Mediaboss Marketing

I was glad when we decided to finally do an official comparison between Hootsuite and ERROR: - slug not found: sprout-social. Reason: 'bool' object is not callable. While I have plenty of experience with many social media management tools from Buffer to Tweepi, Social Sprout and Hootsuite are my two most frequented platforms in my line of work.

While I have more official experience with Hootsuite, over the past year, in the workplace, Ive opted for Social Sprout whenever I can and for managing personal social media projects.

Both platforms will help you schedule Facebook posts, reply to messages, and analyze your social audiences, but one is superior to the other. So here it is, the Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite showdown weve all been waiting for.

Sprout Social is a fantastic option for medium to large businesses with several social accounts per platform and multiple users within a social media management team. With social network management, posting, and reporting features, Sprout Social is one of the best options you can choose.

Sprout Social appeals to many businesses and users, but its pricing shuts some out. This platform starts at an astounding $99/month per user, with each subsequent tier becoming even more expensive.

While its functionality, user-friendliness, and intuitive design are exceptional, this prohibitive pricing places it into a near-enterprise level of expensive.

Hootsuites variety of features, integrations, publishing tools, and even its pricing makes it a good all-around social media management software for businesses and users of all types. And the strongest of those points is Hootsuites pricing.

Not only are all tiers relatively affordable considering everything that comes with the platform, but they even offer a free option with limited functionality for those starting in social media management.

Features are arguably one of the most important topics in any platform comparison. Which social media management tool has the best features to execute your marketing campaigns?

Social Sprout is a comprehensive social media management platform that can do nearly everything you need it to do. Whether you need posting campaign scheduling weeks in advance or youre looking to perform a deep social media audit providing in-depth analytics, Social Sprout has you covered.

The Sprout Social dashboard gives you a rundown of all of the major components of your social media campaigns, from a posting to-do list and channel messages to daily engagement rates and todays posts.

Its the perfect first step to get you up to speed with everything youll be working on throughout the day.

Theres something clean and refreshing about Social Sprouts clean user interface. Image source: Author

Moving beyond the dashboard, youll find a host of other tools from simple publishing mechanisms to a detailed Sprout Social calendar to schedule and monitor your social feeds far in advance.

I particularly love the clarity of Sprout Socials implementation of the social media content calendar, especially when compared to Hootsuites more cluttered social dashboards for tracking posts.

While Sprout Social provides post automation, team workflows for organizing your social media efforts, and even an internal inbox for coordinating your marketing plan from, social listening is where it shines.

Not only can you monitor your own analytics to plan out a successful campaign, but you also get in-depth insight into everything your audience is talking about.

These social listening tools will gather information from social posts relevant to your topics and industry and develop reports on new trends you should tailor your messaging around.

Hootsuite offers the usual features youd expect from a social media management tool: post sharing, feed monitoring, team management, post scheduling, and social analytics.

Ive used Hootsuite with some of my marketing contract jobs and found Im able to do everything I need to execute a comprehensive social media marketing strategy.

Hootsuites post scheduler is easy to use and is perfect for previewing content before it goes live. Image source: Author

The one area where I feel Hootsuite could see some improvement is in the social media analytics department. Ive had trouble locating the metrics I need in Hootsuite reporting, especially when connected to platforms like YouTube, if the data is populated into the analytics reports at all.

Ive had to turn to the native social analytics dashboards sometimes, which is a little frustrating when youre paying money for a platform to manage all of your social accounts in one place.

While there are similarities in the features lists between these two platforms, Sprout Social edges out Hootsuite with additional social listening capabilities and higher quality analytics reports.

When the going gets rough, which platform will offer you the support you need to solve your problems and answer your questions?

Sprout Social offers the support options you'd expect from a software developer, including a phone support number, email queries, webinars, Q&A sessions, and a platform knowledge base.

With this level of support, you can either submit issues or find answers to your questions no matter the level of urgency. Sprout Social support even answers their customers questions through their social channels if necessary which is convenient.

Hootsuite offers three distinct types of customer support. Unfortunately, none of these support routes come in a traditional phone option, but that doesnt mean you cant find answers to your questions.

The first and most basic form of support is the built-in feedback button in the application itself. This button allows you to send your feedback into Hootsuite, with a 500 character limit, detailing your thoughts about the platform.

The second form is the knowledge base complete with support articles for many platform questions. The final form of support is the support ticket form found in the help section of the Hootsuite website. Using this ticket system you can create and track your issues with the support team all in one place.

Sprout Social takes the win for customer support. While Hootsuite offers a satisfactory level of support for its customers, its hard to beat the numerous options offered by Sprout Social.

