Hootsuite, as the world's first social media management tool, has been serving businesses and agencies across the globe for over a decade.
It had the first-mover advantage and established itself as a well-known all-rounder solution.
But from the past year, we're seeing a lot of distrust from Hootsuite users.
The interest for the term Hootsuite alternatives has increased by 60%, the volume of unhappy reviews on G2 have gone up, and there's a lot of negative buzz we're hearing on social media.
Here are the most repeated concerns among Hootsuite customers:
- Upto 200% price increase for most users
- Agencies managing more than 20 social profiles need to go for the business plan, which costs $8,900; there's no monthly payment option for the business plan
- Reliability issues (posts failing to publish on LinkedIn & Instagram)
- A snail-paced customer service response time averaging around 5 days for those paying less than $10,000/year
- Lack of automation features such as automated spam removal, auto moderation, automated approval workflows, etc
If you resonate with these reasons, we've done some homework and compiled a list of top alternatives to Hootsuite. These contenders offer similar (and sometimes better!) features at a much better price.
And while we're indeed a part of this industry and are proud of our product, Statusbrew, our goal in this article is not to promote but rather to provide an objective comparison to help you make an informed decision.
Statusbrew
I talked to 20 of our customers who migrated to Statusbrew from Hootsuite in the last few months to understand their reasons for switching. Based on these parameters, here's a summary of how Statusbrew fares against Hootsuite.
The Price Tag, It's Important - Sure, Hootsuite offers a ton of features, but at what cost? Agencies often shell out $700-$900/month for managing 35-50 profiles with 5 users on Hootsuite.
Compare this to Statusbrew, where agencies pay $300-$400/month for 1:1 features plus more than double the user seats. That's better value for each dollar spent!
Easier From Day One - User experience can make or break a tool. Hootsuite's UI gets a lot of flak for being complicated.
We've worked really hard to ensure the onboarding is as easy it can be, there's zero implementation lag, the navigation is quick and you get custom views for simple publishing, engagement, listening and analytics.
Here's how Statusbrew's Planner looks:
Embracing Automation - Living in the age AI, ChatGPTs & Automations, we believe in maximizing efficiency. From AI auto-moderation to automated analytics, Statusbrew offers not just the basics but also powerful, customizable automation with bots, triggers, conditions, and rules.
These features save you countless hours. You get some of it in Hootsuite, but you have to pay $1000/month.
In Statusbrew? It starts at $129/month.
Robust Reporting - You will get everything in the reports from day 1 cause we will be able to backfill your 18 months of reporting data. On top of that, we have one of the most exhaustive lists of metrics & KPIs (200+). For data enthusiasts, our interactive reporting templates and widgets enable in-depth analysis of each data point. These reports are fully customizable and easily shareable through live links, PDFs, and CSV files.
Here’s an explanatory video of Statusbrew reports.
Customer Support - We aim to make the platform self-serving, i.e, you should have everything at your disposal to get started with the platform and make the most of it.
In essence, when it comes to Hootsuite vs Statusbrew, we're the David to their Goliath, offering better value and user experience.
Pricing & Features Comparison
Sprout Social
A notable feature of Sprout Social that makes it a better Hootsuite alternative is that it includes strategic decision-making using social media analytics that saves your time and speeds up the data collection process.
Image Source: Sprout Social
Sprout Social Vs. Hootsuite: Features
In Hootsuite, you can customize different columns and tabs, each corresponding to a social profile. Whereas in Sprout, all posts from various social networks are integrated into one feed.
Sprout Social provides numerous customer support options that easily beats the satisfactory level of customer service provided by Hootsuite. Sprout offers phone support, email queries, webinars, Q&A sessions, and a knowledge base platform. Hootsuite offers three distinct types of customer service, but none of them includes traditional phone support.
