Gist vs. Hiver

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

One scenario where Hiver works really well is in a shared support or billing inbox or anywhere multiple team members need access to the same messages. For example, when a customer emails about a billing question, we used to reply and manually loop in the billing team or forward the message. That often caused confusion, especially when someone forgot to “reply all” or responded only to the teammate instead of the customer.Now with Hiver, we just assign the conversation to the billing inbox, and whoever is available can respond. Everyone on the team can see the thread, status, and notes, which avoids duplicated efforts and missed replies. We also used to rely on Google Groups, but it wasn’t clear if someone had already replied, and there was no easy way to collaborate behind the scenes. Hiver completely solved that for us.As for situations where Hiver might be less ideal, I’d say if your team isn’t using Gmail or Google Workspace, then it’s probably not a good fit. It’s really designed for teams that live in Gmail so the team doesn't have to learn a new system. I'm sure some businesses will require a more robust ticketing solution but for our use case, this was a perfect option to improve outcomes, client service, and satisfaction.

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

• automation through rules
• tagging emails, anaylics behind them
• support, chat always responds right away

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.

• It could be considered expensive, but ultimately worth every penny for those who use shared inboxes/groups to run their business.

Incentivized

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.

Easy to use

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

Support is there, can be slow at times.

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.

True ticketing solutions are certainly more robust in that you can typically manage social media channels and phones, etc. But, in my opinion, when you don't have a team solely responsible for managing a ticketing system they can be complicated to implement. With HIVER, we're already all accustomed to managing our own G-Suite inbox, so it was simply a matter of teaching the team how to utilize the solution.

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.

• The ROI on showing how many emails are being received and addressed in a timely manner are great for KPIs
• the ability to search and ensure emails are not being deleted as an automatic report is sent out the following day saying if any emails were deleted by whom
• the ability to automate who gets assigned what emails from specific vendors per entity

Incentivized