Agorapulse vs. Meltwater: What’s Best for Agencies and Enterprise?

Agency and enterprise teams have one thing in common: Neither can afford to invest in the wrong social media management software. Choose a tool that lacks essential capabilities or that can’t scale effectively, and you’ll waste time and budget. You also could potentially fail to deliver on key initiatives.

As popular social media management suites, Agorapulse and Meltwater may seem similar. But when you take a closer look, those tools couldn’t be more different.

In this article, we’ll compare Agorapulse vs. Meltwater in terms of ease of use, features, support, and pricing models. We analyzed over 4,500 reviews across major software review platforms to help you choose the tool that best fits your team’s use cases and scales with your organization.

Find out how Agorapulse helps enterprise and agency teams successfully manage, monitor, and report on social media marketing. Sign up for Agorapulse and test the platform at no cost.

Quick Overview of Agorapulse vs. Meltwater

G2 reviewers give Agorapulse a 4.5, while Meltwater gets a 4.0. On this software review site, Agorapulse outranks Meltwater in the vast majority of categories, from usability to features.

Capterra reviewers also give Agorapulse a 4.5 and Meltwater a 4.0. Agorapulse outranks Meltwater in terms of:

• Ease of use
• Functionality
• Customer support
• Value for money

TrustRadius reviewers share a similar sentiment. Agorapulse customers are significantly more likely to renew their subscriptions and recommend the platform to others.

Do Customers Have a Better Experience With Agorapulse or Meltwater?

When you evaluate software, two of the most important elements to consider are 1.) the likely impact on your team and 2.) the social media management tool’s ability to be a good partner to your business.

To help you evaluate, we’ll compare Agorapulse and Meltwater in terms of usability, support, and product direction.

Agorapulse vs. Meltwater usability

A software platform can look great on paper. But if the implementation process doesn’t go smoothly or if your team can’t actually use the tool, it may not be worth the investment.

So, how do these social media management tools compare?

G2 reviewers report having a much better setup experience with Agorapulse. For ease of setup, Agorapulse garners a 9.1 (out of 10), compared to Meltwater’s 7.8 rating.

As one G2 reviewer explains, “While Meltwater offers a wealth of features, the richness of its offerings can be somewhat overwhelming for new users. And there is a learning curve involved in utilizing the platform to its full potential.”

Even after the initial implementation, G2 reviewers report a superior experience managing Agorapulse. In terms of ease of admin, G2 reviewers give Agorapulse another 9.1 (compared to Meltwater’s 8.1).

Based on G2 reviews, it’s reasonable to expect that your entire team would have a better experience using Agorapulse, too. For ease of use, G2 reviewers give Agorapulse a 9.0 (compared to Meltwater’s 7.9).

Agorapulse takes customer training seriously. Our Custom plans (designed for agencies and enterprise businesses) include one-on-one training designed to set teams up for success.

Agorapulse vs. Meltwater support

Ideally, your team will never run into problems or discover bugs once you adopt a software platform. But if you do have questions or require assistance, you need to know you’ll get the help you need when you need it.

If you choose Agorapulse, you can feel confident you’ll be able to resolve issues efficiently. In fact, G2 reviewers give Agorapulse a 9.2 for quality of support, while Meltwater gets an 8.5.

Here’s how Agorapulse’s support team maintains a 96% user satisfaction rating:

• We have an average response time of 30 minutes or less.
• All our plans include specific response windows so you know exactly what to expect.
• We’re available around the clock, so there’s no waiting for help overnight or over the weekend.
• All our plans include email support, and most have chat support. Our Custom plan also has phone support.

In contrast, G2 reviewers report that Meltwater’s support is less reliable and more salesy. As one G2 reviewer shares, “Lately, they pushed a few minutes to a few hours. And if you want answers in minutes, you have to pay extra. Also, it seems they are ALWAYS trying to upsell you.”

Agorapulse vs. Meltwater product direction

Your team’s needs are likely to evolve as your organization grows. As a result, you must choose a software platform that can grow with you and continue to meet your needs.

In G2 reviewers’ experience, Agorapulse surpasses Meltwater in terms of both product direction and business partnership. Agorapulse gets a 9.1 in both areas, while Meltwater gets a 7.8 for the former and an 8.3 for the latter.