Sprout Social forgoes the multi-columnar dashboard approach that is included in Hootsuite. Instead, it aggregates all your social posts into a single feed. Information in your feed can be customized by using filters. You can shift to a network-specific view with one click.
Sprout Social offers extra features in the publishing space with an audience discovery function that highlights people and accounts you should follow. It also points to spam or bot accounts that you probably should not follow. This feature helps identify relevant influencers in your niche.
Sprout Social displays a brief history of your Twitter conversation with someone by pulling data from its CRM functionality.
Sprout Social Vs. Hootsuite: Pricing
Hootsuite provides a broader range of pricing with its lowest plan starting from $99 per month compared to Sprout's $249 per month. Hootsuite's highest plan soars to $739 per month for the Business plan, which is higher than Sprout Social's $499 per month cost for the Advanced plan.
Hootsuite offers four pricing levels to help you choose the right option for your business. Sprout Social offers three pricing tiers with a custom plan for enterprises, but rather than including a certain number of users, they charge based on per user per month. For larger teams, this could get cost-prohibitive easily.
Pro Read: Best Sprout Social Alternatives of 2023
Sendible
Sendible's dashboard is priced roughly the same as Hootsuite. It provides the cross-functionality of Sprout Social (single dashboard) and Hootsuite (multi-column dashboard).
Image Source: Sendible
Sendible Vs. Hootsuite: Features
Sendible's social media inbox collates all tweets, messages, and comments into a single feed.
Sendible allows you to build customized posts for each platform along with previewing them. You can edit and optimize the images with Sensible's dashboard itself using their in-built image editor.
Sendible provides sentiment data in a custom inbox and messaging in the same place. This helps you receive mention alters via Slack or email, and you can assign follow up to specific users.
Sendible provides a cross-posting feature with different scheduling options. It also includes smart queues, optimal posting time feature, chrome extension, automatic URL-shortening, and data tracking. The single dashboard feature of Sendible makes it very easy to use all features as everything is provided in a single console.
Sendible's social listening feature tracks keywords, hashtags, and brand mentions from across the web, including review monitoring on Glassdoor, Yelp, and Citysearch.
Sendible makes it pretty easy to create your own white-labeled reports, which is a massive advantage for agencies.
Sendible Vs. Hootsuite: Pricing
Hootsuite charges you based on per "social profile" and Sendible charges based on per "service."
If you see the business tier, Hootsuite costs a whopping $739 per month for 35 profiles, whereas Sendible provides the Creator plan at $89 per month with 4 users and 24 social profiles and traction plan at $199 per month with 7 users and 49 social profiles. The Creator plan is ideal for small businesses while agencies can go with the Traction plan as the feature set is built toward their requirements.
The bottom line is that Sendible is a cheaper and cost-effective solution for agencies.
Brandwatch
Brandwatch, formerly Falcon, is a SaaS platform aimed at social media marketing and customer experience management. Brandwatch is highly intuitive and has a collaborative UI.
Image Source: Brandwatch
Brandwatch Vs. Hootsuite: Feature
Brandwatch's main features include a visual calendar and an auto-queue.
You can filter and group your content** in Brandwatch by applying labels and notes to them.
Brandwatch provides a content pool from which you can access and reuse all your old content. All of your posts get added to this content pool as soon as they are published.
Brandwatch helps you manage your team's performance and evaluate your social media profile. You can analyze the impact of your content by viewing the number of likes, views, comments, and shares that it gains along with the follower growth and impressions of your profile.
You can track your team's tasks and the time it takes for them to complete each task.
Brandwatch provides you with templates to build customized reports with added charts and demographics. These reports can then be exported in multiple formats like CSV, XLS, JPG, PDF, or PNG or received by the automatic email feature.
Brandwatch Vs. Hootsuite: Pricing
Brandwatch's essential plan gives you the facility to schedule content, engage with customers, and measure the impact at $108 per user per month. Brandwatch's pricing is provided without limiting the use of schedules, posts, reports, teams, and similar. Thus, their pricing strategy is ideal for small businesses.
