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 and health capabilities: Does the platform allow you to get a full view of all your accounts and understand their health?
Automation and AI capabilities: How well does the platform allow you to eliminate busywork and manual data entry with automation and AI
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?
Totango and Gainsight are both solid Customer Success Platforms. While Gainsight stands out for its comprehensive feature base, Totango’s project management capabilities are strong. For Customer Success teams looking for an alternative that can provide them with high visibility along with superior, white-glove services, Velaris is a great alternative.
Let’s break down the key points of difference between Totango and Gainsight so you can make an informed decision.
1. Visibility and health
Both Totango and Gainsight 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
→ Lifecycle management
→ Customizable health scores
→ Reports on customer data and internal team performance
→ Comprehensive set of integrations
However, there are some disadvantages to each platform that buyers may want to consider:
Totango
- Lack of multi-layer account hierarchies: Totango’s customer views are limited to accounts and users. Companies whose customer relationships exist on more than two tiers may not be able to have full visibility.
- Difficulties with customization: Some customers report problems with integrations and custom data imports.
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.
How does Velaris compare to both Totango and Gainsight?
- Customer data consolidation, filters and segmentation, 360-degree profiles, and customizable health scores
- 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 and AI
Totango and Gainsight both enable the automation of multiple processes, such as data entry, task creation, task assignment, onboarding sequences and renewal processes. They also offer an AI assistant that can automate content generation and account summarization.
However, there are some advantages and disadvantages to each platform that buyers may want to consider:
Totango
- Provides out-of-the-box automations that can be customized: Totango’s automation builder comes with inbuilt SuccessPlays designed according to CS best practices
- Limited AI functionality: Totango’s AI functionality is limited to its content generator
- Lacks automatic email integration: Emails sent with Totango do not automatically sync with your email provider
- Complex automation builder: Building automations in Totango can be complicated
Gainsight
- Sentiment analysis tool: Staircase AI analyzes interactions across customer communications and identifies conversational signals.
- Difficult to use automation builder: Building automations in Gainsight is complex and requires extra assistance to implement
How does Velaris compare to Totango 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.
3. Project management and collaboration capabilities
Both Totango and Gainsight offer project management features including task management, account planning tools, and playbooks to standardize processes. While Totango is strong in this area, Gainsight lags behind in its collaboration capabilities.
Here are a few more things to consider:
Totango
- Shareable account plans: Totango allows you to create Outcome Success Plans that can be shared with customers
- Pre-built playbooks: Get access to a library of playbook templates (called “SuccessBLOCS).
- Lack of automatic Success Plan KPI-tracking: Success Plans do not track outcomes automatically.
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.
How does Velaris compare to Totango and Gainsight?
- 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:
Totango
- Knowledge base: Totango provides an expansive library of self-service training resources from help center articles, live data assistance, templates.
- Totango Community: Join a community of Totango customers and get assistance/advice from peers.
- Long implementation period: Totango typically takes 4-6 months to go live.
- Lack of personalized consultations: Totango leans towards self-service, meaning you may not receive support tailored to your needs.
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.
How does Velaris compare to Totango and Gainsight?
- 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.
- Knowledgebase: Access all our 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
Totango
Totango’s pricing follows a modular structure where companies can choose their features a la carte and buy more add-ons as their requirements change. This models offers flexibility to companies who have very specific requirements. However, it may become extremely costly in the long run.
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.
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, Totango and Gainsight are both good options for Customer Success teams looking to scale their operations. Both platforms offer good visibility, health, project management and automation capabilities. They are also focused more on Enterprise market segments, which may put them out of the price range of midmarket companies.
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.
Totango has strong collaboration features and offers a strong base of templates and best practices, eliminating the need for teams to build from scratch. However, Totango’s customer data organization can be limited and inflexible for companies that require unique data structures.
In addition to Gainsight and Totango, 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.
