Birdeye is a reputation management and digital customer experience platform for local brands and multi-location businesses. Birdeye’s AI-powered platform is used by brands to engage with customers, drive loyalty, and excel in local markets.
$299
per month
BrightLocal
Score 8.0 out of 10
N/A
BrightLocal is a search engine optimization tool that tracks search rankings, builds citations, and monitors online reviews and stresses local search performance.
$39
per month
Google Business Profile
Score 8.2 out of 10
N/A
Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is a free tool that allows users to promote a Business Profile and business website on Google Search and Maps. With an account, users can see and connect with customers, post updates to the Business Profile, and see how customers are interacting with a business on Google.
N/A
Pricing
Birdeye
BrightLocal
Google Business Profile
Editions & Modules
Standard
$299.00
per month
Professional
$399.00
per month
Premium
Custom Pricing
Track Plan
$39
per month
Manage Plan
$49
per month
Grow Plan
$59
per month
No answers on this topic
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Birdeye
BrightLocal
Google Business Profile
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
No
Free/Freemium Version
No
No
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
No
No
Entry-level Setup Fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
No setup fee
Additional Details
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BrightLocal offers custom enterprise plans for businesses with more than 50 locations.
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More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Birdeye
BrightLocal
Google Business Profile
Considered Multiple Products
Birdeye
Verified User
Account Manager
Chose Birdeye
I have not used any other platforms similar to Birdeye.
All of these are very similar from a tech stack and API integration standpoint. The dashboard with Birdeye is by far the most transparent, and easy to navigate. There are not a lot of upsells baked into it either. The customer service is also very responsive when we hit a …
Of all the services we have used DemandHub still has been the best. They all accomplish the same thing for requesting business reviews and enabling text messaging on our land lines but the customer service from DemandHub has been the best. Both Podium and BirdEye have …
BrightLocal
No answer on this topic
Google Business Profile
Verified User
Consultant
Chose Google Business Profile
Google My Business offers the basic features and is free. Birdeye is more complete, has a lot of features, has a good support, but need to pay. Google My Business is sufficient for our marketing strategy.
Google is free and easy to use. If you have the time and are willing to put in the work yourself, it is a better solution than paying top dollar for an automated tool.
You can customize all your business information. You can set locations, add photographs, addresses, phone numbers, etc. to make it more interactive. You can also create conversations [that] will give a positive impact on the customers. You can easily stand out and bring in as …
For businesses that have customers or clients or patients with several different locations, Birdeye is essential to help with the reviews and messages received through Google and other platforms. For businesses with only 1 single location, Birdeye could still be useful but wouldn't be as essential as it would be for other businesses.
If you are a local business owner or marketing agency catering to local businesses, BrightLocal is a must have software. It has everything you need to track your local marketing efforts and to identify opportunities to make improvements, all at a very reasonable price point. You can also create nice looking reports to send to clients which are simple to create.
The great advantage of Google My Business is that any business that complies with the privacy and authentication policy requirements can access all the functionality tools that help promote the business website through the referral system, exchange of opinions with other users and search engine optimization (SEO).
When we use BrightLocal's citation building service, I know that we're getting quality citations done right. Their staff will email you with any questions and always double check the information before creating inaccurate citations.
I love that BrightLocal is very quick about making changes when requested. For example, if we can't find a city on the drop-down list, you can chat them and they'll add it. Or if a report is pulling incorrectly, they'll re-run it within a reasonable timeframe.
BrightLocal has a lot of different reports that are easy to send to your clients. You can even add them to a web-viewable dashboard so that your client can simply bookmark a link and view their reports when they please.
Google My Business offers us an alert system in our work email, where we receive notifications when there is a new comment or review of our company. This alert system helps us to be aware of each of the opinions written by each client who has received our services, in order to be able to respond to each of them in record time.
Google My Business gives me a complete visualization of the clicks, location of the searches of my company and the visits that my business file has received. This visualization allows me to control access and measure the traffic that my business listing is generating in conjunction with the Google Maps service.
The update of my company file is done in real time and immediately. I don't have to wait several minutes for my company file to update. When I make a change to my company information, the changes are shown immediately to all clients who consult that business card.
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.
I think it is a good tool overall, there are some hiccups but what program doesn't have them. I think we should be notified of more things, specifically broken integrations. There have been instances where I don't notice for MONTHS a client it's having requests sent out because they are organically still getting reviews.
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.
I gave the Google Business Profile's overall usability an 8 because it doesn't update the directions automatically when you put in an address if a business moves. You also have to go in and manually move the pin. This isn't always easy to do. It would be much easier if the pin updated automatically.
Support is really responsive for the most part. I don't feel like they explain it the best for people who aren't as tech-savvy. I have recently had trouble with a more difficult integration and it is hard to pinpoint who I need to reach out to.
Although their customer support has always contacted me, they have not always been helpful. Many times I've had reports or information disappear with them telling me they had no record of it, even when I had reports that the information was in there. There are times when their system did have bugs and the support was able to help me there. Overall, the support staff is there but they cannot always do much and need to wait for their development team to get back to them which often takes a long time.
Whether it is technical or customer support, Google My Business excels and suffers in the exact same ways that all other branches of Google do. While you'll eventually figure out the issue, the sheer magnitude of the company comes with expected hurdles, wait times, and support you'd come to expect from other large companies.
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.
Thryv reached out to me about 3 weeks before signing up with BrightLocal. While all of their features were impressive, there were only about 3 features that I would have used. Thryv wanted $200 per month for their service, which I found to be way overpriced for what I was wanting to use it for. I selected BrightLocal because it had the features I wanted at a lower price and then add ons. After using BrightLocal for a week and speaking with Becki, a customer service executive, I have discovered more features that I would use on BrightLocal than on Thryv.
Google is the most powerful SERP and has much more robust features than Bing Places. Users also statistically trust Google more than Bing and it provides much more authority in the search space. The good news is that Bing Places can be synched with Google My Business which is great and convenient for business owners. It's just another alternative for businesses and I highly recommend that all businesses have an account with both Bing Places and Google My Business for optimal performance.
BrightLocal's ranking reports have helped us better serve our clients' SEO needs, especially local SEO.
Reporting is nicely accomplished with their online client report dashboards.
Negative: some of their software defects are glaringly obvious take forever to fix, creating a number of awkward moments when we talk our clients through their reports.
I don't have any numerical metrics but, we have seen an influx in customers purchasing our hot hands ever since we listed them on Google Business Profile about a year and a month ago. We have since sold over 400 units since listing them as an available item.
