Hootsuite charges per seat. That single fact is behind most of the searches that land on this page, because a tool priced per seat gets more expensive exactly as your team gets bigger, which is the opposite of what you want when you are growing.
Hootsuite's own pricing FAQ puts Standard at $99 a month, Professional at $199, and Advanced at $399, with Enterprise quoted case by case. For one person posting to a handful of profiles, that is a lot. For an agency adding a second and third coordinator, it compounds.
This is a comparison, not a listicle of features nobody checks. For each tool below you get what it charges, what it charges you for (seat, channel, brand, or workspace, and those are very different billing models), and the one situation where it is genuinely the right answer.
Every price here was read from the vendor's own pricing page on 17 September 2026. Prices move, so treat these as a starting point and click through before you buy.
The short version
| Tool | Entry price | Billed by | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inflowave | $27/mo | Flat plan | Agencies running many clients in one inbox |
| SocialBu | $29/mo | Flat plan | Scheduling plus automation on a small budget |
| Buffer | Free, then $5/mo | Per channel | Solo creators who only need scheduling |
| Metricool | Free, then $20/mo | Per brand | Reporting-led teams watching cost per brand |
| Later | $18.75/mo | Per social set | Visual planning, Instagram-first |
| SocialBee | $29/mo | Per profile count | Evergreen content recycling |
| Planable | $33/mo | Per workspace | Client approval workflows |
| Loomly | $49/mo | Flat plan | Small teams wanting a calendar and brief tool |
| Sprout Social | $199/seat/mo | Per seat | Large teams with budget for deep analytics |
| Sendible | $349/mo | Flat plan | Agencies already standardised on it |
1. Inflowave
Plans are Influencer at $27, Business at $149, Agency Pro at $297 and Agency Max at $497 a month. Every paid plan carries a 7-day free trial.
The difference from Hootsuite is what the plan is priced on. You are not buying seats, you are buying capacity across clients. Instagram account limits run one on Influencer and Business, ten on Agency Pro, and fifty on Agency Max. Adding a coordinator does not change the bill.
It is also not purely a scheduler. Messages across channels land in one inbox, leads move through pipelines, and automations run off what happens in conversations rather than just posting on a calendar. If your problem is "I cannot see what is happening across twelve clients", that is the problem it is built for. If your problem is "I need to queue fifteen posts", it is more tool than you need and Buffer will be cheaper.
White-label is on Agency Max only, so budget for $497 if reselling under your own brand is the point.
2. SocialBu
Starter is $29 a month, or $22 a month billed yearly, which works out at $261 for the year and includes 8 social accounts. Growth is $79 a month, or $59 billed yearly at $711 for the year.
SocialBu is the closest thing on this list to "Hootsuite without the seat tax" at the small end. You get scheduling, a unified inbox and analytics, but the part worth paying attention to is the automation layer. You can set rules that respond to activity, auto-publish from RSS, and trigger replies, which is the sort of thing Hootsuite reserves for higher tiers or bolts on through integrations.
At $22 a month annually for eight accounts it is roughly a quarter of Hootsuite Standard, and the eight-account allowance is generous at that price. The trade is depth of reporting. If your client work lives or dies on custom analytics, look at Metricool or Sprout instead. For a small team that wants to schedule, reply and automate without a per-seat meter running, SocialBu is a sensible landing spot and there is a 7-day trial to test it on.
3. Buffer
There is a free plan. Paid starts at $5 a month per channel on Essentials, or $60 a year per channel, and Team is $10 a month per channel.
Read that billing unit carefully, because it is the whole story. Three channels on Essentials is $15 a month, which is excellent. Thirty channels is $150 a month, which is worse than Hootsuite Standard. Buffer is the cheapest option on this page right up until the moment it is the most expensive, and the crossover comes faster than people expect.
Buy it if you are one person with a handful of profiles. Do not buy it as an agency tool.
4. Metricool
Free tier for one brand. Starter is from $20 a month for up to 5 brands, rising to $36 for 10. Advanced is from $53 a month for 15 brands, $85 for 25, and $159 for up to 50.
Metricool bills by brand, which maps unusually well onto agency work because a brand is usually a client. Fifty brands for $159 a month is the best per-client price on this list by a wide margin, and the reporting is genuinely strong, with competitor tracking and white-labelled PDF reports included rather than sold separately.
Where it is weaker is inbox and workflow. It is a measuring and publishing tool more than a place your team lives all day. Pair it with something else if conversations matter.
5. Later
Starter is $18.75 a month billed yearly, Growth is $37.50, and Advanced is $82.50. Extra users are $5 each and extra social sets are $11.25 a month.
