If you want a single customer success newsletter to start with, pick The Customer Success Cafe (Substack, 4,300+ CS pros) for tactics on churn reduction or ChurnZero's Fighting Churn for benchmarked retention data. The top five CS newsletters in 2026 (Customer Success Cafe, Fighting Churn, Gain Grow Retain, Gainsight Pulse Weekly, ELG Insider) cover the full beat: churn, expansion, health scoring, and AI in CS. The rest of this page covers the communities, podcasts, and training that practitioners pair with the newsletters.
Customer success in 2026 owns net retention, expansion revenue, and product adoption (not ticket queues). The function has split into specialized lanes at most B2B SaaS companies (digital CS, technical CS, customer education, RevOps-adjacent CS Ops), and the resource market has split with it. Newsletters now segment by lane: ChurnZero and Gainsight cover the platform-and-data lane, Gain Grow Retain covers the leader-and-strategy lane, The Customer Success Cafe covers the IC-and-tactics lane.
This list is curated for CS practitioners at every level. The communities where CSMs share retention tactics, the newsletters that track industry shifts, and the tools that make the daily work more effective. We update it quarterly. Vendor blogs are included where the content is research-led (annual Customer Revenue Leadership Study from ChurnZero, Gainsight's Pulse keynotes) and excluded where it is product marketing dressed as editorial.
Substack newsletter and podcast trusted by 4,300+ CS pros. Practitioner playbooks on churn reduction, QBR prep, and digital CS. Weekly cadence, free.
Weekly newsletter with retention tips, tactics, and benchmark data. Pairs with the annual Customer Revenue Leadership Study, the largest public dataset on CS team structure and comp.
Curated weekly digest from the largest CS community (Pulse, 25,000+ attendees). Covers product adoption, health scoring, and the CS-product interface.
Newsletter and free open community for B2B SaaS CS leaders, co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan. Strategy and leadership focus.
Ecosystem-led growth daily newsletter that covers expansion, partner-influenced CS, and retention via partners.
Post-sales, customer success, and product experience content from the leading CS platform.
CS blog with the annual Customer Revenue Leadership Study and Fighting Churn newsletter.
CS blog from Forrester Wave Leader. Covers customer-led growth, health scoring, and CS operations.
CS playbooks from the largest SaaS community, covering scaling, investment, and AI in CS.
Customer success career intelligence with job market data and salary benchmarks.
Active CS community with forums, GameChanger Awards, and product knowledge center.
Free open community and podcast for B2B SaaS CS leaders, co-founded by Jeff Breunsbach and Jay Nathan.
Industry-renowned CSM training and certification platform with self-paced courses.
Three criteria. First, does this resource teach you something you can't learn from a Google search? Second, is it actively maintained and producing new content? Third, do practitioners in the role recommend it to peers? We don't accept payment for listings. We review and update this page quarterly.
Customer success salary benchmarks, tool reviews, and career intelligence. Visit The CS Pulse for the full picture.
The most-recommended single newsletter is The Customer Success Cafe (Substack, 4,300+ CS pros). It is practitioner-written, weekly, and free. For data-led retention reading, pair it with ChurnZero's Fighting Churn newsletter, which publishes the annual Customer Revenue Leadership Study. CS leaders typically read both.
Most of the top CS newsletters are free, including The Customer Success Cafe, Fighting Churn, Gain Grow Retain, and ELG Insider. Gainsight's content library is free with email signup. Paid CS content tends to be community memberships (Pavilion CS Council, Customer Success Network) or certification courses (SuccessCOACHING) rather than newsletter subscriptions.
VP CS and Chief Customer Officer roles tend to read leader-focused newsletters: Gain Grow Retain (leadership and team-building), Gainsight Pulse Weekly (industry shifts and product adoption), and ELG Insider (expansion and partner-influenced retention). ICs lean toward The Customer Success Cafe and Fighting Churn for tactical playbooks.
Cadence varies. The Customer Success Cafe, Fighting Churn, Gainsight Pulse Weekly, and Gain Grow Retain all publish weekly. ELG Insider publishes daily. Vendor blog roundups (Totango, Spekit) publish 2 to 4 times per month. Most CS pros pick 2 to 3 weeklies plus one daily for their reading stack.
The recurring topics in 2026 are AI in CS (LLM-based health scoring, automated QBRs), digital CS at scale (low-touch playbooks for SMB books of business), net retention math (GRR vs NRR benchmarks), expansion ownership (CS vs AM splits), and CS Ops (the rise of CS-specific RevOps roles). Career and comp content runs alongside the tactical reading.
Customer success owns adoption, retention, and product value realization. Account management owns commercial expansion (cross-sell, upsell, renewal negotiation). Some B2B SaaS companies split them cleanly; others run a hybrid CSM role that owns both. The Customer Success vs Account Management guide on this site walks through the splits by company stage and product complexity.