If you're comparing Planhat vs Gainsight, chances are you're trying to find the right customer success platform to help your team stay organized, keep your clients happy, and scale your service business.
Both tools promise to help with your client onboarding, improve retention, and give you better visibility into client health.
But, they take very different paths to get there.
In this post, I’ll break down the key differences between the two. We’ll go over onboarding workflows, client portals, automations, pricing, and much more.
Alright, let’s get into it.
Who is each tool best for?
Planhat and Gainsight are both built to help you manage the post-sale customer experience, but they’re designed with different types of teams in mind.
Planhat is a great fit for smaller service businesses or mid-sized teams that want a modern platform without all the complexity. If your goal is to deliver a clean, collaborative client experience, especially during onboarding, and keep your team organized without hiring a huge CS org, Planhat makes a lot of sense.
It’s especially useful if you want something that doubles as a lightweight CRM, gives clients access to a shared portal, and doesn’t require a full-time admin to run it.
On the other hand, Gainsight is built for larger organizations that need structure, scale, and deep reporting. It’s ideal for enterprise-level service businesses that are managing hundreds of accounts, working across teams, and leaning heavily on Salesforce for data.
Gainsight offers powerful health scoring, segmentation, and automation, but it also comes with a steeper learning curve. It’s the kind of tool that works best when you have the resources to implement it fully and a dedicated person or team to manage it.
If you're a growing team looking for simplicity and speed, Planhat may be the better fit. If you're operating at scale and need a more complex system to support your customer lifecycle, Gainsight is likely the way to go.
Planhat vs Gainsight: Top feature comparison
Both Planhat and Gainsight are powerful, but the tool you go with depends heavily on the type of client experience you’re trying to achieve.
Are you a growing agency that needs simplicity and a personal touch? Or a big enterprise with complex workflows that requires deep reporting and analytics?
Let’s break it down by key features so you can figure out which one’s your vibe.
Client onboarding
Onboarding sets the tone for your client relationship. A smooth, organized process can make clients go “Woah, they have it together!” while a duct-taped one might have them second-guessing their choice.
Both Planhat and Gainsight have solid onboarding features, but they cater to different needs.
Planhat
Planhat’s onboarding game is all about simplicity and collaboration. Their client portals are really clean, and you can create interactive onboarding plans with tasks, milestones, and support docs that clients can access directly.
In Planhat, you can also set up workflows to auto-assign onboarding tasks to members on your team based on the client type. Users on G2 rave about how these portals create “wow” moments during kickoff calls. This not only makes clients feel in control, but it also reduces the number of support inquiries your team gets.
It’s especially great for high-touch agencies or smaller teams who want their agency to feel more like a software product.
Gainsight
Gainsight handles onboarding through Success Plans and Playbooks, which are great for internal task management but don’t include a client-facing experience.
There’s no shared portal, so clients can’t see timelines or deliverables unless you manually send updates. It works well for teams that prefer to manage onboarding internally and communicate updates separately, but less ideal if you want the client more involved in the process.
Automations and integrations
Most customer success management tools these days have automations and integrations built in. Whatever tool you use, you need to make sure that it can not only integrate with your existing tech stack but that it also has modern AI and automation features to help you and your team get more work done quickly.
Let's look at what each platform has to offer in this area.
Planhat
Planhat has a super clean interface for creating automations. On their website, they dub it as your "superhuman colleague."
With Planhat, you can create custom no-code flows or pick from over 100+ automation templates to help you create an unforgettable customer experience.
The platform integrates with tools like HubSpot, Salesforce, OpenAI, Slack, and a ton more. It's a very promising aspect of Planhat as they focused a lot on bringing your existing tools into one platform.
Gainsight
Gainsight also comes with its own automations for your customer success team. It does lean more on an older UI/UX, but beyond just the way it looks, it does function well if you have a large team that is accessing the same Gainsight dashboard.
The platform allows you to identify trends in customer behavior and allows you to see your client health so you can proactively mitigate any risk issues. Gainsight also has its own marketplace for integrations, where it allows you to integrate with tools like Slack, SAP Sales Cloud, Postgres, Google Analytics, Jira, Zapier, and a ton more.
Overall, both Planhat and Gainsight have great automation and integrations. However, if you are more focused on a clean user interface with great automations, I do tend to lean more toward Planhat as the platform of choice.
CRM and project management
At its core, both Planhat and Gainsight are a CRM to help you manage your client relationships. Both platforms have project management tools and features to help you and your team deliver on your clients.
Let's look at what each one has to offer.
Planhat
Planhat's project and task management features allow you to create project plans and use templatized projects to help you track all of your clients (and the work being done). Similar to tools like Asana or Notion, you can apply owners to specific tasks, see the status of that task, when it was started (and when it's due), and a ton more.
You have access to different Kanban views, calendar views, or list views that can all connect to a collaborative customer portal. I have to give it to Planhat for having such an amazing and clean user interface that makes it feel like a modern tool.
