Gainsight vs Totango vs Churnzero

For Customer Success and post-sales professionals, managing accounts without a dedicated Customer Success platform often means dealing with challenges like:

• Scattered data across multiple tools
  
• Relying on spreadsheets and manual tracking
  
• Missed renewal and expansion opportunities
  
• Limited visibility into customer health
  
• Difficulty showing impact to leadership

To solve these problems, many teams turn to platforms like Gainsight, Totango, and ChurnZero. And now, more modern options like Velaris bring AI, automation, and simpler setup into the picture.

Let’s compare Gainsight, Totango, and ChurnZero, while also showing how Velaris stacks up as a strong alternative.

Comparing Gainsight vs Totango vs ChurnZero vs Velaris

*Exact pricing varies by vendor and contract structure.

Platform overviews

Gainsight

Gainsight is one of the most established names in Customer Success software. It offers advanced reporting, playbooks, and customizable health scoring. However, it is also known for its complexity and cost, often requiring a dedicated operations team to manage the platform effectively.

For large enterprises with significant resources, Gainsight can deliver powerful capabilities. For smaller teams, the operational overhead can become a barrier.

Totango

Totango is built around a modular structure, offering different products that teams can combine based on their needs. It’s known for its customer journey mapping and templates that help standardize workflows. While flexible, Totango can feel fragmented at times and may require significant setup to get the most out of it. It’s often a fit for mid-market or enterprise teams that have the resources to configure and maintain the system.

ChurnZero

ChurnZero is a Customer Success platform designed to help teams manage the customer journey end-to-end. It includes features like customer health scoring, playbooks, in-app messaging, and journey mapping. While powerful, ChurnZero can take time to configure and may require ongoing admin effort to fully leverage its automation capabilities. It’s often chosen by mid-market companies looking to strengthen their digital Customer Success programs.

Velaris

Velaris takes an AI-first approach, combining predictive insights, automation, and 70+ integrations into a single platform. It’s designed to give teams real-time visibility into customer health while reducing manual workload. Compared to Totango and ChurnZero, Velaris is built for mid-market and enterprise teams that want advanced capabilities without the burden of heavy admin, balancing usability with power. However, SMB organizations may find Velaris too complex for their needs.

Data consolidation and visibility

• Gainsight: Strong integrations with enterprise systems and advanced dashboards. Data hygiene and system maintenance may be complex and require admin oversight.
• Totango: Offers modular tools for journey mapping and segmentation. A large number of integrations are available.
• ChurnZero: Integrates with CRMs and product data sources to provide customer insights. Offers journey mapping, though configuration can be time-intensive.‍
• Velaris: Designed for real-time visibility with AI features such as account summaries, Slack summaries and meeting analysis, making it easier for teams to see the full customer picture. Supports 70+ integrations and deep customization.

Customer health and analytics

• Gainsight: Known for detailed analytics and customizable health scoring, but maintaining these systems often demands dedicated resources.
• Totango: Offers customer health scoring and reporting. AI predictions are available through their Unison platform as a separate offering.
• ChurnZero: Provides health scoring features and customizable analytics with flexible configuration options.‍
• Velaris: Includes AI-driven health scores and predictive analytics. Analyzes both quantitative data and qualitative data from customer communications (tickets, emails, messages) to identify recurring themes and patterns.

Digital Customer Success and automation

• Gainsight: Offers robust playbooks, journey orchestration, and communication tools.
• Totango: Offers playbooks and journey-based automation. Good for structuring repeatable workflows.
• ChurnZero: Known for its digital CS capabilities, including playbooks, in-app messaging, and automated journeys. ‍
• Velaris: Uses a visual automation builder and AI tools to automate routine tasks, build repeatable playbooks flows, and personalize outreach at scale. Built to reduce manual admin work while scaling CS impact.

Project and task management

• Gainsight: Provides a highly structured, operations-led approach to managing customer work. Its CTA- and playbook-driven model standardizes how teams respond to customer signals, while Success Plans and Timeline create visibility and accountability across accounts.
• Totango: Tasks, touchpoints, and shareable Success Plans enable both internal and customer-facing coordination, making it effective for teams that want structured collaboration
• ChurnZero: Emphasizes action-oriented coordination rather than traditional project management. Plays, Journeys, and task automation help teams respond quickly to customer signals, while Slack and Teams integrations extend collaboration beyond the CS team.‍
• Velaris: Features built-in project and task management with collaborative workspaces (Canvases) for coordinating renewals, onboarding, and success plans.

