16 Best Customer Success Tools: Side-by-Side Comparison

Keeping your customers happy is no simple task. No matter how flawless you think your product is, not everyone will “get it” right from the bat, and you’ll definitely need help to sort through the many issues.

And that’s fine; mistakes happen.

That’s also why supporting your customer success team with the right tool makes all the difference. There are plenty of platforms to choose from for improving workflows, capturing customer data, and identifying friction points. 

So how do you choose the right one for the job?

In this article, we’ll be your trusty guides into the world of customer success tooling. We’ll take you through the 16 best customer success tools to help you keep your ticket queues short and your customer lifetimes long.

Customer success tools are software solutions designed to help businesses deliver personalized support to customers. 

With a customer success tool, businesses can proactively manage customer relationships, track satisfaction, and improve the overall customer experience. Used by businesses big and small, let's see why customer success tools are so beneficial.

As the word so subtly suggests, customer success tools are all about, yep, you guessed it, ensuring your customers are successful in using your product or service.
But what does that success look like?

Here are the five main benefits you’ll get from using customer success tools.

As the word so subtly suggests, customer success tools are all about, yep, you guessed it, ensuring your customers are successful in using your product or service.

But what does that success look like?

Here are the five main benefits you’ll get from using customer success tools.

• To capture user data & understand user behavior: customer success tools let you gather and analyze data, helping you determine the friction points in your customer’s journey

• To provide a better product experience: personalized support and onboarding customer success tools help customers navigate through your product and adopt features, ultimately enhancing user experience 

• Use data to engage with customers in ways relevant to their experience: from user-health scores to behavior tracking, customer success tools help businesses create personalized strategies for target outreach, tailored recommendations, or in-app guidance

• Empowering your customer success team to efficiently handle more tickets: Add the right customer success tool to your tech stack, and your team can optimize workflows, track customer interactions, and prioritize tasks. This makes it easy for your customer representatives to manage a higher volume of tickets without sacrificing quality

• Increase metrics like customers’ lifetime value and NPS scores: providing proactive support and personalized interactions increases customer satisfaction, loyalty, net promoter score, retention, and lifetime value

That’s a lot of value for value for one type of tool. Ready to discover the platforms that do it best? Read on!

Before we do a deep dive into the 16 best customer success platforms that can make personalized support a breeze, here’s a summary table for all you skimmers out there.

Found a few tools that caught your eye? Got your thinking cap on and trying to make a choice? Let’s take a closer look at tools that can help you, no matter your customer success model.

G2 rating: 4.4/5 (259 reviews) 

Free version: Yes

Use cases: SaaS companies that want to improve their onboarding and feature adoption through interactive product tours and in-app guidance. 

• Styling and customization: make your in-app messages consistent and on-brand with styling that automatically populates your account-wide templates, or use case-specific design and custom CSS when you need them

• Self-serve support for your customers: help your customers succeed with your product from day one by offering a list of useful resources with links to product walkthroughs, help docs, videos, and more

• Deep integrations with your tech stack: track the performance of your in-product experiences in the Chameleon Dashboard and choose from a wide variety of integrations to connect data with your CDPs, product analytics, CRMs, communications platforms, and other tools to get a holistic overview of your customer success.

Interactive demos: helps you create engaging product tours, onboarding flows, and in-app guidance to help your users reach their “Aha!” moment

Chameleon works best for product-led SaaS companies that run their product as a browser-based web app or a Single Page App (SPA).  

Pricing

• Free trial

• Startup plan starting at $279 monthly

• Growth plan starting at $1500 monthly

• Custom Enterprise plan

G2 rating: 4.4/5 (1,503 reviews) 

Free version: No

Use cases: Gainsight is best for companies and customer success teams that want to increase retention and reduce churn through feedback management and proactive engagement.

• Monitor Customer Health Scores: provide your team with a score that will determine how you need to engage with each account to fight customer churn or upsell your SaaS products

• Customer monitoring: enabling you to monitor in-app actions as well as other touchpoints with various customer-facing teams

• Customer profiles: build fully-developed data-driven profiles by integrating them with your CRMs, customer support service tickets, marketing platforms, and financial SaaS tools

Best for: Gainsight is a fit for larger corporates or those with at least a Series C funding round or IPO. Some of Gainsight’s customers include SurveyMonkey, Athenahealth, and Pluralsight. If you run a smaller team, you can check out Gainsight alternatives like Vitally or Catalyst (more on these below).

Pricing

Gainsight offers custom pricing, but according to Reddit users, the platform costs $110,000 yearly for 20 licenses.

G2 rating: 4.6/5 (580 reviews) 

Free version: No

Use cases: best for customer success teams that want to streamline workflows and manage customer relationships through health scoring, automation, and detailed reporting.

