10 Best Social Media Management Tools [Pros, Cons, Examples]
All the social media platforms algorithms are rewarding the constant flow of new content and unique engaging posts. It’s hard to stay on top of all these social media platforms, keep being relevant and constantly engage with your audience.
The social media algorithms are very unforgiving of inactivity and lack of engagement. If you can’t keep up, your audience will start to decrease and your brand will become less relevant and harder to notice in that constant social buzz.
We have closely reviewed the best social media management tools will help you keep on top of it all. They help you easily find and curate unique content to share, create a scheduling calendar across all social channels and manage comments, reviews and messages.
This article will help you to find the best software based on your specific needs and get on top of your social media game.
Best for social media agencies and
large teams
The social listening for hashtags and mentions and the multi-channel review management helps you stay on top all the important conversations. What really makes it perfect for social media agencies are the ability to set up approval process that includes your clients and the white-labelled social media reports that can be sent directly to you clients.
Best for content discovery and blog
re-distribution
In case your sharable content is mostly text-based, then it’s more important to quickly discover relevant external blog posts and re-distribute them. The content curation feed is perfect for that. You can also automatically generate Quote Bubbles to visualize the most important bits of your content. The social scheduling and RSS feed make it a powerful social media tool.
Best for social conversations and collaborative inbox
With the Social Inbox, you can have conversations on private messages, comments and reviews across all the social media channels. Create rules for automated messages and assign conversations to your team mates automatically basec on your criteria. Combined with the publishing calendar and detailed social insights, AgoraPulse really qualifies as a social media CRM.
How to Choose a Social Media Management Software?
Managing your social media accounts on Facebook’s native Publishing Tool or Facebook’s Creator’s Studio can work well until you have social presence in more platforms.
For example, if you’re also on Twitter and LinkedIn and want to manage and schedule content across all these channels, then choosing a social media management platform is a step you need to take.
It will not only make bulk publishing easy for you, but you can also engage with followers at scale, discover sharable content, track hashtags and keywords and improve by learning from the social analytics insights.
If you’re a social media agency or team, then workflow automations, content collaboration, task management, approval workflows and whitelabelled reporting can really boost your efficiency and results.
For all of these aspects and features, consider your needs today and where you’ll be in a year or 3 years from now. Ask your internal teams and gather input as to what’s important to them. Make a list of essential features.
And most importantly, try them out. All of these social media tools have either a free plan or a free trial. Below, we’ve carefully researched all of the most popular social media management platforms and we’ve looked in depth:
- What are the pros?
- What are the cons?
- What makes them unique or special?
- What does the pricing structure look like?
See the detailed reviews below.
What are the Best Social Media Management Tools?
AgoraPulse is one of the best social media management tools, because it includes a flexible post scheduler, social inbox and advanced social analytics. The social inbox is one the most sophisticated solutions, because it allows for saved replies, assignments, labelling, reviewing and approvals. While more on the expensive side, it doubles as social CRM software for all of your social media interactions.
AgoraPulse pros
- Concise and helpful published posts overview in a calendar format
- Includes YouTube comments manager, so you can reply to comments directly from the app
- Integrates with Canva to pull images automatically to set as post featured images
- Mobile app includes content scheduling, replying to comments and social analytics
- Create hashtag pre-sets to re-use your customized set up hashtags that work for you
- Ad comments monitoring for 300-600 ads, depending on the plan
- Preview how the post would actually look like on different social channels and further customize each to make it look perfect
- Instagram posting has the feature to set hashtags as the first comment to keep the post content clutter-free
- Assign posts for internal or client approvals before it gets published
- The Social Listening feature allows to search for hashtags and keywords. It even shows a timeline of how often the hashtags and keywords get used
- Customer support replies in 4 hours or less
- Includes Google My Business reviews management
- The Chrome extension allows to grab external pages or snippets directly into a post draft
- Beautifully designed insightful social reporting and analytics
AgoraPulse cons
- The Instagram auto-publish feature needs improvement
- Challenging to publish Instagram reels and YouTube shorts
- Can’t block accounts from appearing in your social inbox
- Sometimes Facebook data doesn’t sync consistently
AgoraPulse unique or best feature
- Inbox assistant allows to use “Saved replies” and even create rules to automatically take actions
- Create custom publishing groups for quicker segmented targeting
- The social media ROI feature allows to measure revenue generated by each team member
- Includes a detailed competitor social analytics overview
AgoraPulse pricing
- The Free plan includes 3 social profiles, but it’s limited to 1 user
- The next cheapest “Pro” plan costs $99 per month and includes up to 10 social profiles and 2 users
- The approvals workflow, social inbox assistant and saved replies become available with the “Premium” plan, which costs $249 per month
- The 30-day trial includes 10 social media profiles, 2 users and requires no credit card to sign up
Zoho Social is a part of the Zoho ecosystem, so it integrates seamlessly if you’re already using their CRM software or webinar software. Zoho Social really hones in on the entire brand management, not just post scheduling. The entire overview of your brand mentions, posts, engagements and connections are just under your fingertips. The customizable reports give you just the insight you need to make smart decisions on your brand presence and social lead generation.
