Top Gong Competitors to Help Your Team Close More Deals
December 17, 2024
If you're on the hunt for alternatives to Gong, you've come to the right place.
Now, don't get us wrong. Gong is a valuable product with its own unique advantages (we'll give credit where it's due!). However, we also understand that not every sales team is the same, and what works for one might not be the best fit for another.
Sales teams, particularly those at startups, are typically looking for a Gong alternative for three common reasons:
- It’s difficult to put Gong’s intelligence features to good use. “Gong has features that sound great in concept, but we couldn’t use it in practice”, said a head of sales at a series B startup.
- Gong is quite expensive. Companies with just a handful of salespeople have to pay thousands of dollars per month to use Gong (On average, each Gong customer pays $30k annually).
Source: Gong
- It can take weeks to successfully implement Gong, onboard your sales team, and start getting value from it.
In reality, most teams, including yours, can use a simpler tool to get what they need to coach their teams and win more deals.
Sounds interesting? Alright, let's dive into some of the alternatives you can use to coach and build a successful sales team.
Top Gong Alternatives for Your Sales Engagement Platform
- Grain
- Chorus
- Salesloft
- Outreach
- Wingman
- Avoma
- Zoom IQ
Grain
Let's address the elephant in the room. We, Grain, are an alternative to Gong. Does this mean that we are going to suggest that you must give Grain a try? No.
We included Grain because we see sales teams switching to Grain from Gong for its simplicity and affordability. Don't trust us? See for yourself.
Product
Grain is an AI-powered meeting recording tool that automates key features like note-taking, record-keeping, and insight capture from every customer conversation.
Sales leaders and reps prefer Grain for its simplicity. All you have to do is sign up, create a Grain workspace, and invite your team. When a sales call happens, Grain will auto-join to record, transcribe, and summarize the conversation using AI. “Grain un-complicates call recording and conversation intelligence.”
- Colby Morgan, Head of Sales and Customer Success, Tango.
With Grain, you can:
Coach your sales team
Grain automatically records, transcribes, and organizes sales calls in a video library—making it easier for you to access and review any conversation. For instance, using the “People” filter allows you to look at the calls with specific opportunities, customers, or reps.
Understand your reps’ talk-listen ratio, stitch together the best examples and insights into a playlist, and navigate through sales calls easily using speaker timelines.
Want to give feedback on the pitch? Clip the moment, add your note, and share it with your team instantly. “Grain is a coaching tool. It allows me to listen to my closers. I need the ability to see what they’re doing right or wrong so that I can coach them.”
- Tucker Hutchinson, VP of Revenue, User Interviews.
Summarize & share key moments
Ditch manual notes and just focus on the conversation. Grain AI will analyze, synthesize, and generate a shareable summary of your sales calls. It empowers your team to share customer feedback and requests in their own words—making sales and product collaboration easier. “The new summary feature saves me a ton of time as well. The auto-generated summary makes it easy to jump to key moments in the call, and gives anyone viewing the call the same ability.”
- Dylan H, Founding Account Executive at RevenueCat.
Understand your pipeline
Grain integrates with HubSpot and Salesforce allowing you to tie customer call data with revenue. Once connected, Grain will automatically add AI-generated call notes to relevant CRM records including leads, contacts, accounts, and opportunities.
Look at the touch points and listen to the calls and highlights of any opportunity in your pipeline. “As we’re associating Grain clips with relevant Salesforce opportunities, I can go watch the videos, read the notes, and figure out what’s going on.”
- Tucker Hutchinson, VP of Revenue, User Interviews.
Pricing
Grain has a free plan allowing you to immediately try the product and see its impact. Its business plan costs $15 per month per user—and comes with advanced integrations and security features.
Grain is ~10x cheaper than Gong and doesn't have any platform subscription fee or minimum spend. Scale as you scale your team and sales operations.
Why Grain?
Grain focuses on providing what you need to understand your customers and win more deals. It joins your calls, works in the background, and allows you to review, share, and learn from your sales conversations.
