The 5 Best Review APIs | Integrate Online Reviews Data Into Custom AI Models
Juan Combariza
May 2024 | 8 min. read
Table of Contents
Top Picks
- Datastreamer: Best for Insights teams
- Socialgist: Best for English & Chinese Review Platforms
- Reviewapi.com: Best for small-scale projects
Real-Time Reviews Data for Your Apps & Reports
The Shift Towards Customized Review Monitoring Feeds
Behind Twitter and Instagram, social listening professionals ranked Reviews and Forums data as the most important sources for insights in their organization. Twitter (X) & IG have widespread availability in nearly every social listening tool, while harnessing reviews data requires more customized collection and some additional steps in procurement. Still, 75% of intelligence professionals surveyed said reviews are an important source for their insights preparation.
Customized reviews APIs help businesses access customer feedback from sources like Google, TripAdvisor, or eCommerce platforms in a targeted manner. This includes features like filtering and refining reviews data and focusing on specific keywords (locations, products, and competitors).
Why Data Teams Prefer APIs over No-Code UIs
For pulling data from review sites, visual tools can be useful for simple keyword-based queries. However, when the integration demands the application of NLP techniques or specific data stream customization, APIs become essential. These tools are more complex but offer greater control, granting data professionals the flexibility to innovate in their analysis methods. Review data, in particular, often needs more targeted collection methods than other types of data.
APIs allow you customize data flows that suit your existing infrastructure:
- Trend Forecasting with Custom AI: A trend prediction platform working with fashion retailers deploys review monitoring APIs to gather and analyze customer feedback from major e-commerce platforms like Amazon Fashion. The collected data is enriched with sentiment and a transformed metadata structure through the API. Then it is combined with predictive AI created in-house to deliver a nuanced understanding of market shifts and emerging fashion trends. These insights allow clients to proactively adjust their inventory and marketing strategies, ensuring they capitalize on trends as they emerge.
- In-House Social Listening (Brand Reputation): An in-house social listening team can set up a review monitoring API to track mentions and sentiments about their brand across multiple review sites such as Google Reviews and TripAdvisor. This is crucial for maintaining a positive brand image and quickly addressing any negative feedback or crises before they escalate. With an API, data can be blended with customer survey responses to cross-examine and draw holistic insights.
- Marketing Insights Reports: An agency working with multinational food brands prepares detailed insight reports by utilizing review monitoring APIs. These reports aggregate vast amounts of customer feedback, synthesizing it into actionable intelligence on consumer satisfaction trends and changing preferences. These insights are delivered to stakeholders to inform strategic planning and ensure alignment in new product development.
Review Scraping Tools v.s. Reviews APIs
Review Scraping Tools: Solutions like Brightdata help you set up your own scraping of review sites. You’ll have to set up proxies and custom coding elements to handle pagination and data extraction. Although these tools reduce the complexity compared to building from the ground up, they still require manual effort.
- Pros: Custom scraping offers the capability to collect the exact data you want from virtually any website.
- Cons: Legal issues, difficult to scale, and each website scraped will require bespoke configurations.
Typically, review scraping tools are recommended for small-volume projects or for collecting niche data that isn’t available through standard Review APIs.
First-Party Reviews APIs: This term refers to an API provided directly by the primary source or owner of the data. For example, you can access an API that is offered and maintained by Yelp or TripAdvisor directly.
- Pros: Utilizing official APIs minimizes the risk of breaching a website’s usage policies. Data quality – Direct access to a platform’s database may include metadata not available through third-party APIs.
- Cons: First-party APIs offer data exclusively from their own platforms, a scope that rarely meets the broader data collection goals of intelligence teams. As a result, organizations must establish and maintain infrastructures for several different API connectors, increasing overall costs.
Third-Party Reviews APIs: These solutions collect and aggregate data from multiple review platforms into a single data stream. This is often achieved with partnerships with first-party APIs and scraping from additional platforms, but it demands no scraping effort from the end-user, who only needs to configure their queries.
- Pros: Data coverage spans multiple platforms and is delivered in a structured format that is ready for analysis.
- Cons: Third-party APIs may be more expensive than any individual first-party alternatives, but these costs level out if you want to leverage multiple sources.
Note from the author:
The solutions listed in this blog primarily focus on Third-party APIs. We usually recommend these to our customers because they cover a broad range of review platforms, include options for customized data collection, and don’t require any scraping by the end-user (lowering compliance concerns).
List of Review APIs to Integrate into Your Tools
1. Datastreamer – Best for Insights Teams
Simplified query for illustrative purposes
While review aggregators provide simple API access to customer feedback, the real challenge lies in the need to create and maintain extra infrastructure to process this data and implement sophisticated AI models. Considering that intelligence teams usually work with 6+ third-party APIs; and technical setup consumes 5-7 weeks per source, you end up with months of roadmap time dedicated to procurement and integration. Our comparative analysis highlights how a pipeline platform, which offers pre-built infrastructure, cuts down implementation time by 720+ hours per source and increases the utility of the data collected.
Review Data Coverage Details
Datastreamer does not collect review data, but as a pipeline platform, we have integrated partners who provide review content. Access these feeds via an API query, just like you would when working directly with a third-party API:
- Reviews from 250+ platforms (such as TripAdvisor)
- Data from Chinese Reviews platforms
- eCommerce review data feeds
- Upon request, new review sites that are not already collected can be added.
You can connect any third-party API to Datastreamer, enabling you to leverage our advanced analysis models and orchestration components with your existing feeds.
Why Use A Pipeline Platform Over Individual APIs
One API Query to Access News Feeds from Multiple Vendors
Merging online feeds from various data providers into a single API platform significantly lightens the workload for your developers and analysts.
