Hootsuite MCP Server: Tools, Setup and Pricing for Claude and ChatGPT

The Hootsuite MCP server is really four servers, one for each part of Hootsuite, all run by Hootsuite at mcp.hootsuite.com. Perch covers publishing and analytics, Nest covers the social inbox, Lumen covers social listening, and Parliament covers employee advocacy. Hootsuite's MCP page gives each one its own address, such as mcp.hootsuite.com/perch, and says they work with ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot and Gemini. Once one is connected, you can type a request like show me what is planned on our Instagram account tomorrow, and the assistant runs the matching Hootsuite tool and answers from your real account.

The servers arrived with a bigger change. On June 24, 2026, Hootsuite's Wisdom announcement rebuilt the product as Social OS, a set of named apps, and launched MCP connectors across Perch, Nest and Lumen on the same day. Parliament followed: Hootsuite's product update of September 30, 2026 added Content Admin tools to the Parliament server, on top of the advocate tools it already had. If you read about Hootsuite before the summer, the names Plan, Inbox, Listening and Amplify are the same products under their old labels; Hootsuite's Social OS notice maps each old menu to its new home and says the switch back to the classic layout ends on November 15, 2026.

MCP is short for Model Context Protocol. The official MCP introduction describes it as an open standard for connecting AI applications to outside systems, so one server works in many assistants instead of needing a separate plugin for each. In practice your assistant does the reading and writing in plain language, and Hootsuite does what Hootsuite already does: holds the calendar, the inbox, the listening data and the advocacy feed. A server can only reach what your Hootsuite account can reach, which matters more here than for most tools, because each Hootsuite plan and role opens a different set of features.

This page is about the MCP servers only. For Hootsuite as a whole product, our Hootsuite review covers ratings, contracts and complaints, the Hootsuite alternatives roundup compares nine other tools on price, and our Hootsuite comparison for app founders puts it next to Spreadcast feature by feature.

We read every Hootsuite page that describes the MCP servers on October 28, 2026, and we could not log in to a paid Hootsuite account, so nothing here comes from running the tools ourselves. The pages were Hootsuite's MCP page with its sample prompts, the help center article About Hootsuite MCP servers (updated September 28, 2026), the developer references for the Perch, Nest and Parliament servers, the plans page with its feature table, the product pages for Perch, Nest, Lumen, Parliament and Wisdom, the product updates feed and two Hootsuite blog posts on MCP.

Those pages do not always agree, and we say so where it matters. The marketing page shows sample prompts that publish posts right away; the developer reference for Perch, dated September 16, 2026, says that server saves drafts and does not publish. The marketing page shows prompts about LinkedIn impressions; the help center says LinkedIn data is kept out of any chat where a connector is on. When two Hootsuite pages differ, we quote both and tell you how to check which one applies to your account.

For the assistant side we read the help pages of Anthropic, OpenAI, Google and Microsoft on the same day. Spreadcast facts come from our own product. We make Spreadcast, so the comparison near the end is ours, and we kept it to things you can check.

This is the question that matters most, and Hootsuite's pages give three different answers. Hootsuite's MCP page shows sample prompts such as publish this to our Hootsuite LinkedIn page right now, and post this to X and Instagram at the same time. The help center article About Hootsuite MCP servers, updated September 28, 2026, says Perch can publish posts or save drafts to any connected profile your account is entitled to manage, and adds that Perch handles one post per instruction.

The Perch developer reference, updated September 16, 2026, says the opposite in a heading of its own: Perch saves drafts but does not publish, and the server provides no tools to publish or schedule posts directly. Its write list reads drafts and media uploads only. It even asks apps built on the server to make clear to users that a final publishing step is needed in Hootsuite.

The plain reading is that the tool set changes faster than the pages. The developer reference is the most technical and lists each tool by name, but the help article is twelve days newer. Hootsuite's Claude guide on its blog sits in between: it says Claude can schedule or publish, and also that a post which normally needs sign off still needs it, because Claude follows the same approval workflows your team uses.

