You know what’s hard to write? A Gong review when you can’t actually use Gong. No trial. No sandbox. No “poke around and see if it works.” Just a gated demo form and the faint hum of a six-figure sales cycle.
So I did the next best thing.
I read and summarized in excess of 20 real Gong reviews – from Reddit, G2, Trustpilot, and wherever else people vent about (or praise) their software stack. I wanted to know what Gong’s actually like for the people who’ve used it… not just what the website says.
This isn’t a hands-on review. It’s a roundup of what real users love, hate, and wish they’d known before getting locked into a contract.
If you’re trying to figure out whether Gong is worth it, or whether it’ll drive your RevOps team slowly mad, here’s what the internet actually thinks.
TL;DR – I Read 20 Gong Reviews So You Don’t Have To
Gong doesn’t offer a true free trial, unless you’re willing to go through a demo call and get vetted first. So instead of testing it myself, I gathered and summarised 20 reviews from real users across Reddit, G2, and Trustpilot.
Here’s the short version of what they said:
What users like:
- Accurate call transcription
- Helpful coaching insights (e.g. talk ratios)
- Good fit for structured, enterprise-sized teams
What users don’t love:
- High cost, with limited pricing transparency
- Messy Salesforce integration
- Steep learning curve and onboarding demands
- Not suited to small/startup teams
- Some describe it as “surveillance-heavy”
Looking for something simpler? tl;dv offers many of the same features — but with a free forever plan, instant access, and no demo gatekeeping.
Why This Gong Review Still Matters
You might be thinking, “Hang on! This isn’t a first-person Gong review.” And no, it’s not. I haven’t used the product myself, because Gong doesn’t exactly roll out the red carpet for prospective users. There’s no instant trial. No sandbox. Just a sales form and a hope that you’re ‘qualified’ enough to get through the gates.
So instead of pretending, I went full research mode: I trawled Reddit threads, G2 reviews, and Trustpilot posts to get the kind of feedback people don’t put on landing pages. And then I summarized it for you.
Because if you’ve ever Googled something like “Gong vs [insert tool here]” and found yourself knee-deep in case studies written by the marketing team, you’ll know how rare honest insight really is.
- This is for the RevOps lead trying to stretch a shrinking budget
- For the Head of Sales who needs coaching tools but doesn’t want to be micromanaged by AI
- For the founder who isn’t about to spend $30,000 just to see if something might work
This is a proxy review of Gong — written on behalf of the people who actually got through the velvet rope and then shared what they found on the other side.
I’ve done the legwork. I found the patterns. I pulled out what’s praised, what’s panned, and what keeps popping up across reviews, regardless of company size or job title.
No sales pitch. No SEO fluff. Just honest, crowd-sourced feedback, distilled for people who want clarity before committing their team, their budget, and their pipeline to a product they can’t test.
Could you do all that research yourself? Sure. But you’ve got a job. I made this mine.
What is Gong.io, Anyway?
Gong calls itself a Revenue Intelligence Platform, which is a fancy way of saying: “We record your sales calls and tell you what’s going on.”
At a high level, Gong offers:
- Call recording and transcription
- Deal forecasting based on conversation data
- Rep coaching and manager dashboards
- AI insights for talk time, objection handling, and more
- CRM integrations that (allegedly) don’t break
The pitch?
Better calls. Stronger pipeline. More wins.
The promise?
A sales team that magically closes more deals.
The reality?
Well… we wouldn’t know. Because we haven’t been allowed past the velvet rope.
Gong positions itself as more than a call recorder (though that’s the part most users actually love). It’s pitching a full-blown, AI-heavy “revenue intelligence operating system”, a platform designed to sit across your pipeline and nudge everyone (from SDRs to CROs) toward more predictable revenue.
Here’s the rough layout of what’s on offer, assuming you get through the sales gate:
Gong Forecast
Their forecasting module. According to their site, it uses over 300 data signals from calls, emails, and CRM fields to surface risk and help leaders figure out what’s real and what’s just a rep being optimistic. It integrates with your pipeline and pings reps to update deals. Some teams say it’s helpful. Others say it’s just another place your manager goes to find red flags.
Gong Engage
This is their sales engagement product. Think Outreach or Salesloft, but with Gong’s call data woven in. It’s meant to help reps prioritize outreach and personalize messages using historical behaviour. Sounds smart but user reviews are full of complaints about bugs, missing features, and the fact that it’s not really built for sequencing at scale.
