Best Review Management Software

Our Review Software Top Picks

We identified 74 popular review software vendors, and after extensive research, we narrowed our list to five of the best. The following review management software companies were selected based on key features, pricing transparency, and customer service. These companies are well-known in the industry and offer a range of features to help businesses manage their online reputation. Please refer to our methodology section for details on each feature and scoring.

Reviews.io – Best Review Management Software for Small Businesses

We like Reviews.io for its affordable pricing (starting at $45/month), sleek user interface, and easy setup. Reviews.io is a licensed Google Seller Ratings partner, which means that the ratings and reviews you collect through the platform can be displayed on your Google Ads. And according to Google, displaying those little gold Seller Rating stars can improve your Quality Score and lower your Pay Per Click costs, ultimately driving more profit for your small business.

Beyond the basics, Reviews.io review management software stands out because it offers visual reviews through its Social Proof Editor. By providing photo and video reviews, your products come to life on platforms like Instagram and Facebook. Reviews.io also supports a robust Influencer Discovery feature that identifies and helps you target influencers that already use your brand.

Reviews.io features

• Review management: negative reviews trigger a ticket you can address through Reviews.io so you never miss an opportunity to resolve customer issues.
• Review collection: You can send a review request to verified customers through email and SMS. You can also opt for an open review program where anyone can leave a review with or without an invitation. There is also the option for you to require proof of purchase to leave a review.
• Review sharing: use the Social Proof Editor to collect photo and video reviews ready to be shared on social media.
• Review insights: gather useful and measurable statistics from your reviews and dive deeper into what reviews say about specific areas of your business.
• Integrations: Reviews.io integrates with most third-party programs, including eCommerce, CRM, marketing platforms, reward programs, and social networks. The company has a development team that can make custom integrations for you on request if you don’t see what you need on their list.

What markets does Reviews.io serve?

Reviews.io is best for companies just starting with an online reputation management tool. The Early Stage plan is affordable and gets small businesses a good start. With the rolling month-to-month contract, you can easily scale up as you grow and your needs change.

Read our full Reviews.io Review

ConsumerAffairs for Brands – Best for Consumer Insights

ConsumerAffairs is an online marketplace where consumers can research companies and read reviews before making important purchases. Companies that have – or want – a presence on ConsumerAffairs can sign up for ConsumerAffairs for Brands, which focuses on helping brands manage their online reputation and reviews all from one dashboard.

Brands that choose to partner with ConsumerAffairs (ConsumerAffairs Authorized Partners) can use the platform to solicit reviews in multiple ways including the in-house call center, which calls your customers and collects reviews over the phone. The platform uses AI to draw insights from reviews, giving brands a clearer view of what makes customers happy and where issues need to be addressed.

Authorized Partners can also engage with reviewers through public and private responses to address issues and turn demoters into promoters. This helps brands boost their online presence, increase growth, and engage with their target audience.

ConsumerAffairs for Brands features

• Review management: see all your online reviews on one dashboard and respond publicly or privately to reviews.
• Review collection: collect reviews through the in-house call center, send review collection emails through the platform, capture reviews from your own website or social media profiles using a custom web form, and/or get printed cards to collect reviews in person.
• Review sharing: use the testimonial widget to share reviews on your company’s website or Facebook page.
• Review insights: analyze reviews collected on ConsumerAffairs and other third-party review sites to get a holistic picture of your company’s online reputation.
• Integrations: CRM integrations are available.

What markets does ConsumerAffairs for Brands serve?

Not every business is a good match for ConsumerAffairs. ConsumerAffairs for Brands works best for companies offering high-consideration consumer products and services. To qualify for a Basic or Authorized Partner account, you must schedule a call with their sales center and meet specific criteria.

Read our full ConsumerAffairs for Brands Review

Birdeye – Best for Businesses with Multiple Locations

Birdeye is an online reputation and review management platform that caters to companies with 10 or more locations across various industries. It is a top-notch review management software that can accommodate businesses of all sizes, from small businesses to large enterprise organizations.

With Birdeye, businesses can easily manage their online reputation by sharing their business profile on up to 50 sites while keeping track of incoming reviews. Customers can also benefit from the platform’s automated review collection and replies, ensuring that no review goes unaddressed.

