7 Sprout Social Alternatives for Social Media Content Creators

Unsure whether Sprout Social is the right tool to help grow and engage your audience? 

At first sight, Sprout Social can seem so ideal, doesn’t it? 

It features a robust social planner, great analytics, and a bunch of AI features to boot. 

However, if you look more closely, you realize it’s not the best option for a social media content creator—it’s pricey, lacks support for niche platforms, and has major limitations in its publishing capabilities. 

Luckily, there are many Sprout Social alternatives better tailored to your needs (including one dedicated exclusively to social media content creators - more on that one below). 

Before we get to those, though, let’s take one last look at Sprout Social. 

What is Sprout Social? 

Sprout Social is a powerful marketing platform designed to help marketers, social media managers, and agencies manage their social media presence more efficiently. 

Founded in 2010, Sprout Social is one of the earliest players in the social media management space. Over the years, the company has strategically acquired several businesses, allowing it to significantly expand its offerings into the robust suite of tools you see today.  

What are Sprout Social’s key features?

Sprout Social’s platform is rich with capabilities catering to different social media management needs. Its core features focus on:

• Engagement: Sprout Social’s unified smart inbox gathers all messages, comments, and brand mentions across channels into a single, filterable stream. Meanwhile, its integrated social CRM tool keeps detailed records of follower interactions, helping you personalize communications and improve engagement. Additionally, AI helps automate message prioritization, sends you crisis notifications, and recommends responses to followers. 
• Publishing and scheduling: Create, schedule, and publish posts across multiple social networks from one place. 
• Analytics: Measure the performance of your content with comprehensive reports that offer insights into engagement metrics, audience growth, and the overall effectiveness of your campaigns.

Additionally, Sprout Social offers these premium solutions:

• Premium analytics: Need more tailored analytics? With this add-on feature, you can select metrics that align best with your business goals and present this data in customized, presentation-ready reports. Dynamic shareable links allow you to distribute these insights quickly to key stakeholders as well, ensuring everyone is aligned and informed. 
• Social listening: Track what’s being said about your brand and competitors across the social web to gauge sentiment and react promptly to trends.
• Influencer marketing: Sprout Social’s tailored insights help you execute data-driven influencer campaigns. Use it to monitor your target audiences across multiple platforms and optimize your strategy for better engagement and results.
• Employee advocacy: Empower your employees to share brand-aligned content easily, which enhances your reach without significant increases in ad spend or headcount. By maintaining consistent messaging, this feature minimizes brand risk while measuring impact vis-a-vis earned media value. 

Why Do Companies Choose Sprout Social?

Companies gravitate towards Sprout Social for several reasons:

• Ease of use: Juggling all the different parts of social media management can be complex and overwhelming. Sprout Social transforms these intricacies into a clean, user-friendly interface, making it accessible even to newcomers.
• Comprehensiveness: As a one-stop shop for all social media management needs, it provides tools from scheduling to deep analytics, all within a single platform.
• Powerful reporting and analytics: The platform’s advanced analytics are second to none, providing detailed insights that help businesses track performance, optimize their strategies, and make informed, data-driven decisions.

Why Sprout Social Isn’t for Social Media Content Creators 

Despite these benefits, Sprout Social lacks certain features that content creators like you would certainly appreciate. 

For one, Sprout Social is expensive

Sprout Social's robust functionality comes at a premium price compared to its alternatives, making it less accessible for individual social media content creators operating on a tight budget. The platform's pricing model can quickly escalate as you add additional features and users, potentially putting a strain on limited financial resources.

If you’re wondering, “Is there a free version of Sprout Social?” the answer is no. However, the company does offer a free 30-day trial of its Standard, Professional, and Advanced plans. 

Sprout Social doesn’t support niche platforms

For social media content creators who rely on niche social media platforms, Sprout Social falls short. The tool primarily focuses on major networks such as Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, and Pinterest. 

The absence of support for emerging platforms such as Tumblr, Mastodon, or Bluesky can be a significant drawback. These niche platforms provide unique opportunities due to less saturation and competition, allowing for more direct and impactful engagement with targeted audiences. 

(Pro tip: if you’re struggling to break through the noise on the bigger platforms, definitely check these ones out!) 

