Your CRM is optimized for sales, and your Google Sheets are so bloated that no one is willing to touch them. Today’s Customer Success teams need their own software.
CS teams need software designed to track every interaction with your accounts while collecting product, support, subscription, and sentiment data, all under one roof. In short, you need a Customer Success Platform (CSP).
It doesn’t take long to explore the CSP ecosystem to encounter three major players: Vitally, Gainsight, and Planhat. Which will you choose? How do you determine which CSP offers the best functionality, flexibility, and integrations for your team?
We’ll give you an honest assessment of each to help you make the right choice for your company.
Vitally
Vitally is a top choice for innovative CS teams that want to build their processes their way.
Innovative is the keyword there. Unlike other CSPs that take a rigidly prescriptive approach, Vitally gives your team control to build processes from the ground up. That’s because Vitally believes that Customer Success teams should have the power to develop their own processes, rather than being told which process to use by their software.
With automations that support seven different triggers, 13 actions, and flexible branching logic and purpose-built AI features to record calls, take notes, and set action items, Vitally is an incredibly powerful platform.
And Vitally’s data collection capabilities are where this all comes together. With Vitally, you can bring in customer data, subscription data, product usage data, and support data all under one roof to feed into custom health scores, shareable dashboards, and real-time alerts.
That doesn’t mean you need to spend hours building absolutely everything from scratch: Vitally is quick to set up and has one of the fastest implementations of any CSP on the market.
It’s this combination of a robust set of tools, forward-thinking functionality, and ease of use that makes Vitally a top choice for many CS teams. It’s easy to see why Vitally gets rave reviews. Here’s what one customer had to say on G2:
“Vitally makes it really easy to get a complete view of customer health in one place. The platform is intuitive, gives us actionable insights, and helps our team prioritize accounts that need attention. The automation and integrations save a ton of time, and the dashboards make it simple to track progress across different segments.”
With feedback like that, it’s not hard to see why Vitally earns high marks with 4.5 stars on G2.
Top Features
Planhat
Planhat earns top marks in the industry for its flexibility and extensibility with your other tools; its robust data modeling capabilities are regularly among the top-cited benefits by users.
That, along with powerful automation features, reporting tools, and AI integrations, makes Planhat one of the leading Customer Success Platforms. But with great power also comes great complexity.
Planhat is customizable, but navigating its blank canvas can be more difficult than more intuitive options. This may be fine if you know exactly what you want to build, but if you’re unsure what to prioritize or how to navigate the tool, you may face 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.”
That said, the same user shares that “[Planhat’s] potential seems limitless,” so it’s a question of how much time you want to spend configuring the platform to your needs.
Planhat may be a fantastic choice for some users, though certain features can feel more cumbersome than those of more intuitive platforms. Like the others on this list, Planhat is a best-in-class CSP; whether it is the right choice for your team will depend on your appetite for complexity and your budget.
As with the other two CSPs, Planhat is well-rated on G2 with 4+ stars.
Top Features
- Account segmentation and management
- AI powered by GPT, Gemini, and Claude
- Data warehouse syncing
- Health score tracking
- Automation
- Dashboards and reporting
Pros and Cons of Planhat
Users praise Planhat for its:
- Flexibility and customizability
- Robust set of integrations
- Bi-directional sync with leading data warehouses
- Automation features
But at the same time, they also find the following sticking points:
- Steep learning curve, which can slow implementation down
- “Blank page” syndrome when building and customizing workflows
- Tacked-on approach to AI compared to purpose-built platforms like Vitally
Gainsight
Gainsight earns top marks as the enterprise leader in Customer Success software, offering a robust platform that can monitor customers, foster relationships, and increase product adoption.
It’s hard to dispute that Gainsight is one of the most powerful CS platforms available. Unlike the other CSPs on this list, Gainsight’s capabilities stretch further than just the needs of Customer Success. Gainsight offers a suite of products for Customer Success, onboarding, customer community management, and product experience.
Like Vitally and Planhat, Gainsight’s Customer Success Platform offers features for 360-degree views of each account, churn signals, branching automation, tools for renewals and expansion, and much more. With the acquisition of Staircase, a customer AI platform, Gainsight blends these powerful features with deep AI integrations to help you craft messages and automate workflows.
Compared to platforms like Vitally and Planhat, Gainsight is far more complex to integrate and manage. Gainsight’s reporting tools alone require a full-time admin to set up and manage, making it a platform best suited for large enterprise teams capable of maintaining it, rather than nimble teams looking to move fast.
Here’s what one Vitally customer had to say after switching from Gainsight:
“Where I had eight Gainsight admins previously, I’m doing the same types of Customer Success motions with just one admin in Vitally today.”
