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
Podium
Score 6.4 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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
