As social media becomes more influential and fast-paced, having robust tools with advanced features is increasingly important.

Consider the rise of new AI tools. According to The Sprout Social Index™, 93% of social media practitioners agree that social content has to keep up with online trends and culture. The takeaway? Teams without modern AI-powered features are already falling behind.

Between new platforms and constant innovations, there’s a lot keeping marketers on their toes—and their schedules full. You need the best tool for the job. Hootsuite is a major player in the social media marketing platform space. And whether you want an option with different pricing, more specialized or just want to try something new, we’re here to help you do your research.

Use this list to brush up on Hootsuite alternatives in a few categories to kickstart your search.

What to consider in a Hootsuite alternative

Social teams should regularly evaluate whether their current tools are hitting the mark or if it’s time to try something new. A social team can only be as agile as their tech stack enables them to be.

Whether you’re curious about Hootsuite alternatives or you just want to see what’s out there before you make a decision, it’s always beneficial to see what other platforms have to offer.

Here are some key areas to look for when researching new tools for your team.

User interface and ease of use

Choosing a solution with a straightforward, clean interface can make a significant difference in your team’s day-to-day work. A well-designed user experience can minimize the learning curve for new team members and reduce the time spent on routine tasks. Look for a platform that simplifies workflows, from publishing content to responding to customer messages.

Consider if the platform’s layout is intuitive and if it helps you quickly find what you need. Is the social media calendar easy to navigate? Can you quickly find your analytics reports? A platform that is easy to use and visually organized will help your team work more efficiently and keep them focused on what matters—your social strategy.

Advanced analytics and actionable intelligence

Measuring your social media performance is no longer just about tracking likes and comments. A modern social media solution should provide advanced analytics that go beyond vanity metrics, offering deep insights into audience behavior, campaign performance and content effectiveness. Look for a platform that can transform your data into actionable intelligence.

The best platforms offer a holistic view of your efforts, helping you understand how social media contributes to your business goals. Look for robust social media reporting capabilities that can be easily customized and shared with stakeholders. You should be able to benchmark against competitors, identify key trends and prove the value of your social media strategy with clear, easy-to-understand data visualizations and reports.

Team collaboration and scalability

As your team and brand grow, your social media tools need to grow with you. A great platform should not only support your current needs but also provide the features necessary to scale your efforts without adding complexity. Team collaboration features are especially important for ensuring a smooth workflow, preventing mistakes and maintaining a consistent brand voice.

Look for a solution that offers features like approval workflows, custom user permissions and real-time activity tracking within the platform. These features help streamline communication and ensure that content is reviewed and approved efficiently. The platform should be flexible enough to accommodate different team sizes and roles, so you can easily add new members and grant them the appropriate level of access. A scalable tool will help you manage an increasing volume of content, a larger number of social profiles and more complex campaigns without a hitch.

Let’s dive into the full list.

1. Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a stand-out all-in-one platform built for businesses ready to evolve their social strategy. As a business matures, its needs shift from basic task management to a more sophisticated, data-driven approach. Sprout Social is purpose-built to meet these evolving demands, providing a solution that simplifies complex workflows and delivers actionable intelligence.

Premium analytics for strategic decision-making

Likes and shares measure the present. Conversations and communities build the future. Sprout Social’s premium analytics and reporting capabilities go beyond surface-level metrics, delivering the in-depth, actionable insights needed to prove social media’s value to leadership. Our suite of powerful analytics tools helps you understand your audience, content and campaign performance, transforming complex data into clear, easy-to-understand visualizations.

Sprout Social interface of premium analytics cross-network performance report
  • Standard and customizable reports: Generate presentation-ready reports tailored to your stakeholders, moving beyond simply reporting on what happened to strategically planning what to do next.
  • Competitor benchmarking: Easily benchmark your performance against competitors to see how you stack up.
  • Integrated intelligence: Connect social performance to business outcomes with capabilities like native Google Analytics reports, providing a full view of the customer journey and social media ROI.

Refined publishing and AI-powered workflows

If you’re facing workflow hiccups, you’re losing precious time. Automation frees you up to focus on strategy—and strategy is what drives results. Sprout’s publishing tools are designed to streamline your content creation process and enhance your strategic options. You can efficiently plan and schedule posts from a centralized calendar, with capabilities that simplify collaboration and reporting.

