Top 6 Gainsight Alternatives & Competitors That Better Suit Your Needs

Gainsight is an amazing tool that can offer great value.

For those who have the time and patience to get past the steep learning curve.

And if you have been using Gainsight or any other product adoption or customer success tool, you would know that efficiency and fast ROI are the top 2 factors when it comes to choosing the tool.

So if you’re searching for a simpler alternative, you’ve come to the right place.

In this article, I will:

• Elaborate on what Gainsight is used for and what makes Gainsight different,
• Compare the top alternatives to Gainsight and its products, based on my own experience and online reviews from verified users,
• Answer the frequently asked questions about Gainsight and Gainsight’s competitors.

First, we should take a look at the features, advantages, and disadvantages of Gainsight to set a base for comparisons later.

You can also go directly to the first alternative by clicking here ⬅️

What is Gainsight?

Gainsight is a robust customer success and product adoption tool for companies that need a complete tool to analyze and guide customers.

Gainsight, as a digital product, is not a single tool itself, it is a company that provides various applications for different use cases.

The 3 tools that Gainsight provides are:

1. Gainsight CS for customer success,
2. Gainsight PX for product experience,
3. Gainsight inSided for customer communities.

Let’s go over each of those tools and their key features:

What is Gainsight CS?

Gainsight CS is Gainsight’s customer success platform which allows you to project customer journeys and get actionable insights from your customer base about your overall health score.

Unlike many other customer success software, Gainsight CS focuses on real-time data and analytics features along with surveying and feedback features.

User ratings and customer reviews on various websites show that the tool’s connection to Salesforce separates the tool from all others.

Still, the tool is very hard to use, and some features don’t deliver the promised value.

Let's take a look at the products:

What is Gainsight PX?

Gainsight PX is Gainsight’s product and customer experiences platform which provides feature adoption and user engagement tools to improve user experience and reduce churn.

Combining digital adoption and customer engagement features, Gainsight PX is a strong tool for product managers, support, success, and even sales teams.

Although Gainsight PX has many features, most of them are limited within themselves and could be improved.

What is Gainsight inSided?

Gainsight inSided is a customer communications and community platform, making it possible to help and listen to all your customers from one place.

While all other Gainsight tools also allow you to gather customer feedback, inSided provides a bigger and more comprehensive platform as an alternative to linear Notion or Slack communities.

Gainsight Pricing

Although Gainsight seems like a great tool with many features, it is questionable whether the pricing is worth what you get.

Bear in mind that you will have to get a custom quotation separately for all 3 tools that Gainsight has.

And it isn’t clear whether they have a discount if you choose to use more than one tool.

Having said that, Gainsight doesn’t provide a fixed pricing plan and only offers a free trial for the PX tool.

For the other tools and getting a custom quote for PX, you need to schedule a demo and get a custom quote.

According to actual users on the internet, the pricing of Gainsight starts from $2,500/month/user and only goes even higher, making the tool inaccessible for small and medium-sized companies.

Gainsight PX Features

1. Interactive product walkthroughs,
2. Slider guides and messages,
3. In-app update notifications and banners,
4. Surveys,
5. Knowledge centers,
6. Advanced analytics,
7. Segmentation and personalization.

Gainsight Reviews

 👍 Pros:

"Gainsight integrates very well with Salesforce and is also easy to integrate with numerous other systems too. That alone is very valuable and is more than many of Gainsight's competitors can accomplish."

G2 Review

👎 Cons:

"Generally, I am patient but the load times often make me wonder if my internet connection is slow. It also seems to open nearly all links in new tabs with NO WAY to adjust this in settings. This can be very frustrating because it causes severe tab bloat where I often have 20+ gainsight tabs open at the end of the day and can get lost trying to find the tab I need."

G2 Review

3 Reasons Why You Might Need a Gainsight Alternative

1- Fairly Expensive Pricing 💰

It makes sense for a robust platform like Gainsight to not be as cheap as you’d like.

But, compared to some other products, its price is not completely justifiable. With 5-figure yearly packages, it might be challenging for small to medium-sized businesses to afford Gainsight.

