Gist Review, Pricing & Features

What is Gist?

Gist (GetGist) is a marketing and messaging software with over 10,000 customers. With features to engage, acquire, and support visitors, it functions as an all-in-one customer support software.

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Table of Contents

• What is Gist?
• Gist Review Summary
• Gist Pricing & Cost
• Gist Features
  • Live Chat
  • Outbound Messages
  • Forms & Popups
  • Chatbots
  • Events Tracker
  • Additional Features
• Gist Customer Support
• Gist vs. Competitors
• Is Gist Right For You?

Gist Review Summary

Gist (GetGist) is a customer messaging platform that was founded by Raghavender Rao Jitta in 2017. Originally called ConvertFox, the company was rebranded as Gist in late 2018. The company is headquartered in Delaware and currently has over 10,000 customers.

Gist offers a host of support and marketing features. Support features include live chat, chat triggers, chatbots, and agent performance reports. The marketing features include contact management, email marketing, and website popups.

There are three types of plans that Gist customers can choose from: the Support Suite, the Marketing Suite, or the All-in-One Bundle. Each of the three types has a forever free option, a mid-tier Professional plan, and a Premium plan. Prospective customers can try any of the plans for free for 14 days.

Overall, Gist is a powerful cross-channel marketing and messaging software. If you’re in the market for a free or mid-tier solution, it should be at the top of your list. It offers more marketing features than close competitors like Crisp and LiveChat, and is priced affordably. It’s not quite as advanced as high-end solutions like Intercom, which larger companies might prefer.

Gist Pricing & Cost

Gist pricing ranges from $19 per month to $548 per month across the Support, Marketing, and All-in-One plans. As of late October 2020, Gist is offering discounts on all premium plans due to the COVID-19 pandemic. There are free options with limited features for all three plan types.

Support Suite

Marketing Suite

All-in-One Suite

Gist Key Features

In this review, we’ll walk through the key features that Gist offers and discuss how those features can support your business. Along with descriptions of the software, we’ll include images to give you a sense of Gist’s overall layout.

To learn more about how we research and rate software tools, read about SoftwarePundit’s review methodology.

Live Chat

Live chat allows customer support representatives, often referred to as chat agents, to speak in real time with website visitors. Visitors will use a window, or chat widget, to chat with a company on the website. Live chat is beneficial for companies that wish to offer live support to website visitors. When testing the live chat feature, we found that it was satisfactory. One drawback is that conversation history is slightly clunky to search through as it’s broken up into open, closed, and snoozed conversations.

Inbox

All chats are stored within the messenger inbox. There’s a team inbox as well as a personal inbox for each chat agent. Within the inbox, agents will be able to see a comprehensive list of visitor data, including their location and local time, last viewed website page, and when they were last “seen” on the site. Agents can sort their conversations by newest, oldest, priority, or by which visitors have been waiting the longest for a reply.

Below is a picture of the messenger inbox:

Agents can take additional actions within the inbox:

Visitor Chat Window

A Gist chat window will be installed on your company’s website and visitors will use the window to send messages to chat agents. This window can be customized with your company’s colors, logo, and the window’s position on the page. Overall, the window has a clean, modern look and has a generous number of customizations, which would make it easy for you to seamlessly integrate it into your website’s design.

A few additional features you can add to the window include forms that ask for data processing consent, the ability to install the window only on specific pages, and typical reply times to manage visitor expectations.

Outbound Messages

In addition to chat, Gist allows you to execute marketing campaigns through email and the chat widget. These messages can be sent to segments of users for different purposes. For example, you can announce the launch of a new feature to your website visitors through chat, or create a monthly email newsletter for your best customers. Overall, this feature within Gist is incredibly easy to use given that all outbound messages are created the same way.

Below is an example of how you can build outbound emails within Gist:

The creation process is the same across chat and email. Gist customers write the message content, choose display rules, and send or schedule the messages. A few metrics, including number of opens, clicks, and replies, are provided once messages are live. This will allow customers to gauge the efficacy of their outbound messages.

Forms & Popups

Forms and popups are eye-catching windows that appear on a site with the intent of engaging and capturing visitor leads. For example, this tool can be designed to create a popup window asking for visitor emails after the visitor has been on the site for 20 seconds. This feature overall is highly useful for lead generation and is somewhat unique as it is not offered by most other live chat competitors.

The forms are highly customizable. Much like outbound messages, the forms and popups are created by writing the content, choosing display rules, and deciding when they will be deployed. Gist provides an array of different popup types that vary by design and location. :

Chatbots

Chatbots are software programs that can converse with visitors when customer support representatives are unavailable. Bots can be programmed to conduct simple tasks, like asking visitors for their name and email address, or they can be more advanced and carry out full conversations. Gist offers a chatbot workflow builder with a variety of options for customers to create varied and complex bots. When building bots, we found the workflow builder to be simpler to use than in some alternatives.

Below is an example of what the bot builder looks like:

Chatbot Abilities

Below is a list of some of the Gist chatbot capabilities:

You will also be able to set rules about when bots can be displayed. The bot can be displayed based on segments, visitor location or behavior, and the webpage that the visitor is on.

Events Tracker

Event tracking is a marketing tool that helps businesses understand how visitors use and interact with their websites. This feature is fairly unique to Gist and is overall extremely helpful for customers to understand which parts of their websites are getting engagement. It is also straightforward to configure each event to track. Gist offers a proprietary event tracking tool with two options: Simple Mode or Event Visualizer.

Simple Mode

With Simple Mode, your company can track the number of visits to each page on your site. You’ll name the event to keep track of its purpose, and then select which URL you’d like to track. Once the event is “defined” or set live, Gist will start tracking the amount of times that page is accessed. Each event’s data will be available in a graph within the Events Tracker tab:

Event Visualizer

The Event Visualizer is a more complex event tracking tool that you can use to track clicks on specific buttons or links that are on your website. This will help you understand which specific aspects of your website are drawing customer attention. Creating events to track with Gist is simple – you use the visual editor to select on-page elements and define the events.

Additional Features

Gist offers additional features to support customer engagement goals and team productivity.

Gist Customer Support

Overall, we found that Gist has average customer support. Though the company indicates that they offer 24/7 chat support, we once waited almost three hours for a reply. However, during conversations, agents were helpful and answered all questions we had about the software.

Gist Alternatives & Competitors

Gist is similar to a few other customer messaging platforms like LiveChat and Intercom. Other competitors are listed below.

Is Gist Right For You?

Gist is a customer engagement software with a wide array of customer support and marketing features. The software provides an all-around customer support experience and has some unique marketing features not found in most alternatives.

Overall, Gist is a powerful tool with particularly rich marketing features that will boost lead capture and provide a well-rounded view of visitor activity. If you’re a business of any size looking to provide live customer support while achieving marketing aims, the All-in-One Bundle is particularly useful. While the Premium plan is normally a bit steep price-wise, the current discount is extremely advantageous.

If you’re searching for a solution that’s focused on live chat, look at Crisp or Tidio.

If you are interested in trying any of Gist’s plans, sign up for a 14-day free trial.