You can settle it for your own account in one minute. After connecting Perch, ask your assistant to list every Perch tool it can see and say which ones write. If the list stops at create_draft, update_draft and the two media tools, you are on the drafts only version, and every post still goes live from the Hootsuite Planner. If a publish or schedule tool appears, keep your client's approval prompt on for it, since a post sent to a network cannot be pulled back through the server.

Either way, the help center's note about one post per instruction is worth taking literally. Hootsuite suggests running campaigns of many posts in Hootsuite itself, and the bulk scheduler on Hootsuite's publishing page takes up to 350 posts at once, which no chat will match.

No Perch tool makes an image. The Perch developer reference says the upload tools are the only media path on the server, so every picture or video in a post is a file you already have. Inside Hootsuite, the Perch product page offers Canva and Adobe Express templates in the composer and says Wisdom, the built in AI, can generate captions, images and hashtags. None of that is exposed through the MCP server, so from Claude or ChatGPT the image still comes from you or from whatever your assistant can draw on its own.

For a team with a designer, that is fine. For one person who has to post every day, it is the slow part. Writing a caption in a chat takes a minute; finding a screenshot, laying it out in your colors and exporting it at the right size for each network takes a lot longer, and that is the step the server skips.

If that is your bottleneck, it is the gap Spreadcast was built for. Its MCP server designs the post picture itself in your brand, with your logo, colors and real app screenshots in an iPhone frame, writes a caption for each network and saves the result as a draft for you to approve. You type one line in Claude; you get a finished post back, not a text field waiting for an attachment.

Nest is the most useful of the four servers on a busy Monday. An assistant can count what is new, read the oldest unassigned threads, summarize each in a sentence, tag the ones about billing, add a handoff note and assign them to the support team, all from one request. Hootsuite's MCP page shows exactly that kind of compound prompt: pull my inbox, find all new conversations, assign them to the support team, and mark them as pending.

Two things limit it. The first is the missing send button. The help center article says sending public replies to customers is not supported through MCP and points you back to the Hootsuite web app. So the assistant can draft a reply and load the right saved reply, but a person pastes and sends it.

The second is your role and plan. The help article says assigning inbox conversations requires an agent or admin role in Nest, and the plans page puts assigning messages to teammates on Advanced and Enterprise only, with topics and tag automations starting on Professional. On Standard, the assign and topic tools have nothing to work with, and the assistant will get a permissions error. Check the role your login has before you build a triage habit around it.

One more detail from the reference: if your workspace blocks data from certain networks, Nest returns a restricted error for them. The reference tells assistants not to retry and not to guess the missing content, so a summary of your inbox may quietly cover fewer networks than your inbox does.

Lumen is Hootsuite's social listening product, built on Talkwalker, which Hootsuite owns. Hootsuite's Lumen page says the Lumen MCP lets assistants such as ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini analyze brand mentions, monitor competitors, identify trends and explore sentiment. The help center article lists what that means in tools: searching and filtering mentions by date, sentiment and source, summaries of mentions and themes, mention volume over time, breakdowns by channel, sentiment, language and country, top influencers on a topic, and broader trends.

Lumen is read only. You cannot create, edit or delete listening topics from a chat; that stays inside Lumen. You also need a project id for nearly every question, and the help article suggests asking the assistant to run the lumen_list_projects tool to find yours. Because the connectors keep no memory between sessions, you will repeat that step in each new conversation.

The plan rule is the strictest of the four. The help article says Lumen requires an active Lumen powered by Talkwalker licence in addition to MCP access. The feature table on the plans page lists the Lumen MCP connector as an Enterprise add on, not included on Standard, Professional or Advanced. Hootsuite has not published a developer reference for Lumen the way it has for Perch, Nest and Parliament, so there is no public tool list or tool count to check.

