Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Gainsight CS
Score 8.5 out of 10
Mid-Size Companies (51-1,000 employees)
Gainsight’s customer-centric technology aims to drive the future of customer success. The company’s Customer Cloud offers a set of solutions focused on customer success, product experience, revenue optimization, customer experience, and customer data, that together are designed to enable businesses to put the customer at the center of everything they do. The vendor states that companies that use Gainsight grow net retention by up to 33 percent. Learn how leading companies like Okta, SAP Concur,…
$2,500
Per Company Per Month
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Score 8.4 out of 10
N/A
Salesforce Sales Cloud is a platform for sales with a community of Sellers, Sales Leaders, and Sales Operations, who use the solution to grow sales and increase productivity. The AI CRM for Sales features data built right in, so that companies can sell faster, sell smarter and sell efficiently. Salesforce Sales Cloud is used for, and supports: Buyer Engagement Sales Engagement Enablement Sales AI Sales Analytics Team…
$25
per month
Pricing
Gainsight CSSalesforce Sales Cloud
Editions & Modules
Subscription
$2,500
Per Company Per Month
Starter
$25.00
Per User/Per Month
Professional
$80.00
Per User/Per Month
Enterprise
$165.00
Per User/Per Month
Unlimited
$330.00
Per user/Per month
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Gainsight CSSalesforce Sales Cloud
Free Trial
NoYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
YesNo
Entry-level Setup FeeRequiredOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Gainsight CSSalesforce Sales Cloud
Considered Both Products
Gainsight CS
Chose Gainsight CS
We went through an evaluation of ChurnZero, which did not have the ability to pull in usage from complex data sets or to visualize it natively.

ChurnZero did not offer the ability to run surveys or NPS which would have required additional tooling and investment.
Chose Gainsight CS
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 …
Chose Gainsight CS
I have not used or evaluated any other products like Gainsight. In the past, I was using Wrike to store my client notes and use keep tabs on their onboarding process. I also synced my email to Salesforce so that the account managers could see my activity with customers. I know …
Chose Gainsight CS
We started with Totango as it was seemingly a much more simple implementation, and it was definitely user-friendly, however ultimately the lack of flexibility was not going to work for us. I also attended demos of the other major players such as Amity and generally found they …
Chose Gainsight CS
Our Salesforce admin is constantly pushing us to adopt more of the features of Salesforce. However, we find that Gainsight is a stronger tool for customization and enhanced interdepartmental communications. Timeline makes it easy to understand where we stand in a customer …
Chose Gainsight CS
Gainsight was much better than Salesforce Lightning due to the intuitive layout and user interface. Gainsight limits the number of clicks and is much more visually appealing and easy to use.
Chose Gainsight CS
After reviewing manual processes and other industry solutions along with our needs for integration and a Salesforce friendly solution, Gainsight was selected based on the breadth of product capabilities and the team of resources we would be partnering with. While there are …
Chose Gainsight CS
We used Totango in the past and Gainsight was attractive with how robust their tool was and how well it integrated with SFDC.
Chose Gainsight CS
We have not tried any other product. We did an evaluation of Gainsight and Totango, however, the integration with Gainsight in our Salesforce instance was the overall decision.
Chose Gainsight CS
We liked Gainsight's interface more, and the integration into salesforce was more user friendly for our teams. Ultimately this is why we selected Gainsight.
Chose Gainsight CS
While features vary across the platform - Gainsight is the easier one to look at every day...appearance wise. It's very well laid out and easy to follow.
Chose Gainsight CS
Gainsight are the thought leaders in the CS space and have a strong European presence, something we were looking for.
Chose Gainsight CS
GS is still the best product I've seen for doing what we use it for. I can see how certain aspects of the Lightning system could accomplish certain things we use GS for, but not everything, and certainly not as fully fleshed out. For the time being, I can't see how anything …
Chose Gainsight CS
NA, we didn't look at any other products like GS.
Chose Gainsight CS
I have not used a similar product. We have tried to piece together homegrown tools that we have used internally.
Chose Gainsight CS
Way better ease of use and automated. Other platforms wait for us to act and then provide data, Gainsight speaks to you and the experiece is way more enlightening
Chose Gainsight CS
Our alternative to Gainsight was to try to configure SFDC to do what we needed. Through our evaluation, we determined that leveraging Gainsight's expertise in Customer Success would be of tremendous value as we stood up a new Customer Success team.
Chose Gainsight CS
The aforementioned tools are great but very segmented. Gainsight allows you to leverage info from Salesforce while creating account based tasks for yourself and keeping all of your information relevant to the account in one place.
