Brightlocal vs. Chatmeter vs. Yext: Which Tool to Choose
Managing your company’s online reviews, listings, and reputation is an essential (but time-consuming) task, which is why there are so many tools available to help you. But it can be hard to decide which is the best option for your business when comparing different tools.
Three popular options are Brightlocal, Chatmeter, and Yext. We’ve compared some of the core functionality of these reputation management tools to give you a better idea of how they measure up. Read on to see how they compare and which will be the best option for your company.
Listings Management
Listings management tools help keep your company information up-to-date and accurate across local directories and online listing sites. Listings management functionality also makes it easy to add new business listings to these sites — for example, if you open a new location.
Brightlocal
Listings management is a core part of the Brightlocal platform. It integrates with many of the major listings directories, including Apple Maps, Facebook, Google, and Bing. Brightlocal automatically syncs across all of these directories to help make sure the information for all your listings is accurate and consistent.
While customers are generally positive about Brightlocal’s listings management features, some users feel the platform needs to make updates to its directory integrations to continue providing the best experience.
Chatmeter
Chatmeter offers comprehensive listings management features. It integrates with all the major directories, including Google, Apple Maps, Yelp, and Bing. Additionally, it automatically flags errors and inconsistencies across business listings to help ensure they are accurate and up to date.
Customers say Chatmeter makes it easy to manage business listings across all these platforms — especially for multi-location businesses with lots of listings to manage.
Yext
One of Yext’s key offerings is its listings management tool, which is supposed to provide one central place for companies to manage their listings across the major directories.
However, despite this, some customers felt that Yext’s listings management tool often caused them more problems than it solved, especially when it created duplicate listings.
Reputation Management
Companies looking to stand out online need to build a positive reputation. That means you need to know what people are saying about your business and be able to keep up with online reviews across dozens of general and niche sites. Reputation management tools help you do just that.
Brightlocal
While Brightlocal offers some reputation management features, it’s not the tool’s main focus (and customers don’t mention it often in their reviews).
Features include notifications for new reviews and sending requests to customers for reviews. The platform also integrates with your website, so you can pick your best reviews from around the web to showcase on your site.
Chatmeter
Chatmeter’s advanced reputation management features help users collect, analyze, and respond to customer reviews and feedback. The platform includes AI-powered intelligence tools that help customers identify trends, changes, and common themes in their reviews and help them understand search insights.
Customers say Chatmeter’s reputation management functionality helps them work more efficiently when responding to reviews, and they frequently mention it in their product reviews.
Yext
Yext’s reputation management functionality gives customers the tools to generate and respond to online reviews. It also offers sentiment analysis powered by natural language processing to help you understand the trends and feelings expressed in customer reviews.
However, for some customers, Yext’s reputation management system was buggy, making it more difficult for them to manage their reviews online.
Social Media Management
Some reputation or listings management tools include features that help companies manage their social media accounts. These features let you post to social media, respond to social media messages, and analyze social performance using the same tool that you use to manage your online reviews and listings, rather than needing a separate social media tool.
Brightlocal
Social media management isn’t one of Brightlocal’s core features. However, customers can use it to create, schedule, and post to their Google Business Profile pages — just not other social media accounts.
Chatmeter
Chatmeter offers social media listening and publishing functionality as part of its platform. This makes it easier for customers to manage their company’s social media accounts as they can create, view, and respond to messages on social media using the same tool they use to manage online reviews.
This is especially helpful for multi-location businesses that have social media pages for each business location, as they have lots of pages to keep track of. Chatmeter gives them an all-in-one solution for managing their online presence, rather than needing to continuously switch between tools.
Yext
Yext offers social media publishing and management functionality as part of its solution. It lets customers publish, comment, monitor, and manage social content across the main social media channels, including Apple, Facebook, Google, and Instagram.
However, some customers feel they would prefer a more robust tool for social media management.
Analytics
The best reputation management tools should include analytics features. This functionality gives you access to data and reports to help you track your company’s reputation, listings, and reviews performance over time.
Brightlocal
Brightlocal offers analytics features that help you track your reviews and local SEO performance. You can also track local rankings and see how your performance compares to your competitors.
Customers say they like the visual nature of Brightlocal’s reports, though some feel they would prefer the tool to offer more in-depth or robust reporting functionality.
Chatmeter
Chatmeter’s analytics functionality helps companies measure and monitor their online reputation and customer sentiment. It combines analytics with natural language processing, machine learning, and generative AI to help users interpret their analytics data quickly and easily.
For example, you can ask questions about your recent online reviews, and the AI will analyze them to identify nuances, trends, or outliers in the data. Customers like the level of detail they can get from Chatmeter’s analytics and find it useful for monitoring the performance of their online listings.
Yext
Yext also offers analytics functionality that helps you track your online reputation and the performance of your local listings.
The tool has robust analytics capabilities that let users build their own reports and dashboards, making it easy to monitor the metrics that are most important to their business. However, some customers feel the analytics features can be a bit confusing, especially for less experienced team members.
Support and Training
The best tech vendors do everything they can to help their customers succeed with their products. That means investing in training resources and support to ensure users know how to use their tools and can quickly get help if they run into any problems with the product.
Brightlocal
Brightlocal offers detailed training materials via its online academy, which offers various free courses to help users (and other website visitors) learn the skills related to Brightlocal’s core product offering. Customers can also contact the customer support team directly, and overall seem to be happy with the level of service they receive.
The Brightlocal support team is UK-based, which can be a challenge for US-based customers who need support after UK working hours. However, Brightlocal says its support teams work shifts to provide round-the-clock coverage for international customers.
Chatmeter
Chatmeter’s award-winning support team is fully based in the US. Customers get a dedicated point of contact who they meet with regularly for support, customer service, or account-related issues. Chatmeter also has an online help center where customers can look up answers to more straightforward queries and frequently asked questions.
Yext
Like Chatmeter, Yext has an online knowledge base where customers can find out how to complete basic tasks in the platform or answer frequent questions. However, customers seem to have a mixed experience with the Yext support team.
Some users report slow response or resolution times when they reach out for help. Others say there has recently been lots of staff changeover on the support team, which makes it hard to build the relationships they need to be most successful with the tool.
Try Chatmeter for All Your Reputation Management Needs
At first glance, you might have felt like these three solutions were very similar. But now that we’ve looked at their core features a bit more, it’s easy to spot some big differences.
Brightlocal is a great choice for companies focused solely on local SEO, but it has a less robust offering for reputation management than some of these alternatives, and it doesn’t offer social media management functionality.
Yext is a comprehensive tool for managing your digital presence, but its support and training offerings lag behind many of the alternative providers.
And while the right tool will depend on your company’s requirements, Chatmeter is a great option for multi-location businesses that want to improve their online reputation with reviews, local listings, and local SEO. Customers love our top-quality service and all-in-one product offering. We’re trusted by major brands like Volvo, Pizza Hut, and Shell.
Try our interactive demo to learn more about our product. Or you can book a live demo with our team to learn exactly how our platform can benefit your business, and how it differs from the other options you might be looking at.
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