Top 6 Gong Alternatives for Smarter Sales Conversations

All things considered, conversational intelligence (CI) is a rather new territory — and Gong has been there since the beginning.

But, we couldn’t help but notice a new trend in the space: the sales community has downgraded Gong as a “nice to have” at best and go-to-market teams are considering other alternatives.

Why?

• Post-Covid, the market for video communication tools like Zoom has significantly grown — fueling the need for call recording, transcription, and analysis tools. The result? You now have way better, truly smart intelligence tools in the market.
  
  
• Gong’s pricing, while undisclosed on its website, is estimated to be north of $1,000 to $2,000 per user per year — fully paid upfront. To boot, Gong.io has no package that caters to mid-market and small teams.
  
  
• Tech consolidation is on the rise and sales leaders are realizing that a stand-alone conversation intelligence tool won’t cut it.

Before blindly slapping down your credit card and dishing out for Gong, it’s important you get the complete picture of the conversation intelligence market to determine the best fit.

We did the research for you. 

In this guide here, you’ll find leading Gong alternatives with a thorough breakdown of their feature set, pricing, strengths, and shortcomings.

We’ve included ourselves, Apollo, in this list because we do genuinely believe our product to be one of your top options based on what we’ve seen from users’ stories, reviews, and experiences.

But only you know which conversational intelligence tool is best for your budget, team size, and growth stage. Here’s some research to help you make that decision.

Gong.io, at its most fundamental level, is a tool for recording your sales calls.

It uses 40+ powerful AI models to sifts through your call recordings to surface insights into what’s helping you close deals so you can win more.

How much do your reps share talk time?

What customer pain points surfaced?

What is the tone, disposition, and language of the call?

What are the recommended next steps?

Gong, like CI tools are built to do, surfaces these answers.

Along with call summaries and insights, it also has deal management features, parsing through your calls to alert you of at-risk deals and next steps.

All in all, while Gong doesn’t assist with lead generation, it serves as a robust hub for optimizing customer interactions in the mid-to-bottom of your funnel — helping more with engaging and moving deals to close than with generating pipeline in the early stages. 

There are three key reasons why Gong might not be right for you.

1. It’s out of budget for small- and medium-sized businesses

We found that one Gong user shares that the platform runs around $9,500 annually for a minimum of three seats.

For startups, small businesses, and mid-market organizations, these numbers are hard to justify for a tool that only helps with conversational intelligence — no more.

In fact, an enterprise user, who admits that the product is great from a functionality standpoint, notes pricing as the reason why they’re looking for an alternative:

 “The pricing is probably the biggest obstacle and hence we are looking to change.” — Enterprise user, Capterra review. 

For its price, Gong also doesn’t do an exemplary job of streamlining workflows or well, doing its job as best as you’d expect it to. Take it from this user who manually moves call transcripts to another tool to analyze them:

“The ‘ask anything about this call’ feature isn’t as powerful as other GenAI summary tools. Currently, I copy and paste transcripts into another tool to summarize and ask questions about the transcript. It's definitely usable but could be better.” — Enterprise user, G2 Review. 

2. There’s a lack of functioning integrations 

If you want to build off of Gong with integrations to help you fill the gaps in pipeline generation, it’s not great for that either.

“It can be glitchy. Added the add-on to my outlook to send a Gong invite with any Zoom invites and it works sporadically.” — Mid-market user, Capterra review. 

A paying user also wishes Gong could “integrate seamlessly with multiple different online meeting platforms (Zoom and Teams, for example), instead of just one and having to manually import calls from the others.”

3. It gives limited help across your sales cycle (straining your budget further!) 

Gong only helps in one aspect of the sales process — calls. 

As a result, you’ll have to get more and more tools to fill the gap — not knowing whether Gong even seamlessly integrates with them or how badly that’d hurt your budget.

For example, Gong doesn’t have an in-built contact database that can help find your target audience’s contact information. Sure, it offers integrations to other data providers like ZoomInfo and Cognism. But that’d mean you’d have to pay for both tools separately.

What makes a CI tool perfect for you?

If you can’t afford Gong — for its sticker price or for its singular use case — you still need a conversation intelligence tool.

A study from Gong themselves found that companies using conversation software for their sales processes experience a 27% increase in deal closure rates.

An ideal Gong alternative should solve the problem Gong solves — at a fraction of the cost.