Chose Gainsight CS
We are currently evaluating Intercom in addition to Gainsight for customer marketing for non-managed accounts. Intercom provides much more robust customer communication tools (in-product messaging and chat, email branching logic and segmentation, app support), but we would …
Chose Gainsight CS
I'm not sure what alternatives are out there (we weren't using anything similar prior to GS)
Chose Gainsight CS
Many within the business had looked at other tools, but other tools were not a part of the decision making process. Other applications in the space honestly aren't a comparison to Gainsight. For us, it was a matter or Gainsight or nothing. Now that we have it, we can't imagine …
Salesforce Sales Cloud
Chose Salesforce Sales Cloud
Compared to GoldMine, the contrast is night and day. GoldMine is good and simple but extremely limiting in what it can do and doesn't work well across as many functions. Salesforce effortlessly provides strong tools for all roles within our organization allowing them a view and …
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
Gainsight CSSalesforce Sales Cloud
Security
Comparison of Security features of Product A and Product B
Gainsight CS
7.1
164 Ratings
19% below category average
Salesforce Sales Cloud
8.7
227 Ratings
4% above category average
Role-based user permissions7.1164 Ratings8.6200 Ratings
Single sign-on capability00 Ratings8.8194 Ratings
Platform & Infrastructure
Comparison of Platform & Infrastructure features of Product A and Product B
Gainsight CS
7.7
205 Ratings
10% below category average
Salesforce Sales Cloud
-
Ratings
API6.9122 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with Salesforce.com7.9204 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with Marketo7.749 Ratings00 Ratings
Integration with Eloqua8.219 Ratings00 Ratings
Customer Data Extraction / Integration
Comparison of Customer Data Extraction / Integration features of Product A and Product B
Gainsight CS
6.8
205 Ratings
23% below category average
Salesforce Sales Cloud
-
Ratings
Product usage8.5194 Ratings00 Ratings
Help desk / support tickets5.2165 Ratings00 Ratings
Customer Success Management
Comparison of Customer Success Management features of Product A and Product B
Gainsight CS
6.3
217 Ratings
26% below category average
Salesforce Sales Cloud
-
Ratings
NPS surveys7.9170 Ratings00 Ratings
Sponsor tracking4.6160 Ratings00 Ratings
Customer profiles6.2194 Ratings00 Ratings
Automated workflow7.9208 Ratings00 Ratings
Internal collaboration5.1195 Ratings00 Ratings
Customer health scoring7.0210 Ratings00 Ratings
Customer segmentation5.2177 Ratings00 Ratings
CSM Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of CSM Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Gainsight CS
7.2
215 Ratings
12% below category average
Salesforce Sales Cloud
-
Ratings
Customer health trends6.9197 Ratings00 Ratings
Engagement analytics7.1174 Ratings00 Ratings
Revenue forecasting7.9107 Ratings00 Ratings
Dashboards6.7212 Ratings00 Ratings
Sales Force Automation
Comparison of Sales Force Automation features of Product A and Product B
Gainsight CS
-
Ratings
Salesforce Sales Cloud
7.7
239 Ratings
0% above category average
Customer data management / contact management00 Ratings8.6239 Ratings
Workflow management00 Ratings7.9230 Ratings
Territory management00 Ratings7.4183 Ratings
Opportunity management00 Ratings8.4233 Ratings
Integration with email client (e.g., Outlook or Gmail)00 Ratings7.5218 Ratings
Contract management00 Ratings7.2190 Ratings
Quote & order management00 Ratings7.5173 Ratings
Interaction tracking00 Ratings7.5204 Ratings
Channel / partner relationship management00 Ratings7.6165 Ratings
Customer Service & Support
Comparison of Customer Service & Support features of Product A and Product B
Gainsight CS
-
Ratings
Salesforce Sales Cloud
7.5
81 Ratings
0% above category average
Case management00 Ratings7.881 Ratings
Call center management00 Ratings7.564 Ratings
Help desk management00 Ratings7.366 Ratings
Marketing Automation
Comparison of Marketing Automation features of Product A and Product B
Gainsight CS
-
Ratings
Salesforce Sales Cloud
7.7
218 Ratings
2% above category average
Lead management00 Ratings7.9213 Ratings
Email marketing00 Ratings7.4182 Ratings
CRM Project Management
Comparison of CRM Project Management features of Product A and Product B
Gainsight CS
-
Ratings
Salesforce Sales Cloud
7.5
221 Ratings
1% below category average
Task management00 Ratings7.5211 Ratings
Billing and invoicing management00 Ratings7.157 Ratings
Reporting00 Ratings7.8174 Ratings
CRM Reporting & Analytics
Comparison of CRM Reporting & Analytics features of Product A and Product B
Gainsight CS
-
Ratings
