Customer Success is a core growth engine for your company, responsible for driving onboarding, retention, and expansion.
Whether you’re cobbling together Google Sheets or trying to squeeze as much functionality out of your CRM as possible, sooner or later, your team will need a dedicated Customer Success Platform (CSP).
It doesn’t take long to explore the CSP ecosystem and encounter three major players: Vitally, ChurnZero, and Totango.
Which will you choose? How do you determine which CSP offers the best functionality, flexibility, and integrations for your team? We’ll answer these questions and more in this guide.
Vitally
Vitally is a leading CSP, with an emphasis on flexibility, ease of use, and data integration for innovative CS teams.
Unlike other CSPs that take a rigidly prescriptive approach, Vitally gives your team control to build processes from the ground up. That doesn’t mean you necessarily 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. This flexibility, along with a robust set of tools for collaboration, customization, purpose-built AI features, and automation, makes Vitally a leading CSP.
Vitally gets rave reviews from CS teams for its user-friendly interface and seamless integration capabilities, offering a variety of automated actions and extensive API support. Vitally’s customer Hubs allow you to organize customer data and views, giving your team access to information when they need it most. Vitally also includes native tools for customer collaboration and real-time data, giving your reps a comprehensive tool for managing Customer Success from top to bottom.
One customer says it best in a recent review:
“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.”
It’s no wonder Vitally earns high marks with 4.5 stars on G2!
Top Features
- Hubs for better organization
- Playbooks for automation
- Purpose-built AI features
- Conversation sync
- Health scores
- Surveys
- Dashboards and reporting
- Goal tracking
- NPS tracking
ChurnZero
ChurnZero is a legacy CSP with several features to empower CSMs, along with AI-powered capabilities to automate tasks.
ChurnZero particularly excels with branching automation thanks to its “Plays” feature, allowing CS teams to create workflows that save hours each week. ChurnZero also offers in-app engagement tools (WalkThroughs and Success Centers), allowing teams to meet customers where they are in the product.
At the same time, ChurnZero’s reporting functionality is a bit rigid, and users report that its UI is clunky compared to more intuitive tools like Vitally. Where Vitally offers flexibility through Hubs, ChurnZero is a one-size-fits-all solution, making it harder to find key data when you need it most. Here’s what one recent reviewer 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.”
Like Vitally, ChurnZero is well-rated on G2 with 4.7 stars.
Top Features
- Account segmentation and management
- Health score tracking
- Automation and Plays
- Dashboards and reporting
- NPS tracking
Pros and Cons
While ChurnZero is a popular option for scaling CS teams, it is not without its drawbacks.
Users love ChurnZero for its…
- Customer support and onboarding process
- Automation and workflow features
- Comprehensive view of customers
- Strong integration ecosystem for extensibility
But they find the following to be limiting:
- Complex UI with a steep learning curve.
- While the implementation team has good reviews, the onboarding process is slow (6-8 weeks).
- Despite a comprehensive view of the customer lifecycle, advanced reporting is limited to data exports.
- Customization options do exist, but they are limited and may constrain you as you grow.
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, making Vitally and ChurnZero better fits for budget-conscious companies.
Totango and Catalyst announced a merger to unify their customer success offerings. A move that, in theory, unifies 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.
Of the three, Totango lags a bit on G2 with 4.3 stars.
Top Features
- Account segmentation and management
- Health score tracking
- Automation
- Dashboards and reporting
Pros and Cons
Like ChurnZero, Totango has its pros and 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 when it comes to 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.”
Vitally vs ChurnZero vs Totango: A Side-By-Side Comparison
To make things simple, here’s a quick side-by-side comparison of Vitally, ChurnZero, and Totango to help you make the right decision for your team:
Between Vitally, ChurnZero, and Totango, you have three solid options for a CSP. For innovative teams that want a purpose-built platform with flexibility to build a process their way without having to sacrifice ease of use, we’d recommend Vitally as the best choice.
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 Totango and ChurnZero.
Let’s take a more detailed look at these key competitive edges.
- Purpose-built AI for Customer Success
- Customization
- User experience and collaboration
- 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 ChurnZero and Totango may offer some configuration options, but they have more limitations compared to Vitally.
User Experience and Collaboration
With customer relationships on the line, does your team really have the time to sift through endless tabs to find a conversation or meeting summary?
Vitally’s intuitive user interface makes it easy to navigate and find key information compared to more complex tools like ChurnZero and Totango. This ease of use gives Vitally one of the shortest implementation timeframes on the market.
It’s also easy to integrate your tools and collaborate with your team. For example, Vitally Docs allows you to share success plans and collaborate directly in the platform, something that other CSPs lack entirely. Totango offers some collaborative tools, but they are generally less integrated and less flexible than those provided by Vitally.
Automation
For scaled Customer Success, especially, time-saving automation is key to help your team service a large number of accounts while providing top-notch service.
Automation is where Vitally excels; Vitally’s automation builder supports branching logic and multi-step flows, allowing your team to automate tasks and streamline your process. In comparison, Totango’s automation capabilities are limited, and ChurnZero’s are more complex to use.
Integrations and Flexibility
CS teams hinge on the data they can collect. To service your customers, you need product usage data, health score insights, behavioral insights, and a conversation history 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 smaller startups.
ChurnZero and Totango are pricier 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 to fit a number of business sizes.
Looking For a User-Friendly, Flexible, and Scalable CSP? Look No Further Than Vitally
Vitally, ChurnZero, and Totango are all strong CSP options. All three offer essential features: data integration, automation, and health score tracking, to name a few.
But only Vitally packages 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. That, with powerful automation features, seamless integrations, and a flexible API, makes Vitally 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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