The Best Trustpilot Alternative Today
If you’re not using testimonials in your business, you’re missing out on a huge opportunity to skyrocket your business and increase sales every single month.
Social proof is more important than ever. If you want to convert more of your site’s visitors into customers, you need to showcase your customer testimonials and use the most effective testimonial templates that work in your industry.
However, revamping your testimonials isn’t an easy task.
First off, you have the problem of obtaining the testimonials in the first place.
If you don’t have an effective process of asking for testimonials, you’ll find that the vast majority of your customers won’t even think about leaving a review for your business, even if they were delighted with the services that you provided.
What’s more, even when people do leave reviews for your business, they tend to be scattered all around the web, in various review and directory sites, giving you no control over how you’re represented online.
In fact, even finding all of the reviews for your business can be a challenge. You are likely not going to be able to use them to benefit your business.
Finally, without useful testimonial templates to follow, you are basically left hoping that your customers will talk about the points that you want to emphasize, which is rarely the case.
Often, you will get little more than a few words out of your customers. This misses a big opportunity of telling your brand’s story through the words of your best customers.
Luckily, there are tools that can help you get more testimonials and make sure that each of them helps your business grow.
Review & testimonial tools like VocalReferences & Trustpilot can help your business grow
With the help of solutions like VocalReferences and Trustpilot, you can take control of all aspects of the customer reviews that you get and ensure that your business reputation is enhanced.
But which solution should you go with?
We’ve taken the time to summarize the key differences between VocalReferences and Trustpilot so you can make an informed decision on which product is best for your business.
Let us start with what is similar with the products.
Both products provide:
- Collection of testimonials – from your website or their platform
- Display on your website
- Listing on platforms’ websites
- Free trial (or a free demo by Trustpilot)
Even though the products are somewhat similar, there are differences, some of which are quite significant.
Many people are unhappy about the pricing, customer support, or lack of certain features that Trustpilot offers. You may want to consider alternatives that can help you get the most out of your testimonials and improve your social proof features.
VocalReferences offers many of the same features as Trustpilot, but also provides you with unique features that you won’t find in Trustpilot.
So, let’s dig into the comparison of VocalReferences versus Trustpilot to see how they fare against each other.
Hands-On Support
When trying to implement testimonials into your business website, it can be hard to figure out exactly where to get started.
With VocalReferences, you don’t have to do it on your own. If you opt for their Pro Plus plan, they will provide you with hands-on support to help you make the most out of your testimonials.
The support team at VocalReferences will review your landing page and give you valuable insights on how to best leverage the customer testimonials on your site.
They will even provide you with testimonial examples that have been used by others to maximize the SEO impact.
In fact, VocalReferences has earned a reputation as a company with top-notch customer support. It strives to provide responsive and fast support to all customers. This is what helps VocalReferences draw customers away from providers of similar solutions.
Trustpilot also offers support, but only to paid users. They do, however, have guides and online support that will answer basic questions, so you won’t be completely in the dark.
Text and Video Testimonials
When it comes to testimonials, diversity is just as important as the content itself.
Segments of your audience are likely to have different browsing habits. Some prefer to consume information in their own way, so if you just place a few text testimonials on your site, you’re limiting the impact that they may have.
With VocalReferences, you can make sure that your testimonials get through to every single visitor of your site.
You can display both text and video testimonials. This has a massive impact on visitor engagement and conversion.
Video testimonials are still widely underutilized in the marketplace. By using video testimonials, you’re instantly separating yourself from your competition. Video testimonials have been proven to be one of the highest converting tools you can use on your web site.
Trustpilot does not offer or support video testimonials.
Import Reviews from Third-Party Review Sites
When collecting reviews, you must have a reliable method for importing them to your own website from third-party websites.
VocalReferences allows you to import your Facebook, Google, and Yelp reviews to your website automatically.
While importing, you have the option of choosing which reviews you want to be displayed, giving you complete control over how you use customer reviews to position your services and tell your story.
This makes VocalReferences not only a review management tool but a marketing tool as well. You gain complete control over which reviews get shown and can be sure that you’re represented in the best way possible.
Trustpilot has an add-on for importing reviews, but it’s only available with their Pro plan, which can further costs to your review management.
Integrations With Web Platforms
One of the biggest benefits of Trustpilot is the number of integrations that it offers. You can seamlessly integrate it with powerful and popular apps and platforms such as Magento, WooCommerce, Shopify, and countless others.
VocalReferences has taken a different approach. VocalReferences is platform independent. This means that you can copy and paste their code on the pages that you want the testimonials to appear on, regardless of the underlying platform.
