Hootsuite vs. Sprout Social: Get ahead with the best social media tool

Hootsuite. And there’s no contest. That’s because we acquired Talkwalker, the industry leader in social listening, in early 2024. Now we provide AI-powered social media monitoring and sentiment analysis to every single one of our customers. 

That means even small businesses and creators can track brand mentions, discover the latest social media trends, and use data to enrich content creation and social media strategy. 

Sprout social listening doesn’t even offer basic functionality that comes with every Hootsuite plan, such as Quick search. Plus, Hootsuite users get better filters (including city or state filters) and a much more intuitive social listening interface.

Businesses who want a deeper solution can upgrade to Hootsuite Listening to get access to the broadest social listening coverage on the market, across 150 million websites and 30 social media channels in 187 languages.

Hootsuite Amplify—the original employee advocacy platform—is the best of the bunch. We hear time and time again that Amplify is easier to use and more powerful than any competitor’s version.

Amplify lets you set your team up to share relevant, on-brand content to send your message further. Quickly boost reach and engagement by tapping into your team's personal network.

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Hootsuite has the best social media analytics tools, period. Boost engagement by learning the best time to post based on your audience and goals. Plus, see your top-performing posts and how your ads are performing.

Want to know how you stack up to the competition? Hootsuite provides industry benchmarking and competitive analysis. Compare performance against similar brands and industry leaders to take your message further.

One more thing! Hootsuite’s analytics are more customizable than the competition. Compare custom time frames, create attractive custom reports, and white-label reports as needed. Note: Sprout charges extra fees to access many of these features.

Hootsuite’s social media inbox is better than Sprout’s for a few key reasons. Whether you simply want to respond to messages and comments across social media or you want a full-fledged customer service solution (more on that in the next FAQ), you’ll find an option for your needs with Hootsuite.

With Hootsuite inbox*, you can:

• Respond to public comments and DMs across social networks and WhatsApp 

• Automate your inbox with saved replies and auto-responders

• Retweet, like, and hide comments across social networks

• Send customer satisfaction surveys after a correspondence with a customer

• View complete conversation histories to get the full context of messages

• Avoid agent collision so you don’t reply to the same message as another agent

• Mask customers’ personally identifiable information (PII) in messages

• Leave contact and conversation notes for fellow agents to give context

And so much more!

*Please note that not all features are available in every Hootsuite plan.

Absolutely! Hootsuite offers many user-friendly customer care tools, many of which go beyond the capabilities of Sprout’s. The Hootsuite dashboard comes with an omnichannel social inbox that lets you bring all your social media messaging and comment management to one convenient view, but that’s really the tip of the Hootsuite customer care iceberg.

Here are a few more options for teams that need more robust customer care solutions:

• Hootsuite Social Customer Care is our Salesforce integration that effortlessly brings all your social media inquiries into Salesforce. 

• The Hootsuite Generative AI Chatbot is a web and social media chatbot that can automate up to 80% of your message replies.

• Hootsuite Advanced Inbox is an advanced customer care tool designed to help teams boost customer satisfaction, automate messaging, measure performance, and improve efficiency.

If you’d like to try one of our customer care offerings, be sure to reach out to our sales team. They’d be glad to give you a quick demo of any of these products.

Yes! And, compared to Sprout, Hootsuite provides a more integrated experience for paid social. Hootsuite allows users to boost organic posts and manage full-scale social advertising campaigns (for Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn) directly within the dashboard across all plans.

While Sprout Social offers excellent organic tools, its paid advertising features are often more limited or require higher-tier plans to access comparable depth. For marketers who need to prove ROI by looking at paid and organic performance in one report, Hootsuite is the stronger choice.

Hootsuite is the stronger social media scheduler because it’s built for high-volume, multi-platform publishing. It lets teams plan, bulk upload, and schedule hundreds of posts across networks in one place, with built-in optimization for timing and an intuitive calendar that makes campaign planning easy. This makes it especially effective for teams managing multiple brands or channels at once.

Compared to Sprout, Hootsuite is faster and more efficient for executing scheduling workflows. Its bulk scheduling, automation, and flexible publishing tools help teams save time and scale their content output without added complexity.