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
WhatCounts
Score 4.0 out of 10
N/A
WhatCounts is a popularly-used, global enterprise level suite of email marketing tools from the company of the same name founded in 2000 and headquartered in Atlanta, GA. Their customers range from Costco, FoxNews.com, the Seattle Times, Red Lion Hotels, and number over a thousand.
Central to the platform is... email. From that it handles advanced segmentation, customer lifecycle building and automation, and personalization. WhatCounts bills itself as a full service marketing agency with…
Gist is a much more robust software with a variety of marketing tools in its arsenal. Things like website tracking is also extremely robust and it has many more features.
The ease of setup is also more enjoyable and intuitive in Gist so the overall result is that you can learn …
Gist is more refined and its tools are very well integrated overall. However, its pricing is on the expensive side and this doesn't really help it stand-out. HubSpot has significantly more generous Free plan, while Dashly offers many of the Premium Gist tools at a fairer price, …
My main use for Gist is live chat. I personally find their live chat to be one of the best, and their mobile app to be invaluable for small businesses on the go. I can receive and response to messages wherever I am, which is imperative for my use case.
Intercom increases its price on a monthly basis. Besides they don't offer some features as Gist, specially about on forms. We think Gist is targeted to SMB companies, differentially from Intercom that seems to be appropriate for larger companies. One main difference between then …
We went with Gist because it had the features we needed at a price we liked. The feature list has grown over time, which is really appreciated. We joined Gist a long time ago (it was still called ConvertFox back then) and have been happy customers for a long time. Happy with …
Gist is much more than a basic mailing list system with chatbot integration and automation that connects you to your prospects in real-time live from your website. Administering your contacts on Gist is much easier with less hassle. And Gist can integrate with most of the major …
Gist is slightly slower than ActiveCampaign but MUCH easier to use than Mailchimp. Overall, you can't beat the bang for the buck you get with Gist. And its messenger bot is the best I've used, it works on not only our main site but also our subdomains, kicking the competition …
We've used Dashly and Tawk.to. Gist looks better than Tawk and that's the reason we switched from Tawk to Gist. But the feature that puts Gist above Dashly is the ability to collect user names and emails before they start the chat automatically. It is important for our business …
Gist is better because easy of use and pricing. Hands down. It has an unbeatable cost-benefit ratio. Customer service has been with us since we started using it. That's great. For us, shortcomings such as no CRM are manageable. We like its front end appearance and customization …
Gist is my first email and chat multi-purpose automated SAAS tool so can't really comment on others I've tried. They came recommended to me by an entrepreneurial group I am a member of. Anecdotally I evaluated it against ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp and it was far better in …
Gist a more integrated and unified product for Sass companies. Some competitors don't have strong chat + email automation + help desk. Other competitors have the features, but they are not well integrated. Gist has integrated complete customer contact with a very finished …
Having a support ticket system is good and will help you resolve issues but, having an all-in-one tool that can let you not only resolve an issue but also to go above and beyond with customer support that later on translates into sales is priceless. That is the kind of tool …
You can do everything you can with AC or Mailchimp (minus dynamic cart recovery for ecom) at a fraction of the cost, and you can do MORE -- better integration with FB ads than MailChimp, more powerful workflows, unified inboxes, live chat and chatbot, etc. It's just a more …
I have a lifetime deal with Gist so I may be a bit biased, but Gist is quite easy to use and has a free tier so it's worth a serious look compared to the other players on the market. Personal preference does play a big role in your final decision, as feature-wise, Gist has most …
Intercom was pricy and less user-friendly in comparison to Gist. It did have a broader range of features that we could use in our plan. However, we didn't see any return of investment in having many features to choose from if the price was too high for what was being offered at …
Assistant Director, Division of Student Affairs Communications and Innovative Technologies
Chose WhatCounts
We selected WhatCounts because it had the ability to help us manage our large list and gave us tools to help tailor our messages. In addition, WhatCounts had the ability to allow us to have an enterprise license but we could still have individual department accounts.
Gist is perfect for SaaS I'd say, and perfect for long sales cycles with lots of lead nurturing involved, and for scenarios where you re-market via FB ads, because there's FB custom audience integration built into the workflows. Perfect for customer service and support. Really outstanding there. It's a little less suited to ecom but they're hammering out the finishing touches to make ecom cart recovery easier.
How big is your email list? For the money WhatCounts allows us to manage a large list and gives us great tools. If you have a small list this product might be more than you need. How many emails do you want to send? WhatCounts charges by the email and of course you get a better price per email the more emails you send. If you will not be sending many emails or are sending to a small list WhatCounts might not be the right tool for you.
Gist provides endless ways of interacting with customers. I can chat and email with them, track their usage on my site, qualify them, add tags and other profile information, and so much more.
There is even an awesome live view that lets me spy on visitors to see how they're using the site.
The tools are powerful, easy to use, and constantly getting improvements. It seems like every week there is another update being rolled out that substantially extends the functionality or usability of the features in Gist.
We receive super customer service from a dedicated account representative.
The list management tools are easy to use and give us granular insight into what users are opening and where they are clicking.
The analytics give us a variety of ways to look at the types of devices being used to view our content and the ways our users interact with content. For example we can see that most opens are on mobile but if a reader wants to spend time clicking into more in depth content they move over to a desktop computer.
Chatbots should work not only for Gist's native online chat, but also for the other chat-based channels such as Facebook. (instead of having to use another software for that purpose)
Pricing structure - Support bot should not be an add-on but a core feature.
Some of the list management tools were hard to find at first but now I use them every month. If I could change one thing I would allow the account details filter window to show all the available slots with no scrolling and I would add a feature to set / reset all selections on the dropdowns.
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
Gist does pretty much anything you want it to when it comes to managing your contacts. Sometimes I wish it updated faster, but wait a few beats and it gets there. I really love that I can show a colleague how to use the chat messenger and they understand it right away. Very user friendly!
I have communicated with their team multiple times and every time they have been very responsive, knowledgeable, and polite. They work to make sure you are happy and informed of what is going on. Better their team keeps up to date with their app, giving you new features, and keeping you notified and educated about what they are and how to use them. A+
We have a great representative. She schedules regular calls with our team and helps us learn new ways to use the tool. We get great personal support. I know she has many other clients but I always feel like she has time for me and genuinely enjoys working with our team.
They both seem to have parity with each other with each having their own small advantages. I went with Gist because it was more affordable. Infusionsoft customer for almost 5 years and it seemed I was always working more on getting it to work instead of getting work done. Gist is so intuitive I had it setting up and running the basics in a few hours.
We selected WhatCounts because it had the ability to help us manage our large list and gave us tools to help tailor our messages. In addition, WhatCounts had the ability to allow us to have an enterprise license but we could still have individual department accounts.
Our ROI has increased significantly because of Gist's chat and app integration into our website. Contact forms are great but a real-time conversation means you can be more effective in meeting your customer's needs.
The additional features in the recent upgrade mean we can use Gist for more. They have always been effective for email campaigns, but the addition of the knowledge base and more effective workflows means we can automate more. This has saved us from buying more software.
We use WhatCounts as a communication tool to our external groups mainly families and alumni. In our case our main objective is to get these groups timely information. While some of our emails do have a call to action for example signing up for Family Weekend or a Reunion Weekend we don't use the tool to generate leads in the way many organizations use html email.