Akita vs Retently
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedAkita compared with Retently
Retently collects customer sentiment through NPS, CSAT, and CES surveys from $99 a month; Akita builds health scores from behavior across your whole stack from $49. Sentiment is one useful input into a health score, not a substitute for one. If you already run surveys, Akita can consume that signal; if you have no feedback mechanism at all, Retently is the cheaper first step and Akita the more complete second.
Retently compared with Akita
Akita builds behavioral health scores across billing, support, and usage data and drives CSM playbooks from $49 a month; Retently collects stated sentiment through surveys from $99. Sentiment is one input into a health score, not a replacement for one. A B2B SaaS with a customer success team should buy Akita first and add Retently as a signal source; an ecommerce brand with no CSM function gets more from Retently alone.
Choose Akita if
B2B SaaS companies with somewhere between 50 and a few thousand accounts, at least one person responsible for customer success, and a churn problem that gets solved by a human conversation rather than an automated discount, who cannot justify or afford a demo-gated enterprise CS platform.
Choose Retently if
Subscription and ecommerce businesses that already have a retention motion and want an earlier warning signal for it, particularly teams running a customer success or support function who will actually act on a detractor alert rather than letting it sit in a dashboard.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Akita | Retently |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Retention | Retention |
| Starting price | $49 per month (Small Teams) (14 days trial) | $99 per month (Ecommerce Basic) (14 days trial) |
| Pricing model | Flat monthly subscription by tier, with seats and integration counts as the gating variables and both available as $29 monthly add-ons rather than forced upgrades. | Flat monthly subscription metered by survey volume, with seats and API access varying by tier. No percentage of revenue and no per-response fee. |
| Free plan | No | No |
| Free trial | 14 days, with the vendor positioning the low monthly plan as the real low-risk evaluation path | 14 days, no credit card required |
| Best for | B2B SaaS companies with somewhere between 50 and a few thousand accounts, at least one person responsible for customer success, and a churn problem that gets solved by a human conversation rather than an automated discount, who cannot justify or afford a demo-gated enterprise CS platform. | Subscription and ecommerce businesses that already have a retention motion and want an earlier warning signal for it, particularly teams running a customer success or support function who will actually act on a detractor alert rather than letting it sit in a dashboard. |
| Setup time | A few hours to connect integrations and see unified account records. Building health scores you actually trust takes considerably longer, because you need enough historical data to know which signals predicted churn in your business rather than guessing at weights. | A day to first campaign. Connect a data source or import customers, choose a methodology and channel, write the question, and send. The in-app and feedback-button channels require a small front-end embed, which is the only engineering work involved. |
| Learning curve | Moderate, and the difficulty is conceptual rather than technical. Deciding what a health score should measure requires an opinion about why your customers leave, and most teams do not have one yet. Expect to revise the scoring model two or three times in the first quarter. | Low to send surveys, moderate to run a program that works. The genuine skills are in survey timing (asking at the wrong moment produces garbage), sampling (avoiding fatigue while getting enough responses to be representative), and building the follow-up process that makes the data worth collecting. |
| Platforms | Web app, Email alerts, Integration connectors | Web app, Email and SMS delivery, In-app survey embed, Embedded and link surveys, Feedback button, Kiosk mode, MCP server on Pro |
| Compliance | GDPR, as an EU-based company subject to it directly | GDPR, Standard data protection controls for survey response data |
| Founded | 2014 | 2016 |
| Headquarters | Dublin, Ireland | Palo Alto, California, United States |
| Ownership | Independent, trading as Akita Ventures Limited | Independent and bootstrapped |
Strengths and limitations
Akita
Strengths
- Published pricing and self-serve signup in a category where nearly every competitor is demo-gated and quotes five figures annually.
- Configurable health scores at both account and contact level, so you can catch a departing champion inside an otherwise healthy account.
- More than 100 integrations available, which is competitive in breadth with platforms costing twenty times as much.
- Unlimited alerts on every tier, rather than rationing the mechanism that makes the whole system useful.
Limitations
- Health scoring is only as good as your data. Without product event data flowing in, scores rest on billing and support signals alone and often just confirm what you already suspected.