Gong Data Engine
The integration bit. This is what pushes all your Gong data into your CRM or data warehouse. It tracks calls, emails, meetings, and contact history. Gong says it simplifies life for ops teams. G2 reviewers say it sometimes requires a backend dev just to extract the data you already own.
Gong AI
This is the catch-all name for everything ‘smart’. Think follow-up suggestions, coaching nudges, objection tracking, and predictive pipeline scoring. Also includes their new “AI Agents”, automated assistants that spot risk, flag activity, and supposedly save managers hours. Whether it actually saves time or just creates more alerts… mixed bag.
Language Support
They say they support over 70 languages, which is impressive. But the UI is still English-only, and feedback from Spanish-speaking teams suggests the transcription models aren’t quite ready for primetime. “Support” in theory isn’t always “useful” in reality.
So yes, Gong does more than record calls. But the moment you start digging into how it works, or whether it works for you, you hit a wall. Because you still can’t try any of it without handing over your details and talking to a rep.
What Real Users Say Gong Does Well
I did however do my digging and seek out real voices to see what they said about Gong. And while many are hidden behind usernames, there are some frank and honest answers to be found.
To keep things fair, let’s start with what users actually like. Because while the sales process is infuriating and the price tag stings, plenty of real users have good things to say, especially if they’re in the right kind of team.
Call Recording & Transcription
This is where Gong gets the most love. The ability to record, review, and share calls without admin drama is a big deal, especially for reps juggling multiple conversations a day.
“Gong’s sharing features are amazing… I can quickly share my calls with clients or prospects right after the meeting without the administrivia.”
— Edan G. – G2
“Having the recording and transcript enables me not to take a million notes and more on the people I am speaking with”
— Valerie B. – G2
Coaching & Talk Ratio Insights
Several users specifically called out how helpful it is to see speaker breakdowns, not just for managers, but for self-awareness.
“Gong’s breakdown of the speaking time by speaker helps me review my calls and see if I am really listening to my customer or just talking at them.”
— Edan G. – G2
Ease of Use
Worth noting: not every enterprise SaaS tool is a nightmare to integrate.
“ It also integrates easily and well with our CRM. The integration was crucial to us getting the most out of the investment.”
— Jess H. G2
Of course, this is the good stuff, the features that work and make sense for teams who are already pretty well set up. But as we’ve seen (and as a lot of users found out too late), getting value from Gong isn’t just about the features… it’s about everything that comes with them.
Gong Reviews from Real Users
Right, you didn’t come here for polished case studies and hand-picked testimonials. Everything I’ve shared so far is based on what I’ve been able to find as a Gong review, and most of it comes directly from the people using (or leaving) the product.
Because let’s be honest: people in SaaS will happily praise software that actually makes their lives easier. And they’re even faster to complain when it doesn’t.
So here you go, what real users say when they’re not on a sales call. Everything below is word-for-word from Reddit, G2 and Trustpilot.
Storage & Salesforce Integrations
“When you have it writing back to SFDC, [Gong] creates a TON of records. This really ate into our storage and actually pushed us over the quota… We were looking at about 25MB a day of records being created, on average. That’s a ton — 12,000 records a day just for this.”
— Reddit, r/salesforce
“It requires downloading calls individually, which is impractical and inefficient for a large volume of data… We had to engage our development team at additional cost just to extract data we already own.”
— G2 review
Trials, Fit & User Support
“Yes, we are about to wind down a 6 month trial of Engage. We will not be moving forward as a paid customer.”
— Reddit, r/sales
“We realised pretty quickly it was a very nice to have but not need to have.”
— Reddit, on Gong Forecast
“We were essentially left with minimal support and no actionable solutions… The only follow-up offered was a survey.”
— G2 review
Cost vs Value
“Not great for small/startup teams — way too expensive when there are more affordable tools that work….Gong is a really powerful tool… but it isn’t the right business decision.”
— G2 review
Sales Experience & Attitude
“Got an email from a sales rep telling me we are too small to use Gong… The cheek! The arrogance!”
— Trustpilot
AI & Trust
“Transcription is mediocre. ‘AI’ features add relatively little value… I would not trust them with my data.”
— G2 review
The picture that emerges? A powerful tool, but one that’s expensive, divisive, and far from plug-and-play.
Why Doesn’t Gong Offer a Free Trial?
Technically, it does have a free trial. But only if you speak to someone first. And they decide you’re “worthy”.
There’s no sandbox. No “have a play and see if it fits your team.” No click-to-start. Just a form, a follow-up, and a BDR who wants to know if you’ve got budget before they’ll show you anything beyond a pitch deck.
