When it comes to getting a lot done within a short period of time, marketers turn to automation. Social media management tools come as saviors when you have to juggle multiple social accounts along with various social media channels.
Hootsuite is a pioneer among them, meeting all the social media-related needs of a business. But many Hootsuite alternatives having similar or even better features come at an unbelievable price range.
Let’s dig further as to why these options are worth considering.
Why Consider Alternatives to Hootsuite?
Hootsuite is a market leader, but the pricing it comes at is nothing short of aspirational. This makes using Hootsuite for smaller businesses, agencies, or solo entrepreneurs absolutely impossible.
So how do they get a piece of the pie, which is social media marketing?
And just like market leaders have a lot of competitors, Hootsuite has a lot of alternatives. These options provide similar features for managing all your social media requirements but at a much more affordable price. This levels the playing field for all marketers.
Here’s why you should be switching to Hootsuite alternatives:
- A jaw-dropping price of Hootsuite plans
- A steep learning curve
- Support available in selected plans
- Limited URL shortener feature
- No Google Business integrations
- Team collaboration on higher plans
Despite spending a pretty huge amount, you might not get the best outcome because of Hootsuite’s limitations.
In this post, we shall review the best alternatives to Hootsuite so you don’t have to. And when we conclude, you will be able to decide on the social media management tool that caters to your marketing needs.
How we analyze and select these tools:
Our process of curating a list of relevant tools involves thorough research and evaluation. Factors considered include platform compatibility, automation, content creation, visualization, analytics, collaboration, pricing, scalability, and user experience. Curated by seasoned professionals, these tools empower marketers with valuable insights to make informed decisions and scale their businesses.
Planable is known to have very visually driven and dynamic collaboration process. It makes the process of working with a large team and the involvement of many stakeholders smooth and hassle-free. It provides you with a calendar view of your content strategy which you can adjust to the timeline of your choice.
With Planable you can collaborate and manage multiple social accounts from all the major channels like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, Linkedin, Youtube, Google Business, and Pinterest.
You can avoid the sharing of any content which is imperfect with the post-approval workflow which pPlanable gives.
Some other features offered by Planable include:
- Unified platform for all content
- Easy collaboration experience
- Multi-layer content approval workflow
- Scheduling and publishing on multiple platforms
- Visually streamlined post creation process
Planable Compared to Hootsuite
When it comes to multi-platform social media management, you can say that Hootsuite and Planable, both are capable tools. But the latter one has more of a user-friendly experience to offer.
The highly dynamic content calendar view that Planable offers to its users is not something Hootsuite is able to do. Users often call Hootsuite a hard tool to master, because of its interface being crammed with numerous features. So the feature which is Planable’s strength is Hootsuite’s weakness.
Price: Planable’s pricing plans start at ground zero, as in, they provide a free plan with limited features, but a good bet for starters. It has a starting price of $28 dollars for 8 social accounts whereas Hootsuite charges $99 for supporting 10 accounts.
Hopper HQ is a strong social media management tool that you can leverage to grow your social media presence. The user-friendly interface saves loads of your time by easily planning and scheduling content, tracking performance, and managing all your social media accounts from one place.
Hopper HQ is suitable for creators, influencers, small businesses, and agencies managing one or multiple social media accounts.
Some key Hopper HQ features include:
- Supports scheduling on Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn & Pinterest
- Repost TikTok content on other platforms without the watermark
- Schedule stories, reels, images, videos, and carousels posts
- Hashtags tool for maximum reach
- Auto publish Instagram Reels without reminders
- Unlimited team members at no additional cost
- Customer support on all plans
- iOS and Android companion mobile apps
Hopper HQ Compared to Hootsuite
Hopper HQ stands outs as one of the top alternative to Hootsuite. It offers features like social media planning, scheduling, and analytics at a fraction of the cost compared to Hootsuite. Hopper HQ is also ranked #1 for ‘ease of use’ by social media managers.
The content repurposing feature allows you to repost TikTok videos on other social media platforms without any watermark in one click.
Hopper HQ offers excellent customer support for all users regardless of the plan.
