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All four products here collect reviews and put them on a dashboard, and two of them start cheaper than we do. Not one of them writes the reply, decides which one star is worth disputing, or files the dispute with the documentation attached. Each comparison sets that platform beside a service that does the writing. Where the software on its own is the better buy, the page says so.
How it all works
Most businesses shopping for review software already know the rating is slipping. They want requests going out on a schedule, and they want the replies written. Those are two separate purchases, and these pages keep them apart. If the replies are the half you want handed over, what the managed service actually covers is set out in full elsewhere.
1
Birdeye and Chatmeter both price per location and neither publishes a rate, so the first thing either one asks is how many you have. Trustpilot prices per domain instead, quotes each domain separately, and commits you for twelve months. BrightLocal moves on a location slider. One location and five locations are different products at every vendor here, so settle the number before you sit through a demo. Local ranking is metered on a different axis again, and the SEO tool comparisons work that cost out the same way.
2
Trustpilot collects onto a Trustpilot profile, and location reviews are a paid add-on on every tier including Premium. Birdeye advertises two hundred sites. Chatmeter is built for multi location brands and wraps listings and local pages around the reviews. BrightLocal puts review monitoring and review requests on Grow, the top of its three tiers. If what you actually need is a stronger Google Business Profile, check that the plan in front of you is really aimed at it.
3
Collection is the easy half to automate. Somebody still has to read the three star review, write a reply that does not sound like a form letter, judge whether the one star breaks Google policy, and file the dispute with evidence. Trustpilot puts AI assisted replies on Premium and above. The rest leave the writing to you. If that person is already on your payroll, buy the software direct and keep the difference. No subscription creates one. Where the writing is the constraint rather than the collecting, the content tool comparisons cover that decision.
Four platforms, four different answers to what you are billed on and how much of the work stays yours.
VS
No Published Price
Priced Per Location
Quote By Phone
Birdeye is the biggest name on this page and the one that will not tell you what it costs. The pricing page is a form: choose a location band, leave a mobile number, wait for the call. It sells one contract across reviews, listings, social, messaging and a stack of AI agents, which is a great deal of platform if you want all of it. What it does not sell is a person who writes your replies. That part stays with whoever on your team opens the inbox.
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VS
Thirty Nine To Start
Reviews On The Top Tier
Fourteen Day Trial
BrightLocal is a local search platform that grew a reputation module, and it is the best value here if rankings and citations matter to you as much as reviews. Its own page advertises plans from thirty nine dollars a month on a slider that moves with your location count, and the review tools sit on Grow, the top of three tiers. Fourteen days free, no card. Their fully managed local SEO service is twelve hundred and ninety nine a month, which is a useful number to hold beside ours.
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VS
Ninety Nine On Starter
Twelve Month Contract
Priced Per Domain
Trustpilot starts at ninety nine dollars a month on Starter, which undercuts us, and that plan is open only to new customers under five million dollars in revenue. Every contract runs twelve months and every price is per domain. Starter buys one hundred invitations a month and one user, Plus is three hundred and nineteen for three hundred invitations, and location reviews are an add-on at every tier. It is a review platform for your Trustpilot profile, which is a different asset from the Google listing people read before they call you.
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VS
Built For Multi Location
Users Not Metered
Quote After A Call
Chatmeter is built for multi location brands, in its own words on its own pricing page, which opens by asking how many locations you have. It prices per location with unlimited users, which is the right shape for a company where six people need to see the same rating. It is now part of Alchemer. Nothing is published, so the number arrives after a call. Run one location or four and you are the smallest band on their form, which is rarely the customer a platform is built around.
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About the service
Managed Reviews is not a dashboard with our name on it. The Google Business Profile, the review history and whatever rating you earn stay in your accounts, under your login. We build the request sequence, monitor the profile daily through the Google API, draft a reply to every review in your voice, dispute anything that breaks platform policy, and report each month on rating, velocity and response coverage. You run the business. The queue is ours.
Reputation software collects reviews and routes complaints, and it does both competently across every option here. What none of it can do is change what customers experience, which is what the reviews are about. If the recurring complaint is a slow callback, no amount of review solicitation fixes the score for long. Be honest with yourself about which of those two problems you have.
The mechanics are worth understanding too. Most of the lift comes from asking at the right moment, which is immediately after the thing went well rather than at the end of the month. A platform automates the asking, which is real value if nobody is doing it. It does not make a lukewarm customer enthusiastic, and gating requests so only happy customers are asked breaches the terms of every major review site.
One thing to watch in the comparison below is how each handles negative reviews. Some route them to a private form first, which edges towards that gating problem. Others alert you fast so somebody can respond publicly and well. A thoughtful reply to a bad review is worth more than three generic five star ratings, and no software writes it for you.
A full review inbox changes nothing on its own. It waits for somebody with the login and a free afternoon, and those two rarely turn up in the same week. We draft the reply, route anything sensitive to you first, and post it. Prospects read the responses more carefully than they read the reviews, and the distance between having reviews and answering them is made entirely of work somebody has to actually do.
The first thing most businesses try is a monthly blast to the whole customer list, which is the version everybody ignores. Requests go out twenty four to seventy two hours after the job closes, while the experience is still fresh, on a one click link generated from your profile. Timing and friction move response rates further than asking more people ever does.
Not every bad review is a legitimate one. Some come from people who were never customers, some name a competitor, some carry content that breaks Google policy outright. Those can be disputed, and the disputes that succeed are the ones filed quickly with documentation attached. We watch for them daily and file them as they appear, which is tedious and is exactly the sort of thing that never gets done in house.
What does a managed review service do that Birdeye does not?