Any viable alternative to Gong should, for starters, have a worldclass call intelligence features. It needs to:

• Give you call summaries to reference in your conversations with customers-to-be
• Offer specific insights into how you and your team can improve your close rates
• Make AI-powered recommendations for next best steps to take to move prospects through the pipeline

With a Gong alternative, there’s also the opportunity to not only match Gong’s CI capabilities — but extend beyond them. 

An ideal solution should pair conversational intelligence with other built-in tools that help you source and prioritize leads before you get on the phone.

For instance, it should include a reliable, up-to-date contact database to give you email addresses for your target customers and outreach tools so you can reach out to those people. This helps you: 

• Reduce the strain on your budget by consolidating the tools you need into one platform
• Increase team collaboration by organizing all prospect info and deal tasks in one place 
• Improve team productivity by reducing friction and manual work caused by tool jumping

Below are a few tools that help you do that.

Not all include that ever-important database, but each one comes with an upside over Gong — they may better fit your needs, budget, and team.

Apollo.io is a robust go-to-market solution that gives you conversational intelligence, a reliable contact database, and built-in sales tools in one platform.

Apollo does a lot of things — and does it well, but its most powerful feature in the context of Gong is Apollo Conversations, an AI-powered call intelligence tool that records, transcribes, and analyzes your call recordings to give you actionable takeaways for improving your sales approach. It constantly surfaces key insights from your calls and makes recommendations based on your customers’ pain points, goals, and objections, pulled straight from its largest living data network of 275M contacts. 

Apollo’s CI is also inextricably linked to its sales engagement features. Your calls — and all of the insights you get from them — exist within the context of your entire outbound. You can build, track, and automate workflows that are personalized to specific personas.

Saad Khan, an Apollo user who used the platform to achieve over 40% conversions for Aligned very thoughtfully summarizes it.

Key Features

• Apollo Conversations for call recording, transcripts, summaries, and analysis for key insights into what’s moving the sales needles (so you can do more of it!)
• Post-meeting assistant to automate post-call activities like auto-generating follow-up emails and logging information in the CRM
• Constantly updated database (what we called Living Data Network) providing accurate contact and company information
• 65+ filters like job title, location, account industry, employee headcount, and revenue
• Sales engagement tools to build outreach campaigns including AI tools to create and automate engaging custom sequences
• Apollo Deals to manage all your deals, across various sales stages in one place
• Data enrichment features to clean, update, and append prospect data in your CRM
• Comprehensive integrations to unite your most important sales tools in one platform  

Why users choose Apollo over Gong

1. Apollo’s conversational intelligence is at par with Gong’s

Apollo Conversations has been ranked among the top three leading platforms for conversational intelligence, right beside Gong.

Users also note call recordings are seamless and transcriptions come out beautifully.

“I have been using the meeting recording feature - with minutes, outcomes and next steps - on Apollo for the past 6 months and loved it! Seamlessly records every Teams/Zoom Call and transcribes very accurately.” — Reddit reviewer

Call recordings and searchable transcripts in Apollo also come with all the bells and whistles of Gong. You can configure keywords or a group of keywords and phrases to track specifics — say competitor mentions, customer objections, and pain points — and with Ask Apollo, you can also use AI to give you data-based insights for improving your sales strategy.

It’s a productivity, coaching, and data tool all-in-one.

See all of the use cases for Apollo Conversations in action in this webinar.

2. Apollo helps you throughout the sales cycle — not just in one area

Apollo consolidates outreach tools, a contact database, and deal management in one platform. This does a few things.

• It keeps your software costs down
• It saves you and your team from all that platform-hopping
• It aligns everything and everyone within your organization with everything you need in one place 

 “Using Apollo Conversations has been a game-changer. It consolidates call recordings and account details into a single view. We no longer need to sift through cloud recordings, request meeting recordings, or dig for account information in separate platforms.” — Jacob McComber, Founder at Agency Immersive

3. Apollo offers an all-in platform at a fraction of Gong’s costs

Apollo’s plan that gives you call recordings and conversational insights costs only $79 per user per month. 

When we do some quick math, this puts a per user total to a yearly $948. For three users, the figure adds up to $2,844 only. Now when you put it beside Gong’s price estimate shared by users ($9,600 for three seats), you’ll see Gong costs almost three times the price of Apollo with its limited feature set.

Here's Apollo vs. Gong, side-by-side.

