G2 review insights

The pros and cons of top customer success platforms

Report by

Suprej Venkat, Director – Churn360
Selvaraaju Murugesan, Head of Data Science, Kovai.co
Vishaal Paraman, Senior SEO Specialist

The market for customer success platforms is expanding quickly as customer success becomes an even more critical component of business operations. Choosing the best platform for your company might be challenging, with many available options. We’ll explore various customer success platforms on G2 review, such as ChurnZero, Vitally, Catalyst, Custify, Planthat, and Totango, based on customer feedback that includes likes, dislikes, price differences, and market share details.

What is a Customer Success Platform?

The Customer Success Platform (CSP) is a software solution that helps organizations build customer relationships. These platforms’ tools and services often help organizations keep track of customer healthscore, upsell services, analyze consumer data, enhance the customer experience and retain more customers. Businesses can improve their overall customer experience, lower attrition, and increase their income through upselling opportunities using a customer success platform.

Purpose

The G2 research of customer success platforms offers several benefits for companies searching for the best platform to manage and optimize customer engagement and retention activities. The main purpose of this work is to compare Customer Success Platforms based on customer feedback received from G2 reviews and convey the findings.

Based on actual user comments and reviews, the study enables businesses to compare and assess various customer success platforms, revealing useful information about the pros and cons of each platform. This may help companies choose a platform that best suits their unique requirements.

Churn360 had done this analysis to understand the customer success market and what the customer success managers are looking for in a customer success platform. Using this analysis, our team has developed the product Churn360 Customer Success Managers want! We are now sharing this analysis with all of you so you can save hours reading the reviews on G2.

Data analysis approach

The methodology on how we did this analysis is briefed below

  • Data analysis: To identify trends and patterns, we applied basic mathematical techniques such as moving average, distribution and statistics
  • Text analysis: To identify the most commonly repeated words and phrases used in the reviews, we used a Bag of Words approach with Bi-gram. Then we created a word cloud representation of the most commonly used words and phrases, which helped determine each product’s most liked, disliked, and benefits. This information can be used to create more targeted marketing strategies and improve products to meet customers’ needs better.
 Customer Success approach

Insights

We analysed the data to determine how many reviews were submitted monthly and each year for each product. This helps to identify patterns or trends in customer behaviour and determine if specific months or years had more reviews than others.

Product name No of reviews
Vitally 300
Planhat 419
Catalyst 419
Custify 215
Totango 695
Churnzero 1006
  • We have undertaken data analysis and found out that Catalyst has been receiving more reviews, it has been in the market for the last 4 years compared to Churn zero, which has been in the market for more than 13 years!
  • All the vendors except Totango have got their maximum reviews submitted in 2022 which means the market is hotting up
  • Churnzero leads the YoY growth of the number of reviews submitted, and they have the highest number of reviews for the customer success platform category

We analysed the data to determine which market size (small business, mid-market, or enterprise) submitted the most reviews for each product. This helped identify trends and patterns specific to each market segment, which can be used to create targeted marketing strategies and improve products to meet each market segment’s needs better.

  • Almost 60% of G2 review for Vitally and Custify comes from small business (less than 50 employees)
  • About 55% of G2 reviews ChurnZero, Totango, and Catalyst come from Mid-market (51- 1000 employees)
  • The popular job title for Churnzero reviews is Customer Success Manager (similar roles), and there are many verified user reviews for Churnzero.

Different customer success platforms and their comparisons

Churnzero is a powerful customer success management software designed to help companies streamline customer engagement, improve retention rates, and reduce churn. It offers many features like email automation, data segmentation, and customer scoring to help companies better understand their customers and build stronger relationships.

Market share

Churnzero has a significant market share, with 55.9% of its users coming from the mid-market, 29.8% from SMBs, and 8.22% from enterprise-level companies. This makes Churnzero a popular choice for businesses of all sizes, a testament to its ease of use and effectiveness.

Likes

Churnzero is well-liked by its users for several reasons. Creating plays is a great feature that allows users to automate certain processes and workflows, saving them valuable time. Moreover, Churnzero is well-regarded for its customer success management features. Users have mentioned that Churnzero helps businesses track and manage customer interactions, build stronger customer relationships, and improve customer retention rates. Lastly, Churnzero provides great recommendations to its users, which can help businesses identify areas where they need to focus their attention and resources.

Benefits

Churnzero has many benefits, including its email automation feature, which allows businesses to send personalized messages to customers at the right time, increasing engagement and retention. Moreover, the software is designed to save time, which can be a significant advantage for customer success teams, often working with limited resources.