2- Some Features Not Advanced Enough 🛠

Gainsight sure provides a generous amount of features and possibilities.

However, since the tool doesn’t focus on one specific use case, it does not offer the most advanced features or professional services in one solution.

3- Limited User Onboarding and Guide Capabilities 📚

Gainsight PX’s Guide Engagement feature allows you to create beautiful guides that can boost product engagement, conversion rates, and even customer satisfaction overall.

But compared to platforms that solely focus on user onboarding, it’s limited to say the least.

There are tools on the market that can provide much more than this add-on for a lower price than the add-on.

Top Alternatives and Competitors of Gainsight

1. Pendo
2. UserGuiding
3. Custify
4. Totango
5. HubSpot Service Hub
6. Intercom

If you need a specific alternative to one of the three Gainsight products, here is a reference table:

So, you’ve decided on using another tool than Gainsight to meet your user onboarding and product analytics needs. Alright, let’s start with the first tool on our list:

Best Alternatives to Gainsight PX

1- Gainsight vs. Pendo

Pendo is a robust product analytics and user engagement platform businesses use to build better products and a better experience for users.

The platform has 2 core functions that users can benefit from: behavior analytics and user onboarding.

Once integrated, you can see every user action, which allows you to create different reports that can later be combined in custom dashboards that fuel your business’s decisions and actions.

And just like Gainsight, Pendo has a “Guides” feature, using which you can create different in-app elements to boost user experience and guide and engage with your users.

Especially in terms of product analytics, Gainsight PX is much more customizable, with more options in user identification, segmentation, and predictive analytics. However, Gainsight PX’s in-app guidance features are more basic than Pendo’s, which is something to keep in mind when evaluating the two solutions.

Pendo Pricing

Pendo does not have a pre-set pricing that is public, they offer custom plans for each customer.

They have a Starter plan that costs $7,000/year, and this plan doesn't include most of their key features.

However, there are various Pendo users that revealed the details of Pendo’s whole pricing. One user claimed that they are a medium-sized business that pays $12,000/year for the standard package of Pendo while another user upped this number to $20,000.

Pendo Features

1. Interactive Product Tours,
2. Tooltips and Hotspots,
3. User Onboarding Checklists,
4. NPS Surveys,
5. Easy Localization,
6. Custom user segments,
7. Advanced integrations.

Pendo Reviews

👍 Pros:

"It's great to see what your users are doing within your software to help you make improvements big or small. Ability to bring analyse users by segment (sector or a list of specific users) or we can bring in custom info such as the CSM that looks after those accounts to make the data actionable."

👍 Cons:

"The tech issues I did present, bugs, were unsolvable. I spent the better part of a month on Zoom calls with tech support only to get a "well, we got nothing, good luck!" So, not exactly helpful."

2- Gainsight vs. UserGuiding

UserGuiding is a thorough user onboarding and product adoption software that helps you educate and engage users faster.

UserGuiding is not a customer service tool like Pendo or Gainsight.

But since Gainsight provides a product tours feature add-on for an unreasonably high price and limited function, UserGuiding deserves a spot as a Gainsight alternative - especially a Gainsight PX alternative.

UserGuiding is a digital adoption platform that has integrations with Intercom and HubSpot, so you can still benefit from CRM features and customer success tools while having a great-looking product walkthrough that blends right in with your product.

And also offer exceptional user experiences while increasing product adoption rates and having happier customers.

The best part of UserGuiding, and the main reason why it is a much better option than Gainsight PX is the wide variety of engagement features that UserGuiding provides:

UserGuiding Features

1. Interactive Product Tours,
2. Tooltips and Hotspots,
3. User Onboarding Checklists,
4. Resource Centers,
5. NPS Surveys,
6. Easy Localization,
7. Advanced Analytics with User Activity Feed,
8. Custom user segments,
9. Material Tagging and Easy Targeting,
10. No-code customization,
11. Advanced integrations.

You get all those features for a very low price, and you can set up all that without a single line of code.

