14 Best Hootsuite Alternatives For 2024: Tried & Tested

Looking for the best Hootsuite alternatives? You’re in the right place.

Hootsuite is one of the most popular all-in-one tools for social media managers and marketers, but its high starting price and feature-gating puts a lot of users off.

We wanted to find out if there was a more cost-effective alternative, so we tried and tested the leading platforms like Hootsuite to see how they compared.

Below, we’ve shared everything you need to know about each of them.

The best Hootsuite alternatives compared

#1 – Sendible

Sendible is the best alternative to Hootsuite for most users. It offers pretty much all the same features including social media scheduling, monitoring, replying, and analytics, but at a fraction of the cost. And it has a better UI to boot.

Let’s face it: The big problem with Hootsuite is the price. Not only is the starting price of Hootsuite 4x higher than Sendible, but you also get less for your money.

For example, on Hootsuite, you can only set up approval workflows (a pretty essential feature for teams of any size) on the top-tier Enterprise plan, which costs thousands of dollars a month.

In contrast, Sendible includes approval workflows in its Team plan, which is just $89 per month. 

Likewise, you only get to add 5 team members and connect 50 social accounts in Hootsuite’s Enterprise plan. 

But in Sendible’s White Label+ plan (which is much cheaper), you can connect 100 team members and 300 social profiles. That’s significantly better value.

Of course, it’s not just about cost. I also prefer Sendible’s user interface, particularly when it comes to the social media calendar. Scheduling posts and tweaking them for different social media networks is a breeze.

Sendible comes with a shared content library too—something that’s missing from Hootsuite—to make it easier for you to collaborate with your team. You can store things like visuals, hashtags, etc., and reuse them in your posts.

But above all of that, the thing I prefer most of all about Sendible is that it lets you set up client dashboards. Clients can log in to their dashboard to connect their socials, and preview and approve content. Again, this is something you can’t do on Hootsuite. 

Key features

• Publishing: Plan your social media content and schedule on all your connected profiles in one place.
• Collaboration: Work more efficiently with your team with user roles, approval workflows, and other collaboration features.
• Content curation: Curate post ideas through RSS/blog feeds, Google Alerts, and more
• Engaging & replying: Manage your messages, mentions, and comments across social media from one Priority Inbox.
• Analytics: Gather insights into your performance on social, build custom reports, and share them with your clients and stakeholders.
• White labeling: Set up a white-label version of Sendible on your own domain under your branding, and sell dashboard access to your clients.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start from $29/month, save 15% with yearly billing. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

Read our Sendible review.

#2 – SocialBee

SocialBee is the best Hootsuite alternative for social media publishing thanks to its cutting-edge AI and powerful scheduling features.

SocialBee’s still an all-in-one social media management tool, so it comes with most of the same features you get with Hootsuite, including content creation, inbox management, analytics and reporting, team collaboration, etc. However, it’s SocialBee’s publishing toolkit that makes it special.

Like Hootsuite, you can use SocialBee to schedule posts to multiple social media platforms at the same time, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, and Pinterest.

However, instead of scheduling posts individually like you do on Hootsuite, you can schedule whole categories of posts at once, which is much quicker.

To save even more time, you can use SocialBee’s advanced Social Media Copilot. It’s an AI tool that takes care of your whole social media strategy from start to finish for you. 

All you have to do is answer some questions about your brand and goals, and the copilot will set up your posting schedule. It’ll create a categorized content plan and generate all the posts you need for months of content in minutes.

Hootsuite also comes with its own AI, OwlyWriter, but isn’t nearly as sophisticated. And it can only really generate captions and come up with ideas—it can’t plan your categories and schedule posts like SocialBee.

Key features

• Scheduling: Auto-publish social media posts to all connected accounts and queue up content categories for hands-off scheduling.
• Social Media Copilot: Automatically plan your entire social media strategy end-to-end with advanced AI.
• Post recycling and expiration: Have Sendible automatically re-queue evergreen content after it’s been published, or delete it after a set amount of days/shares.
• Other SMM tools: Unified social inbox, analytics, reporting, content creation, and collaboration tools.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start from $29/month, save 15% with yearly billing. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

Read our SocialBee review.