Birdeye is a Google Seller Ratings Partner, which means that the ratings and reviews collected through the platform can be displayed alongside Google Ads as long as the business has 100 verified reviews with an average 3.5-star rating within the last 12 months.

Using Birdeye, customers can collect more reviews, engage with more customers, and improve their online reputation.

Birdeye features

• Review management: companies using Birdeye can monitor reviews on over 150 online review sites simultaneously.
• Review collection: you can send out texts and messages to collect reviews for over 200 sites through Birdeye.
• Review sharing: bulk publish your favorite reviews to social media for all your locations from a single dashboard.
• Review insights: Birdeye uses natural language processing to break down data from reviews into actionable insights.
• Integrations: Birdeye integrates with 3,000+ apps and CRMs to better monitor and manage reviews.

What markets does Birdeye serve?

Birdeye works best for enterprise businesses by using an omnichannel view of multiple locations from an intuitive executive enterprise dashboard. The ratings and review software works for many industries, from healthcare to real estate to retail and restaurants.

Yotpo – Best for Boosting the eCommerce Experience

Yotpo is designed to make collecting and displaying reviews easy to increase your revenue through eCommerce. An in-mail form generates reviews within the email and allows you to insert your reviews and review highlights throughout the entire eCommerce shopping process.

Yotpo offers a free plan to get started with its review collection tools, and it’s cheapest paid plan starts at just $15/month. All plans, including the free one, allow you to request reviews via email and SMS. Enterprise plans and custom pricing are available by quote. Beyond review management, Yotpo also offers SMS marketing tools, loyalty and referral programs, visual user-generated content tools, and more to supercharge your eCommerce marketing efforts.

Yotpo features

• Review management: you can reject reviews based on specific criteria.
• Review collection: utilize SMS and email review collection. In-form email allows users to insert their reviews right into the email. You can also ask a custom question around high-converting topics in your review invitations to get highly targeted responses that will prompt purchases.
• Review sharing: share reviews across social media channels and directly to shopping channels like Facebook Shops and Google Shopping Ads, as well as throughout the decision-making and purchasing process to increase sales.
• Review insights: insights are provided in an email dashboard with conversion rates.
• Integrations: a fully integrated eCommerce experience is available in higher-priced plans.

What markets does Yotpo serve?

Yotpo directly targets companies that focus on the eCommerce experience by collecting and displaying reviews within each step of the online shopping experience. Every part is designed to increase your conversions and purchases.

Read our full Yotpo Review

Podium – Best for Local Businesses

Podium is a review management service that works for many industries, from local home and professional services to automotive and financial services. We like that it allows you to send review invites through multiple channels like text messages and multimedia messaging services, providing just one link and making it easy for customers to give reviews.

Podium offers a free trial and its cheapest plan, Essentials, costs $249/month with a 12-month annual agreement required. Podium’s plans include solutions that go beyond review management, offering tools that help local businesses communicate with, market to, and collect payments from their customers. If you end up hitting the monthly limit of contacts or bulk messages, you can upgrade at anytime.

Podium features

• Review management: manage reviews on multiple sites from one dashboard. You can also answer questions and respond to reviews through video and chat.
• Review collection: send SMS and MMS review invitations with a simple link to write a review.
• Review sharing: review sharing through Google, Facebook, and other social media.
• Review insights: automatically see customer scoring through real-time reporting and insights.
• Integrations: Podium provides hundreds of app integrations.

What markets does Podium serve?

Podium works best for local businesses. It personalizes your review prompts and questions based on your industry. It is popular with local service industries such as home and professional services, dental, and healthcare.

Compare the best review management software side-by-side

What is review management software?

Consider that 99.5% of consumers read reviews online before shopping, and 74% of consumers say that reviews increase trust in a company. Review management software helps you track and manage your online reviews, address complaints and issues, and generate insights that lead to better products and more loyal customers.

Review management software helps you collect, manage, and share customer feedback across multiple platforms by

• Allowing you to request reviews in multiple ways to increase your user-generated content (UGC)
• Alerting you when someone writes a review or asks a question so you can respond
• Showcasing your best reviews and creating visual ways for you to share them on social media
• Generating customer insights using AI and sentiment analysis tools to analyze reviews

These features result in more leads, higher conversions, and increased revenue for your business.

