Best Social Media Schedulers

Tool Category: Inbox

Vista Social

Vista Social’s pitch is breadth at a price that does not match the breadth. It does publishing, a unified inbox, social listening, review management, analytics and approvals, and charges less than tools offering half of that.

What is in the bundle

Listening is the notable inclusion. Sprout Social sells it as an expensive add-on, Hootsuite gates it behind higher tiers, and most tools under $50 do not have it. Here it is part of the plan. It is not as deep as an enterprise listening product, and for tracking brand mentions and competitor chatter it does the job.

Review management is the other unusual one. Google and Yelp reviews arrive in the same queue as social comments, which matters a great deal for a multi-location business and is close to absent elsewhere at this price.

Publishing covers Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube, Threads, Bluesky and Google Business Profile, with per-network customisation and a reasonable calendar.

Pricing

There is a free plan covering three profiles and one user, which is more generous than most of what survives in 2026 and makes it easy to trial properly rather than on a countdown.

Paid plans start at around $39 a month, and approval workflows arrive at $79. At that $79 point you are comparing against Agorapulse at $79 per user, where Vista Social is not per-user, and against SchedPilot Enterprise at $79 for a hundred accounts and ten seats but no listening. Different shapes of value at the same number.

The trade-off

Nothing here is the best version of itself. The inbox is not as good as Agorapulse’s. The reporting is not as good as Metricool’s. The publishing is not as cheap as Publer’s. The listening is not as deep as Sprout’s.

What you get instead is all of it in one subscription, which for a small team is often worth more than any individual component being excellent. Running three tools costs more than money; it costs the friction of three logins and three places to check.

The cost of that breadth is a busy interface. There is a lot on screen and learning it takes longer than learning Buffer.

Who it is for

Small agencies and multi-location businesses that need more than scheduling and cannot justify enterprise pricing. Restaurants, clinics, gyms, franchises, anywhere reviews matter as much as posts.

It is also a sensible destination for a team leaving Hootsuite that used the listening and cannot afford $99 a seat.

Overkill for a solo creator, who will use a fifth of it.

Setup and the first week

The free plan makes evaluation unusually painless. Three profiles and one user, with no countdown, so you can connect real accounts and live with the tool for a month before deciding anything. Very few products in this directory still allow that.

Configuration takes longer than a plain scheduler because there is more to configure. Listening queries, review sources, inbox rules and approval steps are all separate setups. Getting seven days of posts queued across three networks took about twenty minutes, which is mid-table, and getting the listening and reviews working properly took most of an afternoon.

Review management, in practice

This is the feature that justifies Vista Social for a particular kind of business, so it deserves specifics.

Google and Yelp reviews land in the same queue as Instagram comments and Facebook messages. You reply from there, assign them, and track response times alongside social metrics. For a dental practice with four locations, or a restaurant group, the alternative is checking three dashboards and forgetting one.

The nearest equivalents are dedicated reputation tools costing more than this entire subscription, or the enterprise tiers of Hootsuite and Sprout Social. That is the gap Vista Social is filling, and it is filling it well.

Verdict

Twelfth, and underrated at that position. The free plan means testing it costs nothing but time, and for a business that needs review management alongside social it is one of very few realistic options below enterprise prices.

September 16, 2026
Sendible

Sendible has spent its whole life selling to agencies, and the product is shaped by that in ways that are obvious once you look at where the effort has gone. The composer is ordinary. The client management is not.

The client layer

Each client gets a dashboard that carries your agency’s branding rather than Sendible’s, on your own domain if you want. They log in, see their content calendar, approve or reject posts with comments, and read reports that arrive under your name.

That sounds like a small thing and it changes the relationship. A client who can see the queue asks fewer questions about whether anything is happening. Hootsuite has never been good at this and Buffer does not attempt it.

Approvals are built around external sign-off rather than internal review, which is a meaningfully different workflow. Planable does the review experience more elegantly; Sendible does the whole client relationship.

Pricing

Creator is $29 a month, around $25 annually, for one user and six profiles. Plans scale up to Advanced at $299 a month for a hundred profiles.

At the top end that compares well with premium alternatives: a hundred profiles on Sprout Social would cost multiples of it. Against SchedPilot Enterprise at $79 for a hundred accounts and ten seats, $299 is expensive, and what you are buying for the difference is the client-facing layer. If your clients actually use it, that is defensible. If they approve posts over email, you are paying $220 a month for a login nobody visits.

