ChurnZero is a Customer Success Platform (CSP) that helps subscription businesses fight churn, expand accounts and renewals, increase product adoption, and optimize the customer experience. It’s often described as a feature-rich solution — so much so, that it may be overwhelming for some CS teams.

Pair ChurnZero’s overabundance of features with its hard-to-navigate interface and platform, and you may find yourself looking for an alternative CSP.

Why Companies May Seek a ChurnZero Alternative

Cost: ChurnZero is one of the more expensive CSPs on the market, especially for small businesses or startups with limited budgets. For fast-growing businesses, they may find that ChurnZero’s price scaling quickly pushes them into more expensive plans.

Feature Overload: While ChurnZero offers a wide range of features, not all companies may require such a comprehensive tool. This can make the platform seem overwhelming and lead to underutilization.

User Unfriendly: ChurnZero’s UX/UI may fall short compared to the other CSPs on this list. One enterprise customer mentioned that the UI can be difficult to use, particularly for users with limited technical knowledge. CSPs are meant to speed up the workflows of Customer Success teams, but a clunky interface can inhibit this.

Top 5 ChurnZero Alternatives

1. Vitally

Vitally is a CSP designed primarily for B2B SaaS companies. The platform contains a wide range of features for predicting churn risk, maintaining account health, and improving the productivity of CS teams of all sizes.

Some of its popular features include:

• Collaborative Docs: Keep CSMs and clients aligned during onboarding, reviews, and other touchpoints.
• Revenue Tracking: Measure net revenue retention (NRR), churn, and other key financial metrics. One customer reduced gross churn by 50%.
• Vitally Hubs: CSMs can significantly customize their Vitally experience with semi-private workspaces.

Vitally also provides robust analytics tools that allow you to segment customers based on metrics like product usage, revenue generated, customer feedback, and more.

Vitally has over 340 reviews on G2.com with a 4.6-star rating.

Why You May Consider Vitally: Vitally is a well-rounded CSP with strengths in all its categories, from features and functionalities to integrations and support. It’s also known for its strong analytics capabilities and its focus on unlocking new revenue potential.

Vitally’s platform provides its customers a holistic view of all their accounts, integrating data from several sources to give a comprehensive understanding of customer health. This makes it significantly easier to identify upsell opportunities and at-risk accounts.

Vitally’s Limitations: While Vitally tops this list of ChurnZero alternatives, some users have mentioned the UI can take time to learn and master. Fortunately, Vitally’s Blueprints of best practices and bite-sized instructional videos help minimize the product’s learning curve.

Why It Could Be Better Than ChurnZero: Vitally’s platform helps your CS team get up and running quickly, and when you need support, the Vitally team is there to help every step of the way.

Vitally also wins against ChurnZero when it comes to plans and pricing. It’s a CSP that scales with your business, rather than inhibiting it.

To summarize, Vitally offers a data-driven and revenue-focused approach to Customer Success, making it a strong choice for B2B companies that are looking to optimize their customer relationships to maximize revenue.

2. Totango

Totango is a cloud-based CSP that offers a wide array of functionalities for improving customer engagement and reducing churn.

Some of its popular features include:

• Pre-built Customer Success templates
• Real-time customer insights
• Built-in NPS tools

Totango also offers easy-to-understand analytics and reporting capabilities to help you make data-driven decisions as a CS leader.

Totango has over 730 reviews on G2.com with a 4.4-star rating.

Why You May Consider Totango: Totango is known for its quick implementation and user-friendly interface, making it a good fit for organizations that want to get up and running quickly. It offers a basic level of customization that is easy to manage. 

Totango also claims that its platform is suitable for both SMBs and larger enterprises, providing a scalable solution that can grow alongside your business.

Totango’s Limitations: While Totango offers a good range of features and customization options, it may lack the depth of analytics and advanced functionalities that some larger or more complex organizations require.

Additionally, although Totango is scalable, enterprises with very specific needs may find it less accommodating than other, more robust platforms like Gainsight.

Why It Could Be Better Than ChurnZero: If you find ChurnZero’s extensive set of features overwhelming or too complex for your team needs, Totango offers a stripped-down CSP for your basic requirements.

Totango offers a balanced approach to Customer Success, combining ease of use with a good variety of features. Its focus on pre-built components and real-time insights makes it a versatile choice for organizations of varying sizes and needs.

3. Custify

Custify is a small CSP that takes an automation-focused approach to Customer Success, making it a strong choice for SMBs that prioritize these aspects.

Some of its popular features include:

• Automated workflows and task management
• EU-based data storage
• Customizable dashboards and reports

Custify is amongst the top CSPs for ease-of-adoption and managing your customer accounts. It’s why Custifty is one of the highest-rated CSPs on G2.com, boasting a 4.7-star rating with over 250 reviews.

Why You May Consider Custify: Custify aims to reduce the manual workload for small Customer Success teams by automating repetitive tasks and providing actionable insights about account health, product usage, at-risk customers, and more.