Price: It starts at $16/month for 1 social bundle (including one account on every social platform) and unlimited users. A 14-day free trial is available on all plans.
eClincher is a robust and feature-rich social media management tool that can be used by small and medium businesses to streamline their social media presence.
It is known to make social media management easier and more effective with its intelligent social media dashboard and centralized inbox.
Key features of eClincher include:
- Advanced publishing
- Content curation
- Marketing automation
- Keyword tracking
- Social media analytics
- Content recycling
- Scheduling
- Engagement
- Team collaboration
eClincher Compared to Hootsuite
eClincher is best known for its publishing, reporting, and monitoring capabilities. It offers an interesting feature called Pocket integration. You can use this feature to share any content stored in your pocket account directly to associated social platforms.
However, compared to Hootsuite, eClincher doesn’t let you collaborate on social media tasks. You will have to collaborate separately for messages via email or Slack.
eClincher’s UI is not as simple as Hootsuite and takes some time to master. It is recommended to use the support documents to train the team before they start using eClincher.
Price: All eClincher subscriptions include a 14-day free trial, and the base subscription starts at $59/month.
Check out how SocialPilot competes as an eClincher alternative here.
CoSchedule allows you to manage your marketing from a unified platform. It offers social organizers like marketing suites and calendars.
Coschedule also integrates with multiple social networks helping businesses by equipping them with the marketing essentials.
Some key features of the tool include:
- Automatic notifications
- Campaign analysis
- Campaign management
- Content management
- Custom branding
- Monitoring
- Reporting and statistics
- Third-party integrations
CoSchedule Compared to Hootsuite
If we compare the two tools, CoSchedule is a cheaper option due to its pricing structure. As you scale up, you will have to pay more for availing advanced features.
CoSchedule also offers a free trial to perform testing. You can curate content, schedule posting time, and automate it from its centralized management system.
Price: CoSchedule – Social Organizer plans start at $29/month for a single user. The top tier allows 10 users, and you need to pay extra to add more users.
Emplifi is an AI-focused social media marketing platform that empowers small businesses to post their content at the right time to generate maximum traction.
You can easily measure, compare, and optimize your social media campaigns with its easy-to-use interface.
Key features of this tool include:
- Social media analytics
- Reporting
- Publishing
- Competitive Ad insights
- Predictive intelligence
- Data integration
Emplifi Compared to Hootsuite
Emplifi and Hootsuite are pretty evenly matched. While the free version of Hootsuite is a good place to start for small businesses, investing in Emplifi might be worth it
Emplifi allows you to schedule posts at a time when they are likely to receive maximum hits. Upload content and get a comprehensive overview of your marketing campaigns with its reporting and analytics tools.
Price: The pricing of the plans for Emplifi is only available on request. It is good to contact them for the exact price to avoid any lengthy bills in the future.
Agorapulse is a publishing tool, but it also covers some other important aspects of social media marketing like competitor research and social listening.
It is one of the popular tools used for hashtags and keywords monitoring. It also has an engaging UI for easy workflow.
Key features of Agorapulse include:
- Unified inbox to view, reply, and assign comments
- Compatible with Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and LinkedIn
- Comment moderation
- Hashtag and keyword monitoring
- Visual calendar
- Follower profiling
Agorapulse Compared to Hootsuite
Agorapulse’s bulk upload options combined with unlimited RSS feed helps it beat Hootsuite in almost all regards.
The unified inbox feature allows you to manage interactions within your social channel in a much easier manner. In addition to that, Agorapulse offers a clutter-free dashboard that adds to the user’s convenience.
Price: Agorapulse offers a 14-day free trial without a credit card, and the subscription for their Solo plan starts at $79/month (billed annually).
SocialPilot also proves to be a cost-effective alternative to Agorapulse. We have compared both the tools in detail here.
Sendible is a tool that helps amplify and manage multiple brands on social media, streamlining processes from planning, collaborating to engagement.
With Sendible, you can manage multiple campaigns and tailor content for each social media. It’s more of an agency-focused tool, making it a great Hootsuite alternative.
