Hootsuite vs Sprout Social: What’s the Best Social Media Management Tool for 2024?

Social media management can be a daunting task, especially with the numerous social media platforms in use right now, it could be a bit overwhelming. But with the right tools, managing your social media accounts doesn’t have to be complicated! Let’s take a look at two of the most popular social media management tools: Hootsuite vs Sprout Social.

In this blog, we will take a look at the features, pricing, and usability of Hootsuite and Sprout Social to figure out what the best social media scheduler is. Keep on reading to find an even better alternative by the end of the blog.

Hootsuite vs. Sprout Social: Features

Both Hootsuite and Sprout Social offer many features to manage social media platforms. You can easily schedule your posts, optimize your timings, and keep track of your social media activities.

Here are some of the top features and the differences between Sprout Social and Hootsuite.

1. Feed management

Hootsuite’s dashboard displays your feed in columns, like having a general overview of all your socials. You can build a separate feed for each of your social media accounts and add specialized filters for each of them.

Sprout Social aggregates postings into a single feed. By selecting and unchecking filters, you can tailor the information you want to see. You can also switch to a network-specific view with a single click. Both platforms let you interact with your feed and comment quickly.

2. Content Calendar

Hootsuite and Sprout Social both offer the latest publishing and scheduling tools. You will also find features like bulk scheduling in their content calendar, where you can also automate your post timings. You can upload and schedule your files in one go. Both of them have proprietary algorithms to help you manage the target audience and get the best engagement.

3. Team Collaboration

Both Hootsuite and Sprout Social allow team members to collaborate on projects. In Hootsuite, there are three roles to assign: super admin, admin, or default. You can apply one of the three authorization settings to an entire team if you wish to control employee Hootsuite accounts. There is also the option to assign who can reply to social media queries.

Hootsuite only allows a maximum of five users in a team. Adding more users is also possible with a price in the Business and Enterprise plans.

Sprout Social has similar administrative features, including role-based permissions and multi-step publishing approval. Users can also allocate any post in the feed to a person or team by tagging it as a task. There are three categories of tasks: general, sales lead, and support. Under the Task tab, you can see open and completed tasks.

4. Extra Features

Recently, Hootsuite released some new extra social media tools, like a caption and username generator. For Sprout Social, the tool has three extra tools: an image resizing tool, some social media templates, and the best times to post tool.

But what both tools lack is the design aspect of social networks since they don’t have any graphic design or video editing tools.

5. Third-Party Integrations

Both tools have over a hundred third-party integrations. Plus, Hootsuite is available in six languages, while Sprout Social is in five. But for the content, Sprout Social uses Google Translate to translate inbound messages and comments in the Smart Inbox.

Bonus: 23+ Best Social Media Scheduling Tools (Free & Paid)

Hootsuite vs. Sprout Social: Ease of Use

Both platforms rank fairly well in ease of use. But in Hootsuite, you can only access your dashboard once you’ve added your social networks. There is a sidebar containing the different functions of your dashboard, and on the main page, multiple columns of your account are displayed.

Sprout Social, however, is the clear winner offering a slightly better user interface for beginners. Hootsuite may be considered slightly more complicated.

However, as someone completely new to the digital marketing world, both platforms can be considered difficult to use because of too many features. It might take you a while to get a hang of all the features and how you can use them to grow your business or brand.

Bonus: The Ultimate Guide to the Best Social Media Inbox Tools

Hootsuite vs. Sprout Social: Pricing

There are a ton of options for the best social media scheduler, but only a few actually fit the budget. Let’s compare the prices of Hootsuite and Sprout Social and see which one has the best deal.

Hootsuite’s Prices:

• Professional: $99/month for 1 user and 10 social accounts
• Team: $249/month for 3 users and 20 social accounts
• Business: $739/month for five users and 35 social accounts
• Enterprise: Custom price that starts at five users and 50 social accounts.

