Top Hootsuite Alternatives for Social Listening in 2025

In this article, you’ll discover:

• Hootsuite challenges and why people are seeking alternatives

• The best Hootsuite alternatives, with detailed features, pros and pricing

• How to find a tool that truly works for your brand’s social listening strategy

Let’s dive in.

Why consider Hootsuite alternatives?

There are three primary reasons to explore alternatives:

• Pricing: Hootsuite's recent changes to the pricing model made it less affordable for smaller businesses and agencies.

• Ease of use: Hootsuite is an all-in-one social media management platform with some social listening capabilities, but this can add to a busy interface and complex workflows.

• Social listening features: Hootsuite’s social listening tools may fall short for those needing more comprehensive insights.

As a result, many professionals are seeking Hootsuite alternatives that deliver better value, user-friendliness, and enhanced audience insights at a more competitive price.

For instance, platforms specializing in social listening enable real-time monitoring of brand mentions and sentiment. To explore these options further, check out some innovative social listening tools reshaping the market.

Selection criteria for Hootsuite alternatives

Selecting a social listening tool can be complicated. Here are some factors you might want to base evaluations on:

1. Ease of use: Is the interface clean and intuitive? You don't want to dedicate more time than you have to learn a complex UI.

2. Social listening capabilities: It should offer deep-set insights into brand mentions, sentiment analysis, and competitor tracking for competitive advantage. Some alternatives offer competitor analysis and market research to let you understand how your brand is measured in the market.

3. Pricing: Look, budget's an issue. We need to figure out if the prices of this are any good, primarily for small businesses or growing agencies.

4. Customization & integrations: Does the tool play nice with your other platforms? Whether it’s CRM or email marketing, good integrations can save you hours of work.

5. Support & reliability: When things go wrong (and they will), is there reliable customer support? It's an important factor that can make or break your experience.

Top Hootsuite alternatives in 2025

YouScan

Image source: G2

YouScan is an AI-powered social media listening platform and a good Hootsuite alternative known for its industry-leading image recognition capabilities. This tool helps businesses understand customer opinions, discover actionable insights, and manage brand reputation through text and visual data analysis.

In an interview, Coca-Cola shared how they leverage YouScan’s social media analytics to stay in touch with customer sentiment and track the success of their campaigns.

Key features:

• Visual insights: YouScan uses advanced image recognition to analyze the photos, logos, and objects that people share online, providing a 360-degree view of brand interactions.

• Sentiment analysis: YouScan measures public sentiment and emotion around brand mentions and classifies them as positive, neutral, or negative.

• Topic and trend analysis: Identifies emerging trends and topics relevant to your brand. This enables a brand to stay ahead with regard to monitoring changes in industries.

• Competitor benchmarking: YouScan tracks mentions of competitors and sentiment towards them, making for some enlightening input that will become necessary to outdo them at every turn for strategic advantage.

• Influencer identification: Identify key voices speaking about topics relevant to the brand, supporting influencer marketing and brand advocacy. 

• Insights and reporting: In-depth analytics and visual reports on metrics such as share of voice, reach, engagement, and sentiment.

• Integration and API: YouScan can easily integrate with workflow via API into CRM and business intelligence applications.

• Crisis management: Real-time alerts and crisis detection empower the brand to immediately take action regarding negative media or unexpected issues.

• Brand health tracking: This is important for companies seeking to closely monitor their public image and make informed decisions based on real-time data.

Pros:

• Unique image recognition capabilities allow companies to track brand visibility in user-generated images, which most platforms like Hootsuite lack.

• Offers unparalleled detailed sentiment and emotion analysis, helping brands understand customer sentiment, including emotional drivers.

• YouScan’s demographic and psychographic data provide deeper insights into customer segments.

Pricing:

The basic plan starts at $299/month (billed annually), with custom pricing for companies requiring advanced features like unlimited mentions and Insights Copilot.

Best for:

Brands and companies that require in-depth analysis of both text and images for enhanced social listening and customer insights.

Image source: G2

Buffer

Image source: G2

Buffer is a social media management tool that makes content scheduling and publishing across channels easier. Its "Engage" tool allows brands to monitor and respond to social media interactions by gathering comments into a single dashboard. 

While Buffer is effective for tracking and managing engagement, it lacks other tools' extensive social listening capabilities that cover broader multi-platform conversations.

If you're interested in more in-depth social media listening, you should explore these top metrics for deeper insights and a broader view.

Key features:

• Engagement dashboard: Collects all comments from Facebook and Instagram in a single location, allowing easy viewing and responses.

• Sentiment analysis: Uses machine learning to categorize comments based on urgency, such as questions, negative feedback, or purchase-related inquiries, helping prioritize important interactions​.

• Analytics: Social media analytics and metrics for reach, impressions and engagement. Demographic data from Facebook and Instagram to help you optimize engagement​.

