Hootsuite is a solid social media management tool, but it isn’t without its limitations.
Despite having standout scheduling features, the tool has a high price-point, limited reporting features, and a lacking user interface.
If you’re looking for a new social media management tool, you’re in the right place. We’ll show you the 12 best Hootsuite alternatives of 2020. We’ll show you each of the app’s pros, cons, and standout features.
Let’s get started!
Table of Contents
Start your free 14-day Fanbooster trial
1. Fanbooster
Fanbooster is the most full-featured social media management tool on the market. And yeah, we made it, but we’re sure you’ll love it too 😉
The tool has excellent smart scheduling tools, in-depth analytics and reporting, and a social inbox that shows all your brand’s mentions, reviews, and private messages in one easy-to-manage place.
For content creation, we have a brand new Canva integration that’s unique from every other social media management tool.
Think it couldn’t get any better? Well, it does…
Fanbooster has an excellent set of reporting features that let you take an in-depth look at how your social media content is performing. You can even pull reports from your favorite email marketing apps, Google Analytics, and review sites like Yelp!
Some of the in-depth reports we offer include:
- Cross and single channel engagement optimization
- Facebook and LinkedIn ads
- Engagement distribution over time
Ready to give Fanbooster a shot? You can try each of our three plans free for 14 days.
Pricing: $49/mo, $99/mo, $200/mo (all plans include a 14-day free trial)
Best For: Agencies, businesses, and marketing teams of all sizes
2. CoSchedule
CoSchedule integrates with many popular social networks, email marketing platforms, blogs, and other marketing essentials. This makes the app a full-fledged marketing suite—but it comes at a price.
CoSchedule plans range from $80 to $1,400 a month. But even at a high price, you don’t get much to show: the top-tier plan includes just 10 users and 25 connected social accounts, so be prepared to pay when growing your agency.
On top of that, you have to pay extra for CoSchedule Academy, the company’s in-house training platform. Make sure to calculate these hidden costs when assessing your company’s social media needs so you’re not met with a surprisingly huge bill.
Pricing: $80/mo, $400/mo, $1,400/mo
Best For: Small marketing teams and enterprises
3. Oktopost
Oktopost has a full suite of scheduling, monitoring and reporting tools for a wide variety of social networks. It even has some interesting secondary features like a built-in sweepstakes tool that keeps giveaways fair and simple.
But there is one major downside: pricing.
The app doesn’t publicly advertise its pricing, leading us to believe that it’s completely customized (and in turn, expensive). So make sure to reach out for a quote before setting your sights on Oktopost.
Pricing: Contact Oktopost for pricing
Best For: Small agencies
4. MeetEdgar
MeetEdgar is a barebones social media scheduling tool with a few interesting features.
MeetEdgar has an interesting self-scheduling content calendar. Just assign a category to each of your posts, and MeetEdgar will schedule them automatically. This ensures you’re mixing up your content, keeping your content interesting to your audience.
However, MeetEdgar isn’t a great choice for agencies.
It doesn’t have any type of analytics tools, direct Instagram scheduling, or other features that are essential for agencies and in-house marketing teams. You also can’t create employee accounts, so you’ll have to share your MeetEdgar credentials.
So with that in mind, it’s tough to recommend MeetEdgar for agency use. However, it might be a viable option for freelancers that are only scheduling content for their clients.
Pricing: $49/mo
Best For: Freelance social media managers
5. Loomly
Loomly has everything you’d expect from a social media scheduling tool. Its scheduling and reporting tools are solid, and it even has some unique features like customizable post previews and a content idea library.
But it isn’t without its cons too. The app doesn’t support Google My Business and lacks a social search tool. This makes brand monitoring and competitor analysis nearly impossible without using another social media tool — just something to keep in mind as you plan client offerings.
Pricing: $10/mo, $25/mo, $200/mo, $300/mo
Best For: Freelancers and small businesses
6. Zoho Social
Zoho Social is a social media management tool that puts collaboration first.
Each of your team members will have their own Zoho Social accounts. Users can be assigned tasks, and you can view what tasks someone is working on, their edits, and more right from their Zoho Social profile.
But beware: Zoho Social isn’t without its limitations.
