In our evaluation, we have assessed the three platforms across the top 5 factors that are most important to consider when scaling Customer Success:
Visibility, health and analytics capabilities: Does the platform allow you to get a full view of all your accounts and understand their health?
Automation and digital CS capabilities: How well does the platform allow you to automate user journeys, eliminate manual data and put internal workflows on autopilot?
Project management and collaboration capabilities: How well does the platform allow you to collaborate with customers when managing mutual projects such as onboardings and implementations
Support and services: How responsive and helpful is the vendor when providing services
Pricing: How cost-effective and scaleable is the pricing model?
Gainsight and Planhat are both solid Customer Success Platforms. For Customer Success teams looking for an alternative that can provide them with high customer data visibility along with an easy-to-use interface and white-glove services, Velaris is a great alternative.
Let’s break down the key points of difference between Gainsight and Planhat so you can make an informed decision.
1. Visibility, health and analytics
Both Gainsight and Planhat offer visibility and health management features that help CS teams organize, prioritize and proactively manage their customers. These features include:
→ Customer 360 view
→ Filters and segmentation tools
→ Customizable health scores
→ Reports on customer data and internal team performance
However, there are some advantages and disadvantages to each platform that buyers may want to consider:
Gainsight
- Some features require Salesforce integration: Some of Gainsight’s features, such as their opportunity management pipeline, require customers to be using Salesforce as their CRM.
- Complexity in data set-up: Bringing your customer data into Gainsight requires a long and intensive implementation period. Most companies also require a dedicated administrator post-implementation to maintain data hygiene and integrity.
- Limited out-of-the-box functionality: While Gainsight’s capabilities are vast, unlocking deeper levels of visibility, such as three-layer account hierarchies, requires additional purchases and implementations.
Planhat
- Customizability: Planhat has customization options for visibility, with customisable setups, profiles, and workspaces.
- Difficulties with integrations: Integrations are limited, and some customers report issues with syncing.
- Challenges with Salesforce integration: Not all Salesforce data can be synced to Planhat, creating issues with customer data integrity
How does Velaris compare to both Gainsight and Planhat?
- Customer data consolidation, filters and segmentation, 360-degree profiles, and customizable health scores: Find every piece of customer data you need on a sleek and intuitive interface.
- Full visibility across multiple account layers: Your customer data can be organized into contact, account AND organization level hierarchies in Velaris, right out of the box. Additional layers and relationships can also be created through custom objects. Track your customers progress across lifecycle stages and get a quick view of recent activities.
- Unlimited integrations: Velaris will connect to any of your tools. If a custom integration is required, the Velaris team will handle the technical implementation for you.
- Lack of self-service reports: During implementation, the Velaris team will set up reporting dashboards for you. However, if you need to customize these reports, you will need to reach out to the team, who will update and publish the new versions within a couple of hours.
2. Automation, productivity, and digital CS
Gainsight and Planhat both offer a suite of tools that help CS teams save time and scale their operations while retaining the human touch. These tools include:
✅ Automation builder
✅ Playbooks for key processes
✅ Product walkthroughs
Once again, there are some advantages and disadvantages to each platform that buyers may want to consider:
Gainsight
- Customer forums tool: Create an online community where customers can help each other.
- Difficult to use automation builder: Building automations in Gainsight is complex and requires extra assistance to implement.
Planhat
- Snippets: Streamline notetaking and communications by automatically populating text instead of manually typing out commonly used sentences repeatedly.
- Limitations in automation builder: Planhat has several limitations in automation, including the inability to set recurring automations.
- Lack of AI: Planhat lacks features like AI account summaries and AI generated tasks.
How does Velaris compare to Planhat and Gainsight?
- The most intuitive automation builder: Build automations on a Zapier-like drag-and-drop canvas. Automate entire customer journey flows, data entry tasks, and advocacy programs.
- Comprehensive set of AI tools that take manual work off your plate: Summarize customer communications, monitor customer sentiment and analyze tickets. All on autopilot.
- Automated email communications with Gmail and Outlook integration: Sync your email communications with your email service provider.
- Lack of in-app communications builder: Velaris only offers email communications at the moment.
3. Project management and collaboration capabilities
Both Gainsight and Planhat offer project management features like task management and playbooks.
Here are a few more things to consider:
Gainsight
- Lack of a customer portal: Gainsight does not offer a shared workspace to collaborate with customers.
- Lack of automatic Success Plan KPI-tracking: Success Plans do not track outcomes automatically.
