Today’s CSMs are responsible for a wide range of tasks from strategic support and onboarding to renewals and upsells. Some CSMs even provide technical support and white-glove assistance to high-value customers.
Nowhere on the laundry list of daily to-dos is there room to decide what software to use to speed up your processes.
Today’s CSMs need software more than ever to meet customer and team demands, but with hundreds of tools across dozens of categories, which will you choose?
You don’t need hours to comb through Google search results or Reddit threads. Just eight or so minutes to read through this article. In this guide, we’ll break down the most popular software platforms for Customer Success to help you decide which ones belong in your toolkit.
Why CSMs Need Their Own Tools
Can’t CS just get by with a CRM?
We’ve yet to hear this from an actual CSM; usually, it comes from leadership trying to keep their software investment extra lean.
Sure, a CRM keeps a log of contact activity, emails, calls, etc. And some CRMs even support NPS surveys and other CS-centric features.
But let’s be clear: CRMs were built for the sales world, and modifying a CRM to behave like a CSP will only get you so far.
At a time when Customer Success has more influence on revenue growth, software designed specifically for Customer Success is a requirement for driving impact both internally and externally. If your leadership team is still not convinced that dedicated software for Customer Success is worth the spend, read the next section and ask if a CRM is really up to the job.
Capabilities to Look for in Customer Success Tools
CRMs may be great at keeping a running log of emails, calls, and meetings, but today’s CSMs do so much more than simply communicate with customers. You need to find software that supports the following:
- Onboarding: Look for tools that let you standardize, automate, and track onboarding tasks so every customer receives a consistent, successful implementation experience.
- Account management: If you're managing customers at scale, you need tools that centralize health signals, usage metrics, and account notes so you know where every customer stands at a glance.
- Productivity: CSMs need a workspace built for actual day-to-day execution – not more tabs, spreadsheets, or manual updates. Look for tools that foster collaboration while removing busywork from your plate.
- Reporting: Great CS organizations run on data, so your tool should make it easy to build dashboards, track KPIs, and visualize customer health trends. Bonus points if they integrate with your stack to tie in CRM and product usage data.
- Automation: How do you support 100 or more customers without tearing your hair out? Automate. Look for tools that automatically trigger tasks, alerts, and workflows based on customer behavior so your team isn’t stuck doing manual busywork.
- AI-powered workflows: AI is your secret weapon to getting more done in less time. Look for AI tools that seamlessly fit with your existing stack to aid with tasks like writing emails, summarizing calls, and analyzing customer data.
We curated 20 tools that help with the above. Browse through them in the next section!
The 20 Best Tools for CSMs
First off, this is a long list.
We recommend using many of these tools together rather than replacing each other. We’ve broken them out into the following categories:
- CSPs
- Analytics
- Productivity
- In-app tracking
- AI
The Best Customer Success Platforms (CSPs)
No Customer Success toolkit is complete without a Customer Success Platform (CSP).
Customer Success Platforms are comprehensive software tools that allow you to manage and report on customers at scale. Many on this list include powerful automation and productivity tools, and AI to help you get more done.
These are the best Customer Success Platforms available today:
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 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.
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, purpose-built AI features, and automation, makes Vitally a leading CSP for innovative CS teams. Don’t let that freedom scare you off, though – Vitally has one of the fastest implementation timelines in the industry.
Vitally’s startup-friendly pricing makes it an attractive option for small and large companies alike. You can see Vitally for yourself with a product tour here.
Top Features
- Hubs for better organization
- Playbooks for automation
- Purpose-built AI features
- Conversation sync
- Health scores
- Custom surveys
- Dashboards and reporting
- Goal tracking
- NPS and CSAT tracking
ChurnZero is a legacy CSP with several features to empower CSMs to get more done at scale.
ChurnZero offers a variety of features for churn management, customer reporting, and AI. 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. That said, ChurnZero is still a well-regarded option in the space.
Totango positions itself as a “composable” CSP with a schema-less data model designed to handle complex data structures. Totango skews toward enterprise teams, which may make it a poor fit for budget-conscious or smaller companies.
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.
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.
Like Vitally, Planhat offers a robust set of features for customer health tracking, automation, productivity, and an impressive list of integration partners to collect your data. For data-hungry teams, Planhat is often a solid choice – but with great power also comes great complexity.
Users report feeling overwhelmed by Planhat’s blank canvas, which can lead to a steep learning curve for your team. Planhat implementations can run long, depending on your team's needs and the complexity of your processes.
Gainsight is one of the leading enterprise providers of Customer Success software.
