BrightLocal vs. Wunderkind

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

BounceX is well suited if you want to boost list/customer base growth, but a tricky aspect of it for me is that I don't know the benefit smaller companies would get from BounceX to accelerate growth without having an existing customer base.

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

• Personalization in email - they have a great ability to surface products in email directly tied to what a past customer was browsing on the site
• Great account management and fast turnaround times to address evolving needs we have
• Very robust site experience capabilities to accommodate a lot of different use cases

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

• Support is awful
• Management will not work with you to make things right
• Tool is buggy. It went down for 50 hours during our Black Friday sale resulting in substantial amount of lost revenue.

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

Beware if you buy from them you are committed for a year. It is too expensive for the offering and they offer no solutions for you to manage the process/tool at a discounted rate. Will not renew my contract, that’s for sure.

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've used both Emarsys and Klaviyo as our ESP, while using Wunderkind to handle email/SMS acquisition and abandonment emails. Wunderkind has proven to be able to capture more emails and send more behavioral emails with the contact matching technology.

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

• For the email campaigns we had an original agreement for them to produce a 5X return on ad spend and thus far they have produced a greater than 8X return

Incentivized