#3 – Pallyy

Pallyy is the best budget Hootsuite alternative. It’s ridiculously affordable and easy to use, making it a better choice for creators and small businesses.

Pallyy can’t do everything Hootsuite can do, but it comes pretty close.

Its core feature is its scheduling tool, which you can use to plan and auto-publish posts to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, Pinterest, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Google Business Profile, just like you can on Hootsuite.

You can view all your scheduled posts in Pallyy’s content calendar, which I much prefer.

Hootsuite’s calendar is drag and drop, but only in weekly view, and you can only see your post visuals in weekly view too. In contrast, Pallyy lets you drag and drop and see post visuals in monthly view too, which makes it much easier to get a birds-eye view of your schedule.

I also love that Pallyy’s content calendar is integrated with its media library (a feature missing on Hootsuite), so scheduling a post is as easy as dragging an image/video onto the right date in the calendar and adding a caption.

Aside from the scheduling calendar, Pallyy also comes with an inbox where you can manage and reply to all your comments, DMs, and mentions. Plus, an Instagram feed planner, analytics and reporting, and its own link-in-bio page builder tool.

The biggest thing Pallyy’s missing is a social listening tool, so you can’t monitor brand or keyword mentions like you can on Hootsuite. There are a few other features Hootsuite has that Pallyy doesn’t besides that, but that’s the main one.

Key features

• Scheduling: Plan, schedule, and auto-publish posts to all your social media profiles from one place, and manage everything in a visually rich content calendar.
• Social media inbox: Manage all your social conversations in one unified inbox—reply to comments and mentions on Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and more.
• Analytics: Track reach, growth, and engagement metrics, and create beautiful custom reports to showcase your data.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Free plan available. Pallyy Premium costs $18/month, save 10% with yearly billing.

Read our Pallyy review.

#4 – Metricool

If you’re looking for a free alternative to Hootsuite, try Metricool. Its free plan is one of the best on the market and it also offers better analytics.

You can only use Hootsuite free for the first 30 days, but Metricool’s free plan is free for life. With it, you can plan and schedule up to 50 social media posts per month.

That’s probably not going to be enough for serious social media managers, but for casual users who just want to post a couple of times a week on a few different profiles, it does the job. And if you need more, you can always upgrade to one of the paid plans. They’re super affordable at a fraction of the cost of Hootsuite.

You can also create a link-in-bio page for free with Metricool’s SmartLinks tool. And what’s cool is SmartLinks integrates with Hootsuite’s post composer, so you can create and schedule posts to be published to your socials and added to your bio link page at the same time.

Posts can be scheduled individually the same way you would on Hootsuite, or added to ‘autolists’. I find that the latter is a much more efficient way to schedule as it allows you to set a recurring publishing schedule, then queue up multiple posts at once.

Like Hootsuite, Metricool also calculates the best time to post for you. However, unlike Hootsuite, Metricool displays the best time and days to post directly on the color-coded content calendar, which I much prefer.

Metricool’s analytics are even better than Hootsuite’s. Not only can you track all the important metrics (reach, growth, engagement, etc.) for all your socials, but you can also research your competitors, analyze influencers, import data into Google’s Looker Studio, and more.

Key features

• Publishing: Create, schedule, and publish social media posts to all the main networks.
• Autolists: Group created posts together into lists and queue them up for publishing according to your schedule.
• SmartLinks: Publish your own link-in-bio landing page and add it to your social profiles.
• Analytics: Measure and analyze your performance on social media, as well as your competitors. 

Pros and cons

Pricing

Free plan available. Paid plans start from $22/month, or $18/month when you pay yearly.

Read our Metricool review.

#5 – ContentStudio

ContentStudio is the best Hootsuite alternative for content marketers. It’s very powerful, with lots of cutting-edge features that you don’t get on Hootsuite.

