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Your social channel's number of followers isn't an accurate measurement of campaign effectiveness, as only 1% to 5% of them will actively engage with your post. Thus, you should carefully select your social media management tool to ensure your chosen platform has features that will support your online content marketing strategy.
Hootsuite is one of the most recognized brands on the market. Users laud it for its tracking and analytics and scheduling tool, all available on its dashboard. However, the drawback of this platform is its price point, with advanced features only accessible in higher-tiered plans or through additional fees.
As a solo user or startup, what are the best alternatives to Hootsuite? This guide explores 11 tools and shows how each stacks up against Hootsuite.
Top Hootsuite Alternatives to Recharge Your Social Strategy in 2023:
Best Hootsuite Alternatives
Post scheduling and reporting are two of Brandwatch’s standout features. It uses a unified calendar and while that isn’t revolutionary and standard for most social media management tools, including Hootsuite, Brandwatch’s calendar takes a more visual approach. You can, for example, use a monthly or weekly view. While the weekly view is quite detailed and includes the caption and image/video to be used, the monthly view is equally useful. At a quick glance, you’ll be able to see how many posts have been scheduled per day helping you to spot gaps in your content calendar quickly. In the integrations department, it’s a pretty equal match. Similarly to Hootsuite, its automated publishing also supports Instagram (including Reels and Carousels) and TikTok. Another area where Brandwatch matches Hootsuite’s functionality is when it comes to managing direct messages and incoming social comments. Both Hootsuite and Brandwatch have what they call an Engage feature. Included in Brandwatch’s Engage module is the ability to customize feeds and automate some common responses. Agorapulse’s Shared Calendar and its free AdsReport are the platform’s top two features that make it better than Hootsuite. Compared to Hootsuite’s exportable planners, Agorapulse encourages interaction and hastens approvals with its Shared Calendar. Advanced and Custom plan holders can share their Agorapulse calendars with clients and other external stakeholders. As with Hootsuite, you can use AgoraPulse’s analytics report to determine the best time to post. Meanwhile, Agorapulse’s AdsReport allows you to track the performance of your Facebook ad campaigns without an extra charge, a service that is only available under Hootsuite’s higher Enterprise plan. The two platforms have a unified inbox, allowing you to view, respond, and delegate responses to all your posts (comments, messages, and reviews) from one social profile in one spot. Like Hootsuite, Agorapulse also has a bulk scheduling and publishing feature to fill your month’s content calendar with images and posts in minutes. A Composer feature—which lets you create, edit, and see a preview of your post—exists in both tools. Agorapulse can help you compose your post for Instagram, but you need to finish the process on the mobile app to publish it. Moreover, both platforms have social listening tools to help you with reputation management and community engagement. You can also monitor certain brands or keywords to discover discussions surrounding your competitors. Like Sendible, SocialPilot offers White Label customization, which not only brings your logo and colors front and center. The platform even lets you set a personalized email address that can integrate with your existing email. The setup for client access is easy and secure. Moreover, your customers can view your social media efforts on reports carrying your brand identity. Users must subscribe to the Agency plan to benefit from this feature. Like Hootsuite, SocialPilot also collaborates with Canva for image generation. While SocialPilot doesn’t have a dedicated social listening tool, you can use its inbox to track brand mentions and spot popular subjects, whether directly related to your business or those of your partners and competitors. You can view your campaigns daily or weekly with SocialPilot’s calendar. The calendar can also display content per client or social network. Like Hootsuite, SocialPilot lets you queue, auto-schedule, and republish posts. Meanwhile, the platform’s analytics reports include “best time to post” and audience insights, including your biggest fans, like your most active sharer or commenter. Buffer‘s primary strength is its minimalist interface that offers a straightforward scheduling process for your social media posts. Unlike Hootsuite, using Buffer’s dashboard is easy to learn, making it highly recommended for small teams with less elaborate social media marketing plans. You can pause your queue or reorder posts on your queue per social channel. If Hootsuite teamed up with Canva to help you create visuals from within the platform, Buffer lets you do the same through its proprietary tool Pablo. The feature integrates with Unsplash, which offers royalty-free images. After choosing an image from the web or your collection, you can edit it in Pablo, including adjusting the dimension or adding a filter, text, or logo. Buffer also shares Hootsuite’s capability to display and reply to questions and feedback from various social media. However, Buffer users must do so from a dedicated Engagement tab for such messages. Use the dropdown menu to pick the social channel whose messages you wish to check. Then select the type of posts to display (questions, orders, or potentially negative messages), so