11 Best Free and Paid Hootsuite Alternatives (2023)

Nowadays, it’s essential to have social media accounts across multiple platforms to take your brand to the next level. You may hear about Hootsuite for that. However, it might not be the ideal solution, particularly for small businesses, mainly because of the price. Keeping that in mind, we have done the research and handpicked some Hootsuite alternatives for small businesses. Let’s dive and see. 

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Who Are Hootsuite Competitors?

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1) Zoho Social

Zoho Social proves to be one of the best and cheaper Hootsuite alternatives going around. It allows you to manage seven social media channels, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Twitter. This particular tool is more suited for small and medium-sized businesses. Also it has some great features that you can’t find in Hootsuite, such as smartQ predictions and social listening.

How does Zoho Social work?

Its features include multi-channel publishing, bulk scheduling, RSS feeds, custom video thumbnails, lead generation, live streams, and content targeting. In addition, Zoho Social permits summary reports and a few other CRM integrations, which can be quite helpful to get the most out of your social media accounts.

Is there a free version of Zoho Social?

Zoho consists of three packages called Standard, Professional, and Premium. The most basic one, Standard, comes to you at $10/month when billed annually. In that plan, they allow only one user to handle the accounts. If you want more members, you will have to switch to the Premium subscription. 

Overall, there are three more plans except for the free plan, costing $10, $30, and $40. Zoho Social offers many social media platforms such as Instagram and Pinterest in their paid subscriptions. You can get many useful features like the best time to post, quick scheduling, advanced analytics, image filters, and GIFS for the paid users to make the most out of these platforms.

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2) Buffer

Buffer is one of the oldest and most reliable social media Hootsuite alternatives that offer valuable features to its users. Especially if you are searching for Hootsuite alternatives free of charge, this is the place that you must wander around.

Buffer is best suited for businesses just starting. The tools are easy to use irrespective of the scale of your tech knowledge. There are six packages altogether, and they are divided into two categories for publishing and analytic tools.

In publishing tool packages, there are four plans, including the unlimited free plan. In which you have the luxury of handling three social media accounts and 10 schedule posts option. For more channels, you will have to go for their advanced plans, Also, for the analytics, you will be given two separate plans to choose from.

Is Buffer Better Than Hootsuite?

Given you have a small business with a limited number of social media accounts and you expect Himalayan tasks, Buffer would be an ideal selection in place of Hootsuite.

Is Buffer For Instagram FREE?

As mentioned, Buffer does offer a free plan to get the feel of it. If you want more features or channels, you will have to purchase a paid plan. Overall, considering the Hootsuite cost, we recommend you start the journey with Buffer instead of the Hootsuite social media tool. 

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3) Agorapulse

This is a tool from the top raw of the cabinet, which you can use instead of the Hootsuite free version. As of now, nearly 20,000 social media marketers are working with Agorapulse. The exciting part of this tool is that it has features and plans for both starters and big agencies. You can connect most of the popular social media accounts with Agorapulse.

Luckily, Agorapulse specifically is built to help newbies. They have a free plan to use with limited but valuable features. You can handle Pinterest and Instagram accounts in the free trial and upload up to 6 users on each profile. The most valuable thing is Agorapulse helps you with thorough analytics to take you step by step to the next level.

The magnificent features of Agorapulse can be taken to your advantage to build a loyal fan base without much of a fuss across platforms. That said, the downside is that if you upgrade from their free plan to a paid plan. It would cost you $99 per month, which we feel little expensive compared to other Hootsuite alternatives.

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4) Sendible

You will get a free trial of 30 days with Hootsuite free account, and Sendible is one of the few social media management tools with that same benefit. You can manage social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. As per our take, Sendible is one of the best Hootsuite alternatives Instagram influencers should go with if they want to build a solid fan base. 

What is Sendible used for?

With Sendible, you can schedule posts, set smart repeating of social posts, get top content suggestions, and explore royalty-free images. In addition, integration with RSS, and Chrome. The creator, traction, scale, and Expansion plans have separate and unique services for the users.

For the people at the growing stage of building a brand, choosing the creator plan of Sendible would be a good option at $29/month. When you gradually make a name among your audience, there are three more great plans named Startup, Traction, and Scale to help you with your business’s next move.

