Gist Comparison with

FreshWorks

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

Chat

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Freshworks and Gist have very similar live chat tools.

In fact, both offer:

• Chat prompts to get the conversation started
• Native integration with support ticketing (ours is called Help Desk, theirs is FreshDesk)
• The ability to create bots (on certain plans)

The difference for live chat (as with all of their other features listed in this comparison) is the pricing. Freshworks separates nearly all of their features into separate products. And live chat is no exception.

They have a free plan, but it’s limited in features (no bots or advanced features) and it’s only for sites with up to 10,000 monthly unique visitors (MUVs).

From there, the plans range from $19 -$99/mo per user.

To add support to the chat, that’s a separate product.

Gist’s live chat starts at the free plan. And all of the support products (Help Desk and Knowledge Base) are just $9 per user per month.

Winner: Gist

Virtually the same product, but it comes down to ease of use and pricing. Gist wins based on our simple all-in-one pricing.

Help Desk

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Gist offers a ticketing and chat support tool, called Help Desk. It natively works with our live chat software and other tools to help SMBs provide comprehensive support for their customers and visitors.

Freshworks has a very robust and impressive support product, called “Freshdesk”.

The advantage of Freshworks is due to a few reasons.

1. The omnichannel support options (phone, chat, even social media)
2. Specific support automations
3. Free options that could be enough for smaller businesses (using other tools to complete the marketing and sales stack)

Where Gist takes a bit of the advantage away is via features per price.

For Freshdesk alone pricing ranges from free to $125/mo per user. That isn’t including the price for other tools you may need (i.e. chat).

For those, it would be a separate fee.

Gist gives all of our support options starting at $9/mo per user (along with many other tools).

Winner: Freshworks

When you throw in the other tools, Gist is ahead. But for the Help Desk alone, Freshworks comes out on top.

Knowledge Base

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Gist and Freshworks have very similar knowledge base creation tools.

With both you can:

• Create articles easily in a simple-to-use editor
• Add media such as images and even video
• Publish articles into an immediately searchable database easily used by your customers and support team.

The slight advantage of Freshworks is that their knowledge has a free plan along with their basic support tool.

Gist’s strength comes with the number of tools you get for the price of our plans.

Winner: None

Can’t really give the win to either. Both Gist and Freshworks have a nice-looking and highly functional knowledge base solution.

Chat Bots

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There’s not a lot of information on Freshwork’s chat bots apart from a little bit about what they do:

• Qualify leads
• Add data to their CRM (Although, the CRM is a completely separate product with it’s own price)

Gist has ready made qualification bots for our Standard and Pro users. Our pro users can use our linear bot creation tool to build custom chatbots in around 15 minute with zero coding.

We use the bot creator to:

• Add contact data for email marketing
• Route customers to the right reps (sales or support)
• Create intuitive and interactive FAQ bots on certain pages

Winner: Gist

Freshworks bots have similar abilities to ours, but Gist allows you to create custom robots in minutes and takes the win here.

Meetings

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A meeting scheduler tool is a logical and beneficial tool in the arsenal of your sales and marketing team.

Gist’s scheduler takes about 30 seconds to sync with your Google calendar and another minute to set your availability and meeting types.

Then, you have a custom link to send to all:

• Prospects
• Cold leads
• Anyone else who’d like to book some of your time

Freshworks doesn’t offer a meeting scheduler at this time.

Winner: Gist

Without comparable features from FreshWorks, the win for this category in our comparison goes to Gist.

Email Marketing

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Seems odd the Freshworks wouldn’t have an email marketing tool.

They already have sales sequences (which I cover further down) and email ticketing in their support product.

Gist offers email marketing with the ability to:

• Collect a list of contacts
• Send broadcasts and drip marketing campaigns
• Create emails based on behaviors and setup up other automations

Winner: Gist

Without comparable features from FreshWorks, the win for this category in our comparison goes to Gist.

Marketing Automation

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Freshworks and Gist both have automation tools.

That said, the features within those tools are vastly different. I would say it’s like comparing apples to oranges, but it’s more like apples to footballs.

Here’s how.

Freshworks automation features include:

• Heatmaps
• A/B Testing
• Funnel Analysis
• Personalization
• And more

Gist’s automation includes:

• Custom events (pages visited, emails viewed, links clicked, etc.)
• Trigger/action automations (link click triggers tag being added, etc.)
• Visual workflows to see how your automations will play out
• Email personalization and sending options

Not a lot of common ground there.

