Social media is the playground for marketers to compete with their rivals. Consistent posting and quality content determine the fate of the contenders. And the trophy is maximum engagement.
But there’re a lot of activities that take place in the backdrop. The list is a long one, starting from brainstorming new ideas to promoting your business, planning campaigns all year round, catching up with trends, and tweaking strategies based on insightful metrics.
Keeping a check on all of this manually can be an absolute nightmare. Hence, having a social media scheduling tool is a must. Sprout Social is among these social media management tools, tracking it all in one go.
However, this may not be the first choice for businesses with varying needs and budget constraints. Hence, the need for Sprout Social alternatives rises.
How we analyze and select these Sprout Social Alternatives:
Our process of curating a list of relevant tools involves thorough research and evaluation. Factors considered include platform compatibility, automation, content creation, visualization, analytics, collaboration, pricing, scalability, and user experience. Curated by seasoned professionals, these tools empower marketers with valuable insights to make informed decisions and scale their businesses.
Let’s dig further!
Why Should You Consider Alternatives to Sprout Social?
Sprout Social is one of the most popular social media management tools, especially for business users. You can use this tool to manage multiple social media activities like scheduling, publishing, monitoring, analyzing multiple profiles and actions, etc.
Various enterprises and SMBs trust Sprout Social to manage their social media presence across multiple platforms with a simple and intuitive user interface. Sprout Social supports scheduling and publishing on 6 social media platforms – Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, and Youtube.
Let’s now go through a detailed analysis of the tools which are considered to be alternatives to Sprout Social. We have compared the best Sprout Social competitors to give you a holistic perspective on your social media marketing endeavors.
But Sprout Social itself has some pros and some cons too. Let’s have a look at them.
Pros
- Helps to manage major social media channels
- A consistent and powerful platform
- In-built robust reporting feature
- Offers CRM integrations and helpdesk options
Cons
- Limitations on keyword monitoring and social listening features
- User-based pricing makes the product expensive for larger teams
- Reported issues in search, filters, and information view in streams, along with posting likes or comments to other platforms
- Limitations on how much you can interact with fans and requires you to sign in to the actual social media platform to find the conversation
Sendible is a comprehensive social media management tool designed for businesses of all sizes. It offers all the standard features like planning, scheduling, publishing, and analytics.
This tool provides an informative dashboard that shows each social media platform’s performance, recent comments, and user engagement report. With Sendible’s visual calendar, you can easily manage all your posts and activities.
Some of the key offerings of Sendible are:
- Analyzes social media performance
- Adds contacts via social media interaction
- Tracks followers
- Automates lead generation by creating specific features
- Automatically finds new profiles suiting set parameters, adding them to the database
- Auto-starts social media conversations
- Collects comments and posts from all accounts
- Publishes new posts at scheduled intervals per day
- Queues optimized posts
- Accesses reports of each post-performance
- Displays reports in a colored calendar layout
Sendible vs. Sprout Social
Both apps operate differently, but both are easy to use with straightforward navigation. They offer similar functionalities and integrate with popular social networks. But a significant difference lies in pricing.
If you want to add more users to your plan with Sprout Social, you have to pay more.
Pricing: Sendible offers four plans that you can buy by paying monthly or annually. The Creator plan is $29 a month for 1 user and 6 social profiles. The Traction plan costs $89 a month for 4 users and 24 social profiles.
Its White Label plan is $240 a month for 10 users and 60 social profiles. Lastly, the White Label + plan is priced at $563 per month for 100 users and 300 social profiles.
Buffer is a powerful social media management tool that positions itself as a publishing and analytics tool. It facilitates publishing on social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Pinterest. This Sprout Social competitor also makes it easier to manage a team and enable inter-team collaboration by integrating over 60+ apps.
Buffer offers the following features:
- Connects to prime social media accounts
- Schedules posting for multiple accounts at once
- Shortens selected photos automatically and then adds links
- Sets a specific time zone to schedule on each profile
- Works well with smartphone apps
- Analytics prompting to update popular posts for resharing
- Offers helpful customer support
Buffer vs. Sprout Social
Both Buffer and Sprout Social have invested in beautiful page designs that effectively capture their target audience’s attention.
Much like Sprout Social, Buffer is one of the most popular scheduling tools for Twitter in social media marketing. Nevertheless, Buffer has improved more than Sprout Social.