Features and integrations dont count for much if the tool youre using is complicated, impractical, and difficult to use. Which social marketing tool is easier to use?

Sprout Social is one of the most intuitive and user-friendly social media management tools Ive ever used. Nothing is hard to find, bugs are practically nonexistent, and the reporting capabilities are easy to use and understand.

All of your high-level function navigation is found on the left, while all of your social functions, composing posts, connecting accounts, etc., are found on the right. Image source: Author

Enterprise-level software is often burdened with a preconceived stigma for being complicated. Not so Sprout Social. It upends this notion through easy to locate features, pre-built social analytics reports, and pre-populated, automated social responses for your account inboxes.

This is a social media management tool meant for bigger businesses with the simple functionality of a tool meant for everyone.

Youd think Hootsuite was a simple tool just by reading through the features lists and clean website, but theres more to this platform than meets the eye. Thats not to say Hootsuite is difficult to use, but its not as intuitive as Sprout Social.

On top of that, in my experience, Hootsuite is buggy and slow at times which is frustrating when I have other tasks on my plate to deal with outside of disconnecting and reconnecting social profiles when they wont load into the tool.

The Hootsuite dashboard seems like a good idea at first but is prone to clutter if too much information is displayed at one time. Image source: Author

Navigating Hootsuite is simple with all of your functions and tools on the left-hand sidebar. This platform only suffers from clutter issues in the dashboard and those occasional bugs that might frustrate the user at times.

And who knows, its possible some of these bugs originate from the social networks themselves (Im clearly not a software developer). And that Ive never had these issues with Sprout Social speaks to some issues that need to be ironed out to improve the Hootsuite experience.

While Hootsuite provides a decent experience for most users, ease of use is one area where Sprout Social excels, making it the superior tool in this category.

Unless your software choice fits within your budget, it doesnt matter how functional it is. How do Sprout Social and Hootsuite stack up for pricing?

This is the one area where Sprout Social falls short of being the perfect social media management tool. While its true that you get what you pay for, Im not 100% sure the price of Sprout Social is justified. At least not to this degree:

Dont get me wrong, I am very impressed with what Sprout Social offers. But Im not entirely sure that an asset library, custom URL tracking, and Twitter surveys are worth the additional $150/month per user over the already expensive Standard option.

Its not very often I label software pricing as excessive, but in this case, I think that term fits the bill.

On the other hand, Hootsuite is more reasonable with its pricing when compared to Sprout Social. Starting off, Hootsuite actually offers a free option that allows you to connect three social profiles and grants you the ability to schedule out thirty posts per month.

Once youve grown out of that free option, the paid tiers start off at the low price of $29/month which gives you more features, although it still limits you to one user just like the free option.

That being said, the price does go up substantially once you move into the higher-featured options Hootsuite offers:

While the price does go up substantially once you graduate beyond the Professional tier, it is still much cheaper when juxtaposed with Sprout Social on a per-user basis.

Hootsuite pricing wins on practically every level. There are just too many things going for Hootsuite that make Sprout Socials pricing seem excessive by comparison, such as Hootsuites free option or the per-user cost of each platform.

Its a fact, all social management tools require integrations to succeed in posting, scheduling, and analyzing your marketing efforts. So, the question becomes, which platform gives you a longer list of options?

Sprout Social integrates with plenty of big-name tools and all of the major social networks, including:

Social

Tools

Hootsuite shines with its long list of social network integrations, apps, and software partnerships, including:

Social

Tools

Hootsuite has so many integrations to offer for marketing, collaboration, and analytics needs.

It's a tie! Both tools integrated with a lot of social networks and their list of outside integrations is extensive.

Whats the onboarding process for both contenders, and which platform will have you up and running with the fewest headaches and delays?

The startup process for Sprout Social was a breeze. I had only to enter my email and other pertinent information and I was granted access to the tool in less than five minutes. The setup process for integrating my social networks was especially easy, and I loaded all of my social posts and data within minutes.

Its refreshing to have a startup process that doesnt require a whole tutorial just to understand basic functions.

While the startup process for Hootsuite was similar to Sprout Social in terms of entering information and starting a new account, the social network integration process was less than ideal in my experience.

This is not the first time Ive set up a Hootsuite account and every time, Ive had only problems trying to connect my social networks, particularly Facebook. If I could connect everything up to Hootsuite without errors or slow loading times, this process would be simple in theory.

Sprout Social has a smoother onboarding process that runs without error or delay. The difference is more driven by user experience than by the steps of the process itself.

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Sprout Social vs. Hootsuite: Which is Better in 2022? - The Motley Fool