Agorapulse vs Hootsuite vs Sendible: Which to Choose?

If you are evaluating Hootsuite, Sendible, and Agorapulse, then this article is for you. It contains a detailed breakdown of the G2 scores and reviews from real users, plus a deep dive into the pricing and features of each platform.

Now, you might think, “Why would I trust an article about Hootsuite and Sendible written by their direct competitor?” And I have two reasons.

1. If anything, our opinion is probably one of the most informed on this topic. We have a vested interest in knowing what our competition is doing and how their product is evolving.
2. We’re biased—but not ignorant. Yes, for some of you, choosing Hootsuite or Sendible could be the right choice. We know that. Ultimately, what we’re trying to do is help you figure out which social media management tool is the best fit. Not just for you, but for your social media team, for your marketing strategy, and for your overall business.

So if you want to read an article from a company that has been in the social media space for over a decade and knows the competitive landscape very well, then you are in the right place.

Now, let’s get started with our evaluation of Hootsuite, Sendible and Agorapulse. You can also book a demo and test out Agorapulse for yourself.

Quick Overview of Hootsuite vs. Sendible vs. Agorapulse

Hootsuite: At a Glance

G2 rating: 4.2 / 5

Free trial available?: Yes, 30 days, but a credit card is required.

Entry-level price: Starts at $99/month.

Hootsuite is a widely recognized social media management platform that allows businesses to execute comprehensive social media strategies across multiple social networks from one centralized dashboard. Founded in 2008 by Ryan Holmes in Vancouver, Canada, Hootsuite has grown to become one of the leading tools in the social media management space.

Best feature: Robust integrations with dozens of third-party apps

Sendible: At a Glance

G2 rating: 4.5 / 5

Free trial available?: Yes, 14 days, no credit card needed.

Entry-level price: Starts at $29/month

Sendible is a social media management platform designed for businesses looking to elevate their social media presence and streamline their workflows. Launched in 2009 by Gavin Hammar, Sendible has positioned itself as a tool that not only focuses on the basic necessities of social media management but also emphasizes efficient collaboration and client management, making it appealing to agencies and social media teams managing multiple brands.

Best feature: Exceptional content curation and suggestion capabilities

Agorapulse: At a Glance

G2 rating: 4.5 / 5

Free trial available?: Yes, no credit card needed.

Entry-level price: Free version is available, and the paid plans start at $49/month per user, when billed annually.

Agorapulse is a comprehensive social media management tool designed to help businesses and marketing agencies effectively manage their online presence across multiple platforms. Founded in Paris in 2012 by Benoit Hédiard and Emeric Ernoult, Agorapulse began as a Facebook management tool but has since expanded to support a wide range of social networks, including X/Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Pinterest, and Google My Business.

What sets Agorapulse apart is a user-friendly interface, an emphasis on efficiency and innovation, and high-quality customer support.

Best feature: One unique thing that users love about Agorapulse is the Social Media ROI report. Once you connect your Google Analytics account to Agorapulse, you can track the entire buyer’s journey and see the traffic, conversions, and revenue generated by your social media efforts—right down to the specific social media post. And if you use UTM parameters, it’s possible to track the ROI from your comments and messages as well. So you know where you should be prioritizing the most time and resources.

This feature also helps you avoid the time-consuming and tedious hassle of digging through Google Analytics reports and data. And if you find there are never enough hours in the day to do everything, this time-saving feature is a huge relief.

(And this isn’t the only time-saving feature in Agorapulse, as you’ll soon find out!)

Hootsuite vs Sendible vs Agorapulse: Features Comparison

Now that we have some background info, let’s take a closer look at how Hootsuite, Sendible, and Agorapulse stack up, based on their G2 scores.

Why do we use G2?

We use G2 as it is the largest and most trusted software review website in the world. G2 provides an objective overview of tools features and capabilities, and the site includes over 30 comparative metrics with ratings based on real user reviews.

Additionally, G2 has a strict review moderation process to ensure that the reviews are authentic and not manipulated or falsified in any way.

Ease of Setup, Use, and Admin

When you are determining the best social media management tool for your business, you need to balance the most important features with how easy the tool will be to use and maintain.

Users on G2 rated Agorapulse higher than both Hootsuite and Sendible in both Ease of Use and Ease of Setup categories. This is a reflection of Agorapulse’s intuitive user interface, and the excellent resources and support provided to help ensure the entire setup and implementation phase goes smoothly.

Listening and Monitoring

What people are saying about your brand matters–⁠and advanced monitoring and engagement capabilities allow you to connect with those who want to connect with you. For its monitoring and social listening capabilities, Agorapulse outranks Hootsuite and Sendible. (Sendible doesn’t even have any social listening features.)

