Hootsuite Review Features, Pricing, Pros & Cons

What is Hootsuite?

Hootsuite has been around as long as we remember in the social media management space and while it's pricing starts at $99/month (which is much higher than other contenders like Metricool and Buffer), as a business we figured if it could take care of all of our posting needs and free up our time from posting manually it'd be worth it.

But boy, were we disappointed 😅

Within minutes of creating an account and starting our trial, any hopes we had that Hootsuite would be helpful to our business disappeared.

Btw—Hootsuite was the only social media scheduling app that asked for a credit card up front... shout out to BILL Spend & Expense for allowing us to pop a virtual credit card on file with a $0 budget for this evaluation.

Navigating the backend of Hootsuite was overwhelming, they have SO many features, not many of them actually useful. It's very apparent the tool was built a long time ago, they have some legacy interfaces that make you feel like you've travelled back in time a few decades and some interfaces have been updated to be slightly more modern.

Hootsuite caters to larger teams with features like post approval, content research, and team permissions. If you're a large enterprise and have tons of layers of managers, managing managers, and need to have social media reports for C-Suite meetings, then sure Hootsuite is possibly a decent choice as it's the only tool that will go that deep with reporting and analytics.

But for a small businesses? Or even medium sized social media agencies? No way, stay away from Hootsuite. We actually found Buffer's free tier better for social media posting (compared to Hootsuite at $99/m)—no exaggeration!

Social Media Scheduling

🟠 Instagram

While Hootsuite worked better than Metricool when it came to posting on Instagram (we didn't have any issues with file sizes), we found Buffer to have a much better user experience when it came to using the actual software for scheduling posts.

❌ TikTok

We tested a TikTok post and quickly discovered that Hootsuite (like every single social media scheduling app) also couldn't handle caption formatting.

That said, Hootsuite was actually worse at TikTok scheduling than other tools—Hootsuite was giving us an error saying that we had exceeded our character limit for our TikTok caption (an error we did not get with other tools).

❌ YouTube Shorts

You can schedule YouTube Shorts via Hootsuite, however, like with the other social media scheduling tools, you can't add related videos, or choose a thumbnail.

Spoiler: There aren't any social media scheduling apps that allow for choosing a YouTube thumbnail, as YouTube's API doesn't allow for it.

For us, YouTube is our most important social platform, so we decided to use the native YouTube scheduling app.

At this stage of our social media management platform evaluation, we had already tested Buffer and had a 10x better experience than Hootsuite, so were eager to disconnect our social media accounts and move on seeing it didn't give us anything more than Buffer did.

Best Time To Post

While Hootsuite gave recommended times to post for the various social media platforms we connected, the way the information is displayed is quite overwhelming. We much prefer how Metricool displays the best time to post right on the calendar.

Social Media Analytics

The caveat to this Hootsuite review is if you are a large social media agency or large enterprise company (aka you have high hundreds or even thousands of employees), then Hootsuite might be a necessary evil because they have the most robust options for social media reporting.

For example, if C-level executives want to review social media trend reports, competitor benchmarking, and overall social media performance, Hootsuite will allow you to curated these reports more deeply than other social media management platforms. Note: Analytics are quite limited outside of the Enterprise Plan so this all comes at a high cost.

Approvals & Permissions

Hootsuite has the most robust approval and permissions structure out of all the social media management tools out there. That said, this is typically required only at super large companies (e.g. think L'Oreal whose marketing, PR, legal, and social media teams need to sign off for a simple Instagram post 😅).

Small businesses do not require so many hands involved in post approvals as the risk of a PR nightmare is much smaller. All this being said, if you're a small or medium sized team, we hope we've convinced you to skip out on Hootsuite.

If you're a social media agency, and might need some permissions, Buffer and Metricool still offer these features, so still definitely check them out first.

Hootsuite Pricing

• Hootsuite Professional: $99/mo (10 social accounts)
• Hootsuite Team: $249/mo (3 users, 20 social accounts)
• Enterprise Plan (Requires Sales Rep)

It's clear from the Hootsuite pricing plans who they are targeting (large businesses). There are several limitations with the Hootsuite Professional and Team plans when it comes to reporting (e.g. a limit of 2 competitor benchmark reports), so make sure to go through their pricing in detail.

Get Hootsuite 30 Day Free Trial.

Final Verdict

In the end, we realized that paying $99 for a tool overloaded with features we didn't need, coupled with an outdated interface, wasn't the right choice for us as a small business. We disconnected our accounts and abandoned the idea of Hootsuite being our ideal solution for posting on our social channels.

Buffer is a much more modern social media management platform than Hootsuite at a fraction of the cost, and we'd definitely recommend checking them out instead.