• Reporting and analytics: consolidate reports across data sets; from Salesforce to Mixpanel or Zendesk 

• Emails: automate recurring email cycles so your CS team can focus on personal service

• Lifecycle management: Catalyst moves new customers through their entire customer journey, so you no longer need to tag accounts in new workflows

Best for: small to mid-market level businesses. 

Pricing

We scoured the web for Catalyst pricing, but you’ll need to contact their team for a quote.

G2 rating: 4.4/5 (2,432 reviews)

Free version: No

Use cases: HubSpot Service Hub is best for customer service teams that want to improve satisfaction through ticketing, knowledge base, live chat, and automation tools.

• Omni-channel messaging: give your CS team context, no matter how many contact channels a customer is using 

• Knowledge base functionality: answer common questions with a self-serve knowledge base to better support customers

• Help desk automation: live chat lets you route customer queries to exactly where they need to go

Best for: HubSpot is renowned for providing software solutions to SMBs, and things aren’t changing with HubSpot Service Hub as their customer service platform. 

Pricing

• Professional plan at $800 monthly

• Enterprise plan at $3,600 monthly

G2 rating: 4.7/5 (1,320 reviews)

Free version: No

Use cases: subscription-based or SaaS companies that want to reduce customer churn and increase retention through real-time automated workflows, account insights, and personalized in-app communication.  

• Account insights: custom dashboards for better customer health and account health tracking

• Real-time alerts: to alert you on the channels you already use, as soon as something happens

• Plays & automation: automate playbooks depending on the actions your users take

Best for: ChurnZero is a good fit for small to medium businesses. 

Pricing

ChurnZero has custom pricing, but according to a Reddit user, it costs $40,000 yearly.

G2 rating: 4.4/5 (22,799 reviews)

Free version: Yes 

Use cases: Companies that want to manage their customer support with a centralized system for inquiries, omnichannel routing, and a self-service knowledge base.

• Salesforce service cloud: Salesforce’s official platform for monitoring and managing customer interactions, complete with real-time channels like chat, phone, and email 

• Omni-channel routing: for automatically routing customer cases to the right service agents based on their expertise, experience level, and workload

• Knowledge base: a customizable self-service portal where your customers can read FAQs, help articles, and guides

Best for: Salesforce is scalable, making it a good choice for small, medium, and larger businesses.

Pricing

Salesforce’s Service Cloud offers:

• Starter Suite of $25 monthly

• Pro Suite of $100 monthly

• Enterprise Suite of $165 monthly

G2 rating: 4.0/5 (1 review)

Free version: Yes 

Use cases: SaaS companies that want to reduce churn through automated workflows.

• Customer segments: powerful filters for every account and contact.

• Task management: stay on top of customer-related tasks

• Customer health scores: customer health scores for your SaaS model to build customer retention

Best for: As far as customer success platform pricing goes, Akita is on the affordable end of the spectrum, which makes it a great option for smaller businesses looking to invest in customer success. 

Pricing

Akita offers:

• An Intercom-connect plan (syncs with Intercom as your main data source) at $49 monthly

• API connect plan at $149 monthly 

• Customized pricing plan

G2 rating: 4.7/5 (319 reviews)

Free version: No 

Use cases: Best for small and medium-sized businesses that want to track custom behavior with real-time feedback collection. 

• In-app surveys: deliver NPS, CSAT, CES, and more at critical customer journey milestones

• Real-time customer sentiment measures: to ensure you’re gathering actionable, qualitative data

•  Customizable dashboards: use your own systems of record to keep all stakeholders in the know

Best for: Although InMoment says they’re a fit for any type of business size, there’s definitely a trending customer base of small to medium-sized businesses. 

Pricing

According to multiple reviews, InMoment costs $100-$500 monthly.

G2 rating: 4.7/5 (122 reviews)

Free version: No

Use cases: best for teams that want to optimize their customer success workflows with a centralized system, analytics, and task automation.

• Data and analytics: tracks customer lifecycle changes, interactions, and health automatically for both high-touch and low-touch accounts

• Automation builder: Offers various drag-and-drop automation triggers such as emails and renewal campaigns

• CSAT and NPS surveys: to help you collect, track, and analyze customer data at scale

Best for: Because of its robust features, Velaris caters well to small, medium, and large businesses alike.

Pricing: Velaris offers custom pricing.

G2 rating: 4.4/5 (34 reviews)

Free version: No

Use cases: best for teams that want to manage customer retention and growth with automation.

• Automation: offers a range of automation tools for handling tasks like customer onboarding, reporting, and campaign management

• 360 view of customers: Comprehensive and real-time view of customer interactions to help improve strategic-decision making

• Customizable playbooks: To help guide your team through predefined workflows 
  

Best for: With its comprehensive suite of tools for customer success, SmartKarrot is ideal for medium-sized and large businesses.

