It costs up to 5x as much to acquire a new customer as to keep one.
Given that a 100%+ NRR is ideal for SaaS companies, you’ll need to either retain/upsell a high percentage of customers or force marketing and sales into an uphill slog each quarter to drive revenue. This puts Customer Success squarely in the driver’s seat for growth.
But managing renewals requires so much more than checking in a week before the subscription date to make sure your customer plans to continue paying. Renewal management today is a sophisticated process that requires automation and plenty of analytics to get right – especially at scale.
In this guide, we’ll break down the best software that Customer Success teams can use to manage renewals.
What is Renewal Management Software? Key Features to Look For
For this article, we’re referring to “renewal management” as the process that B2B software and subscription companies use to retain and upsell their customers.
Typically, this looks like the following:
- Alerting customers of upcoming renewals
- Identifying risks that might lead to churn
- Similarly, identifying opportunities for expansion
- Reporting on renewal forecasts and churn to the team/organization
You can learn more in our guide to B2B renewals (which includes a free checklist) and calculate your NRR here to see where you currently stand.
We don’t know about you, but a CSM’s job is hard enough, so the less manual work we need to do, the better. That’s where software can help by automating tasks or speeding up your workflows. The top features we recommend looking for in software for this kind of renewal management are:
- Segment customers: Look for software that lets you segment customers by tier or state in the customer journey to zero in on cross-sections of your customer base. We recommend creating a dedicated renewal segment to drill down into customers approaching renewal.
- Data integrations: You’ll need subscription, stakeholder, and product usage data to make informed decisions about renewals. Look for a platform that brings all of your customer and sales data together to guide your outreach.
- Create repeatable playbooks: Why reinvent the wheel every time? Look for tools that allow you to map out your steps in the renewal process, from emails to calls, that you can execute and repeat. CSPs like Vitally let you build branching automations to run a renewal process with minimal intervention, saving you loads of time and reducing churn.
- Create and manage templates: Whether you’re alerting your scaled segments about auto-renewals or high-touch segments about scheduling a call, look for a platform that allows you to build a repository of messages and documents you’ll need in communicating with customers.
- Dashboards and forecasting: All of this is moot if you can’t forecast renewals and report on them for the rest of your team and organization. Look for software that allows you to review filters for customers – at-risk customers, growth opportunities, etc. – at a glance and create dashboard reports to forecast ARR, renewals by stage, and upgrades/downgrades.
For all the above, you need a Customer Success Platform (CSP) with built-in renewal management features to monitor customers, alert you of issues, and bring your data together. Read on for a ranked list of the best platforms to pick from.
The Best Renewal Management Software for CSMs
We chose the following six software platforms based on their features, user reviews, functionality, and G2 ratings. The best renewal management software platforms we found are:
Vitally is a leading CSP, with an emphasis on flexibility, ease of use, and data integration for innovative CS teams.
Many CSPs claim they can bring all your data under one roof, but Vitally is one of the few that can guarantee it. Vitally is a purpose-built platform for Customer Success teams that brings all of your customer, product, and sales data together, allowing you to make better (and smarter) decisions. When it comes to managing renewals at scale, you can’t settle for anything less.
Unlike other CSPs that take a rigid approach, Vitally gives you the flexibility and control to customize your processes as you need. That means you can set up custom health scores, alerts, and dashboards to get a bird's-eye view of accounts with the freedom to analyze specific customers as needed.
This flexibility, along with a robust set of tools for collaboration, customization, native AI features, and automation, makes Vitally a leading CSP for innovative CS teams. Don’t let that freedom scare you off, though – Vitally is intuitive and has one of the fastest implementation timelines in the industry.
As one of the most popular CSPs on the market, Vitally earns rave reviews from CS teams for its user-friendly interface and seamless integration capabilities, offering a variety of automated actions and extensive API support. One customer says it best in a recent review:
I love how I can manage all my customers in one place. I really like how you can create a lot of data about a customer. I use Vitally each day, and it has been a game-changer in monitoring my accounts. I have really enjoyed the last 6 months of use.
It’s no wonder Vitally earns high marks with 4.5 stars on G2!
Top Features
- Hubs for better organization
- Playbooks for automation
- Blueprints and templates
- Purpose-built AI features
- Conversation sync
- Health scores
- Project management tools
- Custom surveys
- Dashboards and reporting
- Goal tracking
- NPS and CSAT tracking
ChurnZero is a legacy CSP with several features to empower CSMs, along with AI-powered automation.
