As social media becomes more influential, impactful and involved, having robust tools with the latest and greatest features is becoming increasingly important.
Take the introduction of new AI tools recently. According to The Sprout Social Index™, 81% of marketers already say AI has had a positive impact on their work. The takeaway? Teams who don’t have tools with up-to-speed AI features are already falling behind.
Between new platforms and new innovations, there’s a lot keeping marketers on their toes—and their schedules full. You need the best tool for the job. Hootsuite is a major player in the social media marketing platform space. And whether you want an option with different pricing, more specialized or just want to try something new, we’re here to help you do your research.
Use this list to brush up on Hootsuite alternatives in a few categories to kickstart your search:
- Best overall Hootsuite alternative
- Hootsuite alternatives for scheduling and publishing
- Hootsuite alternatives for social media analytics
- Hootsuite alternatives for social listening
- Hootsuite alternatives for social customer service
- Hootsuite alternatives for influencer platforms
- Free Hootsuite alternatives
Areas to focus on when comparing tools and Hootsuite alternatives
Social teams should regularly evaluate whether their current tools are hitting the mark, or if it’s time to try something new. A social team can only be as agile as their tech stack enables them to be.
Whether you’re curious about Hootsuite alternatives or you just want to see what’s out there before you make a decision, it’s always beneficial to see what other platforms have to offer.
Here are some key areas to look for when researching a new tools for your team.
Quality customer support
Customer support is everything. And it’s two-fold for social media tools—on the one hand, you need a tool that enables you to enact timely quality support. On the other, your team needs to receive quality customer support too.
When sourcing a tool, pay attention to whether they have readily available customer service to help your team. You need to be able to get help quickly to ensure your tool never slows you down.
According to the Index, 58% of marketing teams say they either share social customer care with their customer service team, or they own it but sometimes customer service will step in. Which means you need a tool that enables collaboration between your teams—ideally with AI capabilities to speed you up too.
Strong innovation
Marketers move at the speed of social. And tools must also follow this fast pace to help teams do their best work.
But making these changes and evolving to keep pace with the digital space takes time. The tools that will most benefit marketing teams are those that prioritize innovation by constantly looking for ways to enhance their roadmap and evolve.
Proven ROI
Proving social media ROI is a key success indicator that social teams must demonstrate. It also happens to be the most difficult.
A robust social media analytics and reporting tool enables social teams to demonstrate and prove ROI, and understand the full impact of their efforts. This means offering different kinds of reports that span channels, individual post breakdowns and paid vs. organic metrics.
A robust reporting tool also enables you to demonstrate ROI to leadership and other teams. Your platform should have sharable reports for stakeholders and clear, easy-to-understand data visualizations like charts and graphs.
Best overall Hootsuite alternative
Before we dive into the full list, let’s start with Hootsuite competitors that encompass every category on this list.
1. Sprout Social
We have to toot our own horn a little. Sprout Social is a stand-out all-in-one alternative on this list—especially for mid-size, large and enterprise businesses.
But don’t take our word for it—from AI-powered capabilities that fuel your social strategy end-to-end to high-level integrations with tools like Salesforce and Zendesk that unify your tech stack, check out what makes Sprout the best tool below.
Then try it free for 30 days yourself to compare Sprout Social and Hootsuite for yourself.
Start your free Sprout trial
Scheduling and publishing
Efficiently plan, schedule and publish social posts from a centralized social media calendar. Features like the campaign planner and tags take the guesswork out of reporting on content and campaign success.
The calendar also enables seamless collaboration with in-calendar notes, content placeholders, drag-and-drop functionality and Approval Workflows that enable internal and external stakeholder reviews.
Sprout’s AI and automation features also act as a virtual data or copy assistant. Suggestions by AI Assist generate captions with tone options in seconds. And Optimal Send Times uses 16 weeks’ of audience data to suggest seven “best times to post” as you schedule.
From our “SproutLink” link-in-bio tool, to URL tracking to measure success in Google Analytics, an Asset library and more, Sprout’s publishing capabilities simplify your scheduling process.
Analytics and reporting
Sprout’s analytics and out-of-the-box reports do the heavy lifting of gathering and synthesizing your data for you. This frees you up to focus on the higher-level thinking that requires a creative human behind the wheel, like strategic and creative planning.