At the low end, $29 for six profiles and one user is poor value next to Publer or SocialPilot. Sendible is not really selling to that buyer.

Publishing and inbox

Solid, unremarkable. Calendar, queues, bulk upload, per-network customisation. Coverage spans Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, Pinterest and Google Business Profile.

The unified inbox handles comments and messages across client accounts and is decent without approaching Agorapulse.

The interface is the weakest part. It works and it looks its age, which matters when you are showing it to a client who has been using something newer.

Who it is for

Agencies with somewhere between ten and a hundred client profiles where the client relationship runs through a dashboard. Particularly good for B2B agencies, since the LinkedIn handling is thorough.

Not for freelancers with three clients, who should look at SocialPilot Standard at $34 a month for ten accounts and three users. Not for in-house teams, who are paying for a client layer they have no clients for.

Setup and the first week

Sendible takes longer to set up than a plain scheduler because the setup is per client rather than per account. Each client needs a workspace, a set of connected profiles, a branded dashboard, a report template and a decision about what they can see. For ten clients that is most of a day.

Done properly it pays back, because onboarding the eleventh client is then twenty minutes of copying a template rather than a fresh decision about how things should work. Agencies that skip the template work find Sendible tedious, which is a self-inflicted problem.

White-labelling, specifically

This is what you are paying the premium for, so the details matter. You can put your own logo and colours on the client dashboard, serve it from your own subdomain, and send reports that carry no Sendible branding at all. Client login emails come from your domain.

For an agency positioning itself as the client’s marketing department, that consistency is worth real money. For an agency whose clients know perfectly well they use third-party tools, it is worth nothing, and SocialPilot includes white-label reports at $34 a month anyway.

The report builder is the other agency feature worth naming. Drag sections into a template, schedule it to send monthly, and the client receives a branded PDF without anyone remembering to make one. That single automation is why a lot of agencies stay on Sendible despite the interface.

Verdict

Tenth. Good at the one thing it is built for and mid-table at everything else, which is a reasonable trade if you are the buyer it has in mind.

Before subscribing, ask two clients whether they would actually log in to approve posts. The honest answer to that question decides whether Sendible is worth its price over the cheaper agency options.

September 16, 2026
Agorapulse

Buy Agorapulse for the inbox or do not buy it at all. That sounds dismissive and is not meant to be: the inbox is excellent, and if replying is a larger part of your week than publishing, it is the best tool in this directory for the money.

The inbox

Every comment, mention and message across your connected accounts arrives in one queue, and the queue is designed to be emptied. Items can be assigned to a person, annotated internally, answered from a saved reply, or marked as reviewed. Collision detection means two people do not both answer the same comment, which sounds minor until it has happened to you in public.

What makes it better than Hootsuite’s streams is that streams are a monitoring view and this is a work queue. You finish it. Sprout Social’s Smart Inbox is stronger at very high volume; Agorapulse is more pleasant at ordinary volume and costs well under half as much.

Social listening is included rather than sold separately, which is a genuine advantage over Sprout.

Pricing

$79 per user per month. Legacy plans are being retired, which has irritated customers who had been on grandfathered pricing for years and is worth knowing before you commit.

Per-seat billing is the structural weakness. A three-person team is roughly $2,800 a year. Adding a junior community manager costs another $948 annually regardless of how little they publish. Against SchedPilot Enterprise at $79 a month for ten seats, the comparison is stark, though that is a publishing tool with no inbox to speak of and the comparison is not like for like.

Publishing

Competent and unremarkable. Calendar, queues, bulk upload, approvals. It covers Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, TikTok and YouTube, which is a shorter list than several cheaper tools: no Threads, no Bluesky, no Pinterest at the time of writing.

If publishing is the whole job, you are paying a large premium for an inbox you will not open.

Who it is for

Brands and agencies doing real community management: consumer products with an engaged audience, anyone running paid social with comments that need moderating, and teams where someone’s job title includes the word community.

It is also the sensible landing spot for a team leaving Hootsuite that needs the inbox rather than the compliance apparatus.

It is the wrong purchase for a small business scheduling three posts a week, and an expensive mistake for an agency that grows by hiring.

Setup and the first week

Agorapulse is quick to connect and slower to configure well, because the value is in the inbox rules rather than the publishing. Expect to spend the first week tuning what gets hidden automatically, which keywords flag a message for attention, and who is assigned what.

