Gainsight vs Totango: Main Overview
Let’s begin with an overview of each company:
Gainsight Overview
Gainsight caters more towards enterprises and high-valuation mid-market SaaS.
- Key advantages: great for complex CS use cases and enterprises, an advanced platform with diverse features and AI integration
- Key complaints: setup and usage are too complex for most standard use cases, health score inaccuracies, and limited visibility of data
Totango Overview
Totango is a customer success platform focused on customer journey orchestration and segmentation.
- Key advantages: simple, plug-and-play CS platform with pre-built modules for health scoring and playbooks
- Key complaints: high costs and challenges with implementation and integrations
Custify’s Overview
Custify is the customer success software designed to serve companies of all sizes, funding stages, and regardless of their customer engagement model. With our concierge onboarding, we carefully guide all our customers through setup and implementation, making sure their goals are translated into metrics, health scores, and playbooks. Custify comes fully equipped with AI capabilities, advanced health scoring, and fully customizable dashboards.
- Key Advantages: powerful customer success platform with concierge onboarding (white-glove) and advanced lifecycle management
- Key Complaints: some users have longer setup journeys due to use case complexities, but these are often offset by our tailored onboarding
Key Takeaways:
- Gainsight offers more complex solutions with a steep learning curve, often requiring a lengthy setup
- Totango offers a good overall solution that can be overly simplistic for some customer success use cases
- Custify’s CSP is endlessly customizable and comes with a guided setup that can make it as simple or as complex as you want
- Gainsight is better for large-scale CS implementations and enterprises
- Totango is better for mid-market SaaS companies with simple use cases
- Custify is great for startups, mid-market SaaS, and can serve enterprises well
Comparison Matrix: Gainsight vs Totango vs Custify
Ingests CRM/support/product; multi-object modeling; admin-heavy flexibility
Profiles and attributes; segment-driven; faster setup; fewer custom objects
Event-first accounts/users; custom fields; calculated metrics; lightweight setup
Advanced/customizable health scoring via Scorecards
Data-driven health scores with AI-standard models available
Weighted measures & segment‑level inputs; AI summaries
Playbooks, Cockpit tasks, automations, journey orchestration
Automated triggers, alerts, playbooks, workflows
Event‑based playbooks; AI‑generated playbooks;
Customer success plans and journey orchestration
Customer success plans and playbooks
Custom and built‑in lifecycles (onboarding, adoption, renewal)
Shareable success plans, Gantt charts, timelines
Shareable dashboards, customer-facing reporting
Branded, shareable, customer portals & dashboards, customizable per client
Fully integrated with Staircase AI, account monitoring, sentiment scoring
Simple AI assistant, email writing assistant, AI summaries
Advanced AI summaries, AI playbooks, AI agents, AI churn risk, sentiment scoring, conversational AI
Enterprise-grade dashboards, custom report builder, journey/anomaly analytics
Built-in report builder + prebuilt SuccessBLOC templates and journey/cohort analytics
Fully-customizable, shareable dashboards and reports, customer 360 analytics, and full customer experience monitoring
Cockpit (tasks, playbooks), shared success plans, goal-tracking, team views
Shared SuccessBLOCs, role-based dashboards, task assignment & collaboration
Task management in your CS dashboards, full collaboration capabilities, and automated task assignment
~8 weeks for full framework, ~4 months to “verified outcomes”
~2-4 weeks using modular SuccessBLOCs for standard plans
~1-3 weeks from sign-up to full setup and value addition, with concierge onboarding
100+ integrations
50-100
45+ (+200 in Zapier)
Large enterprise solution
Modular approach, fast implementation
Guided, concierge onboarding; fast time‑to‑value
Essentials / Enterprise pricing / quote-based
5 Plans, quote-based, for different needs
Quote (tiered/account‑based)
Large enterprises and complex orgs seeking deep CS + PX functionality
Teams needing fast deployment and modular CS workflows
Startup → Mid‑market (scales to enterprise)
Feature Breakdowns: Gainsight vs Totango vs Custify
1. Which Platform Has the Best Automation: Gainsight, Totango, or Custify?
Gainsight has the deepest orchestration, Totango is simpler, segment-triggered, and Custify is event-based with AI-generated playbooks. Here’s how they work:
Gainsight automation features:
Cockpit and playbooks. The central hub for customer success in Gainsight is called a “cockpit” and is typically populated by CTAs (lifecycle tasks and alerts) that automatically trigger based on specific account settings.
Journey orchestrator. The main dashboard for automations within Gainsight allows simple and complex automations based on health scores, product usage metrics, lifecycle stages, survey results, and more.