Zoho Social pros
- Allows to schedule time slots for recurring posts. Then posts are taken from the queue automatically
- The bulk scheduling feature allows you up upload an Excel file where you’ve prepared multiple posts based on the template
- Connecting the Google My Business account allows to monitor your brand reviews
- You can draft posts and discuss them collaboratively with your team
- The social activity live stream shows who is engaging with your content in real time
- Everyone who engaged with your content gets automatically added to your connections list, where you can easily see their recent posts and engage with them
- The inbox pulls all the messages and shows connections’ personal info and contacts
- Overview of the active audience and engagement across all social channels
- Monitor hashtags, keywords, profiles, reviews and other channels
- The CustomQ feature allows to find the best publishing times based on your audience engagement
- Includes a separate view for promoted posts and track the leads, ad spend, CTR and other performance metrics
Zoho Social cons
- Facebook posting is only available for business accounts, not personal ones
- Contacting customer support can be difficult and can take a long time
- No Instagram Reels, Tumblr or TikTok social feeds
Zoho Social unique or best feature
- There’s an audience demographic analytics, which shows a breakdown by gender, reach type and sentiment
Zoho Social pricing
- The cheapest “Standard” plan costs $15 per month and includes 1 brand tracking across 7 channels, content publisher and many more features
- For the CustomQ, RSS feed, messages and custom video thumbnails and Pinterest channel management become available with the “Professional” plan and costs $40 per month
- There are also Agency plans if you manage 10+ brands
- There is a 15-day free trial with no credit card requirement
- Once the free trial is over, you can continue using it with a forever free planW
Sprout Social is one of most powerful platforms for social listening and tracking social engagement. The All-in-one Social Inbox and approval process make it easy to simultaneously manage multiple clients. This makes Sprint Social a really valuable tool for social media agencies and larger teams. Even the most basic pricing plan includes 5 social profiles and different types of analytics for internal and external reporting.
Sprout Social pros
- Intuitive and neat user interface, even though there are a lot of features
- When drafting a post, it shows an instant preview of it would look like on all social platforms
- Schedule posts at specific time or optimal time based on your audience
- The All-in-one social inbox allows to respond to comments and messages from Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, WhatsApp, LinkedIn and TikTok
- Integrates with bit.ly to automatically shorten links
- Review management for Google My Business, Facebook, TripAdvisor, Yelp and Glassdoor
- The “Schedule and duplicate” allows to copy the post draft for other channels and slightly customize. This eliminates a lot of copy-pasting and makes drafting smoother.
- Helpful and very responsive customer support
- Detailed performance and engagement tracking for internal and external reporting. The reports can be white-labelled for external client reporting.
- The analytics dashboard also includes sentiment analysis and competitor insights
- The engagement metrics report export includes data from all social channels
Sprout Social cons
- No automated way to translate the posts
- Can’t edit scheduled posts on the mobile app
- Can’t schedule Instagram stories from the mobile app
- Can’t import YouTube comments
Sprout Social unique or best feature
- Ability to enable an approval process for posts. Includes approval workflow builder and internal comments.
Sprout Social pricing
- Sprout Social definitely has a higher price point when compared to other social media management tools
- The cheapest “Standard” plan costs $99 per user/month and already includes 5 social profiles, the all-in-one social inbox and review management
- The CRM and helpdesk integrations and paid social reporting for Facebook, Instagram, Twitter and LinkedIn become available with the “Professional” plan
- The Social Listening and Premium Analytics can be purchased as add-ons to any plan
- Includes a 30-day free trial with no credit card requirement
SocialPilot as a social media management platform is your best choice if you need to discover and curate a lot of content from external websites or other social media accounts. The flexible scheduling options across all different social media channels and the rich Facebook Ads management features make it a valuable tool with an affordable price tag.
