Gist Comparison with

Drip

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

Email Marketing

Drip focuses on email marketing. Not just an email sending tool, but the ability to create an experience for your audience via electronic mail.

As far as similarities, both Drip and Gist:

• Offer drip campaigns
• “One-off” emails or broadcasts
• Personalization and automation
• Visual Workflow builder

The differences mostly end up in Drip’s favor. No surprise given their commitment to and focus on email.

Differences include:

• Email Builder: Putting together an email on Drip is easy and they come out looking great.
• Ecommerce: Drip seems to have niched down to focus on ecommerce shops. This means that if you sell online, Drip is great for email. It could be a drawback for other business models.

Winner: Drip

Drip is really good at email marketing, making it no surprise that we give them the category win.

Chat

Drip focuses on high-end email marketing and doesn’t offer chat services.

One of Gist’s primary and most popular tools is our live chat to help businesses connect with site visitors and provide support for current customers.

Chat prompts, adding team members and tracking every interaction are a few of the benefits of using Gist’s chat tool.

Winner: Gist

With no feature to compare, the chat category definitively goes to Gist.

Help Desk

Customer support software allows businesses to instantly aid customers who have problems, walk people through complicated processes and keep the tickets organized and seen by the right reps.

Gist’s help desk does these things (and more with our other platform tools). Drip doesn’t offer a comparable tool.

Winner: Gist

Gist offers live chat support and help desk capabilities while Drip does not.

Forms

Forms help collect contact data and can create events to tag visitors and put them into your pipeline.

Both Gist and Drip offer form creation tools which directly connect to the email marketing of each platform.

Like the email builder, Drip gives the ability to create really nice looking custom forms. Gist allows users to create 6 different pre-set types of forms and customize them to fit your color palette.

Winner: Drip

While function is similar, Drip allows users to create better-looking forms.

Marketing Automation

Drip has dramatically improved their workflows to include several integrations that just make sense.

Not only do they allow you to do things via emails, but also on other platforms like Facebook or even send direct mail, like postcards.

All of which you can set up in Drip to be automated with their workflow tool.

Pretty impressive.

Gist’s automation allows you to create events, tags triggers and actions in a simple manner. You can get into deep, complex automations based on any number of factors.

However, the integrations and visual builder are more advanced with Drip.

Winner: Gist

Drip has awesome automation. If you’re looking to connect multiple tools and bring them together with Drip’s visual builder, they could be the option for you.

Knowledge Base

Having a knowledge base is a must for companies with more complicated processes and functions.

For instance, if you’re a software or SaaS, there could be many features for users to get the hang of and learn.

Gist offers a knowledge base tool which allows users to:

• Explain complicated features in a bit-by-bit way that customers can understand
• Alleviate the support burden by allowing customers to find quick solutions themselves
• Empower your service staff by giving them the ability to route customers to articles

These articles are quickly created and edited and are immediately searchable, creating a smooth-running resource with little effort.

Drip does not have a knowledge base solution.

Winner: Gist

With no KB feature from Drip, Gist wins this category.

Meetings

Meeting scheduler tools can significantly increase the number of sales calls and demos for reps.

Gist’s meeting tool allows users to:

• Hook up to Google Calendar
• Send your link via chat, email or even automatically with bots
• Choose times that you’re available to show prospects

With Drip’s focus on email marketing — they don’t currently offer a meeting scheduler solution.

Winner: Gist

Gist’s meeting scheduler works with our other tools to help you nurture leads and close more deals.

Chat Bots

Chat bots is a natural progression from offering live chat.

Bots can be around when you and your reps are not available, making them a 24/7 tool to use on your website.

Gist offers an easy-to-use linear bot creator to help you organize exactly how your potential customers will interact with the bot.

To give a few ideas, bots can be used to:

• Qualify leads
• Book meetings
• Collect contact data
• Explain certain aspects of your app
• Answer common questions

Drip doesn’t offer a bot tool.

Winner: Gist

With no tool to compare, Gist is the clear winner.

Event Tracking

Both Drip and Gist offer event creating and tracking.

With both tools, you get:

• Pre-set events
• Custom events
• Tags created can be used with automation

Drip gets a slight advantage given the marketing automation options with their workflows, but Gist does too with the ability to set tags for all of our included tools and our own integrations.

With things being so close, I factor in more of the tools/features of both platforms as well as the pricing. In this case, the event tracking is still so close.

To be honest, it’s a dead heat.

Winner: None

Both event tracking tools are evenly matched and can help you see who’s doing what on your site.

CRM

Drip offers a lightweight CRM, specifically for ecommerce shops.

It allows you to score leads based on previous behavior. The benefit of this is used to trigger campaigns and other automations in order to guide visitors to buy and customers to make another purchase.

While it’s not a full CRM solution, it was worth noting.

Gist doesn’t offer a CRM solution…yet.

Winner: Drip

While it’s not a full CRM, we’ll give it to Drip since they have something that functions to manage customer relationships.

Pricing

Drip and Gist have different pricing models.

Drip’s pricing is simple and solely based on the number of subscribers in your email list.

Up to 2500 and it’s $49/mo
Up to 5000 it’s $122/mo
5001+ subscribers and price varies (a calculator is available)

All features seem to be included at every price point.

Gist’s pricing is a bit less complicated. 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

The lower cost plans on Drip doesn’t offer enough features at that level to really give it an edge.

Summary

Drip is really good at email, automation and ecommerce. Gist’s power lies in the all-in-one approach.

While one is going granular and niche (Drip), Gist’s plan is to be the marketing, sales and support solution for just about any business vertical.

Two wildly different approaches with some similar functionality.

Winner: Gist

E-commerce shops focusing on visual campaigns and integrations may want to give Drip a closer look.

That said, Gist is a better solution for the majority of business models.

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