Hootsuite vs Sprout Social in 2026: Pricing, Analytics and Which Is Better

Hootsuite is the better pick for most small teams that want an inbox, social listening and ads in one tool, because all three are on its $99 Standard plan. Sprout Social is the better pick for a team that wants post approvals, unlimited report exports and live phone support at a lower plan level, and that will pay more per seat for its inbox. Both sell per person, both bill yearly for their headline prices, and both cost the same $399 a seat on their Advanced plans. The prices come from Hootsuite's plans page and Sprout Social's pricing page, both read on October 19, 2026.

The gap opens at the entry level. Sprout's cheapest plan, Essentials, is $79 a seat a month on annual billing and $20 less than one Hootsuite Standard seat, but it has 5 social profiles, no inbox and no listening. The first Sprout plan with an inbox, Standard, is $199 a seat, which is $100 a seat more than Hootsuite Standard and holds 5 profiles against Hootsuite's 10. A team of 3 that wants an inbox for 10 accounts pays $297 a month on Hootsuite (3 times $99) and $897 on Sprout Professional (3 times $299), the first Sprout plan with more than 5 profiles.

The order flips when approvals matter. Sprout puts its message approval workflow on Professional at $299 a seat. Hootsuite holds post approval workflows for Advanced at $399. Five people who need approvals pay $1,495 a month on Sprout and $1,995 on Hootsuite, so Sprout costs $500 a month less in that case. Analytics follow the same split: Sprout lets every plan download unlimited PDF and CSV reports, while Hootsuite starts report exports on Professional and spreadsheet exports on Advanced.

A word on who is writing. We make Spreadcast, which designs and publishes social posts for apps on the App Store. Neither Hootsuite nor Sprout Social works with us, both names are trademarks of their owners, and every fact about them on this page comes from their own pages. Spreadcast appears in one section near the end, for readers who have an app, and in one comparison table.

Both tools charge for every person who logs in, which is the first thing to count. Hootsuite's plans page says plans are sold per user, and you buy a seat for each team member who needs access. Sprout Social's pricing page prices every plan per seat as well. Neither has a free plan, so the smallest bill on either is one seat on the cheapest plan: $79 on Sprout Essentials or $99 on Hootsuite Standard.

The second thing to count is social accounts, and here the limits differ. Hootsuite Standard covers 10 social accounts, which its FAQ illustrates as five Facebook Pages and five Instagram profiles shared by the team. Sprout Essentials and Standard list 5 social profiles, and Sprout's tooltip counts Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn Company Pages and personal profiles, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, WhatsApp, Google My Business, Tripadvisor, Glassdoor and Yelp against that limit. Ad accounts, Google Analytics and messaging integrations do not count. Sprout's pricing page does not say the limit grows with more seats, so a brand with more than 5 profiles should plan on Professional or confirm with sales.

Billing terms are close but not the same. Sprout prints its month to month prices: $99 for Essentials, $249 for Standard, $399 for Professional and $499 for Advanced, which is $20 to $100 more per seat than the annual rate. Its billing FAQ says annual billing needs one upfront payment for the whole term. Sprout's terms of service say annual plans renew automatically, that canceling mid term brings no refund for unused months, and that a renewal price rise is capped at 7 percent unless Sprout gives 60 days of notice. Hootsuite's terms say self serve plans renew automatically and that if you cancel or downgrade you pay for the rest of the term without a refund.

Payment and discounts round it out. Hootsuite takes Visa, Mastercard, Discover, JCB and PayPal, and invoices annual Enterprise plans. Sprout takes major credit cards and PayPal. For nonprofits, Hootsuite's HootGiving page lists Standard at $39, Professional at $79 and Advanced at $159 per user a month. Sprout's nonprofit pricing is narrower: Professional at $239 and Advanced at $299 per user on annual billing, for US 501(c)(3) organizations that commit to at least two seats. Two nonprofit seats on Professional cost $158 a month on Hootsuite (2 times $79) and $478 on Sprout (2 times $239).

Four setups cover most buyers. In each one the sum below uses annual billing and the lowest plan that has the features the setup needs, not the lowest plan overall.

One person, 5 profiles, publishing and reports only. Sprout Essentials at $79 beats Hootsuite Standard at $99 by $20 a month, or $240 a year ($1,188 minus $948). Essentials also includes unlimited PDF and CSV report downloads, which Hootsuite Standard does not export. What it lacks is an inbox and listening, and Hootsuite Standard has both.

One person, 8 accounts, with an inbox. Hootsuite Standard fits at $99, because it holds 10 accounts and includes the inbox. On Sprout, 8 profiles pass the 5 profile cap of Standard, so the plan is Professional at $299. Hootsuite is $200 a month cheaper here, or $2,400 a year. A team of 3 in the same position pays $297 on Hootsuite and $897 on Sprout, a gap of $600 a month and $7,200 a year.

