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
Vision Helpdesk
Score 9.5 out of 10
Small Businesses (1-50 employees)
Vision Helpdesk, which started in 2005 as a simple help desk software has evolved into three customer service and IT support management tools.
Help Desk Software - A multi-channel help desk software that allows users to manage customer communication across various channels like email, web portals, chat, phone, and API.
Satellite Help Desk Software - A multi-company/brand/product help desk software that allows users to manage support for multiple companies in place.…
$8
per month
Pricing
Gist
Vision Helpdesk
Editions & Modules
Professional
$29.00
per month
Premium
$99.00
per month
Starter Help Desk
$8
per month per seat
Starter Help Desk
$12
per month per seat
Pro Help Desk
$16
per month per seat
Satellite Help Desk
$20
per month per seat
Pro Help Desk
$20
per month per seat
Satellite Help Desk
$24
per month per seat
Pro Service Desk
$24
per month per seat
Pro Service Desk
$32
per month per seat
Ent Service Desk
$32
per month per seat
Ent Service Desk
$48
per month per seat
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Gist
Vision Helpdesk
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
Yes
Yes
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Yes
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Gist
Vision Helpdesk
Features
Gist
Vision Helpdesk
Chat Analytics and Reports
Comparison of Chat Analytics and Reports features of Product A and Product B
Gist
8.9
2 Ratings
3% above category average
Vision Helpdesk
-
Ratings
Chat history and transcripts
8.92 Ratings
00 Ratings
Chat reporting
8.92 Ratings
00 Ratings
Chat and web analytics
8.92 Ratings
00 Ratings
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
Gist
-
Ratings
Vision Helpdesk
6.8
3 Ratings
19% below category average
Organize and prioritize service tickets
00 Ratings
8.03 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications
00 Ratings
8.03 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission
00 Ratings
6.03 Ratings
Ticket response
00 Ratings
5.03 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
Gist
-
Ratings
Vision Helpdesk
5.0
2 Ratings
46% below category average
External knowledge base
00 Ratings
5.02 Ratings
Internal knowledge base
00 Ratings
5.02 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
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.
I think that there is probably nothing that Vision Helpdesk can't do given enough work to customize it. The problem is that you almost have to have someone dedicated to knowing everything there is to know about the system and then have them be the administrator of all the customizations and feature additions you want. It's great that it can do so much, but it's not great that it's so complicated and has very little out-of-the-box configurations.
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.
The best thing for us - the timer. It's really cool. We can start the timer and end it when support finishes. It's very important for working with other companies we give support for.
Good-looking, with good visualisation and usability dashboard.
Ticket transfer between support users, comments, ticket printing.
The best price and functionality, comparing to other help desks.
Support. Best support I have seen on internet. Helped with setup, and helped with few minor questions.
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.
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 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.
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.
Support from Vision Helpdesk was rather lackluster. We uncovered a bug pretty early on in our use of the system and it took them about a month to fix it. Our internal admin of the system had to keep pestering them to get it fixed. It wasn't critical to our business but was something we needed fixed and it just seemed like they didn't care that much about fixing it.
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.
Vision Helpdesk was more open for an NGO while the other companies were more attended on the "big-money", which we don't have as an NGO. Second point is that Vision Helpdesk is very easy and simple to use. Not too much installation, programming etc.
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.
Most cost-effective help desk software I have researched from Kayako to SAAS [products] like Zendesk.
We got more features and easy customization done with Vision Helpdesk which where not possible for Zendesk and Kayako was too costly.
Ticket tracking has been easier and faster with Vision Helpdesk; for our web hosting business we prefer a download version which is not possible with SAAS help desk providers ( Zendesk or Freshdesk).