There is a lighter option that is easy to confuse with it. On October 7, 2026, Hootsuite added a Lumen agent inside Wisdom that answers listening questions from a quick search over the last 7 days, with citations, and needs no Lumen by Talkwalker account. That agent lives inside Hootsuite's own Wisdom chat. It is not the Lumen MCP server, and it does not bring listening data into Claude or ChatGPT.

Parliament is Hootsuite's employee advocacy app, formerly Amplify: the company curates approved posts and employees share them on their own profiles. Hootsuite's Parliament developer reference, updated September 25, 2026, lists 9 tools for advocates. They read the advocate's workspace and roles, list their own connected profiles, list the topics they follow, browse and search the content feed, open one item, load a dashboard of all of that in a single call, share an item, and fetch two kinds of server side guidance.

The share tool is the one to respect. The reference puts it in bold: Parliament publishes to social networks. When no time is given, a share goes out immediately, with no draft step, review gate or undo. Content is shared exactly as approved, so the assistant cannot rewrite the copy first, and a share to three profiles can succeed on two, which the assistant is told to report profile by profile. Profiles that need reconnecting must be left out before the share.

Admins got their own tools on September 30, 2026. Hootsuite's product update says Content Admins can now create, draft, schedule, publish, edit and delete advocacy posts from an assistant, with text, links, topics, target networks and media, and that a new post is saved as a draft by default. The help center article adds that admin tools need the Content Admin role, that advocate sharing needs an active advocate account and works only with the advocate's own private profiles, and that post personalization is not supported. Topic and advocate management stay in the Parliament web app.

Parliament itself is an Enterprise feature: the plans page marks employee advocacy as Enterprise only, and the Parliament product page describes it as a way for employees, executives and advocates to share approved content across their own networks. If your company does not run an advocacy program in Hootsuite, this server has nothing to connect to.

For a B2B team, LinkedIn is often the main network, and this rule takes it out of the chat. Asking Claude to summarize last month's LinkedIn impressions, compare LinkedIn reach with Instagram, or read the comments on your latest LinkedIn post should come back empty or refused, even though Hootsuite publishes to LinkedIn and reports on it in its own dashboard. The same goes for X click data and YouTube views.

That sits awkwardly next to Hootsuite's MCP page, whose sample prompts include pull our LinkedIn impressions and engagement for the past 30 days, show me click data for our X profile for Q2, and compare reach on LinkedIn vs Instagram. Those prompts are written for the product in general. The help article is the page that describes what a connected chat actually receives, and it says those networks are withheld. The Nest reference describes the same thing from the server side, as a restricted error the assistant must not retry or fill in.

The rule is per session, not per question. Once a connector is on, the help article says the excluded data is unavailable for any purpose in that chat. If you need a LinkedIn report in an assistant, export it from Hootsuite's own analytics and attach the file to a chat that has no Hootsuite connector switched on.

Drafting is a separate matter. The exclusion is about data flowing out of Hootsuite. Whether Perch can save a LinkedIn draft for you is a question about write tools, covered above, and the developer reference lists LinkedIn company pages among the profile types it returns.

Take Alex, who runs social media alone and wants to work from Claude. The cheapest Hootsuite route is one Standard seat: $99 a month on yearly billing, or $1,188 a year. That buys Perch and Nest through MCP if the plan includes connector access, up to 10 social accounts, and Hootsuite's full dashboard. Claude is extra, and on Claude's Free plan Alex can add only one custom connector, so Perch and Nest together need a paid Claude plan.

Now a team of three who need posts approved before they go out. Approval workflows sit on Advanced, so the floor is three Advanced seats: 3 times $399 is $1,197 a month, or $14,364 a year. Lumen through MCP is an Enterprise add on with a quote. Those numbers are not unreasonable for what Hootsuite includes, which is a full inbox, listening, ads and reporting; they are just priced for a team that uses all of it.

