Hootsuite is one of the most popular and well known of the best social media tools for business. But, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s the best of those tools. In this Hootsuite review, we’ll not only look at the app itself but also look at the comparisons with some other apps in the same market.
As a social media scheduler, productivity tool, and more, Hootsuite is designed to be a one-stop-shop for your social media management needs. It offers a free version designed for individual users, all the way up through subscription plans for large corporations.
But, as we’ll see later, Hootsuite’s larger subscriptions increase in price significantly more than many Hootsuite alternatives, meaning that large businesses should seriously consider whether they’d be better off with a different program. Let’s get started.
Table of Contents
- How Hootsuite measures up to other social media management tools
- Pros and Cons
- Social Pilot vs Hootsuite
- Support
- How Does Hootsuite Work?
- Pricing
- FAQs
- Conclusion
How Hootsuite Measure Up to Other Social Media Management Tools
We’ve compared Hootsuite with its competitors, some of the best apps for social media marketing. Because these apps are all successful and effective tools, expect the results to skew toward high scores.
We’ve used customer reviews combined with our own impressions of these programs to create the scores. Each program is scored on a 1-10-point system for each of these categories.
While these kinds of categories don’t say a lot about the specific function of each program, they will give you a sense of their overall utility, as well as their strengths and weaknesses.
| Hootsuite | Sendible | Sprout Social | eClincher | |
Customer Service |
7 | 9 | 9 | 9 |
Ease of Use |
8 | 8 | 9 | 7 |
Features |
7 | 8 | 8 | 9 |
Value |
7 | 8 | 8 | 9 |
This ranking doesn’t take into account the size of the team using each tool or other factors that might significantly change the review. Unfortunately, controlling for those kinds of variables is incredibly difficult.
We mention that difficulty for one key reason. When you look at larger teams and corporations, Hootsuite tends to get lower reviews. For smaller businesses and individuals, it can be an incredibly popular and successful tool.
Pros and Cons
Pros
- Connects to an incredibly wide variety of social media platforms
- Features a free version
- Wide variety of features and bonuses
- Advanced Content Curation
- The dashboard shows multiple important feeds
- Lots of included analytics options
Cons
- Large subscriptions are costly
- Doesn’t specialize in any one platform over another
- The user interface is a bit clunky
Social Pilot vs Hootsuite
Social Pilot and Hootsuite are often compared since they are two of the most advanced social media management apps. Both work with a wide variety of social media platforms. Both have a suite of analytics tools. Both offer curated content that’s incredibly useful to users.
But they do have very different strengths. Social Pilot success for companies that focus on Facebook campaigns, while Hootsuite can be more of a generalist.
But Social Pilot’s user interface is friendlier and easier to use, overall. Social Pilot is also more affordable for large corporations and businesses.
You can learn more about Social Pilot here.
Support
Hootsuite’s Customer Support is entirely online, through the Contact Us page of their website. From there you can choose to start a customer service chat, contact the sales team, or look at several resources and demos.
How does Hootsuite work?
Hootsuite is a generalist, meaning that in one app you’ll get all the main functions you need for your social media plan.
It’s dashboard, at any level, presents several tabs of information, each of which can be scrolled through independently. The tabs that show can be customized a little, but this page is designed to provide information more than function.
It also provides a great content curation service, which allows you to quickly find relevant content for yourself, your team, and your followers.
Analytics are simple but easy to follow and understand. They can provide a lot of actionable insight into how the program functions and improves your metrics. You’ll be able to get more detailed information with a little navigation, but it can take some work to get everything you want from Hootsuite.
For larger teams, Hootsuite makes permissions and management easy. You’ll be able to quickly assign team members to particular tasks, hand out assignments and authority levels, and change it all just as quickly.
Pricing
| Professional | Team | Business | Enterprise | |
| Price | $29/mo | $129/mo | $599/mo | Not Disclosed |
Hootsuite also offers a functional and effective Free plan. It allows you to run up to 3 social profiles with a single user, and schedule 30 messages out. Those messages are shared across all three plans. But, it’s still a valuable tool for solopreneurs and businesses with a more limited social media presence.
FAQs
Yes, Hootsuite’s unlimited free plan is a good option for solopreneurs and even small businesses that don’t need much social media presence. It only allows for a single user, but can manage up to three different social media accounts.
You’re limited to only scheduling out 30 posts at a time, however. Some other features are also restricted at the free level.
Yes, but Hootsuite can be frustrating to use with Instagram. Instagram is notoriously difficult for posting and drafting new content.
For small businesses and solopreneurs, certainly. Hootsuite is one of the best tools for small businesses. For larger corporations looking at their higher subscription levels? Probably not. The price difference for those higher subscriptions is significantly more than Hootsuite alternatives.
We recommend this to small businesses but recommend looking elsewhere to big corporations.
Conclusion
For one of the first social media managers to really make it big in the corporate world, Hootsuite has done pretty well for itself. Its features are still useful, and the program itself is still relevant and the first comparison for its competition.
That said, it’s now mostly a program for small businesses. If you’re looking to manage a large team and an extensive social media marketing plan through Hootsuite, Social Pilot and Sprout Social come to mind as effective alternatives.
Still, when it comes to small businesses, there are few alternatives with half the functionality and breadth of use that Hootsuite brings to the table.