Sprout Social vs Hootsuite: Comparing Social Listening Features in 2025

According to Gartner’s Market Guide to Social Media Monitoring and Analytics, with the drop in engagement, social media managers are forced to reevaluate the channels and methods they use to reach out to the audience.

At a time like this, it’s more important than ever to choose the right tools for your company as social media analytics and actionable data are taking the spotlight. 

Powerful social media strategies are not just about scheduling and posting—they are an efficient two-way communication street between you and your audience. And every good communication starts with active listening. Social listening has become a go-to for collecting invaluable audience data and making strategic decisions to dominate the market. 

In the light of social listening aspects, we will investigate Sprout Social vs Hootsuite: who does it better?

Sprout Social vs Hootsuite: Quick overview

When it comes to social media management, both Sprout Social and Hootsuite have been valuable players for many years. However, in this review, we will shed light on how they perform beyond scheduling and publishing. Specifically, we will find out whether and how Sprout Social and Hootsuite help understand your target audience and their needs.

Before we get to it, let us briefly review the well-known aspects of both Hootsuite and Sprout Social.

Sprout Social

• Social media management: Scheduling posts, publishing tools, monitoring social media posts across multiple platforms.

• Audience insights: Sprout Social provides listening to the social media presence of you and your competitors by analyzing trends, sentiment, and conversations.

• Social media teams: Collaboration between teams with features such as task assignments, shared content calendar, and smooth workflow.

• Integrated social CRM platform: To manage and track customer interactions down the funnel, Sprout Social has its own customer relationship management system.

Hootsuite

• Scheduling and publishing: Bulk scheduling of social media posts across major social platforms.

• Integrated analytics: Tracks social media performance and engagement metrics across multiple accounts.

• Follow trending: The Discovery feature enables finding and sharing trending content and advanced content curation.

• Integrations: Hootsuite supports 100+ integrations including CRMs, Google Suite, Canva, and more.

What to look at when comparing Sprout Social vs Hootsuite for social listening?

When it comes to high-quality social listening that helps refine your communication strategies and campaigns, there are six key values you need to look for in a tool. 

We are talking about audience insights, visual insights, crisis management features, competitor analysis, market research potential, and finally the potential to discover your top influencers.

Audience insights

Audience insights are a critical part of social media analytics. The more comprehensive these insights are, the more you will learn about your audience, coveting demographics, behaviors, preferences, and sentiment.

Based on the collected data, you can use audience insights to refine your messaging and tailor campaigns that resonate with the audience. For example, based on the audience segmentation across different platforms, you may target a different audience group from each social media platform.

Good social listening tools extract insights from mentions, keywords, and conversations happening across social platforms to paint a clear picture of your audience. Some tools, like YouScan, go beyond basic sentiment classification by offering aspect-based sentiment analysis. This feature evaluates sentiment related to specific aspects of your product or service, providing a more detailed understanding of how your brand performs.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social provides insights into cross-network engagement, allowing users to monitor interactions across various social platforms. Sprout Social's AI-driven sentiment analysis helps you understand audience perceptions of your brand. Its Competitive Analysis Listening tool allows you to benchmark your social presence by providing a side-by-side comparison of key performance metrics, such as share of voice, engagement, sentiment, and impressions, across social platforms.

These insights are easy to export with built-in reporting that helps you create actionable strategies to improve your campaigns on social channels.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite’s audience insights focus on engagement metrics and audience growth patterns. The key metrics they cover are follower demographics, including location and gender. Additionally, Hootsuite tracks total engagement and categorizes sentiment into positive, neutral, and negative classifications—this feature is powered by Talkwalker's AI service, which analyzes the emotional tone behind customer interactions.

Hootsuite’s social listening capabilities expand through an integration with Brandwatch. This integration allows users to monitor and analyze mentions, hashtags, and broader conversations across various online sources, including social media platforms, blogs, forums, and news sites. 

However, Hootsuite analytics are primarily designed for analyzing trends from social feeds, offering a broad overview of audience interactions rather than detailed insights into individual social accounts.

Visual insights

Visual insights refer to analyzing images and videos shared on social media. Advanced AI-powered image recognition can identify logos, objects, and visually expressed sentiments by the users.

By analyzing visual social media content you can track your brand's presence, as well as understand how your audience interacts with visual content.

Visual insights are crucial for social listening, for their potential to provide content suggestions and increase engagement. When you have a large audience pool across many social media channels, a lot of hidden meaning could be uncovered from images and videos. There lies a goldmine of significant insights to learn from and interact with.

Source: YouScan.io

Sprout Social

Sprout Social does not analyze images as such but rather focuses on hashtags and tags within the photos. Their analytical social feature is exclusively semantic, while for analyzing logos or object recognition, you would need to use other tools.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite provides visual recognition capabilities through its Hootsuite Listening tool, powered by Talkwalker. This feature, available as an add-on for Enterprise plans, enables the detection and analysis of visual content such as images and videos for brand mentions and hashtags. It also identifies elements like brand logos and other visual markers, offering valuable insights into visual content performance and engagement.