SocialPilot pros
- Includes Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Pinterest, TikTok, Tumblr, Google My Business and VK
- Smart Queues allows to automatically post based on your audience behavior to maximize engagement
- For Instagram posts, you can separate the hashtags and post them as first comment
- Reply to comments, messages, story replies and Facebook Page posts
- Bulk scheduling (with images) by uploading a CSV file
- Includes Bit.ly, Rebrandly and Sniply URL shorteners
- Import your blog’s RSS feed to automatically publish new blog posts on your social channels
- Customer support is helpful and quick to respond
- Content approval workflows make it easy to review and approve publishing
- The Chrome extension allows you to draft any web page or article into a post and add to queue
- Ability to white label analytics dashboards and reports to send to clients
SocialPilot cons
- On rare occasions scheduled posts are not posted
- Instagram login occasionally expires and you need to log in again
- The analytics dashboard is a bit light and doesn’t allow for a deeper dive
- Can’t export the reports in Excel format
SocialPilot unique or best feature
- The Canva Pro native integration allows you to embed and share your designs in posts
- Includes Facebook ad management, audience targeting, post boosts and ads analytics
- Discover and curate content for the keywords you search for
SocialPilot pricing
- The cheapest “Professional” plan costs $30 per month and includes up to 10 social media accounts, all the content curation and Facebook Ads management features
- If you have a team (more than 1 user), then you’d need to upgrade to “Small Team” plan for $50 per month, but most of the features are available on the cheapest plan too
- Includes a free trial for 14 days, without any credit card requirement
MissingLettr makes it easy to create social media drip campaigns. It’s more focused towards social media campaigns, rather than unrelated one-off posts. It’s best suited for promoting online courses or book releases across LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.
If you’re running a blog, it makes it very easy to re-distribute your blog posts and discover relevant blogs posts from external websites. MissingLettr is the best social management tool if your content is more text-based, rather than image-based.
MissingLettr pros
- Blog posts can be turned into social media posts automatically
- Automatically pulls snippets from your shared content, which you can generate into “quote” images
- Works with RSS feed to automatically pull in your freshly published blog posts
- Auto-generates relevant hashtags, see their popularity and use them for all the campaign posts
- Integrated lttr.ai link shortener
- You can set up a scheduling template with certain post frequency (posts will be automatically taken from your post queue)
- Set up campaigns for 2 weeks, 2 months, 6 months, 12 months or custom duration
- Discover curated content based on your criteria and post them via your social channels
- Quick and helpful customer support
- Detailed analytics shows day of week and time of day when your posts are getting the most clicks
- Shows a clear overview of best performing campaigns, posts and social channels
MissingLettr cons
- Can’t schedule posts for specific time of day
- Not focused on Instagram, TikTok or Pinterest
- No approval process for manager to review posts before publishing
MissingLettr unique or best feature
- Allows to turn YouTube and Wistia videos into campaigns
- Allows to re-publish the content to Medium
- Automatically generate Quote Bubbles from the post content text
MissingLettr pricing
- There is a free plan, which includes drip campaigns and sharing curated content, but limited to 1 social profile and 50 scheduled posts
- The next cheapest “Solo” plan costs $19 per month (-50% with the link below) and includes video posts, up to 3 social profiles and 500 scheduled posts.
- There is a free 14-day trial
Planable is not just a social media management software, but also a content collaboration tool for social media teams. It really helps in-house marketing teams and agencies collaborate and create, approve and publish social media content faster. It focuses on the visual aspect of your social media feed and how your social presence looks like as a whole. Although, you can view your posts on a list or visual calendar view as well.
Planable pros
- Excellent user interface and easy to learn
- Schedule images, videos, GIFs, carousels and stories to Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn or Twitter
- Preview how the post would appear on each social channel with the visually accurate “Feed view”. Make individual edits for specific social channels.
- Keep your content organized with labels
- Visual editor for Instagram stories
- Each brand has a separate space, so you can group pages and people according to the brands you manage
- Collaborative commenting, tagging and internal notes to collaborate better
- Automatically keeps a history of all the previous versions of the posts
- Separate permissions for team members and clients for better collaboration
- Includes an approval process for team or client approvals
Planable cons
- More suitable for quick visual posts, rather than long format content
- The video upload sometimes has some issues
- Managing engagement like comments and messages is average
- Analytics and reporting are not available
Planable unique or best feature
- See how your social media presence actually looks like for your audience
Planable pricing
- Has a free plan with 50 total scheduled posts
- The next cheapest “Basic” plan costs $13 per user and includes unlimited posts, 4 social pages and approval workflows
- The Instagram grid view, content sync and post version history become available with the “Pro” plan, which costs $26 per user
- The number of workspace and users can be added to any plan
- Requires no credit card to sign up and try
CrowdFire is a social media management solution that helps marketing teams and agencies with customer engagement across different social media platforms. You can track hashtag mentions, compose posts and schedule them across different social platforms and even WordPress and Etsy. There’s a clean overview of all the scheduled posts on the scheduled calendar.