Key features of Sendible are:
- Social listening
- Content calendar
- Unified social inbox
- Custom reporting
- Team collaboration
- Social media publishing
- Bulk scheduling and RSS Feed
- Lead generation through Social CRM
Sendible Compared to Hootsuite
When comparing Sendible to Hootsuite, you can go beyond social media management. It can track all of your online campaigns outside of social media as well.
What makes Sendible stand out is its CRM functionality and the 360-degree monitoring capabilities, which Hootsuite completely lacks. The dashboard of Sendible boasts an expansive set of features from social media management, monitoring, sentiment analysis, auto-following and auto-responding, in-depth and detailed analytics, to a lot more.
Though Sendible has some great features, there is definitely a learning curve to it. You can’t understand the dashboard very easily. The pricing is also a bit odd compared to other social media management tools. It’s based on the services you use, which turns out to be quite expensive when you have a lot of scheduling to do.
Price: Sendible’s yearly pricing for startup agencies starts with $204/month for 10 users, where you can manage 60 social profiles in total.
If you’d like to check a detailed comparison of SocialPilot being an awesome Sendible alternative, here it is.
Zoho Social is another tool like Hootsuite that takes social media publishing up a notch with its smart scheduling options.
It is built keeping the needs of businesses and agencies in mind helping them grow their presence on social media.
Key features of Zoho Social
- Social Media analytics
- Custom reporting
- Social media listening with live stream
- Smart scheduling
- Team collaboration
- Social media calendar
Zoho Social Compared to Hootsuite
Zoho Social is more of a tool that is focused on mid-sized businesses and agencies. It proves to be a great alternative to Hootsuite with advanced features like social listening and SmartQ predictions, unlike Hootsuite. Zoho Social also shows the best times to post for wider reach and engagement.
There’s a listening dashboard as well that helps you streamline your social media messages based on the criteria you’ve set, but sometimes you don’t get the accurate engagement numbers.
Zoho Social doesn’t have RSS Feed integration so for automating content pieces to social media you would have to pick another tool. Zoho Social falls into an expensive category where to use certain services you need add-ons to your subscription.
Price: All the subscriptions include a 15-day free trial, and the best plan to begin with for agencies costs $320/month for 5 users.
If you are looking for a Zoho Social alternative, SocialPilot proves to be flexible and intuitive. Check here for a detailed comparison of Zoho Social and SocialPilot.
MeetEdgar automatically keeps your social calendar evergreen. It is time-saving and easy to use. The library is categorized into content types, so you never run out of social media posts ever. It is widely popular among entrepreneurs and small agencies for long-term benefits.
Key features of MeetEdgar are:
- Organized library
- Social media scheduler
- Auto refill queue
- URL shortener
- In-app tracker
- RSS feed import
- Engagement monitoring
MeetEdgar Compared to Hootsuite
MeetEdgar is quite sophisticated when compared to Hootsuite, but getting the hang of it definitely pays off. It automatically pulls content from your website, creating endless content customized for you. While in Hootsuite, you need to decide on the content part on your own and schedule them manually.
The best part is it also recycles the content which is missing in Hootsuite. Moreover, MeetEdgar has an overall simplistic UI with AI integrations for intuitive posting capabilities.
Price: MeetEdgar costs $ 24.91 monthly with 10 weekly automation and 5 social accounts. All plans have a 7-day free trial.
Statusbrew is an app like Hootsuite that has a social inbox and the usual scheduling feature. The workflow is sleek with advanced permission features.
The listening dashboard lets you keep track of real-time happenings, making it an instant favorite of marketers.
Key features of Statusbrew are:
- UTM links and shorteners
- Ad monitoring
- Slack integrations
- Social media analytics
- Team collaboration
- Activity dashboard
Statusbrew Compared to Hootsuite
Statusbrew helps small businesses to access complete analytics. Unlike Hootsuite, Statusbrew’s engagement feature keeps your presence on social media very active. The workflow establishment has advanced permission to regulate collaboration.