Buffer offers more robust site analytics that allows users to see the posts’ details and interactions when compared with Sprout Social.
Price: Buffer offers a free plan with 3 social channels. You can even go for the Essential plan at $5/month per social channel. The team plan costs $10/month per social channel.
Brandwatch is a cloud-based social media management solution. It is also used to enhance customer experience with social listening capabilities. Businesses can have personalized scheduling, publishing, and post customization.
Brandwatch also offers collaborative calendar features for advanced content planning used by social media teams of varying sizes. There are several in-built templates for campaign building too.
Brandwatch’s key features include the following:
- Insightful market research capabilities
- Content pool feature that automatically saves stock items for future use
- Community interaction management with the social inbox
- Manages Facebook and Instagram advertising
- Team management and collaboration
- Audience profiling from social listening
Brandwatch vs. Sprout Social
Like Sprout Social, Brandwatch makes it simple for users to create, plan, modify, and post content on crucial social media sites. You get automated publishing, content management like scheduling your posts and customizing each social media platform’s content. You can access robust analytics showing the results of all your social media activities.
Brandwatch allows you to work with your team, and you are also entitled to manage roles and levels among them. You can even include your clients for collaboration. However, on Sprout Social, you can assign tasks from the inbox to your team members and view their task flows.
Price: The software lets you handle your social media accounts and their content efficiently. Brandwatch’s full-product suit is a fully customizable plan. The social for small businesses plan is recommended for 1-2 users and costs $108/ month.
Hootsuite is one of the dominating marketing tools. It offers a range of apps and integrations besides mere publishing tools. Hootsuite is a robust all-round social media management platform for organizations and users of all kinds. But this tool is expensive for small businesses and agencies to realize its full potential.
Key features of Hootsuite are as follows:
- Enables you to schedule posts in advance
- Offers flexibility in its free edition
- Combines several applicable marketing and social media resources
- View all streams from one dashboard
- Offers privacy features and many customizable tabs with no limitation
Hootsuite vs. Sprout Social
Social Sprout and Hootsuite are robust tools for social media management that can do almost everything you need, such as post sharing, feed tracking, team management, post-planning, and social analytics.
Sprout Social can manage users with team functionality, content creation, and editorial calendar options.
On the other hand, Hootsuite offers a deeper collaboration ecosystem, including departmental and team-oriented dashboards.
Sprout Social has user operational capabilities too. Its interface is built into the editorial calendar and content development features for better collaboration.
Price: Hootsuite tool offers all scheduling and analytics for businesses to cover their client’s essential needs. It provides a free plan and four payable plans.
The free plan includes 2 social accounts of 1 user. Its Professional offer costs $99 monthly for 1 user with 10 social accounts and unlimited scheduled messages.
The team plan costs $249 per month for 3 users, 20 social accounts, and unlimited scheduled messages. The Hootsuite Business option is $739 per month for 5 users and 35 social accounts with unlimited scheduled messages.
IFTTT is the freeway to get your applications and computers to connect. This tool is great for lead nurturing and prospecting. You can select their preset automation features called “recipes” for leads. Though it might sound geeky, these recipes are pretty easy to set up.
With this “If This Then That” tool, you can:
- Connects all accounts for creating recipes and set a course of action to achieve a desirable end goal
- Enables using others’ pre-made recipe
- Seamless integration with other tools
- Offers super flexible website and a user-friendly mobile app
IFTTT vs. Sprout Social
Along with all their standard features, Sprout Social and IFTTT help businesses increase their presence and find new customers.
Also, IFTTT is a leading platform to grow the products’ digital transformation into integrated services and is perfect for home automation.
IFTTT is a great tool to automate your social media management the way you want.
Price: IFTTT offers free services in which you can run 750 posts per month with unlimited flows. Adding more functionalities costs $5 to $15 per user monthly. Its plans are Developer, Team, and Business.
With the Developer package, you can open and extend your API’s scope to 20M users, 200K developers, and 600 services.
There is a fixed price with the Team plan for every linked user and embedding solutions to communicate with you digitally. The Business package offers volume-based pricing. Through behavioral intelligence, enterprise reliability, and committed help, you will maximize your linked users’ value.
Agorapulse is a social media scheduling platform that also offers social CRM capabilities. In addition, businesses can also manage all the incoming communications on multiple social media platforms without leaving Agorapulse. Thus, saving them time and improving efficiency. The UI is simple and easy to learn. You also get your hands on competitor analysis capabilities with Agorapulse.
