An agency does not buy one tool: it buys seven. Social management, message automation, a link page, tasks, chat, storage and invoicing. Each line has its own selection criterion and its own price, and the comparison that helps is the one across the whole basket, not two isolated products that rarely do the same job.
Seven lines of spend, seven criteria
Most best tools lists rank by popularity. This one ranks by decision: what you are buying, and which question that purchase answers. It works the same for an agency with clients and for the marketing team of a company running its own brands, although two of the lines only make sense in the first case and are marked as such further down.
| Line | The real criterion | References with public pricing |
|---|---|---|
| Social management | Who approves before publishing | Metricool, Vista Social, SocialPilot, Sendible |
| Message automation | How a contact gets counted | ManyChat and its category |
| Link page | One per brand, and who sees the metrics | Bundled inside several suites |
| Tasks | Whether the work lives next to the content | ClickUp, Asana, Monday |
| Team chat | Whether you pay for every person who joins | Slack |
| Storage | How much space per person and at what price | Google Workspace |
| Invoicing | Number series, VAT regimes and IRPF withholding | Quipu, Holded, Contasimple |
No agency buys all seven on the same day, and that is precisely the problem. They get bought one at a time, each time something hurts, and two years later nobody has looked at the first one again. Above those seven sits an eighth category that tries to cover them all: agency suites like GoHighLevel or SuiteDash. They come at the end, because the question they answer is a different one and it is better asked afterwards.
Social management: the criterion is who approves
Nearly all of them schedule and nearly all of them measure, so comparing by number of networks leads nowhere. The question that separates them is what happens between somebody writing a piece and somebody publishing it.
Metricool bills by brands, with plans from 20 € a month for five brands and 54 € for fifteen, and its post approval system and role management only arrive on the Advanced tier. Vista Social bills by profiles and users: $79 for fifteen profiles and two users, $149 for thirty and four, with multi stage approval flows from that second tier. SocialPilot leaves approvals and client seats out of its entry plan and grants them on the next one. Sendible keeps unlimited users on every plan, which is an uncommon and genuinely useful decision, although its figures could not be read directly on its site and what circulates comes from secondary sources.
The criterion, then: if you publish for third parties, approval is not one more checkbox, it is the feature. If you publish for your own company, what you need is internal review rather than a client's, which does not exist in that model. The full arithmetic of this line, with more names on the table, is in the social media stack cost guide.
Message automation and the link page
Message automation gets bought for one concrete reason: somebody comments a keyword on a post and receives a direct message with the link. The criterion is not the flow builder, which by now looks alike everywhere, but how a contact gets counted. The category reference, ManyChat, bills per active contact, meaning per person who interacts during the month; its page was not reachable on 8 September, so that description comes from secondary sources rather than its own. The consequence of the model is verifiable in any spreadsheet: the good months are the expensive ones.
There is a second criterion in this line that only surfaces after a few months: which networks the automation actually reaches, and whether the trigger you need exists there. A comment trigger, a story reply trigger and a plain message trigger are three different things, and the follow gate, where the automation checks whether the person already follows the account, is done differently by every vendor. Ask before buying whether that check is a platform lookup or a question the automation asks and reads the answer to, because the two behave very differently in front of a real audience.
The link page is almost always bought on impulse and almost never compared. Two criteria matter: whether you get one per brand or one for everything, and whether the click metrics are yours or the client's. When it comes bundled into the tool you already run, this line disappears from the budget, and that is the easiest subscription in the list to shed.
Tasks, chat and storage
These three get bought out of inertia more than any others, and they are the easiest to consolidate.
ClickUp charges per user per month: $10 on Unlimited and $19 on Business, or $7 and $12 billed annually, with full access to Gantt charts, timelines and dependencies arriving only on Business. Slack charges 8.25 € per user per month on Pro and 18 € on Business+, or 6.75 € and 15 € annually, and its free plan keeps 90 days of history and ten integrations. Google Workspace starts at 6.80 € per user per month with 30 GB per person and rises to 13.60 € with two terabytes; additional storage is bought separately and Google publishes that price only in dollars.
The criterion for all three is the same and it is arithmetic: they are billed per head. On a team of three they are a rounding error; on a team of twelve they are half the software bill, and the intern who only reads costs what the person living inside it costs. Before signing any of the three, check whether the work can live where the content already lives: most agencies keep an entire task manager for half a dozen cards per client and a file folder the client cannot even open without asking by email. That is where consolidation actually shows, far more than on the social tool line, which is usually well chosen already.
Invoicing here, with series, VAT and IRPF
This is the line where international tools stop being useful, and it only exists if you invoice clients.
| Tool | Published price | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Quipu | 17 €/month Starter, 30 € Solution, 59 € Premium | Regular prices, with a three month promotion running |
| Holded | 15 €/month Plus, 29 € Basic, 59 € Standard | VAT not included, invoices per year capped by plan |
| Contasimple | 12.95 €/month Professional, 19.95 € Ultimate | Free basic plan with 12 documents a year |
Prices checked on 8 September 2026: Metricool, Vista Social, Sendible, ClickUp, Slack, Google Workspace, Quipu, Holded, Contasimple, GoHighLevel.
IRPF is the income tax withheld on Spanish invoices, and all three tools handle it. All three also comply with Royal Decree 1007/2023 and declare so on their own pages, Quipu with a dated formal declaration and Contasimple with the exact date from which it operates compliant. The criterion between them is invoice volume per year and whether you need bank reconciliation; the breakdown is in the agency invoicing software comparison.
Everything in this article happens in one place in GoFeed.
Try it freeWhere GoFeed fits and where it does not
Of the seven lines it covers six and a half, and the half matters. Publishing to fourteen networks, an inbox carrying messages, comments and reviews, analytics on six networks, a link page per brand, message automation on Instagram and Facebook, tasks and files: every workspace has that, whether it is an agency, a company or a creator. Client approval, the portal, team chat, the CRM and the commercial documents are agency workspace features; ads are in every workspace from the second tier of its plan, and internal review reaches company workspaces too. An in house marketing team gets the whole content half and never sees the word client anywhere.
What it does not cover: your full bookkeeping, with bank reconciliation and tax forms, which is the job of the three tools in the previous section. And it does not write content: what ships is a door through which your own assistant works on your workspace with your permissions. The price goes per workspace rather than per seat, with current figures on the pricing page and the portal explained on its own page.
How to choose without comparing apples to oranges
Three rules that save months.
The first: compare scope before price. A 20 € tool that does half the job and a $79 one that does twice as much are not in the same conversation, and putting them in the same table only serves to justify a decision already made.
The second: count what is billed separately. GoHighLevel is the extreme example, with SMS, email, phone numbers and AI features charged by usage on top of a subscription that starts at $97 a month and reaches $497 on the tier that allows resale. SuiteDash sits at the other end, flat rate from $19 with unlimited users. Both publish their prices and both are honest; they simply do not cost what they appear to at first glance. The map of what each one calls white label is in the white label guide.
The third: consolidate only what you use for a single checkbox. If four of your seven subscriptions exist for one feature each, merging them genuinely changes the bill. If you use two of them deeply, consolidating will take away things you were really using, and that costs more than the subscription you saved.
And a closing warning about best tools lists, this one included: almost none survives a price change. The figures here carry a date and a link to the vendor's own page for that reason. If you are deciding in 2027, open them.