- Integration limits of two and four on the lower tiers are tight, and the $29 per additional connector means the effective price frequently exceeds the headline.
- No payment recovery, dunning, retries, or cancel flows at all. This addresses one half of retention and you will need a separate tool for the other.
- A small bootstrapped team means slower feature development and a product that feels practical rather than polished next to venture-backed competitors.
Retently
Strengths
- Three survey methodologies covering genuinely different questions, rather than the single NPS score most competitors stop at.
- Seven delivery channels including SMS, in-app, kiosk, and a persistent feedback button, which matters because response rate determines whether any of the data means anything.
- AI feedback classification included from the $99 entry tier rather than reserved for an expensive upper plan.
- The AI agent reads reviews and support tickets alongside surveys, so themes are corroborated across sources instead of resting on one channel.
Limitations
- It prevents no churn on its own. Retently produces a signal and an alert; if nobody is staffed to respond, you have added a survey and changed nothing.
- No dunning, no card retries, no cancel flows, and no offers, so the entire involuntary-churn half of this category is untouched.
- Stated sentiment is a weaker predictor than behavior. A customer who scores you a 9 and then leaves is a common and frustrating outcome, and NPS response samples skew toward the strongly opinionated.
- Plans are named and shaped for ecommerce, and survey volume as the metered unit fits a small B2B SaaS poorly.
Pricing compared
Akita
Flat monthly subscription by tier, with seats and integration counts as the gating variables and both available as $29 monthly add-ons rather than forced upgrades.
- Small Teams$49
- Growing Teams$99
- Enterprise$499
Akita is the only genuinely affordable entry into customer success software, and its value depends almost entirely on whether you have a human customer success motion to support. At $99 a month with four integrations it does what platforms costing $20,000 a year do, minus the polish, the analytics depth, and the enterprise workflow tooling. If you have accounts worth calling, that is an outstanding trade. If your customers are thousands of self-serve subscribers nobody will ever phone, the health scores will be technically correct and operationally useless, and your money belongs in dunning and cancel flows instead.
Retently
Flat monthly subscription metered by survey volume, with seats and API access varying by tier. No percentage of revenue and no per-response fee.
- Ecommerce Basic$99
- Ecommerce Pro$299
- EnterpriseQuote
Retently is well priced for what it does and easy to overvalue for what it does not. Three methodologies, seven channels, AI classification from the entry tier, and an MCP server on Pro is a lot of capability for $99 to $299, and the flexibility of month-to-month with no commitment lowers the risk further. But it produces a signal, not a save. Every dollar of value depends on someone acting on a detractor alert, and companies without a customer success or support motion to receive that alert will get a well-designed dashboard and no retention improvement. Buy it as an input to a process you already run, never as the process itself.
Editorial verdict on each
Akita
Akita exists to answer a question the customer success category has otherwise refused to answer: what does a small company do when every platform in the space demands a demo and quotes five figures? At $49 to $99 a month with published pricing and self-serve signup, it delivers the actual mechanism, configurable health scores, segments, alerts, and playbooks, without the enterprise apparatus. It is also the only product in this category that can reach an annual invoiced B2B contract, because health scoring is the only intervention that works when there is no card to retry and no cancel button to intercept. Two caveats. The integration limits on the lower tiers are tight and the $29 add-ons add up, and the scores are only as predictive as the product usage data you are willing to instrument. Buy it when you have accounts worth calling and a human who should be calling them; buy dunning first if you do not.
Read the full Akita profileRetently
Retently is a good feedback platform sitting at the edge of a retention category, and buying it well means being clear about that. Three methodologies, seven channels, AI classification from the entry tier, and an MCP server on Pro is genuinely a lot of capability for $99 to $299 a month, and month-to-month terms with a no-card trial make it easy to test. The signal it produces is real and often moves before behavior does, which is valuable if you have annual B2B contracts that no dunning tool or cancel flow can reach. But it saves nobody on its own. Every dollar of return depends on a human receiving a detractor alert and doing something about it, and if that human does not exist you have bought a survey tool and called it retention. Third or fourth purchase in this category, not the first.
Read the full Retently profileAkita profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Retently last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.