When it comes to a CRM, they also have client portals that allow you to invite and track specific customer contacts and give them granular control and access to specific data and content within their portal. Plus, everything is in a secure environment, so if you're working with sensitive data, your customers and clients can sleep well knowing that their information is safe.
Gainsight
Gainsight also has a CRM and project management tool. However, they like to call it a “CustomerOS.” This CustomerOS integrates with automated AI agents that can help you onboard new clients, surface relationship health or churn risk, and help you better understand how to interact with each customer based on specific actions that they've taken.
Compared to Planhat, Gainsight takes a more enterprise approach, and when it comes to CRMs and project management, it's probably better for enterprise customers as opposed to Planhat being more for smaller to medium-sized businesses.
Planhat vs Gainsight: Use case comparison
There's no such thing as the best tool... at least objectively speaking. Deciding what tool to use depends heavily on your use case, the size of your company, the number of clients you serve, and who those clients are.
Let's take a look at what each platform is good for.
Planhat is great if:
- You are a startup or a small to mid-size service business that doesn't have a lot of customer support reps.
- You want one platform to manage your client onboarding, communications, and your account health.
- You're looking for a customizable platform that can manage different client types.
- You want a tool that is modern, clean, and powerful but doesn't have an extensive learning curve.
- You care about creating a great client experience that gives your customers visibility into projects that you two are collaborating on.
Gainsight is a better fit if:
- You're an enterprise-level service business with a large customer success organization or a dedicated operations team.
- You already use tools like Salesforce or HubSpot and want a tight integration with your existing CRM data.
- You need advanced health scoring, analytics, and automations across complex customer journeys.
- You're managing renewals, expansions, or upsells as a part of your customer success process.
Overall, you can see that both platforms perform well in their respective use cases. It all depends on the type of company you are. In simple terms, use Planhat if you're a small agency or startup firm, and use Gainsight if you're a larger enterprise-level customer serving large clients.
Planhat vs Gainsight: Pricing comparison
If you're on a tight budget, pricing can be a huge factor when deciding what software to use for your business. Let's look at how each platform compares.
Planhat
Planhat doesn't publicly display their pricing — you have to request it from them. Based on their website, it looks like pricing varies based on the different Planhat products: Customer Success, Service Delivery, or Sales.
To learn how much Planhat will cost for your business, check out their pricing page.
Gainsight
Gainsight offers a free trial; however, they do not publicly display their pricing without you first requesting it from them. Based on their website, it looks like they offer two different plans: Essential and Enterprise.
If you want to learn more about how much Gainsight will cost for your specific business, make sure to check out their pricing page and request to learn more.
Planhat vs Gainsight: Pros and cons
Every platform has some good things about it and some not-so-good things. Here’s a quick breakdown of the pros and cons of each so you can figure out which one fits your workflow and team best.
Planhat
Here are the pros and cons of Planhat:
Pros:
- Clean, modern UI that’s easy to navigate
- Client-facing portal that supports onboarding and collaboration
- Customizable health scores and dashboards
- Works well even if you don’t have an existing CRM
- Solid project management features built-in
Cons:
- Automations aren’t as advanced as Gainsight
- Some integrations can be tricky to set up
- No true recurring automation (e.g. weekly task generation)
- Might feel limited for enterprise-scale use cases
Gainsight
Here are the pros and cons of Gainsight:
Pros:
- Enterprise-grade automation and workflow capabilities
- Deep Salesforce integration for account data and reporting
- Powerful health scoring, segmentation, and journey tracking
- Great for teams managing complex customer lifecycles
- Strong community and educational resources
Cons:
- Steep learning curve and complex setup
- Requires a dedicated admin or ops resource to manage
- No client-facing portal for shared onboarding or collaboration
- Can feel a bit bloated if you don’t use all the features
Planhat vs Gainsight: Customer reviews and resources
Now, let's take a look at what others online say about each tool. And, let's look at what resources they offer to help their customers use and learn the platform.
Planhat
Here's what third-party review sites rate Planhat:
- G2: 4.6 out of 5-star rating (from +696 reviews)
- Capterra: 4.6 out of 5-star rating (from +28 reviews)
Here are resources offered by Planhat:
Gainsight
Here's what third-party review sites rate Gainsight:
- G2: 4.5 out of 5-star rating (from +1,601 reviews)
- Capterra: 4.4 out of 5-star rating (from +49 reviews)
Here are resources offered by Gainsight:
Which is better, Planhat vs Gainsight?
There’s no one-size-fits-all answer here. It really comes down to your team size, how complex your workflows are, and how much control you want over the client experience. If you’re a smaller service business that values ease of use, clean UI, and a collaborative portal your clients can actually log into, Planhat makes a lot of sense.
On the other hand, if you’re running a larger CS org, already deep in Salesforce, and need more powerful automation and reporting, Gainsight is probably the better fit.
At the end of the day, both platforms can help you build stronger client relationships and scale your operations. It just depends on what kind of experience you want to deliver. Hopefully, this comparison helped you get one step closer to picking the right tool for your business. Here’s to smoother onboarding, happier clients, and a thriving service business in 2025 and beyond.