Salesforce Sales Cloud
7.8
234 Ratings
2% above category average
Forecasting00 Ratings7.4203 Ratings
Pipeline visualization00 Ratings7.8222 Ratings
Customizable reports00 Ratings8.2231 Ratings
Customization
Comparison of Customization features of Product A and Product B
Gainsight CS
-
Ratings
Salesforce Sales Cloud
8.1
225 Ratings
7% above category average
Custom fields00 Ratings8.1223 Ratings
Custom objects00 Ratings8.1213 Ratings
Scripting environment00 Ratings7.9158 Ratings
API for custom integration00 Ratings8.1186 Ratings
Social CRM
Comparison of Social CRM features of Product A and Product B
Gainsight CS
-
Ratings
Salesforce Sales Cloud
7.4
143 Ratings
2% above category average
Social data00 Ratings7.5142 Ratings
Social engagement00 Ratings7.3139 Ratings
Integrations with 3rd-party Software
Comparison of Integrations with 3rd-party Software features of Product A and Product B
Gainsight CS
-
Ratings
Salesforce Sales Cloud
7.8
194 Ratings
9% above category average
Marketing automation00 Ratings7.8190 Ratings
Compensation management00 Ratings7.8130 Ratings
Platform
Comparison of Platform features of Product A and Product B
Gainsight CS
-
Ratings
Salesforce Sales Cloud
7.1
205 Ratings
5% below category average
Mobile access00 Ratings7.1205 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Gainsight CSSalesforce Sales Cloud
Small Businesses
Intercom
Intercom
Score 8.7 out of 10
Salesmate
Salesmate
Score 9.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
CustomerSuccessBox
CustomerSuccessBox
Score 9.5 out of 10
Creatio
Creatio
Score 9.1 out of 10
Enterprises
Cisco Webex Experience Management (discontinued)
Cisco Webex Experience Management (discontinued)
Score 8.9 out of 10
Creatio
Creatio
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Gainsight CSSalesforce Sales Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(222 ratings)
8.4
(371 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
6.8
(14 ratings)
9.0
(56 ratings)
Usability
8.2
(24 ratings)
7.5
(120 ratings)
Availability
8.2
(1 ratings)
9.8
(27 ratings)
Performance
6.4
(1 ratings)
9.0
(18 ratings)
Support Rating
9.0
(134 ratings)
5.7
(91 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.9
(11 ratings)
Online Training
5.5
(2 ratings)
9.1
(15 ratings)
Implementation Rating
6.3
(6 ratings)
1.0
(18 ratings)
Configurability
6.4
(1 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
-
(0 ratings)
8.8
(9 ratings)
Product Scalability
7.3
(1 ratings)
8.7
(30 ratings)
Professional Services
-
(0 ratings)
9.3
(8 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
6.4
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
Gainsight CSSalesforce Sales Cloud
Likelihood to Recommend
Gainsight
Well suited for: consolidated and organized note taking tracking stakeholders contact information if properly configured - identifying and categorizing risk categories less appropriate setting up customer journey takes quite a bit of work to implement and make use of - want best practices baked into the product - "customer journey wizard" reporting is robust but clunky to set up reports and get meaningful data
Read full review
Salesforce
Salesforce Sales Cloud is, in my experience, well suited to large B2B businesses who are driving demand and lead generation, and tracking customers through the funnel. It is a system we needed for a long time and has made a huge difference. However, I think it would have been more appropriate for a smaller business / a business who sets this up earlier on. There are great advantages to having historical data. It is really useful for allowing all commercial teams to work together, including sales, new business, marketing, client success etc. However, it relies too much too often on human error. If more things were automated and simpler, perhaps with AI queries, it could be easier to use
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Pros
Gainsight
  • Gainsight's Data Designer is a powerful tool that allows you to create new tables/data sets from different sources (Create a new table by merging Snowflake, SFDC and Gainsight data that you can use for reporting or be the engine of calls to actions)
  • The health score is great! with good data and the right workflows in place, you can easily create automated health scores by your desired segmentation
  • Journey Orchestrator is the best 1:M outreach tool I have seen from any CSP. Very flexible and comprehensive. Can also support surveys! JO can be used for all segments, not just your digital segments!
  • Gmail/Outlook integration - Our CSMs love that you can send an email and attach it to the gainsight account. You can also create a meeting note in Gainsight and email it to your customers!
