Comparisons

Tools for handling Google reviews: what each one does, and what you still do yourself

Five options a single UK venue would shortlist, judged on what they cover, whether they draft or post, and what they cost. Every one of them still needs you to press send.

Alex Riesenkampff

8 September 2026 · 10 min read · Markdown

The category sells itself on writing your review replies, and not one of these tools will put a reply on Google without a person approving it first. Birdeye tells its users to "click 'Post reply'". Trustpilot says you are "only sending the reply when you're completely happy with it". So if you are shopping for something that empties your review inbox while you sleep, it is not on this page and it may not exist.

What does differ is what happens after you approve. Three of the five hand the reply back for you to post yourself. Ours is one of two that takes it from there, which is a smaller difference than the category's marketing implies and the only one worth paying for.

What makes one worth paying for anyway is specific to this country. Google does offer AI reply drafting, through the Gemini app connected to a Business Profile, with prompts as direct as "Help me draft a reply to my latest review". Its own availability line reads: "Available wherever the Gemini web app is supported except the European Economic Area and the United Kingdom." The free option a US operator gets from Google is not available here, and that absence is most of why a UK venue would buy anything below.

And two of the four paid tools will not show a single site a price.

Who publishes this, and what connects us to it

Super44 publishes this page and is one of the five entries. Nobody pays to be listed, and we have no commercial relationship with any other tool named here. This is a category we sell into, and the first recommendation below is still to pay us nothing.

Google Business Profile itself

Start here, and for most venues stop here. Replying to a review is free, takes about a minute, and Google's own description of a Business Profile is that you can manage how your business appears on Maps and Search "at no charge". The steps are four clicks: read reviews, find the review, select Reply, type, send.

What it does well is being the destination. Every tool below is a way of getting words into this box, so the box is never the bottleneck. Replies usually appear within ten minutes, though Google warns that one can take up to thirty days, which is worth knowing before you assume a reply failed and post it twice.

Who should not rely on it alone: an owner who has not replied to anything since March. That is the actual failure mode in this category, and it is not a tooling problem, it is that nobody has the ten minutes on a Tuesday. If your last twelve reviews are unanswered, the free option is not working for you, whatever it costs. The second group is a venue getting real volume, perhaps twenty or more reviews a month, where the tab-by-tab approach stops scaling.

Cost: nothing. If you are not sure how many reviews you should be aiming for in the first place, our piece on how many Google reviews a restaurant needs sets out the numbers before you buy anything to chase them.

Birdeye

The broadest thing here, and the one built for an estate rather than a site. Its pricing tiers are organised by location count, running from one to three sites all the way to 1000 and above, which tells you who it is for before any salesperson does.

What it does well is coverage across listing sites a single venue has usually never heard of and a hotel group cares about a great deal. If your reviews land on Google, Facebook, Tripadvisor, an aggregator and four industry directories, consolidating that into one inbox is a real job that a free Google tab cannot do. Its AI drafting is explicit about the human step: the user "can edit and review it and click 'Post reply.'"

Who should not pick it: anyone in the UK buying it for the AI drafting. Birdeye's own support documentation says of that feature, "This feature is available only for US-based locations/businesses for now." The inbox and the coverage still work here. The thing most people would be shopping for does not. If you run several sites and the review inbox really is spread across platforms, get a quote from them rather than from us, and ask that question first.

Cost: not published. The pricing page asks for a name, a phone number and a location count before it shows a figure, behind a button reading "GET PRICING". US review sites and listing pages put its single-location entry tier somewhere around $300 to $450 a month, on a twelve month contract that auto-renews. No UK price appears anywhere, so read that as the scale rather than the quote: this is a several-hundred-a-month product, not a thirty-pound one.

Podium

The one whose pitch is about volume rather than replies. Podium's reviews page pitches it as a way to "Double your reviews on Google with Podium Reviews—an easier and faster way to build trust and credibility to grow your business with our AI-powered platform", and its strength is the collection side rather than the response side.

What it does well is the ask. Getting more reviews is a different problem from answering the ones you have, and it is the problem most venues actually have, because a venue with nine reviews does not have a reply workload, it has a visibility one. Podium names Google and Facebook and describes consolidating "all of your review sites" into a single inbox.

Who should not pick it: anyone unwilling to commit for a year. Its master terms state that "the initial term for any Subscription to the Services is twelve (12) months and will automatically renew for subsequent periods of equal duration", with non-renewal requiring written notice at least one month before the end of the term. A second thing to settle before signing: its pages describe crafting responses but do not say whether a human approves them before they post, so get that in writing, because posting an unreviewed reply to an angry guest is a specific and public way to make a bad week worse.

