Gentle Giant Moving Company

Gentle Giant is a Boston-based moving company that says it's been in business since 1980 — "moving made easy since 1980," as its own site puts it — and has grown into a full-service outfit doing local, long-distance and international moves, packing, storage, piano and fine-art moving, and crane work, with locations spanning 12 states. On Google it currently runs a 4.9-star average from 158 ratings, and its name comes up constantly and mostly favorably on Boston-area Reddit threads over the past several years, where multiple posters describe themselves as repeat, loyal customers who've used the company for years without an issue. The specific jobs described in its reviews back that reputation up. A 2026 review described a crew using a crane to lift a sectional sofa through a window when it wouldn't fit the stairway; another described splitting a 19-room house's contents three ways over four days for a complicated renovation move. A 2023 review from a customer who's used Gentle Giant for multiple moves since 2008 described a 2024 move where the crew went out of their way to help her, a 70-year-old widow managing a shoulder injury, get everything packed and moved. The company has also been recognized more than once by the hunger-relief nonprofit Move for Hunger for food drives it's run alongside moves, including one haul of more than 385,000 pounds of food. The clearest theme running through years of independent Reddit threads is price: posters repeatedly call Gentle Giant expensive relative to other movers, with quotes ranging from a few hundred dollars to over a thousand for moves some felt should have cost less, though several add that the quality justified it. That price theme shows up in a handful of Google reviews too, alongside more serious, specific complaints worth knowing about: a January 2026 review alleged an employee stole items during a move-out, an April 2026 review described undisclosed hidden fees and said the company held furniture in storage until they were paid, and a 2024 review described being short a mover — two showed up instead of the promised three — leaving the customer to help with the work himself. One more thing to flag: Google shows several different rating snapshots for the business scraped close together in time — high 4.9-star averages, but from ratings counts that don't reconcile into one clean number, which likely reflects more than one linked Google listing for the company. For a Boston-area move, especially a complicated or high-value one, this is a well-established company with a long, detailed history of handling difficult jobs carefully — but given the recurring price complaints and the more serious individual accounts above, it's worth getting a fully itemized written quote up front and asking directly about any potential additional fees before moving day.