Gist vs. Kustomer

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Gist
Score 9.5 out of 10
N/A
Gist is a unified marketing, sales, and support platform. It includes live chat, a help desk, knowledge base, email marketing, marketing automation, opt-in forms, and more.
$29
per month
Kustomer
Score 8.7 out of 10
N/A
Kustomer is a customer service CRM platform built for managing high support volume by optimizing experiences throughout the customer service journey. Kustomer was acquired by Facebook in late 2020, but spun out in 2023 and re-launched as an independent entity, Kustomer, LLC.
$89
per month, per user
Pricing
GistKustomer
Editions & Modules
Professional
$29.00
per month
Premium
$99.00
per month
Enterprise
$89
per month, per user
Ultimate
$139
per month, per user
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
GistKustomer
Free Trial
YesNo
Free/Freemium Version
YesNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsAll plans require an annual subscription and 8 users minimum.
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
GistKustomer
Considered Both Products
Gist
Chose Gist
Gist is a much more robust software with a variety of marketing tools in its arsenal. Things like website tracking is also extremely robust and it has many more features.

The ease of setup is also more enjoyable and intuitive in Gist so the overall result is that you can learn …
Chose Gist
Gist is much more affordable, but intercom is a better product. I recommend going for Gist to begin, and then migrating if you need more.
Chose Gist
Gist is more refined and its tools are very well integrated overall. However, its pricing is on the expensive side and this doesn't really help it stand-out. HubSpot has significantly more generous Free plan, while Dashly offers many of the Premium Gist tools at a fairer price, …
Chose Gist
My main use for Gist is live chat. I personally find their live chat to be one of the best, and their mobile app to be invaluable for small businesses on the go. I can receive and response to messages wherever I am, which is imperative for my use case.
Chose Gist
Intercom increases its price on a monthly basis. Besides they don't offer some features as Gist, specially about on forms.
We think Gist is targeted to SMB companies, differentially from Intercom that seems to be appropriate for larger companies.
One main difference between then …
Chose Gist
Gist is only a few years old, so it lacks some of the features of Drip and ActiveCampaign, but I believe they will get there.
Chose Gist
Hubspot and Salesforce are great and powerful, they are just so much more expensive than what I need.
Chose Gist
We went with Gist because it had the features we needed at a price we liked. The feature list has grown over time, which is really appreciated. We joined Gist a long time ago (it was still called ConvertFox back then) and have been happy customers for a long time. Happy with …
Chose Gist
Gist is much more than a basic mailing list system with chatbot integration and automation that connects you to your prospects in real-time live from your website.
Administering your contacts on Gist is much easier with less hassle.
And Gist can integrate with most of the major …
Chose Gist
Gist is slightly slower than ActiveCampaign but MUCH easier to use than Mailchimp. Overall, you can't beat the bang for the buck you get with Gist. And its messenger bot is the best I've used, it works on not only our main site but also our subdomains, kicking the competition …
Chose Gist
We've used Dashly and Tawk.to. Gist looks better than Tawk and that's the reason we switched from Tawk to Gist. But the feature that puts Gist above Dashly is the ability to collect user names and emails before they start the chat automatically. It is important for our business …
Chose Gist
They both seem to have parity with each other with each having their own small advantages. I went with Gist because it was more affordable.

Infusionsoft customer for almost 5 years and it seemed I was always working more on getting it to work instead of getting work done. Gist …
Chose Gist
Gist is better because easy of use and pricing. Hands down. It has an unbeatable cost-benefit ratio. Customer service has been with us since we started using it. That's great. For us, shortcomings such as no CRM are manageable. We like its front end appearance and customization …
Chose Gist
Gist is my first email and chat multi-purpose automated SAAS tool so can't really comment on others I've tried. They came recommended to me by an entrepreneurial group I am a member of. Anecdotally I evaluated it against ActiveCampaign and Mailchimp and it was far better in …
Chose Gist
Gist a more integrated and unified product for Sass companies. Some competitors don't have strong chat + email automation + help desk. Other competitors have the features, but they are not well integrated. Gist has integrated complete customer contact with a very finished …
Chose Gist
Gist is much more complete than other tools like Crisp, Customerly, etc, at a cheaper price. The perfect deal for your business.