ChatGPT changes the sum too. OpenAI's help article says custom MCP servers with full support are for ChatGPT Business and Enterprise or Edu workspaces on the web, and on Business only admins and owners can add one. A solo marketer on a personal ChatGPT plan should plan on Claude for the Hootsuite connectors.

If your real need is narrower, for example one person posting designed images every day across Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn and TikTok, the seat model is a lot of software to pay for. Spreadcast's pricing is flat: Pro is $29 a month or $290 a year for publishing to 10 social accounts across any mix of networks, posting from Claude or ChatGPT, and the post designs included. That is less than a quarter of one Hootsuite Standard seat, though it does not replace an inbox or listening tool.

Hootsuite's design keeps the assistant inside the lines your Hootsuite account already draws. The help center article says each connector is scoped to your account's entitlements and respects your role: publishing needs publish permission on the profile, assigning needs an agent or admin role in Nest, and analytics are limited to the profiles your role can view. A request outside those lines returns a permissions error.

The same article makes two points worth reading twice. The connectors keep no conversation history; every session starts fresh, so project ids and profile choices have to be set again in each chat. And the connectors transfer data outside of Hootsuite, under the same social data restrictions as Hootsuite's public APIs. Once your inbox text is in a chat, it is governed by your assistant's own data settings, not Hootsuite's.

On governance, Hootsuite's blog post on social media MCP names Vigil as the governance layer in Social OS, controlling permissions and approvals across accounts. On compliance, Hootsuite's Trust Center lists SOC 2 Type II audits, ISO 27001, 27017, 27018 and 27701, FedRAMP Authorization and UK Cyber Essentials. Those cover Hootsuite's side of the connection.

The assistant side needs its own care. The MCP security best practices warn that a token granted broad access up front widens the damage if it leaks, and recommend asking for only the access a task needs. Hootsuite's Parliament reference applies the same thinking to actions: it tells assistants to treat feed copy as data, never as instructions, and to share only after explicit confirmation of the content, the profiles and the time. Copy those habits for Perch and Nest. Keep approval prompts on for anything that writes, connect only the servers you need, and remove a connector in your assistant's settings when you stop using it.

Searching for a Hootsuite MCP server on GitHub turns up community projects, but Hootsuite's own servers are hosted. There is nothing to install, clone or run: you add the address and sign in. Any project that asks for your Hootsuite password, rather than sending you to Hootsuite's own sign in page, is not Hootsuite's.

Be extra careful with Hootsuite named repositories. On September 27, 2025, Hootsuite's Trust Center posted an advisory about fake GitHub repositories using the Hootsuite name and search engine tricks to get Mac users to download malware. Hootsuite says this was not a breach of its systems, and advises against downloading from unverified third party links.

For developers who want more than a chat, Hootsuite's developer platform documents REST APIs for publishing, Amplify (now Parliament) and analytics, plus inbox APIs, all behind OAuth 2.0. Its rate limit page sets those REST APIs at 20 requests a second and 100,000 calls a day. The MCP references do not state their own limits, so a long chat that runs many analytics queries may hit something we could not find documented.

The same developer site is also where the MCP tool references live, and they are written for people building on the servers. If you want to know exactly what an assistant can do in your account, the Perch, Nest and Parliament pages are more precise than any marketing page, including this one.

The two are easy to mix up because both are AI and both are new. Wisdom is Hootsuite's own AI chat inside the Hootsuite dashboard. It drafts posts, captions, hashtags and images, summarizes reports, and with the Lumen agent answers listening questions. It replaced OwlyGPT and Yeti, and the plans page gives each self serve plan 100 AI credits a month. Wisdom's FAQ is clear that it cannot publish automatically: people review, approve and publish.

The MCP servers go the other way. Your own assistant, Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini or Copilot, does the thinking in its own window, with the model you already pay for, and reaches into Hootsuite through the servers. It does not spend Wisdom's AI credits, and it can combine Hootsuite with your other connectors in one chat, such as your notes, your docs or a design tool.