- Additional data feeds include social media, forums, blogs, news and more.
Add New Data Value with Plug & Play Engineering Components
Human generated content will inevitably come with irrelevant noise. This can be drastically reduced with NLP models that are trained to pick up on contextual nuances to reduce false positives.
- Instantly deploy NLP models such as location inference or entity recognition on multiple languages.
- Activate “traffic control” elements like JSON metadata filters and conditional routing.
- Harness enterprise-level data management with visual pipeline tracking and debugging options.
Datastreamer Pricing for Reviews APIs
Pricing for data feeds is set by our partners, and are typically the same as if you work directly with their third-party API. We do not markup prices on data feeds. You pay Datastreamer for the pipeline components (enrichments, data orchestration, transformations) that you use to process your data.
Pricing
- Pricing is based on usage, with a minimum spend of $150/month.
- Our team can facilitate a quote based on usage estimates and desired data sources.
Free Trial
- Datastreamer will build you a pipeline with Review data, that you can run free for 14 days.
- A product manager helps you demo the pipeline to stakeholders and configure components.
2. Socialgist
Socialgist is a top choice as a reviews data API, and this platform focuses primarily on social media and online discussions.
Socialgist gathers comprehensive reviews data (including user comments) from a variety of platforms. The platform also lets you access historical data, making it ideal for forecasting consumer trends and conducting market research. Socialgist is a good option for businesses seeking insights based on brand engagement, sentiment analysis, and market intelligence.
Socialgist Review Sites Available
- Socialgist collects reviews from over 250 English review platforms. Sites collected have a focus on consumer products and travel, such as TripAdvisor.
- Socialgist also offers data from 50+ Chinese review sites.
Can I request an additional review site to be collected by Socialgist? Yes, you can ask Socialgist to include any review sites they aren’t already tracking by requesting them to index the additional site.
Socialgist Review Sites Coverage Details
| Update Frequency | Historical Length | Languages | Output Format |
Hourly, Daily, or Real-Time | 2 Years | English, Chinese | Structured JSON |
Pricing
- Pricing is not publicly displayed. You can reach out to get a pricing quote over email.
Free Trial
- A free trial is not publicly advertised by Socialgist, but you can reach out to inquire.
3. Review API.com
Review API might look like a more minimal-featured entrant on this list. However, this platform specializes in gathering reviews from customer and consumer-based sites like Amazon, Facebook, Sitejabber, Healthgrades, and Aliexpress.
This review monitoring API gathers reviews and other data from multiple platforms with use cases like feedback applicable to marketplaces, customer success management, brand monitoring, and machine learning. Review API offers free tools as well as flexible pricing plans, from small to medium and large to very large.
Review API Review Sites Scraped
This review scraper gathers data from over 30 sources like Amazon, AliExpress, Trustpilot, Yelp, and Tripadvisor.
Can I request an additional review site to be collected by Reviewapi? This feature is currently not available on Review API. However, custom large pricing plans include personalized support which could be leveraged for additional review sites.
Reviewapi Review Sites Coverage Details
| Update Frequency | Historical Length | Languages | Output Format |
| On-demand | N/A | English | Structured JSON |
Pricing
- Pricing starts at $79/month with limited features.
- High-end plans of $399/month and $750/month include all features.
Free Trial
- You can try the free version with a limited 1000 API credits and 30 reviews per review job.
4. Brightlocal
Brightlocal’s Monitor Reviews is among the top APIs for review site data. The platform specializes in helping organizations advance their marketing goals, particularly local marketing. From boosting rankings to reputation management, the platform has helped over 80,000 local marketers ace their customer success and brand health goals.
Brightlocal’s Monitor Reviews tool tracks reviews across industries like automotive, medical, legal, real estate, home services, wellness, FnB, and mechanics.
Brightlocal Review Sites Scraped
Brightlocal tracks over 80+ general and niche review sites like Yellow Pages, Facebook, Tripadvisor, Yelp, Google, and Foursquare.
Can I request an additional review site to be collected by Brightlocal? We were unable to locate any information regarding this query on BrightLocal’s website or their support materials.
Brightlocal Review Sites Coverage Details
| Update Frequency | Historical Length | Languages | Output Format |
Daily Reports | N/A | English | JSON |
Socialgist – Natively Provided Enrichments
- Entity extraction (people, products, brands, companies), Topic categorization (custom taxonomies), Sentiment analysis, Demographic information (age, gender, location), Trend analysis, Clustering by topic
Pricing
- You can monitor reviews with the ‘Grow’ plan of $59/month.
Free Trial
- All three paid plans have a 14-day free trial period you can access without a card.
5. Webz Reviews API
Webz is among the top review sites scraper platforms excelling at collecting and organizing big data into actionable insights. With native enrichments like archive search functionality and smart extraction (who, what, where, when), Webz is ideal for media monitoring and sentiment analysis.
The platform’s Reviews API lets you access structured customer feedback and monitor product health and visibility with real-time news data feed features. Webz boasts of 600M+ reviews collected and 900+ eCommerce sites and marketplace tracked, making this platform a great tool to track customer and product insights.
Webz Review Sites Scraped
Webz gathers ecommerce review data from 950+ sites. They do not mention how many non-ecommerce sites they collect data from.
Can I request an additional review site to be collected by Webz? Yes, you can request for additional review sites and sources to be added and explore custom data.
Webz Review Sites Coverage Details
| Update Frequency | Historical Length | Languages | Output Format |
Real-time (on-demand) | 10+ years | English and others | JSON or XML |
Pricing
- Pricing is not publicly available.
- You can request a quote for custom pricing based on requirements.
Free Trial
- You can schedule a demo or sign up for a free trial.