Best 2023 Hootsuite Alternatives to Up Your Social Media Game
By Hootsuite is a popular social media management (SMM) tool known for its robust scheduling, powerful analytics, and team-centric features.
Unfortunately, it’s one of the most expensive tools around.
In this post, let’s explore ten of the best Hootsuite alternatives available in 2023, comparing use cases, best features, limitations, and pricing. Let’s go!
Hootsuite overview
Source: Hootsuite
Hootsuite is a popular, established SMM tool that:
- Automates and schedules posts on all the major social media platforms
- Reviews data with powerful analytics
- Adds multiple users for easy team collaboration
- Integrates with hundreds of apps, including Canva and Microsoft Dynamics
The downside?
It’s pretty expensive. Just the cheapest plan alone sets you back at $49/month annually!
What’s more, the crème de la crème of the tool’s features are reserved for users with enterprise accounts, which is the most costly pricing tier available.
Hootsuite isn’t a bad tool, but there are options that offer similar features at much more affordable prices.
Best Hootsuite alternatives for social media management
1. Ease of use: Buffer
Buffer offers three main tools for social media management: Publish, Analyze, and Engage. The SMM platform recently launched Start Page, a flexible landing page builder that combines all your links into one URL.
Users can choose which plan best fits their needs based on the services offered in each, such as customization options and unlimited team members.
Best features:
- Instagram Hashtag Manager: Organize, group, and save hashtags for first comments
- User interface: Get started on Buffer right away, thanks to its clean and simple user interface
- Chrome extension: Share content from the web without having to go back to your Buffer dashboard
- Analytics: Review in-depth and digestible data on the best time to post, how often to post, and the best type of posts that drive engagement
Limitations:
- Occasional bugs that won’t let you tag pages on Facebook and upload videos to channels
- No analytics report at all for free plans
Free trial: 14 days
Pricing:
- Free: $0 with basic publishing tools
- Essential: $6/month with all essential tools
- Team: $12/month with advanced tools and unlimited members
- Agency: $120/month with advanced tools, unlimited members, and customizable options
2. Best for team collaboration: Zoho Social
Source: Zoho
Zoho Social is a user-friendly, well-rounded social media management solution.
This team-centric platform helps you communicate and collaborate with team members efficiently. You can discuss social media reports via chat, assign co-workers specific tasks, and more from a single dashboard.
Best features:
- Roles & Permissions: Assign team members specific roles and tasks within designated social channels and decide which social channels they can access
- Discuss: Start a discussion thread on your draft to gather feedback before sending for approval
- zShare: Use Zoho’s Chrome extension to curate and share content from the web on your social media channels
Limitations:
- No free plan
- Can get expensive fast for growing agencies. The $460/month plan only covers 20 brands. To unlock more brands, you need to pay an additional fee.
- Zoho’s publishing suggestion tool, SmartQ, is a hit-and-miss (note: it’s likely the inaccuracy is caused by the lack of data. SmartQ needs at least seven days to predict the best times for posting)
Free trial: 15 days
Pricing:
- Standard: $15/month with 7 channels
- Professional: $40/month with 8 channels
- Premium: $65/month with 9 channels
- Agency: $320/month with 10 brands (90 channels)
- Agency Plus: $460/month 20 brands (180 channels)
3. Best for enterprises: Sprout Social
Source: Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a feature-heavy SMM suite geared to enterprises needing advanced services.
Track how your target audience responds to competitors’ product launches, identify influencers to advocate for your brand in future campaigns, and create personalized experiences based on in-depth customer data.
Hands down, this SMM platform is best for enterprise marketers who want to identify industry gaps and dominate share of voice in their fields.
Best features:
- Social Listening: Track reactions to your competitors’ products and campaigns and identify influencers to engage as brand advocates in trend alerts
- Social CRM: Quickly access customers’ conversation histories and contact details to drive personalization
- Analytics: Prove the value of social to your manager and clients. You can easily show them how social media played a role in their direct revenue.
Limitations:
- No free plan
- Cost-per-user model makes it one of the most expensive solutions in the market. The cheapest plan starts at $99/month. Based on reviews, it’s worth it. As a user said, “Sprout is spendy but solid.”
Free trial: 30 days
Pricing:
- Standard: $99/month with 5 social profiles
- Professional: $169/month with 10 social profiles
- Advanced: $279/month with 10 social profiles and advanced tools (e.g., digital asset and content library)
4. Best for SMB owners: MeetEdgar
Source: MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar is a budget SMM platform with rather elementary features, comparatively.
