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The best Hootsuite alternatives on the market are Planable for its social planning features, Zoho Social for its low pricing and dependable mid-range feature set, and HubSpot for its robust scalability.
We've ranked Hootsuite as one of our top social media management service after factoring in all the top categories relevant to social media management, from publishing tools to engagement, reporting, and social listening features. But social management isn't one-size-fits-all. Here's the competition to consider:
- Planable is best for social planning with your team
- Zoho Social is best for businesses on a budget
- HubSpot is best for growing businesses
| Core Benefit | Pros | Cons | Starting Price | Free Plan Does this platform offer a free plan? | Unlimited Posting Does this platform allow you to post as much as you like without imposing monthly limits? | Try Now | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 | SPONSORED  |  |  |  |  | |||
| Hootsuite | Sprout Social | CoSchedule | ||||||
| Best for publishing social media posts | Best for social planning | Best value for money | Best for large businesses | Best for providing customer service | Best for collaboration | |||
| – Extensive publishing, engagement, analytical and listening features |
| – Affordable for wide functionality | – Extensive marketing features not just social media | – Extensive publishing, engagement, analytical, and listening features | – Extensive organizational/team features | |||
| – Listening features are an add-on |
| – Not great for larger businesses | – Very expensive | – Capped profiles on most expensive plans | – No image editor or listening features | |||
| $99/month | $249/user/month | $29/user/month | ||||||
| | | | | | | |||
| | | | | | | |||
Here, we've listed Hootsuite's top five challengers. Click each brand name to jump down to our analysis of its pros and cons, or just keep scrolling to see each one in turn.
- Planable – Best for social planning
- Zoho – Best value for money
- HubSpot – Best for growing businesses
- Sprout – Best for providing customer service
- CoSchedule – Best for collaboration
Pros
- Extensive features for collaboration and content organization
- 24/7 customer service
- Free plan available
Cons
- 50 post limit on free plan
- Limited customer support on cheaper plans
- Pricing is per user and so can get expensive
Planable is an ideal platform if you want your social media strategy to be a group effort. It provides a vast array of collaborative social planning features that can get your whole team involved in your social media campaigns, because more heads are always better than one.
Planable is specifically designed to allow your team to collaborate on your social media strategy with features aimed at communication as well as basics like scheduling and analytics. You'll be able to get your team involved in the simplest of decisions, like what to post that day, with every single person on the team being able to actually see the post in real time as you edit it.
Team members can leave comments and attach files, so the collaborative process is as seamless as possible. There's also a multi-level approval process, so you make sure the best is being posted every time.
As far as pricing goes, Planable has the edge on Hootsuite, in that it offers a free forever plan. However, it limits posting to only 50 posts and customer support is much worse. For actually paid plans, though, Planable is far cheaper, with a Basic plan that cost $11 per month and a Pro plan that costs $22 per month, both of which are a fraction of the price of Hootsuite's starting price of $99 per month.
Pros
– Affordable for wide functionality
– Offers a free plan
– Extensive organizational/team features
Cons
– Not great for larger businesses
– No phone or live chat customer support
– No image editor or content library
Zoho offers a range of business software applications, including sales, marketing, and inventory. However, we'll be looking specifically at Zoho Social, the service's social media management solution.
Zoho Social offers great value for the cost: Its feature set isn't quite as comprehensive as Hootsuite's (or Sprout's, for that matter), but it covers all the basics you'll need at meaningfully low prices. And unlike many other Hootsuite competitors, it offers a free plan, while Hootsuite only offers a 30-day free trial. You'll also get a higher number of social profiles with the most expensive plan with 120 profiles. Finally, Zoho's team organizing features are worth noting, as they offer the functionality some businesses will need to split up their users for granular campaigns or subgroups.
The engagement features may not offer strong enough functionality, compared to what users get from Hootsuite's comparable plans – particularly for large businesses, since their scale means that every minor engagement tweak can have outsized benefits. Zoho also doesn't offer live chat support – another disadvantage compared to Hootsuite, as are the lack of an image editor or content library.
The pricing is hard to beat, though, at least for the first few plans: Zoho's low pricing starts with its $10 per month Standard plan, with its other plans starting at $30, $40, $230, and $330 per month, respectively. As that price hike between the second and third plans makes clear, Zoho's lower plans offer the highest value-to-cost ratio, at least for smaller companies that want comprehensive features but not deeply complex ones.
Supports:
- YouTube (on Enterprise Plan)
Pricing tiers (all billed annually):
- Professional: $800 + $3000 onboarding fee
- Enterprise: $3600 + $6000 onboarding fee
- Connect up to 50 social media accounts
- Limit of 10,000 posts per month
- Scheduling limit up to three years in advance
- No free plan or free trial
HubSpot is a big name when it comes to business software, and that is no different when it comes to social media management. The platform offers a full-on marketing CRM in its Marketing Hub platform, so you can manage social media right along side paid, email, and other campaigns.
HubSpot is a powerhouse of analytics and functionality, offering a massive selection of features, integrations, and third-party add-ons that will allow you to do virtually anything you can imagine when it comes to social media management. Scheduling, planning, and analytics all rolled into one robust interface.
Even better, HubSpot offers essentially unlimited scalability for businesses that plan to grow. The Marketing Hub is not only equipped with more features than every option on this list, but it also has enterprise-level pricing plans available at the click of a button.