Agorapulse
Agorapulse is known for providing an intuitive interface for social media publishing and engagements.
Image Source: Agorapulse
Agorapulse Vs. Hootsuite: Features
Agorapulse's interface seems neat, sorted, and presentable. Agorapulse's dashboard consists of several icons, each of which represents a social media account on which your campaign is running.
It offers a shared calendar option using which you can easily get scheduled content feedback and approval from those team members who are not on your Agorapulse plan.
Agorapulse consists of a queue editor using which you can streamline your posting schedule across campaigns. Agorapulse also imports conversations such as social comments and Twitter mentions which are not supported by Hootsuite. Agorapulse’s customer support has an average response time of 16 minutes.
Agorapulse consists of basic social CRM capabilities. However, if you wish to take advantage of the social CRM feature in Hootsuite, you will have to pay an additional $19 per user per month through Nimble.
Agorapulse Vs. Hootsuite: Pricing
Agorapulse comes with a broad range of pricing starting at $49 per user per month and 10 social profiles and goes up to $119 per user per month. Hootsuite too provides flexible pricing options but are way more expensive than Agorapulse.
Emplifi
Emplifi is an AI-powered digital marketing and social media marketing solution to manage all marketing tasks in one place. It allows its users to boost social engagements and derive an effective content strategy based on marketing personas and driven by AI recommendations.
Image Source: Emplifi
Emplifi vs Hootsuite: Features
Tons of Emplifi features make it different from other Hootsuite competitors such as performance prediction tools, social media analytics, contest inspiration, benchmarking tools, media stories, and content spotlight.
Emplifi provides an extensive library of content across social media to choose your posts for publishing. It recommends posts based on your social media and web data** and also suggests content according to your audience.
Furthermore, Emplifi helps you to understand your competition's performance as well. You can easily view their success graph and study the areas where they have been succeeding. Comparing your performance will provide significant insights into how you can improve your presence on social.
Emplifi lets you analyze your audience and know their interests and preferences using AI to avoid wasting time on manual audience research. You can follow how your audience and their preferences evolve with time and frame your content to match their interests.
By connecting all your web and social media data sources to Emplifi, you can access multi-channel intelligence. Emplifi AI algorithm creates accurate and up-to-date marketing personas using this data.
Emplifi aligns the entire process of influencer marketing from discovery to tracking to reporting.
Emplifi Vs. Hootsuite: Pricing
Hootsuite charges based on users, whereas Emplifi can also charge for unlimited users.
Emplifi offers various pricing plans that let users decide what kind of services they want. Emplifi plans require you to get in touch with their staff first which helps them decide the most suitable plan according to your needs.
Buffer
Buffer is one of the closest and top competitors of Hootsuite.
Image Source: Buffer
Buffer Vs. Hootsuite: Features
Buffer is a more focused solution that pays attention to one point of your social media presence: content publishing and scheduling. Buffer offers a more intuitive interface that makes it appealing if you're only focused on content publishing.
Buffer's strength is its innovative scheduling capability. It supports you to schedule your posts in various forms (videos, photos, articles, etc.) in a virtual queue.
The pro version of Buffer helps you to see a calendar view of your posts, thus making it more straightforward for you to schedule posts for the entire month or week.
Buffer provides an arsenal of integrations through Zapier, Integromat, and IFTTT to easily create workflows.
Beyond these three integrations, Buffer also includes Pablo, an image creation platform providing access to 500,000+ stock photos, editing tools, and filters. Pablo comes for free with all Buffer pricing tiers.
Buffer Vs. Hootsuite: Pricing
Buffer's starting price is $5 per social channel per month, including publishing, analytics, & engagement tools for social media geeks.
Hootsuite's plans start at $99 per month for the "Professional" plan and go up to $739 per month for the "Business" plan.
