Sendible vs Hootsuite For Social Media Scheduling

Sendible is the best Hootsuite alternative if you’re looking for an affordable social media management tool that offers automated publishing, scheduling, social media analytics, and a central inbox for all your social pages. It allows you to schedule posts on Facebook, Instagram, X (Twitter), LinkedIn, TikTok and more.  

I signed up for a free trial on Sendible and Hootsuite to find out which one would serve my needs without hurting my pocket. 

In this review, I compare Sendible vs Hootsuite scheduling features, analytic capabilities and inbox management tools to help you choose the best app for your needs.

Let’s check them out!

Sendible vs. Hootsuite overview

Sendible and Hootsuite are social media management tools that you can use to manage multiple social media pages in one dashboard. You can use either Sendible or Hootsuite to plan and schedule content, and get real-time analytics or reports on your posts’ performance.  

The two social media management platforms have been around for quite some time. Hootsuite was founded in 2008 by Ryan Holmes, while Sendible was created in 2009 by Gavin Hammar. Both tools started as in-house social media management solutions.

Over the years, Hootsuite and Sendible have grown into top-rated social media tools. Hootsuite has garnered over 200k users, while Sendible has more than 150k customers worldwide. 

What does Sendible do?

Sendible provides a dashboard to create and schedule a month’s worth of content for multiple social accounts including Facebook, X (formerly Twitter), Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, Google Business Profile and WordPress.

The tool helps you customize social media posts by providing AI-generated ideas and customization tools like Pexels, GIPHY, and Canva. Other Sendible integrations include Google Drive, Dropbox, WordPress, and RSS Feed Importer.

Sendible also allows agencies to onboard clients, and have them give in-app approvals without sharing passwords. Sendible’s automated reports help you track your posts’ performance, guiding your social media marketing strategy. Plus, Sendible’s centralized inbox allows you to respond quickly to customers’ messages, boosting audience engagement.

What does Hootsuite do?

Hootsuite helps you create, schedule, publish, and monitor social media posts across multiple networks. It supports Facebook, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Instagram, TikTok, Google Business Profile, and Pinterest.

Hootsuite’s centralized dashboard, “Stream,’ allows you to track content on several social accounts, respond to customers, and analyze your campaigns with insightful analytics.

Hootsuite integrates with various applications, including Mailchimp, Canva, Hubspot, and Shopify, which ease social media marketing. So you can share and monitor email campaigns with Mailchimp, create eye-catching visuals with Canva, and transfer data from Facebook and X to Hubspot for analysis.

Hootsuite vs Sendible pricing

Sendible’s pricing starts at 29 USD per month for 6 social accounts while Hootsuite’s pricing starts at 99 USD per month for 10 social accounts.

Hootsuite pricing

Hootsuite has three payment plans starting at 99 USD per month for one user managing 10 social accounts. The first two plans have a 30-day free trial, but you only get a demo for the third package.

Hootsuite plans include:

• Professional: 99 USD per month for one user managing 10 social accounts.
• Team: 249 USD per month for 3 users managing 20 social accounts.
• Enterprise Custom: Custom pricing for over 5 users managing over 50 social accounts.

Sendible pricing

Sendible has four payment plans. The lowest plan is 29 USD per month for one user and six social profiles. And the whitelabel plan costs 240 USD per month.

Sendible plans include:

• Creator: 29 USD per month for one user managing 6 profiles
• Traction: 89 USD per month for 4 users managing 24 social profiles
• White label: 240 USD per month for 10 users managing 60 profiles
• White label +: 750 USD per month for 100 users managing 300 social profiles

Who is Sendible best for?

Sendible is best for small, medium-sized, and large-sized businesses looking for an SMM platform with a user-friendly interface, a flexible pricing model, and direct integrations at no extra cost. Brands seeking a platform where they can customize messages depending on the social profile will also love Sendible’s ‘Smart posts’ feature.

Who is Hootsuite best for?

Hootsuite is best for large enterprises that want to monitor their social networks on a centralized dashboard. The customized enterprise plan offers comprehensive analytics, allowing brands to track their performance on their socials. However, social listening and paid and organic ROI reporting are only available as add-ons (at an extra cost).

