Hootsuite’s cheapest plan is $99 per user per month. There has been no free tier since 2023. For a three-person team that is roughly $3,600 a year, and the most common reaction to that renewal email is to open a comparison article.
The honest framing is that Hootsuite is not overpriced for what it does. It is overpriced for what most of its customers use, which is scheduling posts and occasionally looking at a chart.
What you would actually lose
Before switching, check whether you use any of this: social listening across the wider web, SSO and audit logs, the employee advocacy product, paid ads management inside the same tool, or a support contract with an SLA attached. Those are the things that justify the price, and nothing below matches them.
If you use none of them, you are paying enterprise rates for a calendar.
1. SchedPilot
The blunt comparison: SchedPilot Enterprise is $79 a month for a hundred accounts and ten team seats with approval workflows. Hootsuite’s entry plan is $99 a month for one seat. Ten Hootsuite seats would be roughly $990 a month, and that is before you reach the tier where the interesting features live.
Most teams leaving Hootsuite do not need a hundred accounts, and Gold at $35 for twenty accounts is the realistic landing spot. It publishes to Instagram, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube, X, Facebook, Threads, Bluesky and Pinterest, which is comparable coverage.
What you give up: social listening entirely, which SchedPilot does not do. If listening is why you bought Hootsuite, stop reading here and look at Agorapulse or stay put.
2. Agorapulse
The closest like-for-like replacement, and the one to pick if the inbox is what you actually use Hootsuite for. Agorapulse’s unified inbox is better than Hootsuite’s streams for anything resembling real community management, with assignment, saved replies and a workflow that lets you clear it.
It is $79 per user per month, so the saving against $99 is real but not transformative, and it worsens as the team grows because both charge per seat. Legacy plans are being phased out, which has annoyed long-term customers.
3. SocialPilot
For a three-person team on ten accounts, SocialPilot Standard is $40 a month, $34 annually. The equivalent Hootsuite setup is close to $300. Approvals, social inbox, bulk scheduling and white-label reports are all included at that price.
This is the switch most small agencies actually make, and the one with the best ratio of money saved to functionality lost.
4. Sendible
If you are an agency using Hootsuite for client work, Sendible is the better-shaped product at a lower price. $29 on Creator up to $299 for a hundred profiles, with white-label dashboards and client approval flows across the range. Hootsuite has never been particularly good at the client-facing layer.
5. Vista Social
Vista Social bundles listening and review management from $79, which is the nearest thing on this page to Hootsuite’s feature breadth at a fraction of the seat cost. It also has a free plan for three profiles, which is useful for trying it against your real accounts before committing.
6. Metricool
Worth listing because a meaningful share of Hootsuite usage is reporting rather than publishing. Metricool at around $20 a month produces better-looking reports than Hootsuite does, with competitor benchmarking included, and charges per brand rather than per seat.
Choosing by what you use Hootsuite for
Scheduling and nothing much else
SchedPilot Gold at $35 or SocialPilot Standard at $34 annually. Both do the job for around a third of one Hootsuite seat.
The inbox
Agorapulse. It is the one thing worth paying per seat for, and it is better at it than Hootsuite.
Client reporting
Sendible or SocialPilot, both with white-labelling included rather than bolted on.
Listening, SSO, procurement requirements
Stay on Hootsuite, or look at Sprout Social if the budget is there. Nothing in the $20 to $80 range replaces an enterprise contract, and pretending otherwise wastes a quarter.
What leaving actually costs
The saving is easy to calculate and the switching cost is not, so it is worth setting out before you commit to a quarter of disruption.
Your scheduled queue does not export in any format another tool reads. Nobody in this category has solved that and nobody is trying to. The workable approach is to stop adding to Hootsuite, build the new queue in parallel, and let the old one drain over a fortnight.
Analytics history is exportable to CSV and PDF, and it will not import anywhere. Pull the last two years before the contract ends, because access stops on the renewal date rather than fading.
Annual agreements generally cannot be cancelled mid-term. That means the decision has to happen roughly two months before renewal, and a team that decides in month four ends up either paying twice or waiting eight months. Find the renewal date before you evaluate anything.
Reconnecting accounts is the tedious part. Expect an afternoon of Meta Business Manager and LinkedIn permission screens, and expect to discover that at least one account was connected years ago by someone who has left.
A staged approach that works
Rather than a single migration weekend, move one thing at a time and keep Hootsuite until the last piece is proven.
Start with reporting, because it is the easiest to replace and the quickest to prove. Run Metricool at around $20 a month alongside Hootsuite for one reporting cycle and see whether anyone notices a difference. Most teams find the reports are better.
Then move publishing to whichever tool the earlier sections pointed you at, and run it on two accounts for a fortnight before moving the rest.
Leave the inbox until last, because it is the hardest thing to replace and the place where a bad switch is most visible to customers. If after two months you still need Hootsuite’s streams, you have learned something useful and the money was well spent.
Frequently asked questions
Is Hootsuite still free?
No, and it has not been since 2023. The cheapest plan is $99 per user per month with a 14-day trial. Articles still recommending the free plan are years out of date.
What is the cheapest Hootsuite alternative?
For a single user, Publer at $5 per account or Zoho Social at $15. For a team, SocialPilot Standard at $34 annually covering ten accounts and three users. For a large roster, SchedPilot Enterprise at $79 for a hundred accounts.
Can I export my Hootsuite content before leaving?
Analytics export, yes. Your scheduled queue, not in a format anything else imports. Run both tools in parallel for a month, let the Hootsuite queue empty, then cancel. Annual contracts usually cannot be cancelled mid-term, so check the renewal date before you start.
Is Hootsuite worth it in 2026?
For a large organisation with compliance requirements and a listening budget, yes. For a small team that schedules posts and reads a monthly report, it is one of the worst-value products in the category, and that gap has widened every year since the free plan was removed.
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