Another remarkable feature of Statusbrew is its enterprise-grade security like single sign-on, team activity logs, and two-factor authentication.
Price: Statusbrew falls on the expensive side, costing $129 per month when billed yearly. There is a 7-day free trial for the standard package, while the premium version has a 14-day trial.
Much like Hootsuite, Buffer also started as a scheduling tool for Twitter and is now quite popular among other Twitter tools in the social media marketing segment.
But as the years progressed, Buffer has undergone more changes than Hootsuite. It has various useful app integrations for better social media management.
Here is a list of Buffer’s key features:
- Comprehensive feed for every social network
- Free plan with 1 social account for a network up to 10 scheduled posts available
- Compatible with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Pinterest
- Users can re-buffer published posts
- Content curation using RSS feeds
- Visual calendar
Buffer Compared to Hootsuite
Both tools have similar dashboards, but Buffer doesn’t show notifications about direct messages or comments. Buffer only displays scheduled posts and previously published posts under the Analytics – Posts path.
Using Buffer is advantageous when creating publishing schedules for different social channels. You can use these schedules and add new content regularly. Hootsuite also has a similar feature which is restricted to a single schedule only.
However, Buffer doesn’t give you many options to interact with fans and followers, but it is great for scheduling posts and re-publishing the ones that worked well.
Price: Buffer offers a free plan. After the trial, you can avail the paid plan for $12 per month for one social media channel.
If you’d like to have a look of how SocialPilot is compared as a great Buffer alternative, we have a detailed comparison here.
Loomly is a popular Hootsuite alternative that lets you create posts from scratch. Find inspiration from trending topics, use asset management features to access media files quickly, and preview them before the scheduling.
Optimize your content as per social media standards to get an aggravated reach. It also has collaboration and workflow capabilities for the social media team.
Key features of Loomly are:
- Calendar View
- RSS Feeds
- Asset Management
- Ad Preview
Loomly Compared to Hootsuite
Unlike Hootsuite, Loomly helps to ideate and preview your social media posts before publishing. It gives you tips based on the latest trends and practices.
Run ads and sponsored posts from the Loomly dashboard to reach out to more people on Facebook and Instagram. Engage with them via community manager, responding to comments and messages quickly.
Price: Loomly starts at $34 for 10 social media profiles and 2 users. You can also take its 15-day free trial before purchasing any plan.
MavSocial is yet another Hootsuite alternative that lets you accomplish your visual marketing goal. It is an all-in-one tool for scheduling, analyzing, listening, and collaboration.
MavSocial also offers stock images, so you need not spend much time creating graphics for your social media posts. You can even create your personal digital library of assets.
Key features of MavSocial are:
- Campaign Optimization
- Workflow Management
- Asset Management
- Social Analytics
- Content Curation
MavSocial Compared to Hootsuite
MavSocial is a great choice for agencies and smaller teams. The starter plan is quite affordable when compared to Hootsuite.
It also offers audience targeting features with marketing automation and keyword tracking. But one that makes it a complete stand-out is its digital asset management.
Price: MavSocial pricing starts at $65 for 30 social media profiles of 3 user. You can also take its 14-day free trial before purchasing any plan.
NapoleonCat is a competitive Hootsuite alternative that helps small and growing businesses engage and support users on social media. It has a Social Inbox that collects comments, messages, and reviews from multiple profiles and platforms: Facebook, Messenger, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube, and Google My Business.
Another feature of NapoleanCat is Auto-moderation. It allows users to set up automatic replies to repetitive questions and shield their social media profiles from spam and harmful content.
Some other features offered by NapoleonCat include:
- Social media analytics and automated reporting
- Scheduling and publishing
- Real-time collaboration feature
- Facebook and Instagram ads comments
- Inbox translations for brands catering to multinational audiences
NapoleanCat Compared to Hootsuite
Both NapoleonCat and Hootsuite offer versatile social media management platforms, but they’re not the same. Most of all, NapoleonCat is advantageous when it comes to automation.
While the platform offers a full range of profile management and social customer service automation features, Hootsuite lacks these options. With NapoleonCat, you can automatically reply to comments and messages from Facebook and Instagram, including ads comments.
