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
Planhat
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
Planhat, headquartered in Stockholm, offers their modular suite of applications to subscription based businesses, providing customer success product usage health alerts and guidance, as well as revenue management for tracking subscriptions and business health.
Gainsight CS is a little more polished and has a wider range of capabilities. However, Planhat did appear to be very easy to use. The biggest difference was PlanHats admin capabilities and how simple it was to configure. Planhat was also considerably less expensive.
Gainsight certainly outperforms Startdeliver, but it's about use cases (Startdeliver is for a certain niche), and everything is better than Salesforce. Planhat, however, is becoming a clear key player here, overtaking the momentum and becoming the market leader and next-gen …
When evaluating Planhat, we found that it had a better UI and was a more rounded product than Churn Zero. Planhat was considerably more expensive than Churn Zero, but we felt that the extra investment was worthwhile given that the product better met our needs.
We needed a software that would not take months to set up and learn how to use. We needed powerful data that was easy to understand and action based on health scores dropping, etc. It was also important for us to be able to get our full team on the platform so that we could all …
Verified User
Vice-President
Chose Planhat
Planhat was the most agile and easy to use software, while still having unique and powerful features that allowed us to really customize the software around our organization and needs. Planhat is more than a Customer Success tool in essence and adds tremendous value and …
Verified User
Vice-President
Chose Planhat
Planhat has a better UI, covers a wide range of features and use-cases. It covers hybrid tech-touch and high touch well. Strong on revenue management.
Verified User
General Manager
Chose Planhat
Planhat won on best UI, easy to use, easy to set up and had the enterprise-grade features we were looking for.
Features
Gainsight CS
Planhat
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Gainsight CS
8.2
283 Ratings
7% below category average
Planhat
7.9
13 Ratings
10% below category average
Role-based user permissions
8.2283 Ratings
7.913 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Gainsight CS
8.1
331 Ratings
7% below category average
Planhat
8.0
13 Ratings
8% below category average
API
7.9222 Ratings
8.212 Ratings
Integration with Salesforce.com
8.5325 Ratings
7.79 Ratings
Integration with Marketo
7.977 Ratings
00 Ratings
Integration with Eloqua
8.039 Ratings
00 Ratings
Customer Data Extraction / Integration
Comparison of Customer Data Extraction / Integration features of Product A and Product B
Gainsight CS
7.7
350 Ratings
13% below category average
Planhat
8.1
14 Ratings
8% below category average
Product usage
7.8335 Ratings
8.414 Ratings
Help desk / support tickets
7.5267 Ratings
7.912 Ratings
Customer Success Management
Comparison of Customer Success Management features of Product A and Product B
Gainsight CS
8.1
353 Ratings
6% below category average
Planhat
8.1
14 Ratings
6% below category average
NPS surveys
8.6284 Ratings
8.212 Ratings
Sponsor tracking
7.4229 Ratings
8.09 Ratings
Customer profiles
8.5305 Ratings
9.014 Ratings
Automated workflow
8.2334 Ratings
6.913 Ratings
Internal collaboration
7.6320 Ratings
8.613 Ratings
Customer health scoring
8.5343 Ratings
8.314 Ratings
Customer segmentation
8.0293 Ratings
7.814 Ratings
CSM Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of CSM Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
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.
For someone working in the Customer Success team, Planhat is a must-have software. All your client-level data can be easily managed, stored, and reviewed at any point in time by Planhat. It also helps the management and the leadership team better see each account and its usage. It also helps in identifying potentially risky customers and taking the required actions to engage and retain the account. It also gets integrated easily with other meeting recording tools wherein the summary from the tool gets easily synced with Planhat
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
Reporting - you can set up filters with boolean criteria to give you insight into everything you need to know.
Playbooks - these are very good for less-experienced CSM's who need a step-by-step guide on how to deal with different stages of the customer lifecycle. More experienced CSM's may not need the playbooks.
Usage data for customers - there's a wide range of charts in Planhat that tell the story of client consumption.
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.
Allow for cc'ing of AEs or others within the same organization from the messaging center. When I went to send a message from within Planhat, I had to manually type out the AE's email address every time if I wanted them cc'd.
The fonts were funky if I went to add text into an existing email template. For example, if I added in an extra sentence or paragraph, in Outlook on the recipient's end, the font was different despite looking the same within Planhat. Gmail was all consistent, Outlook was showing a different font.
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.
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.
It takes a while to learn Planhat even for experienced users. It has limitations in terms of what data you can present where, but its important to set internal guides outside Planhat as well so everybody working collaborative. But as CSM Planhat is a great- and critical tool which I use daily to optimise my work schedule and customer interaction with various topics.
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
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.
The support team couldn't be better. They are quick to respond, very helpful, and thorough. Our CS manager was always happy to schedule calls to go through specific feature queries and she ensured we had a smooth and quick setup.
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
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.
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 was not the person involved in choosing Planhat, but it seems to me that Planhat is much better suited to an account management style role, whereas Hubspot is closer to a sales CRM instead. In my position, Planhat is better suited as it is more graphical, more flexible, and easier to find information on.
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
Planhat has, for the first time, given us a 360-degree view of all our customers and access to all the different types of communication we have with them across different departments and functions.
The ability to automate workflows, tasks, and assign playbooks to the various phases of our customer lifecycle has aligned all our departments.