Hootsuite vs Sendible reviews

Most Hootsuite users love its centralized dashboard ‘Stream” which easily enables multiple account management, but dislike its expensive plans. Sendible users like its user-friendly interface but dislike how the software gets glitchy on the mobile App.

Sendible reviews

Sendible users praised its ease of use, flexible pricing model, and reliable customer support. But some disliked the platform’s limited analytics, clunky inbox, and glitchiness.

Here are some Sendible reviews:

Hootsuite reviews

Hootsuite users love the platform for its convenience in creating, scheduling, and monitoring social media posts. On the flip side, Hootsuite’s steep pricing model makes it inaccessible for small businesses. Users also complain that scheduled content fails to post sometimes.

Here are Hootsuite reviews:

Sendible vs Hootsuite: Scheduling and publishing capabilities

Sendible and Hootsuite have automated scheduling and publishing capabilities, allowing you to plan posts on a content calendar to publish them later on multiple social profiles. 

Sendible social media scheduling and publishing features

Sendible’s content calendar displays scheduled and past social media posts. It also allows you to add, edit, or rearrange your posts.

Sendible’s bulk scheduler allows you to plan a week’s or month’s worth of content, saving you time. 

You can also package multiple posts into a CSV file and import it into your dashboard when composing content in bulk.

I like Sendible’s tailor-post feature that lets you add hashtags, mentions, emojis, and other visuals to customize each post according to your client’s needs.

Also, the built-in image editor lets you resize every image to fit the required specifications for each social media platform.

Other incredible scheduling and publishing features on Sendible include:

• Smart queues – let you group and pre-schedule content to publish at optimal times.
• Content recycling – allows you to set up when to recycle evergreen posts.
• Content libraries – help you save up content for later use.
• Quick reports – give analytics of your content campaigns to track their success.

Hootsuite social media scheduling and publishing features

Hootsuite has a Planner (content calendar) that allows you to create, schedule, and publish your social media posts on one platform. It also lets you view your published or scheduled posts by list, week, month, post status, or social network.

You can create and schedule new posts on the Planner or Composer. I found this a bit confusing at first since I thought that I could only schedule my posts on the Planner. 

The Composer also lets you add hashtags, emojis, and custom images (from its Canva integration) to customize your posts.

You can also pin posts directly on Pinterest from the Composer.

The other cool scheduling feature on Hootsuite is the Bulk Composer, which lets you upload and schedule multiple messages.

Hootsuite vs Sendible: Analytics capabilities

Hootsuite and Sendible provide detailed analytics to help you know how your social media campaigns are doing. They both offer custom reports and the ability to schedule reports. Unlike Hootsuite, Sendible allows you to share live reports. However, Hootsuite offers more detailed analytics including team productivity reports.

Sendible analytics features

Sendible analytics are available from the lowest plan, where you get quick reports on the performance of your social networks.

Your reports hub will have metrics like engagement reports, which include audience growth, content habits, engaged users, top posts, and top photos. It also has customized profile reports for your Facebook page, Instagram business account, LinkedIn company account, YouTube, and Google Analytics account.

You also design your custom reports using the report builder or download (export) data on campaigns, profiles, and users.

I like that Sendible shares your custom reports via email regularly (on higher plans). They’re also presentation-ready, and you can also save them via PDF to share with your team. Alternatively, you can share a live link of your reports with clients to show the ROI of your social media campaigns.

The only downside of Sendible analytics is that more detailed analytics are only available on the higher price tiers.

Hootsuite analytic features

Hootsuite provides more detailed analytics than Sendible in the lowest plan. You’ll find reports on metrics such as post engagement, link clicks, and brand awareness to track your social media performance.

Like Sendible, Hootsuite allows you to build new reports with pre-built templates to track the performance of your social media campaigns. 

You can also create a custom report using your preferred metrics and social media platform.

Hootsuite analytics will help you understand the following:

• what posts are doing well
• the best time to publish your posts
• how you’re competing with industry competitors
• the performance of your paid and organic campaigns

Hootsuite vs Sendible: Inbox management capabilities

Hootsuite and Sendible have all the inbox management features you need to reply to social media comments and messages in real-time. However, Hootsuite offers more features. For example, Hootsuite allows you to add notes to contacts that you’ve engaged with inside the platform. Hootsuite also allows you to create suggested replies and auto-respond based on the keywords you set up.