Although MeetEdgar may not be filled with fancy services, its greatest appeal is the auto-variations feature that automatically finds quotable texts for your updates.
Go with MeetEdgar if you’re a time-starved SMB owner or entrepreneur with minimal scheduling needs (i.e., mainly share evergreen content) and run three or fewer social accounts.
Best features:
- Expiration Date: Set an expiration date for your posts at a specific time and date. This feature is perfect for time-sensitive giveaways and promotions.
- Random- and Category-Specific Time Slots: Mix both time slots to rotate your social media updates, engage your audience, and prevent post fatigue.
- Auto-Variations: Automatically generate variations for your status updates. Just write one that includes a URL link, and MeetEdgar will create a bunch of alternatives based on the link.
Limitations:
- No free plan
- Slight learning curve, particularly when scheduling posts. Some users on G2 report that they found it less intuitive than other SMM solutions.
Free trial: 7 days. MeetEdgar also offers a 30-day money-back guarantee.
Pricing:
- Eddie: $29.99/month with 5 social accounts
- Edgar: $49.99/month with 25 social accounts
5. All-in-one: Falcon.io
Source: Falcon.io
Falcon.io is an all-around social management suite, with the website claiming it as the “best platform for every kind of social media marketer.”
This SMM solution is great for both standard content management and additional digital advertising needs.
Plus, since it’s integrated with Brandwatch, a digital consumer intelligence platform, you can also use it for market research, crisis management, and customer engagement.
Best features:
- Single Inbox: View all messages across channels in one inbox. This saves you the hassle of logging in to multiple platforms to answer queries.
- Profile Cards: Save all customer information (shared by marketing, sales, and customer success) in one card. You’ll have all the info you need to create personalized experiences.
- Integrated Content Planning: Sync your social, online, and offline content activities in one calendar
Limitations:
- No free plan
- Can be challenging to locate certain tools due to the complex nature of the features
- Cost-per-seat model makes it one of the most expensive SMM solutions in the market
Free trial: 14 days
Pricing:
- Essentials: $129/month for up to 5 social channels
- Full suite: Custom
6. Value for money: Eclincher
Source: EClincher
Eclincher has a little something for everyone in the social media management world.
Integrations with this SMM platform are impressive, with allowances for channels like Pinterest, YouTube, and Google My Business in addition to the standards like Facebook and Twitter.
But its most impressive feature is the 500,000+ photo library. Look no further if you often use stock photos in your marketing campaigns.
Best features:
- Improvements: Eclincher is continuously expanding its list of available integrations and improving its tools
- Chrome extension: Schedule and post across your social media networks quickly
- Link Shortener: Automatically shorten your long URL links with Bitly, Sniply, and Google UTM
- Photo Library: Eclincher offers over 500,000 free and high-quality commercial-use photos, making it an ideal choice if you want to use visually interesting photos in your marketing campaigns without burning your budget
Limitations:
- No free plan
- Outdated and clunky interface that doesn’t look as sleek as its competing SMM platforms
- Minor bugs like format errors when using the undo button
Free trial: 14 days
Pricing:
- Basic: $59/month for 10 social profiles
- Premier: $119/month for 20 social profiles
- Agency: $219/month for 40 social profiles
7. Best for organization: CoSchedule
Source: CoSchedule
CoSchedule is a marketing-focused social media management platform perfect for creating targeted content to help organically build traffic and followers.
It’s insanely easy to plan your content on this nifty solution, whether it’s a standalone social campaign or multiple posts across your social channels over a time period.
Best features:
- Social Message Optimizer: Improve your social copy with CoSchedule’s built-in message optimizer so that you can attract more clicks, likes, comments, and shares
- Headline Analyzer Chrome extension: Optimize your social headline, revisit a complete history of your past successful headlines, and improve your copywriting skills
- Blog Calendar: CoSchedule makes uploading and scheduling posts hassle-free, thanks to its easy-to-handle user interface
- Alt-Text: Add alt-text to provide visual descriptions of your photos for visually impaired users
Limitations:
- Expensive if you want multiple users and both blog and marketing capabilities
- Free plan offers minimal features for social media management (e.g., you can’t schedule posts by bulk)
Free trial: No
Pricing:
- Free with 2 social profiles
- Pro: $39/user per month with 10 social profiles
8. Best for analytics: Agorapulse
Source: Agorapulse
Agorapulse is a full-service SMM suite with everything from unlimited one-click reports for data like ROI and response time, to automatic and customized labels for followers with excellent engagement.
This gem excels in extensive analytics and beautiful auto-generated reports. Check it out if you need to get clients to buy-in your ideas.
