Top 12 Social Media Scheduling Tools for Growing Teams and Agencies

Today, in a world where your online reputation can make or break your brand, it makes sense to invest in proper social media scheduling and publishing tools. Whether you’re an in-house marketing manager or part of an agency handling other clients, social media scheduling tools will not only make your work easier but also drive more result-oriented social media marketing efforts with their powerful features and intuitive collaboration setup.

While all social media publishing tools come with some features that are standard across the range such as Publishing, Analytics, Moderation, and Team Collaboration, only a few of them offer all the functionalities that you and your team are looking for.

So, we have evaluated the following 12 tools against their features, customer support, value to money and real verified customer reviews so that you can select the tool that fits the requirements of your team perfectly. We have also elaborated on the strength of each tool and where it falls short.

1. SocialPilot — $50 for 5 Users

SocialPilot has emerged as one of the most comprehensive and easiest social media marketing tools to use. Currently, it is the only tool that allows you to connect numerous social platforms such as Tumblr & VK in addition to prime networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Google My Business and Pinterest.

SocialPilot’s every powerful feature is designed in line with ‘how SocialPilot can help in adding value to one’s social media marketing efforts’ vision. That is the reason it is said to be the only tool that provides the best and the fastest support to its users via email, chat, phone and social.

Features

1. You can create customized posts for individual social platforms at the same time and also mention people in your posts to increase your brand engagement.
2. Analyze how your social media accounts are performing with Social Media Analytics and Reporting (branded reports available).
3. Moderate all your social conversations, mentions & comments and reply to them instantly right from your Social Inbox.
4. Working in a team gets you the best results. So add your team members — assign them roles and see how effectively your post scheduling works with Team Collaboration.
5. Manage your multiple client’s social accounts effortlessly with Client Management. The best part is — you don’t need their account credentials.
6. Get fresh new content suggestions based on what you search, and schedule them right away with the Content Curation feature.
7. Have your new blogs posted automatically to your social accounts with the help of integrated RSS Feed Automation.
8. Save your valuable time by bulk uploading upto 500 posts with the Bulk Scheduling feature
9. Visualize your whole content strategy with the Social Media Calendar. You can also drag & drop posts to reschedule them.
10. Get rid of long, unwanted ugly looking URLs and shorten your links using the inbuilt Bitly, Sniply or Rebrandly URL Shortening services.
11. Share interesting content from anywhere on the web with the browser extension or schedule your posts on-the-go with the help of iOS & Android mobile app.

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2. Hootsuite — $599 for 5 Users

Hootsuite is a social media management tool which is mainly used by big enterprise agencies as it’s more complex compared to other tools in the market

Hootsuite has been around in the social media market since a very long time, resulting in a large customer base with over 16 million users worldwide.

Hootsuite supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest and Youtube social platforms.

Pros

1. The best part about Hootsuite is their social streams feature which allows you to engage with your audience and monitor your social accounts right from the Hootsuite dashboard.
2. Hootsuite provides account specific social media analytics where you can track results by time frame and also create customized reports based on your requirements.
3. Hootsuite lets you connect with more than 150 apps from their app directory. You can browse and select the apps that help you streamline your processes better and as a result, collaborate more efficiently.

Cons

1. Hootsuite is way overpriced, not intuitive and has a much more complicated user interface. It also gets difficult for new users to navigate their clunky dashboard.
2. Hootsuite definitely has a lot of features but the pain is you have to pay for every additional service like access to certain social media account analytics, access to customizable reports, using a different URL shortener than owl.ly, etc.
3. It’s very hard to get a response from their customer support. It can also get very irritating to constantly wait for a reply from their customer service team.. Also, they ask you to pay some more money to get priority support — Wow!

SocialPilot- Best Hootsuite Alternative

3. Buffer — $99 for 5 Users

Buffer is just like SocialPilot; loved by its users and the community. Buffer is a simple social media publishing tool that integrates with prime social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest & Instagram and not any extra ones which might be a turn-off for small businesses and social media professionals.

Pros

1. Buffer has an intuitive and clean user interface which helps the users to navigate within the platform very easily.
2. Buffer lets you customize your posts for each social account with their tailored posts feature.
3. Buffer replies instantly if you are stuck with an issue or have a problem. They provide good support.

Cons

1. Buffer allows you to schedule only about 2000 posts for 25 social accounts which are quite less for agencies and teams.
2. Buffer doesn’t have a Content Curation feature which helps in finding fresh content suggestions.
3. More importantly, Buffer has its own products like Buffer Reply and Buffer Analyze where you have to pay extra in addition to paying for Buffer Publish to manage your social conversations and social media analytics.

SocialPilot- Best Buffer Alternative

4. Sendible — $199 for 5 Users

Sendible calls themselves as a tool that is simply the best way for teams to manage social media marketing for multiple clients and achieve the best results.