Dislikes

Churn zero

ChurnZero has established itself as a leading customer success platform. However, despite its popularity and many likes, ChurnZero also has some dislikes that must be addressed for better customer success.

Some users feel that one of the main issues is the need for more filtering capability in certain features. Users cannot select a specific date range, leading to inaccurate data analysis and hampered decision-making. ChurnZero’s pipeline can get stuck, slowing down workflows and impacting productivity.

Another user mentions that an area for improvement is integrating ChurnZero and Salesforce, a widely used customer relationship management platform. This can confuse and make it difficult for users to keep track of all accounts.

Users have also expressed concerns about the learning curve associated with the platform, particularly with the churn score hierarchy and reporting customization. Some find the user interface difficult to use or unappealing, while others suggest it needs updates and enhancements.

Users’ other minor inconveniences include time-consuming processes, redundant features, and difficulty with automation and contact list creation. Creating segments in ChurnZero can also be glitchy and counterintuitive, leading to inaccurate data analysis.

In conclusion, while ChurnZero is a popular customer success platform with many benefits and likes, it also has some dislikes that must be addressed for better customer success. By addressing these issues, ChurnZero can improve the user experience, increase data analysis accuracy, and boost business productivity.

Reference: Churnzero G2 Reviews


Vitally is a customer success tool created to assist businesses in boosting customer retention, lowering churn, and enhancing all-around customer pleasure. It has a substantial market share and is a well-liked product.

Market share

The customer success product Vitally has been widely adopted by mid-market and SMB businesses, with a market share of 44.3% and 52.7%, respectively. This makes the product withstand this competitor’s world.

Likes

Vitally has many likes in mid-market levels, such as Easy to Set Up and the straightforward implementation process. Users feel that the platform’s intuitive interface made it easy for them to navigate 360-degree views of their customers, allowing them to see all customer interactions and data in one place. Customizable Filters, Health Score Features, and Support Team to the users.

Benefits

According to the business, these adjustments significantly increased the Vitally customer success product’s efficacy. It was simpler for users to use and comprehend, which resulted in higher usage and acceptance rates. The product’s characteristics also improved intuitiveness, which increased output and efficiency. Users could get up to speed more rapidly because of the better onboarding procedure, which increased customer retention rates.

Dislikes

Vitally has a successful history of customer success platform even though it has some dislikes to be addressed:

Users of Vitally have reported some challenges with the product, including a steep learning curve due to the complex vocabulary and user interface. Setting up and understanding all the features can be overwhelming; some users desire more onboarding resources.

Additionally, some users feel that custom fields and reports can be complicated. Navigating the tool during the initial setup can also be difficult and time-consuming. The UI could be clearer, making it easier to transition to intermediate use. Others report issues with crashes when copying and pasting and difficulty accessing certain information.

Users suggest improvements such as more fine-grained role-based access control, sophisticated email design, starter templates for different use cases, better targeting and triggering for playbooks with nested rules, and more complicated success metric calculations.

In conclusion, Customer success is critical for any business, and a product like Vitally can help businesses achieve this goal. By addressing user dislikes, Vitally can improve the product’s effectiveness, increasing adoption, better customer retention, and overall business success.

Reference: Vitally G2 Reviews


Planhat is a customer success platform that helps businesses streamline and optimize their customer success processes. It helps the mid- marketers to retain their customers and to keep track of them.

Market share

Planhat’s market share is distributed as 53.5% in the mid-market segment, 36.5% in SMB, and 9.07% in the enterprise space, indicating its strong presence in mid-market and SMB segments and some growth in the enterprise market.

Likes

Users of Planhat gave positive feedback on its features, such as key performance indicators (KPIs) for measuring customer success, a simple and intuitive interface, Responsive support, Process organization, and email response tracking.

Benefits

Planhat has several benefits to improve its customer success strategies. Understanding customer success strategies helps businesses track and analyze customer data more effectively. Management transparency works in a unified way ensuring that all stakeholders can work successfully. Overview results which allow the customers to view the metrics. Task management is standardized, while renewal tracking ensures businesses can stay on top of customer renewals.

SaaS Customer Success

Dislikes

Planhat is a powerful platform, but users report various challenges, including a steep learning curve, lack of user-friendliness, bugs, and performance issues. Some users find it overwhelming to set up their own views and reports, customize features, and master formulas.

Some users feel that Planhat lacks training and community resources compared to larger competitors, and the auto-saving feature is not available, leading to frustration when notes are lost. Users report uncertainty about the best KPIs to measure the Health Score and find Health Score modeling to be complex, depending on how well the metrics are declared during integration.