Interface of Sprout Social's publishing tool
  • Seamless collaboration: Use in-calendar notes, content placeholders and drag-and-drop functionality to facilitate team and stakeholder reviews.
  • AI-powered assistance: Our AI tools are deeply embedded into the creative workflow, with tools that generate captions with different tones and provide Optimal Send Times based on 16 weeks of audience data.
  • Enhanced publishing capabilities: The platform offers more granular control, including the ability to tag individuals and products in Instagram images. We also provide tools like our SproutLink link-in-bio tool and URL tracking to measure success.

Intuitive design for collaboration

Your audience is talking. Let’s make sure they’re heard.

Sprout’s user interface is consistently praised for being clean, intuitive and functionally ergonomic. This design philosophy ensures a smooth learning curve for new team members, fostering faster productivity and reduced risk of human error. Our platform is built for team collaboration and scalability, offering structured, enterprise-grade workflows that are essential for growing and larger brands.

Interface of Sprout Social's Smart Inbox
  • Approval workflows: Manage content with a multi-level approval system to ensure every post aligns with brand standards.
  • Custom user permissions: Grant the appropriate level of access to each team member. This is particularly useful for agencies or large teams with defined roles.
  • Unified inbox: Our centralized inbox and structured case management system help transform a growing team into a well-coordinated operation, ensuring the right person handles the right conversation.

Sprout is a strategic investment for businesses looking to mature their social media operations. Its robust analytics and scalable collaboration tools provide a clear path to improved efficiency, reduced risk and a measurable return on investment.

Additional strengths

Sprout Social also offers solutions for:

  • social listening, with custom alerts and granular sentiment analysis to get ahead of crises.
  • Our customer service capabilities enable smooth team collaboration and our Salesforce and Zendesk integrations give you a 360-degree view of your customer journey.
  • We also provide a complete influencer marketing solution to help you find authentic creators, manage relationships and measure the success of your partnerships.

Ready to see the difference Sprout Social can make? Request a demo today.

Schedule a demo

2. Agorapulse

While many platforms offer scheduling and analytics, Agorapulse stands out with its emphasis on community management. Its core differentiator is the “Social Inbox,” a unified stream that pulls in all comments, mentions, messages and reviews from connected profiles into one place. This is valuable for brands and agencies that need to be highly responsive to their audiences.

Agorapulse social inbox feature page

Agorapulse also provides collaboration tools to streamline workflows for teams of any size. Marketers can easily assign conversations to specific team members, add internal notes and bookmark important messages for follow-up. This is particularly useful for agencies or larger teams with defined roles, as it ensures that the right person handles the right conversation, promoting accountability and a consistent brand voice.

Beyond engagement, Agorapulse offers comprehensive features for social listening and reporting. Its social listening tools allow marketers to monitor keywords and hashtags, helping them discover what people are saying about their brand, industry and competitors. The reporting capabilities provide the ability to generate customized, white-label reports that can be easily shared with stakeholders.

Agorapulse is a suitable alternative for marketers who want to move beyond basic scheduling and need to expand to more community management and engagement. Its social inbox, combined with collaboration tools and detailed reporting, makes it a good option for teams that are focused on building and nurturing a responsive and engaged community around their brand.

3. Buffer

For teams or solopreneurs who prioritize a clean, intuitive interface and a straightforward approach to social media publishing and analytics, Buffer is a fitting alternative. Its user-friendly dashboard is a significant departure from more complex, feature-heavy platforms, making it a good choice for those who are new to social media management or simply want a tool with a low learning curve.

Buffer’s content scheduling and minimalist workflow are particularly beneficial for brands that operate with a consistent content cadence and need a simple, reliable way to get posts out on time.

UI of Buffer's publishing tool

The platform also offers a bulk upload feature, which allows users to schedule hundreds of posts at once by importing a CSV file, saving time for marketers who plan their content in spreadsheets.

Buffer also allows for unlimited collaborators and offers intuitive review and approval workflows, which can be a needed advantage for agencies or teams where multiple people are involved in content creation and approval. The platform also provides essential analytics, including insights into post performance, audience demographics and the best times to post for each channel, helping with data-driven decisions.

Another unique feature of Buffer is its “Start Page” builder, which allows users to create a simple, customizable landing page directly within the platform. This tool is useful for small businesses and creators who need a simple, centralized link-in-bio to showcase their offerings or website.

