GlowTour.js vs Shepherd.js

Shepherd.js supports React, Vue and Angular through official wrappers maintained by the Shepherd team, which the project describes as wrappers around its core library. A community wrapper exists for Ember.

GlowTour.js ships one adapter per framework that renders the tour with that framework's own components: React, Vue, Angular, Solid, and vanilla custom elements.

Shepherd steps are configured with options such as title, text, buttons, classes and attachTo, and render into Shepherd's dialog structure (header, text, footer). Its default styles are minimal and meant to be themed with your own CSS classes, per tour or per step.

GlowTour.js exposes those dialog pieces as components you can reorder, replace or wrap, and themes them through --glow-tour-* CSS custom properties.

Shepherd builds a tour imperatively: create a Tour, call addStep() for each step, then control it with methods such as start(), next() and back().

GlowTour.js chains steps and step actions in a builder that returns an immutable workflow definition any adapter can run, and accepts a JSON config for tours stored outside your code.

Both document keyboard navigation, focus trapping and ARIA attributes. Licensing is the sharper difference: Shepherd.js is available under AGPL-3.0 for open source and non-commercial use, with a commercial license required for commercial products and revenue-generating companies. GlowTour.js is MIT licensed.

• Choose Shepherd.js if you want a mature framework-agnostic solution with official framework wrappers, and AGPL-3.0 or a commercial license fits your project.
• Choose GlowTour.js if you want native framework adapters, a popover you compose from components, a builder-style API, and an MIT license.