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. This provides CS teams with a powerful blend of traditional CS features with product and usage analytics for deeper analysis.
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.
The Best Customer Success Analytics Tools
CSPs on their own are great tools, but what really makes them powerful is the data you provide. By combining customer, sales, and product data, your CS org can make more intelligent, more timely decisions.
While these tools go beyond the needs of Customer Success, CS teams would be wise to leverage them:
Of the tools in this section, Vitally is the only platform that provides a full suite of analytics tools designed for Customer Success.
Vitally allows you to integrate your CRM, Stripe, marketing data and more to bring everything under one roof and turn data into actionable insights. If you want to track revenue, product usage, NPS, and health scores, you can do it all in Vitally.
In fact, we use Vitally internally so much, we don’t need any of the other tools on this list to monitor and serve our customers!
Mixpanel is a product analytics platform that enables your marketing, product, and CS teams to track how users engage and interact with web and mobile applications.
If someone visits a page, clicks a button, or uses a feature, you can track it in Mixpanel. You can also create cohorts, track feature retention, and analyze funnels, allowing product, growth, and CS teams to understand adoption and drop-off across user journeys.
CS teams can use this data to fuel processes and guide timely conversations with customers, whether to avoid churn or spot an opportunity for upselling.
Like Mixpanel, Amplitude is a powerful product analytics platform that helps teams understand user behavior and optimize products through real-time data and experimentation.
Amplitude offers many of the same features, with a few extras for segmentation, behavior graphs, and session-replay insights. With an impressive slew of charts and other data visualizations, there’s a lot you can track and report on with Amplitude.
For B2B Customer Success teams, tools like Amplitude and Mixpanel provide valuable insights into how their customers use and stick with their product.
Userpilot is a no-code product growth platform that enables non-technical teams to build in-app experiences (onboarding flows, tooltips, checklists) to boost feature adoption and retention.
Think of Userpilot as a more CS-centric tool, while Mixpanel and Amplitude are often used by product and marketing teams. CS teams can use Userpilot to drive user onboarding and activation without relying on engineering.
Userpilot can be a great addition when you want to improve feature discovery and usage within your product, but it should be paired with a CS platform for full lifecycle/account management.
While not an analytics tool per se, Segment is a valuable platform for B2B software companies to use and can add immense value for CS orgs hungry for data.
Segment is a Customer Data Platform (CDP) that collects, unifies, and activates first-party customer data from multiple sources (web, mobile, server) and sends it to other tools for analysis.
Segment can help your company collect and organize data at scale. While this largely fuels marketing, sales, and product, it can fill your CSP with insights across sources, giving you everything you need to analyze customers at scale.
The Best Customer Success Productivity Tools
There are only so many hours in the day; you’re going to need to squeeze value from every minute of the day. That’s where the following productivity tools come into play:
Yep, Vitally doubles as a productivity tool for CSM teams by giving you time-saving automations, collaboration tools, and data management tools to get more done and stay organized.
Vitally stands out among the other productivity tools on this list thanks to the following:
- Flexible automations: With Vitally, you can put your processes on autopilot, managing everything from CSM assignment to task creation and alerts.
- Superior data management: Vitally brings all of your notes and activities together in one place, and allows you to organize teams and customer data into Hubs for easy access.
- Collaboration at scale: Need to collaborate with a remote or hybrid team? No problem. With Vitally Projects, you can keep track of progress, share deadlines, and drive success.
Asana is an all-in-one work management and project collaboration platform that helps teams plan, organize, and track work from start to finish.
We use Asana internally, and can recommend it as an excellent tool for task assignment, timelines, projects, and now includes features like smart summaries to enhance productivity and team alignment.
While not a CS-specific tool like Vitally, Asana can serve as a productivity/workflow backbone, helping you manage onboarding tasks, renewal checklists, and inter-team collaboration.
Still taking notes on calls? Save yourself some time (and paper) with Fathom.
Fathom is an AI-powered meeting recorder for Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams that automatically records, transcribes, and highlights key moments from customer calls. It generates summaries, action items, and searchable call repositories that teams can review and share.
Fathom is especially useful for capturing customer feedback, onboarding details, renewal conversations, and follow-up tasks without relying on manual note-taking. Vitally also has its own AI notetaker, which can summarize calls, highlight risks, and pinpoint key customer interactions.
Playing calendar tag is so 2015.
Calendly is a scheduling and appointment-booking tool that streamlines meeting scheduling by synchronizing calendars and removing back-and-forth emails. Calendly helps both teams and individuals offer availability, let customers self-book, and integrate with calendars, to increase productivity and reduce friction.
