Gist vs. Microsoft Parature (Discontinued)

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Gist
Score 9.6 out of 10
N/A
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
Microsoft Parature (Discontinued)
Score 5.0 out of 10
N/A
Parature was a self-service customer support platform providing a self-service knowledge base to connect with customers across multiple channels, including email, the web, chat or social media. The company was acquired by Microsoft in January 2014 and reached EOL in 2017. Former users are encouraged to migrate to Microsoft Dynamics 365 Customer Service.N/A
Pricing
GistMicrosoft Parature (Discontinued)
Editions & Modules
Professional
$29.00
per month
Premium
$99.00
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GistMicrosoft Parature (Discontinued)
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GistMicrosoft Parature (Discontinued)
Top Pros
Top Cons
Features
GistMicrosoft Parature (Discontinued)
Chat Analytics and Reports
Comparison of Chat Analytics and Reports features of Product A and Product B
Gist
8.6
2 Ratings
3% above category average
Microsoft Parature (Discontinued)
-
Ratings
Chat history and transcripts8.62 Ratings00 Ratings
Chat reporting8.62 Ratings00 Ratings
Chat and web analytics8.62 Ratings00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GistMicrosoft Parature (Discontinued)
Small Businesses
Olark
Olark
Score 9.5 out of 10
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Genesys DX (discontinued)
Genesys DX (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Agiloft Flexible Service Desk Suite
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Genesys DX (discontinued)
Genesys DX (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
Salesforce Service Cloud
Salesforce Service Cloud
Score 8.7 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GistMicrosoft Parature (Discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
9.6
(112 ratings)
6.7
(10 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(2 ratings)
6.1
(10 ratings)
Usability
6.7
(4 ratings)
2.0
(2 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
7.5
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
8.6
(9 ratings)
1.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
GistMicrosoft Parature (Discontinued)
Likelihood to Recommend
Gist
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.
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Microsoft
The single element of Parature I've not seen in any other system of this kind is the Download Module. You can post files in the open, or protect them by any number of entitlement methods. The solution is also appealing to those who don't want to manage the back-end/IT needs as it is a hosted solution and has proven to be very reliable.
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Pros
Gist
  • 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.
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Microsoft
  • Clean/Friendly UI. It was extremely easy to navigate around Parature's menus at a high level, and you could take advantage of the more robust features as you became more comfortable and familiar with how Parature operates!
  • Strong Knowledge Base. Writing KB articles or ticket summaries and making use of the search function within Parature allows for expedient recovery of past ticket information. Being able to search for a fix action, or at least a troubleshooting article that can guide you towards a resolution is extremely valuable.
  • Enhanced Notation Capability. Being able to send/post internal or external updates to a ticket is great! You can leave the wordy technical details for other employees while making sure to communicate the high-points and fix action to the end-user.
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Cons
Gist
  • 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.
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Microsoft
  • Reporting is barebones at best. If you need special reports, we had to go through Parature to have them built.
  • The use of frames on a website is very 1990s. It actually impacts usability of the product, especially when combined with how Parature handled sessions. An engineer could only work one ticket at a time which, honestly, isn't very realistic for a busy support team that is working on several issues at a time.
  • Support was often unresponsive when contacted for unplanned problems.
  • The knowledge base was not very friendly for clients and it provided no real encouragement for it to be used.
  • It took several clicks to do something as simple as edit and assign a ticket or to close a ticket.
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Likelihood to Renew
Gist
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
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Microsoft
Parature has been the best option for this campus in terms of what we use it for and there is no alternative
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Usability
Gist
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.
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Microsoft
It was bulky, cumbersome, and didn't allow us to handle the volume of cases we received on a daily basis. Many of our issues were highly technical in nature and we would often need to work on 2 or 3 at once. The poor design choices prevented this, which was unfortunate.
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Reliability and Availability
Gist
No answers on this topic
Microsoft
They recently had one very extended outage. It was a data center issue - but they were not diversified enough so in the end the system was down for almost 8 hours. There are also periods of time where for no reason the system simply doesn't respond. This small outages are usually short (just a few minutes), and have in fact been occurring less often, so it appears some corrective actions have been taken.
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Support Rating
Gist
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.
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Microsoft
Nothing ever seemed to get resolved
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Alternatives Considered
Gist
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.
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Microsoft
There are services that do bits and pieces of what Parature does. We liked the idea of having one service that meets our needs
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Return on Investment
Gist
  • 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.
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Microsoft
  • Parature allows for better Customer Service
  • Can follow up automatically for tickets
  • Will automatically close tickets that haven't been responded to.
  • Allows customers to reopen tickets easily and not allow them to be missed.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Gist Screenshots

Screenshot of Live ChatScreenshot of Email MarketingScreenshot of Marketing Automation WorkflowsScreenshot of Knowledge BaseScreenshot of Meetings