In essence, Buffer is an alternative for those who value simplicity, ease of use and efficient content publishing. It’s built for small businesses, creators and teams that need a tool to handle the core tasks of social media management without the added complexity of features they may not use.

4. SocialPilot

When the core need is to manage a high volume of social media accounts or multiple brands with a single, comprehensive tool, SocialPilot stands out as an option. This platform is especially well-suited for social media marketing agencies, freelancers and businesses that need a robust solution for a diverse portfolio of clients or brands.

A key differentiator for SocialPilot is its extensive support for a wide range of social networks. It connects with all major social media platforms, including Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, Pinterest and Google Business Profile, making it a versatile tool for managing a broad online presence. The platform’s ability to handle multi-account management is a significant advantage, offering sophisticated content scheduling and a centralized dashboard to manage all accounts in one place, which helps to streamline workflows and reduce the chaos of juggling multiple native applications.

SocialPilot also excels in team collaboration and approval workflows. It offers custom user roles and permissions, ensuring that team members and clients have appropriate level of access. The platform allows for collaborators to leave comments on drafts for feedback and approval, fostering a seamless co-creation process. For agencies, this feature is crucial for maintaining transparency and accountability with clients.

SocialPilot homepage showing a woman smiling with several social media icons hovering above her head and text on the side that reads "the social media scheduler that always saves you time"

SocialPilot also provides a suite of features for content creation and engagement. The platform includes an AI assistant that can generate unique content ideas, captions and hashtags and even allows users to select a specific tone for the content. The “Social Inbox” is another notable feature that consolidates comments and messages from all connected platforms into a single dashboard, which is a major time-saver for teams that need to manage customer interactions and build a strong community.

In short, SocialPilot is a good alternative for marketers who manage multiple brands or need a solution that streamlines content creation, scheduling and team collaboration. Its comprehensive feature set is designed to help agencies and businesses maintain a consistent presence and manage a high volume of work.

Additionally, SocialPilot has recently integrated AI assistance for content creation and expanded into review management, allowing users to monitor and respond to reviews on platforms like Google Business and Facebook.

5. Later

For brands where visual content is at the heart of their social media strategy—especially on platforms like Instagram and TikTok—Later is a compelling alternative. This platform was built with a visual-first approach and its features are uniquely tailored to help marketers plan and execute visual campaigns.

Later’s standout feature is its Visual Planner, designed with a visual-first approach. This tool allows marketers to preview and rearrange upcoming posts on a visual grid, which is helpful for curating a cohesive and aesthetically pleasing Instagram feed. For brands in fashion, food, travel or any industry that relies on a strong visual identity, this feature provides a level of control and foresight that is essential for maintaining brand consistency.

interface of Later's visual scheduler

Later also focuses on helping brands connect with and leverage the creator economy. The platform offers tools for managing creator and brand collaborations and its integration with a vast database of creators can help marketers discover new partners and run influencer campaigns directly within the app. It also includes features for searching and sharing user-generated content (UGC), which is a way for brands to build community and showcase authentic content from their audience.

In terms of publishing, Later provides the ability to auto-publish single-image posts, carousels and Reels on Instagram, as well as videos on TikTok. The platform also offers a best times to post feature that provides recommendations for Instagram and TikTok based on a brand’s specific audience engagement patterns.

Later is an alternative for brands that have a visual-first strategy and want a tool that not only simplifies scheduling but also helps them with the unique challenges of visual content planning. It’s a tool that helps marketers transform their social media feeds into a cohesive visual story.

5. Statusbrew

For large, distributed teams that require strict governance and compliance, Statusbrew is a security-first Hootsuite alternative. The platform is built for enterprise-level organizations where brand safety, auditability and secure approval workflows are non-negotiable. It provides the controls necessary for marketing, legal and customer care leaders to manage risk across dozens of social profiles.

Statusbrew’s core strength lies in its enterprise-grade governance features. You can configure granular user roles, define specific permissions and build multi-step approval workflows that ensure all content is vetted before it goes live. This is essential for regulated industries or brands with complex stakeholder review processes, as it creates a clear audit trail for every action taken within the platform.

Statusbrew Enterprise governance dashboard

The platform also includes a unified engagement inbox designed for high-volume customer care. Features like automatic conversation assignment, collision detection to prevent duplicate replies and service-level agreement (SLA) rules help teams triage and respond to inquiries faster. This transforms the inbox from a simple comment stream into a structured customer service hub.