Freshworks has a ton of cool features, but with the individual product pricing, they run users $159/mo for up to 350,000 monthly unique visitors (MUVs). Sure, there’s a free plan that’s fun, but it lacks the cool features of their automation platform.

Winner: Gist

Again, comparing apples to footballs. But I give the win to Gist based on the practicality and usable tools for marketing. Freshworks gives a ton of data (heat maps, split testing, etc.). But Gist is a functional marketing automation tool.

CRM

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Freshworks offers a CRM tool, called “Freshsales”.

The CRM has some cool features and seems like a pretty comprehensive solution. It includes intelligent workflows and other tools not seen in many CRMs and the pricing is reasonable (although separate from the other tools).

Gist is working on a CRM that will be available soon, but it’s not out quite yet.

Winner: Freshworks

Without comparable features from Gist, the win for this category in our comparison goes to Freshworks.

Sales Sequences

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With Freshsales, you get so many bulk emails to be sent every month.

On their lowest plan $19/mo per agent, you get 250 bulk emails. That goes up to up to 2000/mo on their $79/mo per agent plan.

While you could configure Gist to send sales emails, it’s not something that is native to our platform. That said, we are working to provide this feature soon.

Winner: Freshworks

Without comparable features from Gist, the win for this category in our comparison goes to Freshworks.

Event Tracking

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Here’s another apples to footballs comparison (see the marketing automation section of this comparison).

Freshworks offers forms of event tracking in both their marketing tool, “Freshmarketer” and their sales tool, “Freshsales”.

This includes things like the heat map.

Gist’s event tracking labels both pre-made events and custom events you set (i.e. clicked a link, visit a certain page, etc.)

Freshwork’s sales tool has event tracking that is very similar to Gist’s and can be natively used with their CRM.

However, to get all of their event tracking capabilities, you would need to either:

• Purchase both a Freshmarketer and Freshsales plan (which for the full features would run you over $200/mo per user.
• Get a custom quote for the entire suite of 10 individual products offered by Freshworks.

With Gist, you get all of our automation and event tracking for $149/mo with up to 5 users (and $25/mo for every user after that).

Winner: Gist

Going to give the win to Gist here based on the fact that Freshworks is more expensive and doesn’t offer that much of a difference.

Forms

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Forms allow site owners to collect contact data and send leads/subscribers into the marketing funnel.

Gist’s lightweight form creator allows you to create 6 different types of forms and set the display conditions to have them show up whenever and wherever you choose.

Freshworks isn’t focused on email for marketing purposes and doesn’t have a form creation tool at this time.

Winner: Gist

Without comparable features from Freshworks, the win for this category in our comparison goes to Gist.

Pricing

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Freshworks pricing is perhaps one of the most intricate of any other software tool in any of the marketing, sales and support spaces.

Almost every one of their features is packaged as an individual product, complete with its own pricing page. Recently, Freshworks did unveil “Freshworks 360”. This product seems to be the all-in-one of all of their tools.

Unfortunately, it’s a quote-only pricing model.

The only prices you can see are the 10 different products (most with multiple tiers of payment plans).

One of the benefits of Freshworks is that most of their products come with a free plan. And the free plans aren’t that bad.

The plans get higher (on most, not all) based on the visitor count of your site. This is a basically fair way to organize it, event though it’s a bit more confusing. Added to this confusion is that the pricing plans are also based on features within those products.

For instance, their live chat is free (with limited features) for up to 10,000 monthly unique visitors (MUVs). The next plan is $19/mo per user and has more features with up to 200,000 MUVs.

To unlock everything for solely the live chat product is $99/mo per user for all of the live chat features (including bots) and up to 500,000 MUVs.

Then, there are 9 more individually-priced products — most of which we’ve covered in this comparison.

Gist’s pricing is considerably simpler and more affordable (especially when you start stacking on products with Freshworks).

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

While Freshworks has a lot going on, it’s going to be costly to use their products to the fullest extent.

Summary

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Freshworks has a lot to offer, but the way they offer it (10 different products) is a bit clunky and can add up fast for just about any organization.

Not to mention the lack of an email tool for the marketing side.

Gist offers many of the tools necessary to encompass the marketing, sales and support side of a business. Our all-in-one is clear to understand and easily accessible to anyone — even bootstrappers.

Winner: Gist

Gotta give the overall comparison win to Gist.

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