Sendible social media inbox management

Sendible pulls in messages in real-time from Facebook pages and groups, Instagram, X, and LinkedIn company pages so that you can reply to them instantly. You can also reply to Facebook Ads comments inside Sendible.

Sendible’s priority inbox shows you all social media messages that will likely need a response. So you don’t miss out on any chance to interact with your target audience.

Sendible’s priority inbox also lets you assign specific conversations to your team members. Plus, you can filter direct messages or comments by social media profiles on the Social Feeds feature.

Hootsuite social media inbox management

Hootsuite’s centralized inbox allows you to manage all public, private, and ‘dark’ conversations in one place. The shared inbox organizes your inbox into Incoming and Done messages across your social networks. 

You can also filter your engagements by social account or message type.

Sendible vs Hootsuite pros and cons

Sendible pros include affordability, ease of use and availability of most of the features you’d need to manage your social profiles. However, Sendible offers limited analytics in the cheap plan and the mobile app gets glitchy sometimes.

On the other hand, Hootsuite is packed with more social media scheduling, engagement and analytics features. But this features come as a high price tag.

Sendible pros

• More cost-effective than Hootsuite
• Intuitive and user-friendly interface
• Offers email alerts for custom reports
• Provides better customer support (emails, live chats, calls, and support tickets)
• Dedicated customer success manager for higher plans
• Automated content scheduling and publishing (including IG stories and reels)
• Scheduled reminders for Instagram carousels 
• Easy management of multiple social accounts
• Supports Google Business Profile and Google Analytics
• Direct Canva, Google Drive, and Dropbox integrations
• Available as iOS and Android apps
• Content ideas from RSS/Blog feeds
• No credit card is required to sign up

Sendible cons

• Limited analytics on the lowest plan
• Gets glitchy, especially on the mobile app
• High price jump between the two highest plans
• Slow workflow approval process
• Limited color customization on posts and social accounts

Hootsuite pros

• Centralized dashboard “Stream’ for easy social media management
• Automated scheduling and publishing on multiple social networks
• Advanced security features, such as custom user access permissions
• Detailed analytics for multiple social accounts, including Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, X, and Pinterest
• Free tools and other resources such as courses, webinars, case studies, and blogs 
• Has a Search button to help you find specific features without hovering on the dashboard

Hootsuite cons

• Expensive pricing plans
• Free plan no longer available
• Non-intuitive interface
• Customer support could be better
• A few features on the Pro plan, like no approval workflows, asset library, social content calendar, campaign management 
• Hootsuite’s lowest plan lacks branded reports and a content library, despite being pricier than Sendible’s.
• Some advanced features (like Social listening) and integrations are only available as add-ons.
• Unexplained social account disconnection
• A credit card is required to sign up

Is Hootsuite worth the money?

Hootsuite is only worth the money if you’re a large enterprise with a considerable ROI from your social media efforts.

I wouldn’t pay for a Hootsuite subscription for two reasons. Firstly, their lowest plan is too expensive for freelancers and small businesses. Secondly, there’s a huge price difference between the first two plans, which doesn’t match the feature upgrades. 

Scaling up with Hootsuite is challenging since you must upgrade to the enterprise plan to enjoy advanced features. Hence, I’d go for an alternative tool, such as Sendible.

Is Sendible worth the money?

Sendible is worth every penny, whether you’re a small, medium, or large enterprise depending on your pricing plan.

Sendible offers robust features, such as quick reports, from the lowest plan. I like Sendible’s pricing tier because it’s more flexible. Although there’s a huge price difference between the last two plans (570 USD), it’s considerably smaller between the first two packages (91 USD). Also, the Traction plan is quite affordable for agencies and small to medium-sized businesses. 

Plus, it’s easier to scale up to the White Label package if you’re a large enterprise that is reaping big from your social media campaigns.

Sign up for your free Sendible trial

Sendible and Hootsuite are lifesavers in terms of easing social media management. They save you time by bringing all your socials on a centralized dashboard, allowing you to auto-schedule and publish posts while tracking their performance. However, Sendible is the best social media scheduling app compared to Hootsuite because it offers more robust features at a lower price.

Sign up for Sendible’s free trial to enjoy advanced features, better customer support, and useful insights.

Check out other social media scheduling reviews on Quorage:

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