendor, no snippet, no data leaving your app.

For an internal tool or a single onboarding flow that rarely changes, this is the right answer and paying for a platform would be silly.

Where the cost actually appears

Selectors break when the UI changes, and the tour fails silently in production.
Only developers can edit it, so every wording change is a pull request.
No analytics, unless someone builds them.
It cannot leave your product, so marketing and sales get nothing from it.

Two different escapes

If you need in-product guidance without the maintenance, the destination is an onboarding platform — Userpilot, Chameleon, Usetiful and similar — where non-developers can edit flows.

If what you actually needed was something to show people who are not in the product, that is a recorded demo, and no tour library was ever going to do it.

Where Demorta fits

The second case. A captured copy of your product that anyone can click through from a link, editable by a non-developer, with per-step analytics — five free, paid from $15.99/month.

It does not run inside your app and it cannot react to a signed-in user, so it is not a managed replacement for the library. It is a replacement for the thing you were trying to achieve with it, if that thing was showing the product to outsiders.

Frequently asked questions

What is wrong with using Intro.js?: Nothing, until the tour needs maintaining. Selectors break when the UI changes and the tour fails silently, only developers can edit the copy, and there are no analytics unless someone builds them. For a stable internal flow it remains the right choice.
What replaces an open-source tour library?: It depends which problem you actually have. For in-product guidance without the maintenance, an onboarding platform lets non-developers edit flows. For showing the product to people who are not inside it, a recorded interactive demo is the only option a library was never going to cover.
Can a recorded demo replace an in-app tour?: Not for signed-in users, because it cannot react to who they are or what they have done. It replaces the tour only if the real goal was reaching people outside the product — prospects, a colleague being forwarded a link, a website visitor.

Keep reading

This is what Demorta does

Click through it — the same kind of demo you can record of your own product.

Try it on your own product

Record your first interactive demo free.

Five demos on the free plan, forever. No credit card, no trial countdown, no sales call. Install the Chrome extension, click through your product once, and you have a shareable link in about ten minutes.

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