Learn More About Review Management Software
What is review management software?
Review management software is a powerful tool that enables businesses to effectively oversee and engage with customer reviews and feedback across multiple platforms. By consolidating reviews from various sources into a single, centralized dashboard, this software simplifies the process of monitoring and responding to customer interactions. This streamlined approach saves time and enhances businesses' ability to improve their service and reputation based on customer insights.
This type of software should not be confused with review platforms, even though they serve similar purposes. Review platforms allow any product or service provider to collect reviews, while a company usually uses review management software to create its own reviews portal.
Key benefits of review management software
- Generate brand awareness to help ensure consumers are aware of the distinctive qualities of a brand.
- Encourage authenticity by allowing prospects and customers to learn about brand weaknesses.
- Allow consumers to provide feedback since a positive customer experience is essential to attract and retain customers.
- Increase sales by understanding the overall brand image
Why use review management software?
Review management software helps companies gather, manage, and analyze reviews from customers and consumers. What matters most, though, is using reviews to better engage with prospects and customers and adapt to market changes and consumer needs. The best review management platforms for brand reputation are built around exactly that: turning feedback into action before it affects the bottom line.
Engagement—Companies use review management tools to engage reviewers, address their concerns, and provide assistance when necessary. Engagement makes reviewers feel their opinions matter and can create relationships between consumers and brands. The strongest review management software makes this a team effort rather than a one-person job — Birdeye lets multiple team members collaborate on review responses and add internal notes so context isn't lost when someone's out, and Reputation lets admins assign specific locations or reviews to the right manager rather than leaving everything in one shared inbox.
Improve products and services—Analyzing large numbers of reviews can generate valuable insights into a product or service's strengths and weaknesses. Companies can use this information to improve their offering, which can improve the customer experience and boost customer loyalty.
Who uses review management software?
Reviewer feedback can benefit multiple company departments, from sales and marketing to product development.
Marketing — Marketers use review management software to capture and use reviews for promotional purposes. Review data helps marketers identify buyer personas and more accurately target prospects based on their preferences.
Sales—Salespeople use reviews to help prospects make buying decisions. While case studies and other types of content can still be useful in sales, genuine feedback from many customers is the most beneficial.
Product management — Product managers analyze customer feedback to define or improve go-to-market strategies to increase sales and customer satisfaction.
Kinds of review management software
Review management software can be categorized in various ways depending on how vendors deliver standard and advanced functionality for review management.
Best-of-breed—Most review management software focuses exclusively on collecting and managing reviews. Some products provide additional features, such as brand management and technologies like artificial intelligence. Best-of-breed software has the benefit of providing all features as a single solution at a reasonable price.
Suites—Some vendors provide functionality to manage multiple types of consumer-generated content, such as questions and answers or curated social media content. Other features that may be included are e-commerce personalization, content management, product sampling, or brand protection. Suites are usually delivered as a mix of multiple software products that can be bought and used in multiple configurations.
Point solutions — A multitude of integrations and tools focus on a subset of the capabilities included in review management tools. These tools complement but cannot replace review management software.
Review management software features
Based on G2 reviews, marketing and product teams evaluate review management software by comparing collection and moderation tools, syndication capabilities, and integration with CRM and marketing systems.
Collection—Reviews are usually collected through an online portal embedded in the company's website or online store. Reviewers can provide feedback when looking for or buying a product, but companies also use other methods to collect reviews. Some of the most important include email campaigns, social media, or pop-up ads. To streamline the collection process, most review management software solutions allow users to post multiple reviews simultaneously.
Moderation—Each review should be verified and validated to ensure it is genuine and applies to the right product. Moderation can be done automatically using algorithms to detect potential issues such as duplicate text. The identity of the reviewers and their eligibility for rewards can also be verified. Also, any changes to existing reviews should go through a validation process.
Management—Once reviews are validated and publicly available, they cannot be modified by reviewers or the company. However, administrators may need to manage reviews in certain situations. For instance, when a product is discontinued and removed from the website, the associated reviews will also be removed. If some of those reviews are also related to another product that is still active, they should not be deleted.
Visual display elements such as photos, ratings, or badges can make reviews more attractive.
Syndication—Syndication refers to using reviews to provide consumers with an overview of what others think about a product. Through syndication, companies can consolidate reviews about a product and display the results on their website or online store. Therefore, it is critical to match reviews with the right products and analyze all reviews for each product to generate stats.
