Gist is a unified marketing, sales, and support platform. It includes live chat, a help desk, knowledge base, email marketing, marketing automation, opt-in forms, and more.
$29
per month
Litmus from Validity
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Litmus, from Validity, is an email marketing solution used to create error-free emails in less time. It is also used to build email campaigns, personalize and test them thoroughly, monitor deliverability, and analyze email performance.
$500
per month
Pricing
Gist
Litmus from Validity
Editions & Modules
Professional
$29.00
per month
Premium
$99.00
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Gist
Litmus from Validity
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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Litmus offers different plan types to fit various needs, offering monthly and annual plans, as well as fully customizable Enterprise plans.
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.
Proofing your emails is necessary. This is a tool that allows you to see how your email not only renders on multiple devices but how it performs. Some email building platforms will tell you their drag and drop templates are ready to go, however they stop short of analyzing accessibility, checking links, load speed among other things. I've also experienced drag and drop template issues as new email clients are released. Litmus provides peace of mind that you did your due diligence on crafting your email. While Litmus does provide some reporting you will not see every typical analytic an email report offers. However, you can use your Litmus data to enhance your email reports which in turn creates a robust view of email performance.
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.
We haven’t explored the personalization features in depth yet, aside from using the Add-to-Calendar option, but we're excited to dig in further. Tools like live polls offer an easy way to boost engagement in our product marketing emails, and we see a lot of potential in using these templates to enhance personalization moving forward.
Litmus’ continuing education resources have been really helpful. I recently read an article on email deliverability that offered practical insights my team can apply moving forward. I especially appreciate how Litmus uses real examples and stats from the brands they work with—it makes the content feel actionable and relevant.
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.
I've not seen many limitations but I have noticed that sometimes emails sent from our CRM take too long to land in Litmus, or sometimes don't land at all.
As a beginner it was quite difficult for me to make my way around the platform - I thought "Create new" CTA was actually creating something new, maybe "Import from CRM" would have been more understandable. There were a few others but I remember this one.
In the Emails section, whenever I hover over an email, I want to be able to copy the subject line instead of getting the different CTAs appear intrusively (Summary, Builder, Previews & QA, Proof, Analytics, Monitor) - maybe these could appear on the bottom of the textbox, instead of them being imposed on top?
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
It's one the best tools that we've found for this type of tool but we would like some additional features like spell check so if there's a platform that features that with everything else Litmus has, then we'd potentially look to move over to that platform instead. However, we are overall pretty help with the platform
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.
Litmus has integrations that make the software an integrated part of my work every day. Being able to test right within my email builder is just brilliant. Daily I also use the web interface to review analytics and spam testing. Overall it is one of the pieces of software I use daily without any complaints or issues.
We have never had a problem with Litmus being unavailable so I would say their availability is fantastic. There might have been one time years ago that the site was down briefly but it also might have been a server issue on my end. Either way, Litmus was back up and running in a very short time
As with all technology, there are inevitably use-cases where you are unable to get to your original goal without some good old-fashioned experimenting. Some situations will (and are) more urgent which complicates an effective integration of a new process or a new team using an existing process but the "issues" are regularly resolved by re-starting the process specific to when Litmus is introduced to a project. If it doesn't come out the way you're anticipating, run it again and verify there is an issue before declaring all is lost
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.
I didn’t really personally participate much in the implementation of Litmus, but from what I observed during the process, it was a smooth process with minimal disruptions. The team was able to get up and running quickly, and the platform’s user-friendly interface made onboarding fairly easy for everyone involved from the start.
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.
This is not applicable to my role as I have used Litmus to test emails since I have started. Because of the ease of use, timeliness, consistent quality, and affordability that Litmus offers, I haven't found the need to look at similar products or organizations. If all of these features continue to stay strong, I don't plan on changing providers
With our enterprise account, scalability is not an issue. I have not yet seen or heard of significant issues with user access, API connections for integrations etc. This includes down time for "Scheduled Maintenance" as some providers call them, Litmus has the technology backing to support a global team with a 24-hour workday across regions
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.
Litmus saves our team so much time by making the QA and email review process so much easier, streamlined, and efficient.
We often send out campaigns out to thousands of members, and Litmus gives us the assurance and peace of mind that everything is working as it should before it gets sent out.
Decreases the number of email review cycles we go through.