Price: NapoleonCat offers a free 14-day trial and, contrarily to Hootsuite, you don’t need to connect your credit card while testing. Prices start at $24 a month for three social media profiles and one user.
Wrapping Up
Hootsuite is one of the oldest social marketing tools, but over time many competitive alternatives to Hootsuite like SocialPilot have entered the scene, offering users newer USPs and delivering better results at an affordable range.
Moreover, agencies, always tight on budget, need to think twice before spending the bulk of their marketing budgets on a tool like Hootsuite. But that isn’t a hindrance anymore with tools like SocialPilot.
Take its 14-day free trial and stay ahead of the curve. Go ahead and plan a solid strategy with the right social media management tool to make branding easier.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Hootsuite the best tool?
It totally depends on what your requirements are. But yes, SocialPilot comes out to as the better social media management tool one can use for their brand or agency compared to Hootsuite.
SocialPilot covers almost every feature a small business or digital agency would need to manage social media efficiently and is the most cost-effective option, with prices starting at $50/month for 3 users.
SocialPilot covers mostly all features a small business or digital agency needs to manage social media efficiently and is the most affordable one with a price starting from $50/month for 3 users.
What is the best Hootsuite alternative?
The best budget-friendly alternatives to Hootsuite are:
- SocialPilot
- Buffer
- eClincher
- Coschedule
- Later
- Agorapulse
- Sendible
- Zoho Social
- MeetEdgar
- Statusbrew
- Loomly
- MavSocial
- SocialBee
- Hopper HQ
Is SocialPilot better than Hootsuite?
It totally depends on what your requirements are. But yes, SocialPilot comes out to be the better social media management tool one can use for their brand or agency compared to Hootsuite.
SocialPilot covers mostly all features a small business or digital agency needs to manage social media efficiently and is the most affordable one with a price starting from $50/month for 3 users.
Which Hootsuite alternative is better for small businesses – SocialPilot, AgoraPulse, or Buffer?
SocialPilot is the best choice as a social media management tool to help small businesses build their brand on social media at pocket-friendly prices.
Which is better, Hootsuite or Buffer?
It totally depends on what your requirements are. If you don’t want to shell out much and use an easy user interface, Buffer is the tool for you. But if you are an enterprise and a larger agency where you have the time and money to invest, Hootsuite might be the right fit.
Is there anything cheaper than Hootsuite?
SocialPilot is much cheaper than Hootsuite and offers a similar feature set. You can post on top social media platforms from multiple accounts. The pricing begins at $25.5 per month when billed annually, while the cheapest plan of Hootsuite starts from $49.
Which social media management tools are best in 2023?
Here are the best social media management tools in 2022 worth considering:
- SocialPilot
- Buffer
- eClincher
- Coschedule
- Social Bakers
- Agorapulse
- Sendible
- Zoho Social
- MeetEdgar
- Statusbrew
- Loomly
- MavSocial
- NapoleanCat
Are there free alternatives to Hootsuite?
There are some free Hootsuite alternatives like Planable, Buffer, and CoSchedule. However, the free plans for these tools come with very limited functionalities, which are not enough to meet the requirements of businesses and agencies. Hence, it is better to go with tools like SocialPilot, which proves cost-effective and well-equipped to handle all your marketing needs.
About the Author
SocialPilot
Developed especially for small businesses and agencies, SocialPilot is the best Hootsuite alternative, a tool, which has been designed, keeping in mind small businesses and agencies. From content creation, publishing, and engagement, to analytics, you’ll get it all.
Here are the key features that SocialPilot better than Hootsuite:
Plan for Agencies
$100/mo
Save 15% with annual billing
Plan for Agencies
$739/mo
For a detailed comparison, refer to the following table:
Features
Complex
With Images
Without Images
No Extra Cost
Add on Cost
Other incredible features of SocialPilot you must consider:
More than anything the tool saves us time and money. With an easier process of scheduling posts, SocialPilot helped us stay on top of our social media game.
Arielle Cohen