Sprout Social has limited core social media publishing options

Sprout Social's publishing tools, while powerful, have certain drawbacks:

• Single-draft limitations: Sprout Social lets users publish to multiple platforms from a single draft; however, it confines you to the character limit of the platform initially chosen for the post. For example, if you start drafting a post for X, you are restricted to its 280-character limit, even if the post will also be shared on platforms like Facebook that allow for longer messages. This requires users to create separate drafts to cross-post across platforms, wasting time and effort.
• Lack of re-queueing options: Unlike Sprout Social alternatives that offer advanced options for re-queueing posts, the platform does not support automatic reposting of content. This absence of a more dynamic auto-queue feature means users must manually manage and reschedule evergreen content, which can be a significant time suck for busy social media marketers. 

7 Top Sprout Social Alternatives for Social Media Management

#1: Postpone

Postpone (disclaimer: this is my tool) is a social media scheduling tool specifically tailored for social media content creators. We’ve designed our features to support users across platforms, ranging from mainstream to niche, meaning your posts enjoy greater visibility and follower engagement. 

Postpone vs. Sprout Social

• Type: Social media scheduler
• Best for: Individual social media content creators, brands, and agencies
• Supported platforms: Instagram, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), YouTube Shorts, Bluesky, Tumblr, Mastodon, Reddit
• Top features:
  • Bulk importing and scheduling: Postpone supports bulk importing of content, allowing you to plan and schedule large volumes of posts at once. This is especially useful if you manage multiple accounts or are launching a campaign — you get to enjoy more streamlined workflows and consistency across your posts. 
  • Smart rescheduling: One of Postpone's standout features is its ability to reschedule posts that fail due to platform downtime automatically. This ensures your content reaches your audience without manual re-intervention, saving time and maintaining your posting schedule.
  • Built-in image editor: Postpone's built-in content editor lets you edit images directly within the tool, which is super helpful when you’re resizing to each platform’s specifications. 
  • AI capabilities: Postpone’s AI assistant can help you craft captivating captions (complete with hashtags and emojis), saving you considerable time and effort. 
  • ​Posting time recommendations: With Postpone, there’s no reason to guess when to post. We’ll suggest optimal posting times based on when your audience is most active, taking the guesswork out of scheduling.
  • Analytics and performance insights: Postpone provides detailed insights tailored to the unique demands of visual content creators. We’ll help you understand which types of content perform best and why, so you can refine your strategy in a way that enhances engagement.

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#2: Buffer

If you’ve spent any time dabbling in social media, you’ve probably heard of Buffer before. You get everything with Buffer: content planning, scheduling, and analysis across multiple platforms. Users love it for its intuitive interface, which simplifies the collaboration process for teams and makes launching social media campaigns easy.

Buffer vs. Sprout Social

• Type: Social media management platform
• Best for: Individual social media content creators, small to medium-sized businesses, agencies
• Supported platforms: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Mastodon, Pinterest, TikTok, X, YouTube
• Top features:
  • Social calendar: Plan and schedule your posts from a user-friendly dashboard.
  • Integrations: Buffer works seamlessly with Dropbox, Google Drive, and Canva.
  • Collaboration tools: Use role assignments and feedback on posts to facilitate teamwork. 
  • Content creation assistance: Buffer's AI helps generate post ideas and craft engaging content.
  • Analytics: Enjoy insights into post performance and audience engagement.

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#3: Hootsuite

Hootsuite is one of the biggest and oldest social media management platforms around, offering a broad suite of tools to help automate and optimize social media tasks. It’s unsurprisingly a staple for large brands and agencies who need extensive features for campaign management and reporting. 

“Is Sprout Social better than Hootsuite?” is a common question new social media content creators ask. Here’s the reality: like Sprout Social, Hootsuite doesn’t come cheap — it requires a significant investment, particularly for access to its more advanced features. 

Given its robust capabilities, some users report a steep learning curve as well. (If that doesn’t deter you, great! Otherwise, consider exploring the other Sprout Social alternatives in this list.)

Hootsuite vs. Sprout Social

• Type: Social media management platform
• Best for: Medium to large businesses, agencies
• Supported platforms: Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, TikTok
• Top features:
  • Social media calendar: Manage all your social media activities from one place.
  • Social media ad management: Streamline your ad campaigns across different platforms.
  • Reporting: Use its comprehensive analytics tools to measure campaign effectiveness.
  • DM automation: Respond to direct messages from followers with automated tools.
  • AI capabilities: AI-powered social listening, sentiment analysis, and content generation automate complex tasks while helping you stay ahead. 

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#4: Later

Visually-driven brands, agencies, and social media content creators flock to Later for a good reason: it’s a scheduling tool focused on aesthetically-focused platforms like Instagram. 