What you'd be missing?
Grain is designed for sales teams that move fast. It's simpler to use and cuts down on enterprise-level features like pipeline forecasting, tracking new initiatives, and automatic coaching recommendations. With Grain, you get 80% of the solution for 20% of the cost.
“We had been evaluating other solutions such as Gong, Outreach, and Salesloft but were left frustrated as those were so over-baked and overkill for what we needed. I had Grain up and running in 15 minutes. My calls and notes are well organized and easily accessible by my team.”
Coach your sales team and win more deals without breaking the bank.
Product Suitability
Ideal for SMB sales teams interested in conversation intelligence and sharing customer insights.
Chorus.ai
Chorus is designed to help sales teams improve their productivity, close more deals, and drive revenue growth.
Product
Chorus uses AI to record, transcribe, and analyze sales calls, providing sales conversation intelligence that can help your reps improve their performance. It offers features for coaching and collaboration, such as the ability to share specific moments from a call with team members for feedback and analysis.
Source: Chorus.ai
Chorus automatically detects and provides you with coaching and deal recommendations so that you can spend more time helping your team. With its Analytics, you can understand what moves deals forward and replicate the behaviors of top performers.
In addition, Chorus captures both calls and emails allowing you to review them directly in Salesforce and get the information you need to move forward. Want insights into your pipeline? Chorus automatically identifies, prioritizes, and flags deal risks to help you focus on the right deals.
Pricing
Chorus pricing starts at $8000 per year and it includes three seats. If you need additional seats, it'd cost $1200/year. So, if you are looking for an economical option, Chorus isn't a great fit.
Why Chorus.ai?
While Chorus is expensive (for startups), it made the list for its easy-to-use, recently updated UI. The product also offers robust integration with Salesforce and wins with its conversation intelligence features.
What you'd be missing?
At a higher level, Chorus provides essentially the same features as Gong—with a few exceptions. For instance, Gong's smart trackers allow you to go beyond keyword recognition to understand the context of customer interactions and get relevant moments surfaced to you automatically. On the other hand, Chorus offers contextual trackers that rely on keyword/phrase matches.
Chorus also doesn't have a dedicated “request for feedback” option available.
Product Suitability
Ideal for larger B2B sales teams looking for feature parity with Gong.
Salesloft
Salesloft, a sales engagement platform, offers a suite of products to help sales teams communicate with buyers, understand their performance, and get the insights they need to win more deals. Let's take a quick look at their products.
Product
Cadence + Automation: Helps you plan, create, and send personalized emails, voice, and text messages to your buyers.
Dialer + Messenger: Call your buyers from any device in one click. Drop voice mails, listen to your reps’ calls live, and understand how the call went using sentiment analytics.
Deals: Get pipeline data, forecast deals, locate at-risk deals, identify deal gaps, and do more in one place to effectively manage your sales pipeline.
Analytics + Reporting: Track revenue performance, identify actions that close deals, and build customized reports to understand and share insights across your team.
Conversations: Record, transcribe, and analyze your sales calls and get AI-based insights to better coach your team. Build custom playlists and understand your team’s performance with sales call tracking.
Pricing
Salesloft per user pricing ranges from $125 to $165 per month depending on the products you choose to use. So, a license for a single user comes to $2k per year.
It's worth noting that Salesloft doesn't have a $5k annual platform fee like Gong.
Why Salesloft?
Though the cost of a Salesloft seat is roughly equivalent to that of Gong, you can choose to opt-in for specific products that you need (for instance, Salesloft's conversation intelligence product ‘Conversations') and focus your time on selling.
What you'd be missing?
Salesloft provides a range of products, but it lacks certain features that are available in Gong, such as conversation trackers that highlight specific keywords, concepts, and phrases, as well as topic duration, question rate, and coaching activity.
Additionally, Salesloft doesn't automatically generate coaching insights and recommendations.
If you're looking for an extensive conversation intelligence tool, Salesloft isn't a fit for you.