While Hootsuite offers plans with more advanced features, Buffer's plans are generally more affordable.
Later
Later's goal is to simplify your Instagram marketing effort by streamlining your social media strategy to gain more success and sales. Later's primary features include media management, visual scheduling, marketing, and analytics.
Image Source: Later
Later Vs. Hootsuite: Features
Later has a visually appealing and robust interface. It consists of straightforward features that are not at all confusing and artistically designed. The platform is known for being aesthetically simple in its design.
On the other hand, Hootsuite has a confusing interface (which is also reasonable given the various services it provides). With several accounts, the dashboard becomes a whirlwind, and since too many windows open up, you won't be able to easily find what you want.
Later helps you plan and schedule your Instagram posts and your Instagram stories right from your desktop.
Later provides a Linkin.bio feature that helps you target your followers to the links you want.
Linkin.bio turns your Instagram feed into an easily clickable and shoppable page for your followers. Later has included this feature in all of their plans, including the free ones.
Later Vs. Hootsuite: Pricing
Hootsuite prices are not affordable for small businesses.
Later on, the other hand is almost free to use for a single user. Its lowest plan starts at $18 per month billed monthly while the highest plans goes up to $80 per month for 6 users and 6 social sets (each set consists of 6 profiles each for Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, and LinkedIn).
Later then chargers for every additional social set and user, but the difference in prices is not too high. This way, Later is a highly affordable option for small business owners as compared to Hootsuite.
SocialPilot
If you are working deep into the field of social media marketing along with a group where you have a high content sharing demand, and branding need, SocialPilot is the tool for you.
Image Source: SocialPilot
SocialPilot Vs. Hootsuite: Features
SocialPilot supports a variety of social platforms like Pinterest and TikTok.
SocialPilot also includes support for images that Hootsuite doesn't support yet. SocialPilot allows you to save post drafts and then resume editing them. This content library feature is included in its plans, which start at $25 per month. In Hootsuite, a content library can be accessed with business plans only that start at $599.
SocialPilot allows you to share almost 500 posts a day from up to 200 social profiles. The cap for Hootsuite is 50 profiles per account. This can be a massive consideration for agencies, thus making SocialPilot a well-suited choice to agencies.
SocialPilot provides bulk scheduling with images. SocialPilot easily integrates with the Canva browser extension, but Hootsuite doesn't. SocialPilot provides for custom Facebook branding, which is a lacking feature in Hootsuite.
SocialPilot Vs. Hootsuite: Pricing
SocialPilot's lowest plan which starts at $25 per month supports 10 social profiles for 1 user and priority support.
For the basic plan, SocialPilot provides a lot more features than Hootsuite including bulk scheduling, RSS automation and first comments. If you're tight on budget, SocialPilot is the right choice.
CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a unique tool for marketing teams to organize all their marketing efforts at one centralized location.
Image Source: CoSchedule
CoSchedule Vs. Hootsuite: Features
CoSchedule helps you to schedule your social media posts by suggesting peak time for publishing. It also provides other optimization tips that allow you to write better copy for your social content.
All your marketing campaigns and projects can be viewed in a single calendar. CoSchedule's single calendar view helps you get instant clarity into all your projects. You can create schedule templates for promoting recurring events on social media.
You can create read-only versions of your calendar to share with others. These calendars are interactive, updated in real-time, and give your stakeholders the details they would like to know (nothing more, nothing less).
Should you want to reschedule a task, you can simply do it by dragging and dropping projects right in the calendar. CoSchedule allows you to customize calendars for specific teams using personalized setup and filtering.
CoSchedule is suited when you have a small team consisting of less than 200 users.
CoSchedule Vs. Hootsuite: Pricing
CoSchedule’s subscriptions start at $29 per user per month billed annually. Moreover, CoSchedule provides a lot more features in its starting plan as compared to Hootsuite.