Although Later has its share of weaknesses — since it was designed for Instagram, its support for other channels is significantly limited — its drag-and-drop user interface makes it a great entry point into the world of social media management. However, be warned that as your followers and engagement grow, you could age out of Later’s features sooner rather than later. 

Later vs. Sprout Social

• Type: Social media scheduler
• Best for: Visual social media content creators, small businesses, and social media teams
• Supported platforms: Instagram, Facebook, Pinterest, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, LinkedIn
• Top features:
  • Visual content calendar: Drag and drop your content into a calendar for easy scheduling.
  • Media library: Store and organize all visual content in one accessible place.
  • Instagram-focused tools: Enjoy advanced features for Instagram, such as hashtag suggestions and analytics on the best time to post.
  • Cross-platform scheduling: Coordinate and schedule posts across multiple platforms with a single draft.

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#5: Loomly

Loomly markets itself as a “stress-free social media management platform.” Like the other Sprout Social alternatives on this list, it’s an all-in-one social media management tool that facilitates seamless planning, scheduling, and collaboration. Loomly’s biggest differentiator is that it’s explicitly built for small brands and agencies who rely on approval workflows, inbox management, and collaboration tools to keep content flowing. 

Loomly vs. Sprout Social

• Type: Social media management tool
• Best for: Individual social media content creators, small-to-medium-sized brands, businesses, and agencies
• Supported platforms: Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest, Snapchat
• Top features:
  • Content calendar and creative tools: Access royalty-free photos and videos, built-in image and video editors, and integrations with Canva and Google Drive.
  • Streamlined collaboration and approvals: Customize multi-level approval workflows to keep team members and clients in the loop. 
  • Advanced social analytics and reports: Leverage its automated reporting features to track engagement metrics. 
  • Simplified community management: Manage all messages, comments, and replies from a unified inbox, with features to switch between channels, assign tasks, and use saved replies for efficient response management.

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#6: Agorapulse

Like Sprout Social, Agorapulse has a little bit of everything: scheduling, engagement, analytics. Users get a birds-eye view dashboard of all their content, extensive analytics, and detailed reporting. In other words, you can think of Agorapulse as a cheaper version of Sprout Social that’s particularly suited for larger organizations or agencies.

Agorapulse vs. Sprout Social

• Type: Social media management platform
• Best for: Medium to large businesses, agencies
• Supported platforms: Instagram, Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok
• Top features:
  • Social ROI tracking: Assess the impact of social media activities beyond basic engagement metrics.
  • Social listening capabilities: Use its advanced listening tools to monitor brand mentions and industry trends.
  • Content scheduling and automation: Efficiently manage and automate post-scheduling and responses.
  • Detailed analytics: Enjoy comprehensive insights into post performance, audience behavior, and engagement.

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#7: Vaizle

Vaizle is a comprehensive marketing analytics suite catering to a wide range of users, from individual professionals to large agencies and in-house teams. Supporting popular platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, and integrating with Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Meta Ads, Vaizle offers versatile tools for diverse marketing needs. Its key features include in-depth social media analysis, ad campaign optimization, business performance visualization, and competitive analysis for benchmarking against rivals. What sets Vaizle apart is its ability to provide actionable insights for businesses of all sizes, with standout features like Google Sheets and MS Excel connectors for easy data export and analysis. This makes Vaizle an ideal choice for marketers looking to elevate their strategies with comprehensive, data-driven insights across multiple platforms.

In other words, it’s a great platform for teams looking for analytics, but does not provide post scheduling support or engagement features.

Vaizle vs. Sprout Social

• Type: Marketing analytics suite
• Best for: Marketing agencies, individual marketing professionals, in-house branding teams, and businesses of all sizes
• Supported platforms: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google Analytics, Google Ads, Meta Ads
• Top features:
  • Social Media Analysis: Monitor your social profiles and understand the target audience better.
  • Ad Analysis: Get insights into your advertising campaigns and optimize for better results.
  • Business Analysis: Visualize your Google Analytics (GA4) and Google Search Console data to get meaningful insights.
  • Competitive Social Media Analysis: Compare your social media performance against competitors, analyze trends, and discover their top-performing content.
  • Google Sheets and MS Excel Connectors: Bring all your social media or ad account data to spreadsheets — within seconds.

Wrapping Up

While Sprout Social provides a powerful array of social media management features, it might not align perfectly with the needs of every content creator, especially those who require more niche functionalities or are mindful of budget constraints. 

If you're searching for a solution that offers both innovative features and cost-efficiency, Postpone is one of your best alternatives to Sprout Social. Experience the benefits for yourself by trying Postpone for free today!