Totango automation features:
Automated segment triggers. Totango’s automation options consist of simple triggers that can be assigned to any customer segment. Triggers then allow you to automatically perform specific actions, such as sending an email.
Alerts, playbooks, workflows. Totango also allows you to create alerts, playbooks, and set up workflows with automated task creation (within SuccessPlays).
Custify automation features:
Advanced Automation Engine. Custify’s automation goes beyond simple triggers. With our automation engine, you can create event-based playbooks to automate communication, note-taking, surveys, customer tasks and portals, CSM tasks, and even other automations.
Calculated Metrics. Custify lets you create advanced metrics you can track using no-code automation. These metrics can then be used to view insights, identify patterns, and follow trends.
AI-Generated Playbooks. Last but most importantly, CustifyAI helps you generate playbooks (aka automation flows) using simple prompts.
2. How Does Health Scoring Work in Gainsight, Totango, and Custify?
Gainsight’s Scorecards are great, but lack the overall flexibility of a purpose-built health scoring engine like in Custify. The latter brings account-specific weighted measurements and custom CSM ratings that can override health scores. By contrast, Totango features simple, modular customer health tracking.
Gainsight health scoring features:
Gainsight’s main customer health feature is called Scorecards. With Scorecards, CSMs can set and view multiple customer health dimensions in a single dashboard.
Totango health scoring features:
Totango also features a customer health tracker that combines an overall health score (numerical) with a dimension score that can be Good, Poor, or Average based on different sets of attributes.
Custify health scoring features:
Custify’s customer health feature works slightly differently. Let’s break it down:
- Advanced customer health scores. Account-specific, customer-specific, segmented
- Weighted measurements.
- Signals, or automated health scores.
- Global health score for each account.
- CSM rating that overrides health scores.
3. How Do Shareable Customer Portals Work in Gainsight, Totango, and Custify?
While Gainsight doesn’t feature Customer Portals per se, they offer project plans for customer success (aka “success plans”). Totango comes with simple customer portals designed to share objectives and to-dos. By contrast, Custify offers fully customizable, white-label customer portals that can be shared with clients.
Gainsight customer portal features:
Gainsight does not have customer portals per se, but they do have “success plans,” which are essentially project plans (displayed as a set of objectives in a Gantt chart or in a timeline). These project plans are shareable and usable as or in QBRs.
Totango customer portal features:
Totango also features “success plans” as well as simple customer portals that enable CSMs to share those plans, displaying objectives and simple “To Do’s” in a list.
Custify customer portal features:
Custify offers simple yet extensive, shareable customer portals that can be customized to feature your clients’ branding, objectives, KPIs, files, meetings, tasks, and more. Custify’s portals can also showcase playbooks for specific stages of a customer’s journey – such as onboarding.
4. Which Platform Has the Best AI Implementation: Gainsight, Totango, or Custify?
Gainsight’s AI strengths come in the form of Staircase AI, a customer intelligence AI solution that features sentiment analysis. Totango has some basic AI integrations that help with copywriting and customer summaries. Custify lets you generate customer playbooks, AI summaries, analyze churn risk, and talk directly to CustifyAI in the platform or on Slack.
Gainsight AI features:
Gainsight’s AI features come in the form of Staircase AI, a tool that was acquired by Gainsight in August 2024 and subsequently integrated into their CSP. The built-in AI helper can aid CSMs in their tasks by analyzing customer communication, spotting at-risk customers, and performing sentiment analysis.
Totango AI features:
Totango’s AI features are somewhat more limited, consisting mainly of a simple AI assistant, an email writing assistant, and a basic AI summary for each account.
Custify AI features:
Custify features several AI features designed to augment, not replace, CSM work:
Advanced AI Summaries. CustifyAI can summarize your accounts and include bulleted key insights, an intuitive churn risk analysis, and a SWOT analysis.
AI Playbook Generator. CustifyAI can suggest an automation flow based on specific prompts.
AI Churn Risk and Sentiment Scoring. CustifyAI is also always aware of how your accounts are doing. It analyzes churn risk in real time, tracks sentiment trends, and provides proactive alerts about customer dissatisfaction. To help you act, it can also suggest follow-up tasks, summarize conversations, and recommend follow-ups.
Conversational AI Assistant. CustifyAI doesn’t just live inside our customer success software, it’s also directly integrated into the Slack channel you use to talk to your CSM. You can ask CustifyAI for MRR insights, customer data, and more!
