We have composed a comparison of two full-featured social media management tools: Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite.
These two products support different social networks, choosing between two isn’t as simple as picking the one with the most features.
Both tools will assist you in scheduling social media posts, responding to messages, and analyzing your social audiences, but one is better than the other.
That's why it would be best to examine how each software performs its functions to determine the benefits of one over the other.
Isik Onal
Before Beginning: Why Circleboom Publish is a better alternative to both?
Circleboom Publish is the young blood to the social media management tools market, intending to assist all businesses, notably entrepreneurs, SMBs, and small businesses, in managing their social media accounts to increase traffic and promote brand awareness, focusing on content creation, content curation and multi-platform social scheduling for Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn and Google My Business!
- Circleboom Publisher is simple yet efficient and understandable for everyone out there.
- It embraces the intuitive interface approach to smooth all steps in the tool.
- It is new, young and modern both in software and user interface.
- Offers post scheduling, content design (built-in Canva tool), content curation (article & blog curator) and post automation to multiple social media platforms.
The tool has intuitive designs by keeping things basic. And offered features are designed to use without any training, and they will understand what to do as soon as they log in.
We create the appropriate feature sets for the majority of social media users. At the end of the day, you only pay for what you truly need!
Without leaving the Circleboom dashboard, it is possible to design on Canva and publish your content right away or scheduler for a future date & time.
Circleboom Publish does not add complex features that most users aren’t using but are paying for. Thus, it will not offer advanced features that most users aren’t using but are subscribing for.
Look at the plans, select the features you will practically use every day, and choose your plan.
Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite (2021)
Sprout Social was founded in 2010 to allow businesses and customers to communicate more freely. Sprout Social was created to provide businesses with a variety of features while maintaining a pleasant user experience.
BrightKit, the forerunner to Hootsuite, was created in 2008. The goal here was to help businesses to manage their social media pages in one place. BrightKit evolved into Hootsuite, which now has 18 million users and over 1,400 staff.
Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite: Key Features
Looking at must-have features, bulk scheduling, optimization of send times applies to both of them. Social CRM and Chatbots put Sprout Social one step ahead in Sprout social vs. Hootsuite.
- Sprout Social would be a good choice for midsize to larger firms with several social accounts per platform and multiple users within a social media management team with social network management, publishing, and reporting features. Sprout Social appeals to many organizations and users, although its cost excludes others, as we’ll discuss later.
- Hootsuite is a solid all-around social media management tool for organizations and individuals of all types because of its multitude of features, integrations, publishing options, and even cost. The cost of Hootsuite is the most compelling of these features.
Let’s highlight some of the aspects of Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite to make the comparison easier.
For the Sprout Social,
- A wide range of in-depth reporting options is available.
- Tools for effective collaboration and automation
- Workflow tools for teams
- Templates for insightful reporting-
- Automation tools for social listening
For the Hootsuite,
- Creating a schedule for social media updates
- Management of the content curation team
- 150+ apps in the Hootsuite app store
- A good amount of integrations library
Kevin O. Frank
Publishing and scheduling social media posts
The social media publishing capabilities of these two platforms are nearly identical. You can compose a message from the main feed panel, select which account it originates from, attach photos, shorten links, and select an intended audience.
Both platforms also let you keep track of incoming information like social mentions, shares, and tweets. This feature aids social media engagement, which is important for businesses. Sprout Social offers a social inbox where you can keep track of everything. Hootsuite, on the other hand, maintains each feed separately.
In terms of social media publishing, Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite
- With Sprout Social, you can include the first comment to your Instagram post in addition to the image. It’s quite important to accomplish this simultaneously because people frequently add more hashtags to make the material more discoverable.
- The ability to respond to all content from the dashboard, whether or not it was submitted through Hootsuite. This is particularly beneficial if you want to manage your social media from one location.
These can be platform-specific features that can make or break deals for some users with little nuances.
Analytics
This is quite beneficial. You can access data on every connected social media site with Hootsuite’s analytics, even if you didn’t post the content via Hootsuite. However, you’ll only get traffic statistics for links shared on Hootsuite.