Cost: not published. The pricing page says plans are "designed to fit your specific business needs, talk to our sales team for details". US listings put its entry tier around $400 a month with a setup fee on top, and again there is no UK figure anywhere, so treat it as the same order of magnitude as Birdeye and budget accordingly before you take the demo.

Super44

Ours, and it is built around the gap Google leaves open in the UK. Google reviews sync in automatically, a new review can surface a copy-ready draft in the venue's own tone using its prior review themes and previously approved replies, and on a paid plan we get the approved reply published to your Google Business Profile, typically within a day or two. Nothing is ever published without your explicit approval.

What it does well is the follow-up rather than the writing. The draft arrives without you going to look for it, which is the step that breaks in every other arrangement including the free one. With your permission we also work on the profile itself: categories, hours, services, description and photos.

Who should not pick it: a venue with reviews spread across five platforms, because we cover Google and not the rest, and Birdeye is the entry above built for exactly that. Nor anyone expecting the drafts to learn your voice from your past replies over time, which is not shipped. And you should not pay us anything until the free tier runs out of road, which it does at the point you want the reply published rather than drafted.

Cost: a free tier with no credit card, covering review analysis and reply drafting for you to post yourself. Getting the approved reply published for you sits on the paid plans, at £19 and £49 a month.

Trustpilot

The odd one out, and worth understanding rather than dismissing. Trustpilot manages reviews on Trustpilot. Its own pages talk about your Trustpilot profile page and its widgets, and nothing on them offers to manage a Google Business Profile.

What it does well is the online side of a hospitality business. If you sell beans, gift vouchers, a subscription or merchandise from a website, the reviews that influence that purchase are frequently not on Google, and a Trustpilot widget on a checkout page does work a Maps listing cannot. It is also the only vendor here that publishes a price without a phone call.

Who should not pick it: a venue whose customers arrive on foot. If people find you by searching for a coffee near them, Google is the review surface that matters and Trustpilot does not touch it. Its AI reply drafting also sits on the Premium tier at $799 a month, which is not a small-venue number, and its prices are quoted per domain in US dollars, so budget for the exchange rate.

Cost: there is a free tier, then Starter at $99 a month per domain. Read the billing terms with it: the price is billed annually on a contract Trustpilot describes as "12 months, prepaid", so Starter is $1,188 committed upfront rather than $99 you can stop paying. Plus is $319 a month and Premium $799 on the same basis. Starter is limited to new small business customers under $5M revenue.

Before you pay anyone, know the rules

Three things break Google's policy and all three are commonly sold as tactics.

You may not offer an incentive "in exchange for posting any review or revision or removal of a negative review". That covers the free coffee for a five-star, and it covers asking a guest to take down a one-star in return for a refund.

You may not "Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers". This is review gating, and it is the one respectable-looking tools quietly do: survey first, send the happy ones to Google, route the unhappy ones to a private form. Ask any vendor directly whether their flow does this.

And on asking in the venue, Google says merchants "should not require or pressure users to leave ratings or write reviews while on the premises, nor should they request that specific content be included", explicitly including a merchant "requesting that staff solicit a certain number of reviews". A card on the counter is fine. A staff target is not.

So which one

If you get fewer than about twenty reviews a month and you are on top of them, buy nothing. Reply in the Business Profile, spend the ten minutes a week, and put the money into the thing reviews feed, which is local visibility. If you want the drafts written for you while you do that, our free tier does it without a card and leaves the posting to you, which is the closest thing to a free lunch on this page. Our guide to ranking on Google Maps covers what moves that beyond the review count.

If your reviews are spread across Google, Facebook, Tripadvisor and a directory or two, and especially if you run more than one site, get a quote from Birdeye. Breadth is what it is built for and it is not what we do. Ask about the AI drafting before anything else, because its own documentation restricts that feature to US businesses.

If your problem is that you have twelve reviews and the place across the road has four hundred, the tool that addresses that is a collection tool rather than a reply tool, and Podium is the one here that leads with it. Read the twelve-month auto-renewal before you sign, and ask whether a human approves the replies.

If you sell anything online alongside the venue, Trustpilot is doing a job the others are not, and it is the only one that will tell you the price tonight.

And if the honest description of your situation is that you have not replied to anything since the spring and you keep meaning to, the free tier will not fix that on its own, because it still leaves the posting to you. That is the narrow case for paying us: the draft arrives in your tone without you going to find it, and once you approve it we get it onto your profile. If you would rather write your own replies but want better raw material for them, our collection of hospitality prompts has the copy-paste versions, and they cost nothing.