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5) Contentstudio

Contentstudio is a relatively new platform in the industry. But its unique features seem to match all the qualities marketers expect from the best Hootsuite alternatives. It’s an award-winning social media marketing tool.

What does a ContentStudio do?

Also, it has features for publishing, planning, content discovering, composing, and analyzing to help individuals and social media agencies. By purchasing one of their plans, you can stop paying other software to search for trending content, and you are entitled to receive a two-month free trial as well. 

Is ContentStudio free?

It offers you a free trial of two months before a plan, and there are four paid plans to work with. Unlike most of its competitors, Contentstudio allows one user in their most basic plan while providing access to 10 profiles across platforms; it costs $49/month.

There are five pricing slabs in Contentstudio, and the Pro plan, which is the most basic one, starts at $49 with ten social media accounts for one user. These plans expand up to $299/month. Even they have a separate plan for enterprise businesses for which users have to contact Contentstudio to get a customized quotation. 

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6) Sprout Social

Sprout Social is another famous name in the game and one of the best alternatives to Hootsuite. Although we are concentrating on relatively cheaper options than Hootsuite prices, we cannot omit Sprout Social from our list.

It’s a powerful tool, and well-renowned companies like Glassdoor and Grubhub use this tool to take their content to their audience in an efficient way. Social Sprout is well-equipped with all of the modern-day features you expect from a social media managing tool. They publish and schedule posts, CRM tools, content calendars, messaging, and notifications. 

On top of all, we like its keywords monitoring and the chatbot automation tools because content creators can do wonders with such options. Further, similar to the Hootsuite free plan, they also allow you a one-month free trial to test the services without requiring credit card details and the paid plans of Social Sprout start at $89/month per user. 

The basic plan comes at $89/month, in which Social Champ allows you to control 5 social accounts. However, you have only a thirty-day free trial for the learning curve, and we think that much of a limitation period is not sufficient to test all of its features before purchase.

Is Sprout Social Safe?

Yes, it is a platform for all businesses, and it has a clean sheet in terms of reliability. 

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7) eClincher

Streamlining your social media presence is made easy with eClincher’s solid and contemporary features. It is rich in features, and the interface is intuitive enough to provide users with exactly what they anticipate from the tool.

What does eClincher do?

eClincher comes with options like advanced publishing, content recycling, analytics, keyword tracking, team collaboration, and more features for marketing automation. It works perfectly with Facebook, YouTube, Linked In, Twitter, and Instagram.

Combining a comprehensive interface and advanced features makes it a better alternative to Hootsuite, even though it has a slightly higher starting price for subscriptions. From our point of view, eClincher is not the most appropriate solution for individuals or small businesses as it starts with a hefty price tag of $59/month.

And you only have ten channels to handle. However, with the built-in media library and a few other hard-to-find features, it can be a tailor-made choice for medium-sized and larger businesses to handle social media stuff with a significant amount of ease.

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8) Tweetdeck

Tweetdeck is another social media management software that is designed to cater to one platform; Twitter. It allows Twitter users to handle an unlimited number of accounts for free. If you are running behind a tool to organize, track, and increase Twitter followers, this is where you should stop and see.

This platform is currently developed by Twitter itself and in existence since 2008. You can use this magnificent software regardless of the size of your business; even larger companies can make this tool work for them thanks to the fantastic features. 

Monitoring hundreds of Twitter activities such as hashtags, lists and searches is just a walk in the park with Twitterdeck. It’s the most popular Twitter-related software developed thus far, and you can download the Twitterdeck app as a chrome, web, or desktop app to get this free service from Twitter.

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9) SocialPilot

If you feel Hootsuite is a too complicated tool to handle your social media activities smoothly, SocialPilot is the solution we suggest. It permits you to schedule posts, manage all your comments and messages, see insights and metrics, and a few of the important reports to analyze your progress in one place.

It features team collaborations, client management, social media analytics, Facebook ads, post scheduling, reporting, and many more requirements, especially for small businesses.

