Yext vs BrightLocal vs Synup: Which is best for you?
Choosing between Yext and BrightLocal for your local listing management needs can be challenging. Both offer robust features, but their approaches and strengths differ. If you're torn between these two popular options, you're not alone.
This comparison will help you understand the key differences between Yext and BrightLocal, focusing on their core features, pricing, and overall value. We'll also introduce Synup as a third alternative that might also suit your current needs.
By examining these tools side-by-side, we want to provide you with the information you need to make an informed decision. Whether you're an agency or business managing multiple locations, this guide will help you confidently choose the right local marketing tool for your specific requirements.
Yext vs BrightLocal vs Synup at a Glance
Yext is one of the oldest platforms for managing online listings across a wide network of directories. It offers real-time updates and includes features for review management and local SEO.
BrightLocal focuses on local SEO and citation building. It provides a mix of automated tools and manual services, with strong reporting capabilities. Popular among smaller businesses and agencies.
Synup combines listing management with location-based marketing tools. It’s a first choice for agencies and resellers. It offers a balance between comprehensive listing management and local SEO features such as reputation and local tracking, suitable for businesses of various sizes.
Each tool aims to help businesses manage their online presence, but they differ in their approach, features, and target users. Let's explore these differences to help you decide which one best fits your needs.
Synup
Who it is best for: Agencies, Resellers, Enterprise, Small-mid Businesses
Synup Product Overview
Synup is a local marketing platform built for agencies and multi-location brands. It helps put your local business on the map and create a stellar reputation for your brand. The tool extends to a reseller-centric solution hub, which also helps agencies find new leads and manage their clients and operations easily.
Core Features
🏆Create and sync your listings across Google, Facebook, and 60+ other niche directories.
🏆Bulk edit your business listings for multiple locations and automate any updates in a few clicks.
🏆Optimize your listings for voice search assistants like Alexa, Cortana, Siri, and more.
🏆Collaborate with your team better with location-level performance analysis and user access flows.
🏆Monitor and bulk respond to your reviews with the help of AI and pre-built templates
🏆Integrate your CRM or POS system with Synup to auto-request reviews from customers via SMS, email, or custom landing pages.
🏆Some of the best local keyword tracking and grid ranking technologies to give you deep insights into your local performance.
🏆Managed services to take up some of your workload and help keep your listings updated on niche directories.
🏆Complete Whitelabel software for agencies and resellers who want to manage business local marketing and listings for their clients.
What’s great
✅Expand your digital footprint across multiple platforms, making it easier for potential customers to find you.
✅Boost your chances of appearing in relevant local searches, including voice-activated queries.
✅Enable better coordination and decision-making among team members managing your online presence.
✅Maintain a positive brand image by efficiently handling customer reviews and feedback.
✅Gain insights to refine your local marketing approach and outperform competitors.
✅Offload time-consuming tasks, allowing you to concentrate on core business activities
✅Grow your service offerings or manage multiple clients without proportionally increasing effort.
What’s not great
❌Customer support seems to be a major pain point, especially for small-mid sized businesses that struggle to get flexible plans and get tangled in support tickets
❌Platform is very expensive, especially if you’re trying to add their reputation management feature, you’ll end up paying thousands of dollars a year and get stuck in annualized contracts
❌Lacks continuous innovation. The platform very outdated for its core features and the massive scale of operations mean there’s little to no innovation to add value for customers.
Pricing
If you have fewer than 10 locations, Synup costs about $34.99 per month at the standard plan which is perfect to get a headstart with your local marketing efforts. The tool also offers a free trial of 14 days for a limited set of directories. Agencies and resellers can contact for a bulk price to optimize their margins.
How to get started with Synup
Sign up for a demo and we’ll get your account set up entirely. We let you connect your Google and Facebook business accounts in a few clicks. After that, you can sync your business info to all opted directories. To view and edit your business info, simply go to ‘Listings’ > ’Listings Overview’.
Yext
Who it is best for: Enterprise and mid-market customers
Yext Product Overview
Yext is one of the oldest software in the industry, with very strong capabilities for listing management. The platform is heavily focused on big agencies and resellers, with many expanded offerings adjacent to local marketing. Customer support is something that customers usually complain about, given the massive scale of operations.
Core Features
Access to 200+ third-party publishers for business data distribution
Dual-sync direct API integrations for real-time updates
Consolidated Listings Analytics dashboard
Real-time update architecture across publishers
Duplicate listing deactivation (100+ listings)
Incorporation of suggested edits from Google, Facebook, and users
Competitive performance insights
Image distribution across listings
Comprehensive tracking of listing statuses and error alerts
Automated Listings Verifier for accuracy checks
Reputation management tool that helps you monitor and respond to reviews on Google and Facebook
Custom field support for rich content
Granular custom controls for listing management
Local landing pages to create a hyper-local presence for all your locations.