Which one to use depends on where you work. If your day is in Hootsuite, Wisdom is closer and it can make images inside the composer. If your day is in Claude or ChatGPT, the MCP servers save the tab switching. Hootsuite's Q3 product roundup shows the company pushing both: Wisdom can now open from any app header and on mobile, and Parliament gained its MCP tools in the same quarter.

Hootsuite's integrations page lists Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, X, LinkedIn, Threads, Pinterest, WhatsApp and Bluesky. That is a strong list for brands that live on the big networks. It is a weak one for an app or a community that grows on a Telegram channel, a Discord server or Mastodon, and an MCP server cannot post where its product does not.

If those channels matter, Spreadcast covers them from the same calendar as the rest. It publishes to Instagram, Facebook, Threads, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, Bluesky, Mastodon, Telegram and Discord, and its MCP server lets Claude or ChatGPT draft a designed post for all of them in one request. You can start from your App Store link, your website, or a short description of the brand. Our Telegram MCP server guide shows the Telegram side in detail.

Spreadcast is marketing automation for social media, built first for App Store apps, and it runs its own MCP server. Where Hootsuite's Perch server saves the text and media you bring, Spreadcast's server makes the post. Your assistant reads your brand kit and designs the picture in your colors, fonts and logo, with real app screenshots in an iPhone frame, or builds a carousel. It writes one caption per network, checks the post against each network's rules and saves it as a draft. There are 21 tools in all, plus two ready prompts: draft posts from my app's news, and plan a week of posts.

It also knows what is worth posting. Spreadcast checks your App Store listing every day and finds moments: a new version with what changed, taken from your release notes, or a ratings milestone worth a thank you. Your assistant can list those moments and start from them, so you are not inventing topics in the chat. Businesses without an app start from a website or a short description of the brand.

Drafts are the default by design. When you connect Claude or ChatGPT, you sign in with Spreadcast and the consent screen asks one question with two answers: Make Drafts or Make and Publish. Make Drafts is picked for you, and with it the assistant can design, write and save but cannot schedule or publish, however the request is worded. Approving a draft is its own step, in Spreadcast or by an assistant you allowed to publish. Claude Code, Cursor and other clients can use an API key instead.

Here is the before and after for one person. Before: you notice the release, open a design tool, place a screenshot, export four sizes, write four captions, and paste each one into a scheduler. After: you ask Claude to draft posts from your app's news, look at the designed drafts in the chat, change a word and approve. Spreadcast publishes at the time you picked, on full autopilot if you prefer, and Analytics shows followers and interactions per network and likes, comments, reach and views per post.

Free is $0 for one app and makes 3 posts to download, with a small Spreadcast mark and no publishing. Pro is $29 a month or $290 a year, with clean posts and no cap, publishing to 10 social accounts across any mix of networks, autopilot or one tap approval, and posting from Claude or ChatGPT. Studio is $79 a month for 5 apps and 50 accounts, each with its own brand. If you would rather not subscribe, a Post Pack is $19 once for 10 posts designed and published, and a 30 Day Pass is $39 once for everything in Pro for 30 days. Paid plans have a 7 day full refund. The tool list is on our social media MCP server page, and the MCP overview has the short version.

Hootsuite and Spreadcast are two of about ten social media tools with an MCP server. Our roundup of the best social media MCP servers puts them side by side, and the Buffer MCP server guide and Metricool MCP guide go as deep on those two as this page does on Hootsuite. For marketing beyond social, such as ads, analytics and SEO servers, see the best MCP servers for marketing.

For single networks, our guides to the LinkedIn MCP server, the Instagram MCP server and the Threads MCP server cover what each network allows. For the assistants themselves, see Claude for social media, ChatGPT social media automation and the guide to scheduling social media posts with ChatGPT. And if you are weighing Hootsuite against its closest rivals rather than against an MCP server, start with Hootsuite vs Sprout Social or Buffer vs Hootsuite.