Buffer vs Hootsuite: Which Tool Is Best for Social Listening in 2025?

In 2025, social listening tools will be more critical than ever for understanding your audience, refining messaging, and driving meaningful results. Among the leading platforms, Buffer vs. Hootsuite stands out as the dilemma to be resolved among social media management tools.

But how do they perform when it comes to social listening?

This review explores their key features, comparing their capabilities in audience insights, AI-powered analytics, brand health tracking, and more. By the end, you’ll have a clear understanding of which tool fits your needs and what alternatives exist for brands prioritizing social listening.

Buffer vs Hootsuite: Overview of each tool

Gartner’s 2023 Marketing Technology Survey results show that 68% of respondents purchased a social monitoring and analytics tool, but only 19% utilized it to its full potential.

This highlights the insight that aspects such as an intuitive user interface, comprehensive metrics and user-friendly dashboards are important for adopting and using social listening tools.

Let's see how Hootsuite and Buffer compare as social media analytics tools.

Buffer

Buffer is a renowned, user-friendly social media management platform that primarily focuses on content scheduling, publishing, and performance tracking. Known for its clean interface and simplicity, Buffer is designed for small businesses and teams looking for essential tools to manage their social presence.

Source: Buffer

• Scheduling and publishing: Manage content across platforms like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest.

• Basic analytics: Tracks post performance and engagement metrics, giving you a clear view of your social content’s impact.

• Team collaboration: Buffer’s collaboration features include approval workflows and shared calendars to make team management easier for social media managers.

• Content planning: Visual content calendars simplify planning and reviewing posts, ensuring your strategy stays consistent.

• Affordable solution: Buffer offers budget-friendly pricing plans, making it a good choice for smaller teams or startups.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is built for businesses that need more advanced tools for content scheduling, analytics, and monitoring.

Source: Hootsuite

• Scheduling and publishing: Bulk scheduling of posts across major social media platforms, allowing for efficient content management.

• Integrated analytics: Tracks key engagement metrics, follower demographics, and social media performance across multiple social media accounts.

• Content discovery: Hootsuite’s Discovery feature helps you find and share trending content to stay relevant with your audience.

• Extensive integrations: Supports over 100 integrations, including CRMs, Canva, Google Suite, and other tools to enhance your workflows.

• Social listening: Hootsuite offers AI-powered social listening, powered by Talkwalker, to track mentions, hashtags, sentiment, and trends across various social media platforms.

Buffer vs Hootsuite: social listening features comparison

When evaluating social media tools for their social listening capabilities, six core features stand out:

• Audience insights

• AI-powered insights

• Brand health tracking

• Competitor benchmarking

• Market research

• Audience segmentation

These features determine how effectively you can understand your audience, monitor trends, and refine your social media strategy.

Let’s compare how Buffer and Hootsuite perform across each of these essential areas.

Audience insights

Audience insights are the foundation of any social media strategy. The more you know about your audience’s demographics, behaviors, preferences, and sentiment, the better you can refine your messaging and campaigns.

Buffer

Buffer’s audience insights focus primarily on basic performance metrics, such as post engagement, reach, and audience growth of your business's social media accounts.

The reports are clean, easy to read, and give you a clear overview of how your audience interacts with your published content across multiple social media platforms.

However, Buffer’s insights remain surface-level and lack advanced sentiment analysis or deep conversational tracking. If you’re looking for a simple way to monitor social media engagement trends, Buffer delivers, but it might fall short when you need more detailed audience analysis.

Source: Buffer

Hootsuite

Hootsuite offers deeper audience insights by tracking engagement metrics, follower demographics like location and gender, and overall sentiment.

With Brandwatch integration, you can monitor mentions, hashtags, and audience sentiment, categorizing mentions into positive or negative.

This helps you understand the general mood around your brand while also tracking key trends. While these insights provide a broader overview, they’re more suited for identifying trends rather than diving deep into specific audience behaviors.

Source: Hootsuite

AI-powered insights

AI-powered insights bring automation and intelligence to social listening by analyzing vast amounts of data quickly while increasing accuracy every day. These features will help you identify emerging trends, shifts in sentiment, and actionable opportunities to scale your brand across social media channels.