Additionally, the integration with Dash enhances these capabilities with AI-powered auto-tagging and facial recognition, making it easier to organize and manage visual content for social media campaigns.

To sum up, Hootsuite has good visual recognition capabilities via its Hootsuite Listening tool and integration with Dash, allowing for a complete visual content monitoring and management process. Sprout Social, although having a variety of AI-driven features for social media management, does not focus on visual recognition or search functionalities as much.

Crisis management 

When it comes to social listening, sometimes a negative buzz occurs online. In these situations, crisis management features are crucial to discovering and mitigating all negative PR. Best-of-breed social listening solutions help you identify potential spikes in negative sentiment, as well as controversial mentions you flag as dangerous to your reputation.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social employs a machine learning technique, a Deep Neural Network (DNN), for sentiment analysis to track mood shifts in audience conversations and flag potential challenges. However, for precise monitoring, you need to manually set up Listening Topics by inputting specific keywords, hashtags, or brands you wish to track.

This feature's real-time notifications of sudden increases in mention volume make it appropriate for crisis management. Moreover, the tool allows social media managers to create custom tags to organize and prioritize flagged messages, ensuring that critical issues receive immediate attention.

Hootsuite

Crisis management is an area where Hootsuite takes advantage of its integration with Brandwatch. By monitoring mentions and flagged keywords across social media, Hootsuite helps you quickly identify negative sentiments and emerging risks.

However, compared to Sprout Social, Hootsuite's crisis management features may require more manual configuration to effectively track potential issues.

Competitor benchmarking

The way to stay ahead of the game is to understand your competitors and top them. To do that, a reliable competitor analysis tool is your right hand, which is why you must choose wisely.

What should you analyze about your competitors? As many things as you can, really. But the very list, keep tabs on their performance, their audience growth and engagement, and try to dig deep into which strategies work for them.

Based on this research, you can identify industry trends and discover the gaps in the market that you can fill to better position your brand.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social's main edge in competitor benchmarking is a side-by-side comparison in an intuitive dashboard that sums up the metrics of your choosing over a period of time.

Their competitor analysis feature lets you compare follower growth, engagement metrics, and content performance across social media channels. Moreover, Sprout Social enables you to monitor competitor activities as well as detailed audience demographic information, such as age, gender and location metrics, which can be accessed through the Analytics tab.

Hootsuite

The Hootsuite dashboard allows social media teams to track competitor mentions, hashtags, and social media content engagement. Hootsuite offers basic competitor analysis and benchmarking, providing a high-level comparison of your performance with industry leaders.

Unlike Sprout Social, they do not offer granular insights and comprehensive analytics such as demographics. However, you can use integrations alongside Hootsuite to make up for these single-suite solution limitations.

Market research

Market research is the pillar of growing and profitable businesses. It helps you analyze broader industry trends, consumer behavior, and niche opportunities.

With the right data and analysis, you are able to create targeted campaigns and meet emerging market demands.

Sprout Social

Within the Sprout Social dashboard, you can leverage different market research options. For example, monitoring industry-specific hashtags, keywords, and trending topics can help you create actionable data for your next campaign.

Sprout Social also supports audience segmentation, which is particularly useful for diving deeper into niche markets.

Hootsuite

With Hootsuite, you can conduct market research using their monitoring and analytics features, similar to Sprout Social, by tracking industry keywords, mentions, and competitor activity. However, its native features are more suited for basic monitoring rather than in-depth social listening.

Its tools are better suited for broad overviews rather than in-depth analysis. For more comprehensive market research, you may need to pair Hootsuite with a specialized tool or choose a different software that caters to your needs fully.

Influencer discovery

There is no good social media campaign without a little help from the top influencers in your niche. Influencer discovery features should help you identify the key influencers to collaborate with, including key opinion leaders in the industry.

This capability analyzes engagement, reach, and relevance to determine which influencers align best with your brand’s goals.

Sprout Social

Sprout Social can help you map out the influencers by listening to the conversations with the potential for collaboration. The tool also signals high-engagement posts that are aligned with your target keywords.

However, while Sprout Social’s social listening features can help spot potential influencers by monitoring conversations, it doesn’t have a dedicated influencer identification feature like some specialized platforms.

While it doesn’t have a dedicated influencer database, its analytics can help you make informed decisions about influencer partnerships.

Hootsuite

Beyond monitoring mentions and identifying high-performing accounts, Hootsuite does not offer more advanced influencer discovery features compared to Sprout Social. While integrations can extend its capabilities, they often add complexity and expense.

Hootsuite is better suited for teams looking to monitor influencers they’re already aware of rather than discovering new ones.

Side-by-side comparison table and pricing

When to choose Sprout Social

Sprout Social is the right choice for businesses and social media teams looking for a single suite-based tool for both social media management and social listening. It is a comprehensive management tool that comes with a built-in CRM and powerful reporting, which reflects its high price.