If you’ve checked Agorapulse’s release notes recently, you won’t be surprised by these results. In Q1 2024 alone, we released:

• A new Advocacy feature
• Salesforce and HubSpot integrations
• Analytics Open API for customized BI reports
• Instagram collaborative post capabilities
• Facebook post boosting capabilities

In contrast, G2 reviewers report that Meltwater can be slow to implement new capabilities and address customer requests. As one G2 reviewer states, “Very slow to implement new platforms and media, like TikTok and any picture/video/sound-based content.”

Agorapulse vs. Meltwater: Which Has the Best Social Media Management Features?

To meet your organization’s or your clients’ needs, the social media software you choose has to have the right features. To help you make an informed decision, we’ll compare the two platforms’ feature sets.

Social media management features

If social media management is a top priority for your organization or agency, you need a tool that can handle everything from publishing to engagement. So, how do Agorapulse and Meltwater compare?

G2 reviewers strongly prefer Agorapulse for almost all publishing and content creation functions, including:

• Social publishing
• Campaign planning
• Campaign optimization
• Social engagement

As one G2 reviewer explains, “I often experienced glitches in the social media scheduling tool […] Not being able to connect all our social channels was a challenge. When scheduling social media content, I would occasionally have to navigate content disappearing, profiles not being tagged, and channels not publishing correctly.”

With Agorapulse’s composer, you can draft, publish, and schedule content across one or more social profiles. Since Agorapulse offers post customization by profile, you can easily optimize posts for each channel.

Managing dozens of retail, office, or franchise locations? With Agorapulse’s custom fields, you can plug in location-specific data for each profile or group to customize posts quickly and accurately.

Want to speed up your publishing workflow? Rather than uploading each creative asset individually, save them all to your Agorapulse asset library. There, you can organize them in folders by profile, project, or client. When you’re ready to publish, you can attach these creative assets to posts.

Agorapulse also offers integrations with Canva and Google Drive to speed up your content creation and publishing workflow. Design creatives in Canva and attach them to social posts without leaving Agorapulse.

Need a colleague or client to approve a social media post before it goes live? Use Agorapulse’s workflows to assign posts for approval. Assign them to internal or external colleagues and get the sign-off you need.

When your posts or profiles generate engagement, manage everything in Agorapulse’s social inbox. From this unified inbox, you can respond to comments and DMs using unique messages or saved replies.

You can also assign inbox items to specific team members and flag items for follow-up. With Agorapulse’s inbox labels, you can even organize items to find them more easily later.

Social media listening features

For many enterprise and agency teams, social media publishing and engagement are just two pieces of the puzzle. Social listening is another crucial capability for brands that need to monitor relevant conversation.

Meltwater’s core strength is its social media monitoring and listening features. However, G2 reviewers still prefer Agorapulse for tasks like brand monitoring and influencer identification. And Agorapulse is a close second for keyword tracking and trend analysis.

As one G2 reviewer shares, Meltwater’s listening and brand monitoring tools aren’t always reliable. “It seems to only pull in about 75% of our earned media. We still have to set follow up actions for tracking articles, and double check that Meltwater pulled them in.”

With Agorapulse’s social media listening tool, you can create custom searches to monitor brand health, competitors, industry trends, and any other relevant keywords. Our social listening tool supports Facebook, Instagram, X (formerly Twitter), and web-based searches.

It monitors search volume and engagement trends so you can easily spot when relevant conversations are happening. You can sort the related posts and webpages by engagement to find trending content quickly.

Agorapulse automatically assesses sentiment for each listening item and tracks sentiment over time. With this data, you can understand how people feel about the brand or topic and monitor changes in perception.

As one G2 reviewer laments, sentiment analysis isn’t always so smooth with Meltwater. “Sentiment tagging is still a challenge, especially when getting a high volume of data […] Also, the data delay should be improved. Currently, I understand that there’s a 2-hour delay and that’s a setback especially for trend monitoring.”

Reporting and ROI features

Whether you’re managing social media for your organization or for clients, you need reliable analytics and reporting tools. Agorapulse outranks Meltwater in almost all areas of analytics, including:

• Post performance
• Follower analysis
• Hashtag analytics
• Sentiment analysis

Agorapulse automatically generates comprehensive social media reports for each connected profile. You can monitor everything from audience growth and post impressions to content performance and engagement.

Need to customize reports for your team or clients? Use Agorapulse’s Power Reports to build reporting templates for brands, channels, or campaigns.

Curious how much revenue your social media strategy has generated? Use Agorapulse’s social media ROI reports to track the website traffic, conversions, and revenue from social media.

