14 Community management tools to engage with your audience

Social media marketing involves much more than just posting on social media. It includes content planning, measuring analytics, copywriting and design, and more. Community management is just one piece of the puzzle.

And, just like with every piece of social strategy, your community managers need to leverage a proper social media management tool to see success. To support your marketing team in finding the best options, we’ve put together a list of 14 different community management tools that are perfect for engaging your customer base and building a community.

What is community management?

Community management is the process of engaging customers across digital channels to increase brand loyalty and grow authentic connections with their audience. Creating a brand community is a way to be accessible for your audience through customer service and engaging online content.

It involves social listening, responding to comments, nurturing online forums and communities and more to engage with your audience on a deeper level.

This supports an increase in loyal customers and word-of-mouth marketing, so community management is an essential part of your overall social strategy.

But you can’t do any of this well without the right arsenal of tools. We’ve rounded up a list of tools that support a variety of aspects of community management.

Let’s dive in.

1. Sprout Social

To kick off our list, we’re going to highlight Sprout Social’s community management features. Although Sprout Social is a full-service social media management platform that supports teams in managing several aspects of their social strategies–—from content scheduling to analytics to social listening and more–—our platform also offers social media engagement tools perfect for community management.

Whenever your brand gets a comment, reply or message on any social media platform, you’ll get a notification so your team takes action. Whether it’s a simple response or handling a customer service issue, ensure these comments get to the right members of your team using Sprout Social’s workflow features.

2. NapoleonCat

NapoleonCat is another great community management tool that makes it easier to handle online conversations surrounding your brand. With a social inbox, it’s quick and painless to manage each of your ongoing conversations, whether concerning a customer service issue or engaging with a follower.

This tool also automates set responses to frequently asked questions. This saves your team time that they use to focus on tasks that need more attention, like managing more complex conversations across your brand communities.

3. Brand24

Brand24 is perfect for social listening and reputation management. Staying on top of everything your customers and their connections have to say about your brand is key for ensuring bad experiences don’t spread or get out of hand.

A tool that supports your focus on online reputation is a gamechanger for your marketing team.

Brand24 sends your team instant notifications for online mentions across social media and other online platforms. This ensures they respond to any conversation about your brand, whether it’s positive or negative.

4. Keyhole

Keyhole’s tool gives users access to social mentions across a variety of platforms.

Being a part of these conversations is a great way to improve your brand’s reputation and expand your reach to new audiences. Keep tabs on competitors, influencers, hashtags and more to make sure you engage in any relevant conversation.

Keyhole’s dashboard makes it easy to manage your social listening, but keep in mind that you don’t have access to your social media inboxes with this platform. If you want a community management tool that focuses more on responding to comments and messages, check out another option in this list.

5. Emplifi

Emplifi provides a comprehensive cloud platform that integrates the capabilities of the former Socialbakers tool. It offers a unified solution for managing publishing, community engagement, and analytics from a single, centralized dashboard.

The platform delivers AI-driven insights, competitive benchmarking, and influencer discovery to inform strategy. Its integrated approach combines social media management with customer care and commerce functionalities, giving teams the tools for setting up workflows that connect social activities directly to business goals.

6. X Pro

X Pro, formerly known as Tweetdeck, is the native management dashboard for the X platform. Its column-based interface allows power users to monitor multiple timelines, lists, searches, and mentions in real-time, making it an essential tool for active community management and trend-spotting on the platform.

With X Pro, you’ll manage multiple accounts and track fast-moving conversations.

This makes it the go-to tool for managing live events like X chats, ensuring you engage with your community without missing a beat.

7. Circle

Circle is a community platform that empowers brands to build their own branded hub for customers and fans. Instead of managing a group on a social platform, Circle allows you to create a dedicated space with discussion forums, live events, exclusive content, and courses.

This approach gives you full control over your community, free from algorithmic noise and ads. It’s designed to foster authentic connections and turn your audience into a loyal brand ecosystem, connecting engagement directly to business objectives like retention and revenue.

8. Sociality.io

Sociality.io is another option for both overall social media management and community management. They offer both social listening and engagement features that allow you to monitor certain brand mentions and keywords online while also having a birds-eye view of all ongoing communications.

Also, Sociality.io offers competitor analysis reports so you have an idea of what your competitors are talking about online and are always in the same spaces to reach a wider audience.

9. Taggbox

Sometimes your community management strategy involves specific underlying tactics, like user-generated content. A tool that supports you in collecting and sharing user-generated content on social media for your brand is a massive time saver, and that’s where a tool like Taggbox comes in.

It also supports you in getting permission and rights to publish UGC from the original creators, ensuring your brand reputation stays intact.

UGC is great for e-commerce, retail and hospitality brands, so if you’re on a marketing team promoting one of these industries, add Taggbox to your marketing toolbox.

10. Khoros

Khoros is an enterprise-level platform designed for brands that want to build and manage their own branded community forums. It moves beyond social media feeds to create a space for peer-to-peer support, knowledge sharing and ideation, supporting you in fostering a dedicated community hub.

The platform provides advanced digital care tools, including intelligent queueing, SLAs and routing to manage high volumes of customer interactions.

With a built-in knowledge base and robust analytics, you’ll measure case deflection and track community health.

Khoros also offers enterprise-grade governance and integrates with major CRM and ITSM systems like Salesforce and ServiceNow.

11. Sprinklr

Sprinklr offers a unified customer experience management (CXM) platform for large organizations. It brings social media, messaging apps and online reviews into a single environment, allowing enterprise teams to manage engagement and care at scale.

With AI-powered listening and sentiment analysis, Sprinklr supports you in monitoring brand health and ensuring response quality.

12. Hivebrite

Hivebrite is a community management platform that empowers brands to create fully-branded, owned online communities. It supports you in converting your social media audience into a dedicated member ecosystem, giving you direct control over the user experience and data.

You’ll also leverage monetization options like membership tiers and sponsorships.

Unlike tools focused on social feeds, Hivebrite allows you to segment your members and analyze engagement, retention and revenue within your own private portal.

13. Agorapulse

Agorapulse is a community management tool well-suited for small to mid-market businesses. It provides a balanced set of features, combining a user-friendly unified social inbox with practical reporting to support teams in managing engagement efficiently.

The platform includes a Social CRM that builds profiles of your engaged followers, along with inbox rules and saved replies to speed up response times. A key feature is its built-in ROI reporting, which uses UTM tracking to connect social media activity to website traffic and conversions. It also offers content scheduling queues and ad comment moderation for Meta platforms.

14. Reputation

Reputation expands the definition of community management by integrating online reviews and location-based feedback with social engagement. This makes it a valuable tool for multi-location brands in industries like retail, healthcare and hospitality.

With Reputation, you’ll monitor and engage in the local conversations that directly impact customer trust and purchasing decisions.

Start your community management transformation

Choosing the right community management tools is crucial for effectively engaging your audience, managing conversations and building authentic brand connections. A comprehensive platform can streamline workflows, unify your social inbox and provide the analytics needed to prove your impact.

If you’re ready to see how an all-in-one tool can elevate your strategy, start your free 30-day trial of Sprout Social today.

Community management tool FAQs

What is a community management tool?

A community management tool that helps you engage with customers across digital channels to increase brand loyalty and grow authentic connections with their audience. Community management tools usually include social listening, responding to comments, nurturing online forums and communities and more to engage with your audience on a deeper level.