Birdeye vs. Brandwatch

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
Birdeye
Score 8.6 out of 10
N/A
Birdeye is a reputation management and digital customer experience platform for local brands and multi-location businesses. Over 100,000 businesses leverage Birdeye’s AI-powered platform to engage seamlessly with customers, drive loyalty, and excel in their local markets.
$299
per month
Brandwatch
Score 8.3 out of 10
Enterprise companies (1,001+ employees)
Brandwatch, from Cision (acquired February 2021) is an enterprise social intelligence platform that is designed to allow brands to listen and analyze online conversation to extract meaningful insights, inform their business decisions and understand more about the return on their marketing spend.
$800
10k mentions
Pricing
BirdeyeBrandwatch
Editions & Modules
Standard
$299.00
per month
Professional
$399.00
per month
Premium
Custom Pricing
Pro
$800
10k mentions
Enterprise
3000+
Unlimited mentions or Queries
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
BirdeyeBrandwatch
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoYes
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeOptional
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Best Alternatives
BirdeyeBrandwatch
Small Businesses
BrightLocal
BrightLocal
Score 7.7 out of 10
Simplify360
Simplify360
Score 7.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Brandwatch
Brandwatch
Score 8.3 out of 10
Mention
Mention
Score 9.4 out of 10
Enterprises
Brandwatch
Brandwatch
Score 8.3 out of 10
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Score 9.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
BirdeyeBrandwatch
Likelihood to Recommend
8.5
(156 ratings)
4.0
(65 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.6
(2 ratings)
10.0
(8 ratings)
Usability
9.0
(70 ratings)
6.1
(7 ratings)
Performance
-
(0 ratings)
7.0
(2 ratings)
Support Rating
8.2
(69 ratings)
4.1
(13 ratings)
Online Training
-
(0 ratings)
6.4
(1 ratings)
Implementation Rating
9.1
(1 ratings)
9.1
(2 ratings)
Ease of integration
-
(0 ratings)
5.0
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
BirdeyeBrandwatch
Likelihood to Recommend
Birdeye
I think Birdeye is great for businesses that use a CRM system that is able to integrate with Birdeye so that clients are automatically pulled into Birdeye and sent review requests. I would also say this is more suited for businesses that see multiple customers and clients weekly versus businesses that maybe only have one or two clients a month. Ex: Dentist offices get great returns, but contractors/real estate agents may not be as great.
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Cision
The user interface is great and is easy to use for social media marketers of all ranges. In regard to planning and scheduling content, it allows all users with access to the capability to view all upcoming on an actual calendar. For organizational purposes, this is great and mitigates any confusion that other team members may have. The tool seems to always be updating which has its pros and cons because once you figure something out, there's a switch and you'll need to relearn how things are positioned but overall, it's not a heavy lift.
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Pros
Birdeye
  • Their customer service is always very helpful and ready to give you the personal attention that you require.
  • They connect many different sources and funnel them straight to you so you can easily capitalize on multiple platforms and information streams.
  • They are constantly innovating and improving their systems with real-time feedback from their customers.
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Cision
  • Clean, beautiful visuals that can be easily incorporated into reports to be used internally and externally.
  • Customization-- anywhere from the queries you create to adjusting individual report widget/components this tool is very flexible.
  • Excellent Customer Service and support. My Brandwatch rep is always open to hearing from me for questions and often reaches out to me to check in on my status or see if I would like to participate in beta programs.
  • Constant innovation. It seems like Brandwatch is constantly updating and adding improvements to their platform--especially with their 2019 acquisition of Crimson Hexagon.
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Cons
Birdeye
  • The sentiment feature is just okay. It requires custom adjustments and time to understand where it is working well and where it is not in order to get the most out of it, while other features require very little user input.
  • Social listening needs work. I often receive notifications for unrelated terms because of their similarity in spelling to my organization's name, so I don't use this feature.
  • Birdeye could have more built-in features to create digital content from the reviews.
  • Birdeye could also have additional reputation tools to strengthen GMB listings and to combat negative press. Review listings and rich snippets in search are great, but having a tool that measures and helps to improve overall brand health/search results would be amazing. My CEO isn’t looking at what is going right. He looks at what is going wrong. We may have thousands of positive reviews on Google, but the bad article with false information is still showing up on page one of search results. That makes for an unhappy CEO.
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Cision
  • Very steep learning curve- good luck training casual users on the difference between a query, a rule, a category etc
  • Lack of access to FULL historic data is a serious drawback- populating that data takes a minimum of 24 hours and incurs additional costs
  • Volume limits mean you may have to build your query to exclude mentions that may be useful in getting the full context of the situation
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Likelihood to Renew
Birdeye
