Free Hootsuite vs Sprout Social: Best Social Media Dashboard

The following is a comparison of two full-featured social media management tools: Hootsuite vs Sprout Social. Because these products support different social networks, choosing between the two isn’t as simple as picking the one with the most features.

Sprout Social and Hootsuite are two of the most popular social media marketing management solutions on the market today. We’ll compare the dashboards, publishing, scheduling, collaboration, reporting, and integration capabilities of Sprout Social vs Hootsuite.

Sprout Social vs Hootsuite: A Study of the Two Companies:

Sprout Social was founded in 2010 with the goal of providing businesses with a wide range of features while maintaining an appealing user experience. Among the company’s notable clients are Subaru, Ticketmaster, and Evernote.

• The single interface integrates four primary functions:
  • Engagement
  • Publishing and scheduling
  • Reporting and analytics
  • Monitoring and social listening

In 2008, BrightKit, the precursor to Hootsuite, was launched. Its goal was to make it easier for businesses to manage all of their social media accounts in one place. Their offices are located in Vancouver, Toronto, New York, Mexico City, London, Paris, Hamburg, Sydney, and other cities throughout the world.

Hootsuite vs Sprout Social:

• Post creation and scheduling
• Streams management allows you to keep track of and monitor activity across all of your social media channels at a glance.
• Dependent on your demands, robust analytics across a mix of all channels or per channel.
• Team management for social campaigns
• Custom content maintained in a content library

Benefits of Using Social Media Management Software?

Individual contributors can interact with platforms as if they were a full department, while agencies and huge company operations benefit from the capacity to manage several branded social channels swiftly and efficiently.

Feed dashboards – Hootsuite vs Sprout Social

Although both Hootsuite and Sprout Social gather posts in a feed, the way each platform shows the feed differs significantly.

Hootsuite allows users to create adjacent streams on a single dashboard and tailor the information displayed in each feed.

Once you’ve set up your feeds, you can interact with the content directly from Hootsuite, making replying to queries and comments across different networks a breeze.

Sprout Social (seen below) foregoes its competitor’s multi-columnar method in favor of aggregating postings into a single feed. One of the coolest features of Sprout Social’s Feeds is that you can add RSS feeds to help you find content to share.

Sprout Social, like Hootsuite, allows you to interact with and respond to messages right from your feed.

Publishing and Scheduling:

When compared to Hootsuite vs Sprout Social, both from the main feed dashboard, you can compose a message, select which account it originates from, attach photographs, shorten links, and select a target audience.

Both services have a draught feature that allows you to save posts that aren’t quite ready for publication and come back to them later. With its audience-finding feature, Sprout Social adds some new data to the publishing department.

Compared to Hootsuite vs Sprout Social both provide content calendars that you can use to schedule posts ahead of time. Both platforms use a unique algorithm to determine the best times to post in order to get maximum engagement from your audience.

Collaboration:

Users can be assigned to one of three roles in Hootsuite: super admin, admin, or default. You can apply one of the three permission settings to an entire team if you wish to control employee Hootsuite accounts.

Sprout Social contains administrative features that are similar to Sprout Social, such as role-based permissions and multi-step publishing approval. Users may also allocate any post in the feed to a person or team by tagging it as a task.

Reporting – Hootsuite vs Sprout Social

Your social accounts are divided into four perspectives in Hootsuite’s overview report: posts, followers, interaction, and metrics. You may also create custom reports in Hootsuite, which you can export to PDF, PowerPoint, Excel, or CSV files.

The chart that shows which days and times your posts receive the most impressions and engagement is a useful feature. This improves the timing of your posts, resulting in increased visitors.

You may look at engagement on a single platform or analyze how your posts are performing across all of your social media accounts using Sprout Social.

You may also generate your own custom reports using the filters and queries, so you can compare the results of your fall social campaign to the revenue data for that time period.

Pricing models- Hootsuite vs Sprout Social

Hootsuite has four pricing categories to help you choose the best plan for your company. The basic subscription allows you to schedule several posts in advance for up to ten accounts, includes free app integrations, and includes a social inbox where you can respond to consumers.