Five people with 20 accounts who must approve every post. Approvals put Hootsuite on Advanced: 5 times $399 is $1,995 a month. Sprout has approvals on Professional: 5 times $299 is $1,495. Sprout is $500 a month cheaper, or $6,000 a year, and still includes unlimited profiles. If the same team also needs to assign messages and send satisfaction surveys, both tools move to Advanced at $399 and the bills match.

Ten people on Advanced, with the API. Both Advanced plans are $3,990 a month for 10 seats. Sprout lists its API on Advanced. Hootsuite's developer page documents its APIs without naming a plan, so ask before you sign. At this size the difference is not the seat price but the extras: Hootsuite includes 7 to 30 day listening, while Sprout sells Listening and Premium Analytics as add ons.

Analytics is where each vendor claims to win, so it helps to separate what each plan includes. Hootsuite's analytics page covers Facebook, Instagram, TikTok, X, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube and Threads, with paid ad results next to organic posts. Every Hootsuite plan includes report templates, post performance reports, side by side network reports, industry benchmarks, best time to publish charts, a social performance score and benchmarking against 5 competitors. Professional adds customizable reports, report notes, scheduled reports, PDF and PowerPoint exports and 20 competitors. Advanced adds CSV and XLSX exports, your logo on reports, sharing inside Hootsuite and sending reports to an outside email address.

Sprout's analytics page covers Facebook, X, Instagram, Bluesky, Threads, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest and YouTube. Every Sprout plan, Essentials included, gets group, profile and post level reports, a cross network group report, a Google Analytics report, custom date comparisons and unlimited PDF and CSV downloads. Professional adds competitor reports for Facebook, X and Instagram, paid social reports, tag reports and your own branding on reports. Advanced adds team activity reports, customer care reports and scheduled delivery of any report by email.

Above that, Sprout sells Premium Analytics as an add on for Standard and up. It adds a report builder, selectable metrics, interactive charts, advanced filters, plus over 150 extra metrics, with reports shared as live links. Hootsuite's custom report builder is part of Professional, and its deeper attribution and ROI reporting is an Enterprise feature.

So for the analytics search the answer depends on plan level. At the entry plans Sprout gives more: its $79 Essentials plan exports every report, while Hootsuite's $99 Standard plan exports none but benchmarks 5 competitors and reports on ads. At the middle plans Hootsuite gives more for the money: $199 buys custom reports, scheduled reports and 20 competitors, while Sprout's competitor reports start at $299. At the top, Sprout's Premium Analytics and Hootsuite's Enterprise reporting are both sold through sales.

Hootsuite's inbox, called Nest, is on every plan. Hootsuite's inbox page says it supports messaging across Facebook, Instagram, X, WhatsApp, TikTok, LinkedIn and Threads, with public comments and private messages in one view. Standard includes saved replies, inbox search, notes, conversation history across networks, masking of personal data, business hours and collision alerts when two people open the same message. Professional adds automated replies, Instagram DM automations triggered by a keyword, tags and topics with automations, AI smart replies, contact profiles and CSV exports of up to 18 months of inbox data. Advanced adds assignment, skill based routing, team settings, agent chat, satisfaction surveys and team productivity reports.

Sprout's Smart Inbox starts on Standard, not on Essentials. Sprout's engagement page describes one stream for messages across networks with tags, custom views and bulk actions. Standard includes the inbox, brand keyword monitoring, contact views, 90 days of conversation history, collision detection, comment moderation, case management, push alerts on phones and moderation of comments on Facebook and Instagram ads. Professional adds full history, message tagging, saved replies and engagement reports. Advanced adds chatbots, sentiment, spike alerts, surveys, rules, macros, approvals for replies, AI reply suggestions and conversation summaries.

Review management is one place Sprout clearly leads. From Standard it reads and answers reviews from the Apple App Store, Google Play, Trustpilot, Facebook, Google My Business, Tripadvisor, Glassdoor and Yelp in the same inbox. Hootsuite's plans table lists brand review monitoring as an Enterprise add on, and its integrations page offers a review app for 85 sites.

On price the inbox favors Hootsuite: the same team of 3 pays $297 a month for Nest on Hootsuite Standard and $597 for the Smart Inbox on Sprout Standard, and Sprout's version holds 5 profiles. On depth at the top the two match, since both put routing, surveys and team reports on their $399 Advanced plans.