Sprout’s analytics provide deep insights that make measuring ROI and benchmarking against competitors to stay ahead a breeze. With Sprout’s ability to plug into your CRM, get a full 360-degree view of your customer, and the customer journey. And our Tableau integration to create dynamic reporting dashboards, further breaking down social data silos.
Sprout’s analytics and reporting enable you to get a full view of your strategy performance, to benchmark against competitors and helps transform your social media intelligence into shareable business intelligence. Find out more about Sprout’s analytics and reporting capabilities here.
Social listening
Sprout’s social listening solution and AI-driven technology offers custom topics, or pre-built topic templates that enable you to perform competitor analysis, analyze brand health, uncover industry insights, analyze campaigns and monitor events in a snap.
Our social listening solution empowers you to be proactive by grasping how your audience feels about you and your competitors, uncovering influencers to partner with, identifying trends as they emerge and by getting ahead of crises with custom alerts and granular sentiment analysis.
If you want to try our social listening solution, reach out to us for a personalized demo.
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Customer service
Sprout’s social media customer service solution goes beyond responding to comments. Our features enable smooth team collaboration and provide ways to improve the customer experience across platforms.
Manage conversations yourself, or create a Case for other team members to complete. See in real-time when other team members are responding to comments in the inbox to avoid duplicate work and a disjointed customer experience.
Meet customer needs quickly with Sprout’s copy AI features, or with canned FAQ answers stored in the Asset Library. And further free up your team’s time with a customizable SproutBot that can handle the common inquiries for you.
With Sprout’s customer service solutions, directly engage with customers and see the extent of past interactions for more context. And with our Salesforce and Zendesk integrations, effectively bridge the gap between sales and customer service to get a 360-degree view of your customer and their journey with your brand.
Influencer marketing
The future of social media marketing involves creators and influencers. According to a Q3 2023 Sprout Pulse Survey of 307 US-based social marketers, over half of marketers are using dedicated influencer marketing platforms to help offset their primary challenge of finding the right influencer for their campaigns.
With Tagger by Sprout Social, we offer a creator and influencer marketing solution to help you ease into the future of social media.
Discover authentic and impactful creators to partner with, and use Tagger to manage your relationships, contracts, campaigns and more in one centralized platform. And Tagger takes the guesswork out of creator partnerships by measuring the success of your collaborations.
Hootsuite alternatives for scheduling and publishing
A robust social media scheduling tool is a must to keep your posts timely and accounts consistently active. Yet, 35% of marketers cite their brand’s scheduling tool as their top challenge when planning and scheduling content, according to Sprout’s 2023 Content Benchmarks report.
A solid publishing and scheduling tool must be intuitive on top of easing the publishing process. And with 43% of social teams feeling siloed, according to the Index, collaboration features are key, too.
Check out these Hootsuite alternatives for their scheduling and publishing features.
A quick note: Our pricing sections highlight “billed monthly” plans, but most of these tools also offer annual plans.
2. Agorapulse
Agorapulse is an end-to-end social media management platform with features that cover inbox and publishing, a unified social inbox, reporting, monitoring and team collaboration needs.
Agorapulse supports publishing and scheduling on Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube, Google My Business and TikTok. And their high “Ease of Use” ranking on G2 is reflected in their intuitive, clean publishing calendar. Communication features enable smooth, real-time collaboration with shared notes, tracked action items and visibility into who is communicating what.
Agorapulse’s calendar offers other staple features as well, including UTMs and an AI assistant. But one unique feature is its grid layout feature to preview upcoming Instagram posts, making Agorapulse an interesting option if you prioritize Instagram.
Pricing: When billed monthly, standard plan at $69/mo, Professional at $99/mo, Advanced at $149/mo and a Custom plan.
(Source: Agorapulse)
3. Buffer
Buffer has been around nearly as long as Hootsuite. While Buffer won’t have as many features as Hootsuite or Sprout Social, it’s well-suited to creators, individuals, entrepreneurs and small businesses.
Buffer offers a simplified publishing calendar and core team collaboration features, like post reviews and account management. In their analytics, they also offer your best days, types of content and posting frequency to power smarter publishing.