The basic package, on the other hand, limits your post boost spending to $500 and excludes advanced features like customizable reports and a content library.

Sprout Social has three pricing tiers, but instead of charging per user per month, they charge per user per month. The basic platform includes social CRM and scheduling for up to five social accounts.

If you want competition reports, optimal send time scheduling, or advanced reporting, you’ll need to subscribe to a higher plan.

Sprout Social vs Hootsuite: A Quick Overview

Who is Sprout Social for?

Sprout Social is an excellent choice for medium to large enterprises with several social profiles on each platform and multiple users on their social media management team. Although Sprout Social caters to a wide range of businesses and individuals, its pricing excludes some. The first tier of this platform costs $99 per month per user, with each succeeding tier costing significantly more.

Who is Hootsuite for?

Hootsuite is a good all-around social media management software for organizations and individuals of all types because of its multitude of features, connectors, publishing options, and even cost. Hootsuite’s price is the most appealing of these qualities.

Sprout Social vs Hootsuite: Features:

What Sprout Social offers:

From a posting to-do list and channel messaging to daily interaction numbers and today’s postings, the Sprout Social dashboard gives you a summary of all the essential components of your social media efforts. It’s an excellent way to get acquainted with everything you’ll be doing during the day.

What Hootsuite offers:

Hootsuite has all of the standard social media management functions, such as post sharing, feed monitoring, team administration, post scheduling, and social analytics.

Which Social Media Manager Is Better: Hootsuite vs Sprout Social?

After comparing features, pricing, and support, Hootsuite is a superior social media management solution to Sprout Social.

Sprout Social, on the other hand, has a lot to offer, and if you value excellent customer service, you’ll find it to be the superior tool.

The following are all of the advantages, downsides, and pricing plans for the two top social media management services available today.

Hootsuite vs Sprout Social- Pros & Cons:

Hootsuite is best for publishing social media posts while Sprout Social is best for providing customer service

Pros – Hootsuite:

• – Features for publishing, engagement, analytics, and listening
• – Excellent free plan
• – All plans include unlimited scheduling.

Cons:

• – Listening features are an add-on
• – Customer service is not available by phone or email.
• – Analytical features are more expensive.

Pros – Sprout Social:

• – Only platform to give automated reactions to incoming communications
• – Extensive publishing, interaction, analytics, and listening functions

Cons:

• – the most expensive plans, profiles are limited.
• – Additional users are more expensive
• – The cost of advanced listening and analytics features is higher.

Pricing: Hootsuite vs Sprout Social

Sprout Social has both a monthly and annual billing cycle, but Hootsuite only has an annual paying period. Both providers base their prices on the number of users and social accounts they have.

Starting Price:
Hootsuite- $25 per month
Sprout Social- $99 per user per month

Hootsuite free version:

Hootsuite has a free version that allows you to manage two social media accounts and schedule up to five articles for publication. The free edition also comes with self-service support and free app connections, making it ideal for freelancers or those with only the most basic requirements. In addition, Hootsuite offers a 30-day free trial.

Sprout Social free trial:

Sprout Social doesn’t have a free version, but it does feature a 30-day free trial that allows you to log in to and post to several social network profiles. On your social media profiles, you can add up to 20 competitors and conduct a competitive analysis. You can also experiment with features like mobile apps, brand keywords, and social listening.

Key Features – Hootsuite vs Sprout Social

In terms of social media management, Sprout Social and Hootsuite are at the top of the industry. Hootsuite is best for teams, whereas Sprout Social is best for customer service.

Features in common:

Hootsuite and Sprout Social both have a wide range of social media management tools. Monitoring, social performance management, social promotion, tagging, data visualization, dashboard, automated scheduling and publishing, social media integration, reporting and analytics, and reaction management are all supported by each tool.

Best Dashboards:

Hootsuite and Sprout Social both have a vertical menu on their home pages that lists the many dashboards each platform offers, ranging from Publisher to Inbox to Analytics. Finally, both services provide a simple way to access all of its capabilities with only a few clicks.

