Podium vs. Stripe Payments

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

Incentivized

We had a client who wanted a QR to use in their marketing, which enabled their clients to donate to us. It was so useful to be able to set it up, and we can track the views and donations received using this code. Another client with issues with our website wanted to set up a monthly subscription, so I sent her a payment link, which worked brilliantly. For clients that want to make one-time donations, it also lets the client choose the amount. The only scenario where we haven't been able to help is when clients want to change the card associated with the payment - whilst we understand it is for security/gdpr, it means they have to cancel and set up something new, which poses the danger that we may lose them as a customer.

Incentivized

• 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!

• They are reliable. I can count on everything going smoothly with transactions.
• They are accurate. I don’t run into problems with collecting the proper amounts or being overcharged for fees.
• They have good customer service. If I have a question about the customer portal or a problem with a customer, they help me resolve these issues.

Incentivized

• 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.

Incentivized

• It would be nice to be able to see my Shopify payments from my main payment gateway. I currently have to go to Shopify for that.
• The ability to be able to offer discounted rates at a smaller threshold would be nice.

Incentivized

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!

Incentivized

Stripe is the leader in the industry when it comes to any type of industry. All that is needed is a plan and then implementing that plan either with a developer, or through the help of Stripe's customer service team to assist in getting you setup. The ease of use time it takes to get up and running is second to none

Incentivized

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.

Stripe offers a very easy-to-navigate platform with many different functions. From linking it to our website and accounting platform to tracking our payments, being able to issue a refund quickly if required, and setting up QR codes and payment links for subscriptions or one-time donations, it really covers so many aspects that we need and use on a weekly and monthly basis.

Incentivized

We haven't had any outages or issues whenever we need it over the last few years of use

Incentivized

It moves quickly and has no issues with delays. Performance is good as it is a web-based tool

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Stripe's support is nearly perfect – great attention to detail, fast response times, and a willingness to really dig into issues and get to the bottom of them. In the five years we've been using Stripe, the only negative thing I can say about their customer support is that it seems like there has been a slight shift to less technical front-line support agents, which means it's more likely your issue will have to be escalated before you get more information. This, however, has happened as Stripe rolled out more real-time support features like call and chat, and that really isn't workable if you're escalating everything right off the bat. It's absolutely an acceptable trade-off.

Incentivized

We only had a hard time getting our technicians to remember to send the review invites.

Incentivized

It took less than an hour to have everything setup and running

Incentivized

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.

Incentivized

Stripe is easier to use and offers better support and rates. My favorite part with Stripe is probably their ready-to-use plug-in that's offered for me. We have multiple eCommerce stores and we rely on our payment process going smoothly. The plug-in from Stripe is free, constantly updated, secure, and very easy to implement.

Incentivized

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

Incentivized

• 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

• It makes getting money from your clients really easy
• It gives your clients the guarantee that their payment information is totally secure and confidentially used and kept
• It is very easy to integrate with online assets of the company
• In a couple of occasions, some companies have wanted me to use Stripe for them to pay me, and I have had a couple of hiccups. This was more related to the way that these companies set up the Stripe integration of my account to their platform. In both cases, the integration has not been possible and to this date, I still do not know why with exactitude.
• As I said before, the commissions kept by Stripe could be lower, and shared with the CC companies, rather than having us clients pay for all of o it.

Incentivized