Key features of Agorapulse are as follows:
- Schedule posts to all the major social networks like Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, Twitter, and YouTube
- Collaborate with team members for posts, replies, and customer requests in the app’s social inbox
- Customize social media reports by date range
Agorapulse vs. Sprout Social
Agorapulse and Sprout Social offer automated publishing, analytics, contact management, keyword filtering, post scheduling, and multi-account management.
Agorapulse is suitable for small and medium-sized businesses, whereas Sprout Social is not the right fit for small businesses and independent contractors.
Price: After a 30-day trial, Agorapulse suggests four paid plans with assumed monthly payments.
The Enterprise level supports 8+ members and 40+ social profiles. The pricing of this plan is customizable.
Emplifi positions itself as a unified social media marketing platform covering all aspects of social media marketing. Many big brands like Toyota, McDonald’s, Jägermeister, and ASUS use this tool.
Emplifi offers two paid plans. One is essential with the basic features to manage 10 or 20 profiles. The second is the complete solution that can be configured based on the requirements.
The easy-to-use Emplifi interface makes it possible for social media managers like you to:
- Post quickly and monitor all of your social media accounts
- Post at optimum times and increase your followers
- Find the right Influencers on Instagram and Youtube
- Manage customer care queries
- The app has a lot of high-cost add-ons
Emplifi vs. Sprout Social
Emplifi is a powerful social tool that schedules, manages, publishes, and analyzes content for brands on social channels.
Sprout Social’s CRM tools increase productivity by enabling team collaboration commonly in all industries. Emplifi tracks and monitors your social media to find the right influencers, maximize your budget, and use a single dashboard to benchmark your performance.
Price: Emplifi’s essential plan for marketing and management costs $240 per month for 5 users and 10 social profiles. It costs $480 a month for 10 users and 20 profiles.
The smart package is for 20 users, and up to 30 social profiles cost differently. Scale plan offers 25-2000 social media profiles with an unlimited number of users. Integrated 360 is ready for 100 or more social profiles with no limitation for the number of users.
MavSocial provides a complete social media management tool for brands and agencies. Along with content management and curation, it lets you schedule posts on multiple social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube, Tumblr, and WeChat.
MavSocial simplifies the process of managing visual content in social media by providing businesses with a central platform that can store hundreds of images, videos, and infographics.
A few key features of MavSocial are as follows:
- Offers users to purchase photos via an automated payment system
- Allows saving pictures in the library for quick access
- Automatically chooses added profile pictures, company logo, images, videos, audio clips, and promotional content into the system when accounts are linked
- Analyze and plan for various social media channels
- Send posts via email or app’s chat feature for approval
MavSocial vs. Sprout Social
Sprout Social (a SaaS software) and MavSocial (an end-to-end platform) help brands and all sizes of businesses communicate better.
Like Sprout Social, you can schedule, save your content, create a customized scheduling calendar, plan campaigns, and edit your photos via MavSocial.
However, MavSocial’s customers are brands and organizations that need a cost-effective and time-saving social media management and marketing solution.
Price: There is a free edition for 14 days. MavSocial Advanced paid plan is suitable for freelancers and small businesses, costing $19 with one user and 10 social profiles.
The Pro plan, ideal for agencies or growing brands, is $78 for 3 users and 30 social profiles. The Business package is offered for larger teams and franchises with 5 users and 40 social profiles at $249.
The Enterprise plan costs $499 is fully configurable and offers custom solutions.
MeetEdgar, also known as Edgar, is a great social media management tool for busy social media marketers. It automatically repurposes and schedules your content even if you are out of new posts.
A few key features of MeetEdgar are as follows:
- Provides an automated re-sharing option for popular posts to improve traffic rates
- The Super Smart Insights option for user interaction and tracking publishing queue continuously
- Unlimited library to store all of content and updates, all organized under categories like account, category, and date
- No reporting or monitoring features
- Advance scheduling and direct posting to social media
MeetEdgar vs. Sprout Social
Sprout Social and MeetEdgar allow you to schedule sharing posts on social media like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn profiles, and brand pages.
However, MeetEdgar has a more intuitive design and is easier to use than Sprout Social.
Sprout Social, lets you schedule updates or put them in Queue to be shared manually that you have organized in advance. On the other hand, MeetEdgar stores all updates online in a categorized resource automatically.