Like many social media management platforms, Buffer has an AI Assistant feature that helps you brainstorm, repurpose and tailor posts to publish across platforms, and will provide suggestions for posts from long-form content. What makes it unique is that, as of the writing of this article, Buffer offers their AI Assistant to all new users, including those on the Free plan. While Hootsuite’s is currently free of charge to its users, that offer is for a limited time while OwlyWriter AI is in beta.
Pricing: When billed monthly,, they have a Free plan, then paid plans start at $6/month, making Buffer an extremely affordable option.
(Source: Buffer)
4. Oktopost
Oktopost touts itself as a tool best suited for B2B companies looking for a full social engagement suite.
The platform emphasizes its calendar’s focus on managing campaigns, with every cross-channel post published categorized with a specific campaign. The calendar is visually appealing and has color-coding and drag-and-drop functionality for quick adjustments.
Like other platforms, it also offers an asset library, UTM tagging and team collaboration functionality like revision history. Additionally, Oktopost puts an emphasis on their brand safety features. Their “banned keywords” function assures everyone is adhering to brand voice and company standards.
Pricing: Custom pricing based on customer needs.
5. Eclincher
Reviews praise Eclincher for being easy to use for scheduling, and overall, for having supportive customer service.
The platform has many of the key features we’ve talked about for publishing, including an intuitive drag-and-drop calendar for cross-network publishing, link in bio for Instagram, best times to post feature and agencies/team collaboration features. Additionally, it offers a local SEO tool to show how well your business ranks for any keyword, which can help inform content.
Pricing: Eclincher is an affordable solution, with a Basic plan at $65/month, Premier at $175/month, Agency at $425/month (all while billed monthly) and an Enterprise plan at a custom price.
Hootsuite alternatives for social media analytics
The way that brands use social media analytics is expanding beyond the marketing team. According to The Sprout Social Index™, 76% of marketers agree that their team’s insights inform other departments.
Here are some Hootsuite competitors who are worth looking into for their analytics and reports.
6. HubSpot
While other platforms on this list are social-specific, HubSpot is a “customer platform” that connects marketing, sales, content and customer service teams and efforts.
HubSpot enables you to see marketing, sales and service data in one place, breaking down silos with out-of-the-box social reports and analytics. HubSpot’s reports give you a holistic view of how your platforms and campaigns perform.
HubSpot’s ability to integrate with your CRM helps you see your social media efforts in the context of your larger business by: tracking leads, new customers and website traffic—a metric 60% of mid-management social media pros track regularly, according to the Index.
Pricing: Their Marketing Hub pricing is broken down by team size.
(Source: HubSpot)
7. BuzzSumo
BuzzSumo is one of the more specialized Hootsuite competitors on this list. It’s meant for analyzing competitor content and discovering content and influencers with an emphasis on journalists.
For competitor analysis, BuzzSumo can ID the most-shared content and how it performs by network and format. Their Facebook Page Analyzer helps you benchmark and compare up to 10 Facebook pages for content engagement. And if YouTube is your focus, BuzzSumo’s video marketing feature helps analyze and optimize your videos, surface popular video content by topic, ID gaps on competitor channels and more.
BuzzSumo also has a robust influencer marketing tool. With a focus on Instagram, X and the web, this tool helps you uncover influencers and creators who post about topics relevant to your brand.
Pricing: When billed monthly vs. annually, BuzzSumo offers a Content Creation plan at $199/mo, PR & Comms plan at $299/mo, Suite at $499/mo and Enterprise at $999/mo.
(Source: BuzzSumo)
8. Rival IQ
If you’re looking for Hootsuite competitors that solely offer analytics, Rival IQ is hyper-focused on analytics and reporting. Its suite of reports and analytics tools includes solutions for competitive analysis, social post analysis, social media audit tools that you can compare directly to competitor performance, hashtag analytics and social listening solutions.
Their tools can surface phrases and topics that drive social engagement in your content, helping you optimize it. The post type analysis feature helps you see engagements by different types of media and posts. And custom dashboards or templates help you present your data the way you want to.
Pricing: They do offer a free analytics plan. For their monthly billed plans, they also offer a Drive plan at $239/mo, Engage at $349/mo and Engage Pro at $559/mo
(Source: RivalIQ)
9. Sprinklr
Sprinklr is a customer experience management tool made for large companies and enterprise. Their Marketing Analytics feature gathers data across 30+ digital channels. And those insights are added to a dynamic, AI-powered dashboard that unifies your cross-channel data and makes it visible to everyone.
