ChurnZero is a Customer Success platform designed to help subscription businesses succeed through improved customer experiences.
ChurnZero
helps Customer Success team spot potential churn risks early and see
renewal and expansion opportunities faster. Its automation and
personalization, in-app communications, and Customer Success AI™ support engagement with customers and lead them to value. The platform offers
journeys, health scores, survey tools, segmentation, plays,…
N/A
Gainsight CS
Score 8.8 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Gainsight Customer Success (CS) is presented as a growth engine for modern post-sale teams. Built for CROs, CS leaders, and operations pros, it provides visibility into customer health, expansion potential, and revenue risk. With automation, AI, and health scoring, Gainsight helps scale outcomes without scaling headcount. With its playbooks and success plans to CSQL tracking and journey orchestration, Gainsight CS helps teams to take the right action at the right time, every time. Access to…
$2,500
Per Company Per Month
MindTouch
Score 7.0 out of 10
N/A
MindTouch is a customer experience management platform with content management and help authoring capabilities. Formerly known as MediaWiki, it is optimized for building knowledge bases for customer self-service and agent assistance purposes.
While Gainsight CS and PX are owned by the same parent company, they couldn't be more different on a fundamental level. PX is a nuts and bolts usage data platform which reports on many of the same datapoints as ChurnZero, but beyond that, PX has very little in terms of team …
Gainsight CS - you need a team to manage this tool; not intuitive to use, and you're not able to be as agile once configured
GUIDEcx- One of my favorites in the space, and so easy to set up, configure, customize, and scale. Able to connect onboarding milestones to SFDC cases, …
ChurnZero seemed a little more geared towards our customer base and goals. Their onboarding was thorough and included (Gainsight's was not). Cost/Budget also came into the picture as well!
ChurnZero was the perfect mix of tools and features at the right price. It has scaled as we've scaled and the new features they roll out are always industry firsts.
Gainsight is a great software, and a good alternative to ChurnZero. However for us, ChurnZero had made a number of key changes to their product suite that helped us decide for it over Gainsight. For instance the integrated AI text generator, the new round robin, enhanced note …
Our management team reviewed both Gainsight and Totango, while both were very robust and feature rich, the cost and price point did not make sense for a team of our size and where we would be scaling to. It also seemed that through our conversations both of those tools would …
ChurnZero is a better fit out of the box for our business in terms of its features, functions, usability, scalability, serviceability, and costs. We really wanted a customer success platform that doesn't take a long time to deploy while being flexible enough to allow us to …
We selected ChurnZero based on price and having the functionality we needed for right now. Gainsight had more features, but at a much higher cost and these features weren't necessarily items we needed to get ourselves up and running now.
ChurnZero was feature-rich and had everything we needed (Totango was lacking in key features such as displaying a journey to a customer and having them follow along). ChurnZero was way more financially approachable than Gainsight. ChurnZero also was much more of a CS platform …
ChurnZero was the most competitive product for us given the price, ease of use, and feature availability.
Verified User
Director
Chose ChurnZero
[N/A]
Verified User
Account Manager
Chose ChurnZero
We selected ChurnZero as while the other platforms (not limited to those listed here, just some aren't options on TrustRadius), ChurnZero matched my concept for what I wanted to provide my team. Until I tried ChurnZero in a demo site, I was completely sold on ClientSuccess, but …
The in-app messaging based on certain segments was the key differentiator. Also, while they are growing as an organization and expanding their portfolio of customers, they are extremely receptive to product suggestions, most of our suggestions we have given them have been …
Gainsight is incredible too. Nothing negative to say about that tool either! However, ChurnZero had everything we needed, and they are a local company to us with a more palatable price point given our business size.
Another product not listed: SenseData. They were great contestants with even more structure and functions to the platform, but it was more expensive and CZ already fulfilled our needs.
My companies both chose Gainsight before I arrived, so I was not part of that process. I have evaluated ChurnZero outside of the process and I think it's a great tool - maybe more so for smaller companies.