It’s a tool that was built keeping the agencies in mind — a complete agency-focused tool.

Sendible supports Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, Google My Business, Youtube and Pinterest along with other blogging platforms like Wordpress, Medium & Tumblr.

Pros

1. Sendible has a unified Social Inbox from where you can track your brand, competitor and key industry terms to stay ahead. You also get email/slack notifications of mentions that match the criteria you’ve set.
2. You can generate in-depth custom reports and send them automatically via email to your clients, team members on a daily, weekly or monthly basis.
3. You can assign conversations/delegate messages to your team members for better and efficient customer service right from the Sendible dashboard.

Cons

1. The pricing and structure of their plans is a bit out of line when compared to other scheduling tools. The pricing is based on the number of services you use. For eg — Publishing to your Facebook page and streaming the Facebook page are 2 different services. So at a price of $199 you get only 105 services which turns out to be quite expensive.
2. When replying to conversations/mentions from Sendible, it doesn’t show the responses immediately. Sometimes this creates a situation of double responses.
3. It takes quite some time to get your hands familiar with Sendible, you need to take out time to go through their tutorials to make it your go-to social media tool. In short, it’s not very user-friendly. Some say they have a clunky dashboard as well — oops!

A Great Sendible Alternative- SocialPilot

5. Agorapulse — $199 for 5 Users

Agorapulse is a social media scheduling and CRM tool helping agencies and teams work collaboratively. One can engage, listen, collaborate and measure with Agorapulse

It supports social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Youtube and Instagram. (No Pinterest & Google My Business integration)

Pros

1. Agorapulse lets you label your content for easy retrievals and analysis.
2. Using the Social Inbox you can assign messages to your clients with a customized note or comment for them to directly handle it.
3. Agorapulse helps you understand your audience better with their in-built CRM feature.

Cons

1. The reporting feature of Agorapulse is pretty basic. Though it lets you download the reports in a powerpoint format — it is not very much helpful.
2. Agorapulse’s user interface is not intuitive. They need a serious makeover for users to navigate easily within the tool.
3. Agorapulse has very limited features compared to other tools in the market for the price it charges. It also doesn’t integrate with any external apps or tools — except for bit.ly which we suppose is a no biggie. (Dropbox, Google Drive, Zapier? They don’t do any)

Best AgoraPulse Alternative — SocialPilot

6. Sprout Social — $149 for 1 User

Sprout Social is a social media management tool quite similar to HootSuite. It’s more of a corporate tool where you can access features like an intuitive Smart Inbox, in-depth social media analytics, and customized reporting.

Sprout Social supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Pinterest.

Pros

1. Sprout Social’s bot builder helps you set up, operate and manage chatbots within Facebook Messenger.
2. Sprout Social has this feature which no other scheduling tool has, which is grouping team members together.
3. Sprout Social lets you integrate tools like Zendesk, Hubspot and UserVoice for support teams to seamlessly manage user issues without leaving the dashboard.

Cons

1. Sprout Social can be highly expensive when it comes to managing social media with teams as it charges for every team member/user you invite.
2. For the price it charges, Sprout Social doesn’t offer integration with visual platforms like Youtube.
3. Though the inbox is intuitive, they don’t have a unified inbox. You have to toggle between different social account streams individually

SocialPilot is a Great Sprout Social Alternative

7. CoSchedule — $400 for 5 Users

CoSchedule is a social media planner tool very much focused on publishing and known for its content calendar feature.

With CoSchedule you can manage your Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest and Tumblr social profiles. CoSchedule integrates with blogging tools like Wordpress and Hubspot which help you organize and publish your blogs right from your Coschedule account

Pros

1. CoSchedule has an intelligent feature called ReQueue which automatically fills your queue by analyzing and rescheduling your top performing posts from your posting history postings.
2. If you miss out on posting as per the schedule then it automatically fills in the gap with your top performing posts.
3. CoSchedule has this Kanban Project dashboard where you can see everything your team is working on. You can apply custom statuses to workflows based on the way your team works.

Cons

1. CoSchedule is highly priced compared to any other scheduling tools in the market even though it doesn’t have any enterprise-level features like social listening and monitoring.
2. CoSchedule doesn’t offer many integrations and collaborations with other tools which makes it less efficient when working in a team and streamlining processes.
3. The ReQueue feature is great but it comes with limitations. It only allows you to requeue your posts twice.

SocialPilot- The Best CoSchedule Alternative

8. Zoho Social — $200 for 5 Users

Zoho Social is built keeping in mind the needs of a growing business. It helps you work with team members, monitor brand mentions and manage social conversations.

Zoho Social lets you manage Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram and Google My Business.

