At some point, a CRM and cobbled-together Google Sheets just stop working for your Customer Success process.
Maybe it’s the fact that most CRM automation tools and AI features are built for marketing and sales. Or perhaps conversations and notes are getting lost in the ether of spreadsheets. Whatever it is, you need the right tools to automate your workflows and deliver a stellar customer experience at scale. You need a Customer Success Platform (CSP).
It doesn’t take long to explore the CSP ecosystem to encounter three major players: Vitally, Totango, 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 leading CSP, with an emphasis on flexibility, ease of use, and data integration for innovative CS teams.
The key word there is innovative.
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, their way, not be told what process to use from 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. By connecting your stack to Vitally to bring all of your customer data under one roof, you can fine-tune Health Scores and build custom shareable dashboards to gather insights faster and make smarter decisions.
But 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
- Hubs for better organization
- Playbooks for automation
- Purpose-built AI features
- Blueprint for ready-to-use templates
- Conversation sync
- Health scores
- Surveys
- Dashboards and reporting
- Goal tracking
- NPS tracking
Totango
Totango positions itself as a “composable” CSP with a schemaless data model designed to handle complex enterprise data structures. Of the three platforms, Totango skews toward enterprise teams, but can still be a suitable choice if you have the budget and bandwidth to take it on.
Totango and Catalyst announced a merger to unify their customer success offerings—a move that, in theory, combines the twin missions of Customer Success and growth. Today, Totango offers an expanded product line, including the original Totango platform, along with Catalyst and the 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 and prepare accordingly.
Of the three, Totango earns high marks as well on G2 with 4+ stars.
Top Features
- Account segmentation and management
- Health score tracking
- Automation
- Dashboards and reporting
Pros & Cons
Users love Totango for its…
- Customizable dashboards
- Automation capabilities
- Salesforce integration
- Improved forecasting features
But many find the following to be limitations of an otherwise robust platform:
- A lack of flexibility for segmenting accounts.
- Inflexible handling of health scores for sub-accounts.
- A steep learning curve and a generally unintuitive platform.
- Numerous glitches that slow users down.
Here’s how one Reddit user compared Totango and Vitally:
“I didn’t understand Totango’s UI… I had someone implement it, and they said the platform doesn’t work half the time… Vitally has a really nice UI, and they have a Notion-like capability that allows you to build templates and use them whenever. Vitally let me test the platform with a proof of concept; a lot of these companies don’t let you do that.”
Planhat
Planhat earns top marks in the industry for its flexibility and extensibility with your other tools. Planhat users regularly cite both flexibility and robust data modeling and management as the platform’s top perks.
With powerful automation features, insights, and data collection capabilities, like Vitally, Planhat is one of the leading Customer Success Platforms on the market. But with great power also comes great complexity. Planhat is customizable but rigid, which can make navigating its blank canvas more difficult than in Totango or Vitally. This may be fine if you know exactly what you want to build, but if you’re unsure of what to prioritize or how to navigate the tool, you may be faced with a steep learning curve to overcome.
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 & Cons
Like Totango, Planhat has its pros and cons.
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
Vitally vs Totango 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, Totango, and Planhat to help you make the right decision for your team:
Between Vitally, Totango, 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
Why? 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 Totango.
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
- Scalability and pricing
Purpose-Built AI With Customer Success in Mind
Vitally brings AI-powered features to provide you with a smart copilot for Customer Success.
Unlike other platforms that tack on AI features to their products, Vitally provides a purpose-built solution for AI, embedded within the platform and your data. With Vitally AI, you can transform all your customer data into actionable 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 turns those into insights, like:
- Rich AI summaries to pinpoint sentiment, churn risks, and more.
- AI-generated Plays to give your team detailed to-dos, action items, 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 actionable insights for your reps.
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 Totango 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.”
If you can dream it, you can often build it in Vitally.
Automation
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:
- Check-ins
- Alerts
- Health monitoring
And more, you can do it in Vitally. You can also create Playbooks to automate many day-to-day activities, such as creating tasks or sending emails, to free up even more space in 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 for starters.
Vitally brings all your data under one roof with a wide range of integrations along with an extensive 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.
Scalability and Pricing
If you’re already investing in a CRM and marketing suite, a dedicated CSP can present a financial burden — especially for earlier-stage startups.
Totango and Planhat can be pricey options, but Vitally’s pricing model is transparent and scalable, accommodating a wide range of business sizes and growth stages. CSMs need a CSP, not a CRM, to manage customer relationships effectively, and Vitally aims to make it scalable and affordable for businesses of various sizes.
Looking For a User-Friendly, Flexible, and Scalable CSP? Look No Further Than Vitally
Vitally, Totango, and Planhat are all strong CSP options. All three offer the usual package of features: data integration, automation, and health score tracking, to name a few.
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!
Table of Contents
Request a Demo
Request a Demo