Product Suitability
Ideal for sales teams consolidating their tool stack.
Outreach
Similar to Salesloft, Outreach offers a suite of products—from prospecting to forecasting—to help you create and close more pipeline. As we're looking to replace Gong, let's focus only on the relevant products and features to help you assess if Outreach is a fit for you.
Product
Deal Management: Get a snapshot of every deal in your pipeline, use bulk editing to keep your deal values updated, and inspect at-risk deals to streamline your sales processes.
Conversation Intelligence: Record, transcribe, and capture key moments from your sales calls. Leverage real-time content cards to answer buyer questions and understand your rep performance with talk time reports and more.
Rep Coaching: Review sales calls from your team, share key moments with other stakeholders, build a playlist to share best examples and coach your reps, and compare individual performance to team benchmarks.
Deal Insights: Identify at-risk deals, coach your team to take the ideal next steps, and spend more time on winnable ideals by using AI-generated deal insights.
Pipeline Management: Understand your teams’ pipeline from a single view, track rep productivity by looking at progress week-over-week, see how your pipeline moved during any period, and more.
Forecast: See how many deals you might close and how much revenue your team might bring in by the end of the current sales period, test different possible scenarios (bull case, bear case, most likely), and leverage automated forecast roll-ups to plan your next steps.
Pricing
Outreach offers two types of licenses—Accelerate and Optimized. Accelerate license costs $80 per user per month ($960 per year for a rep). Optimized license, which gives you deeper insights, real-time coaching recommendations, team reporting, buyer sentiment analysis, etc. costs $140 per user per month.
While Outreach doesn't have a platform subscription fee, you might incur a one-time implementation fee.
Why Outreach?
Outreach offers everything you need to understand your pipeline, coach your reps, and forecast with confidence. You can also use Outreach for prospecting, automating outbound emails, and optimizing sales touch points.
What you'd be missing?
Outreach is primarily a sales execution platform, not a sales coaching tool. And, naturally, it doesn't offer several Gong features including a sales activity timeline, coaching inbox, trackers, and more. If you'd like to see automatic coaching insights and recommendations, Outreach isn't the best fit.
Product Suitability
Ideal for larger sales teams looking for deal intelligence and advanced forecasting.
Wingman
As a platform designed specifically for conversation intelligence, Wingman offers call recording, transcription, coaching insights, and pipeline forecasts.
Product
As a revenue intelligence tool, Wingman records, transcribes, and indexes sales calls from your team, making it easier for you to search, review, and coach your reps based on reality. You can get insights into topics and share snippets internally in a few clicks.
With Wingman, you can also curate best moments and ideal examples into a playlist and share it with your reps.
Use battle cards to help your team answer buyer questions and position your product as a winner. Contextual call scoring helps you assess and score your reps after every call and see how they’ve improved over time.
And, Wingman’s pipeline health scanner enables you to spot at-risk deals and get visibility into the status of your deals.
Pricing
Wingman's conversation intelligence product costs $1080 per user for a year and you need to commit annually.
Why Wingman?
Wingman offers all the conversation intelligence features you need in a simple UI. While the cost per license is roughly equivalent to that of other tools (except Grain), it wins with its integrations. You can import your sales calls from dialers like Salesloft and Outreach, not just video conferencing software.
What you'd be missing?
Wingman focuses on conversation intelligence and lacks several coaching features you see in Gong including Contextual trackers, activity timeline, coaching inbox, and win/loss data. Also, you wouldn't be able to set up and keep track of the outcomes of your strategic initiatives (for instance, a new sales methodology).
Product Suitability
Ideal for sales teams interested in analyzing and sharing insights from sales calls.
Avoma
Avoma is an AI meeting assistant that helps you plan, run, and get more value out of your meetings. It also offers conversation and revenue intelligence features to help sales teams improve their performance and close more deals.
Product
Avoma helps you plan your agenda, record and transcribe sales calls, and analyze customer interactions to coach your sales team. Additionally, you can track deals in the pipeline, review sales touchpoints, and score your reps based on their calls.