The moderation rules are the part worth the effort. You can automatically hide comments containing particular words, which for a brand running paid social is the difference between a community manager’s day and a losing battle with spam. Very few tools at any price do this as well.

Reporting

Better than the publishing features suggest. Agorapulse reports on response time and volume handled per team member, which is the sort of thing a head of support cares about and almost no social tool measures. If you are trying to justify a community management headcount, those numbers are the argument.

Content reporting is solid without being Sprout Social. Export is clean, white-labelling is available, and the ROI reporting that ties social traffic to conversions works if you set up the tracking properly.

One practical note before committing: the network list is shorter than several cheaper tools. No Threads, no Bluesky, no Pinterest at the time of writing. If any of those matter to a client, check the current coverage rather than assuming a tool at this price covers everything.

Verdict

Sixth, and it would be higher on a list ranked by inbox quality alone. The reason it sits here is the seat model, which makes the tool progressively worse value as the team that needs it grows.

Trial it against your actual message volume for a fortnight. If two people can clear the queue, it is good value. If you need five, do the annual arithmetic before signing.

September 16, 2026
Sprout Social

Sprout Social is the best product in this directory and it is fifth, because a ranking that ignored price would be useless to almost everyone reading it.

Standard is $199 per user per month on annual billing, $249 monthly. Professional is $299. A four-person team on Standard is more than $9,500 a year.

What you get for that

Three things, and they are all genuinely class-leading.

The reporting. Sprout’s reports are the only ones in this category you could put in front of a chief executive without reformatting them first. Cross-network comparison, presentation-ready layouts, and a level of polish that no $30 tool approaches. If a monthly board pack depends on your social numbers, this is what that looks like done properly.

The Smart Inbox. It handles several hundred messages a day across networks without becoming unusable, with assignment, collision detection so two people do not reply to the same comment, and saved replies. Agorapulse is the nearest competitor and is arguably more pleasant day to day; Sprout is better at volume.

And the contact history, which is close to a light CRM. You can see everything a given person has ever said to your brand across every network, which is invaluable for a support-heavy account and has no real equivalent at a lower price.

The pricing problem

Per-seat billing with no cheap read-only tier is what makes Sprout expensive rather than merely premium. Teams routinely buy seats for people who look at a report once a month, and those seats cost the same $199 as the ones belonging to people who live in the inbox.

Before renewing, count who genuinely needs to log in. Most organisations find two or three people publish and the rest just want a PDF. Exporting a PDF is free.

Listening is sold separately and is expensive. A fair number of teams believe they are paying for listening and are not.

Who it is for

Consumer brands with a real community management workload, in-house teams of three or more whose social output is scrutinised by people outside marketing, and organisations where the reporting has to be defensible.

For everyone else it is an expensive way to do something SocialPilot does for $34 a month. That is not a criticism of Sprout. It is a statement about what most people actually need.

Setup and the first week

Sprout takes longer to get running than anything else in this directory, and that is partly deliberate. Expect an onboarding call, a guided configuration of your approval rules and tagging taxonomy, and a genuine training session for the team. Getting seven days of posts queued across three networks took us close to an hour, against roughly ten minutes on the lighter tools.

That is defensible for what Sprout is. A platform that runs a brand’s entire inbound conversation should be configured properly rather than guessed at. It also means a solo user evaluating it during a 30-day trial will spend the first week setting up and may conclude the product is heavy, which it is.

The tagging system is the part worth investing in early. Tag posts and inbound messages by campaign, product or sentiment from day one and the reporting becomes genuinely powerful six months later. Skip it and you have expensive charts showing engagement by network, which the free tier of Metricool would also have given you.

Support during setup is the best in the category, which is one of the things the price is paying for and one of the few premium features that reliably shows up in practice.

The seat arithmetic, done properly

Because everything about Sprout’s value depends on headcount, it is worth running the numbers rather than reacting to the headline price.

Two people on Standard, billed annually, is $4,776 a year. Four people is $9,552. Six is $14,328. There is no discount for a colleague who only reads reports, and no viewer tier, which is the single most common complaint from existing customers.

Set against that, Agorapulse at $79 per user puts four people at $3,792 a year with an inbox that is arguably nicer to work in. SchedPilot Enterprise at $79 a month covers ten seats for $948 a year, with no listening and a far thinner inbox.

The question is not whether Sprout is better. It is. The question is whether it is nine times better than the flat-rate option for your particular team, and for a team that mostly publishes, it plainly is not.

