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 7.7 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
Podium
Score 7.2 out of 10
N/A
Podium, formerly Repdrive, is a ratings and review management platform from the company of the same name in Provo, Utah.
$249
per month
Pricing
Birdeye
BrightLocal
Podium
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
Podium Essentials
$249
per month 3 users
Podium Standard
$409
per month Unlimited users
Podium Professional
$599
per month Unlimited users
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Birdeye
BrightLocal
Podium
Free Trial
Yes
Yes
Yes
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
—
BrightLocal offers custom enterprise plans for businesses with more than 50 locations.
We selected Birdeye because the feature set was almost identical, but Birdeye was more cost effective. Still expensive, but not as expensive as Podium.
Birdeye crushes Podium. The metrics that are tracked in Birdeye go above and beyond those in Podium. I've compared dashboards with a client on a video call and we were looking at Birdeye and Podium side by side and it was easy for the client to see the value this way. I was …
We were on Podium prior to Birdeye. Birdeye obviously has more features than Podium did. We were able to consolidate our listings management and review solicitation into one platform with Birdeye, and at Podium we couldn't do that. I wasn't here for the onboarding onto Podium, …
Birdeye is much faster than Podium. Our messages come through quicker and more consistently from customers reaching out. Their SMS marketing features and abilities are pretty much the same, we haven't noticed too big of a difference there. On the other hand, their Internal …
We had used podiums before, but they were not as user-friendly as Birdeye. Also, Birdeye seems to fix its issues much faster than Podium did and I feel that Birdeye is still growing and has more potential than Podium.
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 …
Verified User
Manager
Chose Birdeye
Birdeye customer service is ten fold better than Podium. Podium was a nightmare to use, and the customer service is terrible.
We tested a number of reputation management softwares during out search. Birdeye was the most intuitive platform and they also had the most reasonable prices. The other programs like Reputation and Podium, did most of the same things that we were looking for but we ultimately …
Podium also has issues with account management and customer service. They are comparable but Birdeye has a better review request interface and reporting than Birdeye.
It has been some them since I have used either one of those platforms but at the time Birdeye had plenty more features than the others. They were also the first one I found that had automatic review responding.
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 …
I do not have much to say on this matter, as Birdeye was our selected choice before any other options had been investigated very far. Birdeye offers fair rates and made the onboarding process pretty seamless.
President & Co-Founder I Onsite Paper Shredding I Document Destruction I Hard Drive Shredding Expert
Chose Podium
BirdEye was not easy to use and it did not give us the features we were looking for such as SMS and our employees would not use because it slowed them down with little ROI.
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.
Podium is well suited for several types of businesses. If you are an entrepreneur or small business owner, Podium would be a great way for you to ask that customers leave you a review online sharing their awesome experience. For medium to large businesses, Podium review invites can be automated through the company's customer management system, allowing the use of Podium to be simple and not timely, even with a large customer base. It may not be appropriate for a large company to manually send out individual review invites
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.
Maintains conversations indefinitely, so we are able to go back to confirm details from conversations.
Provides the ability for our company to have a 'team' messaging platform where we can communicate with one another via single person to a single person, groups where we can add/subtract members of the group... this is invaluable to our organization.
Until today(!), we could 'share' or forward a message to one another; oddly, that feature disappeared just today, so I'm hoping it's a glitch!
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.
Account manager communications: I had been asking my Podium account manager for integration with our CRM tool for over 8 months before my account manager fell silent. After another 6 months, I proactively reached out only to find out that the integration had been in Beta for months and 8 other companies had already integrated. It was frustrating that my account manager did not remember a key request and make the Beta available to me the minute that it was open.
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.
Again, Podium has been so wonderful in the year and a half we have been using it, we are able to integrate it with our CRM and use alot of the available features. The most helpful has been getting TONS of reviews on MULTIPLE sites through Podium!
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.
While giving our clients the ability to leave a review was there, we had much worse results and got fewer reviews through the Podium portal than we did by sending our clients simple email requests, or simply having our service staff ask for a review while still on the clients' job sites.
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.
I have to send an email to get information. They have a chat system but I end up having to go through my rep for account questions. It was a little frustrating to not have a direct phone number to call with questions. I would like to see a helpline added.
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.
We use Digital Air Strike at our two GM dealerships because it is one of a small list of reputation management companies authorized by GM as part of their SFE program. Digital Air Strike surveys our customers and invites them to write a review about our dealership. It is not as effective or flexible as Podium so we have been using Podium at those dealerships alongside Digital Air Strike. We also recently started a trial use of ReplyPro which is a service that monitors review sites and writes customized responses to positive reviews and suggested responses to negative reviews. I'd like to see Podium add this as part of their service so we can consolidate 3rd party vendors and manage every aspect of online reputation management from one place.
Its easy to scale to different departments as needed. We initially began using it to solve one problem and as new features became available it was easy to scale this and include other departments who could benefit from its tools
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 am glad there are card readers now, sales team members too often try to just send a request instead of taking payment onsite.
It's made capturing messaging leads much easier.
It's worth the cost but if it did a few more things it would be worth a lot more to us. Document signatures, surveying after jobs, even geotagging of photos/reviews for SEO
