Review platforms: the best & worst

tl;dr: Trust no-one, avoid platform risk. Build your own reviews page, optimize SEO and ignore the noise.

When it comes down to purchasing time, the final decision-maker/breaker for most customers is almost always comparing product reviews (& pricing) with competitors.

Thus, it's no surprise that businesses spend hundreds of hours and dollars every month to curate their profiles on review platforms like Trustpilot, G2, and SiteJabber.

However, in recent years, the experience & quality of many such review sites has dramatically deteriorated. Nevertheless, business owners continue to invest in review platforms, for two reasons:

The main reason for this is SEO — many of these websites appear first or on page 1 of search results.

The other is the "free $20 Amazon gift card" programs that sites like G2 have launched in an attempt to revive their spam-ridden platforms.

That said, small startups & solopreneurs have limited time & resources and cannot afford to manage tens of different review platforms. So where should you start?

The top 2 worst review platforms:

Trustpilot — Home of scammers & fake reviews.

Even some of the largest companies (>$10M ARR) I've worked with avoid Trustpilot like the plague. Trustpilot deliberately allows huge amounts of spam reviews (ie. see 5,000+ fake 5-star reviews for Template Monster), then their sales reps cold call founders every month to try to get them to pay for an account, claiming it will help "clean up" the reviews.

Trustpilot also makes it virtually impossible for users to remove reviews, so negative experiences are immortalized even after you fix them (Trustpilot requires users to jump through hoops like driver's license verification just to remove a review). Avoid Trustpilot at all costs & don't allow them to hold your good name for ransom. They deliberately enable scammers to post fake reviews while ruining the good name of legitimate businesses — it's a truly disgusting business model.

G2 — Painfully difficult to post reviews, dismal support.

Whereas Trustpilot cares too little about fake content, G2 is on the opposite end: they make it excruciatingly painful for your real customers to actually post a review, with highly arbitrary rules for verification. If you want to frustrate your early adopters and brand evangelists, send them to G2.

You can see some first-hand experiences with G2 for yourself: just check out this Quora thread with countless horror stories from vendors, or Sitejabber for the buyer's side (equally bad).

G2 employs a whole slew of incredibly shady practices: the foremost of which is a "review depreciation" algo that artificially lowers your software's rating, while G2's team hides behind chat agents who try to upsell you.

G2 deliberately makes it incredibly difficult for buyers to leave a review, as well as for vendors to contact them — they will harass you & your customers. Their platform is particularly badly-suited for companies that sell to sole proprietors, who often have "hi@company.com" email address — one of the many random reasons G2 may reject a review.

Additionally, the dismal support team is highly unresponsive and offers no help in the rare cases where they do reply; they may even ban your customers without explanation! With G2, there's a high likelihood you'll end up with no reviews after wasting hours of your own time and that of your customers.

The top 2 best review platforms:

Trustradius — Somewhat tedious, with great support

TrustRadius requires perhaps the most work of all the review platforms, but it's overall the quickest experience (apart from perhaps SiteJabber). The review process is a bit more extended, but the team is incredible responsive and helpful: a native English speaker will annotate your review and personally reach out to you before it's published.

It should only take your customers about ~10min. to leave a review on TrustRadius, and it's completely painless compared to the likes of G2.

SiteJabber — Quick & easy with high SEO impact

SiteJabber appears often in the "featured snippet" questions (ie. "Is {your product} legit?") that Google often shows for brand name queries, so this is a good site to keep your eye on. The SiteJabber submission process is the simplest & easiest of all the platforms, plus the amount of spam reviews is much lower.

One of the easiest ways to tell that SiteJabber is legit is looking at their pages for some of the other review sites we've discussed already, like G2 (1 star) and Trustpilot (1.5 stars) –

If there was only one review site you could focus on, SiteJabber would probably be the ideal choice.

The ideal alternative: host your own reviews

If you can, avoid ever creating a profile on any of these third-party review websites. Online reputation management can be expensive, tedious, and frustrating. Keep all your reviews on your own website and skip the noise of third-party review platforms. You can use your social profiles (ie. Google, Facebook, LinkedIn) for verified testimonials, if needed.

If you're really concerned about SEO, simply build your own web pages for reviews. Additionally, creating competitor pages is a great way to ensure you also show up for search queries such as "competitor x reviews."

If Capterra or G2 is the only reason you currently show up on the first page of search, your problem is much bigger than reviews: your website needs better SEO content — the worst thing you could do is exacerbate this platform risk by sending your best review content to third-party platforms. The safest bet is to build your own reviews page, optimize SEO and ignore the noise (at least, in my opinion).