Podium Vs. Birdeye Comparison

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 and listing 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.

This feature is in full production, while Birdeye’s is still in beta. Podium’s payments feature lets you reduce cart abandonment and eliminate uncertainty. Having this feature will yield much higher response rates than other traditional ways of requesting payment.

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. Plus, it’s ballpark pricing, so nothing seems exact. In fact, we noticed it’s not very clear how your quote will arrive anyway, whether that’s a call or an email. It could, and likely should, be much clearer on how your quote will be handled. That’s a downside.

Reporting: On the surface, the analytics available with Podium are awesome. You can monitor the overall performance of marketing efforts and more. The only problem with the reporting is you’re not able to download that report so you can take it with you, unless you screenshot it. And that is so prehistoric in the world of data transfers and cloud storage.

Lead organization: When leads come in, they all end up in your Podium account dashboard and go to your inbox. You may have a team that handles these leads, but you can’t separate which leads go to who.

Other software lets you funnel leads with precision control, whether you have a ringer that handles high-value leads, a team focused on social media leads, or specialists that are great in helping experienced users switch to your product or service.This type of control is not available with Podium. All the leads go into one big pool, so everyone sees everyone else’s, making it hard to keep things organized.

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: The best part about Birdeye’s reporting is how deep you can get with it. See your reviews in one dashboard, sliced and diced by source, history, rating, and trends. And that’s just one facet. You get detailed reports also on SEO health, PPC ads, social media presence, and call and email tracking. Birdeye lets you drill down as much as you need it to.

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, and real-time sentiment analysis. Each of these features makes improving retention and your online reputation easy as pie.

Where Birdeye Falls Short

Slow email support: Many customers have complained that you will have to wait a minimum of 24 hours for a response from Birdeye email support. That can be an eternity when you need something resolved that is affecting your revenue, rankings, or customer experience.

Responding to Yelp reviews: At the moment, you can’t respond to Yelp reviews through the Birdeye platform. That’s something that Podium can handle, in comparison. With Birdeye, you have to actually take the time to sign into Yelp before you can respond. It’s a minor problem and inconvenience, but making this seamless would be much better and help Birdeye keep pace with other reputation management platforms.

Automated reporting: There is no automated reporting available in Birdeye. You’ll have to run and download each report manually. Many users complained that It would be nice if they had the capability to automate daily, weekly, and monthly reporting. This can be a huge time saver if Birdeye implements it into their platform. But, for now, it all has to be generated manually.

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 Birdseye, 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. They help you create tons of new leads and customers. But they do lack Podium’s payment capability (for now).

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 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 didn’t make the cut, but there are several other options that work great for a variety of use cases.