• Grid view and hotkeys: Posts and comments in a grid for easy navigation, hotkeys for high-traffic accounts​

Pros:

• Features like keyboard shortcuts allow faster, more targeted responses and are helpful for brands focused on efficient, real-time engagement.

• Buffer’s pricing model is generally more affordable.

Pricing:

Free plan available for up to 3 channels, with paid plans starting at $5/month per channel for more advanced features like analytics and engagement tools.

Best for:

Buffer is great for small to medium-sized businesses, content creators and teams who want straightforward social media scheduling and direct engagement. Simple design and affordable pricing for those who don’t need social listening or third-party integrations.

Image source: G2

Iconosquare

Image source: G2

Iconosquare is a social media analytics and management tool that focuses on improving the brand's performance, especially on platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

While Iconosquare is best known for analytics and scheduling, it does have some basic social listening functionality to help brands understand their audience and identify who is engaging or talking about their content. Its social listening capability is not as deep as dedicated solutions for social listening, such as YouScan.

Key features:

• Social listening dashboard: real-time view of brand mentions, hashtags, and trending topics.

• Industry benchmarking: Benchmarks all performance metrics, including growth and engagement rates, against industry peers. 

• Competitor tracking: It monitors the social activities of competitors and relative engagements, making it possible to adjust the strategy in time. 

• Hashtag tracking: Identifies up to 10 specific hashtags to track per profile, including in-depth analytics for each. 

• Automated reporting: Allows scheduling monthly reports to keep track of and compare performances. 

Pros: 

• Tracks key performance indicators like engagement rate and follower growth that help judge social performance against competitors.

• Offers personalized features to track your required hashtags and competitors' profiles.

Pricing:

• Personal: $49/mo, 5 social profiles

• Teams: $79/mo, 10 users, five social profiles

• Enterprise: For more than 50 profiles, it offers a customized option with unlimited user access.

Best for:

Iconosquare is a great fit for social media managers and marketing teams looking for an easy-to-use tool to quickly monitor brand health and competitive trends across a host of social networks.

Image source: G2

Agorapulse

Image source: G2

Agorapulse is a social media management tool with social listening and engagement capabilities. Its social listening features are tailored to help users monitor, analyze, and respond to online conversations. It’s valuable for tracking brand reputation, customer sentiment and competitive insights across major social media platforms.

Compared to Hootsuite, Agorapulse stands out for its intuitive interface and emphasis on social engagement and collaboration. While both platforms offer scheduling, social listening, and analytics, Agorapulse is great for user-friendly reporting and inbox management.

Key features:

• Keyword tracking: It can monitor specific terms or hashtags that can be used to identify perception about a brand and trending topics in industries.

• Sentiment Analysis: Through this AI-powered feature, mentions are classified into positive, negative, and neutral sentiments to keep track of consumer sentiment.

• Competitor monitoring: Allows tracking mentions of competitors and keywords connected with them for providing insights for competitive analytics.

• Influencer and brand advocate identification: Pinpoints the potential brand influencers and advocates that brands can approach for collaboration.

• Tagging and automated responses: It shall enable tagging and automatic response by keywords and sentiment.

Pros:

• Advanced competitor monitoring, providing insights to benchmark against competitors.

• Automated response tagging is very useful for larger teams, making it ideal for customer service workflows.

Pricing:

• Free plan: $0 per month

• Standard plan: $49 a month per user (billed annually)

• Professional plan: $79/month per user (billed annually)

• Advanced plan: $119/month per user (billed annually)

• Custom plan: Contact for pricing

Best for:

Agorapulse is ideal for small to mid-sized businesses and agencies focused on social engagement and customer service. It’s especially well-suited for brands aiming to stay on top of customer sentiment, engage with influencers, and monitor competitor activities.

Image source: G2

Sprinklr

Image source: G2

Sprinklr is an enterprise-grade social media management platform with strong social listening, offering insight across different channels. It combines AI-powered analytics with real-time social media monitoring to drive home important information about customer sentiment and online brand presence.

Compared to Hootsuite’s "Insights" tool, which allows some advanced social listening, Sprinklr’s offering includes a broader data set. 

Key features:

• Social listening: Track customer conversations and brand mentions across 30+ social and digital platforms with real-time data capture and analysis.

• AI-driven insights: Utilize AI for sentiment analysis, trend detection, and logo recognition in visual content, including images and videos.

• Competitive benchmarking: Compare performance metrics, such as share of voice and customer satisfaction against competitors, with automated benchmarking tools.

• Crisis management: Detect imminent crises in near real time and respond in real time, via alert or workflow automation. 

• Reporting: Easily build, schedule, and publish custom reports, with automated distribution and deep personalization options that facilitate sharing insights easily across teams.