What's best about UserGuiding is that you can choose to host your UserGuiding on a US or EU server depending on your privacy and data requirements.

The tool is GDPR compliant, and offers higher-tier functionalities to the basic plan as well as add-ons to provide maximum efficiency for the price you pay.

UserGuiding Pricing

UserGuiding offers scalable plans with adjustable active user ranges. When billed yearly:

• Basic Plan: Starting from $69/month.
• Professional Plan: Starting from $199/month.
• Corporate Plan: Custom quote.

UserGuiding Reviews

👍 Pros:

"Really easy to understand how to use and workout how to implement the different features without having to click through lots of different help pages. Good dashboard to view things like user interactions with the help guides you create. Easy to get help or ask questions through the chat feature if needed."

👎 Cons:

"The only thing we dislike about Userguiding is the fact that we can't directly import a list of clients we would want to segment. The segmentation is possible with Userguiding but limited to criteria you directly push from the product."

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Best Alternatives to Gainsight CS

3- Gainsight vs Custify

Custify is an intuitive and user-friendly customer success platform designed for SaaS businesses to reduce churn and increase customer lifetime value.

Custify’s greatest strengths are the personalized onboarding process and the automation features.

Within its modern interface, you can set up multiple health scores to track and determine their weight on the global account health score.

With the playbooks feature, you can set up automation such as creating and assigning tasks to CSMs, sending personalized messages, or triggering custom actions.

Compared to Gainsight CS, Custify is much easier to use and costs only one-tenth of Gainsight's price, but it doesn't provide as many features and integrations as Gainsight does.

Custify Pricing

• Starter Package: $199/month up to 2 users
• Standard Package: $499/month up to 5 users
• Enterprise Package: quote-based

Custify Features

1. Engagement Tracking
2. Third-Party Integrations
3. Health Score Tracking
4. Analytics
5. Playbooks
6. Automation

Custify Reviews

👍 Pros:

"Custify has made our work so much easier that even our new joiners can do the task by themselves. Apart from this, Health check has made customer success so easy. After integrating Custify with our platform, we can see how our customers are using our platform and if there is a scope for improvement."

 👎 Cons:

"We use Custify to manage many KPI data points and have chosen to break them out over incremental time series'. In that case, the UI within the customer 360 profile requires scrolling to get to specific data points."

4- Gainsight vs Totango

With customers like Google and Zoom, Totango is a promising software that ought to help you keep all your customers happy.

Totango’s customer success tool Spark has a clean and easy look right from the start. It’s easy to use and the fluid interface is one of the best sides of the software.

Although most of its features such as customer segmentation and the ability to integrate with third-party tools are highly praised, most clients of the product dislike the lack of automation of certain features.

However, Totango is still a high-rated tool with a free version and a 30-day free trial for the enterprise version, making it an extremely functional and preferable tool for small businesses and startups.

Totango Pricing

• Free version available with limited features
• Free Trial of higher plans available for 30-days
• Starter Plan: starting at $249/month 
• Enterprise Plan: custom quotation upon request.

Totango Features

1. Reporting & Analytics
2. Surveys
3. User Profiles
4. Customer Health Scores
5. Product Usage
6. Customer Experience Canvas

Totango Reviews

👍 Pros:

"Totango is constantly releasing new features and functionality that help us better serve our enterprise customers. We've been able to measure customer health, track KPI's and prioritize our efforts."

👎 Cons:

"The reports module is not too rich and most of the data (scorecards and reports) are only shared internally in the system for users who are logged in to Totango. It would be great to have more possibilities to share data externally."

Best Alternatives to Gainsight inSided

5- Gainsight vs HubSpot Service Hub

HubSpot is a customer relationship management (CRM) tool with a clean and intuitive user interface that helps users find the needed element in a breeze.

For customer service teams, HubSpot suggests HubSpot Service Hub, a customer service software that displays the customer journey from A to Z, giving the agents a chance to observe insightful reports regarding customer queries.