Its intuitive widget-based system has multiple display layouts/templates that can display stunning-looking testimonials. Each display can be integrated and easily customized with almost any web design and web platform.
SEO Enhancements
While testimonials are extremely powerful for increasing conversions and driving more leads to your site, they are also a potent tool for improving your SEO rankings and growing your organic search presence.
VocalReferences submits your testimonials to Google for indexing on a weekly basis. The submission process marks up every testimonial with Review Markup. This provides you with a massive boost to your SEO efforts, showcasing your testimonials on the Google search engine results pages (SERPs) as a star review SERP, as seen below.
The service creates a unique Google Reviews SERP rich snippet, which helps your results stand out and drive clicks because of the prominent star rating displayed next to your site.
If you opt for the Pro or the Pro Plus plans, you will also get a “Recommended Merchant Badge” which can add more credibility to your site. It can also help you close more of the cautious visitors that you get.
Trustpilot also offers a similar snippet feature with their Pro plan, but as already mentioned, this plan is likely out of the price range of a lot of businesses . VocalReferences comes out on top with this feature, based on price alone.
Recognition Badges for Online Reputation
Both products provide badges to display a summary of the reviews received to date. VocalReferences has added a couple of unique badges which can further enhance your online reputation.
The Recommended Merchant Badge is a highly visible badge which changes colors (from bronze to gold) based on the number of reviews received.
For businesses that are active on numerous social ratings sites, The Social Ratings Badge displays a summary of the reviews and ratings from the various social reviews sites.
This badge is automatically updated on a daily basis – once you place this badge on your site, you can leave it and it will always show your latest results.
Price
We’ve already briefly mentioned pricing difference between the two products. Since it’s such an important criteria when choosing a review solution it requires its own section.
VocalReferences basic Free plan gets you started, allowing you to try out their service. They have two paid plans for users who want more features:
The Pro plan, priced at $20.99 per month if paid annually, offers unlimited testimonials, Google Optimization, a customizable testimonial form, and much more.
With the Pro Plus plan, priced at $29.99 per month if paid annually, you get all of the features of the free and Pro plans, plus Premium Support that includes personal help to ensure that you get the most out of the software.
Trustpilot also has a basic Free plan, but if you want to get more features, you’ll need to opt for one of the paid options. And that’s where it gets problematic.
Their Lite plan starts at $299 per month if paid annually, which is more than ten times the cost of the Pro plan offered by VocalReferences.
The Pro plan offered by Trustpilot is priced at $549 per month if paid annually, and you really need to opt for this plan if you want to get the advanced features such as the Google snippet functionality and Review Insights.
As you can see, the price comparison isn’t even close.
Trustpilot is leveraging their brand awareness and credibility in the market, but honestly, the features that they offer do not justify such a price difference at all.
Ease of Use
We already mentioned the integrations, where Trustpilot has the advantage, as it integrates with most major platforms out there.
However, even though VocalReferences doesn’t use integrations, that doesn’t take away from just how easy it is to set up and use on various web platforms.
VocalReferences can be used on any platform. Simply paste the code onto your site and you can start displaying your testimonials in seconds.
The entire software is very intuitive and straightforward to use, so you don’t have to worry about a steep learning curve while you try to figure out their main features.
Trustpilot has a relatively intuitive dashboard as well, but since it’s a more prominent solution, you might need more time to figure out how best make it work for your business.
SMB Fit
If you are a small or medium business (SMB) then you need to find a cost effective review solution to meet your needs.
You must look for a solution that has your needs in mind. You don’t want to overpay for an enterprise-level solution that you simply don’t need.
That’s where VocalReferences really stands out.
VocalReferences is designed for small and medium-sized businesses that want to take complete control of their customer testimonials to grow their business.
The simple set-up, intuitive dashboard, and hands-on support are all extremely well-suited for a small business that needs a user-friendly yet powerful solution that starts delivering results from day one.
Trustpilot is clearly geared towards larger companies that have the budget to pay hundreds of dollars every month for testimonial integrations. Most small and medium businesses simply don’t.
Final Verdict
As you probably figured out by this point, VocalReferences is the clear better choice in most situations.
It not only costs a fraction of what Trustpilot charges but also comes with a range of features that are just as powerful, if not more, than what Trustpilot can offer.
In fact, even the video testimonial feature alone can become a real game-changer. Having your customers vouch for your business on camera is as powerful of a persuasive tool as any you can use online.
If you are a small business starting out, or you simply want to take control over how your customers review your services, VocalReferences is the right way to go.