Buffer

Buffer does not currently offer AI-powered insights for social media performance. While it has introduced an AI Assistant to help with content creation, such as generating post ideas and repurposing content, it does not provide AI-driven insights into engagement trends or performance metrics.

Buffer is primarily a social media scheduling tool, and its analytics features focus on basic post-performance data, engagement metrics, and audience growth. However, it lacks advanced tools like sentiment analysis or predictive trend detection, which are commonly found in specialized social media listening platforms.

For AI-driven insights or more detailed performance analysis, you would likely need to pair Buffer with a specialized tool to fill this gap.

Source: Buffer

Hootsuite

Hootsuite Listening offers AI-powered insights that simplify the tracking and analysis of social conversations. With features like Quick Search, trending hashtags, brands, and events can be discovered from across the globe, alongside in-depth insights about a specific brand.

Key features include:

• Key metrics: Discussions around a brand or competitors can be monitored with more than just mention counts. Enhanced sentiment analysis reveals the true tone of posts, providing a clearer picture of public perception.

• Top themes: Insights into the main themes and topics surrounding a brand are easily accessed. The tool highlights both positive and negative posts, making it possible to identify opportunities or areas of concern.

• Results tab: For more detailed analysis, specific posts related to search terms can be explored, with filters for sentiment, channel, and more. This allows for a deeper examination of the most relevant conversations.

Through these AI-powered features, Hootsuite simplifies the process of monitoring social sentiment and extracting valuable insights.

Brand health tracking

Your brand’s reputation can shift in an instant. Brand health tracking helps you monitor real-time sentiment, mentions, and potential crises to respond quickly and maintain audience trust.

Keeping tabs on your brand mentions and comments is vital to crisis management and keeping your social media presence positive. If your brand owns social media accounts on multiple social media networks, this game becomes more demanding. In that case, investing in reliable social media management solutions is a must.

Buffer

Buffer’s capabilities for brand health tracking are limited. While it allows you to track basic analytics for engagement metrics, it does not offer tools for sentiment analysis or real-time crisis monitoring.

Buffer is primarily focused on content management and scheduling, making it less effective for monitoring your brand’s overall health.

Source: Buffer

Hootsuite

Hootsuite provides strong brand health tracking with its Hootsuite Listening tool, powered by Talkwalker. This feature offers social listening and sentiment analysis, giving insights into how people perceive a brand and their overall mood.

Key features for brand health tracking include:

• Hootsuite Listening (powered by Talkwalker). Tracks brand mentions, hashtags, and keywords across social media, providing insights into conversations around a brand or industry, including both volume and sentiment.

• Sentiment analysis. Identifies the emotional tone of conversations, categorizing them as positive, negative, or neutral. This helps businesses evaluate their brand perception and spot potential issues early.

• Trend analysis. Identifies key topics and trends related to a brand or industry, offering a strategic view of shifts in conversation that could impact brand health.

• Real-time alerts. Sends immediate notifications for changes in brand mentions or sentiment, enabling quick responses to potential PR issues or negative sentiment.

Source: Hootsuite

Competitor benchmarking

Keeping an eye on your competitors is key to staying ahead. Competitor analysis and benchmarking help you compare your performance, audience engagement, and content strategies with others in your industry.

There are different metrics you can follow when analyzing the performance of your competitor brands. For example, you can track engagement, follower growth tendencies, and overall performance across multiple accounts.

By knowing what works for them, you can refine your approach and claim your spot at the top.

Buffer

While you can track your own post engagement and growth trends, there’s no built-in feature to monitor competitor performance with Buffer.

To get a broader view, you'll need to manually compare metrics or integrate third-party tools. For teams wanting to track competitors with minimal effort, Buffer may feel a bit limited in this area.

Source: Buffer

Hootsuite

Hootsuite Listening offers tools to monitor and benchmark competitor activities across various online platforms. 

With its social listening capabilities, businesses can track brand mentions, hashtags, and keywords, allowing them to assess competitor performance and engagement levels in real time. Key features like sentiment analysis and trend tracking help identify shifts in public perception or emerging trends that competitors may be capitalizing on. 

