Sprout Social vs Metricool

Sprout Social is an enterprise social media management tool with publishing, reporting, approvals, inbox management, and "social listening" all living in one app. It's designed for agencies and enterprise marketing teams, or anyone managing multiple clients or brands.

While Sprout Social isn't a part of our social media posting workflow, we interviewed Social Media Manager, Anna Sawyer who runs her own social media consultancy and has worked extensively with Sprout Social to tell us about her experience.

She said the main reason you'd want to use Sprout Social is if you have deep approval needs: you need the legal team, PR, CEO, and you're manager to approve a post before it goes out. This is the part she leaned on the most.

• Strong approval workflows
• Groups keep client work fully separated: channels, calendars, approval queues, and client logins all stay contained to their own workspace
• AI Assist felt genuinely thought out rather than bolted on, with Brand Voice settings that respect different tones across platforms
• Optimal Send Times shifts based on real engagement patterns instead of random suggestions

• Feature-heavy for a single brand. A lot of what makes Sprout Social excellent (permissions, layered approvals, groups) is solving agency problems
• Social Listening isn't included outside of the Enterprise plan
• Pricing adds up fast at agency scale

Sprout Social's approval workflows are some of the strongest around. You don't just get a basic checklist of people who need to approve a post, it literally won't even be shown up-the-funnel if your internal team doesn't approve it. If you've ever shared something for review and had a client flag an embarrassing typo or mistake, you know exactly why so many users love this.

You'd be surprised at how many scheduling tools treat client separation as an afterthought. Sprout Social has a huge emphasis on this.

Groups let you bundle social channels and team members together by client, so you're never staring at one dropdown with every client's channels mixed in together. That also extends to client logins: if you give a client access to review and approve their own content, Groups make sure they only ever see their own calendar, approval queue, and accounts, so they can't wander into another client's workspace and poke around.

• Standard, $199/seat/month (billed annually): Up to 5 social profiles, Smart Inbox, basic reporting. No tagging, no approval workflows. Best for a true single-user setup, though most teams outgrow the 5-profile limit faster than they expect.
• Professional, $299/seat/month (billed annually): Unlimited profiles, tagging unlocked, internal approval workflows, digital asset library, competitive reports. Best for growing teams or single agencies just starting to formalize approvals.
• Advanced, $399/seat/month (billed annually): Adds external approvers (up to 3 per workflow), automation, API access, sentiment analysis. Best for agencies that need the full internal-then-external layered approval chain.
• Enterprise, custom pricing: White-glove onboarding, SSO, dedicated support, and Social Listening included by default. Best for the largest agencies and enterprise teams managing high volume across many clients.