What’s great
✅Leverage an extensive network to ensure your business information is consistently visible across the web.
✅Keep your business information current and responsive to market changes to build customer trust and satisfaction.
✅Present a unified, accurate business image by eliminating confusing duplicate listings and inconsistencies.
✅Save time and resources with automated processes that maintain your online presence with minimal manual intervention.
✅Built for scale with custom support for agencies and resellers that partner with Yext
✅Platform is robust, with minimum technical glitches and issues making it easy to handle thousands of locations smoothly.
✅Whitelabeling is available for agencies and resellers
What’s not great
❌Customer support seems to be a major pain point, especially for small-mid sized businesses that struggle to get flexible plans and get tangled in support tickets
❌Platform is very expensive, especially if you’re trying to add their reputation management feature, you’ll end up paying thousands of dollars a year and get stuck in annualized contracts
❌Lacks continuous innovation. The platform very outdated for its core features and the massive scale of operations mean there’s little to no innovation to add value for customers.
Pricing
Yext doesn’t offer any free trial for their regular plans, but for their enterprise plan there might some sort of a trial plan, however it’s not clear on their website. The paid plans are billed annually, starting at around $16 per monthper location for a very limited set of directories. For more than 10 locations, you’ll have to reach out to their support team. The reseller pricing for Yext differs from regular price structure.
Brightlocal
Who it is best for: Small-mid businesses, Agencies
Brightlocal Product Overview
Brightlocal is a great local marketing software, with a very appealing UI and some of the best analytics and reporting capabilities in this category. Their listing management solution is manual – a cheaper option for citation submissions but may be costly for updating listings. Their local analytics tools like keyword tracker and Grid ranker offer deep insights into your local performance.
Dedicated team for creating and optimizing listings on authoritative sites
Permanent citation ownership without recurring fees
Real-time updates for major platforms (Google, Apple Maps, Facebook, Bing)
A streamlined process for establishing and maintaining accurate listings
Authority Layer for foundational citations
Engagement Layer for high-visibility platforms
Combination of expert intervention and API-driven updates
Emphasis on authoritative sites for maximum SEO impact
What’s great
✅Stellar insights into competitors and your own local performance
✅Manual submissions ensure you have better control over your listings.
✅Reputation management tool to keep you on top and attract positive feedback from customers
✅Ensures permanent ownership of your listings
✅Highly visual reporting with powerful analytics and insight-capturing capabilities that helps agencies/resellers communicate their results better
What’s not great
❌Manual services may take time and ongoing updates are costlier. It may feel cheaper up front (just $3 to build a citation) but it’s known that your citations need to be updated regularly to keep your NAP consistent. Such updates require you to pay up more to Brightlocal and can easily mean shelling out 30-40% more than most API-based tools like Synup.
❌No additional selling support for agency partners. Brightlocal does offer good reporting and whitelabeling for agencies, but doesn’t have any features to support their business and help them find new clients.
Pricing
Brightlocal offers a 14-day free trial for all of their plans. If billed monthly, the pricing starts at $39 per month for a single location for the base plan, which just includes listing tracking and reporting. For listing management and more advanced features like reputation management, you may pay up to $59 per location per month. Brightlocal also offers a citation submission service priced on a per-citation basis. This doesn’t include managing citations, which may incur extra costs. They call it ‘Simply Listings’, hah, sweet!
Yext vs BrightLocal vs Synup: Listing Management
Synup’s listing management tool is API-based and lets you auto-sync your listings across 60+ directories. You can also identify and remove duplicate listings to keep your local SEO health in shape. Ongoing bulk changes to your listings are super easy, you or your clients can log on to the platform and update info for any number of locations in a few clicks.
Yext has a more extensive network of publishers (100+) and is good at handling listing management at scale. They also allow you to make bulk changes to your listings. However, customers report losing access to their listings or not having full ownership of their listings once they leave Yext. It also does a poor job at suppressing duplicate listings.
Brightlocal offers manual submission services for listings and auto-sync for Google, Facebook, Bing, and Apple. You can track what citations your business isn’t present on. But the plan doesn’t include editing the listings created, which is an additional service you have to opt for and pay for. Customers have reported issues with listing accuracy at times.
Yext vs BrightLocal vs Synup: Reputation Management
Synup has an AI-powered reputation management tool that’s built into our listing management offering itself, unlike Yext and Brightlocal. One USP of Synup’s reputation software is that it integrates with CRM and POS software to fetch customer data directly and get reviews from new customers. Synup also helps you automate the review management process and showcase new reviews on your website with beautiful widgets.