Additionally, Hootsuite lets businesses to benchmark competitors by tracking their social media accounts directly, monitoring engagement metrics such as likes, shares, comments, and overall sentiment. This approach provides valuable insights into the effectiveness of competitors' content strategies and helps businesses refine their own strategies by understanding what works and what doesn’t in their industry.

Source: Hootsuite

Market research

Solid market research is the foundation of any successful business growth strategy. It’s about uncovering trends, understanding consumer behavior, and discovering the next big opportunity to connect with your audience.

Buffer

Buffer's market research tools are fairly straightforward. While they allow you to track your post performance and assess your content's reach, they don’t offer many advanced features. 

If your goal is to explore industry trends or dive deeper into market conversations, you may find Buffer’s tools lacking in those areas.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite makes market research more approachable with its monitoring tools. It enables you to track industry-specific keywords, hashtags and mentions to keep up with trends and understand what’s buzzing in your space.

With the help of its friend, Brandwatch, Hootsuite allows you to uncover broader conversations happening across social media, helping you adapt your messaging and campaigns to meet market demands.

However, while it offers a solid overview, teams looking for deeper, actionable insights may find it a bit limiting without additional integrations.

Source: Hootsuite

Audience segmentation

Audience segmentation allows you to break your audience into groups based on demographics, behaviors, and preferences. By understanding these segments, you can deliver hyper-targeted campaigns that hit the mark every time.

If you are still sending the same message to the entire auditorium, segmentation should definitely be your next priority.

Buffer

Buffer provides basic performance data and audience insights, primarily focused on demographics like age, gender, and location, specifically for the social media platforms you curate, such as Instagram. You can track your top demographics, including the most engaged age groups, cities, and countries. However, it doesn't offer advanced features for segmenting your audience into detailed categories or analyzing specific behaviors.

Additionally, Buffer only provides insights for the platforms you manage, so it does not offer a holistic view of audience behavior across all online channels. 

While this makes Buffer suitable for smaller teams or those with straightforward social media management needs, it lacks the tools necessary for scaling more complex marketing campaigns. 

Source: Buffer

Hootsuite

Hootsuite offers audience segmentation tools through its Hootsuite Insights and Hootsuite Analytics features. These tools enable you to segment audiences by demographics such as age, gender, and location, and analyze engagement patterns to understand how different segments interact with your content. 

Source: Hootsuite

Side-by-side comparison table and pricing

When to choose Buffer

Buffer is the perfect fit for one-man-show and small businesses looking for an affordable, user-friendly tool to manage their social media presence. If your main focus is on scheduling posts, managing content calendars, and tracking basic engagement metrics, Buffer delivers all the essentials without overloading you with features you don’t need.

With its clean, intuitive interface, Buffer makes it easy to streamline your content workflow while staying on budget. If advanced analytics or social listening aren’t top priorities, Buffer will help you get the job done efficiently.

Source: Buffer

When to choose Hootsuite

Hootsuite is the better choice for teams managing multiple accounts across different platforms, especially if you need advanced scheduling capabilities. If your strategy involves tracking audience sentiment, monitoring mentions, or keeping up with trends, Hootsuite Listening provides a lot of capabilities. 

Hootsuite’s extensive integrations and content discovery tools also make it a solid option for teams who rely on external apps like Canva, Google Suite, or CRMs to keep their workflows seamless. While it comes at a higher price point than Buffer, the additional features make Hootsuite a strong contender for growing teams and businesses.

Source: Hootsuite

What is a good Buffer and Hootsuite alternative for social listening?

Both Hootsuite and Buffer are primarily designed for social media management, but they may not fully address the need for in-depth audience understanding.

If your focus is on gaining a deeper insight into your audience, tracking sentiment, and uncovering actionable insights, it’s worth considering tools with a strong emphasis on social listening. YouScan is one such solution that could meet your business needs.

While Buffer and Hootsuite focus mainly on content scheduling and surface-level monitoring, YouScan offers a deeper dive into audience behaviors, visual insights, and real-time brand health tracking, providing a more comprehensive understanding of your online presence.