Users have also reported that certain processes can be less straightforward and manual, such as cleaning up user data, which can be time-consuming due to previously unclean CRM data. Some users have reported performance issues and difficulties with functionality, and certain pages take a long time to load, requiring reloading or refreshing.

Most customers mention that they had to take more time to configure Planhat due to ambiguous dev docs, and chat support took a long time to answer. Some users see the NPS module in Planhat as limited and complicated, and customization and analysis functionality are lacking.

The customer portal also needs enhancements to be more user-friendly, as the main dislikes mentioned are related to the limitations and lack of customization in the customer-facing portal. Users feel that the portal’s customization options are limited and impractical, making it difficult to create a professional-looking portal.

There is also room for improvement in terms of user-friendliness for some features and functionality. Some users want more tracking and reporting options for sending campaigns and analyzing data with graphs and indicators.

In conclusion, Planhat is a customer success platform with benefits such as great KPIs, an easy-to-use interface, modern design, process organization, and responsive support. It also offers management transparency, standardized playbooks, renewal tracking, unlimited user model, and visibility of the client portfolio. Although there are some identified areas for improvement, such as the complexity of the learning curve, UI glitches, bugs, and limitations in the customer-facing portal, Planhat continues to gain market share in the mid-market and SMB segments, indicating its strong presence in the customer success space.

Reference: Planhat G2 Reviews


Totango is a platform for customer success that provides several advantages, such as accessibility, simple client account tracking, scalable workflows, and efficient KPI administration. To be sure, Totango has its drawbacks and room for growth, just like any other platform, according to user feedback. We will concentrate on the complaints people have about Totango in this case study.

Market share

Totango has a market share of 54.3% in the mid-market segment, 22.8% in the SMB segment, and 16.1% in the enterprise segment, making it a major player in the customer success platform market.

Likes

Users report that Totango’s intuitive and open platform offers a range of advantages and features, such as customizable workflows that boost the effectiveness of customer success operations, KPIs that facilitate effective team management and data-driven decision-making, and the capacity to record use case conversations, which gives businesses a useful resource for upcoming interactions with their customers.

Benefits

Totango offers benefits like increased productivity, greater data collection, and the capacity to record use case discussions. Its platform is simple to use, open to customization, and supports automated and human workflow adjustments. Totango’s KPIs improve team management, allowing organizations to monitor progress and make informed decisions. Totango’s capacity to capture and archive client discussions offers a useful resource for subsequent interactions.

Dislikes

totango dislikes

Some users reported that the billing system occasionally displays inaccurate renewal information, which can be a frustrating experience. However, despite this occasional bug, the billing system still provides invaluable business services.

While Totango offers useful business services, users have reported a steep learning curve associated with the platform. Understanding the data structure, configuring views, and mapping success plays can be particularly challenging. Some users also find the user interface unintuitive and the terminology confusing, which can be especially difficult for those accustomed to other customer success platforms like Salesforce.

One aspect that users dislike about Totango is the lack of flexibility and accuracy in health scores. The difficulty in tracking churned accounts and the confusing terminology used in Totango can frustrate users. Suggestions for improvement include the ability to weight health score metrics, more customization options, and the automation of the campaign management process. Users have also reported bugs in the system affecting account-level views and health scores.

The platform is not very user-friendly and can overwhelm new users, especially in modules like Forecasting. Glitches and trouble configuring the system have also been reported. The mobile app is not very intuitive, further adding to the platform’s difficulty.

Reporting and task features in Totango are limited, making it difficult to get an overall picture of campaigns and set tasks on an account level. Some users have also experienced bugs and limited customization options when working on email campaigns. The process of sending email notifications can also be improved, with users wishing for more notifications for overdue tasks and a simpler notification process.

Users have reported that the platform can be time-consuming due to bugs, time-consuming processes, and limited customization options. Some users have also suggested that data integration from more sources could be increased. They would like to see more open note fields and better email notifications for task completion.

Reference: Totango G2 Reviews


Catalyst is a customer success tool that helps businesses keep track of client interactions, stay organized, and successfully manage time. Catalyst has built a commanding presence in the mid-market space and is well known for its intuitive user interface and specialized customer success manager (CSM) solution. Let’s look at how Catalyst can overcome these drawbacks and achieve its full potential.

Market share

Catalyst’s market share is significant, with a 69% hold in the mid-market, 13.7% in SMBs, and 8.65% in enterprises. These numbers indicate that Catalyst has a strong presence in the customer success platform market, particularly in the mid-market segment, which is the largest market segment for Catalyst.