Other features of review management software: Community Q&A Capabilities, Customer Service Capabilities, Engagement Capabilities, Integration & APIs Capabilities, Marketing Capabilities, Response Types Capabilities, Sampling Capabilities
Additional review management software features
Brand management—Review data provides valuable details about how a brand is perceived. Companies can monitor reviews and respond when their brand is at risk due to negative feedback. Since companies cannot remove or alter reviews because they don’t like them, brand managers need to engage and address issues as soon as possible.
Omnichannel communications—Advanced review management platforms include multiple options for communicating with reviewers, such as email, social media, or SMS. Anyone can share reviews on multiple channels and comment on and rate them.
Potential issues with review management software
Moderation—Review moderation requires necessary human and technical resources, which many companies cannot afford. While review management software usually provides functionality for moderation, this type of feature can vary significantly from one product to another. Also, moderation features rarely replace human intervention completely, meaning companies still require some moderators.
Integration—Review management systems integrate with other types of software, such as CRM, sales, and marketing automation. Since review data is essential to improving sales and marketing strategies, seamlessly transferring data between multiple systems is also important. Vendors usually provide standard integration and connectors or APIs, but these aren’t always enough for complex integrations. Companies may need to invest in additional software, such as data integration software.
Review relevance—Due to the fast pace of change in most markets, especially consumer products, reviews may become irrelevant very quickly. Companies need to constantly receive new reviews and ensure that irrelevant reviews don’t influence buyer behavior.
Privacy — While review management platform vendors provide secure features, companies in highly regulated industries often require additional privacy functionality. Examples include financial institutions, healthcare organizations, government agencies, and public sector agencies.
Increased competition — As reviews become more popular, finding new reviewers or convincing existing users to share new reviews will become difficult. More brands will try to source reviews from the same people, and they will need to provide better incentives.
Review Management Software FAQs
Most Popular FAQs
Which review management software has the best reviews?
Across the Review Management category, the highest rated platforms for online reputation are also the most trusted names in verified user reviews, the ones that make collecting and responding to reviews feel automatic rather than an extra task.
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ReputationStacker: Carries a solid review base at a perfect satisfaction score, with a hands-off system built to win more customers through consistent review generation.
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Cacao: Also posts a perfect score, with a synchronized console that keeps multi-location operators on top of consumer feedback across every site.
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Kudoz Reviews: A smaller sample so far, though it matches the category's top satisfaction scores.
What is the best free review management software?
A handful of platforms in this category offer a genuine free trial rather than a stripped-down demo.
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Birdeye: Listed among G2's free review management picks, with the largest review base in the category backing up strong satisfaction at that scale.
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Reviews.io: Also appears on G2's free lists, with solid satisfaction scores across a wide range of company sizes.
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Videowise: Listed as a free option too, with a supportive team helping with development, integration, and ongoing account management.
Which review management platform offers the best review aggregation features?
The platforms that stand out here treat aggregation as a genuine single-pane-of-glass view, not just a list of links to separate review sites.
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Cacao: A synchronized console effortlessly aggregates real-time consumer feedback across multiple local business endpoints into one dashboard.
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Okendo: Makes review aggregation and displaying pretty seamless, consolidating what used to be three separate apps into one.
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Birdeye: Lets a business view all important information in one location across multiple properties, saving time compared to checking each source separately.
What platform integrates review management with CRM tools?
The clearest fits among top review management vendors with business system integration are the platforms built to sync review activity directly with a business's existing customer records rather than operating as a separate silo.
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Birdeye: Integrates with a wide range of different CRM platforms, making it easy to set up alongside systems already in place.
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Klaviyo: Connects review and customer data together, which matters for teams that want reviews feeding directly into broader marketing workflows.
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Okendo: Integrates well with a business's site and email systems, keeping review data connected to the tools a team already relies on.
What is the best review management software?
The right answer depends on what a business needs most, but a few platforms come up across a wide range of use cases.
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Okendo: Carries a large, well-established review base, with expertise in review aggregation built up over a long time in the space.
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Feefo: A solid review base backs up consistently strong satisfaction, with support reviewers rate among the best in the category.
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Experience.com: Makes it easy to manage and improve online reputation all in one place, with a guided onboarding process that gets positive marks.
Small Business FAQs
What is the most affordable review management software for SMBs?