Pricing

SmartKarrot offers:

• Basic plan starting at $15,000 yearly 

• Growth, Pro, and Enterprise plans offer custom pricing

G2 rating: 4.5/5 (600 reviews) 

Free version: No

Use cases: SaaS companies that want to track customer metrics like NPS and health scoring. 

• Project management: customize and replicate agile processes for your customer success team

• NPS Surveys & analytics: send targeted surveys to bring your teams the data they need to make customer-centric decisions

• Customer health score: a proprietary health score model enabling CS teams to track customer success and act on every account

Best for: Vitally is a great fit for all-sized businesses. There are solutions for SMBs that focus on efficiency and scaling workflows. There are also solutions for Enterprise companies that focus on data protection and better time to value (TTV).

Pricing

Vitally offers custom pricing, and an average contract value is $44,524.

G2 rating: 4.5/5 (3,230 reviews)  

Free version: yes 

Use cases: Intercom is best for SaaS companies that want to improve customer engagement through real-time chat and messaging, analytics, and custom segmentation.

• Real-time chat and messaging: enables your business to directly chat with customers, providing real-time support and engagement

• Analytics and insights into customer interactions: including detailed reports on conversation volume, response time, and customer satisfaction 

• Customer segmentation: allows businesses to group users based on specific characteristics to enable more targeted messaging

Best for: Intercom is best for small and medium-sized businesses. 

Pricing

• Essential plan starts at $29 monthly

• Advanced plan starts at $85 monthly 

• Expert plan starts at $132 monthly

G2 rating: 4.6/5 (626 reviews)

Free version: No

Use cases: companies that want to maximize customer success with the help of advanced customer analytics. 

• Product analytics: understand users, engagements, actions, and other customer behavior analytics to personalize the product experience for every account

• Opportunities: automate tasks and alerts when users show expansion opportunities and better predict revenue 

• Customer surveys: send via email or in-app, and get real-time brand and product feedback

Best for: Planhat is the best fit for small to medium-sized businesses that are looking for a tool for expanding and growing their customer engagement. There’s also a product-led growth solution for those businesses looking to build better UX from trial to launch.

Pricing

Planhat pricing starts at $1150.00 monthly, according to reviews.

G2 rating: 4.3/5 (945 reviews)

Free version: Yes

Use cases: companies that want to drive customer success and improve retention through customer health monitoring and goal-based success planning.   

• Customer Health Score: multidimensional health scores allow you to break down customer health into operational priorities of your business

• 360 Customer view: display the most important metrics to you per account and automate customer success actions

• Success plans & customer portal: measure and track customer goals and share fellow success tactics in an online portal to better meet customer needs

Best for: Totango is a great fit for all-sized businesses. Although it doesn’t have some of the highest reviews, it also has many happy customers from all company sizes. 

Pricing

Totango’s paid plans start at $249 monthly, according to reviews.

G2 rating: 4.7/5 (362 reviews)

Free version: No

Use cases: B2B SaaS companies that want to reduce churn and increase customer lifetime value through 360 views and customer feedback.  

• Customer 360: collect all of your customer data in one place and customize your view depending on your priorities

• Tasks & alerts: automate task creations and stay in touch on the platforms you already use

• Surveys: run Net Promoter Score and Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) surveys to specific customer segments

Best for: Custify is definitely a better fit for smaller businesses with tighter budgets. The tool doesn’t offer as many bells and whistles as some of its competitors but can take care of the customer success essentials. 

Pricing

Custify pricing starts at $899, according to reviews.

G2 rating: 4.4/5 (7,469)

Free version: Yes

Use cases: businesses that want to streamline customer support and improve response times through multi-channel ticketing, automation, and self-service options. 

• Multi-channel ticketing: allows customer success teams to manage customer inquiries from multiple channels, including email, chat, and social media, using one platform

• Automated workflows: provides workflow automation, automatic ticket assignments, follow-ups, and status updates

• Self-service portal: a knowledge base and community forum, letting customers find their own answers and reducing the number of tickets your team needs to solve

Best for: FreshDesk is best for small to medium-sized businesses that need to provide customer support but are on a tight budget.

Pricing

• Free plan

• Growth plan for $15 monthly 

• Pro plan for $49 monthly 

• Enterprise plan for $79 monthly

Choosing the right tool is like finding the perfect dance partner; it’s all about finding the right fit for your company’s unique rhythm, whether starting fresh or ditching your old moves for something better. Just make sure it plays nicely with your tech stack, CRMs, CDPs, analytics, and all the usual suspects. The last thing you want is a tool that steps on toes!

And hey, don’t skip those third-party reviews, especially from people who’ve made the switch. You’ll get the real lowdown on whether it's worth the change.

Good luck! Soon enough, you’ll be wowing your users with one of these 16 top customer success tools!