Best features:
- ROI: Agorapulse creates stunning auto-generated reports for your social media ROI and improved social content strategies. It’s perfect if you want to present your results to stakeholders without expertise.
- Inbox: Save feature for common replies to follower comments and questions across social channels
- Reporting: Create custom easy-to-understand reports based on the metrics you choose, so that you can spend less time analyzing results
- User interface: Agorapulse boasts an incredibly user-friendly and beautiful interface
Limitations:
- No free plan
- Lack of integration with several popular social media channels like Pinterest. According to customer support, it may be in the works soon.
- Occasional bugs like timing out when editing a post
- No draft feature when scheduling a post on the calendar
Free trial: 15 days
Pricing:
- Pro: $99/month for 10 social profiles
- Premium: $249/month for 20 social profiles
- Enterprise: Custom for 40+ social profiles
Hootsuite alternatives on AppSumo
Source: Sociamonials
Sociamonials is a comprehensive social media solution that optimizes your campaigns and increases your ROI with advanced analytics and automation.
This SMM platform is best for delivering exceptional customer experience thanks to its customer-centric features like incentivized sharing, contests and sweepstakes, and integration with user-generated content.
Best features:
- User-Generated Content: Collect, approve, and sync users’ video testimonials, photos, and stories to your social media pages. You can also launch a contest or referrals reward campaign to drive greater engagement.
- Automated Fraud Prevention: Flag and block duplicate votes and referrals automatically
- Share Buttons: Identify top influencers and track which specific share button brings in the biggest revenue
Limitations:
- Learning curve for full functionality is steep for people who aren’t social media pros
- Template designs aren’t polished
- No free plan
Free trial: 14 days
Pricing:
- Social Pro: $19/month for 10 social profiles
- Social and Campaigns: $49/month for 20 social profiles
- Business: $149/month for 30 social profiles
- Enterprise: $399/month for 60 social profiles
Grab the Sociamonials lifetime deal on AppSumo for $69 today.
10. Unlimited scheduling: SocialQ+
SocialQ+ is an intuitive social marketing platform that lets you collaborate, schedule, and analyze your posts for all major channels from one dashboard.
Some of its exciting features include watermark support and unlimited scheduling across all social media platforms—yes, this includes the cheapest plan!
Best features:
- Watermark Support: Add a watermark on all photos and videos with your logo directly on SocialQ+
- Scheduling Tool: Sumo-lings get access to all upcoming schedule tools for free. Grab the SocialQ+ lifetime deal on AppSumo for $39 today.
- Unlimited scheduling: Get instant access to unlimited scheduling on all platforms and plans
Limitations:
- No free plan
- Performance can be slow when navigating the menu and scheduling posts across platforms. According to several reviews, the SocialQ+ team is fixing this in their next upgrade.
Free trial:
Pricing:
- Basic: $17 for up to 20 social accounts
- Standard: $15 for up to 40 social accounts
- Premium: $27/month for up to 72 social accounts
Grab the SocialQ+ lifetime deal on AppSumo for $39 today.
Free Hootsuite alternatives
Out of the ten tools in this list, only two offer a freemium plan: Buffer and CoSchedule.
Thanks to its beginner-friendly interface, Buffer is best for casual social media users. On the other hand, CoSchedule’s clean and straightforward blog calendar is ideal for organization.
Of course, it’s impossible to manage multiple social accounts in these free plans. Consider upgrading or investing in another paid SMM tool to unlock more features.
How to choose the perfect social media marketing tool for your needs
The social media management tool that you use should fit your company like a glove.
Every tool mentioned offers a free trial and we even listed two amazing lifetime deals for Sociamonials and SocialQ+, so there isn’t any excuse not to explore your options. And as always, if you want to continue exploring your options, browse here.
Hootsuite alternatives FAQs
1. Is there a free Hootsuite alternative?
Buffer and CoSchedule are your best options. While the former tool is easy to use, the latter is best for organizing your marketing activities.
2. Is it worth paying for Hootsuite?
Probably not, as you can get similar features at a much lower price.
Review the alternatives in this list. You might discover an SMM solution with the same capabilities, if not better.
3. What is the best social media scheduling tool?
We’ll let you be the judge of that.
Look through each SMM platform’s use case and best features and make the most out of the free trials before settling for one final tool.
4. What’s better: Buffer or Hootsuite?
In terms of ease of use? Buffer.
However, if we’re talking about advanced features (e.g., you’re an agency owner who works with a dozen clients and needs more collaboration-centric features), then Hootsuite might be a better fit.