It’s the SaaS equivalent of walking into Hermès, asking to see a bag, and being told to sit quietly while someone checks with the manager if you’re allowed. Spoiler: the bag isn’t coming.
Now, I’ve worked in SaaS sales in the past. And the product I sold (not tl;dv) had a closed trial too, but here’s how it worked. You couldn’t just log in and explore. We’d install it, run it for a week, then present the results back to you like a big reveal.
We said it was to help busy business owners who “didn’t have time to explore it themselves,” or to “make things simple and clear so they didn’t get overwhelmed.” We positioned it as a helpful hand-holding exercise. But in truth?
It was about control.
We wanted to present a neatly packaged case study, their data, our interface, our framing. “Here are the results, here’s what it means, and here’s the next step.” Basically: tee up the sale so well the customer couldn’t say no. That’s what Gong’s doing here. It’s not that the product isn’t good, it’s that they want to own the narrative before you get your hands on it.
They may let you play with it for six months prior, but they want to know ALL the juicy details so they can say, “Well, Potential Customer, this was your pain and here’s how I’ve solved it.”
You’re then stuck. In a total bind because they know everything and have proved it all, even if the results aren’t quite what you were hoping for…”Bad workman blames his tools…blah blah blah” and all that. They’ve proved the tool works, and now you need to pay a squillion dollars.
And I get it.
Gong isn’t aiming for scrappy little teams or solo founders. It’s enterprise software. But still, in 2025, asking someone to sit through a multi-step sales funnel just to see the tool is wild. Even Salesforce lets you poke around.
If I can’t try it, I can’t trust it.
I don’t know how it feels to use. so I don’t know if my team will hate it.
I don’t know if the AI makes sense or just looks clever in a deck.
You don’t find out until you’re locked in.
This is where tl;dv is different.
You don’t need permission to see our tools. You don’t need to pretend you’re a Head of Whatever with decision-making power. You just try it. Record a call, upload a meeting, and see what it gives you.
Because if your product’s actually good, it should speak for itself.
Also, I continued my quest to find honest reviews and demos, and on YouTube and I found a “demo” that is, well, not a demo.
It IS, however, 9 minutes of someone showing you the website and telling people to book a demo.
Reading between the lines, I think this says a lot more than it intends to:
What Gong Users Don’t Love: The Common Threads
After reading dozens of reviews, the same themes came up again and again:
- It’s expensive – ~$30k/year for a 15-rep team, even before onboarding
- It’s not for small teams – Gong actively turns away startups
- It feels surveillance-heavy – Tracks rep behaviour, talk time, objections, etc.
- Onboarding is a slog – Requires internal training, tech-savvy reps, and dev support
- You have to adapt to it – Gong pushes its process, not yours
Gong Is Expensive. Like, Really Expensive.
We’re talking serious enterprise spend. We’ve talked about this before on our Gong pricing article, but it appears not a lot has changed. One post I read broke it down like this: $5k just to get in the door, then around $1,400 per user, per year. So if you’ve got, say, 15 reps? That’s nearly 30 grand a year, and that’s before you even know if the team will actually use it.
If it doesn’t stick, that cost starts to feel very heavy, very quickly.
It Can Feel Like Overkill for Smaller Teams
We saw from one user above that they were deemed not big enough, Gong wouldn’t even entertain them. And while I get that there’s a time/cost ratio, it can feel a bit… exclusive.
There’s a real sense that Gong is built for big, busy teams with layers of enablement, RevOps, coaching staff, and a decent tech stack. If you’re a lean team that just wants to stay on top of deals and coach better, it might be more platform than you need. But at what point of the Gong review cycle is it “Hmmm, this is useful” and “Hmmmm, we can’t afford this.”
They let you waste your time requesting demos and getting excited before spitting you out.
It Can Feel Like You’re Being Watched
Now, this is a big one. Many users said it’s useful, but also a bit surveillance-y. That weird vibe where you’re trying to do your job, but suddenly everything’s being tracked and scored, talk time, keywords, objection handling, and your manager’s in the corner nodding like they’ve just cracked the sales matrix.
I did see hints, although not expliciftly stated, that PIPs (performance improvement plans) started being built using Gong data, which sounds efficient on paper, but probably doesn’t feel great when you’re the rep on the receiving end.
I’m also going to caveat this and say, even tl;dv records and scores meetings, but it’s all about the positioning and execution of this.