Who is Apollo ideal for?

Apollo is ideal for revenue teams of all sizes, looking for a solution that offers tools to adequately power their GTM motion. 

Pricing

Apollo offers three, customizable premium plans:

• A free plan with unlimited email credits
• Basic for $49 per user per month + a 14-day free trial
• Professional for $99 per user per month + a 14-day free trial
• Custom plan with all the bells and whistles for large organizations — starting at $5k per year

 

Of these, conversational insights are accessible in the Professional plan and up. There’s also a dialer included in this plan (for calling prospects directly from Apollo) and there are no caps on the number of Sequences (outreach campaigns) you can create.

Free plan: Yes (14-day trials for premium plans also available). The free forever plan gives you access to the full database, filters for granular searches, and integrations with HubSpot and Salesforce. You can also build a library of sequences and activate up to two of them at a time.  

Sign up for Apollo’s free plan here.

Clari is another AI-powered platform that lets you manage, track, and automate your pipeline in one place.

Following its acquisition of the conversational intelligence tool, Wingman, Clari now also offers call recordings and AI-powered insights under the name, Clari Copilot.

But, it’s not built with a huge emphasis on CI. And its ease of use doesn’t quite match up to Gong’s.

Where Clari truly excels though is its basic pipeline management capabilities, an area where Gong falls short.   

Key features

• Clari Copilot to record, summarize, and analyze sales calls
• Sales pipeline management capabilities
• Forecasting capabilities to predict revenue
• Deal intelligence to track deal health and identify at-risk deals
• Activity tracking to capture, log, and track sales activity across sales channels

Pricing

Clari offers custom pricing based on companies’ specific needs. According to a marketplace estimate, the average cost of Clari is about $160,000 annually.

Free plan: No. Free trial available upon request. 

Who is Clari best suited for?

Clari is a realistic option for enterprise teams (with a big ol’ budget) that want to manage their leads — and the calls they are using to reach out to them — on a more granular level. 

Like Gong, Clari also doesn’t have a built-in contact database to help with prospecting. So you’ll want to either integrate it with a third-party contact database or select a tool like Apollo that comes with an in-built contact database.

What are users saying about Clari?

Clari has a 4.6-star rating on its 5,347 reviews on G2. Users are appreciative of its ease of use but also point out the implementation can be “a bit slow.”

Users also share:

“Clari has a very friendly user interface and is very easy to quickly analyze one's pipeline via the opportunity inspect module. The ability to create custom views and filter by groupings is great for live forecast calls where you quickly need to jump from one rep to the next.” — G2 reviewer

“Easy call recording that happens as per your calendar events and integrates well. I use it everyday to review my calls [but] the transcript sometimes [gets] confused between different attendees.” —G2 reviewer

ZoomInfo is a B2B contact database, offering prospects’ email and phone contact details alongside insights into their company.

Like Apollo, it also offers sales outreach tools and conversational intelligence but, unlike Apollo, these features are sold as separate, premium add-ons called Engage and Chorus, respectively. 

Chorus records and analyzes your sales calls and automatically logs call details in your CRM. It also points out at-risk deals including factors jeopardizing the opportunity.   

Key features 

• A comprehensive database of 135M+ phone numbers, plus emails addresses and personalization information
• “Chorus” CI tool with real-time conversation analytics, summaries, and next-step recommendation
• Sales engagement tools for building outbound campaigns
• Lead scoring for pipeline management
• Free Chrome extension to layer contact details on top of LinkedIn

Pricing

ZoomInfo’s pricing is custom, based on your credit usage, the number of licenses you buy, and the (department-specific) features you need. 

 

To give you a point of reference, ZoomInfo costs can easily go over $10,000 annually, according to one estimate.

Free plan: No. 14-day free trial available. 

Who is ZoomInfo/Chorus best suited for?

If you’re already a ZoomInfo user, looking for conversational intelligence, it’d make sense to get Chorus instead of a third-party tool for call recordings and sales coaching (assuming you already have that “enterprise-level” budget).  

If you’re not a ZoomInfo user, you’re better off choosing a dedicated CI tool or an all-in-one solution that offers data and engagement without breaking the bank.

Wondering how ZoomInfo and Apollo compare to make your choice? Here’s a detailed breakdown of Apollo versus ZoomInfo. 

What are users saying about ZoomInfo?