Like Vitally, ChurnZero offers a variety of features for churn monitoring and renewal management, including health scores, customer profiles, real-time insights, and renewal forecasting. That said, ChurnZero’s reporting functionality is rigid, and users report its UI is clunky compared to more intuitive tools like Vitally. This can make it harder to find key data when you need it most – something CS teams can’t always afford when managing renewals at scale.
Here’s what one recent reviewer on G2 had to say:
“ChurnZero can feel overwhelming at first because of the wide range of features, and it takes time to configure everything to match your workflows. Some reporting functions could be more intuitive, and there’s a bit of a learning curve for new users.”
Top Features
- Account segmentation and management
- Health score tracking
- Automation and Plays
- Dashboards and reporting
- NPS tracking
Totango positions itself as a “composable” CSP with a schema-less data model designed to handle complex enterprise data structures. Totango – like Gainsight – skews toward enterprise teams, making Vitally and others on this list better fits for budget-conscious companies.
Totango offers features to track customer health scores, numerous data integrations to bring your data under one roof, segmentation features, and configurable alerts. For renewal management, you really can’t have too much data, which makes Totango a solid choice for CS teams.
Totango and Catalyst announced a merger to unify their customer success offerings. A move that, in theory, unifies the twin missions of CS and growth. Today, Totango offers an expanded product line, including the original Totango platform, Catalyst, and Unison AI. While technically all under one roof, these are separate product lines with their own subscription options, so you will need to factor this into your pricing.
Top Features
- Account segmentation and management
- Health score tracking
- Automation
- Dashboards and reporting
Planhat earns high marks in the industry for its flexibility and extensibility with data warehouses and other tools. Planhat users regularly cite both flexibility and robust data modeling and management as the platform’s top perks.
Planhat’s renewal management features include customer health tracking, warning signals, churn risk identification, 360-degree customer views, and an impressive list of integration partners to collect your data. The latter piece is one of the major pluses of Planhat; its integration capabilities are among the best in the market, alongside platforms like Vitally and Gainsight.
But with great power also comes great complexity. Users report feeling overwhelmed by Planhat’s blank canvas, leading to a steep learning curve. Here’s what one reviewer on G2 has to say:
“The extensive customization options can make onboarding feel overwhelming at first. There is definitely a learning curve, and our team is unable to access many views until administrators have set them up.”
Top Features
- Account segmentation and management
- AI-powered features built on GPT, Gemini, and Claude
- Data warehouse syncing
- Health score tracking
- Automation
- Dashboards and reporting
Gainsight is one of the leading enterprise platforms in the CS industry.
Gainsight offers powerful features for onboarding, product adoption, retention, and expansion. This gives your team a complete view of every customer, from in-app usage to face-to-face interactions. That said, for small and mid-market teams, Gainsight is likely overkill. It’s one of the most expensive platforms on this list, and many other CSPs offer similar features for a lower price, albeit in a simpler package.
Gainsight’s renewal management features support customer health score tracking, AI-powered predictions, product usage and adoption, in-app customer engagement, and much more. All this data combined in one platform can be a powerful driver for renewals in your company.
Though Gainsight hides its pricing behind a conversation with sales, one Reddit user (from 2022) shared that the lowest quote for 10 CSMs and eight viewer seats was $26,000/year. It’s fair to assume that, as of the time of publishing this post, Gainsight’s pricing has changed since then.
Top Features
- Customer 360 view
- Product adoption and usage tracking
- Automation
- Goals
- Customer journeys
- Surveys
- In-app engagement tracking
Like many others on this list, Custify is a comprehensive and user-friendly CSP that offers a variety of features for CS teams.
Custify positions itself as a lightweight alternative to legacy platforms on this list, such as Gainsight and ChurnZero, with a focus on small- and mid-market SaaS companies. Like Vitally, Planhat, and Totango, Custify brings your data together; the key difference is that Custify is a much simpler tool and may not work well for advanced use cases.
While Custify earns top marks for simplicity, that simplicity can come at a cost. Reviewers on G2 are frustrated by limited customization and a lack of advanced integration partners.
Top Features
- Surveys
- Tasks and alerts
- Health tracking
- Automation
- Dashboards and reports
The Best Renewal Management Software: A Side-by-Side Comparison
Here’s a quick snapshot of each CSP’s renewal management capabilities to help you choose the right platform for your team.