Security is reinforced with features like single sign-on (SSO/SAML) integration, comprehensive audit logs and activity tracking. Statusbrew also allows teams to manage paid and organic social in one place, with workflows for moderating ad comments and boosting posts on Facebook and Instagram. This provides a more holistic view of social media activities.

In short, Statusbrew is an ideal solution for enterprise and mid-market companies that prioritize governance and security. It offers the depth in approvals, user management and compliance that risk-sensitive brands need to operate safely at scale.

6. Oktopost

Oktopost is a Hootsuite alternative purpose-built for B2B organizations that need to connect their social media efforts directly to business outcomes like leads and revenue. While many platforms focus on engagement metrics, Oktopost prioritizes pipeline impact, making it a strong choice for marketing teams measured on their contribution to sales.

The platform’s key differentiator is its native integration with major CRM and marketing automation platforms. This allows marketers to track how social media campaigns influence leads, opportunities and ultimately, revenue. By connecting social activities to the sales funnel, you can finally prove the ROI of your B2B social strategy with hard data.

Oktopost B2B analytics dashboard

Another core component of Oktopost is its robust employee advocacy solution. The platform makes it easy for employees to share approved company content with their networks through a user-friendly mobile app. Features like gamification encourage participation, while built-in compliance guardrails ensure all shared content remains on-brand.

Given its B2B focus, Oktopost offers advanced capabilities for LinkedIn, including support for Lead Gen Forms and strong UTM governance to ensure consistent tracking. These features are critical for B2B marketers who rely on LinkedIn as a primary channel for generating qualified leads and engaging professional audiences.

Oktopost is the go-to platform for B2B marketing teams focused on lead generation and revenue attribution. Its tight integration with the B2B marketing stack and its powerful employee advocacy tools provide a clear path to demonstrating and amplifying the business impact of social media.

7. Vista Social

Vista Social is a modern Hootsuite alternative designed for SMB and mid-market teams that need sophisticated features without enterprise-level complexity. It stands out by offering advanced capabilities for short-form video and AI-driven content creation, allowing smaller teams to stay agile and capitalize on current trends.

The platform leans heavily into AI assistance to help teams create content faster. Its AI tools can generate captions, brainstorm content ideas and suggest relevant hashtags, which helps overcome creative blocks and scale content production. This is particularly valuable for small teams or agencies managing multiple accounts with limited resources.

Vista Social AI content assistant

A key strength of Vista Social is its robust support for short-form video. The platform allows you to auto-publish content to TikTok and Instagram Reels, a feature not always available in other tools. This direct publishing workflow saves time and allows teams to schedule and manage their video content within the same calendar as their other social posts.

Beyond social media, Vista Social includes review management capabilities. You can monitor and respond to reviews from platforms like Google Business Profile and Yelp directly within its Smart Inbox. This unifies social engagement and local reputation management, providing a more holistic view of your brand’s online presence.

For SMBs and mid-market brands focused on creating timely, relevant content, Vista Social is a compelling option. It combines modern workflows for AI and short-form video with practical reputation management tools at an approachable price point.

8. Metricool

For marketers who need a single source of truth for performance data, Metricool offers a unified analytics dashboard that sets it apart from other Hootsuite alternatives. The platform is designed for teams that want to correlate social media performance with website traffic and paid ad campaigns, all in one place.

Metricool’s main advantage is its ability to pull data from social media platforms, your website or blog and major ad platforms like Meta Ads, Google Ads and TikTok Ads. This provides a holistic view of your digital marketing efforts, allowing you to see how different channels work together and make smarter decisions about budget allocation.

Metricool Unified analytics dashboard

The platform enables you to track ad spend and performance alongside your organic social metrics. Instead of toggling between different ad managers and analytics tools, you can monitor key metrics like impressions, clicks and cost-per-click for all your campaigns within the Metricool dashboard.

In addition to its cross-channel reporting, Metricool offers valuable insights to guide your strategy. Features include competitor benchmarking to see how you stack up against other brands, content heatmaps to identify what resonates with your audience and best-time-to-post recommendations to maximize reach and engagement.