If you are a previous user of Hootsuite, we bet you won’t feel much of a difference in using SocialPilot as both the tools work more or less similar to each other. One of the major visible differences is that SocialPilot allows you to schedule up to 500 posts, whereas Hootsuite only gives you 350. 

Is there a free version of SocialPilot?

Speaking of the free trial, this tool gives you only two weeks, and the lowest plan costs you $25/month but provides the opportunity to maintain up to 25 social media accounts. Another fact of SocialPilot is that you don’t need a credit card to start the free trial, and you can cancel the service anytime you wish. 

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10) RecurPost

Assume you don’t have even a small business yet and you are planning to build a business or look forward to building a career as a social media handler around Pinterest and Instagram. If this sounds like you, it would be ideal for experimenting with a Hootsuite-free alternative before opting for a paid tool.

Would you like to try a social media managing tool with a two-month trial period? Who doesn’t? Yes, Recurpost is such a service that gives you that cushion when purchasing one of their annual plans. They support all the popular social media platforms and even offer 20% off for non-profit organizations.

How do you use SocialPilot?

After a few platform-specific products, here is another all-around social media management tool for your consideration. Yes, you can handle up to 10 social accounts with Social Champ, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, and Google My Business.

Speaking about the features, Recurpost consists of bulk scheduling, content libraries, URL shortener, advanced analytics reports, Google alerts, time scheduling, and many more great options to fight with high-class tools, including Hootsuite.

Is there a free version of SocialPilot?

Recurpost has three plans to choose from as per the requirement of your business, and the most popular plan, the Solo, which is made to serve individual users, comes at $25/month. The best part of Recurpost is providing all the services in the basic plan for the users.

They limit only the number of users, recurring posts, daily posts, and RSS feed which we see as something unique to this platform. If you used it consciously, it would help your small business to accomplish most of the tasks without switching to pricier plans.  

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11) Tailwind

Our last suggestion is Tailwind. Like other tools, you can enjoy one free social media accounts for lifetime use with Tailwind; Facebook, and Twitter. However, they have Facebook, Pinterest, Instagram, and Google My Business in their paid plans, which come to you affordable compared to other Hootsuite alternatives.

What is Tailwind for?

This tool is for the influencers and all other people who are interacting with Pinterest and Instagram. Actually, unlike most of the software we mentioned throughout, Tailwind won’t have features to handle social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, or LinkedIn.

However, it is well-equipped to serve Pinterest users, particularly with 200+ monthly Pinterest designs, 100 posts, analytics, and essential reports to thrive on the platform. Tailwind has a free plan for lifetime use, in which the users can handle one Pinterest and Instagram account. You have the opportunity to play with 20 posts and 20 Pinterest designs.

Is it free to use Tailwind?

All in all, Tailwind is not for all social media accounts but is a must-have for Pinterest users. The paid subscriptions have publishing tools, automation solutions, analytics, and collaboration tools to help small businesses. The pricing structure starts from $9.99/month and expands up to 39.99/month. We feel these plans are unnecessarily complicated for the first time trying a social media management tool.

However, if you have previous experience in such software solutions, you can closely inspect all the details before choosing a plan. There are loads of more information available on the website; the same information can be intimidating for rookies.

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What Is The Best Free Social Media Management Tool?

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Hootsuite is the most popular out of the lot, and if you have any valid reasons to say no to Hootsuite, you can try options like Buffer, Zoho Social, Spendible, or Sprout social with more or less similar features.

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How Do You Stay On Top of Social Media Trends?

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You will have to stay alive on social media to grab the most trending stuff before your competitors. Joining related communities, groups, and following influencers are few simple steps you can implement. Of course, having a sound social media management software tool can help your course in more ways than one.

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Summary

You need to create constant content and adequately maintain all accounts to build your audience. In doing that, you must have one tool to manage all social media tasks, and this is where you ask yourself which is the best social media management tool? The common answer that you would hear is Hootsuite. 

Hootsuite is one of the best social media management tools, but in this world, nothing is irreplaceable. It’s the same with Hootsuite. The best thing about these alternative tools is that most of the service providers allow considerable time as a trial period to test their services. It tells you can explore whether our suggestions are suitable for you or not. Have a great day!

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