Chose Gist
Having a support ticket system is good and will help you resolve issues but, having an all-in-one tool that can let you not only resolve an issue but also to go above and beyond with customer support that later on translates into sales is priceless. That is the kind of tool …
Chose Gist
You can do everything you can with AC or Mailchimp (minus dynamic cart recovery for ecom) at a fraction of the cost, and you can do MORE -- better integration with FB ads than MailChimp, more powerful workflows, unified inboxes, live chat and chatbot, etc. It's just a more …
Chose Gist
I have a lifetime deal with Gist so I may be a bit biased, but Gist is quite easy to use and has a free tier so it's worth a serious look compared to the other players on the market. Personal preference does play a big role in your final decision, as feature-wise, Gist has most …
Chose Gist
Intercom was pricy and less user-friendly in comparison to Gist. It did have a broader range of features that we could use in our plan. However, we didn't see any return of investment in having many features to choose from if the price was too high for what was being offered at …
Kustomer
Chose Kustomer
I think that Kustomer is the most user friendly BUT I think the other platforms are built to do a lot more and can be much more customized
Chose Kustomer
I find it baffling how little data can be stored or associated with a customer in many other systems, and how difficult that can be to set up. It is fine if you already have a robust CDP that you can hook up and use to power your CRM, but it is rare that an organization has the …
Chose Kustomer
It has improved a lot of the training time needed for our new hires to understand the Kustomer interface and how to handle communications fully. The time invested went significantly down, and the learning curve improved a lot as well.
Chose Kustomer
Apps like Intercom, Zendesk, and Gorgios all treat customer inquiries as tickets, just tracking that one issue or interaction with a customer. Kustomer treats each customer as an individual, which allows us to provide top-notch customer service. Customers love that we're able …
Chose Kustomer
Kustomer is more modern and capable of so much more any of my other systems have compared to in technical support customer interfaces.
Chose Kustomer
Kustomer is a great fit for our organization because we can cut down on multiple contacts from the same customer and see all their information in one place. It's also infinitely customizable, so if we need changes made we can make them while still using the same platform. This …
Chose Kustomer
Kustomer is different from slack since Slack is just for communicating with the whole team while Kustomer is more on communicating with our customers.
Chose Kustomer
I have never used anything besides Kustomer and I don't know if I ever will because Kustomer is just so helpful!!
Chose Kustomer
The UI of Kustomer is a lot cooler than what we are using before. There are a lot of features that Kustomer has that make things easier and more convenient than Desk.com.
Chose Kustomer
I use both in my role with the company. Our social media channels are managed through Khoros, but we use Kustomer to notate and contact customers outside of social media. I'd much rather bring our social media channels into Kustomer, to help with efficiency.
Chose Kustomer
I have not had any experience with other programs like Kustomer.
Chose Kustomer
Kustomer has a great team that is easy to work with. They are always there to support and are pleasant, as well.
Chose Kustomer
Zendesk: In my opinion, Kustomer is more powerful when used to its full potential due to its workflows/automations.
Chose Kustomer
Kustomer is far more intuitive, personal, and holistic than Zendesk. As a company who has a lot of interaction with a single customer, it is such an advantage to take the customer approach rather than a single ticket approach. Zendesk was very limited in a lot of the actions …
Chose Kustomer
All other systems I have used have been internally-made programs that were a lot more basic order-taking systems, no notes or call functions outside of when order was placed. Doesn't really compare here.
Chose Kustomer
Kustomer simply does more than any other platform I've been able to work with. Sure some others will give you a handful of neat tricks built in for managing a channel or two but those rarely offer any external integrative capacity or limit what you can do in connections. …
Chose Kustomer
Intercom, Kayako, Zendesk, Freshdesk have all been used by myself in the past, and were evaluated before we chose to go with Kustomer.
Chose Kustomer
I was not personally involved in the decision-making process when selecting a new CRM and ultimately settling on Kustomer. That said, I'm happy with the decision to partner with them. Compared to our previous CRMs, it is much easier to work with everything in one place and we …
Chose Kustomer
Kustomer was better suited to the personalized nature of the service that we're trying to provide.
Chose Kustomer
Glovo was using Zendesk before. Kustomer is much more flexible in terms of integration capabilities and customisation.
Chose Kustomer
Moving from Zendesk to Kustomer was driven by the clarity that the customer timeline brings for advocate engagement alongside the custom workflow abilities.
Chose Kustomer
Zendesk did not give a big picture of the customer. It was more of a ticketing platform, and only gave statistics of those conversations. We were unable to track customer sentiment, or other attributes of the customer.
Chose Kustomer
Kustomer is far more scalable and flexible than Zendesk, and it provides a real omni-channel experience far from the "Zendesk for mails, Zendesk chat for chats" we were used to. On the automation and customisation features, it gets even clearer how Kustomer can deal with a lot …
Chose Kustomer
I've used Desk and other platforms in the past and none of them are as interactive or user friendly as Kustomer.