you can read and respond directly from that window. eclincher is a platform to consider if you’re looking for a Hootsuite alternative with an efficient approval workflow. The tool can generate a link to send to colleagues, clients, or those you’ve assigned as approvers. Approvers can add a comment when they don’t approve the content. You can even upload batches of content for approval through bulk processing. The platform lays out these items in spreadsheet form that you can share as a .csv file. eclincher also has an auto-post feature with three queue options: a recycle queue that re-uploads your post once it reaches the end of a queue, a one-time queue for one-time posts, and an end-date queue that will upload the post on your chosen end date. Like Hootsuite’s RSS Autopublisher, eclincher’s Auto Post with RSS will let you draw content from RSS (rich site summary or really simple syndication) or feeds from various websites and queue this onto your content calendar. Google Analytics is part of eclincher and Hootsuite’s social analytics reports. Do you want to view your performance across three or more social platforms? eclincher can generate one document to show all your stats when you click the cross-channel report. Meanwhile, you can delegate engagement to specific team members from the platform’s inbox. The intelligence and social listening features of Emplifi‘s Social Marketing Cloud go head-to-head with Hootsuite, deploying AI to help your brand discover your share of voice in the industry. For a 360-degree view of your customers, the platform combines insights from your channels with those from the web. The platform’s analytics dashboards and shareable reports are customizable—you can go from an aggregate, top-level data analysis to more granular presentations of each campaign. Moreover, Emplifi’s real-time sentiment analysis alerts you to your market’s pain points and interests, allowing you to create and deliver experiences with empathy. Need a hand with engagement? Program the platform’s chatbot for common queries so you and your team can handle messages needing a more personalized touch. Emplifi’s Community Inbox and responsive calendar can promote the kind of collaboration that Hootsuite users enjoy. You can organize ideation, proofing, and approvals through its mobile-ready content scheduler. With its predictive AI woven into this feature, you can determine the posts to promote and when to publish them. Meanwhile, Emplifi teamed up with Salesforce to enhance its inbox for faster replies. Take your social media content ideation and creation to the next level with Loomly. Its Post Builder is a wizard-like tool that not helps you upload your content in 5 easy steps. It also ensures post optimization by giving instant feedback on your chosen date and time to publish, copy length, readability, and the format’s suitability for your chosen platform. Moreover, you can enhance the look of your images using Loomly Studio. You can access the tool through Post Builder or Loomly Ads Manager to resize the original dimension of your visual file, adjust its brightness, improve focus, or add a filter and text. Like Buffer’s Pablo, the Loomly Studio integrates with Unsplash. This platform has basic and advanced analytics like Hootsuite. However, Loomly’s analytics package doesn’t include social listening or brand mentions monitoring. You’ll find basic data (clicks, shares, comments, engages users, and reach) right below individual Post Views. Meanwhile, users of the Standard Plan and higher can go to their Loomly calendars to view advanced analytics data, including total Facebook page likes, Instagram followers, engagement rates, and others. Like Hootsuite, Loomly lets you compare results across timeframes and automate the publication of weekly or monthly reports. The platform ensures you won’t miss a new task or deadline by sending you an email notification, an extra reminder besides the To-do list in your Loomly dashboard. Meanwhile, you can set your colleagues’ and external stakeholders’ Loomly access privileges by assigning them roles (client, contributor, editor, or viewer) on the calendar. Give your social media followers something fresh to read, listen to, or view daily or weekly with MeetEdgar. Its “bottomless” Content Library stores and classifies your visuals and text beyond your campaign’s duration. The two main categories are the seasonal or event category—which can repurpose posts next year—and the holding category, which contains posts requiring approval before publication. MeetEdgar also allows you to customize categories. The platform can auto-generate five new variations of your content so your social account is regularly updated when you’re too busy to prepare and upload brand-new posts. At the same time, you can choose the “Use Once” setting for one-time postings. You can also populate your social channels and Content Library through the platform’s Import tool. On the Import page, select a source to connect, like your blog, YouTube, Vimeo channel, Pinterest, podcast, or any website. Like Hootsuite, MeetEdgar has a bulk processing feature to edit, import, or delete posts en masse. Edgar emails a weekly report of your campaigns’ performance, although you can also view the analytics of all or specific social accounts on your dashboard. Past reports are accessible through the History page. The platform doesn’t have a social listening feature, but up to 20 team members can use MeetEdgar whether you choose the Lite or Standard plan. NapoleonCat boasts of saving your team’s time and energy by 70%, thanks mainly to its automation features. You can automate replies to commonly asked questions, including