Listening is the clearest structural difference. Every Hootsuite plan includes Quick Search over the last 7 days, trending topics, sentiment analysis, image recognition that spots your logo, peak detection and Wisdom summaries. Hootsuite's listening page says the basic sources are news sites, newsletters, blogs, forums, Facebook, X, Bluesky, YouTube, Quora and podcasts. Standard compares 2 brands or topics, Professional and Advanced compare 5, and Professional adds 30 day search, exports and 90 day trend forecasts. Enterprise adds Instagram, Threads, LinkedIn, Reddit and other sources, 13 months of history, alerts and the Lumen by Talkwalker product.

Sprout does not include listening in a base plan. Its listening page says Listening is an add on for Standard, Professional or Advanced, and the pricing page sends you to a demo rather than printing a price. What you get for that is query building without Boolean skills, demographics, sentiment and share of voice, competitor tracking and Trellis answering research questions in plain language. Sprout's integrations page lists Bluesky, Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, TikTok, Tumblr, X, YouTube and the web as listening sources. Sprout does include brand keyword monitoring in the Smart Inbox from Standard: 10 keywords per group on Standard and Professional and 20 on Advanced.

For a brand that only wants to see a week of mentions with sentiment, Hootsuite Standard covers it for $99. For a brand that wants deep listening as a research product, both tools send you to sales: Hootsuite for Talkwalker on Enterprise, Sprout for the Listening add on and NewsWhip.

Hootsuite does not have a free plan, a published monthly price, Snapchat or Reddit publishing, or Telegram and Mastodon. Approvals wait for the $399 Advanced plan, report exports wait for Professional, and CSV exports of analytics wait for Advanced. Review monitoring and the deep Talkwalker listening are Enterprise only. Its plans FAQ also notes that some features need more than one seat, so a solo user should check which team features they will actually get.

Sprout Social does not have a free plan either, and its cheapest plan has no inbox and only 5 profiles. Listening and Premium Analytics are add ons with no published price. Bulk scheduling, competitor reports and approvals wait for Professional at $299, and the API waits for Advanced at $399. It does not publish ads campaigns the way Hootsuite does, though every plan can boost Facebook and Instagram posts. It lists no MCP server, no Telegram and no Mastodon, and its nonprofit discount skips Essentials and Standard and needs two seats.

Neither tool makes the posts for you. Both have AI that writes or rewrites captions and both connect to Canva, but the idea, the image and the timing still start with a person. That is true at every price on this page.

People search for Hootsuite vs Sprout Social on Reddit to get an opinion that is not a sales page. We did not quote Reddit threads here, because we cannot check who wrote them or when. What we can check is what each company says about the other, and where those claims no longer match the vendor's own pricing page.

Sprout's comparison article, last updated on October 2, 2026, uses G2 data it dates to May 2026. It reports Sprout ahead on product direction, 8.9 against 8.0, and on ease of use, 8.8 against 8.6, with both at 8.7 for ease of setup. It says most of Hootsuite's G2 reviews come from small businesses, 59.5 percent. It also says Hootsuite's OwlyWriter AI caps content by tokens while Sprout's AI Assist is unlimited. Both points have aged: Hootsuite's plans page now lists Wisdom with 100 AI credits a month, and Sprout's own pricing page now meters Trellis at 100 credits per seat.

Hootsuite's comparison page says it has nearly 4,000 five star reviews on G2, that every Hootsuite plan includes social listening and that Sprout does not let you schedule or publish paid ads. The first two match Hootsuite's plans page. On the third, Sprout's pricing page does list paid promotion of Facebook and Instagram posts on every plan, so boosting is possible on Sprout while full ad campaign publishing is not listed.

Read both pages as marketing. Each picks the categories it wins, and neither mentions where its own plan table is weaker. The tables on this page use the plan tables instead, which both vendors keep current because customers buy from them.

Hootsuite rebuilt its product on June 24, 2026 as Social OS, a set of named apps: Perch for planning and publishing, Nest for the inbox, Lumen for listening, Parliament for employee advocacy and Wisdom as the AI agent across them. Hootsuite's announcement launched MCP connectors across Perch, Nest and Lumen on the same day. Hootsuite's product updates page then lists parallel approvals, bulk tagging of up to 50 posts, WhatsApp working alongside the WhatsApp Business app, monitoring of public Threads profiles, a Parliament MCP connector, Instagram DM automations moved into Nest and tracking of how a brand appears in ChatGPT, Gemini, Claude and Perplexity.

Sprout spent the year on AI and listening. In February 2026 it expanded its Reddit partnership so brands can publish to subreddits and answer owned subreddits from the Smart Inbox, and launched a creator tool called Recruit. On May 13, 2026 it announced that its Trellis agent would reach every customer in July, and on August 20 it reported Trellis generally available on every plan, with Trellis Studio for reusable AI workflows. The pricing page now marks Essentials as a new plan and meters Trellis by credits.