With Agorapulse’s built-in attribution, you can easily see which social profile, channel, or post has created the most value. Our ROI tool also tracks these metrics for comments and DMs, giving you a complete picture of your ROI.

Outreach and competitive intelligence features

In addition to its social media management, social listening, and social analytics features, Meltwater has  several other product suites.

• Customer intelligence: Perform market research, analyze target markets, and develop audience segments. Use AI to assess how prospects and customers really feel about the brand.
• Influencer marketing: Find and vet creators and influencers in specific niches. Recruit them to promote products or services, manage influencer relationships, and measure the results.
• Media relations: Identify and build relationships with journalists and bloggers. Build media relations databases and distribute press releases to attract more earned media.
• Sales intelligence: Improve prospecting strategies and sales outreach with competitive intelligence. Get real-time alerts on events that may affect your sales process so you can take action efficiently.

Agorapulse’s social media management suite offers some of these capabilities. For example, our social listening tool helps with customer and intelligence and market research. Likewise, our social inbox can help you identify and engage influencers who already interact with your brand.

When you need an all-in-one social media management tool that also handles influencer marketing and media relations, Meltwater has a wider range of capabilities. However, you’ll certainly pay for it (see below). And Meltwater reviewers report lower value for money overall.

Only 60% of Meltwater reviewers on TrustRadius report satisfaction with the platform’s value. In contrast, TrustRadius reviewers are overwhelmingly satisfied with the value they get from using Agorapulse. A whopping 94% report that Agorapulse delivers good value for the price.

Meltwater vs. Agorapulse: Which Pricing Model Is a Better Fit?

As important as features and integrations are, you need to know if they fit into your budget. Agorapulse publishes pricing so you can easily crunch the numbers, but Meltwater doesn’t.

Meltwater’s pricing is a well-kept secret

Meltwater’s pricing page reveals next to nothing about what the platform offers. It doesn’t show pricing or even provide a list of features available with each plan. To access any information, you have to contact sales.

What does this mean exactly? There are no standard Meltwater plans. All are customized based on the number of tools you plan to use, social media profiles you need to connect, and team members you want to onboard.

While there are no preset fees, our Meltwater pricing analysis uncovered a general range. Small businesses are typically quoted $10,000 to $15,000 per year for limited platform capabilities.

Based on these numbers, it’s likely that an agency or enterprise team seeking full platform capabilities should expect to budget much more per year.

As one G2 reviewer sums up their experience with Meltwater, “This is an incredibly expensive platform, and it is simply not worth the price.”

Agorapulse’s pricing is easy to calculate

Agorapulse pricing couldn’t be easier for customers to access and understand. We offer four paid plans and one completely free plan.

Customers have the option to pay monthly or annually. If you opt for an annual plan, you’ll save 20% to 30% overall.

There’s no question which features are included in which plan. We publish detailed lists of the features and capabilities for each plan.

Each plan offers some level of customization. With our Standard, Professional, and Advanced plans, you can add more social profiles at a monthly cost of $10 each.

However, our Custom plan is completely personalized to fit the needs of agency and enterprise teams. It includes all social media, social listening, and social reporting features.

Our Custom plan also supports unlimited profiles and unlimited Shared Calendars. To help large teams succeed, it includes priority support and a dedicated account manager too.

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Is Meltwater or Agorapulse a Better Fit for Agencies?

Technically, both social media management platforms work for agencies. Agorapulse and Meltwater each have:

• Customizable plans that agencies can purchase to access the capacity they need for teams and clients.
• Automated reports and customization options so agencies can analyze client results more efficiently.
• Complex approval workflows that can include both external clients and internal agency team members.

However, Agorapulse offers additional features to help agencies succeed:

• Shared Calendars your team can set up to share scheduled and published content with clients.
• ROI reports you can use to demonstrate the value of your team’s work for clients.
• Agency Love program designed to help agencies scale and deliver better results.

When you need a complete social media management tool for agencies, Agorapulse is a smart choice. With its robust feature set and agency-specific capabilities, Agorapulse is designed to support agencies of any size.

Wrapping Up Our Agorapulse vs. Meltwater Comparison

Across G2, Capterra, and TrustRadius, reviewers rank Agorapulse far ahead of Meltwater in nearly every category. It’s easy to see why when you explore our features, experience our industry-leading support, and review our pricing model.

To see how our social media management solution works for your team, try Agorapulse for 30 days at no cost. Sign up for a free trial (no credit card required).