As of writing this article, Zoho Social supports Twitter, Facebook pages, Instagram, and LinkedIn, so you’re out of luck if you want to update your Google My Business profile or moderate a Facebook group.
And while Zoho Social does have direct Instagram scheduling, it only supports direct image posting—not videos.
Pricing: $10/mo, $25/mo, $200/mo, $300/mo
Best For: Small businesses
7. MavSocial
MavSocial is a social media management tool that focuses on images and video. The app’s intuitive media library lets you store important brand assets, so you can easily share marketing materials and more with your audience
You can use MavSocial to collaborate on social posts with your team too. An employee can write a tweet and send it for approval via email or through the app’s nifty built-in chat feature, so approval processes are a breeze.
But there is one huge downside to MavSocial: its limited reporting capabilities. As you can see above, reports look a bit dated and don’t offer as much information as Fanbooster or other apps on this list.
Pricing: $16/mo, $65/mo, $166/mo, $416/mo
Best For: Small and medium-sized businesses
8. Agorapulse
Agorapulse is a straight-forward social media management suite.
You can schedule posts to all of the major social networks (Pinterest, Facebook, Twitter, Google My Business, Instagram, YouTube) and invite your team members to collaborate on posts and respond to customer inquiries.
But like some of the other options on this list, Agorapulse is expensive.
Its base plan is only $49 per month but includes just 3 user-profiles and one user account. Pricing goes up exponentially from there, putting this social media scheduling tool out of reach for small teams and freelancers.
Pricing: $49/mo, $99/mo, $199/mo, $299/mo (all plans include 14-day free trials)
9. SocialOomph
SocialOomph is one of the only options on this list with a free tier. However, the app isn’t for everyone.
SocialOomph is geared towards Twitter marketers, and it has some really interesting features not found anywhere else. For example, it has interesting bulk tweet deleting, DM purging, and email-to-tweet features.
And while the social media management tool does support other networks like Pinterest, Facebook, and LinkedIn, support is super limited. You can post to those networks, but there are no Twitter-like growth hacks offered.
We recommend SocialOomph for growth hackers and marketers that want access to Twitter tweaks. Just note that you’ll still need another social media management app to update, monitor, and report on other social networks.
Pricing: Free, $6.97/mo, $17.97/mo
Best For: Social media growth hackers specializing in Twitter
10. SocialBakers
SocialBakers is an AI-focused social media platform that makes it easy to post at the right times for maximum engagement. On top of this, its clean interface makes it easy for social media managers to quickly schedule to and monitor their social media accounts.
But like Oktopost and others, pricing isn’t publicly available. Reviews say that the app has a lot of paid add-ons too, so sure to ask about these when you request a quote to avoid an unpleasant billing surprise.
Pricing: Contact for pricing
Best For: Small marketing teams
11. eClincher
eClicher is a social media management tool with a full suite of publishing, monitoring, and reporting tools.
One of our favorite eClincher features is Pocket integration; using this feature, you can share saved content from your Pocket account direct to social media.
But there are a couple of drawbacks to using eClincher.
One of the biggest is that there’s no way to collaborate on social media tasks. You can’t assign tweets or other social media messages as tasks, so you’ll have to collaborate on this separately via Slack or email. Not fun.
We’ve found that eClincher’s UI can take some getting used to. So if you decide to go with them, make sure to read over its support documents so you can train your team.
Pricing: $49/mo, $99/mo, $199/mo (all plans include a 14-day free trial)
Best For: Medium-sized agencies
12. Sprout Social
Sprout Social is a social media management tool for enterprises.
It has top-notch collaboration features that make it super easy for large teams to collaborate on social media publishing, monitoring, and reporting.
Unfortunately, though, Sprout isn’t practical for most social media agencies or small businesses.
The app costs—at a minimum—$99 per month per user. This means that whenever you expand your team, you’re also upping your social media management bill by a considerable amount. So tread lightly and see if you can get similar features for a lower price (think Fanbooster 😉).
Pricing: $99/mo, $149/mo, $249/mo per user
Best For: Large enterprises
Bottom line on choosing Hootsuite alternatives
And there you have it: the 12 best Hootsuite alternatives for 2020. Keep your company’s needs and future growth in-mind as shop for a new social media management tool—otherwise, you could have to switch at the last minute.
