Sprout Social vs. Later: Which is Better For your Business?

Overview

What is Sprout Social?

Sprout Social is a versatile social media management platform that allows users to schedule and publish content on various social media platforms. The tool’s clean UI contributes to its user-friendly interface that allows you to monitor and analyze performance from a single dashboard.

Unlike other Sprout Social Alternatives, it supports various networks, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Instagram. It also enables you to manage reviews on Google My Business and Facebook. You can also leverage its analytics capabilities to gain data-driven performance insights.

Sprout Social comes packed with social listening capabilities and helps you to maintain your brand image. Its inboxing capabilities provide an overview of all your social interactions. You can also integrate a range of apps, including Google Analytics, Tabula, Salesforce Cloud Intelligence, etc.

What is Later?

Being a social media management tool, Later helps you plan, schedule, and publish content on various social media platforms. It is a visual first tool that comes with a user-friendly interface.

It is a visual first tool with a visual content planner, letting users preview and organize their content on a calendar while ensuring a consistent and visually appealing feed. Additionally, it provides analytics and insights to track post performance and optimize content strategy accordingly.

Besides scheduling and publishing content, Later offers other functionalities like scheduling Instagram Stories, user-generated content curation, and the ability to search and repost content from other accounts.

Later has a free plan with basic features and paid plans that include more advanced features and increased scheduling capacity. Although some eminent Later alternatives enjoy their fair share of popularity, for now, let’s see how Later vs. Sprout social compare against each other.

Best Suitable for

At a Glance

It can be tough to tweak the differences when comparing two options offering the same functionality. If you compare Sprout social vs. Later, certain factors may come into play in deciding what works best for you.

Sprout Social is more popular than Later and is suitable for agency and enterprise-level customers. It is well-liked for its usability, ease of setup, and reporting capabilities. However, all this comes with expensive pricing plans that may not fit your budget and marketing needs.

On the other hand, Later is much preferred by influencers and small businesses for its fair share of features needed for social media management. It is a tool loved for its content planning and scheduling capabilities. With its visual first interface, you can plan out your calendar in the most convenient way and analyze its performance.

Let us take a look at the user ratings of Sprout Social vs. Later and see how it compares to SocialPilot.

Quick Comparison

So, now that we know what Sprout Social and Later are ideal for let’s compare the two in terms of essential features offered at their respective price points.

Sprout Social offers a fair share of publishing, analytics, inboxing, and collaboration capabilities for its high-priced agency plan that will cost you $499 per month. It also allows competitor tracking and offers a content library that Later fails to offer.

Later charges you six times less than Sprout Social, with only $80 per month, making it a good option for marketers and small businesses.

When it comes to language support, both Sprout Social and Later provide support for various languages. However, both tools fail to offer robust support as they provide only Email and chat support.

For a concise overview of the functionalities and constraints of Sprout Social vs. Later, along with SocialPilot, here’s a detailed comparison of the three tools.

Reviews

Pricing

The price of two similar products often significantly impacts which one we will choose in the end. So, let’s make a fair assessment by comparing the prices of Later vs. Sprout social to determine which one provides a better pricing advantage.

Sprout Social offers four price plans, whereas Later offers only three. Sprout’s standard plan will cost you $249 per month, which is way more expensive than Later, which charges only $18 for its starter plan.

As stated, Sprout Social’s agency plan costs you $499 per month for only one team member and charges $349 extra for every additional team member. On the other hand, Later charges only $80 while allowing a team capacity of six members. However, Later fails to offer many advanced features crucial for high-end customers.

Overall, Sprout can be a choice for agency and enterprise-level customers, but it is definitely a high-priced tool.

To offer you a comprehensive view, here’s a comparison of the pricing structures for various subscription plans provided by Sprout Social vs. Later and SocialPilot.

In-depth Scheduling and Publishing Capabilities Comparison

Planning your content calendar and making sure that it goes live at the right time is crucial for the success of your social media campaigns. With that being said, let’s compare Sprout Social vs. Later to find the right choice for strengthening your content planning and publishing initiatives.

Both Sprout social and Later allow smart and advanced queueing, post customization, and personalized posting capabilities. However, Sprout Social doesn’t offer hashtag suggestions and a media editor, unlike Later.

When it comes to integrations, Sprout allows integrations with platforms like Hubspot, Shopify, Zendesk, Salesforce, Marketo, Woocommerce, and Microsoft dynamic 365.

On the other hand, Later only allows integration with Shopify, Mailchimp, and Unsplash. Later also fails to offer post preview and Canva integration capability.

Let’s compare Sprout Social vs. Later with SocialPilot to know how these three compare against each other in terms of all their scheduling and publishing features.

In-depth Analytics Capability Comparison

Social media analytics is of paramount importance to hit your social marketing goals. So, let’s compare Sprout social vs. Later for analytics capabilities.

Considering sprout social’s pricing, there is no surprise that it offers all essential analytics capabilities. Later, on the other hand, does a fair job of providing basic analytics features. However, Later falls short for not offering downloadable white-label reports and a custom report builder.

To know all your options, check out the table below for all the analytics features offered by Later vs. Sprout Social compared to SocialPilot.

In-depth Inbox/Listening Capability Comparison

When comparing Sprout Social and Later’s inboxing and listening capabilities, Sprout Social stands out as a superior option. Sprout Social allows you to leverage real-time listening while enabling you to raise support tickets, reply to messages, visitor posts, questions, reviews, etc.

In contrast, Later does not allow real-time listening and deprives you of replying to questions, reviews, and visitor posts.

Check out the table below to compare all the inboxing and social listening capabilities offered by Sprout Social, Later, and SocialPilot.

In-depth Social Media Collaboration Capability Comparison

Collaboration capability is key for agencies and big businesses to maintain a proper workflow for teams and manage all their clients’ projects.

Both tools allow multi-user collaboration, content approval workflows, and easy access management. However, Sprout Social’s agency plan charges you a total of $499 with a single-user capacity and charges an additional sum of $349 for every additional member.

On the other hand, Later allows six team members with its advanced plan, which will cost you $80 per month. The only limitation with later is that it doesn’t offer free unlimited client onboarding.

To add more value to this comparison, we have made a side-by-side comparison of Sprout Social vs. Later and SocialPilot.