Birdeye is extremely beneficial in generating new reviews for clients and there is a direct impact on their business from these reviews.
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Cision
Brandwatch is a simple tool that is easy to learn and understand. Without any rigorous training, the team can learn to use it and interpret the results in an efficient manner. It saves a lot of work and helps the team to focus on other important time consuming tasks. I would like to continue using Brandwatch.
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Usability
Birdeye
I think it is very easy to figure out very quickly by just playing around in the dashboard. If you have a question you can reach out to our contacts and they do a very good job of figuring out if or what is the problem and getting back to us fast.
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Cision
I've invited quite a few of my colleagues to try Brandwatch, and all of them were able to use its features with no assistance, and most of these had never used a social listening/monitoring tool before, or even a digital analytics tool! Brandwatch is not only easy to use, but filters, widgets, menus and other options are in intuitive places - it just works
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Performance
Birdeye
No answers on this topic
Cision
Brandwatch craps out sometimes. Pages freeze, data doesn't populate for hours. It's fine if you're not in a hurry but something to keep in mind if you're working in real-time. It's not as bad as Talkwalker but it's impacted timely delivery of work for me, and one of the first things I teach when introducing the platform is the process for closing out and re-logging in to see if it unfreezes
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Support Rating
Birdeye
The customer support is usually very fast in getting someone connected with you to figure out a solution. Sometimes the communication following up on how they did can be a little much, but they are just practicing what they preach and doing what they know best. People are usually very friendly and knowledgable also.
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Cision
The Brandwatch Consumer Research customer success team is outstanding. Every member of their team has been wildly helpful and remarkably pleasant. These people go above and beyond to ensure you have all the tools and help you need to find success on their platform. I had several calls where we discussed difficulties users where having on the platform that resulted in an overall improvement in reporting across the board. They didn't just answer our questions, they dug deeper to find root problems and helped us build out dashboards to alleviate them.
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Online Training
Birdeye
No answers on this topic
Cision
good knowledge, great tips, although the program seems a bit disconnected. It could improve it they create more free webinars and a good content calendar and tackle little topics in each webinar. Their trainers are top notch and they know a lot about the tool but they fall a bit low on technical level understanding of how the tool actually works
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Implementation Rating
Birdeye
Let Birdeye do what they do
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Cision
Not that I can think of.
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Alternatives Considered
Birdeye
Our choice of reputation management platform came down to two contenders, Birdeye and Listen360. Ultimately we chose Birdeye because of their ethical review gathering process. Listen360 had review-gating built in as part of their process, which is against Google's terms of service. We wanted to be very careful to gather reviews in an ethical way, and Birdeye was better for our needs.
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Cision
If you're using it to monitor your brand's social presence only, or if you're in an agency and using it to monitor existing clients and provide reports to them, then this is a great tool and you're hard-pressed to find something better. But if you're wanting it more for new business and discovery, there are tools that do this much better, including Sysomos and Crimson Hexagon. So it depends on what specifically you're trying to do. My agency was already using this product when I arrived, so I did not have a choice in the matter, but I've evaluated both of these other tools. Crimson is similar enough that the slight increase in cost doesn't justify switching. Synthesio is the most expensive competitor in the market (no matter what they tell you), but you get what you pay for. If you can afford it, go with Synthesio.
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Return on Investment
Birdeye
  • My clients have experienced very large increases to overall SEO and SEM traffic after reviews began coming in, this has increased CTR and conversions through ads to generate more revenue than ever before.
  • The old-school gated review processes were wonky and required way to much time with hands-on functionality. With BirdEye the software manages almost all the work, so we can spend less time manually managing reviews.
  • Being able to provide local SEO and reputation management as a service option has increased our overall retainers while driving more growth for our clients. It's a win/win for relatively low investment.
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Cision
  • At a high level, the biggest impact the Brandwatch Analytics has had is giving us the ability to quantify the impact of social media for our clients. In the world of social, ROI is defined and interpreted differently across clients (particularly where it's more difficult to apply traditional ROI) - so this may mean reporting on earned media for some, while for others it's measuring increasing engagements or social mentions over time.
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ScreenShots

Brandwatch Screenshots

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