Planhat
- Centralized inbox: Planhat’s inbox gives access to every customer-facing conversation from a central, searchable inbox.
- Customer portal: Planhat has a portal that allows sharing of documents, dashboards and workflows.
- Complexity in playbooks setups: Although Planhat does offer playbooks, they are difficult to initially set up.
How does Velaris compare to Gainsight and Planhat?
- Task management, success plans and playbooks.
- Automatic KPI-tracking for Success Plans: Track the impact of your projects and account plans in real time with KPIs that are updated automatically.
- Frictionless customer portal: Velaris’ customer portal comes with a widget that can be embedded in your product’s interface. This eliminates the need for your customers to log in to a separate workspace, and can instead access their portal tasks and messages through an in-app window.
- Lack of document sharing capabilities: Velaris does not yet offer the ability to share files and documents through the customer portal, although this feature is in development.
4. Training, support and services
Each vendor carries a slightly different approach to support and services. Here’s a full breakdown of their offerings:
Gainsight
- Gainsight Help Center: Gainsight has expansive documentation on their products within their Help Center.
- Longest and most complex implementation: Due to the complexity of the platform, Gainsight takes more time and resources to go live than any other Customer Success Platform. Implementations may take an average of 4-8 months to complete.
- Lack of personalized consultations: Gainsight’s Customer Success team may not offer in-depth guidance on how to make the most of the platform.
Planhat
- Long implementation: Planhat typically takes 12-16 weeks to go live.
- Lack of access to services and support: It can be difficult to access Planhat’s consultancy services and support, with reports from smaller accounts in particular about inconsistent service.
How does Velaris compare to Gainsight and Planhat?
- Effortless implementations: With an average go-live time of 4 weeks, Velaris’ implementation periods are at the top of the industry. You will have a dedicated team that will handle the heavy lifting on the technical side, even if custom integrations are required.
- Personalized onboarding + consultation: The Velaris team will consult with you to understand your specific needs and build out the early playbooks and automations for you, giving you a solid foundation to start on.
- Knowledge base: Access all help articles within a searchable knowledge base.
- Responsive feature development: Velaris is highly responsive to new feature requests and suggestions for feature improvements.
5. Pricing
Gainsight
Gainsight offers two pricing tiers: Gainsight Essentials and Gainsight Enterprise. The Essentials tier is limited to Gainsight’s AI and automation tools, Customer 360, Playbooks & Success Plans, Dashboards, Health Scorecards, Surveys and Digital Journeys. It supports 10 users and 100 customers per user.
The Enterprise plan offers Renewal and Expansion Forecasting, Company News and Organizational Mapping & Sponsor Tracking, and accommodates a minimum of 20 users with 200 customers per user.
The average contract price according to Vendr is around $50,753.
Planhat
Planhat offers three packages: Start-Up, Professional, and Enterprise. The Start-Up package is ideal for emerging businesses. The Professional package is designed for growing companies, and offers more advanced features. The Enterprise package is suited for large organizations, and to manage complex customer success operations at scale.
Usage Metrics, Health Lab, Churn Management, Revenue Management, Advanced Projects, Sequences and Customer Portal are some of the highlights common to all packages.
The average contract price according to Vendr is around $71,570.
Velaris
Velaris offers a full suite of features for a flat base platform fee with 5 users. As their team grows, you can buy more user licenses for your CSMs, making Velaris a scalable option for fast-growing teams.
Final recommendations
To sum up, Gainsight and Planhat are both good options for Customer Success teams looking to scale their operations. Both platforms offer visibility, health, project management and automation capabilities.
Gainsight may not be suitable for teams that need to collaborate with its customers due to its lack of a customer portal/project workspace. Gainsight also comes with a lot of complexity and requires a high level of administration and maintenance in order to function smoothly. Teams implementing Gainsight should be prepared to spend a lot of time and resources in setting up and maintaining the platform.
Planhat stands out for its project management and collaboration capabilities, but may require more effort to configure and lacks multi-layered account hierarchies.
In addition to Gainsight and Planhat, Velaris is also a strong contender in the Customer Success space. Velaris’ Customer Success Platform offers all the capabilities that a high-growth CS team requires. Their customers also benefit from highly responsive, attentive and personalized service that adapts the platform to their specific needs, drives ROI fast and makes implementation easy.
If you're looking for a flexible, scalable solution designed to help you manage Customer Success with ease, book a demo today and see how Velaris can support your team.
