StarReply vs GatherUp

This is the closest comparison on the list, and the only one where both sides publish a price. GatherUp is a good product doing a job adjacent to this one; the difference is worth stating precisely rather than loudly.

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What GatherUp is

GatherUp is review and customer-experience software for local business and the agencies that run it for them: review requests, monitoring across sites, surveys, and replies. It is priced per location — $99/month for one location on the Small Business plan, and $60/month per location on the 2-10 location plan, with the Agency tier publishes no price. Read from gatherup.com/pricing on 2026-08-14.

It also lists "Unique AI-crafted replies" among the features every plan includes. So AI drafting is not the line between these two products, and this page will not pretend it is.

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Where the line actually is

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?

  • StarReply will never publish a reply to a 2★ or lower review unattended. That is not a default, a recommendation or a toggle we ship in the safe position. It is the first branch in the routing code, it runs before the autonomy mode is read, and the database rejects any update that clears the flag on the row.
  • The reply is still drafted, so the hard one is already written when you open the queue. It just cannot go out without you.
  • On the reviews it may handle, it posts at most 20 a day per location, and every one of those waits 30 seconds behind a kill window first.

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Choose GatherUp if…

  • You need review REQUESTS and surveys as well as replies.
  • You are an agency reselling review management to your own clients.
  • You monitor more review sites than Google and Trustpilot.

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Choose StarReply if…

  • Your reviews already arrive; the backlog is unanswered ones.
  • You want per-business pricing rather than a line item per site.
  • You want the tool to be incapable of answering the review that could cost you a customer, rather than configured not to.

The two suites on the same shortlist: StarReply vs Birdeye and StarReply vs Podium. Or read how the agent actually works.

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Common questions

How much does GatherUp cost? $99/month for one location on its Small Business plan, or $60/month per location on the 2-10 location Multi Location plan; the Agency tier is quote-only. Read from gatherup.com/pricing. StarReply is $39/month for up to three locations and $99/month for up to twenty-five, priced per business rather than per location.

GatherUp already does AI review replies. What is different? Its pricing page lists “Unique AI-crafted replies” under All Plans Include, so the drafting is not the difference. The difference is what the tool is structurally unable to do: StarReply will not publish a reply to a 1–2★ review without a human tap, in any mode, and there is no setting that changes it.

Which is cheaper for five locations? On the published figures, GatherUp's Multi Location plan is $60 per location per month, which is $300/month for five. StarReply's Chain plan is $99/month for up to twenty-five locations. Both figures are on this page because both are on the vendors' own pages.

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