CrowdFire pros
- Beautiful and intuitive user interface
- Automatically find relevant articles to share based on keywords
- Choosing several accounts under which you can schedule the post
- Schedule posts on a specific time or the “Best time” when your audience is most active
- Clean overview of all the scheduled and published posts
- Post content from your blog from an RSS feed
- The “Mentions” feature allows to track certain keyword mentions on Twitter
- Has a Chrome extension which allows to choose any article or image to draft into a post
- The analytics dashboard shows an engagement breakdown for tweets, likes and replies
CrowdFire cons
- Sometimes there are errors when accessing certain features of the platform
- Loading time on the “Mentions” feature can take a long time to load
- Sometimes the content suggestions are not relevant
- Can’t upload video or tag other people in the LinkedIn scheduler
- No way to reply to messages that are received on social profiles
CrowdFire unique or best feature
- The mobile app makes it easy to scan for new content daily
CrowdFire pricing
- The free plan allows to link 3 accounts and to schedule 10 scheduled posts and supports Twitter, Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn. The downside is that social analytics only shows 1 day data.
- The next cheapest “Plus” plan costs $9.99 per month and allows for 100 scheduled posts and supports Pinterest as well. The social analytics show 30-day data.
- The more advanced “Premium” package costs $49.99 per month, but allows to track competitor social accounts too
Hootsuite is one of the most well-known social media management tools and for a good reason. The platform connects to all the most popular social media channels (including TikTok, Pinterest and YouTube). You don’t really need other integrations, as Hootsuite has built-in URL shortener, image editor, free image library, Facebook and LinkedIn ads management. This really makes it a one-stop-shop for all the social media management you’ll ever need.
Hootsuite pros
- Easy to monitor mentions, keywords and hashtags in different social media channels
- Streams has an intuitive interface and shortcuts to quickly engage with posts, replies and mentions
- The hashtag stream allows to filter by number of hashtag followers or additional keywords
- The post creation view shows an instant preview how it would look like in different channels
- Add tags, location and location restrictions by social channels
- Includes their own built-in owl.ly link shortener and link tracking
- Has a ton of apps and integrations to automate your workflows and scheduling
- Auto-scheduling will choose an optimal time to post based on your audience
- Upload bulk posts with a CSV file upload
- Includes a library of free images to attach to your scheduled posts
- Approvals workflow for managers to review and approve posts
- Assign tasks, private messages and posts to team mates
- Hootsuite Academy has social media certification courses and trainings
- Social Boosts includes built-in promotions and ad management for Facebook and LinkedIn
- Detailed analytics dashboard for post performance, ad performance and team performance
- Allows to filter posts by reach, engaged users, audience “reactions” and much more
Hootsuite cons
- The number of features it offers can make it hard to navigate at first
- Can’t assign tasks to user roles, clients or content creators
- Customer support can be slow
- On a rare occasion, the content will fail to publish and it’s difficult to track that
- Adding more users and many of basic features require to upgrade to an expensive plan
Hootsuite unique or best feature
- Create pre-defined reports or customize your own report (with branding) to best fit your use case. Schedule reports to be sent to email weekly or monthly.
- Has a built-in photo editor with pre-set channel-specific crop sizes and filters
Hootsuite pricing
- The “Professional” plan costs $49 per month and includes 10 social accounts, unlimited posting and scheduling, but only 1 user
- The price tag skyrockets exponentially when your more than 3 users
- Also has a forever Free Plan with 2 social accounts and 5 scheduled posts. Scheduling becomes available again when the scheduled ones are posted.
- There’s a 30-day free trial
Buffer was one of the first social media scheduling tools. The app was launched in 2010 and allowed to schedule Twitter posts. Today, Buffer has covered all the prominent social media channels like Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, TikTok and even Google My Business.
