Sprout Social Pricing, Features, Reviews & Comparison of Alternatives

Pros
Great user interface (I like it much better than Hootsuite's interface). Customer service is superb! Anytime I had any issues with using SproutSocial, their customer service was a chat or email away. Their customer service seems like a very small team of people, but they are very quick to respond and get to a solution. I've used SproutSocial for several different companies, both large and small, and it works great for managing it all. Analytical reports are clean and better than the ones in Hootsuite. My favorite features are the reports, social listing tools (You can see who's interacting with your company or specific keywords you set up) and being able to 'check off' messages or notifications that you have seen or responded to already. In HootSuite, you cannot do this and sometimes messages can be missed. Another favorite feature in the reporting is being able to compare your company page with competitors and see how you stack up agains the competition. Following/unfollowing accounts on Twitter is another great and useful feature.

Cons
There are a couple social networks that cannot be integrated with SproutSocial, and therefore I have to resort to also using Hootsuite. Things like LinkedIn Showcase Pages, Youtube, Vimeo, LinkedIn groups, Facebook groups to name a few cannot be scheduled or automated. SproutSocial covers the larger social media pages you need to manage like Facebook pages and Twitter. Because it cannot schedule at all social networks, I have to do most of my scheduling in Hootsuite.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
Our team has used a variety of social media scheduling platforms, including Buffer, Hootsuite, Sprout Social, and others, and Sprout Social is by far our favorite for many reasons. • As an agency with hundreds of profiles, Sprout Social makes multiple account management a breeze. • The scheduling browser is very easy to use. • It offers ideal posting times to help you optimize reach and engagement. • It offers a birdseye view of the month. (One of our pain points with Hootsuite was that this was not an option.) There are also many features that those who work with social media every day can appreciate that the average user might not, such as: • The option to schedule and create a new post without having to click into a new window each time. • The ability to download reports by platform and specific date easily and quickly. • The option to view data which allows you to see which content is performing the best.

Cons
I won't beat around the bush. It's pricey. Very pricey. If you're a freelancer or not using social media daily, it may not be worth the investment. If you're an agency working with multiple clients or if social media is part of your daily routine, a scheduling software that offers everything Sprout Social offers is well worth it.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 10/10

Pros
It's user-friendly and makes social media management so much easier by allowing to schedule posts and sometimes comments. I also like that they give warnings to make sure we use the best practices for each social media channel

Cons
The platform needs more features, like allowing to post several pictures on Instagram, schedule IGTV videos, and schedule stories on Facebook and Instagram. It's also complicated to add additional accounts to Sprout

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10

Pros
I manage 13 different social media accounts so I need scheduling software to keep up with everything! The majority of the reports on sprout are the same as you can find on your social media channel, but having everything in one place makes reports easier.

Cons
We have had some issues with Sprout since we signed up and the customer service along with the follow-through has been less than ideal. First off you have no account manager, the guy who signed us up washed his hands of us the second he got the check. I found this out when we were having issues connecting our Instagram. After 2 MONTHS, yes 2 months, of talking to support and engineers none of which could help us solve the issue we finally spoke with someone who had an idea of what was going on. After a couple of hours on the phone with him, everything was all fixed, except it wasn't truly fixed. The next day we discovered that since they were having issues connecting our business FB to our business Instagram they just created another business page for us to connect it to. So now we have a business page out there that isn't ours that we can't get Fb to remove. In addition to this major issue we have has small ones such as not being able to post a gif, and not being able to post multiple photos to Instagram through the desktop. It seems the more we use Sprout the more we realize it is not up to par.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 6/10

Pros
Sprout Social is an easy-to-use product that allows the Beginner Social Media Manager/Coordinator the ability to save time and be efficient. It has a basic reporting cluster and overall, it's a good tool.

Cons
There was no drap-and-drop ability. This may seem petty but when you're scheduling 60-90 pieces of content per month, having to manually open each desired post to edit the date and/or time so that the posting doesn't clash with another post is quite cumbersome. Furthermore, when you have all of these posts on different days and at different times, it's hard to go into a day and recall which date had which post on which social platform at which time. Seeing all of this in a calendar view and literally moving the desired post and everything that corresponds with it, to another date is soooo easy and pleasant to the mind. The lack of a social queue was a major deciding factor as well.

Rating breakdown

Likelihood to recommend: 7/10