Gainsight CS vs. Totango vs. Twilio SendGrid

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.

Incentivized

for a CSM it´s marvelous, you have in one window everything,the agenda for your day by day work, the workload you have in a day,all the customers database and call history added by tasks and toutch points, the to do thing in each customer you know what to do next, with renewal you hace an digital engadgement with customers inform they need to renew in order to keep using the app.

If you're prepared to build out your whole staff UX, audience creation, email production, and analytics on your own using API, this tool may have that flexibility. If you require a sturdy drag and drop production tool, this tool has it but at the expense of a lot of other critical functionality. Out of the box analytics/reporting, is extremely limited. Complex queries, even something like pulling those who haven't engaged in email within a certain time period, is clunky. If you require any support at all, this is not the tool for you. I'm a deliverability consultant and have used many of the top email marketing tools and SendGrid has been extremely difficult for my team. I do not recommend it. Shiny and bright during sales, pretty disappointing thereafter.

• 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

Incentivized

• Enables us to easily send and collect NPS & CSAT scores regularly.
• Syncs with HubSpot to bring in updated client data and deals automatically.
• Allows us to manage clients based on health score which is multi-dimensional.
• I can log touch points directly in Totango from Gmail so easily..
• As we improve and develop our non SaaS business client experience, Totango continues to develop more functionality that we can benefit from.

Incentivized

• Managing email lists / audiences is easy with features like groups and segments.
• They provide pre-built email templates that are very easy to modify. It is also super easy to create new email templates with their drag-and-drop email builder.
• Provides clear / easy-to-read analytics of email campaigns.
• I can easily import large email contact lists all at once or add a user manually one-at-a-time, when needed.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Integrations -- in my experience, they constantly break and disconnect.
• Implementation -- I feel it was a HUGE challenge to set-up our environment. It took over 200 hours and it didn't work.
• Communication -- during implementation/onboarding, in my opinion, we were mislead on how to create some of our custom data objects and it ended up being a big waste of time since the approach we were instructed to use ended up being incorrect.

• Not necessarily their Email API but their email in general - they are currently in beta for automated email sequences but are still bare bones. Much more work is needed before it can be used mainstream and be able to convert everything to SendGrid.
• Helping with warming up our dedicated IP for the best-sending score.
• We seem to hit the promotions folder a decent amount (maybe the IP problem above) and even a lot of their emails hit my spam or promotions folder (whether they be transactional or marketing) which isn't a great sign when trusting an ESP.
• Transactional email sequences would be a huge plus.
• Now that Twilio owns SenGrid, having an integrated platform where you could see all our transactional emails together.
• Better reporting and split reporting between transactional and marketing emails.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I personally believe Totango is the right Customer Success Tool for me, my team, and my organization. I couldn't find limitations until now, it's capabilities are on point and it's very scalable. of course, transitioning to another tool would mean a lot of hours and training, and would expose risks

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

It is easy to use and understand, and simple to follow day to day. Logging notes and tasks is one of the key areas this is utilised along with tracking reports and accessing key data points for conversations with customers which is helpful. Mobile app helps too to access information on the go.

Incentivized

It is usable but needs improvement in overall user experience and ease of use. A new joinee/anyone new to the tool would need more tarining currently before he can use the platform seamlessly. The set-up to value realization time for Twilio SendGrid customers is generally high because of this concern.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

I have yet to experience any downtime with Totango (knock on wood) so reliability has been really top tier since we were onboarded. Given that the support team has been really helpful so far, I can imagine should downtime every be the case, they'll be able to communicate proactively/effectively on the current state of the platform

Incentivized

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

At times the integration sync can be really slow when it comes to touchpoints. I can't say the same for customer health syncing, but I do tend to notice the lag from email syncing, and in those cases, I will need to refresh the Totango page a couple of times or wait a couple of extra seconds/minutes for it to show up.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

I give Totango a support rating of 10 because I can always get support whenever needed. If its a technical issue, I know I can email their support team for help. If it's a more in depth question with respect to our instance of Totango, I can reach out to our CSM and always get help in a very reasonable amount of time. I always look to Totango as the standard when I think of how to best communicate and support our own customers.

Incentivized

Twilio SendGrid Email API is everything we want it to be, and we have no reason to look for any other solution. Features and pricing match exactly what we need. As developers for SaaS products, Twilio SendGrid Email API provides a great service. I hope that they stay this way and don't inflate the service with too many marketing oriented features, because there are other tools for that and Twilio SendGrid Email API is a API for sending email first and foremost.

Incentivized

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

Our CSM did a great job of conducting the training so we understand, at the very least, the functionality that is directly relevant to us. This also allowed us to train our own new team mates when onboarding based on the training flow that was first presented to us. This was also conducted as a interactive sessions, as training are notoriously known to be dry

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Totango has been easy for our team to integrate most of our new features into, which is great considering we have to factor in the customers' usage of the new features into all of the health and usage metrics we have. It has taken a while to integrate our second product however, which is why I would rank this a 7.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Pipedrive is a great CRM for Sales purposes but it doesnt give much tools for CX management. Totango is all the opposite, it is an excellent product for Customer Management . We currently use both platforms integrated with each other and it gives great results to both Sales and Customer Success teams

Incentivized

Sendgrid has a lot of features that other providers have and a few more - like the dynamic template builder, which AWS SES doesn't have. We choose the provider based on the scenario of use and the provider we're using. If we're going to be making regular changes to a template, then we'd go with Sendgrid, as the changes will be easier to make and don't necessarily require developer intervention.

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Information keeps missing and changing in totango . Because of that there is are lot of problems with it. We need to manually keep the backup in an another file. More over if in case we take the backup its so hard to track since its all in numbers. Totango can be much better if the cloud storage is working fine. My company is planning to discontinue due to this factor

Incentivized

• 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

Incentivized

• Since using Totango we have seen our engagement numbers go up as we are better able to identify the groups that are struggling.
• We have also seen an increase in retention as we are more consistent in messaging and not missing any data.

Incentivized

• As it was cheaper than the transactional service we previously used, it saved costs.
• The API was relatively easy to work with so it helped us ship the service and test it quickly.
• We still use the transactional email service, even though we recognize its limits as it meets our immediate needs.

Incentivized