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The best Hootsuite alternatives on the market are Sprout Social, for its wide range of in-depth features and support options, and Zoho, for its low pricing and dependable mid-range feature set.
We've ranked Hootsuite as our top 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:
| Score | 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? | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Hootsuite | Sprout Social | Zoho Social | Loomly | Sendible | CoSchedule | Buffer | ||
 |  |  |  |  |  |  | ||
4.6 | 4.6 | 3.7 | 3.8 | 4.3 | 3.4 | 2.8 | ||
Best for publishing social media posts | Best for providing customer service | Best value for money | Best for managing multiple social profiles | Best for affordable listening tools | Best for collaboration | Best for flexible pricing | ||
– Extensive publishing, engagement, analytical and listening features | – Extensive publishing, engagement, analytical, and listening features | – Affordable for wide functionality | – Can post to Tiktok and Snapchat | – Great social media listening | – Extensive organizational/team features | – Good range of publishing and analytical features | ||
– Listening features are an add-on | – Capped profiles on most expensive plans | – Not great for larger businesses | – Unable to bulk schedule via import | – Has posting limit | – No image editor or listening features | – Lacks advanced Publishing features | ||
$25 per month | $99 per user per month | $10 per month | $25 per month | $25 per month | $29 per user per month | $12 per 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.
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 $99, $149, and $249 per month, billed annually, so it's not 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
– 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 that's on par with Hootsuite's free tier. You'll also get a higher number of social profiles with the most expensive plan – 120 profiles, compared to Hootsuite's cap of 50. 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 $25, $200, and $300 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.
Pros
– Can post to Tiktok and Snapchat
– No posting or schedule limit
– Extensive organizational/team features
Cons
– Unable to bulk schedule via import
– No phone support
– No Listening features
Loomly is a great option for ambitious teams. This is thanks to the large number of users per plan, combined with the larger number of social media platforms it will let a business post on.
In addition to the usual platforms, Loomly supports Tiktok and Snapchat, setting it apart from Hootsuite. Like Hootsuite, it offers unlimited posting and scheduling across all paid plans. Loomly's lowest plan supports two users and its highest non-custom plan supports 26 users, putting it far above Hootsuite's comparable plans – even with a paid add-on, Hootsuite's highest plan tier only supports up to 15 users.
Plus, Loomly's higher priced plans support up to 50 social profiles, contrasted with Hootsuite's 35 social profile cap on its comparable plan. Add in Loomly's extensive organizational and publishing features, and you have a service that's a great fit for a large company that needs to manage a sprawling social media empire.
The downsides to Loomly? It has limited engagement features, and none of the listening features that could help businesses track and analyze brand mentions – two things that a large company would likely benefit the most from. Unlike Hootsuite, there's no ability to bulk-schedule via import. There's no phone support either, although that's one downside Loomly shares with Hootsuite.
Overall, Loomly is a solid choice for a company with a lot of users and a lot of social media profiles to manage. Loomly's pricing includes plans starting at $25, $57, $119, and $249 per month, plus a custom-priced Enterprise plan, so it has a price for everyone. Its Premium plan, the $249 per month one, should be a particularly appealing option for a business considering Hootsuite, since it offers features comparable to Hootsuite's $599-per-month Business plan – at less than half the price.
Pros
– Great social media listening
– Extensive organizational/team features
– Extensive publishing features
Cons
– Has posting limit
– User roles restricted
– No ad functionality
Sendible offers the extensive social listening tools that Zoho and Loomly are missing, making it a great Hootsuite alternative for companies that rely on being able to track all of the mentions and conversations being had about their brand online.
The service also offers in-depth features in the publishing and organizational categories, making it a useful management solution for a company that has a lot to say, has a lot of teams working, and needs to manage it all. Further proving this point, the higher plans support a truly massive number of social profiles: 192, to be precise. Even the lowest priced plan supports 12 profiles, putting it above Hootsuite's highest priced non-custom plan (unless you opt for an add-on).
Sendible isn't without its disadvantages, however. When compared against Hootsuite, its biggest problem is the cap on posting: Sendible users will be capped at either 100, 200, 300, or 500 posts per day, depending on the plan, while Hootsuite users will get unlimited posts across all plans. Hootsuite offers live chat support instead of phone support – Sendible offers neither. Finally, there's no functionality to handle social advertising.
Is Sendible for you? It depends on your needs. If your business invests in advertising as a social media tactic, or if you post more frequently per day than the plan you want will allow, you should look elsewhere. Every other business that has a large number of profiles and users will be well served by Sendible's relatively affordable plans, priced at $25, $85, $170, and $255 per month, billed annually.
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 two plans start at $14 and $29 per month, making it 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 Sprout Social or Sendible more attractive 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 $12, $56, and $85 per month for the publishing and organization service, and $28 and $40 per month for the analysis service.
There's also a free plan, similar to Hootsuite's. For more on that, just read on.
Free Alternatives to Hootsuite
When looking only at permanently free social media management plans, you'll find two options: Zoho and Buffer. 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. Buffer's free plan supports one user, three social profiles, 10 scheduled posts at any given time, and access to integrations, though no engagement tools and limited reporting.
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 our top pick 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. It starts at a reasonable $25 per month, too.
But 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.
Final Thoughts
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, Loomly supports the most types of social platforms, Sendible supports granular social listening, 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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