5. Which Platform Has the Best Implementation and Services: Gainsight, Totango, or Custify?
Gainsight implementation takes an average of 8 weeks and requires a dedicated admin. Totango’s implementation takes an average of 3 weeks for simple use cases, but can take more for enterprise applications. Custify takes between 1 and 3 weeks with guided, concierge onboarding for any new customer.
Gainsight Implementation and Services:
Gainsight promises 8 weeks to full implementation and an average of 4 months to achieve verified outcomes. However, in practice, many users complain that setting up the platform feels like a never-ending project and presents a steep learning curve. Others still mention the need for a full time administrator in charge of Gainsight in order to make the most of the platform.
Totango Implementation and Services:
Totango’s implementation is comparable to that of Gainsight, particularly due to lack of native integration options. Enterprise customers or those with advanced, custom setups take longer to implement. Many customers go live in weeks, especially using modular SuccessBLOCs, but they don’t have as much control over their custom setup as with other platforms.
Custify Implementation and Services:
Custify’s implementation can take as little as one week, but it usually takes longer depending on account specifics. However, companies begin to see results as early as 3 weeks after implementing Custify.
A big advantage of our platform is the dedicated white-glove onboarding process (also known as concierge onboarding). You get a dedicated CSM and everything you need to get started with configuring everything inside the platform. We help you set goals, offer advanced training, and onboard your team into Custify.
Standout Features: Gainsight vs Totango vs Custify
1. Gainsight | Best for multi-data-source journey orchestration at enterprise scale
Possibly the most impressive feature of Gainsight comes from its integrated Staircase AI, enabling customers to use AI in a more efficient and seamless way to analyze large datasets, build a data warehouse, and determine the ideal next steps for every customer.
2. Totango | Fastest ‘journey block’ setup for mid-market teams
Totango comes with SuccessBLOCs, which are essentially customer success dashboards containing customer scorecards (with health scores), reports, automated workflows, and customer campaigns.
3. Custify | Best balance of guided onboarding plus flexible automation and portals
Concierge onboarding. By far the most cited advantage of Custify is that we offer concierge onboarding to any new account. That means white-glove, guided setup and implementation backed by some of the most knowledgeable and professional CSMs in the industry. With their experience, you can implement similar solutions and programs to some of the leading companies that use Custify for their customer success needs.
Unbeatable Automation. At Custify, we like to think of automation as a key element of customer success, so we built one of the most advanced automation engines, where every playbook can trigger based on a range of customer signals, send messages, notify CSMs, create and update tasks, and even trigger a separate automation flow. And you can now generate these playbooks with a simple AI prompt, giving you more control over specifics with less time spent actually building the bones of your automations.
Summary: When to Choose Gainsight, Totango, or Custify
Why large enterprises choose Gainsight
Need deep enterprise orchestration and budget is less of a blocker → Gainsight
Gainsight is a powerful customer success platform that may be slightly too complex for your average use case. It’s best suited for large-scale enterprises and customer success implementations with extensive books of business and mid-to-high touch engagement models.
Why mid-market teams choose Totango
Need fastest rollout and modular workflows → Totango
Totango is a customer success platform more suited towards mid-market SaaS companies that need quick implementation of CS workflows using a modular approach.
Why SMBs and enterprises choose Custify
Need guided setup, flexible automation, portals, and fair costs → Custify
Custify is an excellent customer success platform that can serve the needs of small startups, mid-market SaaS, as well as larger businesses with a more extensive customer base. The way our software is designed, the only difference is in how complex the implementation, setup, and onboarding are, for which we, of course, assist you through our proprietary concierge onboarding process. So, whichever your use case and whatever your company size, a Custify CSM will be able to help you!
Why choose Custify over Gainsight and Totango
Get a platform that adapts with you, with fully guided implementation, advanced AI agents, and outcome-focused customer portals.
FAQs about Gainsight, Totango, and Custify
What customers say about Custify
A better experience for your customers, fewer headaches for your team. You'll be set up in minutes.
Custify helps us to identify upsell opportunities and churn risks very quickly. We now have better retention and a higher customer lifetime value. If you're looking for a CS tool, this is an easy decision.
Custify helps our success team to strategically manage our customers' life cycle. We can now instantly identify churn risks and use a data driven approach to onboarding, product adoption and health scoring. Custify is a no brainer for subscription businesses.
We saw ourselves reflected in Custify. Two small companies trying to really disrupt an industry and try to do something different. We were just excited to work with a company like that.
Custify helped us integrate their customer success management solution within weeks. We've gained a 360 degree view of our clients & it has allowed us to improve our customer focus and further refine our CS strategy. Their solution is scalable, easy to deploy and very user friendly.