Pros

1. Zoho Social offers the best time slots to schedule your posts with its SmartQ feature (based on when your audience is active the most)
2. It has CRM integrations where you can engage with prospects and generate potential leads from social media.
3. You can create automated reports to be delivered to your clients in the format and frequency of your choice. You can also include team members in the delivery list and add a personalized message.

Cons

1. The analytics and reporting feature is not very in-depth. They don’t have a combined analytics feature.
2. RSS Feed integration is missing in Zoho Social whereas all other scheduling tools have this feature.
3. Zoho Social also falls into the expensive category when you take into account the features and UI it offers.

A Great Alternative to Zoho Social — SocialPilot

9. eClincher — $219 for 5 Users

eClincher is a social media scheduling tool that supports social media networks like Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Instagram, Google My Business and Youtube.

It’s an agency-focused tool that lets you manage your social media campaigns with reporting & analysis functionalities and a convenient unified social inbox.

Pros

1. eClincher has a feature where you can find top influencers based on keyword searches and also top content suggestions shared by those influencers.
2. It has a unified inbox which helps you monitor and listen for the criteria you’ve set and also helps in viewing competitor activity updates.
3. eClincher has an inbuilt media library that lets you upload images and videos to your own dedicated cloud storage.

Cons

1. The user-interface of eClincher doesn’t win any awards. It’s not very user-friendly and feels outdated. Same goes for their mobile app.
2. The unified inbox is a great feature but it becomes clumsy and difficult to use with multiple social media accounts.
3. eClincher can get quite expensive if you are an SMB or a social media professional.

Read: Check out the detailed comparison of SocialPilot and eClincher

10. MavSocial — $199 for 5 Users

MavSocial is a social media planner tool that focuses more on visuals to help you achieve your visual marketing goals.

MavSocial supports Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Youtube & Tumblr. MavSocial lets you engage, listen, analyze and collaborate.

Pros

1. MavSocial has a separate digital assets library where you can upload images, videos, and audios. You can create your own digital libraries by giving them tags and descriptions.
2. They have their own photo market where any media you purchase (or if it’s a free one) stays up in the Mavsocial account, forever saved in your digital library.
3. MavSocial has an inbuilt photo editing app where you can edit your photos before posting them. You can also discover which media performed the best. It captures cross-platform engagement for individual media pieces as well.

Cons

1. MavSocial has a pretty outdated user interface and a complex scheduling structure.
2. The mobile application is a bit glitchy. Some features are not available on the web version so using a mobile app becomes necessary.
3. They don’t have an in-depth reporting feature. You can’t customize your reports in MavSocial.

11. MeetEdgar — $49 for 1 User

MeetEdgar is a different solution than other social media scheduling tools. It schedules your content in a unique way with its feature of evergreen posting that doesn’t leave your queue empty. Once you schedule your post in there, it saves the post in the library to be reused later.

MeetEdgar supports only four social media platforms — Facebook, Twitter, Instagram & LinkedIn.

Pros

1. MeetEdgar has a posting queue which never leaves your queue empty. It recycles your evergreen posts forever.
2. It has category based scheduling. You can group your content to different categories and schedule them accordingly.

Cons

1. Though you can schedule posts based on categories, you can’t shuffle your posts in the queue to reschedule them for later time slots.
2. MeetEdgar has very limited features and supports only 4 networks which doesn’t make it a one-stop-shop for marketers.
3. You cannot add team members, no social inbox, no in-depth social analytics and just one pricing plan which can’t be called affordable for the set of features they offer.

12. SmarterQueue — $79.99 for 1 User

SmarterQueue is a different solution than other social media scheduling tools. It schedules your content in a unique way with its feature of evergreen posting that doesn’t leave your queue empty. Once you schedule your post in there, it saves the post in the library to be reused later.

SmarterQueue supports — Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram & Pinterest.

Pros

1. With SmarterQueue you can say goodbye to manual scheduling. You can assign time-slots to categories and recycle evergreen posts automatically.
2. SmarterQueue has a feature where you can create variations of your posts for re-queueing so that you don’t have to constantly create unique posts.

Cons

1. SmarterQueue is highly priced for the features it offers. It has no collaboration feature where you can add team members and manage multiple client accounts. Nor do they have in-depth reports. You can manage only 25 social accounts at a price of $79.99/month and that too per user.
2. It doesn’t have a social inbox where you can manage your social conversations.
3. Their user interface is neither intuitive nor user-friendly, hence it presents a bit of a learning curve.

Conclusion

For a team of five to work efficiently, you need a tool with a comprehensive list of features that also proves to be a cost-effective solution. That’s exactly how SocialPilot helps your small team make a huge impact in the world of social media.

Top Social Media Scheduling Tools Feature Comparison

Originally published at https://www.socialpilot.co.