There are a few reasons why ContentStudio is a much better solution than Hootsuite for content marketers.

First off, you can use it to compose, schedule, and publish both social media posts and blog posts from the same place, whereas Hootsuite is only for social.

Secondly, content marketers often want to promote their branded content from other channels (e.g. their blog posts or YouTube videos) on social, and ContentStudio is loaded with automation recipes to help with precisely that. 

For example, you can use automations to automatically share RSS feeds or article links on social media using smart rules and filters. Plus, automatically recycle your evergreen content, share videos on your blog and social media, and more.

ContentStudio is also far better than Hootsuite when it comes to content curation. Their Discovery tool allows you to easily find top-performing, niche-relevant content from across the web and compile it into custom feeds. Plus, identify the leading influencers in your space.

The Discover tool is seamlessly integrated into the post Composer too. As you create and schedule posts, you can search for content suggestions and drag and drop them into the composer to share. You also get ‘best time to post’ suggestions and an AI caption writing tool in the post Composer, just like Hootsuite.

You can manage your scheduled posts in ContentStudio’s content calendar. But unlike Hootsuite, you can switch between different views: the default calendar view, list view, or feed preview view. It’s also shareable, making it easy to collaborate with your team.

Key features

• Composer: Create and schedule social media posts and blog posts in the post Composer.
• Automations: Use pre-made automation recipes to auto-fill your social media profiles and blogs with content.
• Planner: Manage all your scheduled posts in a drag-and-drop, multi-view calendar.
• Discover: Research the best influencers and top content in your niche from across the web and share it with your audience.
• Inbox: Manage your conversations in a unified social inbox, assign conversations to team members, and use canned responses to automate replies.
• Chatbot: Ask the built-in, GPT-like chatbot anything, or prompt it to generate ideas and content for you.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start from $25/month, save 20% with yearly billing. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

#6 – Iconosquare

Iconosquare is a good alternative to Hootsuite if analytics are your top priority. It has one of the best analytics dashboards we’ve seen, plus other tools for social media publishing, listening, and replying.

I found Iconosquare’s user interface much easier to work with than Hootsuite. In particular, the customizable analytics dashboard is fantastic. It lets you choose which metrics to display out of 100+ options.

Reporting is also super easy. Just select the profiles you want to report on, choose a custom time frame, and drag and drop the metrics you want to display. Then, export them as PDFs or PPT files, or schedule them for automated email delivery.

The publishing workflow is solid too. Unlike Hootsuite, Iconosquare gives you a media library on all plans. So you just upload your photos etc to the library, then drag them onto the calendar to schedule posts. 

Next, click on any post in the calendar to edit the caption as needed, and choose whether you want to crosspost it to other social media platforms on the next page. Easy!

Another thing I like about Iconosquare is its flexible pricing plans. You can choose how many social profiles you want to manage and the price adjusts accordingly. In contrast, Hootsuite gives you a set amount of social profiles on each plan, so you can end up paying for allowances you don’t need.

Iconosquare doesn’t do feature-gating like Hootsuite either. You get unlimited access to every feature no matter which plan you sign up for, whereas, with Hootsuite, essential features like a content/asset library, custom user roles, and approval workflows are locked behind higher-priced plans

Just keep in mind that Iconosquare only integrates Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and TikTok. Unfortunately, it doesn’t yet support YouTube or Pinterest like Hootsuite.

Key features

• Analytics and reporting: Build your own custom analytics dashboard and beautiful reports with 100+ metrics.
• Conversations: View and reply to all your comments and mentions across Instagram and Facebook in one place.
• Publishing: Set your social media content to be auto-published at the time of your choice.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start at $59/month, save up to 22% with yearly billing. 14-day free trial available.

Read our Iconosquare review.

#7 – Publer

Publer is another solid Hootsuite alternative with tools for creating, scheduling and analyzing social media posts.

Publer works with most of the same platforms that Hootsuite does, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, and YouTube. Plus, two more that Hootsuite doesn’t support: Telegram and Mastodon.