Price: The Eddie Monthly Plan costs $29.99 with 4 categories, 5 social media accounts, 10 automated posts per week, plus unlimited manually scheduled posts. The Edgar Monthly Plan costs $49.99 per month plan is 25 social accounts, 1000 automated posts per week, unlimited manually scheduled posts, and unlimited categories.
Later is no longer limited to just Instagram scheduling. This Sprout Social alternative allows you to schedule posts on LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, Facebook, and Twitter too. If your focus is on visual marketing, Later is the undisputed choice.
Along with publishing your branded content, you can also share posts from others. This is a game-changer for those who heavily rely on user-generated content for promotion. Later’s analytics is great for evaluating your influence online.
A few key features of Later are as follows:
- Gives a personalized touch to curated content
- Drives increased traffic to the site, and increases sales
- Reporting features with insightful metrics
- Easy planning and scheduling of content with a built-in content calendar
Later vs. Sprout Social
Later is a time saver when it comes to hashtag search. You can also save captions for future use. It gives you a grid view of your scheduled posts, eliminating the risk of creating a messy profile.
Sprout Social is good for businesses with fairly large budgets and teams. Later, on the other hand, is affordable even for freelancers. Its customizable plans suit every need.
Price: Later offers three paid plans. The Growth plan begins at $40 for 150 posts per profile and 3 users. You can schedule unlimited posts with 6 users with the Advanced plan which starts at $80. At last, the Scale plan which costs $200 and offers unlimited posts, and access to 10 users.
Wrap up
Consider investing in social media management tools to be mandatory these days. Scaling online presence manually is a tough nut to crack since social media platforms continuously evolve with their features. Keeping a tab on those changes without letting your results take a nosedive calls for automation tools like Sproutsocial and SocialPilot.
But again, choosing the right tool will require a thorough assessment. As you have seen in this blog, many different social media management tools have advanced features that you can use as Sprout Social alternatives. Start evaluating your current business situation to purchase the right social media tool for growing faster.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is Sprout Social a good investment?
Sprout Social is actually pricey. You can get the same features that Sprout Social has to offer at their base price with other tools. You can consider Sprout Social alternatives like SocialPilot for a better investment.
How much is Sprout Social a month?
Sprout Social starts at $249 monthly for 5 social profiles for 1 user. You can consider SocialPilot, a Sprout Social alternative for $50 with 25 profiles and 3 users.
Who are Sprout Social competitors?
Sprout Social competitors are as follows:
Does Sprout Social have a free plan?
No, Sprout Social does not have a free plan. But you can take a 30-day free trial of any plan you like.
Which social networks does Sprout Social integrate with?
Sprout Social integrates with the following social networks:
- Youtube
- Google My Business
Does Sprout Social integrate with TikTok?
No, Sprout Social doesn’t integrate with TikTok. You can opt for SocialPilot instead. It allows you to post on 9 popular platforms.
About the Author
Sprout Social Alternative – SocialPilot
SocialPilot is one of the best social media management tools trusted by more than 115,000 marketers globally. Offering all the advanced features at unbeatable prices, it has been developed with small digital marketing agencies and businesses in mind.
Being a great Sprout Social alternative, SocialPilot lets you effortlessly create customized posts for LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, and TikTok.
You can add CTAs, Emojis, GIFs, Videos, Images, etc to strengthen your content game and get all those likes and shares.
Have a look at some of SocialPilot’s key features:
SocialPilot vs. Sprout Social
Both tools support Twitter, Facebook, Instagram (Direct Publishing), Google My Business, Pinterest, and LinkedIn as their most significant social media networks.
Sprout Social is great for businesses to introduce a brand and promote a blog. It is also suitable for a solopreneur.
However, SocialPilot is better for agencies that want to schedule and publish on different platforms at an affordable cost.
The software has gone for high functionality while being affordable. SocialPilot is suitable for agencies where a team creates content, edits, and schedules collaboratively. And at $30 per month for each user!
However, Sprout Social is not as good of an option for teams as SocialPilot. You have to pay more to add anyone on the base price of $249.
Pricing: SocialPilot considers a wide range of audiences with no restrictions on its features. There are four pricing plans and 14 days of free trial for small businesses to larger enterprises. The subscription starts at $25.50/month (billed annually) compared to Sprout Social’s pricing – $249 per user per month subscription.
Willing to explore more?