sensitive or complicated issues that a customer service agent can later review and resolve in a private message. NapoleonCat’s Auto-moderation feature lets you create a rule to set off auto-replies. The rules cover designating “trigger” keywords, follower classification (prospects, customers, top fans, and so on) to which the rule will apply, and the action for that message (like mark sentiment, assign a ticket to a moderator, or hide and delete as in the case of junk comments). Auto-moderation works on Facebook, Facebook Ads, Facebook Messenger, Instagram, and Instagram Ads. You can select the dates when to run this automated feature, which NapoleonCat recommends for holidays and work breaks. NapoleonCat’s Publishing tool provides the same ease that Hootsuite offers to upload content on all your social platforms simultaneously. Moreover, you can customize your analytics reports—including your competitors’ activities on social media—and engage with your followers, including those who post Google reviews. Sendible can make it appear that you had your own programmers design a social media management tool exclusively for your organization with its White Label solution and Client Connect feature. Ideal for social marketing agencies, white labeling allows you to brand the platform’s dashboard as your own, as the interface will carry your logo, company colors, and web domain. With this feature, you can submit branded reports—you have a selection of over 200 possible metrics. Hootsuite users must subscribe to the Enterprise plan to generate a social media monitoring report with company branding. Meanwhile, Client Connect will let your customers safely connect their social accounts to Sendible and access your dashboard without sharing passwords. Improve your client engagement further with Priority Inbox, which notifies you about messages from your identified recipients, and report creator. You can create images in Sendible using Canva, similar to Hootsuite’s integration with the graphic design tool. Together with the platform’s calendar, you can aim for what matters most in 2023—consistent and high-quality posts, not just frequent and high-quantity uploads. Moreover, social listening is possible on blogs and Google Alerts besides the social channels where you post content after you set the criteria, hashtags, and keywords on the Sendible dashboard. Besides staying on top of new developments, social listening helps you contribute to conversations and build your brand’s thought leadership. Sprout Social and Hootsuite mirror each other in various functionalities, from their inboxes and social listening tools to their employee advocacy and chatbots. However, in each of these areas, Sprout offers a little more than what Hootsuite can provide, which is welcome news to those whose social following and workforce are growing. Sprout’s Smart Inbox is a powerful engagement and collaboration hub. It displays all messages in a single feed, but you can filter them by social network. Sprout also lets you create and share Inbox Views to help you and your team focus on one message type at a time when necessary. The pre-set views include Private Messages, Completed, Saved, and Reply Approvals. Hootsuite’s shared inbox only divides messages into the following folders: unassigned, assigned, assigned to me, and done. To help you determine the volume of messages that need your attention, you can refer to the real-time activity bar at the top of the inbox. You can choose the date selector to view messages within a specific timeframe (24 hours, 7 days, 90 days, or a custom range). Sprout and Hootsuite operate chatbots, but the former has a proprietary bot that works on Twitter and Facebook. Unlike Hootsuite, Sprout’s bot doesn’t require activation, although you must set up its conversations. Meanwhile, you can set permissions for Social Listening on Sprout to include specific teammates. You can set and track topics and hashtags for these listening templates: Industry Insights to stay relevant in your sector, Market Research to help plan your company’s future, Competitor Analysis, and Brand Health for audience analysis. Or you can discover who’s mentioning and comparing you with other brands using the Trends Report, the Sprout counterpart for Hootsuite’s Streams. Although Sprout doesn’t have an AI assistant for analytics like Hootsuite, the former platform’s users can glean rich insights from its various reports, including social advertising performance across channels and audiences for Enterprise subscribers. Sprout and Hootsuite also have programs that help companies turn their staff into their brand ambassadors. In 2022, Sprout renamed Bambu to Employee Advocacy, the equivalent of Hootsuite’s Amplify. However, Sprout has an advocacy ROI calculator, helping you estimate returns depending on your goals (brand awareness, lead generation, or top talent acquisition).
1. Brandwatch (Formerly Falcon.io)
2. AgoraPulse
3. SocialPilot
4. Buffer
5. e-clincher
6. Emplifi (formerly Socialbakers)
7. Loomly
8. Meet Edgar
9. NapoleonCat
10. Sendible
11. Sprout Social
Discover More Options for Your Social Media Posting Needs
Any well-prepared copy, image, or video meant for social media posting is worthless if marketers don't strategically publish the content at the right moment or monitor its impact and influence. With Hootsuite, you can manage your social media accounts more effectively. If you’re looking for Hootsuite alternatives, check out our list above to find the perfect tool for your team.
Find more platforms that you or your marketers can use for your social media campaigns in our article "Top 15 Social Media Posting Tools for 2023."