We went with Gainsight above Totango or ChurnZero primarily because of the maturity of their organization. They are the market & thought leaders on Customer Success management and we wanted that in our corner when maturing our own CS organization. Gainsight is also the most …
We were users of ChurnZero -- however, it reached a point where the features and functionality of Gainsight surpassed what ChurnZero was offering at the time
Gainsight CS simply had a broader set of functionality that we wanted. That said, if Vitally or ChurnZero were to close a few of the functionality gaps that mattered to us, we would prefer to use either of those competitor products.
Gainsight CS is more user friendly than ChurnZero on the CSM side and the UI in general is more up-to-date and easier to glean insight. ChurnZero just looks outdated.
Gainsight CS is beautiful and much more user friendly HOWEVER it does take more time to set up to have the desired impact than a software like ChurnZero.
More customization with Gainsight CS, but Churn zero did have a great UI and easier to use. Would recommend CZ if you're a smaller company with no technical admin.
Overall look and feel of the platform was what won us initially. We demoed these two side by side and everyday navigation for the CSM's was easier. In the end this is very important as the data is the data either way but if the CSM's enjoy using it and feel the impact on their …
Gainsight not only has the superior technology, (by a lot) but they have the community, documentation, LMS to overcome the inevitable struggles of adopting a new tool for the first time. It scales with your business and is built for start ups, mid size and large enterprise …
If you are a SaaS business with a high volume of customers, having ChurnZero is a must. If you have a subscription based business and a customer success or account management function in your company, I would highly recommend ChurnZero.
I love using Gainsight CS for global collaboration, monitoring account health, digging into potential churn risks, summarizing account activity, logging account activity and having an overall historic record of account activity across multiple account teams, especially in my segment on a global account team.
If a company doesn't want to make their knowledge base public-facing, you lose a lot of the value of using MindTouch in a closed environment. MindTouch is not ideal for extremely structured content management scenarios that are strong DITA advocates. Companies that require localization might not be good fits either.
ChurnZero has excellent customer success! They worked very hard to ensure a successful implementation and launch.
The CZ platform gives a detailed view of customer usage. We know exactly how clients are using our platform which allows us to provide excellent customer success services. This allows helps our product team understand the needs of clients and the success of new features.
We are able to create plays based on usage which provides a customized and personal experience for each user. CZ makes it possible to give our clients what they need when they need it.
Ability to capture all customer information in one spot
Gantt charts for overall success plans to map out TAM deliverables
Automatically integrate feeds from sources to build reports as needed
Ability to capture customer follow-up tasks so I'm not trying to capture the list of actions too repetitively (e.g. using the "Tasks" section of an entry)
Ability to use the plugin to automatically add emails to timeline; ability to use calendar integration to automatically add meeting minutes that will sync up to Gong notes
When composing an email out of segments, the ability to save it as a draft to review later would be awesome, instead of needing to set up a Play
In the admin section, I love that we can have a color palate - but we'd like the color palete to be applied in other areas so CZ has more of our companies branding
The content templates can be hard to stylize if you don't know html
Add the Merge Fields functionality to tasks, especially tasks made by playbooks
Outlook integration could be better as within Outlook we do not get much insight of the account. While contacting a contact from Outlook, it will be great if the Outlook -Gainsight CS tool can show certain important information, like any pending CTAs, the latest billing amount, and pending certifications, etc. This will improve the communications and make it more aligned with the company and account perspectives.
Limitations of report creation are user level - As a user I can not create report as per my wish on my set of accounts. Only the admin user has access to that, and also it's very intuitive compared to Salesforce.
Dashboard customization - as a user I have very much limited options to put in my dashboard. It's all about CTA all the time.
When we do have a support issue, we frequently need to go through multiple people, contacts, ways of explaining things, etc,. before someone on their end actually understands our problem. It's rare that the first person we talk to understands the big picture or appreciates our use case.
The draft functionality is a promising start but lacks some key features that cause us regular frustration. For example, you can only create one draft of a page at a time. This is fine if changes come to you in perfect sequential order, but it makes it impossible for us to update a live page while a draft exists. More specifically, if we're working on updating content on a page for a new feature being released next month, but then we notice a typo today, we can't fix the typo in production without first deleting the draft or doing some hacky workaround of temporarily copying/pasting the source HTML of the draft page and saving it someplace else.