Custify is also one of the more affordable CSPs on the market, making it an attractive option for SMBs just getting their CS function up and running. Finally, if you require white glove onboarding and implementation, Custify can typically get that done for you.

Custify’s Limitations: While Custify excels with startups and small businesses, it’s not as scalable of a CSP as other options in this roundup. For instance, there are still no data warehousing integrations for Custify, and there are limitations with its Salesforce and HubSpot integrations. 

If you require a more mature CSP built for high-growth businesses, Custify may not be right for you.

Why It Could Be Better Than ChurnZero: If you’re on the hunt for a CSP that is better suited for SMBs, has all the essential automations for your CS team, and doesn’t carry a hefty price tag, Custify may be your solution.

4. Gainsight

Gainsight is a leading CSP that offers a comprehensive suite of features designed to help large organizations improve their customer satisfaction.

Some of its popular features include:

• Email and in-app NPS survey functionality
• Customer journey mapping
• In-depth product usage analytics

Gainsight also provides a variety of “out of the box” pre-templated features that can be set up and used immediately.

Gainsight has over 1,100 reviews on G2.com with a 4.4-star rating.

Why You May Consider Gainsight: Gainsight is known for its scalability and is often the go-to platform for enterprise-level organizations. It offers extensive customization options, allowing you to tailor the platform to your specific needs.

Gainsight has a strong focus on helping CS leaders make confident decisions backed by data, and this is supported by its powerful analytics tools and integrations. For organizations that rely heavily on data insights and feedback for its product teams, Gainsight may be the preferred solution.

Gainsight’s Limitations: While Gainsight has all the bells and whistles a large Customer Success team may need to operate efficiently, implementing Gainsight in your organization can take a very long time, and you may run into issues during roll out.

• “Be prepared for a very involved setup and give yourself some time for full implementation.” - Mid-Market Customer
• “Our original implementation was not well configured for our business and adoption was weak.” - Enterprise Customer
• “There’s a lot of pressure on the admin as a role. The implementation process can be slightly prolonged.” - Enterprise Customer

Given the expensive price tag of Gainsight, it could be difficult to justify a long and complicated implementation period.

Also, while Gainsight is customizable, it can also be a high maintenance solution. You may need a Gainsight admin to assist with customizing the app, creating playbooks, configuring dashboards, and so on.

Why It Could Be Better Than ChurnZero: If you’re a large organization or have highly complex Customer Success needs, Gainsight could offer more depth and customization than ChurnZero.

Its analytics capabilities are robust and allow for a deeper understanding of customer behavior and needs. The platform is designed for scalability, making it a good fit for enterprise companies that are already familiar with CSPs but require a comprehensive solution.

5. Catalyst

Catalyst is a small but notable CSP that offers a range of features designed to improve customer relationships and CS team productivity.

Some of its popular features include:

• Email triggers for opens, replies, and clicks
• Easy navigation across its entire platform (for locating accounts, tasks, opportunities, and so on).
• Unlimited access to all features across all plans

Catalyst is also a very active brand in the Customer Success community, offering everything from thought leadership content to events geared toward CS professionals.

Catalyst has over 470 reviews on G2.com with a 4.6-star rating.

Why You May Consider Catalyst: Catalyst is known for its user-friendly interface and ease-of-adoption by CS teams. It offers a suite of intuitive features, templates, and playbooks for CS teams when speed and productivity are top of mind.

Catalyst may be able to reduce the learning curve for teams new to CSPs.

Catalyst’s Limitations: While Catalyst offers all the essential features for your everyday CS team, it may lack some of the specialized functionalities that are available in more established platforms.

Additionally, the range of integrations offered by Catalyst may not be as extensive as other CSPs. This could lead to gaps in data collection and the need for manual data transfer. For example, there is no HubSpot integration, no revenue integrations, and NPS or surveying integrations.

Why It Could Be Better Than ChurnZero: If you’re a mid-market company looking for a CSP that is easy to use for workflow management, Catalyst could be a better fit than ChurnZero. Its intuitive design and features make it easier for your team to adopt and utilize the platform effectively.

Why Vitally Is The Top Alternative to ChurnZero

While ChurnZero has certainly made a name for itself in the Customer Success space, there are several reasons why some businesses would consider Vitally a better alternative more suited for their needs.

1. Time-to-Value (TTV): This is one of the most important metrics when it comes to onboarding new customers and helping them realize the ROI of a solution. In regards to ChurnZero, implementing and onboarding may take several months, compared to a streamlined process of getting up and running with Vitally.
2. Price Scaling: We mentioned this earlier, but ChurnZero is not as budget-friendly when your business starts to grow. In contrast, Vitally is literally built to scale alongside your business and CS team.
3. Integration Capabilities: Vitally has an extensive library of integrations to ensure your data plays well with its solution. On the other hand, ChurnZero is still playing catchup with its integrations. For example, they only have one data warehouse integration, and this was only added recently. You’ll want a solution that integrates with all your customer data sources to ensure you’re making data-driven decisions.

If you want to see the power of Vitally and everything it can offer your CS team, book a personalized demo of Vitally at your convenience.

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