Interested in gaining deeper insights to refine your strategy, manage your reputation, and engage with your audience? Request a demo to see how YouScan works.

Audience insights (YouScan)

Your audience doesn’t just speak with words—they communicate using emotions, context, and visual cues.

YouScan’s AI-powered audience insights go beyond basic metrics by analyzing the nuances of conversations, detecting emotions, and providing real-time sentiment analysis.

YouScan ensures you never miss what your audience is really saying.

Source: YouScan

Visual insights (YouScan)

YouScan doesn’t stop at text. It’s one of the few tools on the market that analyzes images and videos to reveal logos, objects, and even visual sentiment in social media content.

Who wears you? Who drinks you? Where are your customers interacting with your brand in their real life?

Discover where and how your brand is being represented visually, measure logo visibility in user-generated content, and gain insights into audience perceptions like never before.

Source: YouScan

Crisis management and brand health tracking (YouScan)

Negative buzz can spread like wildfire, but YouScan helps you stay ahead.

Its real-time crisis management features monitor mentions and sentiment shifts, alerting you to potential PR issues before they escalate. YouScan tracks your brand health across platforms, ensuring you can protect your reputation and respond proactively.

YouScan is a good social media solution that protects your reputation day and night.

Source: YouScan

Competitor benchmarking (YouScan)

Staying ahead of your competitors starts with understanding them.

YouScan’s advanced benchmarking tools compare your brand’s performance to your competitors’ social media presence. Get actionable insights into audience reactions, engagement trends, and opportunities to outshine the competition.

Source: YouScan

Market research (YouScan)

YouScan’s market research tools help you uncover emerging trends, niche opportunities, and audience behaviors that influence your strategy. Learn where, when, and how to engage your audience while staying one step ahead of shifting market demands.

Moreover, YouScan will help you segment your data in advanced ways. With a smart tags feature, powered by machine learning, you can train the system to segment new data automatically. Finally, each segment will run its own sentiment analysis, helping you see your strengths and weaknesses clearly.

Source: YouScan

This way, you are able to convey personalized messages for targeted channels and take advantage of social media analytics to the fullest.

Source: YouScan

Influencer discovery (YouScan)

Your social media efforts shouldn't stop at scheduling and publishing content. Finding the right influencers can be a game-changer and fully transform your campaigns.

YouScan automates the discovery process, analyzing content creators based on relevance, engagement, and audience alignment. Beyond follower count, YouScan identifies influencers who resonate with your target audience, making collaborations more effective.

Source: YouScan

Are you ready to find out how influencer discovery can skyrocket your social channels?

Buffer vs Hootsuite FAQs

What is the difference between Buffer and Hootsuite?

Buffer focuses on simple content scheduling, publishing, and basic post analytics, making it ideal for smaller teams. Hootsuite, on the other hand, offers more advanced features like bulk scheduling, content discovery, audience insights, and some social listening capabilities through integrations.

Which is better: Buffer or Hootsuite?

They both have pros and cons. For example, Buffer is better for small teams and businesses looking for affordable, user-friendly tools to manage content scheduling and track basic performance. Hootsuite, on the other hand, is a better fit for teams needing an advanced tool with an exhaustive list of integrations.

What is better than Buffer?

There are several alternatives to Buffer, each offering unique features depending on your needs. If you need more than basic social media scheduling and analytics, YouScan stands out with AI-powered advanced audience analysis and visual insights capabilities that can inform your overall business strategy.

What is the best Buffer and Hootsuite alternative for social listening?

When considering an alternative to Buffer and Hootsuite for social listening, it's important to look for a tool that provides more than just basic metrics. The right solution depends on your specific business needs and the level of insight you're seeking into audience behavior and content performance. Some tools may focus more on engagement tracking, while others offer advanced analytics.

A good alternative to Buffer and Hootsuite for social listening is YouScan. It offers more advanced features such as audience insights, AI-powered sentiment analysis, and visual content recognition, which can help brands gain a deeper understanding of their audience.