Later's unit is the "social set", which is one profile per network bundled together. That suits a single brand with a presence everywhere and suits an agency badly, because every client is another social set.
Its strength is visual planning. The grid preview, the link-in-bio tool and the media library are the best on this list if Instagram is the centre of your work. Its analytics are thinner than Metricool's and its inbox is basic.
6. SocialBee
Bootstrap is $29 a month, or $24.20 billed annually, for 5 profiles. Accelerate is $49 a month, $40.80 annually, for 10 profiles. Pro is $99 a month, $82.50 annually, for 25 profiles.
The reason to pick SocialBee over anything else here is content categories. You bucket posts by theme and it recycles them on a schedule, which means an evergreen library keeps working without someone rebuilding the queue every week. For a business with a back catalogue of content that stays true, that is real leverage.
It is less suited to reactive, news-led posting, and the inbox is not where you want to run customer service.
7. Planable
Basic is $33 per workspace per month and Pro is $49 per workspace per month. Analytics is a $12 add-on, social inbox is $7.50, and social listening is $82.50, all per workspace per month.
Planable solves one problem extremely well: getting a client to approve a post without a forty-message email chain. Content is previewed exactly as it will appear, comments thread against the post, and approval is a click with an audit trail.
Watch the add-on structure. Basic at $33 plus analytics plus inbox is $52.50, at which point compare it honestly against tools that include both. Buy Planable for approvals, not as an all-in-one.
8. Loomly
Starter is $65 a month billed monthly, or $49 a month billed yearly at $588 for the year, covering 12 social accounts and 3 users. Premium is $332 monthly or $249 a month billed yearly.
Loomly sits between a calendar and a brief tool. Post ideas carry guidance, hashtag suggestions and target audience notes, which is useful when the person writing is not the person who owns the strategy.
The jump from Starter to Premium is steep and there is not much between them, so most small teams stay on Starter and outgrow it awkwardly.
9. Sprout Social
Essentials is $99 per seat a month billed monthly, or $79 billed annually. Standard is $199 per seat, Professional is $299 per seat and Advanced is $399 per seat.
Sprout is not a cheaper Hootsuite, it is a more expensive one with better reporting. If you have the budget, the analytics, listening and CRM-style contact history are the strongest on this list and the reason large in-house teams pick it.
For anyone here because Hootsuite's $99 felt steep, Sprout is not your answer.
10. Sendible
Sendible now publishes Elite from $349 a month and Enterprise at $800 a month.
It has a long history as an agency tool and the client-reporting and permissions model reflects that. At $349 as an entry point, though, it has moved out of the bracket most people searching for a Hootsuite alternative are shopping in. Worth a look if you are a larger agency comparing against Sprout, not if you are trying to spend less than $99.
What Hootsuite still does better
An honest comparison has to include this. Hootsuite's network coverage is broader than most tools here, its Enterprise tier has governance and approval controls that small vendors do not attempt, and it has been around long enough that almost every integration you might want already exists.
If you are an enterprise with compliance requirements, security review and a long list of connected systems, the per-seat price is buying you something real. The tools above are cheaper partly because they are not solving that problem.
How to actually choose
Work out what you are being billed for before you compare headline prices, because the unit decides the bill:
- Per channel (Buffer): cheap for a few profiles, punishing at scale.
- Per seat (Hootsuite, Sprout): punishing as the team grows, fine if one or two people do everything.
- Per brand or client (Metricool, Inflowave): scales with clients, which is what agencies actually add.
- Per workspace (Planable): fine until you need add-ons, then recalculate.
Then run one test inside the free trial. Add a second user, assign them to one client only, and check whether they can see the other clients' data. On several tools the "workspaces" on the pricing page are folders rather than real permission boundaries, and you only find out after the client asks.
FAQ
What is the cheapest Hootsuite alternative?
Buffer's free plan and Metricool's free tier both cost nothing. Among paid plans, Later at $18.75 a month billed yearly and SocialBu at $22 a month billed yearly are the lowest entry points here.
Is there a free Hootsuite alternative that is actually usable?
Metricool's free tier covers one brand with real analytics, which is more generous than most free plans. Buffer's free plan handles basic scheduling for up to three channels.
Which Hootsuite alternative is best for agencies?
It depends on whether your bottleneck is reporting or conversations. Metricool is the best value per client for reporting. Inflowave is built around a shared inbox and pipelines across clients. Planable wins if client approvals are the thing slowing you down.
Why do people leave Hootsuite?
Overwhelmingly price, and specifically per-seat price as the team grows. The second reason is paying for an enterprise feature set that a five-person team never touches.