Publer’s publishing tools are just as good if not better than Hootsuite’s. You can easily schedule posts through the interactive content calendar with displayed social media holidays. Plus, schedule in bulk to save time.

Publer’s AI Assist is like Hootsuite’s Owlywriter. You can use it to generate content like captions or post ideas. It can even respond to comments in the built-in social inbox, which is pretty neat.

Another thing I like about Publer is that, unlike Hootsuite, it lets you organize social accounts into different workspaces. So if you’re a social media manager or marketing agency that works with a bunch of different brands, you can keep them all in separate dashboards.

Key features

• Publishing: Schedule posts to all your favorite social networks and manage them in a calendar view.
• Workspaces: Manage your socials more effectively by organizing accounts into separate workspaces.
• Link in bio: Create an IG-style link-in-bio landing page, publish it, and add it to your social bios.
• AI Assist: Generate content using an AI chatbot tool powered by GPT-4.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Free plan available. Paid plans start from $12/month, save 20% with yearly billing

Read our Publer review.

#8 – Later

Later is another all-in-one platform that comes with most of the tools you need to manage your social media presence, at a much lower starting price than Hootsuite.

Later’s feature set includes publishing/scheduling tools, a bio link page builder (Linkin.bio), content creation tools, and an AI caption writer.

It supports Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and TikTok. The only platform that it doesn’t support but Hootsuite does is YouTube.

My favorite thing about Later is its Creator Database. This is something you don’t get with Hootsuite, but it’s really useful for both creators and brands who are looking for influencer marketing partnership opportunities.

Influencers can join the creator database to get discovered by brands, and brands can browse it to find influencers in their target niche. You can use Later to build your own custom media kit to add to your creator database profile and provide extra details about things like your analytics, past collaborations, and rates.

Key features

• Publisher: Create and schedule posts and Later will automatically publish them to your social feeds.
• Linkin.bio: Build and customize a micro landing page with all your links and drive traffic from Instagram, TikTok, and beyond.
• Content creation: Use the AI writer to generate captions, the hashtag suggestions tool to search for and add relevant, and media integrations to source visuals for your posts.
• Creator Database: Find brand collab opportunities and monetize your audience.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start at $25/month, get 4 months free when you pay yearly. 14-day free trial available.

#9 – Vista Social

Vista Social is another all-in-one platform like Hootsuite that comes with social media publishing tools, a unified inbox, collaboration features, and more.

One thing Vista Social can do that Hootsuite can’t is schedule posts to Reddit (as well as all the usual platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, etc). So if Reddit is one of the channels you focus on, it might be the right alternative.

Its scheduling capabilities are better than Hootsuite’s too. You can schedule posts individually or publish content queues. Plus, schedule the first like and up to 10 post comments.

The Smart Inbox collates messages and comments from all your connected social media accounts and combines them into a single stream of conversations, making it easy to monitor all communications and reply quickly.

If you’re working as part of a team, you can create internal notes, assign tasks to specific users, and more.

Aside from its social media toolkit, Vista Social is also one of the only platforms on this list to come with a review management tool. You can use it to monitor, manage, and respond to reviews from places like Facebook, Tripadvisor, Yelp, etc. 

You can get review management with Hootsuite too, but only if you sign up to the Enterprise plan and purchase an add-on, which is eye-wateringly expensive.  

Key features

• Publishing: Curate and create social media content and schedule it to be shared to all your connected social accounts.
• Smart Inbox: Gather messages from all your socials in one place, reply to them, and assign conversations to team members.
• Social listening and analytics: Analyze your social media performance and listen in to conversations about your brand.
• Review management: Manage your brand reputation by monitoring and replying to reviews from across the web.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start from $15/month, save up to 20% with yearly billing. 14-day free trial available.

#10 – Crowdfire

Crowdfire is another more cost-effective alternative to Hootsuite. It consists of four separate social media tools: Discover, Publish, Mentions, and Analytics.

