gainsight-customer-cloud-vs-salesforce-com

Both Gainsight and Salesforce are cloud-based platforms that provide companies with a place to store and track contact information. However, Salesforce is primarily a customer relationship management (CRM) solution, while Gainsight is a customer success platform. 

These two products can be used together to help organize and gain deeper insights from customer data. In fact, Gainsight has a native integration with Salesforce Connector, so it can be used from within the Salesforce platform. 

Features

These software products are both able to store and track customer information, though Gainsight is often used to aggregate together customer data from multiple sources. 

As a CRM solution, Salesforce includes features like contact and opportunity management, lead scoring and qualification, sales forecasting, and access to Einstein Analytics. Salesforce also has advanced workflow automation and customization capabilities. These features can be found within the Salesforce Sales Cloud. 

Gainsight, on the other hand, has features that are more focused on measuring customer engagement, improving account retention, and prevent customer churn. These capabilities include customer health scoring, customer engagement dashboards, churn risk prediction, customer journey mapping, activity alerts, and email and in-app Net Promoter Surveys (NPS). 

Limitations 

If you are deciding between investing in Salesforce or Gainsight, first consider what business needs the software will serve. 

Salesforce is designed to be a best-of-breed CRM and is therefore not the best choice if you need a tried and true customer success platform. With Salesforce, users can completely customize the CRM to their industry and business, but this also means there is a lot of customization work to be done. Reviewers on TrustRadius have commented that Salesforce is also very ‘feature-heavy’ and the newer Lighting interface can be hard to use. 

In contrast, Gainsight is not primarily a CRM. Instead, it’s a best-in-class customer success platform that can also help businesses aggregate and organize large amounts of customer information. The number of customer success features Gainsight offers may also be overkill for small businesses or small teams. 

Pricing

Pricing information for both Gainsight and Salesforce is not available for free on the vendors’ website. However, each product has a subscription pricing model based on the number of users per month. For larger plans, annual subscription options may also be available.  Both vendors will provide custom quotes upon request. 

Which Is Right For You?

If you are interested in comparing Gainsight and Salesforce, that probably means your business is looking for a CRM or customer success solution. 

Businesses looking for a best in class customer success platform will probably be better served by Gainsight. On the other hand, if your company is searching for a flexible and powerful CRM, Salesforce is a better option. 

Gainsight and Salesforce can be used by companies of all sizes. However, both offer advanced features and have complex customization capabilities that may be too resource-intensive for smaller businesses and teams.