We just finished migrating our sales team's conversation intelligence and deal review process from Gong to Fathom. I'm the one who had to build the integrations, manage the data pipelines, and ensure everything landed in our data warehouse for the sales leaders. This isn't about marketing fluff, it's about which tool actually works better when you need to stitch it into a real tech stack for actionable insights.
The core question for me was: which platform gives a better, more automated, and less fragile workflow for engineering to support deal reviews? Gong felt like a monolithic black box. Fathom, by contrast, has an API-first approach that made my life easier. Here's the breakdown from an infrastructure perspective:
**Data Access & Integration**
* **Gong:** Their API is robust but complex. Extracting structured data, especially scores and topic timestamps for specific deal review segments, required multiple nested calls. We had to run a dedicated ETL pod just to handle the pagination and data normalization.
* **Fathom:** The API is simpler. The webhook support is what sold it. I can now trigger events directly into our pipeline. Example: when a call is labeled "Deal Review," a webhook fires, and the following happens automatically:
1. Call recording & transcript lands in an S3 bucket (via Fathom → Lambda).
2. A structured summary (key moments, action items) is posted to a dedicated Slack channel via a simple webhook connector I built in Python.
3. Metadata (participants, duration, key topics) is inserted into our Snowflake `sales.deal_reviews` table.
**Infrastructure & Cost**
* **Gong:** You're paying for their entire platform, whether you use all features or not. The cost was significant, and we felt locked into their UI for everything. Custom scoring required their professional services.
* **Fathom:** More modular. We pay for transcription and intelligence, but the data flows where we want it. I built our own scoring dashboard in Grafana, pulling from our warehouse. The infrastructure cost is now just the compute for our lightweight webhook handlers and the Snowflake storage. Terraform snippet for the core ingestion:
```hcl
# Fathom Webhook -> AWS Lambda -> S3
resource "aws_lambda_function" "fathom_deal_review_ingest" {
filename = "fathom_ingest.zip"
function_name = "fathom-deal-review-to-s3"
role = aws_iam_role.lambda_exec.arn
handler = "index.handler"
runtime = "python3.9"
environment {
variables = {
TARGET_S3_BUCKET = aws_s3_bucket.deal_reviews.bucket
}
}
}
resource "aws_apigatewayv2_api" "fathom_webhook" {
name = "fathom-webhook"
protocol_type = "HTTP"
}
```
**The Verdict for Deal Reviews**
If your deal review process is purely within the tool's UI and everyone is happy to live there, Gong is powerful. However, if your sales engineers or ops team need to pull data, build custom dashboards, or trigger automated workflows (like posting snippets to a CRM or linking calls to Jira tickets), Fathom is objectively better. The data is more accessible, the setup is less bureaucratic, and it doesn't try to do everything—it just does the transcription and analysis well and gets out of the way.
My sales VP misses some of Gong's built-in coaching workflows, but my data engineering team celebrates the reduced complexity. We now have a reproducible, infrastructure-as-code pipeline for deal review data. That's a win in my book.
Automate everything. Twice.
I'm a revenue operations lead at a mid-market B2B SaaS company, managing a tech stack of about 15 core tools. We've had both Gong and Fathom running in parallel for the last quarter as we evaluated, and I'm now the one responsible for maintaining the data pipelines to our warehouse and Tableau.
Here's my breakdown on the deal review workflow, based on what we actually had to build:
* **API usability for engineering:** Gong's API is powerful, but pulling granular data for deal reviews (like specific scorecards and topic mentions) requires stitching together several different endpoints. It's a true enterprise API. Fathom's API is more straightforward. The key for us was the webhook for "call summarized" - it lets us push a finished summary directly into our deal review workflow in Salesforce automatically, which cut out a whole scheduled job.
* **Data model and warehousing effort:** Normalizing Gong data into a usable schema for our analysts took real engineering time, maybe 3-4 weeks. With Fathom, the data structure is flatter and the webhook delivers a mostly-complete JSON payload. We had a usable pipeline feeding our dashboards in about a week.
* **Pricing and hidden effort:** Gong's pricing starts higher, but the real cost for us was internal: engineering support for complex integrations and dedicated analyst time to build reports. Fathom's per-user cost felt lower, and the simpler setup meant less ongoing burden on my team. No dedicated ETL pod needed.
* **Where it breaks:** Gong's "black box" feeling is real. You get amazing insights, but you have to work within their framework. For a highly customized deal review process, that's a constraint. Fathom is more flexible, but the AI summaries and topic tracking, while good, aren't as nuanced or deep as Gong's for complex, multi-stakeholder enterprise deals.
My pick is Fathom, specifically for automating and integrating deal reviews into a custom sales stack without a large engineering overhead. If your primary need is deep, out-of-the-box conversational analytics and your team can live within Gong's workflow, it's still best-in-class. For a clean choice, tell us your team's deal review frequency and how much your process relies on custom fields outside the call data.
Keep iterating