Gist Comparison with

ConvertKit

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

Chat

Starting a conversation is often as easy as having live chat on your site.

Gist’s Live Chat is ready in less than 2 minutes and helps:

• Get more subscribers by suggesting content and offers/li>
• Seamlessly move the conversation from chat to a call by scheduling meetings
• Answer frequently asked questions and customer issues immediately

ConvertKit doesn’t have a live chat tool.

Winner: Gist

Gist offers live chat and ConvertKit doesn’t at this time. Have to give this category to Gist by default.

Help Desk

Using our live chat tool and our backend dashboard, Gist provides a dedicated help desk solution for our users.

With this tool, users:

• Communicate with their audience when they have issues
• Segment reps to quickly handle issues
• Works well with our knowledge base tool, giving reps content to answer questions even faster

ConvertKit’s focus is on email marketing and doesn’t offer a support product.

Winner: Gist

Gist not only offers tools to aid in marketing and sales. Our help desk was created to keep the entire customer journey in one place.

Knowledge Base

Creating a knowledge base on your website, using Gist, can;

• Explain the most complicated elements of your products and services
• Have a searchable, extensive database full of the most common questions about your business and products
• Allow your support reps the ability to direct customers quickly to the KB articles

ConvertKit does not offer a knowledge base creation tool.

Winner: Gist

Starting with our Standard plan, Gist users are able to support their customers with both a help desk and a knowledge base.

Chat Bots

With Gist’s chat bot creator, our users can create a number of bots to be there when you and/or your reps aren’t available.

When and wherever you and your team can’t be there, bots can:

• Gather contact data
• Qualify leads by asking the right questions
• Even book meetings ore direct people to relevant content

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

ConvertKit doesn’t do chat bots.

Winner: Gist

Gist’s chat bots can make your website interactive all day every day. Without a comparable tool, the win goes to Gist here.

Meetings

Hooking up your Google Calendar to Gist’s Meeting Scheduler tool takes a couple of clicks.

You can then create a custom link, set the meeting times and title your meeting(s) (e.g. 15 minute consult call).

Use these links all over your site (live chat, email, even bots) to:

• Get potential customer on the phone
• Setup demos for users on the fence
• Schedule consults times

While you can use other tools and send them those links in ConvertKit emails, there is not meeting tool available.

Winner: Gist

Gist’s meetings tool ventures into the sales category, not just marketing and support. ConvertKit doesn’t have this feature and the win goes to Gist.

Email Marketing

Nathan Barry has done some really cool things.

One of those things is to create a newer email marketing tool that is really, really good. While they don’t have the same number of features as Gist — the ones they do have are super intricate and highly usable.

A few of the ways they stand out include:

• Drag-and-drop sequence builder to make your funnels clear
• Easy segmentation to see who your subscribers are and to quickly see what to send them
• Nice looking forms are easy to create

ConvertKit offers plain text emails, just like Gist to help users avoid spam filters and really seem like a personal email.

So, if you’re looking for highly visual emails neither tool offers these.

Winner: ConvertKit

ConvertKit is really good at email, especially if you’re a personal brand (blogger, author, speaker, etc.). They win the email marketing category.

Marketing Automation

ConvertKit actually has something close to full marketing automation — more so than most others who only offer email marketing tools.

That said, most of them heavily rely on integrations.

Even then, they offer many of the automations that Gist does and their automation tool looks very similar to ours.

Gist’s is a bit more robust in terms of how you can use it in conjunction with our other tools. Having everything “in-house” is valuable and our differentiator.

ConvertKit does integrate with many different payment processors and content delivery services (like Gumroad). Between this and their drag-and-drop sequences (which fall halfway in between email and automation) — it’s pretty cool.

Winner: None

Teetering on the edge, I believe both Gist and ConvertKit are evenly matched in terms of marketing automation.

Event Tracking

ConvertKit has limited event tracking. It works well with their email and automations to help segment audiences.

Gist’s Event Tracking allows users to create a custom snapshot of everything that happens on your site, in your app and/or in emails.

Our users can create custom events for just about anything that happens within all of your web properties.

Winner: Gist

ConvertKit’s events get the job done for marketing email sending. Gist allows users the ability to see everything that is happening online.

Forms

Gist has a form creation tool with 6 preset form types.

• Lightbox
• Hellobar
• Bumper
• Notification
• Fullpage Takeover
• Welcome Mat

From there, you can customize colors and, of course, text.

Aweber has 4 separate types of forms, but their customization is really cool. You can include images, use their templates and even create landing pages.

The templates and styles are heavily geared toward content creators, online courses and other creative types. Of course, you can use their form tool to create forms for just about every other business category, it’s jut how the themes and templates are geared.

Winner: ConvertKit

The look at feel of ConvertKit’s form tool is really nice. What you can create looks good and functions well. They win here.

Pricing

ConvertKit offers a really direct and easy-to-understand pricing structure — almost entirely based on subscriber count.

There is no free plan, but subscriptions go from:

• $29/mo for up to 1000 contacts
• $49/mo for up to 3000 contacts
• $79/mo for up to 5000 contacts
• Then, you can calculate for more than this number

All features are included with every single plan — except for “concierge migration”.

This feature seems to be included for those who are moving a list that is more than 5000 subscribers.

Gist strives to create a very easy pricing structure as well, but it isn’t based on contact count.

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

It’s hard to do an “apples to apples” pricing comparison with two different models like this. But Gist wins for two reasons.

Straight subscriber comparison: At $29/mo you get 1000 with ConvertKit. With Gist, it’s $24.99/mo.
Overall number of tools: With that same $29 plan, you get a number of growth tools that aren’t available with ConvertKit.

Summary

If you sell online courses, ebooks or other digital products; I can absolutely see the appeal of ConvertKit.

The integrations with tools you already use make it really easy to connect and go to give your students/customers a seamless connection.

However, if you’re a business wanted to fully automate your marketing, increase your sales and offer support to your customers — Gist is the clear winner.

Winner: Gist

Content creators may take some time to consider ConvertKit, but most businesses and power users will want to take a serious look at Gist.

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