AliveChat vs. Gist

It is well suited for communication with existing customers and prospects. It is less appropriate for people just looking to visit our website to get up to date with the latest team news or those who aren't at a computer.

Incentivized

If your marketing model is selling products, services, or SAAS where you are doing inbound marketing and your website will do most of the lead generation and conversion, this is a great product. From live chat, support, event tracking, and automation, you could almost put your entire business on autopilot. If your marketing model is mostly outreach to cold leads and conversion, this software currently does not have any type of sales stages or task generation. I would still use Gist for website inbound but use another software for outreach and cold leads then when they become a lead put them into Gist for marketing automation.

Incentivized

• Mobile compatibility - AliveChat has a dynamic user interface which makes its popup chat widget display and work perfectly on all devices - mobile and desktop. Thus web visitors get a complete experience no matter the device from which they use in accessing our website.
• Analytic - AliveChat provides us with a dynamic set of website analytics that helps us in analyzing our progress or decline in a timely manner. With the analytics provided by AliveChat, we are able to monitor the number of visitors on the website at a particular time, the duration of which they have been on the website, the number of times they have been on the website in time past etc.
• Feature packed - AliveChat is packed with features which makes the job of the customer care agents easier. For instance, with AliveChat it is very easy for an agent to transfer a web visitors chat to another agent that has better answers to the agent's query. We are also able to introduce short survey questions to web visitors, which they respond to before they begin chatting with a customer care rep.

Incentivized

• Customer service via a unified inbox so you dont have to separately monitor your twitter, Facebook or IG account for consumer communication there. Gist unified all into one inbox, better than anyone else I've seen in the market. They archive all communications and tie them back to a single user so you get unified customer history / data.
• Marketing segmentation and automation: they track user history and behavior across the site and have super detailed segmenting capability, on par with ActiveCampaign's, but better I'd say. Better UI for the marketing admin person, and more unified data than in AC.
• Live chat and chatbot. Usually it's either one or the other but with Gist you can do both seamlessly.

Incentivized

• There seems to always be required upgrades where you need to spend more money to get a better product.
• The look and feel continues to change, not necessarily for the bad.
• Price point has gone up a decent amount recently.

Incentivized

• Plan limits can be confusing. For example, there is a monthly charge for support and a monthly charge for "growth," plus there's a separate charge depending on how many contacts and seats you have. Perhaps this is normal in the industry, but it can make it a little challenging to understand the bill every month.
• The vast amount of features means development will never be as fast as you'd like it to be (even though they release updates all the time). This may not actually be a valid concern, and it certainly isn't unique to Gist (who doesn't have a wishlist they're waiting on their favorite SaaS to get to?), but I do believe the likelihood of being stuck without your desired feature being developed goes up a lot as the product gets bigger and bigger.
• Email deliverability has been less than perfect in the past, but it has improved drastically in the last year.

Gist is a quite reliable service with a lot of added values. We don't need to pay for different Saas for these important features. If I had an issue the team was super responsive and helpful, that is essential for every business. The email delivery is great, so virtually no email has landed into spam folder

Incentivized

It’s pretty simple, but it does a lot so there are more complicated features which depend on an individuals ability for software implementation. I am not an IT expert and I’ve managed to implement everything myself, others that are more tech-minded may find everything easier.

Fantastic support. Ask a question, get an answer within 24 hours every time. And sometimes within a few minutes. They've always come through for me, helpful and, even when it's an issue on my end, they point me in the right direction.

Incentivized

AliveChat really serves a different purpose than other products. Very few products offer the ability to chat through our website, so it compliments our phone, text, and email options very well.

Incentivized

Gist combines all our previous products into one application and adds many more features that would require more apps. Gist is excellent and a no-brainer all-in-one application when compared to having to manage multiple applications at higher cost. The support from the whole Gist team has been extremely responsive.

• AliveChat has made it easy for us to track the effectiveness of our marketing campaigns. As the real-time number of visitors on the website gives us insights into the performance of ongoing campaigns.
• AliveChat also makes it possible for us to have an idea of where our web visitors are coming from i.e. via the pre-chat survey form for instance. We are able to generate important data like how a web visitor got to know about us, their expectations when visiting our website etc.
• AliveChat makes it easy for web visitors to get a real-time response to their questions, with a delay of probably a few seconds.

Incentivized

• They are perfect for me as a someone who needs a lot of bang for the buck. The chat messenger device on my website alone has brought me new prospects that I did not have to spend money recruiting.
• I am able to save hours of time with the automated emails that are GDPR compliant.
• I don't have to pay for a designer to have excellent looking emails either.