Buffer pros
- Automatically populates the best posting time slots for each social media channel
- Suitable for private users, entrepreneurs and larger teams
- Integrated buff.ly link shortener, but bit.ly and custom ones are also available
- Scheduling Instagram posts, stories, reels and carousels
- Different team members can collaborate on draft posts together
- When the same posts are queued up in the same order for 2 social channels, you can shuffle the queue to create more variety across the channels
- Reply to any private message inside the Buffer app
- The Chrome extension allows to schedule any external web page or article to the publishing queue
Buffer cons
- Sometimes unlinks your Instagram account without notice
- Very limited images available in the stock photo gallery
- No YouTube video scheduling
- No bulk post upload with a CSV template
- No hashtag and mentions monitoring
Buffer unique or best feature
- Shopify integration allows to see simple social sales analytics reports
Buffer pricing
- There is a free plan with up to 3 channels and 10 scheduled posts per channel, but limited to 1 user
- The next cheapest “Essentials” plan costs $6 per month/channel and allows up to 2000 scheduled posts per channel, but it’s also limited to 1 user
- If you want to invite your team, you’d have to upgrade to the “Team” plan, which costs $12 per month/channel
- Includes a 14-day free trial
Publer is a lightweight and affordable social media scheduling tool. It focuses on scheduling and publishing, not so much on managing comments, messages, reviews or social listening. On the positive side, it’s a lot easier to set up and has a lot cheaper price tag. It has a very attractive free plan, which allows to schedule posts on Facebook page, Facebook group, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, Google My Business, YouTube, WordPress and even Telegram. Definitely one of the best social media management tools if you’re on a budget.
Publer pros
- The auto scheduling feature according to your defined posting time slots
- Recurring posting setup to recycle the same posts to be shared again
- Option to recycle posts only when there are no new posts in your post queue
- Connect blog RSS feed to automatically schedule blog articles to social media
- Easy to manage articles, since the app keeps track of which articles you’ve already published
- Group social profiles together to publish to several social channels simultaneously
- Quick preview how the post would look like on any channel (desktop or mobile)
- The Chrome extension allows to easily share articles, photos and quotes from external websites
- Bulk upload posts with a CSV upload and mass schedule them
- Assign social media accounts to your team members
- Analytics dashboard shows follower growth, reach, engagement
- See which posts are performing best and re-share them directly from the analytics view
Publer cons
- Doesn’t support video attachments on posts
- No social media monitoring for hashtag or keyword tracking
Publer unique or best feature
- Add watermarks and signatures that would be added to each scheduled posts
Publer pricing
- Has a free plan with 3 social accounts and 10 scheduled posts. It includes the auto-scheduler, built-in photo editor and Canva integration
- The cheapest “Professional” plan costs $15 per month and includes scheduled follow-up comments, watermarks and signatures and has a 7-day free trial
- The more expensive “Business” plan costs $28 per month and includes content recommendations, social analytics and has a 14-day free trial
- You can add more social accounts and team members to any plan
Can I Schedule Posts on Facebook and Instagram Without a 3rd Party App?
It is possible to schedule posts and stories on Facebook on the Business Page using the Publishing Tools. You can schedule a post for the future or backdate the post with a past date. You can also schedule Instagram posts and stories in the Facebook Creator’s Studio.
You can also schedule Instagram posts on the same Facebook Publishing Tools page. However, the native Facebook Publishing Tool is missing some key features when publishing posts and stories:
- Can’t view the scheduled posts across multiple accounts (you’d have to select each account separately)
- Can’t schedule posts or stories for private profiles (only Business accounts)
- Can’t choose to schedule posts at the best time based on your audience behavior
- Can’t bulk upload CSV with post contents
- Can’t view all your scheduled posts in a calendar format for a better overview (there’s only a list view available)
- Can’t send the post draft for your team to review or set up an approvals process
- Can’t schedule Instagram video stories or reels (only photo and text stories)
- Can’t view detailed analytics
The Facebook Publishing Tools are quite primitive compared to the 3rd party social media management software. If you have an active presence in other social media channels, then it’s definitely recommended to use the best social media management tools listed above. That way you’ll get an aggregated overview of the scheduled posts and detailed analytics across all your social channels.
Summary of the Best Social Media Management Tools
To summarize, if you’re just experimenting with tapping into your social channels and audience, it’s fine to use the Facebook’s native publishing tools.
However, if you’re serious about expanding your reach, truly engaging with your followers, having meaningful conversations with them and really analyzing your brand’s performance on all the social channels, then utilizing the best social media management tools listed above is a must.
The list might seem long, there are tons of features and pricing to consider. So, if you’re not sure which one to pick, then here’s a quick summary for you.
Are you looking for a full-fledged social media CRM with approval workflows, sophisticated reporting and truly measuring your social media ROI?
Go with AgoraPulse.
Are you looking to curate a lot of external content and schedule them as posts, and also manage Facebook and Instagram ads on the same platform?
Go with SocialPilot.
Are you more focused on the visual side of how your account looks and feels like, schedule posts and stories with ease and not so much concerned about reporting?
Go with Planable.
Are you promoting more text-based social media content, want to automatically generate quote images that pique your audience interest?
Go with MissingLettr.
Are you on a tight budget and want to cover the most social channels possible, while not sacrificing on the scheduling functionality?
Go with Publer.