Metricool is a strong choice for data-driven social media managers who need to justify their strategy with comprehensive performance metrics. It provides the analytical layer necessary to connect social media to broader business outcomes without requiring a dedicated business intelligence team.

9. Planable

Planable is a Hootsuite alternative that specializes in content collaboration and approval workflows. It’s an ideal solution for agencies and in-house marketing teams that juggle numerous stakeholders and require a streamlined, error-proof process for getting content reviewed and approved.

The platform’s signature feature is its pixel-perfect post previews. Planable generates mockups that show exactly how a post will look on each social network, including how links will unfurl and how images will be cropped. This eliminates surprises and ensures that what stakeholders approve is exactly what gets published.

Planable Content collaboration and approval view

Collaboration is at the core of the Planable experience. Team members and clients can leave comments directly on the post previews, creating a centralized feedback loop. The platform also supports version history and multi-level approval workflows, allowing you to create separate stages for internal, legal and client reviews.

To reduce friction for external collaborators, Planable offers shareable links that allow stakeholders to view and approve content without needing to create an account or log in. This simple but powerful feature significantly speeds up the review cycle, especially when working with busy clients or executives.

If your team’s biggest bottleneck is the back-and-forth of content approvals, Planable offers a focused solution. By prioritizing the collaboration experience, it helps teams reduce miscommunication, accelerate review cycles and ship content with confidence.

10. Zoho Social

For teams operating within the Zoho ecosystem, Zoho Social is a Hootsuite alternative that offers deep, native alignment with its business suite. It is designed for marketers who need to connect social media engagement directly to leads and pipeline data within Zoho CRM, providing a single, consolidated view of the customer journey.

Zoho Social CRM Integration Dashboard

Its key differentiator is the native Zoho CRM integration, which allows you to create leads and contacts from social interactions and attribute revenue to your social media campaigns. The platform includes a unified Social Inbox for managing conversations, with team collaboration features like assignments and internal notes. It also provides an advanced publishing calendar with content queues and smart scheduling suggestions.

Zoho Social also offers features for monitoring keywords and tracking competitors, along with role-based permissions and audit trails for brand governance. This makes it a strong option for SMB and mid-market teams seeking to tighten attribution and prove the direct business impact of their social strategy within a unified tech stack.

11. eclincher

As a Hootsuite alternative, eclincher is built for operational efficiency, helping lean teams scale their output with smart automation. It combines robust publishing workflows with engagement and reputation management, making it a good fit for agencies and brands that manage a high volume of social profiles with limited headcount.

eclincher Auto-Post with Queues

The platform’s “Auto-Post with Queues” feature allows you to recycle evergreen content and automate publishing from RSS feeds, ensuring a consistent stream of posts. Its unified Smart Inbox consolidates messages from all profiles and includes tools for tagging and assigning conversations. A standout feature is its built-in reputation management, which lets you monitor and respond to reviews from Google, Facebook and other sources.

With integrations for Canva and various drive services, eclincher streamlines the content creation process. For teams focused on maximizing productivity, it provides a practical solution that merges always-on publishing with essential community and review management in a single hub.

12. NapoleonCat

For brands where social media is a primary customer service channel, NapoleonCat presents a customer-care-first alternative to Hootsuite. The platform is purpose-built to help teams manage high volumes of comments and messages, reduce response times and mitigate risk through powerful automation.

NapoleonCat Auto-moderation Rules

Its main strength is its auto-moderation engine, which can automatically hide, delete or reply to comments and ad comments based on predefined rules. This frees up teams to focus on more complex inquiries. The Social Inbox is designed for service efficiency, featuring SLA timers to track response goals, collision detection to prevent duplicate replies and automated conversation routing.

NapoleonCat also provides cross-channel analytics with a focus on team performance reporting, allowing managers to track agent productivity and workload. With multilingual support and auto-translation, it’s a suitable solution for mid-market and enterprise teams managing a global social presence and prioritizing a responsive, well-governed customer experience.

When it comes to your tech stack, it pays to do your research

Your tech stack is your lifeline. In social media marketing, it can make or break your workflows, strategy and ability to scale your business. That’s why choosing the right solution for your social media needs—from publishing and engagement to influencer marketing and analytics—is critical.

When it comes to new tools, it always pays to understand what you’re getting into before you buy. Want to see it for yourself? Schedule a demo today to experience how Sprout Social can transform your social strategy and drive real results for your business.