StarReply vs Podium
Every tool in this category can draft a reply. The question a multi-location owner should ask is narrower: what will it publish without me, and what does it cost to find out?
| What its own page publishes | StarReply | Podium |
|---|---|---|
| The price on its own pricing page | $5/month for three locations, $15/month for twenty-five. | No figure. |
| What the price is per | Per business. | Not published. |
| How you get the number | It is on the page. | A sales team and a demo request. |
| What the page says about AI-written replies | Every reply is drafted by the agent, in your voice. | Nothing on its pricing page. |
| A review class it will not answer unattended | Named: 2★ and below, enforced in code rather than by a setting. | None named on its pricing page. |
What Podium is
Podium is a text-first customer-interaction platform for local business: webchat, shared inbox, review invitations, payments and an AI receptionist. Reviews are one surface inside it, and the emphasis is on generating them.
It does not publish a price. No pricing page. The pricing page says "Plans designed to fit your specific business needs, talk to our sales team for details". Read from Podium — Pricing on 2026-09-21.
What StarReply is
StarReply is a single agent pointed at one job, the morning after. It polls each location overnight, reads what each new review is actually about, drafts the reply in your voice, and routes it.
- 2★ and below is approval-only, in code. There is no autonomy setting that reaches it: the branch runs before the mode is read, and the database refuses any update that clears the flag on the row.
- Below 70% confidence in what a review is even about, the reply is held whatever the rating. The agent does not answer a review it is unsure it understood.
- A 30-second kill window between your tap and the listing, and a receipt for every read, draft, hold and post. Killing inside the window means it was never published, not published and then deleted.
- On the reviews it may handle, at most 20 posts a day per location, and never more than 1 reply to any one review.
- $5/month for up to three locations, $15/month for up to twenty-five. Published, flat, per business rather than per location, and no annual contract.
Choose Podium if
- Your problem is review VOLUME: you do not have enough of them yet.
- You want webchat, a shared SMS inbox and payments in the same product.
- You have someone whose job is running the platform.
Choose StarReply if
- You have plenty of reviews and a backlog of unanswered ones across several sites.
- The reply to a bad review is the thing that keeps slipping, and you want it drafted and waiting rather than automated away.
- You want the price on the page.
Moving off Podium
Podium and StarReply read and write different parts of the same listing, so this is the one on the list where leaving is rarely the right move: Podium sends the request, StarReply drafts the reply. If you do leave, the thing that stops is the inbound, the review invitations and the webchat conversations, and neither of those is something StarReply does. The replies you already posted stay on the listing because they were always on the listing. StarReply only ever writes a reply the rail already reports as unanswered, so running both is safe: it will not overwrite a reply another tool posted.
Questions
How much does Podium cost? Podium does not publish a price. Its pricing page says plans are designed to fit your specific business needs and routes you to a sales team and a demo request. StarReply publishes $5/month for up to three locations and $15/month for up to twenty-five.
Podium gets me more reviews. Does StarReply? No, and that is the cleanest line between them. Podium is built around asking for reviews: text-first campaigns, webchat, lead capture. StarReply is built around the reviews you already have, and specifically around the one you have to answer today.
Can I run both? Yes. They read and write different parts of the same listing: Podium sends the request, StarReply drafts the reply. StarReply only ever writes a reply the rail already reports as unanswered, so it will not overwrite a reply another tool posted.
The rest of the shortlist
Further reading
- What to write under a one-star review, and what never to
- Replying to reviews at five addresses with one morning
- What the FTC's 2024 review rule actually bans
Every Podium figure on this page is the value carried in this site's claim register, read from Podium's own page and re-checked on rotation. Last verified 2026-09-21.