Marketing Analytics enables you to look at campaigns, marketing insights and general trends in one source of truth, breaking down silos and streamlining data. These reports can be customized to reflect content performance, for example, to better understand what performs well.
Curious about how Sprout stacks up? Compare Sprout Social vs. Sprinklr here.
Pricing: You can only request a customized quote.
(Source: Sprinklr)
Hootsuite alternatives for social listening
As social data becomes more impactful and utilized across whole companies, marketers will also need more sophisticated tools to uncover impactful insights. That’s where social media listening comes in.
Social listening unpacks insights about competitors, products, audience sentiment and more. Here are a few Hootsuite competitors for social listening and some of their features.
10. Brand24
Brand24 is among the specialized Hootsuite alternatives that purely handle social listening—not management or publishing. While it features media monitoring, it’s multi-purpose at what it touts as a lower industry price point.
Brand24 offers many of the core features that marketers look for in a social listening platform. It pulls insights from 25 million digital sources to support social media monitoring (in addition to media monitoring). And it can ID influencers, send alerts for discussion changes, measure customer sentiment and track hashtags. And it supports up to 108 languages, making it widely accessible.
Pricing: Their monthly billing plan offers an individual plan at $99, a Team plan at $179, a Pro plan at $249 and an enterprise plan at $499.
(Source: Brand24)
11. Keyhole
Social listening is just one of Keyhole’s products—they also offer solutions for publishing, influencer marketing, analytics and data, and trends. And G2 reviews often highlight its user-friendly design.
Like other social listening solutions we’ll talk about, Keyhole offers many of the core features you would need for industry research, benchmarking, brand monitoring and influencer marketing. And their QuickTrends feature enables you to easily identify opportunities in your industry.
Pricing: Their monthly billing plan offers an individual plan at $79/mo, Team at $149/mo, Pro at $249/mo, Advanced at $449/mo and Enterprise at $833/mo (billed annually).
Hootsuite alternatives for social customer service
Social media customer service is an increasingly important piece of the marketing puzzle. It can make or break a brand’s connection with customers, and their loyalty.
According to the Index, 51% of consumers say that the most memorable brands simply respond to them on social. So you must take advantage of every chance to interact.
If you’re looking for Hootsuite alternatives that are specifically built for customer service, here are a few options to consider, and some of the features they offer.
12. Zendesk
If you’re looking for Hootsuite competitors that only handle customer service, Zendesk is built purely for managing customer relationships, and for helping sales teams.
While not social media specific, Zendesk allows your social and customer service teams to deliver personalized interactions, across multiple touchpoints—from social media channels like Facebook and WhatsApp to Slack, mobile apps and your website.
Zendesk offers robust automation and AI capabilities that enable agents to quickly respond and provide self-service articles that Zendesk suggests for you to share. Zendesk also helps you create new help articles on the fly—write a few bullet points and the platform will help turn it into a customer service hub article. And their Content Cues help you understand what gaps exist in your help center articles.
Pricing: Zendesk comes at a high price point, but has a lot to offer. Their monthly billing plan offers a Suite Team at $69/agent/month, $115/agent/month, $149/agent/month and Suite Enterprise, which is a custom price.
(Source: Zendesk)
13. LiveAgent
LiveAgent is a dedicated customer service tool that emphasizes its solutions for social customer care. They also provide an all-in-one customer service tool vs. offering multiple products that must be purchased separately—a factor that makes LiveAgent an especially budget-friendly option.
LiveAgent also highlights its social media monitoring and customer service platform as part of its software, further bridging the gap between customer service and social team workflows.
Pricing: LiveAgent’s monthly billing plan offers a Small business plan at $15/agent/month, Medium business plan at $35/agent/month, a Large business plan at $59/agent/month and an Enterprise plan at $85/agent/month.
14. Hiver
The factor that makes Hiver one of the unique Hootsuite competitors is that this customer service platform was built for Google Workspaces and as they put it, “transform your Gmail into a multi-channel helpdesk.”
Hiver enables agents to manage support channels, like email, live chat, phone and beyond, directly in their Gmail inbox. Agents can add color-coded tags and automated rules that help categorize business communication emails directly in their inbox to sort by priority.
It promotes itself as easier to use and cheaper than Zendesk. The catch is that Hiver only supports WhatsApp when it comes to social media.