Yext’s reputation management tool is still pretty new and needs further improvement. Many basic features that you expect with a ORM solution are lacking – such as AI-automation and review generation. It does a good job at monitoring review if you’re using it as a supplementary (but rather expensive) feature to their listing management offering.
Unlike Yext, Brightlocal has a more well-rounded review management offering. They help you monitor reviews across 80+ sites, generate more reviews via email or SMS, and respond to reviews. However, the tool lacks AI support for review responses and doesn’t integrate with CRM or POS software like Synup does, hence the ratings.
Yext vs BrightLocal vs Synup: Local Analytics
When it comes to local analytics – Synup offers you almost all data points you need to gauge the performance of your business or client. From listing analytics (profile views, phone call, website visits, and more) to local rank tracking (keyword and grid rank tracking solutions), Synup covers everything. The achilles’ heel as we discussed above is Synup’s reporting and visualization, which can be improved further.
Local analytics isn’t Yext’s strong suit. They have some great SEO and listing analytics capabilities for enterprise. But doesn’t offer any location-level or rank tracking capabilities which are important from a local perspective.
Brightlocal has hands-down some of the best analytics solutions in the industry. While their analytics capability is the same as Synup’s, what sets them apart is the focus on reporting and visualization which makes it easy to gather insights from the data.
Yext vs BrightLocal vs Synup: Local SEO
Now this is from an overall local SEO perspective.
Synup has many tools and features that aid the performance of local businesses online. This includes local landing pages and store locators, voice search optimizer, AI-powered local content and posting tools, and even a social media platform. One unique selling point is Synup’s hyper-personalized local campaigns. These campaigns let you run promotions and offers based time and event-triggers such as weather, festivities, etc.
Yext has an extensive suite of features for large businesses and entreprises for local SEO. This includes local pages, an AI-powered chatbot, social media, and search box. They’ve also built some vertical specific marketing solutions for eCommerce such as site search, product searches and reviews, and more.
Yext vs BrightLocal vs Synup: Reseller Support
Synup wins in this category simply because of the stellar support the tool offers to agencies and resellers using the platform. While Yext and Brightlocal allow basic reselling solutions, Synup goes beyond and has a full-fledged platform that not only helps agencies resell Synup but also manage clients, find new leads, prospect better, and operate their agency smoothly. It’s sort of like an agency operations software. Synup also has a whitelabel business scan tool you can integrate with your site to capture leads.
Yext offers integration and partnership program for agencies and consultants as well as other SaaS resellers/platforms. However, the support you get once you partner with them is minimal and given their focus on enterprise segment, they don’t invest as much into growing their partner’s business.
Brightlocal is more agency-oriented than Yext. They offer some good prospecting tools such as business audits for client locations, scan tool for capturing leads, and stellar reporting to help you communicate the impact of your efforts. They also let you whitelabel their platform and reporting. However, there’s little to no support for actually helping you sell or manage your day-to-day client operations.
Yext vs BrightLocal vs Synup: Which Should You Choose?
Depends on which segment you belong to.
For enterprise customers, either Yext or Synup make for a great choice. Yext has somewhat of an upper hand with their primarily enterprise-focused platform and scale of operations. But Synup competes strongly with a more comprehensive featureset that won’t have you look elsewhere.
For SMB businesses, Brightlocal and Synup are promising. Brightlocal’s pricing and certain pay-as-you-go plans for listings are appealing for small businesses. Synup is a good shot if you want to keep your listings updated without the hefty cost build-up.
For agencies and resellers, Synup hands down wins the race. Going beyond just basic whitelabeling and reporting, Synup is building a platform that’s partner-first and helps you grow your business with our tools.
To sum up
I hope you have a more well-shaped opinion on how each of these tools work. We tried to be as transparent in our insights as possible. All three tools have some unique strengths and shortcomings that we’ve covered. After filtering based on the segment you’re in, it’s best to go ahead and try a software for your choice.
Yext vs BrightLocal vs Synup: Frequently Asked Questions
What is better than Yext?
There are many software that do better than Yext at multiple parameters and features. You can check out Synup as an alternative if you want a similar API-based solution for local marketing with better support. Brightlocal is also a good alternative to Yext in terms of customer support and pricing.
What does BrightLocal do?
Brightlocal is a local marketing software build for SMB businesses and agencies that deal with multiple locations. It offers solutions such as listing management, review management, and reporting capabilities.
What does Yext do?
Yext started as a listing management software, which now deals in enterprise-grade local marketing solutions. It has a range of capabilities – from listing management to eCommerce specific solutions for search.
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