You wanted more reviews, not a receptionist.
Cloutly is the Podium alternative for the business whose reviews are the marketing. It asks every customer when the job is done, brings every location into one inbox, and tells you what people say about each one. The price is on the plans page, so you can start this afternoon. Billed monthly, whether that is one van or two hundred sites.
14 days free. No credit card.
“Dale found the leak in twenty minutes and left the kitchen cleaner than he found it.”Josh M. · ★★★★★ · 2 days ago
Trusted by 5,000+ service businesses
Buy the product for the job you actually have.
Most people shopping for a Podium alternative are not after a smaller Podium.
Podium is built to answer the phone.
Their product picks up the lead, books it in and takes the payment; Podium says around 60,000 businesses run on it. If the phone is the job, they built the receptionist.
Cloutly is built for businesses whose reviews are the marketing.
Every finished job turns into an ask, and every review lands in one inbox with what customers say about each location. The price per location is published, so you start today.
What Podium’s own customers wish they had known: the way out.
- ★☆☆☆☆
“Their customer service is awful. We'd wait weeks to get help. That doesn't work for a phone system.”
- ★★★☆☆
“They’ve really strayed away from small businesses like me. All the new features are way out of my price range and geared towards larger companies.”
- ★★★☆☆
“The AI assistant starts answering conversations and then they sit in that box without letting us know it is there to be dealt with.”
Read September 2026. Public review excerpts, quoted as written, with the reviewer’s rating.
The reviews come in. Then Cloutly puts them to work.
Know how many said it, not how many you remember.
Ask in your own words and Cloutly counts across the 312 reviews Ridgeway has. The answer is a count with the reviews behind it.
See whether an assistant names you, or gives out your old number.
Once a month Cloutly puts your questions to ChatGPT, Gemini and Perplexity and records who they named. It checks the phone number too, because the old one costs the job.
Every review is credited to the plumber who earned it. How the credit works.
The last two rows are the ones you live with every month.
The top is the work; the bottom two are how you buy it.
| Capability | Cloutly | Podium |
|---|---|---|
| Review requests by text | Yes | Yes |
| Review requests by email | Yes | Partial |
| Ask for a video review | Yes | Not publicly documented as of September 2026 |
| QR codes and printed links | Yes | Not publicly documented as of September 2026 |
| Reviews and messages in one inbox Cloutly: Google and Facebook reviews, Messenger, Instagram DMs, SMS, live chat | Yes | Yes |
| AI-drafted replies | Yes | Yes |
| AI search visibility (ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity) | Yes | Not publicly documented as of September 2026 |
| Ask a question of your reviews | Yes | Not publicly documented as of September 2026 |
| Staff recognition leaderboard | Yes | Not publicly documented as of September 2026 |
| Surveys and NPS Cloutly: no survey product; reviews are unsolicited, see /review-led-vs-survey-led | No | Yes |
| Pricing published on the website | Yes | No |
| Sign up without talking to sales | Yes | No |
Partial means it exists only part way; hover for what we found. “Not publicly documented as of September 2026” means we found no public statement. Every No was read on the vendor’s own public pages.
You can start Cloutly without ending anything else.
“Eleven months into a twelve-month term.”
Cloutly is 14 days free and monthly, so run both at once.
“Four years of reviews, gone.”
They are on Google; connecting it puts four years in front of you today.
“We lose the momentum.”
Connect the booking system or import a list; requests go out on your timing.
Brook has run this in his barbershop for six months.
One shop, one owner, his own marketing.
“We have been using Cloutly for 6 months now in our barbershop. Since then we have had a massive surge in positive reviews, pushing us well beyond the ratings of our competitors.”
Brook PhillipsBOY Barbershop The things people want settled before they switch.
Choose Podium when the job is answering the phone and taking the payment. Choose Cloutly when the reviews are the problem.
Cloutly publishes its price per location on the plans page, monthly, with 14 days free. Podium’s is on request, and blog estimates are not their figure, so we print none.
All of them. They were never inside Podium: they live on the 39 sites Cloutly reads, so connecting Google shows four years today.
Both ways. Replies land in the same inbox as your Google and Facebook reviews, your Messenger and Instagram threads and your review page chat.
Every row was read off a public page in September 2026. Where we found no public statement the cell says so.
Comparison accurate as of September 2026. We review these pages every six months; tell us if something has changed.
The reviews were the part you actually wanted.
Connect Google, pick a message, and the requests go out today.
- Minutes to set up. No dev team, no tech headaches.
- Your team will use it. Front desk to head office.
- One site or hundreds. Built for networks of 400+ locations.
Rolling it out across a network? Book a rollout call and we'll pilot it with you first.
