Birdeye vs BrightLocal Reputation Manager

Birdeye is an AI review management platform for multi-location brands. It gathers ratings and reviews from Google, Facebook, and more than 200 industry review sites, then tracks ratings, review counts, and responses over time. Businesses can request reviews by email and SMS, including targeted requests to customers likely to respond. AI can draft replies in a brand voice and either publish them automatically or hold them for approval. The platform also reads review text, photos, and past visits, creates branded graphics, and shares reviews on social and web channels. Teams can compare locations with competitors and track visibility on Google, ChatGPT, and Perplexity. Multiple agents route issues and work to address underlying causes of negative reviews. Birdeye also includes listings, social, messaging, appointments, surveys, insights, reporting, and ticketing tools. The mobile app supports customer conversations, review requests and responses, social publishing, notifications, and payments. It is included with a Birdeye subscription at no additional charge. Pricing is available on request, based on location count and deployment.

BrightLocal Reputation Manager helps businesses collect, monitor, answer, and display customer reviews. It gathers reviews from more than 80 sites, including Google, Facebook, Yelp, Trustpilot, TripAdvisor, OpenTable, Yellow Pages, BBB.org, Foursquare, and industry-specific platforms. Users receive new-review notifications, reports, and real-time alerts about negative feedback. Review invitations can go out through branded email, SMS, QR codes, or in-store campaigns, with automation available. Users can answer Google and Facebook reviews in BrightLocal; for other sites, it provides a link to the listing. Dashboard AI assistance can draft replies, and customizable review widgets can be added to websites without coding. The Grow plan covers one location and includes monitoring, responses, requests by email, SMS and in-store campaigns, and a website widget. It costs $65 a month billed monthly, or $584 USD billed annually ($49 / mo). The paid service has no free plan, but offers a 14-day full-access trial without a credit card. SMS requests use credits, and in-app replies to Google and Facebook reviews are limited to 350 characters.