Sprout Social offers various reports for each platform, allowing you to investigate what’s going on with business pages and groups. Also, monitoring the tags and keywords can be beneficial. These assist you in remembering crucial business terminology so that you can reply to and communicate with your audience.
Sprout Social provides additional analytics because it was created to serve agencies and enterprises. For ordinary users, though, this social listening can be unnecessary and sometimes overwhelming if you are not growing on the side of preparing social media analytics reports for your clients or so.
Integrations
Sprout Social integrates with Google Analytics, Zendesk, and UserVoice, among other tools, to help you improve your social media analytics and customer service.
However, Hootsuite has its app catalog with hundreds of integrations (including Adobe and Slack, which Sprout Social does not offer).
Zeynep Morelli
Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite: Pricing
Sprout Social will hit you in the wallet, no need to deny that.
Sprout Social has 3 tiers of pricing:
- The standard plan asks for $89 per user/month (billed annually) or $99 month-to-month
- The Professional Plan asks for $149 per user/month (billed annually) or $169 month-to-month
- The advanced plan asks for $249 per user/month (billed annually) or $279 month-to-month
There is no free edition of Sprout Social; however, it does offer a 30-day free trial. The standard plan includes 5 social media profiles; however, if you require more social media profiles, competitor social media reports, or assistance identifying ideal send times for social media, you will need to pay more.
Hootsuite can be more feasible with pricing at the beginning. So, Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite pricing winner definitely will be Hootsuite.
Hootsuite has 5 tiers of pricing:
- Free Plan(which is valuable) - 3 social profiles for 1 user and 30 posts monthly
- Professional Plan: $29 per month: 10 social profiles offered for 1 user with unlimited post scheduling.
- Team Plan: $129/month: 20 social profiles and unlimited scheduling.
- Business Plan - $599/month: 35 social profiles comes with unlimited scheduling and 10 different users along with advanced features
- Enterprise Plan: Custom pricing for client
Even though Hootsuite pricing starts lower when you need other features – in some way, you will need it inevitably; the price goes up exponentially.
Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite: Ease of Use
Any genuine social media management tool will bring together postings from several social media platforms. However, the way the interface presents the workflow and navigates the user has a big impact on usability. Although both Hootsuite and Sprout Social gather posts in a feed, each platform shows the feed differs significantly.
Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite Dashboards
Hootsuite allows users to create adjacent streams on a single interface and tailor the information displayed in each feed, such as filtering and displaying Facebook posts or new tweets.
It can be preferred by those who want to see everything at sight and keep their mind quite active. It may seem anxiety triggering for those opting for a lean page view due to its to-do-list methodology.
Sprout Social applies a different method in favor of aggregating postings into a single feed. By selecting and deselecting filters, you may tailor the data in the feed. You can also switch to a network-specific viewing (for instance, everything from Facebook) with a single click.
Yet, this aggregated view – which seems complicated with too many graphics, can scare some people and cause them to act reluctantly when discovering the software for the first time.
While Hootsuite delivers a satisfactory experience for most users, Sprout Social shines in ease of use for larger groups and enterprises, making it the superior business application.
Zeynep Morelli
Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite: What could better
What could be better for Sprout Social:
- Sprout Social prices quickly rise for large team plans, making it unsuitable for SMEs, freelancers, or solo entrepreneurs.
- Advanced capabilities are only available to premium subscribers, and YouTube integration is limited.
- If you are not a social media agency or type, the overabundance of functionality given for various plans complicates the process of selecting and using the software.
What could be better for Hootsuite:
- Hootsuite has a reputation for being a little out of date. It also has relatively restricted lower-tier packages.
- More effective collaboration and social listening technologies, as well as enhanced automation capabilities, could be developed.
Final Verdict
In the end, the best social networking platform will be determined by your individual requirements. You can try something new if you’re only concerned with cost and don’t require all features, or if you prefer a much intuitive tool for content creation and posting while you would be able to keep your money in your pocket!
We know that Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite debate is an ongoing one. Yet, you don’t have to go for the mainstream options that the market offer. Since Circleboom beats the Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite pricing, its simple-to-use interface and on-demand features will enhance smoother social media management.
If you feel that you need something new and tailored for your needs without a burden on your shoulders, try Circleboom today!
Kevin O. Frank