I like Crowdfire’s Discover tool the most. It’s like Hootsuite’s content discovery streams, but much better. You just choose some topics that are relevant to your audience, and Crowdfire will recommend articles and images from around the web, which you can then share in social media posts in a couple of clicks.

Its Publish tool is great too. Like Hootsuite, you can use it to compose, schedule, and publish social media posts at the recommended best times or times chosen by you. You can schedule to multiple platforms at once, and automatically customize them for each network, which is a huge time-saver. 

I also like the fact that you can use RSS feeds to automatically share new content on your blog, YouTube channel, or Shopify store as social media posts.

That said, Crowdfire does limit the number of posts you can schedule each month (10 – 800 depending on your plan), which is a bit of a bummer.

The Mentions tool is essentially a team inbox, where you can manage and reply to all your social media mentions, comments, and messages. What’s really cool is you can attach images, videos, and gifs to your replies—something I don’t think you can do on Hootsuite.

In terms of supported social networks, Crowdfire integrates with Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and TikTok. But unfortunately, it doesn’t integrate with YouTube or TikTok like Hootsuite does. 

Key features

• Discover: Curate top-performing articles and images from around the web.
• Publish: Create and schedule social media posts to all your favorite networks.
• Mentions: Manage and reply to communications and messages from a unified team inbox.
• Analytics: Build reports, gather insights into all your socials, analyze your competitors, and more.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Free plan available. Paid plans start from $9.99/month, discounts available when you pay yearly.

#11 – Loomly

Loomly is another good Hootsuite alternative for teams. Its user interface is a little dated, but it has great team collaboration features.

You can use Loomly to schedule social media posts to Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, TikTok, LinkedIn, and Pinterest—all the same platforms as Hootsuite.

However, unlike Hootsuite, you can also use it to schedule posts to Snapchat and other custom channels via manual publishing. Due to API limitations, it can’t publish your posts directly to Snapchat, but it’ll send you a push notification to remind you to do it at the right time.

As you create and schedule posts, they’re categorized as either ‘draft’, ‘pending approval’, ‘required edits’, ‘approved’, ‘scheduled’, or ‘published’. This structured workflow is ideal for teams and allows you to easily see exactly what stage each post is at at a glance.

My favorite of Loomly’s features, though, is its post optimization tips. As you create posts, they tell you things like if you need to add/remove words to achieve the optimal copy length, as well as tips for date/time scheduling, media suggestions, formatting suggestions, etc. This is something you don’t get on Hootsuite.

Key features

• Publishing: Schedule and auto-publish posts to all the same channels as Hootsuite, plus get push notifications for Snapchat.
• Asset management: Store all your media files in a shared asset library.
• Optimization tips: Get tips to help you optimize your social media posts inside the composer.
• Ads and sponsored posts: Boost posts and set up paid social media campaigns.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start from $42/month, save 25% with yearly billing. Get started with a 15-day free trial.

#12 – Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a pricey Hootsuite alternative with some top-of-the-line features. 

Like Hootsuite, Sprout Social caters to larger businesses and enterprises, and that’s reflected in both its features and pricing.

On the surface, it seems like Sprout Social is more expensive than Hootsuite as its starting price is higher. 

However, you’ve got to consider the fact that you can add unlimited social profiles on Sprout Social’s Professional plan. 

In contrast, Hootsuite’s Team plan (which is in a similar ballpark pricing-wise) only lets you add 20 social accounts, and its Enterprise plan (which is much more expensive) only lets you add 50.

When you factor that in, Sprout Social actually works out to be much better value for money for large teams with dozens of users.

Both platforms offer all the social media management tools you need for scheduling/publishing content, managing engagement, analytics, reporting, social listening, etc.

Plus, Sprout Social also has some extra features you don’t get on Hootsuite, like social CRM that provides information on all your social media customers, a bot builder that lets you create your own branded chatbots, and some of the best social media automation tools on the market.

