EZ Texting vs. Podium

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
EZ Texting
Score 8.9 out of 10
N/A
Since 2004, EZ Texting has provided businesses and organizations with a way to start text marketing — and features and integrations to keep conversations going. A simple interface, customizable templates, and generative AI assistance, help businesses to craft compelling messages that resonate with their audience. Effective communication is key to the success of any business. With consumers constantly on the go and bombarded with information, reaching them through traditional…
$25
per month
Podium
Score 6.3 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
EZ TextingPodium
Editions & Modules
Launch
$25
per month
Boost
$75
per month
Scale
$125
per month
Enterprise
$3,000
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
EZ TextingPodium
Free Trial
YesYes
Free/Freemium Version
NoNo
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
NoNo
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup feeNo setup fee
Additional DetailsLAUNCH PLAN: Recommended for up to 500 contacts. Local EZ Textable Number. Max Speed: up to 500/day. Cost Per Msg:$0.030. Delivery Rate: 95% Includes 500 free msg/mo or 6k annually. BOOST PLAN: Recommended for 501-2,000 contacts. Local EZ High-Volume Number. Max Speed: up to 2,000/day. Cost Per Msg: $0.025. Delivery Rate: 95% Includes 500 free msg/mo or 6k annually. SCALE PLAN: Recommended for 2,000-50,000 contacts. Local EZ High-Volume, High-Speed Number. Max Speed: up to 50,000/day. Cost Per Msg: $0.020. Delivery Rate: 95%. Includes 500 free msg/mo or 6k annually. ENTERPRISE PLAN: Recommended for 50,000+ contacts. This Plan offers. Dedicated Short Codes. Max Speed: up to 1 MM/day. Cost Per Msg: $0.010. Delivery Rate: 99%. Includes 200k msg/mo. Pricing information for EZ Texting is supplied by the software provider or retrieved from publicly accessible pricing materials. Final cost negotiations to purchase EZ Texting must be conducted with the seller. Included in All Plans: Unlimited: Incoming Messages, Contacts, Keywords & Two-Way Texting. New Features: Realize ROI faster with AI Compose & Team Inbox with AI Reply. Live Support Chat: Monday-Friday 8am-8pm ET and Saturday-Sunday 9am-5pm ET. Growth Tools: QR Codes, Keywords & Signup Forms. MMS Edge: Millions of Images & Image Editing Tool Powered by Shutterstock. CRM-Lite: Upload, Management, Groups & Personalization.
More Pricing Information
Best Alternatives
EZ TextingPodium
Small Businesses
OneSignal
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Score 9.0 out of 10
BrightLocal
BrightLocal
Score 7.8 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
Flurry Analytics
Flurry Analytics
Score 9.0 out of 10
Brandwatch
Brandwatch
Score 8.3 out of 10
Enterprises
Flurry Analytics
Flurry Analytics
Score 9.0 out of 10
Brandwatch
Brandwatch
Score 8.3 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
EZ TextingPodium
Likelihood to Recommend
8.8
(239 ratings)
5.7
(42 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
8.4
(11 ratings)
10.0
(3 ratings)
Usability
8.7
(78 ratings)
9.9
(4 ratings)
Availability
8.0
(2 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(2 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Support Rating
7.2
(112 ratings)
1.7
(12 ratings)
Implementation Rating
8.2
(4 ratings)
10.0
(2 ratings)
Configurability
7.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Contract Terms and Pricing Model
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Ease of integration
8.5
(5 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Product Scalability
7.0
(2 ratings)
10.0
(1 ratings)
Professional Services
10.0
(1 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
10.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
10.0
(2 ratings)
-
(0 ratings)
User Testimonials
EZ TextingPodium
Likelihood to Recommend
CallFire
We've found that our employees are way more engaged with company communication by text over email. We send out notices for company-wide Zoom/Teams meetings and have increased our participation by 50%. Link tracking in text messaging similar to what is available with email services like HubSpot is extremely valuable, which helps us learn what works well. We can send messages that disperse important announcements of upcoming deadlines, new employee opportunities (professional development), and timely job site information such as weather related closures.
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Podium
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
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Pros
CallFire
  • Easy to use web interface.
  • The ability to set up our main business phone to receive texts is fantastic.
  • There are an abundance of features we haven't even explored yet but look forward to doing so!
  • The mobile app is great alternative when a desktop or laptop isn't available.
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Podium
  • 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!
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Cons
CallFire
  • Texts should sync between multiple devices. We cannot all reply to patient texts to share the work load because we don't know if another employee has already responded. It just doesn't show up. If we answer on our phone via the app, the desktop doesn't update with the reply. So we have to look back and forth between any of the devices used to reply to determine which patients have already received a reply, etc.
  • We could really use an "out of office" automatic reply. We had a company retreat to Cancun and hated having to text all weekend with patients, when it would have been much more relaxing to know that they could get an automatic reply that we would be back in the office on Monday.
  • Patients accidentally unsubscribe from us often because they text things that sound like "remove from list" etc. For example, when patients ask us to cancel their appointment.
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Podium
  • 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.
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Likelihood to Renew
CallFire
We're excited about EZ Texting and what it does for us. We want to get more into automation with campaigns dealing directly with web sales so a more robust solution will likely leave EZ Texting as our event activation partner and only be used during select times of the year.
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Podium
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!
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Usability
CallFire
Very easy dashboard to use, but with several options for reports and channeling of text messages. Automatic purchases of credits when the credits run low - no worry about a missed campaign because I did not buy more credits. Simple and straightforward message entry.
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Podium
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.
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Reliability and Availability
CallFire
We have never needed to use the system and it be unavailable. They seem to schedule their server maintenance perfectly (at least for us!).
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Podium
We haven't had any outages or issues whenever we need it over the last few years of use
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Performance
CallFire
Your internet connection/speed is the only limiting factor. EZ Texting's pages are optimized to load quickly and do so.
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Podium
It moves quickly and has no issues with delays. Performance is good as it is a web-based tool
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Support Rating
CallFire
The tech support at EZ Texting is amazing. They are there all the time and are available to chat or to talk on the phone. They are all very friendly individuals who have a very calming tone and will make sure that you walk away satisfied. They are very professional.
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Podium
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.
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Implementation Rating
CallFire
The most important aspect of implementation was selecting a valuable keyword. When we first started using EZ Texting, we were able to grab a simple, easy word to use to connect people to our texts. That proved invaluable in our marketing and selling people on using the service. If we didn't have a good word, I would imagine it wouldn't have been as successful.
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Podium
We only had a hard time getting our technicians to remember to send the review invites.
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Alternatives Considered
CallFire
EZ Texting has a much better user interface and better support. At first I wanted to "pay as you go" so switched from EZ Texting to BulkSMS. BIG MISTAKE. After 2 hours of banging my head against the wall, I went straight back to EZ Texting and paid the little extra monthly and it was like light from Heaven shined down upon me
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Podium
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.
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Scalability
CallFire
We have never had a problem with the system NOT sending out our message.
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Podium
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
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Return on Investment
CallFire
  • Using EZ Texting to remind our drivers to do their safety training each month has increased participation in the training program by 47% over the last year.
  • Drivers have communicated that they feel they are more heard due to the reply to the message feature on each text we send out and the manner in which we address any concerns. They may have been hesitant to call into the office in the past about issues but now they are comfortable sending a text.
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Podium
  • 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
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ScreenShots

EZ Texting Screenshots

Screenshot of DashboardScreenshot of Sending a MessageScreenshot of Delivery ReportScreenshot of Contact ManagementScreenshot of Media Library and Image Editor