We’ve talked about this in our Cluely takedown, that the same tool, when delivered in two different lenses, can be “helpful” or “creepy”.
This is then a barometer for the company as a whole in many ways… Do you track because you want to help and offer training, or do you track because you don’t trust?
Bigger picture here, but the more you invest in “lack of trust” the closer you are to doing eye trackers and keystroke software hidden away.
A fairly big morale killer. Not how you need your happy, motivated sales squad to be, am I right?
It’s Not Plug-and-Play
Even the fans admit: this thing takes time. There’s a learning curve, onboarding, internal training, rollout, you don’t just sign up and start flying. You need buy-in across the team, especially if you’re trying to actually use the insights properly and not just collect them like data hoarders.
There is a feeling here that you need to “pay attention to your end users’ technical ability…” Which is corporate speak for: if your team isn’t already quite tech-savvy and structured, this could be a headache.
You’ll Probably Need to Change How You Work
And honestly? This was the most interesting bit. A lot of the negative feedback wasn’t about the tool being bad, it was about it not fitting.
Gong doesn’t slot into what you’re already doing. It often wants you to do things their way. This is their processes, their structure, their categories of risk, their metrics for what’s “working.”
That might be brilliant for some teams, but sales are creatures of habit (ask poor CS), and if you have a system that’s working, even if this does work, it’s going to be hard to roll out easily.
So… Should You Buy Gong?
Honestly? Depends who you are.
If you’re in a company that’s already structured for this, you’ve got RevOps support, sales enablement in place, budgets signed off before you even open a pricing page, maybe Gong makes sense. You’ll probably get a lot from it. It’s powerful, clever, and it appears to have a lot of layers.
But even then, it’s a massive commitment. Not just financially, but culturally. It’s like saying yes to a system that assumes you’ll build around it. It’s not plug-and-play, it’s plug-and-prepare-to-adapt-your-entire-process.
I used to sell advertising space using a CRM that was clearly built for SaaS sales, full of pipelines and MQLs and deal stages that didn’t reflect how we actually worked. And it was a nightmare. We spent more time fighting the tool than closing anything. Gong gives me a bit of that same energy. Like it’s not really designed for you, it’s designed for how they think your business should operate.
That’s where tl;dv feels different.
It can do a lot, record your calls, summarize meetings, pull insights across accounts, let you ask questions after the fact, but it doesn’t expect you to change how you work just to make the most of it. It grows with you. You start small, you find what’s useful, and you build from there. There’s no pressure to commit to some big philosophy. You just get the clarity you need, when you need it.
There’s no forecast theatre, no AI telling your manager your deal’s dead before you’ve even had a chance to follow up, no platform trying to outsmart you. Just a tool that lets you be better at what you already do.
If that’s what you’ve been looking for? tl;dv is already open in another tab, waiting. And guess what, it has a TOTALLY FREE plan. Try it to your heart’s content. Speak to our sales teams if you want to. Not because you’re forced to.
Want meeting insights without the gatekeeping?
Try tl;dv, free forever, no credit card, no permission slip.
Your name is definitely down, and you can absolutely come in.
FAQs About Gong
What is Gong used for?
Gong is a revenue intelligence platform. It records and analyses sales calls, provides coaching insights, forecasts pipeline health, and integrates with your CRM to surface deal risk and team performance trends.
Can I try Gong for free?
Sort of, but not really. There’s no self-serve trial. You have to book a demo, speak to a sales rep, and be deemed “qualified” before you might get access. No sandbox, no click-to-try experience.
Is Gong worth the money?
That depends. For large, well-structured sales teams with RevOps support and budget to spare, maybe. For smaller or leaner teams? Probably not. Most reviews mention the high price and steep rollout effort.
What’s the difference between Gong and tl;dv?
Gong is enterprise software built for sales leaders, packed with call analytics and deal forecasting. tl;dv is the nimble, no-fuss alternative: a powerful meeting recorder and smart insights suite that lets your whole team record, summarize, and search calls without sales gatekeeping or bloated features. Oh, and it’s free forever.
Need more? Check out our side-by-side comparison of Gong vs tl;dv .
Is Gong good for small teams?
Not really. It’s expensive, requires setup support, and assumes you’ll adapt to its workflow. Many small teams find it overkill.
Also, there is a high chance you will be denied even a demo at the inquiry stage.
What are Gong alternatives?
Can I use Gong for coaching?
Yes. Coaching is one of its strengths, think speaker talk-time breakdowns, call libraries, and AI nudges. Just be aware it can come across as micromanagement if not rolled out with care.