There are still a few things that Hootsuite does better than Sprout Social, though. For example, I prefer Hootsuite’s best time to post recommendations. It tells you the optimal publishing time for different goals, e.g. for maximum reach, awareness, engagement, or traffic. 

In contrast, Sprout’s ‘best time to post’ recommendations are more generic. They’re not personalized for different goals.

Key features

• Publishing: Easily plan, create, schedule, and deliver social media posts.
• Engagement: Communicate with your customers on social through a unified inbox and CRM.
• Analytics: Best-in-class insights to help you make strategic decisions.
• Listening: Uncover trends and analyze brand awareness and sentiment by monitoring social conversations.
• Influencer marketing: Find influencers and content creators to work with and manage your partnership campaigns.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start from $249/month, save up to 25% with annual billing. Get started with a 30-day free trial.

Read our Sprout Social review.

#13 – NapoleonCat

NapoleonCat is the best Hootsuite alternative for customer service teams. Its social media inbox is second to none and packed with powerful features that you don’t get on Hootsuite.

Like Hootsuite, NapoleonCat takes all your incoming communications across social media and compiles them into one inbox for easy access.

But unlike Hootsuite, it comes with lots of features to make it easier for you to manage and reply to those communications at scale.

My favorite feature is NapoleonCat’s auto-moderation. It can automatically filter and sort through messages to help you stay organized. Plus, it can also automatically delete spam, and even reply to common queries for you through canned responses. 

All that significantly reduces your team’s workload and frees up their time to focus on more complex/important queries.

The built-in social CRM lets you create user profiles for all the people who contact you on social media. You can add internal notes, complete conversation history, and personal contact information for each profile to help give your team all the context they need to provide the best possible service.

In addition to the inbox and CRM, you can also publish/schedule posts in NapoleonCat’s shared content calendar. Plus, analyze your performance with the built-in analytics, and more.

Key features

• Social inbox: Engage with your social media communities and automate conversations with auto-moderation.
• Publishing: Schedule content across platforms in a color-coded shared calendar.
• Analytics and reporting: Measure your social media marketing performance and generate eye-catching reports.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Plans start from $32/month, get 2 months free with yearly billing. 14-day free trial available.

Read our NapoleonCat review.

#14 – Buffer

The last Hootsuite alternative we wanted to talk about is Buffer. It’s another all-in-one platform with all the social media marketing tools you need.

Buffer’s feature set includes a publishing tool, engagement (i.e. inbox management), Start Page (link in bio), analytics, and an AI assistant. That’s most of the same stuff you get on Hootsuite.

Supported social media platforms include Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok. And unlike Hootsuite, it’s one of the few platforms that also lets you schedule content to Mastodon.

When scheduling posts on Buffer, you can either compose and schedule them individually to specific times/dates, or add posts to a content queue and share them according to your set posting schedule.

Unlike Hootsuite, it comes with a generous free plan with no monthly or yearly scheduling limits (though you can only schedule up to 10 posts per social channel at any given time).

Key features

• Publishing: Create and schedule posts individually or set up content queues for streamlined scheduling.
• Engagement: Manage comments and engage with your audience from across social in one simple dashboard.
• Start Page: Build a customizable landing page in minutes and bring all your best content together in one link.

Pros and cons

Pricing

Free plan available. Paid plans start from $6/month, save 2 months with annual billing.

Final thoughts

So, those are our top picks for the best Hootsuite alternatives on the market this year—but which one should you choose? 

It depends on what you’re looking for. You’ll need to weigh up factors like features, pricing, supported social networks, ease of use, etc. to make your decision. 

Most of the Hootsuite alternatives in this list offer free trials, so you can always try a few out for yourself before picking your favorite.

For more all-in-one platforms like Hootsuite, see our roundups of the top social media management platforms and the best social media dashboard tools.

If you’re just looking for an alternative to Hootsuite’s scheduler, check out our roundup of the best social media schedulers. Or for an alternative to Hootsuite’s analytics, check out these social media reporting tools. 

You might also want to check out these interesting social media statistics.

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