Hootsuite alternatives for small agencies

What pushes a small agency off Hootsuite

It is rarely a missing feature. The first reason is the price: it goes per seat, so the team grows and the invoice grows with it, and the features that justify the price live in tiers an agency of five never gets round to buying. You end up paying for the shape of a large company to do the work of a small one.

The second reason is subtler and turns up in year two. An agency adds people in seasons: somebody joins in September, leaves in January, comes back in March. When the pricing unit is a person, every one of those moves is an administrative task and a change to the subscription. When the unit is the brand, the channel or the workspace, it is not.

There is a third reason nobody writes on a list of reasons and that surfaces at renewal: the minimum number of social accounts. A plan designed for one corporate brand with 20 profiles does not resemble an agency with five clients on three networks each, even when the totals look similar, because the second case needs the work separated by client rather than pooled into one dashboard.

One column deserves reading twice, because it is the one that decides whether a switch actually saves anything. An agency that grows by taking on more clients wants a unit tied to brands or channels; an agency that grows by hiring wants a unit that is not the person. Most small agencies do both at once, which is why the answer is rarely the cheapest entry tier and usually the model whose worst case is least painful.

None of these units is better in the abstract. Paying per seat is the fairest when every person genuinely works in the tool every day; paying per brand is the cheapest when the team is big and the accounts are few. What hurts is picking a unit that does not resemble the way your agency grows.

What is published today

The figures come from each vendor's own page and in its own currency, which is not the same one in every case. All of them exclude tax.

Prices checked on 6 September 2026: Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Metricool, Buffer, Later.

That table reads badly if the figures are compared as they stand, because they do not measure the same thing. Buffer's 5 dollars are per channel, so an agency with five brands on four networks each has 20 channels and the real number is different. Sprout Social's 79 are per seat and only when billed annually. Metricool's 20 euros cover five whole brands without looking at how many people touch them. An honest comparison means putting your own case on top of it.

How the list reorders around a concrete case

Take an agency of four people with five clients, each on three connected networks. That is 15 social accounts and four people signing in.

With Buffer, those 15 accounts are paid for one by one and the headcount is irrelevant. With Metricool, what counts is the five brands and the team does not matter either. With Sprout Social or Hootsuite, the four people count and the price multiplies by four before anything else is considered. With Later, four people fit on Scale and not below it. The ranking changes completely depending on which of those three numbers grows first in your agency.

The same exercise rules out a common trap. Entry tiers are designed to look comparable to one another, but the tier you actually end up buying is almost never the first one. In Hootsuite, moving from 10 social accounts to unlimited is the step from Standard to Professional, which doubles the price; in Sprout Social, going from 5 profiles to unlimited is the step from Standard to Professional, which also adds 100 dollars per seat. Comparing five entry plans means comparing five things no agency with clients ends up on.

That is also why the price here goes per workspace. The limits belong to the whole workspace rather than to each person: adding a summer intern changes nothing, and removing somebody in January changes nothing either. Exactly how brands, members, connected accounts and the rest of the quotas are counted is in the seats and quotas guide.

Who says yes before anything is published

This is where an agency has more at stake than it looks, because a post that goes out without permission costs a client, not a feature. All five tools on this list have some form of review before publishing, so the right question is not whether it exists, but three sharper ones.

• Who approves? A colleague reviewing is not the same as the client reviewing. The first is quality control, the second is permission.
• Does it block or does it notify? A real approval is a state of the post: without it, the piece does not enter the queue. Anything that only notifies is a conversation.
• Does the client take up a seat? In tools priced per person, inviting the client in to review can cost exactly as much as hiring somebody.

The third question moves the most money and gets asked the least. Under a per seat model, every person on the client's side who wants to look before publishing is another seat, and since nobody wants to pay that, the approval leaks out of the tool and back into email or a shared sheet. That is where the record of who said yes gets lost, which was the problem the tool was supposed to solve.

Here one yes is enough, from either side. With approval on for a client, the post waits for your team's approval from the app or the client's from their portal, whichever comes first, and the client can send it back with the reason attached. In house workspaces approve between colleagues; the client's yes needs the portal, which is an agency feature. A creator workspace has no approvals, and that is the right answer for it.

Which one to pick, by how your agency is built

If your bottleneck is connected accounts rather than people, Buffer is hard to beat on price and its editor is still the fastest on this list for working alone.

If you mostly work with one brand per client and with visual networks, Later organises the work into social sets, which is a comfortable way to think when each client is a closed block of profiles rather than a loose collection of channels.

If you run many small brands and what you need is to schedule and measure well without further ceremony, Metricool charges by brand in published tiers and is probably the best cost per brand available in the Spanish market.

If your operation is social listening, reporting to a committee and annual contracts, Sprout Social and Hootsuite itself are built for that and a younger tool is not going to replace them. The piece by piece comparison is in GoFeed versus Sprout Social.

If what weighs on you is everything around publishing, the client approval, the place they ask questions, the monthly report and the invoice that follows, then the conversation stops being about schedulers. How planning per brand and publishing from a single piece works is on the calendar and publishing page, and the current figures are on the pricing page.

What Hootsuite does better

Four things, and all four are legitimate reasons to stay where you are.

The first is real social listening, tracking mentions and conversation well beyond your own accounts. Nothing equivalent exists here and pretending otherwise would be silly.

The second is network coverage, which includes platforms you will not find here. If you publish on one of them regularly, this list ends before it starts and Hootsuite wins with no argument.

The third is enterprise integration and governance: fine grained permissions, audit trails, single sign on and connectors to corporate tools that have worked for years. A company with a brand team buys that and is right to.

The fourth is support and mileage. Hootsuite has spent more than a decade solving odd cases, has documentation for almost everything and support sized for large accounts. A younger product competes on the pricing model and on what happens around publishing, not on that, and the head to head is in GoFeed versus Hootsuite.