The catch? HubSpot's powerhouse platform comes with a powerhouse price. While Marketing Hub starts at only $18 per month and offers a great free plan for those interested in CRM software, you will not get access to social media management features at either of those price points. You'll have to pay for the Professional plan, which costs a whopping $800 per month. For some context, that's eight times as expensive as Hootsuite's most affordable plan, and 100 times more expensive than Zoho Social's starting plan.
Pros
– Extensive publishing, engagement, analytical, and listening features
– Only platform to provide automated responses to incoming communications
Cons
– Capped profiles on most expensive plans
– Extra users cost more
– Advanced listening and analytics features cost more
Sprout Social is a dedicated and feature-rich social media management platform with an extensive array of tools and abilities across all core categories, including publishing, engagement, analytics, and listening.
It stands out for a few features Hootsuite doesn't offer, most notably the ability to set automated responses to incoming communications for faster response times. Hootsuite is known for its own extensive range of features and does offer a few more publishing abilities than Sprout but Sprout certainly holds its own. Sprout also offers phone support to its customers – a big perk that Hootsuite is missing.
The downsides to Sprout include several caps on usage: Their most expensive plan supports a max of 10 social profiles (though this can be expanded with a paid add-on), which is equal to the maximum offered by Hootsuite's least expensive plan. Plus, each Sprout plan is limited to one user per license, meaning costs will rise quickly if more than one employee is handling social. Businesses will also need to buy add-ons to access advanced listening features and advanced analytics features, potentially increasing costs further.
Sprout's three pricing plans start at $249, $399, and $499 per month, billed annually, so it's not far from the budget choice. But combined with its more than healthy range of features, these prices make it a great fit for medium and large companies looking for the most cost-effective social media marketing platform – particularly those who plan to take advantage of the strong customer service on offer.
Pros
- Extensive organizational/team features
- Low cost platform
- Unlimited scheduling and posting
- Provides send time optimization
Cons
- No image editor or listening features
- Not great for larger businesses
- Cheapest plan only provides simple analytics
CoSchedule has affordable prices, yet offers a solid range of features – particularly when it comes to organizational tools that help teams and sub-teams work both together and apart.
Like Hootsuite, CoSchedule offers unlimited posting and scheduling, and a few less common but highly useful social management abilities, such as send-time optimization to allow posts to go live at the best time of the day for engagement. On the whole, though, CoSchedule stands out less for the depth of its features, and more for the features that it offers at lower price ranges than comparable social media management services. Specifically, it supports team-related tools, with all plans supporting a calendar, user roles, task management, and team commenting.
The potential problem with CoSchedule is the features that it doesn't include: You won't get any form of image editor, so creating the perfect Instagram post won't be easy, and no listening features are included at all. The starter plan only offers the most basic of analytics tools, while none of the plans include the deeply extensive engagement features (like automatic tagging, message routing, and responses) that could help a large business get the most value out of their audience's social activity.
That said, it's priced well: CoSchedule's lone plan start at $29 per month, making it one of the least expensive social media tool for businesses that need to manage their teams.
Is Buffer a good alternative to Hootsuite?
In short, no – Buffer is likely not the alternative to Hootsuite that you're looking for.
Buffer's features are limited. This may not be clear from looking at what Buffer has to offer, since it includes two separate products – one aimed at publishing and organization features, the other aimed at analysis tools. Once we dug into the actual features offered by each product, however, we found that they didn't measure up to Hootsuite – particularly when it comes to publishing abilities, an area Hootsuite is particularly strong in. Buffer's feature depth is industry-average or below.
In addition, Buffer doesn't have any engagement features at the moment (though it may add them down the line), making it not the best option when it comes to Hootsuite alternatives.
That's not to say Buffer isn't a good platform: It offers great value for the money it costs, due to the low starting prices of $6, $12, and $120 per month.
Free Alternatives to Hootsuite
When looking only at permanently free social media management plans, you'll find two options: Zoho and Planable. Zoho's free plan supports one user, seven social profiles, and some engagement features, but has very limited reporting, no social listening, and no add-ons. Planable's free plan supports one user and 50 total posts, but you'll have to go for a paid option if you want more than that, which luckily only costs $11 per user, per month.
As always, you'll get what you pay for: If the limits on social profiles aren't too restrictive, and you don't mind the lack of features, then either service should work.
Why Should You Consider an Alternative to Hootsuite?
Hootsuite is one of our top picks for a social media management service, due to its depth of features across all the core categories that matter – from engagement to listening to publishing.
The price is admittedly high at $99 per month to start, and the price tag rises quickly as the plans expand, and businesses may not be able to leverage all the features to their fullest without spending a large amount – particularly given the extra add-ons they might need to purchase. Different social management services offer different packages for those with different needs: CoSchedule or Zoho are more affordable solutions, while Sprout offers a few features Hootsuite doesn't, including phone support.
As with any investment, a business should plan to get far more value out of a service than they'll lose through their monthly fee for that service. We've done the heavy lifting to parse out what that value is for each service, testing software and logging the data, in order to help you find the right fit.
Verdict: What Is the Best Alternative to Hootsuite?
That said, all five of the alternatives we've covered on this page could be considered better than Hootsuite in specific circumstances. Sprout Social has great features plus phone support, Zoho is inexpensive, Planable offers great social planning features, HubSpot is rock sold if you need to scale, while CoSchedule is great for team collaboration.
In addition, Sprout Social sort of supports the feature: Users can only schedule up to ten posts per day, but there's no limit on the total number of posts that can be in the schedule. This means that anyone can add ten posts once a day every day, slowing building up their list of scheduled posts.
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