Best Scheduling:

Sprout Social allows you to schedule an unlimited number of posts across all tiers, but the number of posts you may schedule each day is restricted to ten.

Hootsuite supports three profiles with its Free plan, ten with its Professional plan, 20 with Team, 35 with Business, and 50 or more with Enterprise, Sprout, on the other hand, supports five social profiles on the Standard plan and 10 on the Professional and Advanced plans.

Best Reporting – Hootsuite vs Sprout Social

Hootsuite has powerful reporting capabilities, but your plan determines what you get. Sprout Social’s plans all contain audience demographics, ad analytics, and pre-made reports.

Which should you choose – Hootsuite vs Sprout Social

It all depends on what you’re after. Both are wonderful tools for managing your social media, but the distinction is in which features are most relevant to your company.

It all depends on what you’re after. Both are wonderful tools for managing your social media, but the distinction is in which features are most relevant to your company.

Both Sprout Social and Hootsuite provide tiered subscription structures for their products. Higher tiers cost more, but they provide you access to additional features and the opportunity to track more accounts.

Sprout Social is considerably easier to look at and use from a design standpoint.

Which Platform Is the Most Effective Hootsuite vs Sprout Social

Overall, Hootsuite’s capabilities are more extensive and give you more freedom when it comes to managing accounts, especially if you have a staff of marketing experts in charge of social media. While Sprout Social offers capabilities that give it an edge in customer relationship management and customer service, it provides users with less robust experiences that are both limited and costly.

Highlight – Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite:

• Sprout Social Allows You to Post to Facebook Messenger – Hootsuite Integrates with WordPress
• Hootsuite Just Got a Refresh — Sprout Social Has a Modern User Interface
• Sprout Social Has a Killer Instagram Feature – Hootsuite Is a Publishing Powerhouse
• Hootsuite Provides Reports on All of Your Social Media – Customizable Templates are available from Sprout Social.
• Sprout Social has a few key integrations, whereas Hootsuite has more than 100.
• Sprout Social Is Expensive – Hootsuite Offers a Fantastic Free Plan
• Based on the tools’ pricing per user/profile and sophisticated capabilities, agencies will struggle to find value in both Hootsuite and Sprout Social.

Hootsuite vs Sprout Social vs Buffer:

Buffer allows you to construct a queue of posts that will be uploaded according to a timetable you choose. Buffer calculates the number of likes, shares, comments, tweets, and other responses to your article.

Multi-user cooperation is possible with Hootsuite. Users may easily share engagement streams with their team using this app.

Leading brands and agencies, such as Shopify, use Sprout Social’s social media management, marketing, customer service, analytics, and data intelligence solutions.

Summary: Hootsuite vs Sprout Social

Here’s a high-level overview:

In the bigger picture, Hootsuite is the clear loser. The 5K+ ratings on G2 rank Hootsuite lower than Sprout in terms of ease of use, support, and product direction. (And there is a clear winner, and it isn’t who you think!)

In feature-by-feature comparisons, Sprout Social is just ahead of Hootsuite. Hootsuite routinely ranks bottom on G2 in terms of publishing, monitoring, and reporting. Sprout does slightly better on average, but only by 0.2 points.

The hidden cost of both Hootsuite and Sprout Social will stun you. Hootsuite’s pricing strategy is shady, as it only shows annual pricing on its pricing page, provides misleading information about its Business plan pricing, and forces growing businesses to upgrade from the Team plan to the Business plan, which starts at $7,200 per year, or the Enterprise plan, which starts at $18,000 per year.

If you’re an agency with more than three users and/or 20 social profiles, Hootsuite and Sprout Social will cost you a fortune. There is no month-to-month alternative; you must choose the Business plan and pay annually.

What to Read Next:

• Hootsuite – Best Social Media Dashboard
• The 10 Best Social Media Dashboard
• 16 Effective Google Analytics Dashboard Template

 

Free Hootsuite vs Sprout Social: Best Social Media Dashboard

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