Surprisingly, CoSchedule offers some of Hootusite's Business plan features in it's $29 plan with priority support. CoSchedule easily wins this by a fair margin.
The Best Hootsuite Alternative For You?
Choosing the best alternative to Hootsuite can be tricky, given there are a lot of tools that claim to offer similar services as Hootsuite. However, as a social media manager, it's essential for you to evaluate what each contender brings to the table for your business's needs and carefully choose the one that caters to them.
Here are a few pro tips to consider when purchasing an alternative tool to Hootsuite.
Identify Your Social Media Goals
Start by identifying your specific goals and objectives for your social media marketing efforts. Consider your target audience, your content strategy, your desired outcomes, and any unique needs or requirements you may have.
You may start by performing a social media SWOT analysis.
Evaluate The Features
Look at the different features offered by each social media management tool and compare them to your goals and objectives. Consider features such as social listening, social scheduling, team collaboration, analytics, and reporting.
Compare Pricing
Consider the pricing plans and options for each tool, and evaluate how they fit into your budget. Look at the cost of different plans, the number of users or social media accounts supported, and any additional fees or charges.
Check For Integrations
Look at the integrations offered by each tool and check to see if they integrate with the other tools you use. This will ensure that your social media management tool fits seamlessly into your existing workflow. Furthermore, based on the SWOT analysis, rethink what other integrations you might need in your updated social media strategy and consider them while choosing the tool.
Customer Support
Customer support is often ignored when choosing a social media management tool. When you switch to a new tool, you are bound to encounter technical issues.
A dedicated customer support team can be the difference between a minor inconvenience and a major disruption to your workflow. Statusbrew offers customized onboarding with 1:1 training and round-the-clock on-demand email and live chat support to ensure you get the right help as needed.
Read Reviews
Last but not least, look for customer reviews and ratings of each tool to get an idea of how other users feel about them. Pay attention to reviews that highlight strengths and weaknesses in the areas that are most important to you. However, be smart enough to spot fake reviews.
Wrapping Up!
While Hootsuite is one of the oldest yet credible social media marketing tools, the Hootsuite alternatives stated above have their own unique selling points and features too at a very competitive price.
Using the right social media tool, you can create an efficient strategy that will allow you to make wiser decisions for your business and derive the maximum value for higher profits and better customer retention. A careful check for the features you need most in a Hootsuite alternative will help you make a suitable shortlist.
Ensure that you do your own research while choosing any Hootsuite alternatives available as per your business requirements.
Statusbrew is a social media management platform that integrates all your social media efforts to help you run seamless social media campaigns, track engagement, and derive analytical reports.
Statusbrew is an all-in-one social media management tool that supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and even Google My Business.
Frequently Asked Questions
Who are the competitors of Hootsuite?
- Statusbrew
- Sprout Social
- Buffer
- CoSchedule
- Agorapulse
What can you use instead of Hootsuite?
Statusbrew offers flexible pricing for agencies and SMBs with features like comments moderation and editing content specific for different social channels while publishing, unified inbox, reporting, and SOC 2 Type 2 compliance. You can try the platform at no cost for 30 days.
Is Hootsuite free anymore?
Hootsuite ended free plans on March 31, 2023, restricting platform access for free trial accounts.
What features should I look for in a Hootsuite alternative?
When evaluating Hootsuite alternatives, look out for features such as social media scheduling and publishing, analytics, and reporting, team collaboration tools, customer relationship management (CRM) features, and integrations with other tools and platforms.
Is Statusbrew a good Hootsuite alternative and why?
Statusbrew is an excellent Hootsuite alternative because it offers a wider range of features, better customer support, and more affordable pricing plans.
What are the competitive advantages of Statusbrew over Hootsuite?
Statusbrew has a competitive edge over Hootsuite as it offers better customer support, has more affordable pricing plans, advanced analytics and reporting dashboards with over 200 metrics, and improved CRM integration to streamline your social media and customer support workflows.
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