If you're going to integrate a brand new tool into your day-to-day operations, you want to make sure that the people behind the tool are the ones with whom you see yourself doing business for a number of years. We felt safe investing in Custify because we know that they care about the product and its functionality & performance.
We've watched NRR grow steadily a lot over the past year, as we've doubled down on our customer usage, without increasing headcount. 90% of what we built is either an automated sort of email connection or automated task reminders.
Our SaaS is quite complex and offers multiple integrated solutions. Even in this scenario, Custify has proven to be a great tool. Our CSMs get a holistic 360 view of each customer and their interactions. On top of this, their support exceeded all our expectations.
Since using Custify we could manage more customers per CSM and we could identify customers that needed our attention. It allowed us to be more proactive on a daily basis and automate manual tasks. The process became really streamlined and it helped us become better for our customers.
Custify freed up more time for our team to focus on the parts of the job that they enjoy and remove the manual tasks and the things that they don't particularly like doing quite as much.
We use Custify to reduce unwanted customer churn. The setup was fast and easy for our tech team. Now our Customer Success Team can't live without Custify anymore.
We feared that the integration would wind up taking a lot of developer time, but we finished in less than half a day thanks to Custify's concierge onboarding.
The most important aspect of working with Custify is that they are very keen to hear and act on customer feedback. Dialogue is key - new product releases often have features that are useful to us. Their CSMs, proactively reach out once feedback that was important for us, has been implemented.
Custify's easy integration and native compatibility with platforms like Intercom and Hubspot streamlined our data centralization. Segmenting customers for targeted automated communications has been a game-changer.
Custify transformed our approach, consolidating information from scattered sheets to one efficient hub with insightful dashboards and dynamic health scores. Thanks to its integration capabilities, our team is now faster, more productive, and closely connected with our clients.
Custify's standout features, the flexible calculated metrics and the visual playbook builder, enable our data-driven company to extract meaningful insights from our customer data. It provides a comprehensive view of our Customer Success impact, from broad overviews to detailed individual customer analyses. With real-time notifications on upsell opportunities and actionable insights for both our Sales and Product teams, Custify is an essential tool for informed decision-making.
read more
Utilizing Custify, we've seen a significant increase in tool adoption, underscoring the value of health scores. The ability to instantly assess a company's performance and track user engagement trends has greatly empowered our customer success team. This has shifted their focus towards enhancing customer experiences, leading to higher engagement and referrals. Essentially, health scores have been pivotal in our strategy to understand and support our customers more effectively.
read more
Since integrating Custify, we've consistently exceeded our core KPIs, improved our retention rate and boosted our upsell revenue by 25 to 35% monthly. Coming into this role after Custify was onboarded, I've seen firsthand how much easier it is to manage these critical metrics. It's a game changer that supports my growth as a customer success manager, allowing me to focus effectively on our clients and drive our company's success forward.
read more
Before Custify, I juggled multiple platforms and tasks, struggling to keep track of everything. Now, everything is centralized, and I can focus on our customers without getting lost in mundane work. We've become more efficient, and our ability to engage and support our customers has greatly improved.
Without Custify, we would be completely blind-sided. It has brought all our customer data into one platform and automated key processes, allowing us to focus on what really matters—driving customer success. Thanks to the real-time alerts and insights, we increased our expansion MRR by 43% and reduced churn significantly. The time savings alone have been invaluable for our lean team.
read more
When we started with Custify, we had been using another platform that was too complex and required a lot of technical effort to maintain. Custify made everything simpler—centralizing our data, improving our NPS by 20%, and automating workflows, which saved us about 15 hours each month. With Custify it's easy to streamline your processes and focus more on customers.
read more
Custify has been a game-changer for us. Before, we were duct-taping solutions together, but now, with real-time insights and a holistic approach to customer data, we've significantly boosted customer satisfaction and made well-informed, data-driven decisions. This shift to proactive management has helped us reduce churn and better support our customers' success.
read more
Custify helped us shift from firefighters to a consultative team, without needing to hire more people.
The creation of our global health score process was definitely a milestone. We see Custify as a partnership rather than something we were sold and had to figure out on our own. That support has been what's made this successful for us.
You might also enjoy:
Guides
The Outstanding Guide to Customer Success Strategy
Everything you need to know about creating your first customer success strategy – free pdf guide.
Customer Success Articles
The Full Guide to Customer Health Scores
A comprehensive article and free PDF guide to Customer Health Scores: everything you need to know about how to set them up in one place.
Guides
The Secret to Data-Driven Customer Success | eGuide
Discover the role of data in customer success. How to tackle data challenges. how to resolve them, and what CS metrics you should monitor.