Two company events matter for buyers. Sprout's CEO letter of July 15, 2026 announced that about 20 percent of the team was leaving. And on July 10, 2026, Sprout said Gartner named it a Visionary in the first Magic Quadrant for social media management and listening. If you last compared these two a year ago, Hootsuite's menus and Sprout's plan lineup have both changed, and older reviews describe products that no longer look the same.

Hootsuite and Sprout Social share one trait no table above shows: both start with an empty calendar. Someone decides what to post, makes the image, writes a caption for each network and then schedules it. Their AI helps with wording once the idea exists. For an app founder, that first step is usually why the feed goes quiet between releases.

Spreadcast designs the post and publishes it for you. You paste your App Store link once at the start page. Spreadcast checks the listing every day, and when a new version ships it makes an update post: your own screenshot in an iPhone frame, a headline and two or three points from the release notes, in the language of the release notes. A rating milestone becomes a thank you post. Posts use your icon, screenshots and colors, plus the logo and fonts from your website. It writes a caption for each network and publishes to Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn (to a personal profile), Facebook, Threads, Pinterest, Bluesky, Mastodon, Telegram and Discord, plus YouTube for video posts. Each post waits for one tap of approval, or on paid plans runs on full autopilot at nine in the morning in your time zone.

Free drafts your posts: 3 posts made for you to download, with a small Spreadcast mark. Pro is $29 a month and includes design, captions and publishing to every network for 1 app and 10 social accounts. Studio is $79 a month and includes 5 apps, each with its own brand and accounts, 50 social accounts and 3 seats. One Hootsuite Standard seat is $99 a month for scheduling the posts you make, which is $70 more than Spreadcast Pro, or $840 over a year. Three Sprout Essentials seats are $237 a month, $158 more than Spreadcast Studio with its 3 seats. Plans are on the pricing page.

Spreadcast is narrower than both suites. It works only for apps on the Apple App Store, it has no inbox and no listening, and it does not post to X. If you reply to messages or App Store reviews all day, keep Hootsuite or Sprout for that and let Spreadcast handle the release posts. For a wider list of tools, see our Hootsuite alternatives and our Sprout Social alternatives.

Agorapulse is the usual third name for teams that live in the inbox. Agorapulse's pricing page puts unlimited scheduling and one inbox for all messages and organic comments on its Standard plan at $79 per user on annual billing, with 10 social profiles per user and extra profiles at $10 a month each. That is Sprout's entry price with Hootsuite's entry feature, the inbox. Professional at $119 adds ad comment replies and assignments, and Advanced at $149 adds saved replies, automated moderation, advanced reports, ROI analysis and competitor benchmarking. Its trial runs 30 days without a card, and its FAQ says you can keep using a free plan after the trial.

For a team of 3 that needs an inbox for 10 accounts, the monthly bills are $237 on Agorapulse Standard, $297 on Hootsuite Standard and $897 on Sprout Professional. Hootsuite still leads if listening must be included, and Sprout still leads on approvals per dollar and phone support. Our Agorapulse alternatives guide covers its plans in depth.

Buffer is the answer when the question is Hootsuite, Buffer or Sprout Social and the job is mostly publishing. Buffer's pricing file lists a free plan for 3 channels, then $6 per channel a month, and its Team plan adds unlimited users and approvals at $12 per channel. Ten channels and a whole team cost $120 a month billed monthly, or $100 billed yearly, which is less than one Sprout Standard seat. Its inbox covers comments, and its pricing page lists no listening, so it replaces the scheduling half of either suite, not the care and research half.

Everything on this page was read on October 19, 2026. For Hootsuite we used its plans page and the feature table inside it, its product pages for publishing, inbox, listening, analytics and integrations, its nonprofit page, its terms, its developer page, its Wisdom announcement, its product updates and its own comparison with Sprout. For Sprout Social we used its pricing page with the plan comparison and billing FAQ, its feature pages, its integrations page, its API documentation, its terms, its nonprofit pricing, its press releases and its own comparison with Hootsuite.

Four things could not be confirmed and are flagged where they come up: Hootsuite's monthly billing rate, which Hootsuite plans may use its APIs, what one AI credit buys on either tool, and whether Sprout's 5 profile limit grows with seats. Both help centers would not load for us, and review sites blocked our requests, so no review scores appear except those each vendor quotes about itself. We did not run paid accounts, so nothing here is a claim about speed or reliability.

We make Spreadcast, and it appears in one section and one table. If a price or a limit here no longer matches a vendor's page, the vendor's page is right. For Spreadcast compared with Hootsuite alone, see Spreadcast vs Hootsuite.