Top Features
- 360-degree customer views
- Real-time alerts
- Automated orchestration
- Forecasting
- Success plans and playbooks
- Customer surveys and NPS tracking
Pros and Cons of Gainsight
Users regularly praise Gainsight for its:
- Power: Gainsight is the top choice for enterprise CS teams
- Expansive featureset beyond Customer Success
- Customizable and sophisticated reporting tools
But at the same time, they also find the following sticking points:
- As an enterprise platform, Gainsight is by far the most expensive
- Gainsight is far more complex than the other platforms on this list, making for a lengthy implementation and a need for active management
- Gainsight’s reporting tools alone require a full-time admin
Vitally vs Gainsight vs Planhat: A Side-by-Side Comparison
We’ve covered quite a bit of ground so far. Let’s make things simple with a quick side-by-side comparison of Vitally, Gainsight, and Planhat to help you make the right decision for your team:
Between Vitally, Gainsight, and Planhat, you’ve got three solid options for a CSP.
On paper, they’ll look remarkably similar: powerful platforms that emphasize ease of use, automation, and AI. While these platforms are pretty similar at first glance, we recommend choosing Vitally if you meet the following criteria:
- You work at a B2B SaaS company
- You value flexibility and configurability
- But not at the expense of ease of use
- You want purpose-built, cutting-edge AI tailored for CS
- You have a large number of data sources you wish to tie together
Read on to see why innovative Customer Success teams choose Vitally.
Why Customer Success Teams Love Vitally
Earning G2's ”Best Results” award in the CSP category for four straight quarters (and counting), Vitally offers several competitive advantages over Planhat and Gainsight.
Let’s take a closer look at these key competitive advantages.
- Purpose-built AI for Customer Success
- Customization and flexibility
- Automation to power your team
- Integrations and flexibility
Purpose-Built AI With Customer Success in Mind
Unlike other platforms that provide a ChatGPT wrapper, Vitally gives you a purpose-built AI platform for scaled Customer Success. Whether you want deeper insights into your customers, risk signals that would otherwise go unnoticed, or growth opportunities, Vitally AI can keep you one step ahead of every account.
First, Vitally takes in all of your customer data, like:
- Notes
- Meeting transcripts (and AI recordings)
- Tickets
- Docs
- Conversations
- NPS and survey data
And turns those into structured insights for deeper analysis. Here’s a taste of what CS teams can do with Vitally:
- Create custom prompts to surface risks and opportunities
- Auto-generate follow-up emails, tasks, or notes
- Capture every call and customer interaction
Because Vitally AI lives inside your CS platform, it understands the full picture. From your customer’s health and history, product usage data, and business goals, Vitally AI ensures every insight is grounded in context that generic AI tools simply don't have.
Customization and Flexibility
Your customers and processes are unique, so you need a CSP that gives you the flexibility to build a Customer Success process from the ground up.
Vitally provides customizable Hubs that allow you to create tailored workspaces for different needs, such as team roles, lifecycle stages, or customer segments. Tools like Gainsight and Planhat may offer configuration options, but they can be more complex and have more limitations compared to Vitally.
As one customer puts it on G2:
“Vitally is super customizable. You can create workflows that are specific to your customer journey and the specific use cases that your team needs… and surface specific data to CSMs to automate outreach.”
Automation to Power Your Workflows
For scaled Customer Success, time-saving automation is especially key to helping your team service a large number of accounts while providing top-notch service.
Automation is where Vitally excels; Vitally’s plug-and-play automation builder supports branching logic and multi-step flows, allowing your team to automate tasks and streamline your process. Whether you want to:
- Automate playbooks for any scenario
- Trigger actions based on signals
- Guide your team with custom workflows
You can streamline your process and scale CS in Vitally to carve back valuable hours into your calendar.
Integrations and Flexibility
The ability to collect, sync, and gather insights from your data is critical for Customer Success teams. To serve customers at scale, you need product usage data, health score insights, behavioral insights, and a conversation history, just to start.
Vitally brings all your data under one roof, with a wide range of integrations and a flexible REST API, giving your CS team every datapoint they’ll need to make better decisions. Vitally also offers a bi-directional sync with Salesforce, allowing you to seamlessly transfer data between the two platforms.
Looking For a User-Friendly, Flexible, and Scalable CSP? Look No Further Than Vitally
Vitally, Planhat, and Gainsight are all strong CSP options. All three offer the usual package of features: data integration, automation, and health score tracking, among others.
But only Vitally matches these features with advanced customization options, a speedy implementation timeline, competitive pricing, and a user-friendly interface that helps you move faster when you need it most. 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 that fits the unique needs of their customers.
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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