ZoomInfo has 8,604 reviews on G2 with an overall rating of 4.4 out of 5. While there are mixed reviews about its data accuracy and Chrome extension, users generally agree it comes with a hefty price tag.

The conversational intelligence add-on, Chorus, on the other hand has a 4.5-star rating from its pool of 2,960 reviews on G2. Users say:

“I love that my calls are recorded and are easily shareable to my clients. I also love that there is a transcript, so I can go back to the call and easily find the areas I need to re-listen to for notes and takeaways.” — G2 reviewer

“I have had a few instances where my calls have not been recorded and that can be very frustrating when I'm going back to review important information or send a recording to additional folks on my team.” — G2 reviewer

Outreach.io is primarily a sales engagement platform that includes call recording and analysis capabilities. The depth of its outreach features are something Gong can’t offer, letting you create automated campaigns across different channels to reach out to your target customers. 

But like Gong, it doesn’t offer an in-built database for sourcing prospects’ contact information — requiring integration with a data provider to find leads to call.

Key features

• Conversational intelligence that surfaces key insights with transcriptions and keywords
• Capabilities that cover the entire sales cycle, like deal forecasting and pipeline management
• AI-powered analytics and revenue intelligence that helps leaders forecast performance and revenue
• Strong integrations with popular CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot

Pricing

Like others listed here, Outreach’s pricing is custom — and not the most transparent. Their plans are largely divided by feature packages.

For access to conversational insights, you’ll likely want to inquire about the Meet plan as it includes automated call summaries and action steps.

As for what to expect in terms of pricing, one user shares Outreach averages $3,000 per user per year. 

Who is Outreach best suited for?

If you’re looking for a Gong alternative that gives you conversation intelligence coupled with engagement tools, Outreach is a good call.

But you’ll need to get a separate sales intelligence tool to find contact information for prospects you want to reach out to. That in addition to your CRM? Your tech stack will start to get bloated pretty fast.

A much more streamlined approach that Predictable Revenue took is to consolidate all these tools into one robust platform. In doing so, they cut their costs in half by replacing ZoomInfo, Outreach, and Salesforce with one tool, Apollo. This reduced the complexity of three tools in one —  decreasing SDR workload by 20%.  

What are users saying about Outreach?

Outreach has 3,417 reviews on G2 and a 4.3-star rating. Generally, users agree its UI is cluttered. However, there are mixed reviews about how seamlessly it integrates with other tools.

Here’s more: 

“Outreach is great because of how much it does, but that makes it also a problem. It's too complicated. I would compare it to Salesforce vs Pipedrive.” — Reddit reviewer

“A sales enablement platform like Outreach is a necessary product for any growing sales team once you reach 10+ BDRs/SDRs/AEs. [It] has allowed us to become more sophisticated and intentional with how we handle outbound sales, working opportunities, and onboarding new customers…[but] the product is definitely focused on "delivering every possible feature" vs "let's take some time to build this feature in the right way.” — G2 reviewer

How do Apollo and Outreach — both sales engagement platforms with CI — stack up? Here’s a complete breakdown.

Salesloft is similar to Outreach in many ways.

It’s a standalone sales engagement platform for managing, tracking, and automating outreach that also offers call intelligence features. These include call recording, analysis, and AI-powered call summaries and follow-up emails.

With its “Conductor” AI, Salesloft can prioritize and execute outreach campaigns across different channels — offering way more automation for moving prospects through the funnel than Gong. That said, the same shortcoming persists: you don’t get a database for finding mobile numbers and moving them into your calling tool. 

Key features

• “Cadences” for building personalized engagement campaigns across email, calls, and action items
• Conversation intelligence tool with transcripts, talk tracks, comments, and notes
• Email tracking and analytics
• Sales forecasting to identify opportunities and at-risk deals
• Integrations with popular CRM tools

Pricing

Salesloft’s pricing is locked but broadly divided into two plans: Advanced and Premier. Both offer similar features with the Premier plan also providing forecasting and revenue management tools. 

For a rough idea, a user shares Salesloft is “around 1000 USD per person per year. Minimum 3 seats. 200 USD extra per person per year if you want the dialer.”

Free plan: No. Free trial available upon request

Who is Salesloft best suited for?

