When it comes to building a successful business, you can’t get by without good reviews and a good reputation. Podium and Birdeye both do a great job with that. When it comes to dealing with local businesses, Podium is perfect. The software allows you to get reviews easily by text message. For larger businesses, Birdeye is a better fit with their robust SEO, listing, and multi-location customer experience services.
Podium Compared to Birdeye
Podium makes getting five-star reviews easier than ever by sending simple text messages to your customers. You can stop losing sleep over generating more reviews. And Podium makes fixing any negative reviews easy because you get one simple dashboard to see them all and respond to your customers instantly. Click here to start your free Podium account.
Birdeye is in the personalized customer experience business, but they help you gain better online visibility. The service makes it easy to be found on every platform that matters, with accurate times and locations. Birdeye is great at tracking reviews for individual locations and your overall brand. Try a free account on for size and see how Birdeye can take your business from lost to found overnight.
More Top Reputation Management Software Platforms
We’ve investigated almost every reputation management platform on the internet. Our detailed research can help you gain a full understanding of these platforms, so we created a list of the best reputation management options out there. You can compare other providers to Podium and Birdeye while learning about the features and benefits that matter most.
Where Podium Shines
Webchat to text: Podium does this extremely well and its at the heart of their other key features. When a visitor goes to your website and starts a live chat, your Podium widget immediately allows for the conversation to move to normal text messaging straight to their phone. This feature enables you to continue your conversation while your prospect is on the move or convert more effectively on a more personal platform. Either way, you don’t lose your sales momentum.
Generating reviews: You can’t ignore the fact that online reviews drive business these days. You know you need them, but how do you make giving them less complicated for your users?
Podium makes getting online reviews super simple. Start by using their messaging services which can allow you to take the conversation from webchat to SMS texting or Facebook Messenger. Via those channels, send an easy link after a customer interaction, get a review, and repeat that process again and again.
It’s so easy for your customers because they already just bought or got great service from you and are happy. So, why wouldn’t they take 30 seconds to write a quick five-star review? Just sit back and watch those revenue-building reviews come rolling in.
Team chat: When your team is in sync everyone gets more done. But, as your business grows, things become harder to manage, especially when everyone is on different channels. Podium’s team chat feature makes collaboration and group messaging available in one place. Set up private chats between teams or individuals, loop in customers or prospects, and collaborate at a large scale.
Video chat: Podium makes getting in touch with your business through video chat a possibility. All you have to do is send a simple link to initiate video chat. There is no software your customer or prospect has to download to join.
You can use this feature to close a sale, explain why a problem is still under review, or even have a customer to show you what they received and why they are not happy. This gives you and your customer in-the-moment feedback and a personalized experience they will appreciate and share with other people.
Payments: Now you can easily ask for payments, resolve past due balances, or close a sale over text. Once again, Podium allows for sending a simple link that takes someone right to the checkout page, sales page, or other location to seal the deal.
Both Podium and Birdeye now offer fully released, text-first payment tools. Podium still pulls ahead for a lot of local businesses because it adds card readers, financing options, and tight review/marketing tie-ins right at the point of payment, while Birdeye leans on its automations and CRM-style integrations to send and follow up on payment requests across many locations.
Where Podium Falls Short
Customer support: Many users complain that Podium’s support is not as good as other platforms. When you get assigned a rep to call you back, it can take days. There are also situations when, over that time, a new rep gets assigned to solve your problem which extends your wait time. Some current users also have complaints of return calls being promised but never happening.
Custom pricing: This can go both ways in pricing out your needs, but many users don’t like that you have to message Podium through an online form to set up a custom quote. Podium does now publish some starting points on its site, but you still have to talk to sales to know your real number. That’s a downside.
Reporting: Podium has expanded its analytics and lets you export and share data, but it’s still not the most flexible reporting stack compared to full-blown BI tools. If you want highly customized, multi-location rollups or reports that look a certain way for executives, you may still have to pull data out and work on it elsewhere.
Lead organization: Podium used to dump every lead into one big inbox. Now you can create rules to auto-assign and escalate conversations to the right team or person, but you still need to set those rules up carefully. If you don’t, things can get messy fast.
Where Birdeye Shines
Bulk messaging: You know how an autoresponder can send out 10,000 emails to your list in order to offer products, deals, and coupons to your subscribers? Well, Birdeye can do that with text messaging.
No matter the size of your contact list, you can send texts in bulk to offer a flash sale or highlight a new product launch. This is huge for visibility in your campaigns, because everyone texts. So, customers and prospects will receive a message you know for a fact they will see.
Detailed reporting: Birdeye now lets you download, share, and even schedule review and survey reports, plus it layers AI insights over the top. You can see your reviews in one dashboard, sliced and diced by source, history, rating, and trends—then have the system email that report to your team automatically.
Campaign analysis: You even have the ability to analyze your social media, ad, and marketing campaigns to see what was impactful and effective. This monitoring also helps you to track social media trends, mentions, and interactions, so you can respond quickly to adverse comments about your brand.
Listings: Ever wish you could list your business in every possible place that customers are looking? Birdeye helps you place your business in any online directories you could want. This is huge for larger organizations with multiple locations or franchises. Everything is kept accurate and localized, so you will have customers finding your business at every turn. You might even have a hard time keeping up with all your new leads.
Enterprise-grade CX management: Bigger companies have a harder time staying on top of the customer experience. Birdeye helps tremendously with an intuitive dashboard that lets you view the customer journey from multiple perspectives. Take your business to the next level with competitive benchmarking, review monitoring, real-time sentiment analysis, AI-generated responses, and automated follow-ups across every location.
Where Birdeye Falls Short
Pricing scales fast: Birdeye is powerful, but it charges per location and per bundle of features. That’s fine for groups and franchises, but it can add up quickly if you run a lot of locations or want every add-on.
Learning curve: Because Birdeye now covers reviews, listings, social, messaging, surveys, AI insights, and payments, new users can feel overwhelmed. You’ll probably need to train your team so people don’t miss features you’re paying for.
Integrations can need attention: Most major review and business platforms connect smoothly, but if you rely on niche tools or industry-specific software, you may have to work with Birdeye support or middleware to make everything talk to each other.
Responding to Yelp reviews: Birdeye now has a live integration with Yelp, so you can monitor and reply to Yelp reviews from inside Birdeye. This used to be a weak spot for them, but it’s been closed.
The Final Verdict on Podium Compared to Birdeye
As we mentioned earlier Podium has specific, custom pricing they provide each client. That means you have to message them for a price tag and they will get back to you.
We wished you did not have to wait to find out what your ballpark pricing might be. With Birdeye, it’s different. You have access to their pricing configurator and all you have to do is enter some contact and business information to find out your pricing.
In the end, you have two reputation management platforms that both can do great jobs depending on your needs. Podium is great for small businesses, but doesn’t give you the big customer experience management that Birdeye delivers.
Birdeye, on the other hand, gives you tons more features for local and enterprise businesses, from listings to bulk messaging to built-in payments. They help you create tons of new leads and customers.
It really depends on your idea of value from a reputation management service. We feel you get the best of both worlds with Birdeye, and its customer support generally performs better than Podium, as well.
If neither have fully convinced you, look into our list of the top reputation management software. You’ll notice Birdeye is on the list now, alongside Podium and the other heavy hitters.
- Brand24 – Best for most
- Nextiva — Best for advanced social media monitoring
- NetReputation – Best for building a complete online presence
- InternetReputation.com – Best for individuals
- Birdeye – Best for automating review management
- Podium – Best way to get more five-star reviews
- Reputation.com – Best for multi-location businesses
- Mention – Best for social media focused companies