With HubSpot Service Hub as your customer support management tool, you can:

• Perform user, role, and access management on selected data, features, and many more.
• Allow customization for users in terms of texts, logos, and chat colors.
• Track vital metrics regarding the performance of customer support and improve workflow.
• Set up an automated reply to the support tickets based on their specific category and collaborate on tickets with ease.
• Create surveys to send out to customers and analyze their responses to find ways to boost the support team’s performance.

The fact that you can use HubSpot Service Hub for free without time limitations makes it the first chocie of small companies, and the affordable pricing brings HubSpot on a better position than Gainsight.

HubSpot Service Hub Pricing

• Individual plan: 100% free (no credit card required)
• Starter plan: $50/per month for 2 seats ($45/per month when billed annually) + per additional user cost is $25 and $23, respectively
• Professional plan: $500/per month for 5 seats ($450/per month when billed annually) + per additional user cost is $100 and $90, respectively
• Enterprise plan: $1,200/per month for 10 seats with a cost of $120/per additional user

Hubspot Service Hub Features

1. Conversational tools,
2. Shared inbox,
3. Help desk automation,
4. Knowledge base functionality,
5. Customer feedback & custom surveys,
6. Reporting,
7. Customer Portal,
8. Playbooks

HubSpot Service Hub Reviews

👍 Pros:

"The 2 features we utilize the most are Knowledgebase and omni-channel messaging. What I love about the knowledgebase is its very easy for any team, especially sales to quickly search and add articles in they find relevant to the call they had with a prospect."

👎 Cons:

"The KnowledgeBase and Customer portal customizations are still limited and I believe that the services hub works well as is, however, there are still a lot of features within those tools that are missing in order to take the customer experience and collaboration with customers more meaningful."

6- Gainsight vs Intercom

While Intercom is known mostly as chat software, there is more than that to Intercom. It is a full package for almost any customer support team.

Intercom is mostly similar to Gainsight inSided while it also provides PX and CS features too.

Using the tool, you can:

• Create a business messenger and enable live chat for end users,
• Benefit from the bots and automate your support process,
• Create simple interactive customer onboarding tours,
• And easily integrate your help center articles with many tools (including UserGuiding.)

In terms of functionality, Intercom could be a better alternative to Gainsight since it is more user-friendly and easier to use. Intercom has also more advanced features than Gainsight CS.

But if it is data and analytics that you need, then Gainsight will be your single source of truth.

Intercom Pricing

Intercom has a pay-per-feature pricing model, so the more features you need, the more you will have to pay.

• Starter Plan: $74/month for small businesses
  • Product Tours Add-On: $199/month
  • WhatsApp Add-On: $9/user
  • Surveys Add-On: $49/month
• Support Plan: Custom quotation upon request
• Engage Plan: Custom quotation upon request
• Convert Plan: Custom quotation upon request

Intercom Features

1. Intercom Messenger
2. Chat and email channels
3. Shared inbox
4. Help Center
5. Company and behavioral data
6. Ticketing
7. Integrations

Intercom Reviews

👍 Pros:

"Intercom is always developing new features, based on the users feedback. Also, the Bots are very helpful to Qualify the type of data we are receiving in our customer support; and the best part is it is included in the plan - you don't need to pay a lot of extra money to have this feature. And they are always improving this feature."

👎 Cons:

"We're looking into some of Intercom's premium features/integrations. However, it isn't totally clear whether we can pay for premium features (e.g. WhatsApp integration) while maintaining our other startup program benefits."

Which One Is For You?

Gainsight is too big of a tool to fit in one single alternative or solution, which is good and bad in its own ways.

It is good since the data transfer between the internal tools is amazing, but it is difficult to ensure maximum efficiency since the tool isn't a master in either of the solutions it provides.

UserGuiding is the best alternative to Gainsight's PX tool since UserGuiding is both transparent, effective, and loved by customers..

HubSpot is another tool like Gainsight that provides all kinds of solutions except for product tours, and is more transparent about pricing. You can integrate HubSpot with UserGuiding to save both money and effort on your customer experiences.

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