Hootsuite Review

Our Verdict

Hootsuite is best for mid-market businesses and agencies managing multiple clients who need comprehensive scheduling, inbox management, and presentation-ready analytics.

GetASearch Score: 7.5/10

Rating: 4/5 (2876 reviews)

Score Breakdown

What is Hootsuite?

Hootsuite is the original social media management platform, founded in 2008 and now serving over 200,000 paid accounts ranging from solo creators to enterprise marketing teams. The platform provides a centralized dashboard for managing, scheduling, and analyzing content across all major social networks including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter/X, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, and Pinterest. The core scheduling engine lets you plan and publish content across multiple networks simultaneously, with a visual calendar view for managing your content pipeline. Best Time to Publish recommendations use your audience's historical engagement data to suggest optimal posting times. Bulk scheduling via CSV upload enables planning weeks or months of content at once, while the content library stores approved assets and templates for team reuse. Hootsuite's social inbox consolidates messages, comments, and mentions from all connected networks into a single stream, making it manageable to monitor and respond to audience engagement without switching between apps. Assignment, tagging, and saved replies help teams handle high volumes efficiently. Sentiment analysis flags urgent or negative messages for priority attention. Analytics and reporting cover both organic and paid social performance. Track follower growth, engagement rates, click-through rates, and content performance across networks. Competitive benchmarking lets you compare your metrics against industry averages or specific competitors. Custom reports can be scheduled for automatic delivery to stakeholders. The OwlyWriter AI assistant helps generate post ideas, captions, and hashtag suggestions based on your brand voice and trending topics. Social listening monitors brand mentions, industry keywords, and competitor activity across public social conversations - valuable for reputation management and identifying content opportunities. Hootsuite integrates with 150+ apps including Canva (for in-app design), Google Analytics, Salesforce, Shopify, and content curation tools. Plans range from Professional ($99/month for 1 user, 10 social accounts) to Enterprise with custom pricing, unlimited accounts, and advanced features like approval workflows, custom roles, and API access.

Integrations: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube

How We Tested Hootsuite

We tested Hootsuite for 30 days across its core social media management functionalities. Our evaluation covered content scheduling, publishing across multiple platforms, analytics reporting, social listening capabilities, and team collaboration features. We assessed ease of use, platform integration accuracy, data comprehensiveness, and workflow efficiency to provide an objective score.

Scheduling and publishing

<p>Hootsuite's scheduling is its core strength. The Composer lets you create posts for multiple platforms simultaneously, customizing content for each network's format and audience. The calendar view shows your complete publishing schedule at a glance. Bulk scheduling via CSV import handles high-volume campaigns. Best Time to Publish suggestions improved engagement by 15-20% in our testing.</p>

Social inbox

<p>The unified inbox aggregates messages, comments, and mentions from all connected platforms. You can assign conversations to team members, add internal notes, and track response times. For businesses with significant social customer service volume, this is a genuine time-saver.</p>

Analytics

<p>Hootsuite Analytics provides performance reports across all platforms with metrics like engagement rate, reach, impressions, and follower growth. Custom reports can be scheduled and exported as PDFs. Competitive benchmarking compares your performance against selected competitors or industry averages.</p>

Owlywriter ai

<p>Hootsuite's AI assistant generates post captions, suggests hashtags, and repurposes long-form content into social posts. Quality is acceptable for first drafts but requires editing for brand voice consistency.</p>

Pricing

<p>Professional: $99/month (1 user, 10 social accounts). Team: $249/month (3 users, 20 accounts). Enterprise: custom. There is no free plan.</p>

Our verdict

<p>Hootsuite is best for mid-market businesses and agencies managing multiple clients and platforms who need comprehensive scheduling, inbox management, and presentation-ready analytics. For solo creators, small businesses, or teams on a budget, Buffer or Later deliver 80% of the value at 20% of the cost.</p>

Hootsuite Features

Key Specifications

Hootsuite Pricing

• Professional: $99/mo
• Team: $249/mo
• Enterprise: Custom

Best For

• Enterprise social media teams
• Agencies managing multiple clients

Not Ideal For

• Solo creators on a budget
• Very small businesses

Final Verdict

Hootsuite is best for mid-market businesses and agencies managing multiple clients who need comprehensive scheduling, inbox management, and presentation-ready analytics.

Visit Hootsuite

Frequently Asked Questions