Existence of, or integration with, true source control would be a huge win, but it's something currently lacking in the product. MindTouch's content reuse feature is helpful in the right situations, but it's not robust enough to scale well for lots of content.
Version history of page changes is not 100% reliable. Sometimes items don't show up at all or there is a delay before the diff is visible. Also, creating a draft does not register at all in the page version history.
In-site search is poor, unless you know the *exact* title of what you're looking for. We tell our customers to use Google, not the MindTouch search. Google is excellent at searching our MindTouch site.
Our team is very happy with the product after evaluating multiple vendors, including Gainsight, Totango and Planhat. We like the additional functionality that CZ offers on its enterprise version. We were strongly considering other products if the price was right and functionality worked, but the change management would have been too heavy and taken too long. The ChurnZero team has been a good partner to rely on and allowed us to free up our time and resources to focus on more pressing matters
Gainsight offers a level of support that I've not experience before. They will work with you to come up with a solution to a problem - or help match you with another client that has a similar setup as you to get their feedback. Also the functionality that we have built within the software works for us. It's 'easy' to use (once you get the hang of it) and our users rather enjoy working in the software.
We've put lots and lots of content into the MindTouch system, of course, so that makes it harder to opt out, but we're also very pleased with their rate of development and weekly pushing of improvements, as well as their response and solutions to our questions and input All in all, a winning combination.
ChurnZero makes my work life a complete game changer. I say it all the time ChurnZero is a one stop shop for data! I don't fumble through numerous different programs, try to remember different passwords, I literally login to CZ and it is right there in front of me
Gainsight CS earns a 10/10 usability rating for me by prioritizing strategic power and deep configurability over simplistic, rigid design. Instead of forcing users into a generic workflow, the platform allows us to build bespoke health scores and playbooks that align perfectly with our unique business model. This high degree of customization ensures that the tool acts as a tailored workspace that meets the needs of mature CS organization like ours. By leveraging the proactive CTA triggers, Gainsight CS reduces the manual burden on our CSMs, allowing them to focus on high-value customer interactions rather than administrative data hunting. It ultimately functions as a professional grade cockpit that empowers our team to manage complex revenue lifecycles with precision and repeatability.
The site is responsive across multiple devices and screens. It has a clear path to contact support. The articles are searchable. Site users do have trouble navigating the site and finding what they need. That may be due to the architecture of the site, but it'd be nice if MindTouch offered more solutions are this. Our content is organized by product line. And many of those product lines have overlapping training content, so we have extensive duplicate content.
Rarely any issues with availability or outages. When they do occur, there is excellent communication and consistent updates. Bugs are usually addressed in a timely manner, and communication around those issues is also extremely good
There are some times when it can take almost a minute to load some of our reports or the rules engine. Within a rule it can also take time to load the actions as they each load one at a time when scrolling. The ability to scroll without waiting would be ideal
MindTouch is a hosted site, so as a heavy user there are times when I notice that pages are slow to load, or something happens like Amazon Web Services crashing the entire east coast for a few hours, that you do notice even if it isn't actually the fault of the MT tool itself. It's the risk of using a hosted tool, but the benefits are pretty amazing and outweigh these performance issues.
I recently had the opportunity to interact with ChurnZero's customer support team, and I must say, I am thoroughly impressed. Their responsiveness and willingness to solve problems are exemplary. From the moment I reached out, their team displayed a level of professionalism and dedication that truly stood out.
The CSMs are very hands-on and helpful, both Elaine and Lane have provided a lot of guidance and value over the years. Support is responsive and will jump on things as needed. The thought leadership and community is probably the most valuable part of our support from Gainsight.