Features
GistKustomer
Chat Analytics and Reports
Comparison of Chat Analytics and Reports features of Product A and Product B
Gist
8.9
Ratings
3% above category average
Kustomer
-
Ratings
Chat history and transcripts8.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Chat reporting8.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Chat and web analytics8.90 Ratings00 Ratings
Incident and problem management
Comparison of Incident and problem management features of Product A and Product B
Gist
-
Ratings
Kustomer
8.1
Ratings
1% above category average
Organize and prioritize service tickets00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Expert directory00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Subscription-based notifications00 Ratings8.50 Ratings
ITSM collaboration and documentation00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Ticket creation and submission00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Ticket response00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Self Help Community
Comparison of Self Help Community features of Product A and Product B
Gist
-
Ratings
Kustomer
8.5
Ratings
8% above category average
External knowledge base00 Ratings8.00 Ratings
Internal knowledge base00 Ratings9.00 Ratings
Multi-Channel Help
Comparison of Multi-Channel Help features of Product A and Product B
Gist
-
Ratings
Kustomer
8.0
Ratings
3% above category average
Customer portal00 Ratings8.60 Ratings
IVR00 Ratings8.30 Ratings
Social integration00 Ratings7.30 Ratings
Email support00 Ratings10.00 Ratings
Help Desk CRM integration00 Ratings6.00 Ratings
Best Alternatives
GistKustomer
Small Businesses
Olark
Olark
Score 10.0 out of 10
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Genesys DX (discontinued)
Genesys DX (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Agiloft Service Desk (discontinued)
Score 9.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Genesys DX (discontinued)
Genesys DX (discontinued)
Score 10.0 out of 10
SysAid
SysAid
Score 9.1 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
GistKustomer
Likelihood to Recommend
9.5
(0 ratings)
9.0
(0 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.2
(0 ratings)
7.9
(0 ratings)
Usability
6.7
(0 ratings)
10.0
(0 ratings)
Availability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
6.4
(0 ratings)
Support Rating
8.6
(0 ratings)
9.4
(0 ratings)
In-Person Training
-
(0 ratings)
7.6
(0 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
8.3
(0 ratings)
Implementation Rating
-
(0 ratings)
7.9
(0 ratings)
Configurability
-
(0 ratings)
7.9
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
7.2
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
-
(0 ratings)
8.7
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
-
(0 ratings)
9.1
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
GistKustomer
Likelihood to Recommend
Gist is perfect for SaaS I'd say, and perfect for long sales cycles with lots of lead nurturing involved, and for scenarios where you re-market via FB ads, because there's FB custom audience integration built into the workflows. Perfect for customer service and support. Really outstanding there. It's a little less suited to ecom but they're hammering out the finishing touches to make ecom cart recovery easier.
Read full review
It works really well for you to ask a teammate to review a case/email/message and provide some input since you can all review the same conversations and client accounts. They can also cover your inbox using your email handle in case you are out of the office suing some well deserved PTO.
Read full review
Pros
  • Gist provides endless ways of interacting with customers. I can chat and email with them, track their usage on my site, qualify them, add tags and other profile information, and so much more.
  • There is even an awesome live view that lets me spy on visitors to see how they're using the site.
  • The tools are powerful, easy to use, and constantly getting improvements. It seems like every week there is another update being rolled out that substantially extends the functionality or usability of the features in Gist.
Read full review
  • All customer data (past orders, communication with customer service, rewards account data) is in one place. This helps agents avoid confusion and reduces the number of tabs they need to open.
  • The Knowledge Base (or K Base) is very helpful. Any time we roll out a new policy or have a limited-time promotion, we can add all the relevant information and worksheets there for the convenience of the agents. That way they can stay in a chat while looking up the answer to a question.
  • We can seamlessly move from chat into email if the customer leaves or the queue times are too long. All the interactions will stay on the customer profile page, so they are kept up to date.
Read full review
Cons
  • Free plan limits are too low.
  • Chatbots should work not only for Gist's native online chat, but also for the other chat-based channels such as Facebook. (instead of having to use another software for that purpose)
  • Pricing structure - Support bot should not be an add-on but a core feature.
Read full review
  • For our team, the feature that defaults all notes to begin in "done" status is difficult. Throughout each day we need to have notes open and assigned back and forth to different teams, and we have to remember to manually "open" each note. There is too much room for human error with this setting, and it is easy for important notes to be missed if a user forgets to open the note.
  • Similarly, it can be hard to remember to assign emails/notes to a particular team in addition to a user. We almost exclusively work out of team inboxes, and if someone on Care writes an email to a customer, the email will automatically be "done" when it is created, and it will be assigned to the user who wrote it, but not also to the user's team. There are instances where an email needs to be snoozed for several days/hours with further action needed, and unless the user remembers to assign the email to their team it may "awake" from the snooze and not be visible to anyone except the user who created it. Similarly to my first comment, this leaves a lot of room for human error and is not very intuitive.