Birdeye will pull reviews from two hundred sites into one inbox, route them to the right location, and give you AI agents to draft with. That is genuinely useful and nothing on our side replaces the breadth of it. What it does not do is decide that this particular three star review needs a careful answer, write that answer in your voice, spot the one star that breaks Google policy, and file the dispute with evidence attached. Those are the parts that move the rating, and each needs a person rather than a bigger plan.
Why is our rating slipping when the work has not changed?
Usually because the only people motivated enough to review you unprompted are the ones who had a problem. A business doing steady work for years can sit at four point two because the twelve people who wrote something were the twelve with a complaint. The fix is not asking harder, it is asking everybody, at the moment a job finishes, in a way that takes one tap. Ratings tend to recover faster than people expect once the sample stops selecting itself.
Do the reviews end up somewhere we do not control?
They do not. Everything happens on the Google Business Profile you already own, under your login, with the review history intact. One product on this page collects onto its own profile instead, which is a legitimate model and quietly puts the asset you spent a year building on somebody else's domain. We work on the listing you own, and we would say that plainly before you signed for the other thing.
Can you get a bad review taken down?
Not on request, and anybody promising otherwise is selling you something. What can happen is a dispute. If a review breaks Google policy, from somebody who was never a customer, naming a competitor, carrying content the guidelines prohibit, it can be reported with documentation and it sometimes comes down. Success rates are middling and the ones that work are filed quickly and evidenced properly. Everything else gets answered rather than removed, which is usually the better outcome anyway.
Which of these platforms will write the replies for us?
None of them, in the sense you mean. Trustpilot offers AI assisted replies on Premium and Enterprise, and Birdeye sells agents that will draft, so both will generate text for you. Generating text is not the same as somebody deciding a reply needs care, writing it that way, and standing behind it when the customer answers back. BrightLocal and Chatmeter make no such claim and are clearer for it. Collection turned out to be the easy half to automate, which is why every product here started there.
Why not buy the cheapest platform and do the work ourselves?
You should, if the work is not the constraint. BrightLocal advertises from thirty nine dollars a month and Trustpilot starts at ninety nine, against our two hundred and forty nine, and that is not a close contest on price. What none of them include is somebody who opens the queue every morning, writes the replies, judges which disputes are worth filing, and is still doing it in month seven. If you already have that person, buy the software direct and keep the difference.
How long before the rating actually moves?
New reviews start arriving within days of the first requests going out, because you are asking people who have just had a good experience. The average moves slower, and that part is arithmetic rather than strategy: a business at four point one with sixty reviews needs a long run of fives before anybody browsing notices. Three months is a fair horizon for a number a customer would see. Anyone quoting faster is counting requests sent rather than reviews posted.
Can we keep the platform we already pay for?
Yes. We work inside whatever account you already have, so the review history, the integrations and the reporting stay where your team expects to find them. We will also tell you plainly when the licence has stopped paying for itself. Once a person is writing the replies, a good deal of what the top tier charges for stops being load bearing, and dropping a tier is often the honest recommendation.
We already have a marketing person. What is left for you?
Quite a lot, and it is a common arrangement. Review work is unglamorous and relentless in a way campaign work is not. It is fifteen minutes a day, every day, forever, and it is the first thing dropped the week a launch lands. Somebody good at marketing is usually delighted to hand over the daily queue and keep the strategy. We take the queue, the disputes and the monthly reporting, and leave the rest of the plan alone.
Do we get a dashboard, or another seat to learn?
Neither, deliberately. Every platform on this page is something you log into, and the hour a week somebody spends staring at it is a cost nobody puts on the invoice. What arrives here instead is a monthly summary: rating, review velocity, response coverage, and where you sit against the businesses ranking near you, with a note on what moved and why. When a reply needs your judgement, we come and ask for it.
When should you not hire us for this?
Two cases, and both are common. If somebody in house genuinely enjoys writing the replies and has the fifteen minutes a day, buy the software direct, because these platforms are good and the price gap is real. And if nobody finds you through a map pack, because you are wholesale, or subcontract, or carried by one large client, then reviews are close to decorative. We will say so rather than sell you a retainer.
What if reviews are not our real problem?
We will say so before taking your money, and looking costs nothing. Reviews are one input into local ranking and one input into whether somebody calls you instead of the business listed above you. A profile with the wrong hours, a phone nobody answers, or a service area drawn at the wrong radius will quietly undo a year of five star reviews. We look at those first, because they are cheaper to fix and they are more often the actual problem.
What does the multi location plan add?
Managed Reviews is two hundred and forty nine dollars a month for one location, with the Google Business Profile work included. Multi Location is six hundred and forty nine for up to five, and it is not simply the same service five times over: reporting splits by site so you can see which location is pulling the average down, and each one runs its own request cadence and its own response queue. Past five locations we quote it, because the response workload rather than the software is what actually scales.
Are we locked into a contract?
No. Month to month, thirty days notice, no setup fee. That is worth holding against the software side of this page, where Trustpilot commits you to twelve months on every plan and prices each domain separately, and where the figure being advertised is usually the annual one. Reviews are also not a purchase that finishes, because the newest one always ages and the map pack keeps reshuffling, so treat it as a running cost of being findable rather than a project with an end date.
What do you need from us to begin?
Manager access to the Google Business Profile, a way to know when a job has closed, whether that is an export, a webhook or a weekly list, and an hour to talk through who your customers actually are. The first fortnight is an audit: what the profile says, where reviews come from now, what the current response rate is, and which reviews should have been disputed and never were. Requests start going out in week two, and you see the sequence before anything sends.