Likes

Catalyst has serval advantages for the platform’s user-friendly interface and simple navigation. Users have reported that the platform’s ability to synchronize the customer lifecycle for a 360-degree view and the configurable CSM tool have both been shown to enhance adoption rates. Additionally, users mention that Catalyst aids client retention, enhances data management, and offers a better understanding of health and risk tracking. These likes show how Catalyst may help businesses better manage their client connections and customer success initiatives.

Benefits

Catalyst provides its users with a number of features. They can better manage their time, stay organized, and maintain tabs on client interactions. Additionally, the platform offers a health score that aids users in understanding the condition of their client connections. Users have found Catalyst to be intuitive and simple to use, though there may be a little learning curve initially.

Dislikes

catalyst

The integration with Salesforce can make adding contacts a challenge for some users of the Catalyst platform. While the product roadmap includes some missing features, such as those available in other CRM tools, users have reported minor glitches and slow performance issues, particularly when working with notes. Notes may not be saved correctly or disappear altogether, causing frustration.

Other features that some users have identified as lacking in the Catalyst platform include the ability to co-edit notes in real-time, the ability to import historical notes and tasks from other platforms, and a lack of Google Calendar integration. Users have also noted limitations with task automation and customer segmentation.

Additionally, advanced email functionality and user-level access restrictions are needed. Users would like to see calculated fields within the app to track certain metrics and improve integration with other software, which is already on the product roadmap.

Although some users have found the Catalyst platform confusing to use at times, with certain features not being immediately apparent or difficult to find, most users found the platform intuitive and easy to navigate after a slight learning curve.

In conclusion, while some users have reported dislikes with Catalyst, the platform can overcome these challenges by prioritizing the development of missing features, improving performance and stability, and providing more comprehensive training and support. By doing so, Catalyst can maximize its benefits and continue to be a valuable tool for companies to manage their customer relationships.

Reference: Catalyst Software G2 Reviews


Custify is a potent customer success tool that aids companies in increasing revenue, decreasing churn, and improving customer retention. Custify allows users to track usage data, identify consumer threats, and automate procedures to enhance customer success strategies.

Market share

Custify has a notable market share, with 64.7% in the SMB segment, 26.5% in the mid-market, and 3.26% in the enterprise market. These numbers suggest that Custify is a popular choice among small and medium-sized businesses, with a smaller presence in the mid-market and enterprise segments.

 Customer Success market

Likes

Custify has many features that users appreciate, such as the easy identification of risk levels (high, medium, and low), which helps users prioritize their efforts. Custify’s integration with CRMs and user-friendly navigation make it a popular business choice. The platform’s churn understanding features, as well as its usage statistics and easy-to-build tasks, are additional benefits that contribute to its popularity among users.

Benefits

Custify offers various benefits to its users, such as the ability to run campaigns, send notification alerts, and automate tasks. It also provides users with access to a dedicated customer success manager to help them achieve their goals. The platform’s 360 view feature allows users to view all customer interactions and activities in one place, enabling them to understand their customers and identify trends for improving customer success efforts.

Dislike

Custify provides several functionalities, but some users have reported minor issues that could be improved.

Users want more integration with tools such as Zoom, CRM, and billing tools. Some users find that the UI and setting up health scores can be complicated. The task management feature needs

improvement and is not as flexible as other dedicated task management software, leading some users to continue using separate software for this purpose.

The main dislike among users is that Custify could be more intuitive, especially in email template customization and prompting users for specific actions. Some data points may require scrolling within the customer profile. Users experienced a learning curve when initially using Custify, with some acronyms being difficult to understand. Building playbooks and lifecycles to produce the desired outcome can also be complicated, and some aspects of the UI/UX feel clumsy.

Some users have reported issues with bugs and the UI/UX not being as intuitive as possible. While Custify has several functionalities, there is still room for improvement in terms of integrations, health scores, task management, and UI/UX. Despite these issues, Custify still provides a valuable service to its users.

In conclusion, Custify has gained significant market share in the mid-market and SMB segments due to its powerful platform. Users appreciate its easy identification of risk and increased CRMs. However, the platform’s task management feature, learning curve, and UI/UX can be improved for better usability.

Reference: Custify G2 Reviews


Wrapping up

The G2 Market Analysis report provides insights into the customer success platform market. It highlights key players, their market share, and strengths/weaknesses. The report also includes user feedback, emphasizing the importance of these platforms for improving customer relationships and retention rates. It’s a valuable resource for businesses looking to select the right platform or understand the market.

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