  • Personally, I do not love that all tickets/emails/notes are jumbled together in the same inbox. While this gives visibility to everything on the "to do" list at the same time, it can be visually overwhelming. We have created unique folders for certain types of projects or categories of work, but have experienced tech glitches or just the awkwardness of another step to manually read the note, determine what type of category it is, and then manually assign it to another folder. Would love to have things auto-sort and take out this manual lift.
  • I love the idea of the autopilot setting, but we have not been able to use this for our work because it sorts items based on time, and not based on priority. In our line of work, we may have an urgent situation arise that needs attention before an email that was sent in 60 minutes ago. The autopilot feature would push the email to my associates sooner than it would the urgent situation from 5 minutes ago. Due to this, we manually monitor inboxes and assign work to ourselves and others.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Gist is a quite reliable service with a lot of added values. We don't need to pay for different Saas for these important features. If I had an issue the team was super responsive and helpful, that is essential for every business. The email delivery is great, so virtually no email has landed into spam folder
Read full review
Because there's no other tool like Kustomer
Read full review
Usability
Gist does pretty much anything you want it to when it comes to managing your contacts. Sometimes I wish it updated faster, but wait a few beats and it gets there. I really love that I can show a colleague how to use the chat messenger and they understand it right away. Very user friendly!
Read full review
There is a learning curve, but it is more than worth it, especially to have a dedicated resource pointed at Kustomer and any other software it interacts with. The basic implementation is useful, and powerful - certainly a MASSIVE upgrade over taking care of your customers in an email inbox or shuffling between multiple windows and applications! It is also set up really well to grow and reconfigure with your business. I'm a big fan.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
No answers on this topic
Because Kustomer is available when you need it
Read full review
Performance
No answers on this topic
Because ages load quickly, reports complete in a reasonable time frame, given their complexity
Read full review
Support Rating
I have communicated with their team multiple times and every time they have been very responsive, knowledgeable, and polite. They work to make sure you are happy and informed of what is going on. Better their team keeps up to date with their app, giving you new features, and keeping you notified and educated about what they are and how to use them. A+
Read full review
It’s a great tool that has helped our company and overall customer service. I believe if we were able to edit certain setting for our specific company that would be hopeful. We have been told before that certain desires of ours would make a change throughout all of Kustomer. Which is not something we would want, we would just want that to change for our business.
Read full review
In-Person Training
No answers on this topic
Because they are very hands-on in training us and very approachable
Read full review
Online Training
No answers on this topic
It was very easy to understand.
Read full review
Implementation Rating
No answers on this topic
Nothing really because it is easy to use. After an hour of using it, we're already getting the hang of it.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
They both seem to have parity with each other with each having their own small advantages. I went with Gist because it was more affordable. Infusionsoft customer for almost 5 years and it seemed I was always working more on getting it to work instead of getting work done. Gist is so intuitive I had it setting up and running the basics in a few hours.
Read full review
I find it baffling how little data can be stored or associated with a customer in many other systems, and how difficult that can be to set up. It is fine if you already have a robust CDP that you can hook up and use to power your CRM, but it is rare that an organization has the resources or the customer-focus to rally behind setting up their customer service/experience team up for success. With a platform like Kustomer, you can actually evolve the relationship over time, or use the past experiences (number of contacts, purchases, previous issues, etc.) to power your next steps with a customer, making for a much more nuanced relationship with a human, not just a ticket.
Read full review
Scalability
No answers on this topic
Because customer is flexible and scalable
Read full review
Return on Investment
  • Our ROI has increased significantly because of Gist's chat and app integration into our website. Contact forms are great but a real-time conversation means you can be more effective in meeting your customer's needs.
  • The additional features in the recent upgrade mean we can use Gist for more. They have always been effective for email campaigns, but the addition of the knowledge base and more effective workflows means we can automate more. This has saved us from buying more software.
Read full review
  • We’re getting so much positive feedback — which is not something you traditionally associate with a customer care team — because we’re making it effortless for customers to deliver both positive and negative feedback, and we can now resolve the bad feedback really really quickly.
  • Primarily from our increased efficiency with Kustomer, we’ve seen a significant reduction of $3 to $4 for every cost per contact.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Gist Screenshots

Screenshot of Live ChatScreenshot of Email MarketingScreenshot of Marketing Automation WorkflowsScreenshot of Knowledge BaseScreenshot of Meetings

Kustomer Screenshots

Screenshot of Example of a customer profile within Kustomer.Screenshot of Example of how Kustomer’s automated chats can save agents time by handling less complex requests automatically.