BrightLocal vs. PLANOLY

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.

Incentivized

Planoly is perfect for managing social media accounts for business or public figures. It would work great for personal use as well but maybe wouldn't be as necessary. For business purposes, it changes the game! Having something that is easy to teach colleagues to use is one of the most important features I looked for when choosing a social media management platform

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• Grid view
• AI Caption generator
• Auto post feature

Incentivized

• Up and down rankings were not always right on with the local search, but only off by one or two spots
• It felt like it was only used for local SEO, and I know there are more features, just never got to them.
• Didn't seem useful for every single client in the way Ahrefs or Spyfu did

Incentivized

• overall not very many points I would add for improvement

Incentivized

PLANOLY is super easy to use. We just need to connect our Instagram account and start working in just a few clicks

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

The support team was instantly responsive and were always happy to answer even the simplest software question. I knew that my clients would be in good hands should I not be available for any scheduling question through the support team. Everything was always impeccably handled in a timely manner! 100% satisfaction.

Incentivized

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.

I have tried an AI tool called Vocable and used Google Sheets to plan my content. PLANOLY is better because of the visual grid feature. However, vocable is better in terms of the variety of content. With Vocable, we can create text content for Instagram, YouTube, and Linkedin, Product pages, SEO meta titles, descriptions, email newsletters, Blog posts etc. However, PLANOLY is only limited to Instagram and Pinterest.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It allowed us to engage with potential customers for clients in an easy way
• Our follower count went up by a steady 100 followers per week
• Our numbers for viewers on videos and IG Lives doubled

Incentivized