Podium 2026: Benefits, Features & Pricing

We started using Podium to reach a younger demographic who will text but not read an email or make a call. It allows us to serve our clients & patients 24/7 or whenever they need us the most. Love that we can have messages prepared in advance to respond to most text questions which speeds the connection to new patients.We're just exploring the reporting functions which provide a good KPI for us to measure.

The ability to assign additional users was a bit challenging because I am not a technical person nor do I use lots of different apps. Once new users were assigned, it runs perfectly!

Podium is great with its bulk messaging and template options! You can save unlimited amounts of templates to use and reuse for easy response.

It sometimes sends an automatic message in the middle of a conversation, such as if we are responding to a client outside of normal business hours, it will still send a closed text.

I signed on with Podium based on what they claimed was a best-in-class AI platform that would engage with my leads afterhours or by text to free up staff during the workday. The phones and CRM were just part of that system. I will say that onboarding and training was very good. I am also happy with the phone performance and stability. We have not had a single outage in a year of using them. I like having the ability to text from our actual phone number, and the texting platform is very good. There are some good features like templates for answers to frequently asked questions, lots of automations, etc. Most of it is reasonable easy to use and intuitive.

Be warned: Podium is NOT set up for international calls, which seems ridiculous in the year 2026. We did not know this when we signed on for their service and who would think to ask such a thing?? I would think this was a given. We were not told that their phone platform was BRAND NEW when we signed up and a lot (A LOT) of kinks needed to be worked out. Little things like the fact that you need to be able to adjust the number of times the phone rings. THe system is not very flexible. They have no problem using your business as their Guinea pig. Changes/improvements are not communicated to users. I left the suggestion to change the number of rings MANY times. I ran into a Podium salesperson at a conference and again made the suggest, and he told me that in fact you can now change that! But no one told me despite the fact that I made the suggestion many, many times. There is no way to make calls private from other users. So if you make a personal call, the transcript is there in the call log unless you delete it. This seems so short-sighted it's almost unbelievable. Another thing we didn't learn until the system was in use. The system is designed to pull in leads from emails but it frequently also pulls in spam and/or personal emails which then have to be manually deleted. The AI component was an absolute joke. It was NOT ready to roll out when we signed on and we were never told that it was still in Beta mode. It was a lot of money to spend to be their test case. When I let them know it was not up to snuff, they agreed with me. However, I was made to jump through hoop after hoop as I had to make my case up their chain of command, like I have nothing better to do with my time. That was extremely frustrating. We only signed up because they touted their AI as an additional staff member and we were hoping it would connect with afterhours leads. I would never have purchased it as a standalone phone system or CRM. However, they would not let me out of the phone and CRM contract. This ends up being a VERY expensive phone service, almost 3 times more expensive than the Ooma phone systems we replaced with Podium. It has additional functions but I could live without those for the cost differential. Ongoing training is minimal. Set up training was great but once we went live, that fell off. We have never been fully trained on how to get the most out of the CRM so we basically don't use it. Lots of turnover. You will have a new account rep almost every month but it doesn't matter much because you will never hear from them. Like, at all!