Between these six CSPs, which will you choose?
Ultimately, it depends on your goals, team size, technical proficiency, and budget. If you ask us, Vitally is one of the best choices for innovative and fast-moving CS teams that live by their data and value the ability to design processes their way rather than fight with their tools. And when it comes to renewal management, CS teams can’t afford anything that slows them down or lets opportunities slip through the cracks.
Why Customer Success Teams Choose Vitally to Manage Renewals
So why do 600+ CS teams trust Vitally to guide their renewal processes?
Here are the four biggest reasons CS teams choose Vitally:
- Vitally brings all of your data into one place
- Vitally is purpose-built for CS teams
- Vitally offers intuitive and powerful automation
- Vitally includes AI that fits seamlessly into your workflow
All of Your Data in One Place
While a good product makes the renewal process a bit easier, renewals are far from automatic or by accident.
CS plays a critical role in driving renewals, but when you’re managing 50 or 100+ accounts, it’s easy for customers to slip through the cracks and drop off. That is, unless you have the data you need at your fingertips.
Vitally integrates with your product and favorite tools to bring all your data together:
- Product usage
- Engagement
- Revenue data
- Call recordings
- Marketing and sales data
And so much more.
Thanks to finely tuned Health Scores, you can create your model, adjust it without code, and set up alerts when customer health changes. With custom dashboards, you can forecast renewals and spot risks at a glance. That’s a lot less time digging through records, platforms, and BI tools and a lot more time hitting quota.
Purpose-Built for CS Teams
CRMs are built for sales teams, Vitally is built for Customer Success.
When managing customers at scale, you simply can’t do it all with tools built for other teams. CSMs don’t just need a CRM with deal and contract history, or a dashboard of product usage and daily active users – they need it all and then some.
Only Vitally brings your data under one roof and matches it with powerful features like:
- Custom Health Score tracking
- Custom surveys
- NPS and CSAT tracking
- Goal setting
- Call recording
Rather than try to make a CRM work, smart CS teams run on Vitally to move faster while delivering a stellar customer experience at scale.
Intuitive and Powerful Automation
When you’re juggling dozens or hundreds of accounts, every second matters, and it’s all the more painful if renewals lag and drag on revenue goals.
Thanks to Vitally’s powerful automations, pre-built blueprints, and templates, you can shave precious hours from your workflow while running a renewal process at scale.
Vitally Playbooks allow you to automate workflows and processes while leveraging seven different triggers, 14 actions, and branching logic — rivaling platforms like Planhat for automation power. With powerful branching, your team can handle CSM assignment, project creation, email delivery, task completion, and much more, all from a single Playbook.
Vitally’s automation is a must-have for teams looking to scale their renewal process efficiently.
AI That Fits With Your Workflow
Rather than tack on OpenAI functionality to a CSP, Vitally takes a unique approach to deliver embedded AI-powered features, providing a smart copilot for Customer Success.
Vitally AI is a native solution, built directly within the platform and your data. With Vitally AI, you can transform all your customer data into insights, delivering a best-in-class customer experience. Vitally takes all of your:
- Notes
- Meeting transcripts (and AI recordings)
- Tickets
- Docs
- Conversations
- NPS and survey data
And Vitally then turns this data into insights, such as:
- Rich AI summaries to pinpoint sentiment, churn risks, and more
- AI-generated Plays to give your team detailed to-dos and next steps for every account
- Instant answers to team questions about every customer
- Meeting recordings that capture real-time insights for your team
Only Vitally can bring all your data under one roof and turn that unstructured data into insights for you and your team to spot risks and drive renewals.
Looking for a Better Renewal Management Solution? Look no Further Than Vitally
Churn is often the problem that gets the C-Suite’s attention, but managing churn starts with a rock-solid renewal process.
The platforms above all offer a suite of powerful features to monitor accounts, alert you to warning signs, and forecast revenue, but only Vitally packages them in a highly flexible and easy-to-use platform for innovative Customer Success teams.
With powerful automation features, seamless integrations, and a flexible API, Vitally is the top choice for innovative Customer Success teams looking to build a CS process tailored to their customers' unique needs.
To see how top-performing companies build a winning Customer Success org, schedule a demo of Vitally or explore our free platform tour today!
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