  • Calls to Action/Playbooks are very customizable, interoperable with SFDC and a great way for CSMs to keep on top of their work and also a great tool for reporting outcomes and CSMs work throughout the year
Read full review
Salesforce
  • Logging notes: SF makes it easy to log notes in the timeline or static notes that live in an easy-to-see spot for longevity.
  • Logging activities: It's easy to post a call, text, email, etc.
  • API data: Once connected, SF is critical to automation, such as website activity, login activity, pages visited, etc., which saves the Customer Success side time in understanding account activity.
  • Custom fields: you can add custom fields to really personalize your experience. We use quite a few and it's brilliant.
Read full review
Cons
Gainsight
  • Sometimes tying Salesforce Data into Gainsight objects can be challenging. (I don't believe this is a true Gainsight limitation)
  • I would love to see the ability to create a dashboard directly from JO Analytics, to help save time recreating measure the program analytics already provide. (Since the JO program analytics aren't extensible to everyone, a dashboard needs to be created )
Read full review
Salesforce
  • I have hard-coded the auto-update of the phone number format and state format from some codes shared by the community, but I do not know where to do it. I cannot reset it either.
  • It is unclear what functionalities each version has. We use the enterprise version, and it seems we can only have one design of the pipeline. But different business segments would have very different sales cycles, and hence, pipeline tracking would be different. It would be nice to have this available in our version.
  • It seems I cannot create a report to pull notes logged at the account levels.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Gainsight
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.
Read full review
Salesforce
There are days when I wish we hadn't switched, but I know that if we put in the time, we will get to where we want to be with the software and that it has many more capabilities than anything else we looked at. However, the amount of time and onboarding we need to do is also far greater than we realized/were told when we originally bought the product. They told us we should hire onboarding support, but at the end, after we had already reached our budget maximum for this, so it's been slower than we had hoped.
Read full review
Usability
Gainsight
I give it this score based on the implementation at my current employer. I don't know if it could be higher based on if the implementation went better, or if there is something on the vendor side that could help. If this were asked at my previous employer, I would have given it a score of 9 or 10.
Read full review
Salesforce
Salesforce has been designed on the basis of "Clicks, not code". So anyone willing to learn the Salesforce user interface (which is quite good as far as management software platforms go) is able to become a Salesforce user or even a Salesforce administrator. You don't have to know coding language to work in the Salesforce environment. Also, Salesforce has one of the best software training resources (Trailhead) that I have ever encountered. It is free to all, easy to use, and most importantly it is interactive. No scrolling through endless text in a user manual. There are hands-on modules and related videos interlaced and through it all you earn points and badges to display your level of learning.
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Reliability and Availability
Gainsight
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Salesforce is always available securely from any internet-capable device anywhere in the world, UNLESS you choose to set security measures so that ONLY trusted IP ranges may access the system at certain times of the day. It's all about choice and flexibility with Salesforce products.
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Performance
Gainsight
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
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Salesforce
Salesforce performance in general is excellent. "The cloud infrastructure beneath Force.com has been fine-tuned over the past 10 years. It powers nearly 100,000+ businesses running more than 185,000 applications that 3 million users count on every day."
Points per Salesforce -
1) Multitenant kernel - With a multitenant platform, each business that uses the app doesn’t have its own copy. Instead, all businesses share a single copy and then customize it for their specific needs.
2) ISO 27001 certified security - You can’t compromise when it comes to enterprise-level security. Force.com is road-tested and trusted by nearly 100,000+ companies, including many of the world’s most security-conscious organizations, such as banks and health care providers.
3) Proven reliability - All Force.com apps run on world-class data centers with backup, failover, and disaster-recovery facilities. Force.com has had a proven 99.9 percent uptime record for years.
4) Proven, real-time scalability - Force.com is used by many of the world's largest enterprises, including Cisco, Japan Post Network, and Symantec. Applications can automatically scale from a few users to millions of page views, as needed.
5) Real-time query optimizer - You need fast access to your data. The Force.com query optimizer delivers under 300ms response time, at a massive scale.
6) Real-time transparent system status - You can always see real-time system performance, availability, and security information at trust.salesforce.com.
7) Real-time upgrades - Unlike traditional software platforms, our upgrades never break your customizations, code, or integrations. We upgrade the platform for you 3 to 4 times each year. As a result, you’re always on the latest version, with access to the latest features, performance, and security enhancements.
8) Real-time sandbox environments - With a single click, you can create copies of your applications, configuration, and data in separate environments for development, testing, and training.