Other considerations

Ease of use

• Gainsight: Feature-rich but complex. Most teams require a dedicated admin or ops team.‍
• Totango: Offers templates to simplify setup, but its modular design can feel fragmented. Some learning curve is expected.‍
• ChurnZero: Offers many features but can feel clunky to navigate. Setup and management often require admin resources, which can slow down adoption.‍
• Velaris: Prioritizes simplicity with intuitive dashboards and automation. Designed to reduce admin overhead and get teams up and running quickly.

Scalability

• Gainsight: Built for enterprise scale and complex data structures.‍
• Totango: Scales with additional modules, though this can create complexity as you grow.‍
• ChurnZero: Scales for mid-market companies but managing the platform can become cumbersome as processes expand.‍
• Velaris: Scales with mid-market and enterprise teams by combining AI, automation, and integrations, without requiring heavy customization.

Integrations

• Gainsight: Gainsight offers a mature, enterprise-grade integration ecosystem designed to centralize customer data from multiple systems. Its architecture supports complex data environments, though implementations often require structured governance and technical oversight.
• Totango: Provides reliable integrations across core customer success tools, helping teams unify customer data without heavy operational lift. Its approach prioritizes faster deployment and usability over deep architectural customization.
• ChurnZero: Integrates with major CRMs and customer data systems.‍
• Velaris: Offers 70+ integrations with real-time sync, aiming to make setup easier and reduce silos.

Support

• Gainsight: Enterprise-grade support and community resources, though navigating them can take time.‍
• Totango: Provides documentation and customer support, though users sometimes note delays for complex issues.‍
• ChurnZero: Provides robust support for enterprise customers, but smaller teams often report receiving less hands-on attention.‍
• Velaris: Emphasizes a hands-on approach with personalized onboarding and responsive support. Dedicated CSM and Slack channel offered to all customers.

AI Innovation

• Gainsight, Totango, and ChurnZero have rolled out AI products by means of acquisition. However, these products are not part of their core Customer Success offering and need to be purchased separately.
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• Velaris is an AI-first platform that has built AI into the foundations of their core offering. For Customer Success teams, this translates into AI that feels seamless, actionable, and accessible without needing to buy extra products or manage disconnected tools.

To see how Velaris’ AI can help your workflows, book a demo here.

Implementation

• Gainsight: 6 months minimum implementation time
• Totango: 4-12 weeks
• ChurnZero: 4-12 weeks
• Velaris: 4-8 weeks

Pricing

• Gainsight: Gainsight does not publish list pricing publicly and generally sells through a tailored enterprise quote. For large deployments, total costs commonly run into six figures annually for full customer success suites, reflecting its enterprise focus
• Totango, ChurnZero and Velaris follow a largely quote-based pricing model, making direct comparisons difficult without evaluating specific requirements. In practice, their pricing tends to fall within a similar range for organizations of comparable size, with costs typically influenced by factors such as seat count, feature access, integrations, and level of support.

Choosing the right platform

Who should pick Gainsight

Gainsight is ideal for large enterprises with complex Customer Success operations, significant budgets, and the ability to support a dedicated ops function.

Who should pick Totango

Totango is a strong fit for teams that prioritize flexibility and want the ability to tailor their Customer Success workflows to their operating model. Its modular approach allows organizations to adopt capabilities progressively, supporting solid journey management and automation as needs evolve. While this structure may require some initial configuration, it also gives teams greater control over how the platform scales alongside their processes.

Who should pick ChurnZero

ChurnZero works for mid-market companies that want detailed journey mapping and strong digital CS capabilities. However, it can feel clunky to use and requires dedicated effort to manage effectively. High-touch support is typically reserved for enterprise customers, so smaller teams may find themselves with less guidance.

Who should consider Velaris

Velaris is designed for mid-market and enterprise teams looking to centralize customer data, leverage AI-driven insights, and automate key Customer Success workflows. With a broad integration ecosystem and guided onboarding support, the platform aims to help teams scale efficiently while keeping configuration relatively manageable. As with many modern platforms, organizations with highly complex or deeply customized processes may still require some upfront planning to fully tailor the system to their needs. You can dive deeper into Velaris’ functionality by booking a personalized demo here.

Conclusion

Gainsight, Totango, ChurnZero, and Velaris each bring different strengths to the table. Gainsight delivers enterprise-grade depth, Totango offers modular flexibility, ChurnZero emphasizes digital CS capabilities, and Velaris provides an AI-driven alternative designed for visibility and efficiency.

The right choice depends on your team’s goals, data structure, and the resources you have to manage a platform. What works for one organization may not be the best fit for another.

If you’re looking for an AI-driven platform that balances power with ease of use, book a demo with Velaris.