It's good. Pretty solid. We got a lot of input to get up and running, but did a lot of the setup and customization work ourselves, because of our high standards. We've gotten good response and results on specific projects related to customization and our CSM is also pretty responsive. Overall, I think that the jobs of CSMs and support folks would be easier if the product weren't wonky in some ways. They seem to have to do more "workarounds" for basic functionality that should just work out of the box
The training and onboarding have been very helpful. Since I was not a part of the team when ChurnZero was implemented, it was important to get brought up to speed as quickly as possible and our CSM has been incredibly receptive in that regard.
The online videos are very good for basic tasks in the platform, but it isn't very descriptive or helpful trying to make your own specific variables fit the simple example that is typically used. Typically, I'll watch a video, try on my own and still have to get help from support or Customer Success team
Written documentation and videos are very good and have helped on numerous occasions when I've had to look up how to accomplish a certain task. The reason I have not given a full score is mainly because there have been some inaccuracies in the documentation because updates to the MindTouch framework have slightly changed the way things work. But this is usually the same type of challenges I face when making documentation for the software solution we develop. So all in all I'm very satisfied with both the personal webinars and the online documentation MindTouch provides for their service.
I implemented CZ in 4 months. When I look back, this is not a long time where I needed to get to know CZ by myself (as I did not have knowledge of it at all..) study the Academy, playing around in the test environment and setting up in live environment.
I was not part of the implantation (I took over later). However, based on what was passed to me, the tool was not well implemented at our org. I think this had to do with complexity, wrong person assigned in our org, and org buy-in. I think it would have been very successful if we had a better assignment process internally.
Just know that there is so much more involved than adding your content. There are so many pieces to launching your site -- especially if you are moving from another platform. If you are not a person who typically works in the "website" realm, do your homework, ask your web people, engineers, etc., because there's a lot to do that you won't know about until you are unexpectedly smacked in the face with it. Learn from my mistakes! We are very happy now, but it was a long road getting to launch day for us
Gainsight CS - you need a team to manage this tool; not intuitive to use, and you're not able to be as agile once configured GUIDEcx- One of my favorites in the space, and so easy to set up, configure, customize, and scale. Able to connect onboarding milestones to SFDC cases, and share out as a customer portal. Mixmax has been purchased in past companies to help fill in gaps of other tools (gives us scheduling links, in-inbox email templates, SFDC lead/contact and task management)
They're pretty neck and neck. Both are super similar. I love the icons for logging account activity in Totango. I also like the dropdown activity tab we have in Gainsight. We need to improve our auto forms for QBR notes and cancellation notes, but I do like that we can have details listed for the CSM to fill out without them having to think about it. Helps us improve our reporting efforts, too.
I will be brief. DealerTeam is built upon Salesforce and we try to support native apps. We used Desk.com first for basic Help Ticket management. The product did not satisfy how our customers were looking for information. We upgraded to Service Cloud with Knowledge Base and spent one year writing content and developing our support agency. Again, our customers were upset about submitting help tickets and waiting for answers. They wanted access to self-help while working with a customer. Today we continue to use Service Cloud with MindTouch integration and have found complete success. There is simply no other solution I know of that is a flexible and easy to use as MindTouch when it come to providing customer success and product support
It can lean a little heavily toward Customer Success, but the ability to customize many areas based on specific user or account characteristics allows you to make it work across many different roles. This also makes collaboration within the tool across teams possible. It a flexible tool if you have a skilled admin to help guide your process building.
No metrics yet, but we have improved our at-risk customers by identifying risks earlier via our automated health score and with our Gainsight approved mitigation workflow, CSMs and leaders have better discipline with mitigation efforts and sharing at-risk customers across the org so other teams can step in and assist
Our operational efficiently has improved significantly. Prior to Mindtouch, we managing duplicate content in two separate authoring solutions. Delivering content predictably and consistently was difficult and stressful for writers. In Mindtouch, we were able to optimize our content (remove redundancies) giving us more time to test, review, and improve content quality.
Traffic to our knowledge center is increasing monthly.
Internally, SMEs and customer-facing teams are recognizing the value Mindtouch brings through self-service knowledge. These SMEs want to contribute more to content, either as contributing writers or collaborators with tech writers.