Within this category, a few platforms stand out specifically for strong price-to-value scores among smaller organizations.
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Shopper Approved: Posts the strongest price-to-value scores among small business reviewers in this data set.
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EmbedReviews: Also rates well on value, alongside support scores that hold up strongly for a smaller organization's needs.
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Videowise: Solid value scores back up a supportive team that helps smaller businesses through setup and integration.
What is the best review management software for startups?
Startups evaluating review management tools tend to prioritize something a lean team can run without a dedicated reputation manager.
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Cacao: Among small business reviewers, it posts a perfect satisfaction score, with a centralized console that keeps multi-location monitoring simple even for a small team.
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Kudoz Reviews: Also earns a perfect score among smaller organizations, though the review base here is still modest.
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ReputationStacker: A large small-business review base backs up a fully automated system that gets more reviews without ongoing manual effort.
Which review management software is the most user-friendly for small teams?
Ease of use matters most at this stage, since the person managing reviews is often juggling several other responsibilities too.
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Yotpo: Posts strong ease-of-use scores among small business reviewers in this data set.
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EmbedReviews: Also rates highly on ease of use, backed by support scores that stay strong for a smaller team.
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Klaviyo: A strong ease-of-use score pairs with review and customer data working together in one place.
Which review management tool is easiest to set up for small teams?
Setup speed is one of the more differentiated ratings in this category, and small teams generally do best with something usable well before it needs to prove its worth.
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ReputationStacker: Posts some of the strongest setup scores among small business reviewers in this data set.
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Kudoz Reviews: Also posts a top-tier setup score, though the sample here is still small.
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Cacao: A strong setup score backs up a centralized console that's ready to monitor multiple locations from day one.
Which review management tool is best for local or service-based small businesses?
A distinct pattern in this category is small, service-based businesses focused on winning local search visibility rather than managing a large e-commerce catalog of reviews.
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ReputationStacker: Built specifically to help businesses rank higher in local search and win more customers through automated review generation.
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Experience.com: Guides small businesses through setting up a Google My Business page alongside broader online reputation management.
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Lipscore: Strong satisfaction scores back up a platform built for straightforward review collection without a heavy setup process.
Enterprise FAQs
What is best-rated review management software for large enterprises?
Within the Enterprise segment of this category, a smaller set of platforms have the review volume from large organizations to back up a strong rating.
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ReputationStacker: Holds a perfect satisfaction score among its enterprise reviewers, consistent with the top ratings it earns at every organization size.
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Birdeye: Carries by far the largest enterprise review base in this category, holding a strong rating even at that scale.
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Experience.com: A smaller enterprise sample so far, though satisfaction holds up well among the larger-organization reviewers using it.
What is the most reliable review management tool for enterprises?
Reliability at this scale tends to come down to support responsiveness, since a large organization needs fast answers when reviews are coming in across many locations at once.
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ReputationStacker: Support ratings are the strongest in this data set among enterprise reviewers.
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Feefo: Also posts strong enterprise support scores, consistent with a support team reviewers rate among the best in the category overall.
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Birdeye: Support scores stay solid across the largest enterprise review base in the category.
Which platform offers the strongest review aggregation for enterprise teams?
At enterprise scale, aggregation needs to hold up across many properties and locations, not just a handful of review sources.
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Birdeye: Lets an enterprise view all important information in one location across multiple properties, backed by the largest enterprise review base in this category.
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Reputation: Built specifically around aggregating and managing reputation data at scale for larger organizations with multiple locations.
Which platform offers the strongest CRM integration for enterprise teams?
At this scale, CRM integration needs to sync review data across many teams and touchpoints, not just a single sales pipeline.
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Birdeye: Integrates with a wide range of CRM platforms, a feature that scales cleanly across the largest enterprise review base in this category.
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SingleInterface: Solid enterprise satisfaction scores back up a platform built to connect listings, reviews, and customer data across multi-location operations.
Which review management platform is best for multi-location or franchise enterprises?
Large, multi-location organizations need a platform built to manage reputation across many sites at once, not a tool designed for a single storefront.
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Birdeye: Reviewers specifically cite the ability to view important information across multiple properties in one place, which matters more as the number of locations grows.
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SingleInterface: Positioned around managing listings and reviews consistently across many locations for larger, multi-site operations.
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Reputation: A solid enterprise review base backs up a platform built for reputation management at scale across a large portfolio of locations.