CSM teams can use Calendly to simplify scheduling of onboarding calls, check-ins, QBRs (quarterly business reviews), and escalation meetings.
The Best In-App Tour/Engagement Tools
If you’re working at a B2B SaaS company, then in-app tours and engagement tools are a necessity. The following tools can provide guidance and education for customers, helping ensure they are successful with your product:
Pendo is a software experience platform combining product analytics, in-app guidance (walkthroughs, tooltips), and feedback collection to improve user adoption and product-led growth.
Pendo enables teams to see how users engage with features, deliver in-product messages or tours, and collect user feedback. This can be especially useful for helping to surface adoption signals, drive feature usage, and feed those insights into CS workflows.
Like Pendo, Chameleon is a product adoption tool geared toward building in-product tours, tooltips, surveys, and checklists targeted by user behavior and segments.
Chameleon integrates with analytics/behavior data to trigger personalized in-app experiences that keep users engaged and reduce friction. Lately, Chameleon has gone all in on AI, offering powerful features to build tours and demos just from speaking. This can be a great help in driving feature adoption and encouraging usage – both keys for CS!
Heap is a product analytics platform that automatically captures user interactions across websites and apps. Thanks to automated event-tracking and visual labeling, you have a lot of flexibility in understanding how users move through a product and where they get stuck.
Heap can provide valuable insights into user behavior, friction points, feature usage, and adoption. Of the three tools in this section, we’d probably recommend Pendo or Chameleon for their CS-specific support, though.
The Best Customer Success AI Tools
Everyone’s talking about AI these days.
We’ve all seen those LinkedIn posts about AI replacing Customer Success – in reality, the smartest CS teams are using AI to their advantage. Here are the best AI tools for Customer Success teams:
Vitally has some of the best AI-powered features of any CSP on the market today.
Unlike some Customer Success software that tacks on ChatGPT or Anthropic to its features, Vitally offers native AI features that deliver powerful recommendations and insights based on your customer data.
Vitally AI takes in your notes, transcripts, ticket requests, docs, conversations, survey data, and turns them into actionable insights that help you identify risks, upsell opportunities, and even draft responses or create tasks.
When you’re managing customers at scale, Vitally AI is your superpower to getting more done.
Does ChatGPT really need an introduction?
This popular AI tool, developed by OpenAI, allows you to generate content, answer questions, automate tasks, and integrate with workflows via APIs.
ChatGPT can be used to draft emails, summarize calls/meetings, generate playbook content, answer internal questions, and automate routine tasks. This can be a great complement to purpose-built AI tools like Vitally.
Like Vitally, Velaris positions itself as an AI-powered Customer Success Platform designed to give B2B CS teams a unified view of customer data across product usage, communications, support history, and revenue context.
Compared to mature platforms like Vitally and Planhat, Velaris may not yet offer the same depth of automation and advanced features to power CS.
Why Innovative CS Teams Consistently Choose Vitally
While you have plenty of software platforms to choose from, if you come from an agile company looking for purpose-built solutions to build your own process from the ground up, we’d recommend Vitally.
Here’s why:
- All of your data in one place
- Purpose-built for CS teams
- Intuitive and powerful automation
- AI that fits seamlessly into your workflow
All of Your Data in One Place
When you’re managing 50 or 100+ accounts, it’s incredibly easy for customers to slip through the cracks and drop off – 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
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. Vitally gives you all the data you need to turn customer information into actionable insights to prevent and mitigate churn.
Purpose-Built for CS Teams
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
And an AI Copilot that meets you where you are, removes busywork off your plate, and guides your every move.
Intuitive and Powerful Automation
Vitally’s automation packs a punch while still being easy enough to use that you can get started right away.
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 from a single Playbook.
AI That Fits With Your Workflow
Rather than tack OpenAI functionality onto a CSP, Vitally takes a unique approach to bring you embedded AI-powered features, providing a smart copilot for Customer Success.
Vitally AI is a purpose-built 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 your reps.
See Why 600+ Customer Success Teams Love Vitally. Take a Product Tour
If you’re going to pick one tool from this list, we’d recommend you select a Customer Success Platform to tie all your data together, automate workflows, and turn data into insights.
And if you pick one CSP, we’d recommend Vitally.
You don’t have to take our word for it – and you don’t even need to schedule a demo (though you can here, if you’d like). Click the button below to take a product tour of Vitally. You’ll see the best that Vitally has to offer, and how your CS team can scale Customer Success.
Table of Contents
Request a Demo
Request a Demo
Request a Demo