9) Three global production data centers and disaster recovery - Force.com runs on three geographically dispersed, mirrored data centers with built-in replication, disaster recovery, a redundant network backbone, and no single points of failure
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Support Rating
Gainsight
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.
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Salesforce
The overall support has been good. More and more features are being released quite frequently. Very small features are also making big difference in how the tool can be adapted and used better. If there is anything we need or are stuck, the support team sets up a call and helps in resolving the issue/provides workarounds.
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In-Person Training
Gainsight
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
I attended two training sessions. I would rate them a 4 as an advanced user. It was very basic – great for someone new – would give 8+ for new person.

I had 3 years of experience at the time. I skipped basic and went onto advanced and still not helpful. A lot of it was best practices that didn’t feel relevant for our business
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Online Training
Gainsight
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
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Salesforce
I have gone through multiple. The content that’s delivered is quite basic – I wish they had more advanced training.

We are grandfathered into premium support plus training. We get unlimited access to instructor led and online training for free. We have taken advantage of this
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Implementation Rating
Gainsight
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.
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Salesforce
Just from an organizational standpoint - we standardized our data prior to moving to Salesforce. But we essentially standardized it wrong. That's created a big disgusting mess for us know that I'll have to deal with as the Admin. Be sure you think through use cases prior to doing something like that - seek outside opinions on how the data will work best, especially depending on what else you're going to integrate with Salesforce.
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Alternatives Considered
Gainsight
Our Salesforce admin is constantly pushing us to adopt more of the features of Salesforce. However, we find that Gainsight is a stronger tool for customization and enhanced interdepartmental communications. Timeline makes it easy to understand where we stand in a customer lifecycle, which is far superior to reviewing an activity history related list in Salesforce.
Read full review
Salesforce
The thing that puts Sales Cloud above the top is its simple user interface, which is easy to interact with. The visuals and automation are also quite amazing. Given its attention to data and customer relationship management, Sales Cloud is tough to beat. Of course, Microsoft Dynamics integrates nicely with other Microsoft products, and Monday is a tool everyone is familiar with, so it is hard to compete with those.
Read full review
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
Gainsight
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Salesforce is the most widely used CRM system. Professionalism tends to increase when things go wrong for market leaders. Salesforce considers us as users because they own the market. Having all of our data in one place and all of our teams working within Salesforce. Anyone who uses Salesforce is impacted by it, even if they don't.
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Scalability
Gainsight
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Salesforce sales cloud implementation can give you the desired outcome for your business. Its workflow, approval, sync, and file-sharing features help automate the process. The Macros feature helps business to shorten their sales cycle. Sales Cloud also allows businesses to make the right decision with its real-time business insights and analysis.
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Professional Services
Gainsight
No answers on this topic
Salesforce
Using Salesforce.com has made my daily routines more efficient and simplified the manual tasks I had to perform independently. I can now access data from any device, online or offline, and provide better guidance to my team about the forecasts provided by the built-in artificial intelligence (AI). A chat with a Salesforce support specialist would be great. The knowledge base has a community forum where Salesforce users can ask questions and learn more about the product.
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Return on Investment
Gainsight
  • We increase account coverage by more than 20% through the tools within Gainsight CS to generate actions for our CSMs to prioritize accounts.
  • Now that we are using Success Plans, we are seeing 65-75% of customer outcomes realized within a 12-month period. This was something we weren't able to track before.
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Salesforce
  • All tools we've implemented with Salesforce had a pretty quick positive ROI with the exception of CPQ & Billing. That was a very large project that I would only suggest for businesses with many SKUs that tend to be packaged together.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Gainsight CS Screenshots

Screenshot of Get notified when your sponsor moves with our social media tracker - Sponsor TrackingScreenshot of Get more face time with your customers with 60 second videos - GsnapScreenshot of Automate Calls-to-Action on customer risks, opportunities and lifecycle events, better prioritize tasks with AI-driven priority scoring and follow a step-by-step playbook to deliver a consistent, best-in-class customer experience.Screenshot of Our collection of best practice-based solutions can be deployed within your Gainsight instance to help you move quickly and realize value fasterScreenshot of Design dynamic, multi-step customer journeys that blend human and digital touchpoints to deliver personalized engagement at scale. Analyze data at every step and adjust to each customer's behavior to more effectively deliver the outcomes your customers desire.Screenshot of Organize your team’s activities around your customer's key objectives. Collaborate directly with customer stakeholders to realize their desired outcomes and demonstrate how your efforts translate to results.

Salesforce Sales Cloud Screenshots

Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of Screenshot of