With its activity dashboard, you can get an overview of conversations happening across your team including the number of calls and total hours spent in conversations—by individual reps or teams.
Avoma’s platform offers an instant overview of your most and least-mentioned competitors, helping you stay on top of market trends. You can also analyze your team’s collective meeting data to identify the average time spent on various topics such as introductions, demos, and pricing, giving you insight into how to optimize your sales process.
Furthermore, you can use Avoma to track your deal progress and proactively identify any deals that may be at risk of stalling, enabling you to take corrective action and drive revenue growth.
Pricing
Avoma's business seat—which gets you access to conversation and deal intelligence—costs $1080 per year. If you want to opt-in for monthly billing, it costs $100 per user. It's also worth noting that there's an annual contract.
Why Avoma? A Revenue Intelligence Tool
Avoma packs and delivers the essential conversation intelligence features while allowing you to plan, schedule, record, transcribe, and share key moments from your sales calls.
What you'd be missing?
Avoma doesn't offer a coaching inbox, activity dashboard, data-driven coaching recommendations, or smart trackers. It doesn't automatically flag at-risk deals or help you understand the impact of your initiatives (for instance, new sales messaging).
Product Suitability
Ideal for sales teams looking for an AI meeting assistant.
Zoom IQ
Zoom IQ, a conversation intelligence product from Zoom, uses AI to analyze your sales calls and deals to provide insights and recommendations.
Product
Zoom IQ offers several sentiment and engagement metrics including talk-listen ratio, talking speed, longest monologue, and patience score to help you identify areas of improvement and coach your team accordingly. Zoom IQ integrates seamlessly with various video conferencing platforms, including Microsoft Teams, to enhance meeting productivity and analytics.
You can also track and set up alerts for words and expressions across your sales calls—making it easier to jump in and guide your sellers before the deal slips away.
Zoom IQ helps you understand every deal in your pipeline and view deals by stage, size, teams, and more. With an activity timeline, you can quickly identify if a potential sale is at-risk or not being worked on.
And, of course, Zoom IQ supports playlists. You can curate the best practices and examples from past sales calls into a playlist and share it with new reps to reduce the ramp-up period and onboard them faster.
By connecting IQ to your CRM, you can pull data and combine it with information derived from phone and video calls, providing added context. This, in turn, enables you to gain intelligence on frequently discussed topics, negotiation timelines, and more.
Pricing
Zoom IQ is an add-on that you need to buy separately. If you're already a licensed Zoom user, you can buy an IQ seat at $79 per month (or $948 per year).
Why Zoom IQ? A Conversation Intelligence Solution
It offers the necessary integrations and advanced conversation intelligence features right out of the box. It's a cost-effective solution if you use Zoom to connect with your buyers.
What you'd be missing?
Zoom IQ is a lightweight CI (conversation intelligence) tool designed for sales teams using Zoom. Naturally, it doesn't come with several features you see in Gong including smart trackers, coaching inbox, win/loss data, pipeline forecasting, and more.
Product Suitability
For zoom users interested in conversation intelligence.
What's Next?
Gong earned its place by offering a product that's valuable to thousands of sales teams. Looking to replace Gong—whether you're an existing user or not—requires you to spend days, if not weeks, on research and trials.
In this (long) piece, we attempted to arm you with all the information you need—product specifics, pricing tiers, and differentiations—so that you can make an informed decision. Before wrapping up, here's a quick rundown of the best Gong alternatives.
- Grain: For SMB sales teams interested in conversation intelligence and sharing customer insights.
- Chorus: For larger B2B sales teams looking for feature parity with Gong.
- Salesloft: For sales teams consolidating their tool stack.
- Outreach: For larger sales teams looking for deal intelligence and advanced forecasting.
- Wingman: For sales teams interested in analyzing and sharing insights from sales calls.
- Avoma: For sales teams looking for an AI meeting assistant.
- Zoom IQ: For zoom users interested in conversation intelligence.