Pricing: Hiver’s billed monthly option offers their Lite plan at $19/user/mo, Pro plan at $49/user/mo and Elite at $69/user/mo. They also offer custom quotes for brands that need over 50 licenses.
Hootsuite alternatives for influencer marketing
According to a Q3 Sprout Social Pulse Survey of 300 marketers, 81% of social marketers describe influencer marketing as an essential part of their social strategy.
Creator and influencer marketing is only going to become more important. And over half of brands are using dedicated influencer marketing platforms, like Tagger, to help offset their main challenge of finding the right influencer for their campaigns.
Here are a few platforms to consider for influencer marketing.
15. CreatorIQ
CreatorIQ offers a database of over 17 million creators from all niches. Their platform offers robust search tools to help you unearth the right creators to partner with, including enriched creator profiles that highlight brand affinities, and AI-powered advanced search that helps you search by metrics, keywords, hashtags and more. They also offer creator recommendations that uses a helpful proprietary scoring system that helps automatically and quickly narrow your search.
They also offer an extensive list of 13 solutions that span discovering and managing creators, a creator CRM, competitor benchmarking and team collaboration tools.
Pricing: They prompt you to sign up for a free demo and to request pricing.
16. Heepsy
With a free plan complete with 360 monthly creator search results and core filters that help you surface relevant creators, Heepsy is among the most budget-friendly options.
This platform supports sourcing creators on Instagram, TikTok and YouTube across all payment plans. Heepsy is more focused on the search element of influencer marketing, including features focused on finding influencers, influencer search, influencer statistics and influencer lists. With features like an authenticity analysis, they make it easy to find quality influencers to partner with.
Pricing: Free Plan, then their “billed monthly” plans are as follows: Starter Plan at $49/mo, Plus Plan at $169/mo, Advanced Plan at $269/mo and Heepsy services or Enterprise plans that prompt you to talk to their sales team.
(Source: Heepsy)
17. Influencity
Influencity offers a robust community of influencers to choose from at 200 million influencer profiles worldwide to search through in their library. And the emphasis they provide on their site highlighting their high G2 rating makes them a stand-out.
This platform offers an extensive lineup of features and products that span influencer discovery to relationship management and campaign reporting. This makes them a competitive end-to-end solution for finding and managing influencer partnerships.
Pricing: Influencity plans range from Basic at $168/mo, Professional at $348/mo, Business at $698/mo and a custom plan, making them a great option for mid-market and large enterprise businesses who want to expand their influencer marketing strategies.
Free Hootsuite Alternatives
Free tools will always be the most budget-friendly option, including the aforementioned Buffer. However, free tools also have more limited features and options—like limited profiles or no analytics options.
But if you’re looking for Hootsuite competitors that are free, here are a few tools to check out.
18. Social Champ
Social Champ is a full social media management platform that provides a calendar, publishing capabilities, analytics and an inbox solution.
Social Champ’s free plan enables one user to connect up to three social accounts and have 15 scheduled posts active in their queue at a time. While you have access to sentiment analysis, you can only use their AI Imaginator and AI content wizard tools three times in total.
Social Champ’s free plan offers a robust lineup of content suggestions, GIFs for content and reports. But your reports only gather data as far as two weeks in the past.
All-in-all, this is a solid option if you want to try Social Champ out, or if you have a handful of social accounts.
(Source: Social Champ)
19. SocialBu
SocialBu is an all-in-one social media management solution specifically geared towards small businesses. It’s also a newer tool, having launched in 2018.
SocialBu’s Free plan enables you to connect up to two profiles, with your choice of Facebook, X or Mastadon. You can publish up to 40 static posts per month, and can surface hashtag suggestions, design with Canva and discover content within the platform. However, just note: This tool doesn’t offer an inbox in the Free plan.
When it comes to your tech stack, it pays to do your research
Your tech stack is your lifeline. And in the social media marketing world, it has the power to make or break your workflows, strategy and ability to grow the entire business.
That’s why choosing the right solution for your social media needs—from publishing and engagement to influencer marketing and analytics—is critical.
When it comes to new tools, it always pays to try before you buy. Check out Sprout Social’s different plans to evaluate which is right for you. Then try our platform free for 30 days, or reach out to us for a personalized demo.
