Gist Comparison with

Aweber

• Intercom
• MailChimp
• Zendesk
• Hubspot
• Keap (Formerly Infusionsoft)
• ActiveCampaign
• FreshWorks
• Klaviyo
• ConvertKit
• Aweber
• Constant Contact
• Drip
• Drift
• Olark
• Calendly

Email Marketing

Aweber is one of the best-known and longest-running email marketing services online. The notoriety is well-deserved and they remain a quality affordable option for email.

Most new bloggers and many small businesses cut their list-building teeth with Aweber and they still hold up.

To be honest, they kind of run away in this category.

Their domination in email isn’t surprising given it’s been their (nearly) sole focus for more than 20 years.

Gist offers the ability to create plain text emails and deliver them via a broadcast, drip campaign or through behaviors of potential recipients.

Our unique attribute is the ability to have your email marketing feature along with other tools (e.g. live chat, help desk, meeting scheduler and automation)

Aweber stands out in a few different areas.

• Well-designed templates with images and easily editable frameworks
• The ability to split test your email performance
• An app that curates things you want to share into a sort of an AI newsletter-builder

Winner: Aweber

Giving credit where it’s due, Aweber is the better tool for sending marketing emails to your list.

Marketing Automation

Aweber offers some automations, mainly based on triggers surrounding the emails you send via their tool.

With Aweber, you can:

• Setup up basic campaigns
• Connect them to signup forms
• Apply simple tags based on interactions with emails

Gist’s Marketing Automation offers a more dynamic approach, including:

• The ability to tag site visitors, app users and email subscribers based on virtually any possible event
• Create new events and tags to further segment visitors, users and contacts
• Set triggers based on events and tags for endless possibilities.

Our automation isn’t based solely on emails and forms — but any action you set on your site or in your app.

Winner: Gist

Aweber’s automation is great for email-only operations. That said, if you want automations across all of your online resources — Gist takes the win here.

Forms

Gist has a lightweight forms product that offers 6 different form types.

Aweber has a forms feature that allows users to create custom, well-designed forms with images.

Gist’s advantage comes in the display conditions. You can have your forms appear at the time you set. Some of the triggers include:

• Specific pages
• Time on site/specific pages
• Visitors from specific places

All-in-all, there are hundreds of different settings you can choose from.

Aweber creates nicer-looking forms than Gist and allow you to add images. But you then have to get them on your site via plugins or manual code. (Note: Our forms feature will be getting an overhaul in the near future. 🙂

Once you install Gist, our forms will show up when and where you tell them to be.

Winner: None

I can’t objectively give the win to either in this category. If you want a more visual form, it would be Aweber. If you want more dynamic display option, it’s Gist.

Chat

Chatting with visitors on your website while they are there is one of the fastest growing communication channels for businesses.

Gist’s Live Chat can also help business owners:

• Collect contact data, like emails
• Get more leads on the phone (with our meeting tool)
• Turn client problems around with little to no time

Aweber doesn’t offer live chat as one of their services.

Winner: Gist

Without a live chat tool to compare, Gist is the winner here.

Help Desk

Gist’s Help Desk allows our users to:

• Communicate with customers
• Organize team members
• Handle customer tickets quickly

There is no similar function available from Aweber to help your current customers with their support issues.

Winner: Gist

Gist strives to be the solution for marketing, sales and support — our help desk means we stand apart from single solution tools like Aweber.

Knowledge Base

Having a knowledge base helps businesses;

• Relay complex features or processes using text, video and images
• Create a library of common issues your customers have to help them find a solution quickly
• Enable support reps to quickly direct customers to the right article and fix their problem

Gist’s Knowledge Base tools allows anyone to create a beautiful, searchable database of content.

Aweber does not offer a knowledge base solution.

Winner: Gist

Gist wins the knowledge base portion of our comparison.

Chat Bots

Gist Chat Bots allows businesses to have communication with site visitors around the clock.

Nights and weekends, when you and your team isn’t at work, bots:

• Collect data to grow your list
• Asking questions to see if visitors could be potential customers
• Explain commonly asked questions in an interactive style

Creating bots with Gist is easy (no coding required).

Aweber does not offer a chat bot tool.

Winner: Gist

Gist’s bot tool wins this category.

Meetings

A Meeting Scheduler means hooking up your online calendar (in Gist’s case, we sync with Google Calendar). You then set up the availability and a custom link is generated to send and book meetings and/or calls.

These links can be distributed anywhere from emails, to live chats and bots. Schedulers help:

• Book more sales calls with leads
• Get demos setup
• Schedule calls visitors

Aweber does not offer a meeting tool.

Winner: Gist

Gist’s Meeting Scheduler Tool is a great way to get more people to speak with your or your team.

Pricing

Aweber has some of the most upfront and easy-to-understand pricing out of the other email marketing tools.

Every plan gets all features and the monthly subscription is based solely on the number of subscribers.

Those fees start out at $29/mo (for up to 500 subscribers) and go up to $149/mo (10,001-25,000 subscribers). If you have more than 25,000, you’ll have to get a quote.

Like I said, really clear.

We try to be as up front with our pricing at Gist.

We have 4 plan options.

Free

Our free plan rivals many paid plans from competitors. Really. Here’s what you get:

• Live Chat
• Email Marketing (up to 500 contacts)
• Forms
• Meeting Scheduler
• Unlimited Pages, Chats and Visits
• Customization
• Drip Campaigns
• And up to 2 Users!

Free forever.

Growth (starts at $24.99/mo)

Growth gets you everything in the free plan and up to 1000 contacts. It also opens up our marketing automation and visual workflows.

In addition to all the free features, the Growth Plan includes:

• 1000 Contacts
• Automation Rules
• Workflow Builder
• Behavioral Emails
• Event Tracking
• Re-Send to Unopens
• Email Scheduling
• Reporting

Support ($9/mo per user)

This plan also includes everything in the free version. In addition to those free tools, you’ll also get:

• Knowledge Base
• Chat bots (and snippets
• Insert those KB articles into chat
• Team Inboxes for Chat
• Routing Rules
• Office Hours
• Reporting

The All-in-One (Based on number of contacts and number of users)

With our “All-in-One Plan”, you get everything. And the pricing is $9 per user plus the Growth Plan price, based on the number of contacts you have.

So, if you have fewer than 1000 contacts and 2 users, the price would be $24.99 + $18 = 42.99.

It’s really some of the most affordable pricing on the market. The power of 8 tools for the price of 1 (with more coming soon).

Winner: Gist

Gist wins here. To give a clear picture as to why, at $24.99/mo you get double the contacts, live chat, meetings and other features that cover growth (when compared to Aweber’s $29/mo plan).

Summary

Aweber is really good at email marketing. If you aren’t ready to offer live chat, schedule meetings or have a full-range marketing automation product — it could be a good solution.

Overall, Gist offers more for the same price (or less).

Businesses who desire to have a full platform of tools that encompass marketing, sales and support will want to choose Gist.

Winner: Gist

The overall win goes to Gist do to the all-in-one power for businesses with a web presence.

Interested in switching from Aweber to Gist? Here’s a guide for migrating specifically from Aweber.