Salesloft is an ideal pick if your primary objection is a sales outreach platform that lets you create and track outreach sequences. Its conversational insights also make a good alternative for Gong as a user shares:

“We use [Salesloft recordings] and sunsetted our Gong package. Gong seemed to be a good tool during 2020 but didn't really innovate…their product competition caught up. [There are] better alternatives in the space.” — Reddit reviewer. 

But if you’re a scaling team focused on outbound enough to invest in a big engagement platform, chances are you’ll want easy access to data to funnel into said campaigns.

If you want to dig more into how Salesloft compares with data + engagement solutions, check out our guide on Apollo versus Salesloft. Here's a sneak peek.

What are users saying about Salesloft?

For its 4,026 reviews on G2, Salesloft has a 4.5-star rating. Folks generally appreciate its cadences feature but note that there’s a steep learning curve.

Here are more reviews from across the web:

“The tool provides accurate forecasting and insight into conversations that ensure accurate messaging and email tracking.” — Gartner reviewer

“Our company uses Salesloft. Love the tool. The phone piece is a little wonky but the cadencing feature, ability to build templates, import contacts easily, and monitor what is working vs. what is not and with whom is a huge win.” — Reddit user

Fathom is a stand-alone conversation intelligence tool that records, transcribes, and summarizes your Zoom, Google Meet, or Microsoft Teams meetings with an “AI notetaker.” 

It uses these call recordings to auto-generate call notes and sync them to your Salesforce, HubSpot, or Close CRM.

It’s less robust than Gong, but also cheaper and more lightweight; it’s really all about tradeoffs you’re willing to make.

Key features

• One-click extension to Zoom, Google Meet, and Microsoft Teams plus a desktop app
• AI-generated meeting summaries, action items, and follow-up emails
• Keyword searches within transcripts
• Unlimited call recordings and storage
• AI-powered action steps and follow-up emails
• Coaching metrics available

Pricing

Fathom offers three premium plans:

• Premium plan for $15 per user per month
• Team Edition plan for $19 per user per month
• Team Edition Pro for $29 per user per month

Each plan unlocks a different set of features to meet different needs. However, features ideal for growing your sales team, including call metrics, deal view, and CRM integrations are reserved for the Team Edition Pro.

Free plan: Yes. The free plan gives you unlimited call recordings, recording length, and storage with a Slack integration (CRM integrations are limited and there are no AI or team features in the free version). 

Who is Fathom best suited for?

If you’re looking to plug in a standalone, budget-friendly conversational intelligence tool to your sales stack, Fathom is a great choice.

But unless you have plenty of other tools to handle critical components of the sales process (like a database for prospecting, an email sequencing tool for outreach, and a dialer for collaborative calls, Fathom won’t get you very far. 

Small teams with limited budgets could be a good fit. But be prepared to outgrow it as you scale.

What are users saying about Fathom?

Fathom has 3,304 reviews on G2 with a full rating — a leading factor contributing to this rating is the tool’s simplicity and ease of use.

Here’s more:

“Simple to use and gives me the opportunity to be more productive by having Fathom attend all my meetings. Having Fathom record and summarize every meeting, allows me to focus on other work in my queue. I love how you can share the recordings, summaries and/or action items, or pick and choose what to send to whom. I love the premium plan feature that gives you various options to choose the format/tone of how you want Fathom to summarize the content.” — G2 reviewer 

“There are some Zoom calls I don't want recorded… I haven't been able to find a way to turn off the app before starting my ‘meeting’.” — G2 reviewer

 One point worth noting here is that most users are individuals, and in the reviews we went through, hardly any talked about their experience using Fathom for their sales teams.

There’s revenue hidden in your sales calls — find it with the right tool

There’s a lot you can do with Gong. If you have the budget, it’s a worthy investment.

But — even budget aside — the most productive, functional, and profitable tech stack will always be unified; data, engagement, call intelligence, deal management, and analytics all operating out of the same place. 

As you sit to make your decision, make sure you go back to reviewing your specific needs so you can make a smart, cost-effective choice. Here’s a summary: 

Given the current economy though, budgets are low. Plus, there’s no better way to increase your productivity and drive better results than through tech consolidation. As the CEO of Predictable Revenue and an Apollo user puts it:

"The thing that made me excited as somebody who’s been in sales development a long time was Apollo’s integration between sales data and sales engagement and the magic that you can make happen when those two are together on the same platform." — Collin Stewart, CEO at Predictable Revenue

Take Apollo for a free spin and decide for yourself.