It's designed for corporations and brands who are represented all over different social media channels.

When to choose Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a better fit for smaller brands looking for social media management platforms to navigate their online presence while not spending a fortune on a bunch of features they do not need.

If your focus is on efficiently managing multiple accounts, bulk scheduling posts, and tracking engagement metrics, Hootsuite offers everything you need at a lower price point.

What is a good Sprout Social and Hootsuite alternative for social listening?

If your true aim is in-depth social listening, then YouScan is, first and foremost, a social listening software that enables you to understand every bit of information shared about your brand online.

When all-in-one social media management software doesn’t provide deep insights to help understand the market, audience and competition, YouScan comes into play. Check it out by scheduling a live demo with us so we can show you what we do.

Audience insights (YouScan)

Online language is evolving, and sarcasm, trolling, memes, reels and emojis—all fall under the complex ways we communicate on social media. Analyzing simple semantics is, therefore, not enough.

YouScan is a pioneer in extracting detailed sentiment and analyzing emotions by looking at the subtle context-specific nuances that other tools miss.

Visual insights (YouScan)

While Sprout Social analyzes the keywords surrounding an image, YouScan looks into the image itself. Our AI-powered feature recognizes logos, objects, and sentiment from a visual post and helps you truly understand the audience's feelings across multiple networks.

Crisis management and brand health tracking (YouScan)

YouScan's crisis management and brand health tracking incorporate real-time monitoring of your brand online—everywhere you are. With the help of AI, we uncover what people really think about your brand and alert you as soon as a new mention appears.

Competitor benchmarking (YouScan)

YouScan provides advanced features to analyze your performance across your entire online media library, allowing you to see where you lead your competitors and where improvements are needed.

Our software analyses how social accounts react to you and your competitors, segmenting detailed reports to help you run a full SWOT analysis.

Based on the actionable insights, you can make your next move. YouScan’s dashboard includes more than just simple charts and numbers: it compiles radar charts, integrates snapshots of social media posts, and uses AI to identify trending topics and offer performance insights to help inform your strategy.

Market research (YouScan)

Without good market research, all your social efforts online are in vain. YouScan offers a set of tools to help brands understand their market better. Here’s how it works:

• It tracks conversations: YouScan listens to social media, blogs, forums, and news sites to capture real-time mentions of your brand, product, or industry.

• It analyzes sentiment: The platform automatically categorizes mentions as positive, negative, or neutral, so you can understand how people feel about your brand and identify areas for improvement.

• It identifies trends: YouScan spots emerging trends and shifts in consumer behavior, keeping you ahead of the curve and helping you adjust your strategy.

• It monitors competitors: You can track what your competitors are doing online, giving you valuable insights into their strengths, weaknesses, and overall position in the market.

• It provides audience insights: YouScan breaks down who’s talking about your brand, so you can refine your targeting and make sure your message reaches the right people.

• It tracks visual content: The platform can also monitor logos and images related to your brand, helping you see how your visual content performs across different platforms.

Influencer discovery (YouScan)

Influencers on social media are potential external collaborators if you know how to find them. YouScan helps identify new social media stars who align with your brand by monitoring activity and mentions.

Our platform analyzes various factors such as keywords in their bios, engagement metrics, and available demographic details (like location). Using advanced AI, YouScan detects content patterns, trends, and areas of expertise to help you discover the right influencers.

Once you've identified the right influencers, YouScan helps provide valuable insights that you can use to create tailored pitches and reach out effectively, building trust with your audience.

Sprout Social vs Hootsuite FAQs

Why is Hootsuite better than Sprout Social?

Hootsuite is better suited for businesses looking for affordable, straightforward social media management. It provides content scheduling, publishing, and basic analytics, making it a solid choice for smaller teams or startups.

Additionally, Hootsuite integrates with many third-party tools, including content creation platforms like Canva and analytics solutions like Brandwatch. Its user-friendly interface and budget-friendly pricing plans make it accessible for small businesses and startups with limited resources.

Is Sprout Social worth it?

Yes, Sprout Social is worth it for teams and businesses that need advanced social management, in-depth audience insights, and powerful reporting tools. It stands out with its semantic sentiment analysis, competitor benchmarking, and built-in CRM solution, making it particularly valuable for larger enterprises and brands that prioritize audience engagement and strategic planning.

While its pricing may be higher than other tools, the robust features and comprehensive analytics justify the cost for those seeking to go beyond basic social media management.

What is the best Sprout Social and Hootsuite alternative for social listening?

For businesses seeking a dedicated social listening solution, YouScan emerges as a strong alternative to Sprout Social and Hootsuite. YouScan offers unparalleled capabilities in visual insights, audience analysis, and real-time sentiment tracking.

Its AI-powered tools can recognize logos, objects, and emotions in visual content, providing data that goes beyond standard textual analysis. With a focus on actionable insights, YouScan is an excellent choice for brands aiming to deepen audience understanding and improve campaign performance.