Verdict

Rated 4.4 on quality, ranked fifth on value. If you have the budget and the volume, it is the best tool here and the 30-day trial is long enough to prove it on your own accounts.

If you are considering it because it looked impressive in a demo, run the seat count first. That number, rather than the feature list, is what decides whether Sprout is a sensible purchase.

September 16, 2026
Hootsuite

Hootsuite is not a bad product. It is a product whose price assumes you use all of it, bought by a great many people who use about a fifth.

The entry plan is $99 per user per month. There has been no free tier since 2023, which a surprising number of comparison articles have never noticed.

What it does

Publishing across Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Pinterest, YouTube and Threads, with a calendar, bulk scheduling and approval workflows. That part is unremarkable and works.

The distinguishing pieces sit above it. Streams, the column-based real-time view Hootsuite has had since the beginning, is still the best way to watch several accounts and several search terms simultaneously. Social listening extends past your own accounts into forums, news and the wider web. Paid ads management lives in the same interface as organic posting, which very few competitors attempt.

Then there is the enterprise apparatus: single sign-on, audit logs, role-based permissions granular enough to satisfy a compliance team, and support with a contractual response time. These are the things that make Hootsuite purchasable by a bank, and nothing in the $20 to $80 range offers them.

Pricing

$99 per user per month at the entry tier, with a 14-day trial. Higher tiers add listening depth, advocacy and ads, and enterprise pricing is quoted rather than published, which is itself a signal about who the product is for.

Per-seat billing is what makes this painful. Three people is roughly $3,600 a year. Ten is close to $12,000. The scheduling capability you get for that is comparable to what SocialPilot provides for $34 a month covering ten accounts and three users.

The test worth running

Open Hootsuite and look at which sections you have used in the last month. If the answer is Publisher, and Analytics when a report is due, you are paying enterprise rates for a calendar and a chart.

If you have used Streams daily, or pulled a listening report someone senior actually read, or escalated a support ticket under an SLA, the money is doing something.

In our experience most teams that churn from Hootsuite discover they were in the first group and had assumed otherwise for years.

Where it has slipped

The interface carries a decade of accumulated features and navigating it is a skill rather than an intuition. New team members need training, which is a real cost nobody puts on the invoice.

Removing the free plan in 2023 cut off the pipeline of small users who grew into paying ones, and the tools that kept theirs have taken that ground. Meanwhile the middle of the market has improved enormously. Agorapulse has a better inbox at $79. Vista Social bundles listening from $79. Neither existed in a mature form when Hootsuite set its pricing.

Who it is for

Organisations with a procurement process, a compliance requirement, and a social team large enough that listening and streams get used daily. For those buyers it is a reasonable choice and the alternatives genuinely do not qualify.

For a small team that schedules posts and reads a monthly report, it is one of the worst-value products in this directory, and that gap has widened every year since the free plan disappeared.

Setup and the first week

Hootsuite is the second slowest tool here to get value from, after CoSchedule. Connecting accounts is straightforward; configuring streams, permissions and approval routing is a project, and most organisations do it with a customer success manager rather than alone.

Getting seven days of posts queued across three networks took about thirty-five minutes, largely spent navigating rather than composing. That is a poor result for a tool at this price and a predictable one for a platform built around a decade of accumulated capability.

Streams, which is the part worth learning

If you are paying for Hootsuite and not using Streams, you are almost certainly on the wrong product. It is the feature nothing cheaper replicates properly.

A stream is a live column: mentions of your brand, a hashtag you are tracking, comments on a specific account, a competitor’s feed, a keyword search. Arrange a dozen side by side and you have a live monitoring wall, which is genuinely useful during a product launch, a live event, or a developing problem.

Agorapulse’s inbox is a better work queue and it is not the same thing. A queue is for clearing; a stream is for watching. Teams running a crisis communications function need the second and rarely find a substitute below enterprise pricing.

Before you renew, count how many people opened Streams last month. That number is the honest measure of whether Hootsuite is the right tool for your organisation.

Verdict

Third here on capability, not on value. The feature set is broad and the enterprise credentials are real, so it belongs high in a ranking of what these tools can do.

Rated 4.0 rather than higher because the price only makes sense for a specific and fairly small group of buyers, and because too many of the rest are paying it out of habit. If you cannot name three Hootsuite features you used this month, you are the second group.

September 16, 2026