Hootsuite doesn’t have a free plan, so their paid plans all include unlimited posts and scheduled posts. The difference between the plans is the access to collaboration features (approval workflows, tagging, and assigning posts to team members), customer support, and automation tools.

Sprout Social’s Prices:

• Standard: $249/month
• Professional: $399/month
• Advanced: $499/month
• Enterprise: Custom price

The paid plans of Sprout Social all start at five users with the option to add more at a price starting at +$199 to +$349 per user per month.

The Standard plan includes up to five social profiles for scheduling, as well as a social CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and review management for reading and responding to customer evaluations. To access more features (like unlimited social profiles, optimal send time scheduling or advanced reporting), you would have to subscribe to any of the higher packages.

Bonus: 9 Hot Alternatives to Hootsuite for Social Media Management

Introducing Simplified: The Ultimate Hootsuite vs Sprout Social Alternative

When it comes to the best social media scheduler, Simplified takes the cake, and here’s why:

Simplified’s Social Listening Tool and Other Features:

Streams: Simplified offers Streams, a social media listening tool to efficiently monitor engagements, quickly interact with multiple comments or messages, and have a real-time sentiment analysis of your customers. This way, it will be way easier to reach your engagement goals and continuously grow your brand.

Social Inbox: Similar to Stream, Simplified Social Inbox merges all of your social media comments, messages, and mentions in a singular inbox thread. This tool makes responding to potential clients more convenient and pushes for a more seamless messaging workflow among your team members.

Social Media Scheduler: Simplified social media scheduler allows you to schedule up to 5,000 posts to multiple social media accounts. More than that, you can use the free AI writer to generate captions or use the hashtag generator. It’s also possible to design graphics, use templates, and edit videos within the tool.

Content Calendar: Probably the most important tool in social media management, Simplified social media enables you to organize, plan, and schedule posts in just one platform. On top of that, collaborating with team members and clients is effortless. You can tag, comment, and assign roles to members, create approval workflow, and make your client review your work.

Aside from these top features, Simplified has a Chrome Extension where you can share articles, posts, and more with one click in your browser. The iOS app is downloadable, too, for Apple users!

Bonus: Hootsuite vs Buffer: Which Is the Better Social Media Management Tool

The Sprout Social (cheaper) alternative: Simplified’s Pricing

• Free Forever: $0 with one user seat and three accounts
• Social Media Pro: $17/month, $132/year for one seat and seven accounts
• Social Media Agency: $199/month, $1,908/year with 10 seats and 70 accounts
• Social Media Agency Plus: $399/month, $3,828 with 20 seats and 200 accounts

If you’re on a tight budget, the Free Forever plan has all of the basic features you would need without paying a dime, unlike in Sprout Social and Hootsuite, where both only have a 30-day free trial that once it’s over, you would need to pay over $99 even for the most basic plan.

The paid plans of Simplified are complete with access to open and closed team spaces, a unified inbox, bulk scheduling, team approval workflow, and analytics reports. The number of social accounts and seats are customizable too!

Bonus: 12 Best Social Media Calendar Tools You Can Use

Hootsuite vs. Sprout Social: The Final Verdict

Remember, when choosing a social media management tool, always consider your team and brand’s needs. Would you need to post multiple times a day on different platforms? How about an integrated AI assistant to help in generating captions and hashtags? What about budget-wise? There are a ton of factors you need to think about.

So, with everything laid out, which one’s the best for you? Hootsuite is a fairly simple platform that’s easy to use. It offers a variety of features, including scheduling posts, tracking mentions, and analyzing data. However, its reporting capabilities are not as in-depth as Sprout Social. Even though Sprout Social does show some great features, it’s extremely expensive for small businesses.

If you’re tight on a budget and want to still maximize your social media accounts, Simplified is the one for you. It’s the all-in-one social media management tool complete with a content calendar, social media scheduler, graphic design and video editor, built-in AI assistant, and team collaboration features.