Review management platforms can also help you collect more reviews which is equally as important to your online reputation as having good reviews. In fact, businesses with 200 or more reviews generate more business than those brands with less than 200 reviews.

Types of review management software

Most review software enables you to monitor the reviews you’re getting online, respond to negative comments, and share positive reviews to increase purchases. The biggest difference comes down to the types of companies and industries they serve. Here are some examples.

• Enterprise-level reviews software – Some review sites are designed for big enterprises with multiple locations, such as Birdeye, where you can monitor large amounts of reviews simultaneously and keep your company profile up-to-date across multiple locations.
• Small business reviews software – Other review software providers work better for small businesses or companies just starting out that need a service to scale with them as they grow, such as Reviews.io, which we like due to its 14-day free trial and flexible month-to-month pricing.
• Industry-specific reviews software – Others are industry specific. For example, eCommerce businesses rely heavily on online reviews, and product review software like Yotpo is designed with that specific need in mind. ConsumerAffairs for Brands is a good option for companies in consumer categories that want review collection and reputation management and visibility on third-party content related to their product and service categories.

No matter which type of review software you choose, you’re taking steps toward better understanding your customers and improving your online reputation by using it.

How much does review management software cost?

Review generation software is usually priced on a monthly basis (some give a discount per month when committing to an annual plan). They are also billed per location and per the number of review invites you send each month.

The following table illustrates the pricing of three of the most popular review management software companies that bill this way.

Choosing the right review management software for your business

The best review software for your business depends on your business. When looking at online review management software, consider the following about your business:

• Industry – look for review software that specializes in collecting feedback from customers like yours
• Number of reviews you collect – this will depend on the size of your customer base and budget
• Number of business locations – make sure the software can parse reviews by location if needed
• Integrations – make a list of must-haves to ask about during the demo or trial period

Knowing these key points will help you narrow down the best online reputation management software for your business. We recommend scheduling demos or signing up for a free trial with at least two vendors on our list to determine which review software you should ultimately use.

Review Management Software FAQs

What is a review management tool?

A review management tool is part of your overall online reputation management strategy. Most top reputation management companies include review management as part of their offerings. A review management tool is anything that helps you monitor, respond to, and collect reviews and share them on your website or other platforms.

What is the best reputation management software?

When it comes to finding the best online reputation management software on the market today, the one you choose will depend on your exact needs. If you are just starting out, a free option like Yotpo might be best. Likewise, if you have 150 different locations and send out tons of review invites per month, a customer review software like Birdeye might meet your needs better.

How do you collect user reviews?

User reviews are collected in several ways. If you want verified reviews, then you will organize sending invites to customers after they make a purchase. Most review generation software will do this by SMS, MMS, email, and surveys. Some ratings and reviews software won’t let just anyone comment and review without a verified purchase. However, some have an open review policy where anyone can comment or review without verification.

How we chose the best review management software providers

We curated a list of 74 review management tools and identified 15 popular vendors with significant online reach to narrow our focus. From there, we chose the best customer review software vendors that stood out for their review management features, the markets they serve, their brand reputation, and more.

We collect information from vendors and verify it through:

• Interviews
• Video and live demos
• Vendor and parent company websites

We score companies on a scale of 1 (poor) to 5 (excellent) across the following criteria, each worth 25% of our total score:

• Variety of features: We looked for vendors that offered review collection, review management, and review sharing options, as well as many common integrations, reporting, and review insights. A company scores higher when they offer all of these features, as it means better reputation management for your business.
• Pricing transparency: We not only compare actual pricing and plans for each vendor but judge companies on whether or not this information is readily available online – or if you have to jump through a million hoops to get it. Companies with transparent pricing and free trials get a better score.
• Customer support: We look for companies that offer multiple types of ongoing customer support, such as phone, chat, and email support, as well as a knowledge base and onboarding.
• Brand reputation: You can’t talk about reputation management tools without checking the reputation of the tools themselves! We gathered data from customer reviews and ratings published on trustworthy third-party review sites to understand each vendor’s reputation with its customers.