 Pros

•  The diversity and range of access to social channels make it suitable for brands with a wide, dispersed audience. Sprinklr delivers timely crisis alerts and options for automation in proactive reputation management to add an additional layer of brand protection. 

Pricing

Self-serve plans include:

• Social media management solution: $199/seat/month The essential publishing, listening and engagement tools.

• Social media management and customer service solution: $299 per seat/month, including additional customer service features.

• Enterprise plans: Custom pricing based on needs, offering extended capabilities for larger teams, including advanced AI insights, custom onboarding, and professional support.

Best for:

Sprinklr is best suited for large enterprises and teams that need an AI-driven social listening tool that integrates seamlessly with broader customer experience management solutions.

Image source: G2

Sendible

Image source: G2

Sendible is an all-in-one social media management platform that helps agencies, marketers, and brands grow their presence across social media channels, including Google Business Profile.

Sendible’s social listening features help businesses monitor and respond to online conversations about their brand, industry, or relevant keywords across social media platforms.

Key features:

• Keyword monitoring: Monitor mentions of keywords, your brand, and industry-related terms on social media, blogs, and news sites instantly.

• Sentiment analysis: Monitor the sentiment of social media mentions- preferred, neutral, or negative-to understand the perception of consumers.

• Competitor tracking: Analyze the activity of competitors, the trends of followers, and levels of engagement.

• Custom feeds and filters: Organize social mentions with custom feeds and filters.

• Alerts: Receive alerts for important brand mentions or spikes in sentiment to respond to critical events quickly.

• Analytics and reporting: Access detailed analytics on mentions, sentiment trends, and engagement metrics to assess campaign effectiveness.

Pros:

• Sendible features custom feeds and filters for greater control over monitoring; it's also possible to engage in a very customized way.

Pricing:

• Creator plan: $29/mo for one user and six social profiles

• Traction plan: $89/mo for four users and 24 profiles

• Scale plan: $199/mo for seven users and 49 profiles

• Advanced plan: $240/mo for ten users and 60 profiles

• Enterprise plan: $750/mo for 50 users and 300 profiles

Best for:

With client management and approval features, Sendible is better suited for agencies handling multiple brands or clients.

Image source: G2

Mention

Image source: G2

Mention is a social listening and social media monitoring tool tailored for brands, agencies, and marketers. It helps track mentions and conversations across various online platforms, providing insights into brand health, market trends, and competitor activity.

It was designed as a social listening tool and doesn’t offer the extensive social media management set of features that Hootsuite does; however, it can be connected with social media platforms to allow for content publishing. 

Key features:

• Sentiment analysis: Track brand mentions, trends, and sentiment across social media, blogs, forums, and review sites.

• Competitive analysis: Compare metrics like share of voice, audience sentiment, and key influencers between your brand and competitors.

• Customizable reports: Generate detailed reports on brand performance and social campaigns with options for segmentation by chas and, regions, and more.

• Influencer identification: Find influential voices driving discussions relevant to your brand for targeted engagement.

• Shareable analytics: Easily scale and distribute reports across teams, allowing for collaborative strategy updates.

• Crisis management: In case of a negative mention spike, it can send notifications so that users can take quick action before the situation spirals out of control.

Pros:

• Mention is very versatile because report types range from social listening to competitive analysis.

Pricing:

• Solo: $49.00 per month-billed annually, 2 alerts, 5,000 mentions, 1 user.

• Pro: $99/month (billed annually), includes 5 alerts, 10,000 mentions, and up to 10 users.

• ProPlus: $179/month (billed annually), includes seven alerts, 20,000 mentions, and unlimited users.

• Company plan: Custom pricing for larger teams, offering advanced features and extensive mention limits.

Best for:

Mention is well-suited for small to medium-sized brands, agencies, and marketing teams looking for a cost-effective solution for social listening and competitor analysis.

Image source: G2

How the right social listening tool can transform your strategy

The social listening tools help you understand your audience in-depth and make decisions in the right direction for the growth of your brand.

The right choice of tool will basically depend on your needs and the brand focus.

Would you like to know how advanced social listening can help?

Take control of your brand's reputation by getting a demo of YouScan today!

FAQs

What is a cheaper alternative to Hootsuite?

YouScan is a cheaper alternative to Hootsuite. It offers advanced user sentiment monitoring and analysis.

Did Hootsuite increase prices?

Yes, Hootsuite increased prices, which led some users to look for more affordable options.

Which Hootsuite alternative is best for agencies managing multiple clients?

Sendible is a good choice for agencies managing multiple clients because it offers custom client dashboards, approval workflows, and white labelling features. However, it doesn’t provide advanced social listening. 

Is there a free version of Hootsuite?

Yes, Hootsuite offers a free plan, but it limits the number of social profiles you can manage and the features you can access.