In fact, Agorapulse recently enhanced its social listening, and the new version is more advanced than ever.

You can now tap into conversations happening in your industry by searching specific keywords or phrases across thousands of news outlets, millions of blogs, and all the largest social networks like Facebook, Instagram, and X (Twitter). This makes it even easier to stay informed about what people are saying about your brand, your products, and your competitors.

Plus, you can track how mentions, sentiment, and engagement evolve over time, allowing you to build your content strategy based on useful insights.

Reporting

Reporting is quite often the most dreaded aspect of a social media manager’s job. And understandably so, because the manual process is incredibly time consuming and tedious, especially if you are using Excel sheets, switching tabs constantly, and then also trying to make the data look visually appealing for your client or boss.

Using a social media management tool should make this process a lot easier and a lot less manual. Let’s see whether that holds true for the reporting in Hootsuite, Sendible and Agorapulse.

Hootsuite Analytics and Reporting

Hootsuite has fairly comprehensive reporting capabilities, and you have the option to use template reports or create your own custom report. However many of the advanced features and analytics are not included in the Professional or Team plans. They are mainly offered in the Enterprise plan, or as an add-on (Advanced Analytics) that you must pay extra for.

Hootsuite does have one unique reporting feature, which is their paid campaign tracking. This is not offered by Agorapulse or Sendible (at least right now), so if you need to track your paid campaign performance, this could be one reason to consider Hootsuite.

Sendible Analytics and Reporting

Sendible provides two levels of reporting – Quick Reports, which is basically templated reports, and then they have a more advanced Report Builder to create custom reports. The customized Report Builder is only available for those on the White Label plan or higher.

Agorapulse Analytics and Reporting

In regard to analytics and reporting, Agorapulse leads in nearly every aspect. The G2 scores indicate that we are ahead of Hootsuite and Sendible for key reporting features such as:

• Attribution
• Post performance
• Follower analysis
• Competitor analysis

If you are curious, here’s the metrics included within a basic report from Agorapulse:

• Account growth
• Audience demographics
• Impressions
• Content overview
• Engagement
• Community management
• Best times to publish

Agorapulse Power Reports have even more options, and are customizable to your needs. They are ideal for creating multiple reports on multiple channels and provide a more in-depth look into your social media marketing efforts.

Reports can also include the number of replies sent in the Social Media Inbox, and the speed of the replies. For companies using Agorapulse as a customer support tool, this is valuable information to know, as you can see the resources being used (in-house or outsourced) and see how each individual is performing.

Deep dive into Agorapulse’s Power Reports

Team Collaboration and Management

As any social media manager knows, effective workflows for team collaboration and management are critical for success. In this area, Agorapulse and Sendible are both clear winners, with each tool providing useful collaborative features for teams. While Sendible edges out Agorapulse for its content calendar and approval workflows, Agorapulse takes the lead for its content library and shared inbox features.

However, Agorapulse’s unique additions like collision detection and the ability to share content calendars externally make it particularly appealing for agencies and businesses with collaborative workflows.

Hootsuite, while offering basic collaboration features, falls behind in ease of use and flexibility compared to its competitors.

Product Direction

The future direction of a product is an important consideration. Agorapulse clearly demonstrates a strong commitment to innovation and user feedback, with a high rating of 9.1 on G2. Our clear roadmap aims to prioritize new features and integrations that our users request. This approach helps us ensure that our platform is evolving in line with the needs of our customers.

Sendible is rated at 9.0, also reflecting a strong future outlook. But Hootsuite’s score of just 7.3 is one of the lowest in the industry, and suggests a need for a more user-focused development approach to keep pace with the industry and changing customer needs.

Quality of Support

On G2, Agorapulse has a rating of 9.2 for quality of support, coming out three points ahead of Sendible, and a full TWELVE POINTS ahead of Hootsuite, whose scores are 8.9 and 8.0, respectively. Here’s what the customer support experience looks like for each of these tools.

Hootsuite Customer Support

Hootsuite has a large resource library and plenty of help center articles available to its users. But for those more complex issues that require talking to an actual human, your options are somewhat limited. For starters, the support team is only available via email Monday to Friday, 9am to 5pm. And some G2 user reviews seem to indicate that the response times aren’t great, so if you are dealing with a problem that needs to be fixed urgently, you may be out of luck.

Sendible Customer Support

Sendible’s support consists primarily of FAQ articles, webinars, email support, and a live chat on their website. In general, users of Sendible do seem to be satisfied with the quality of the support that they receive, as Sendible has a rating of 8.9 in this category.

But one thing of importance is that Sendible’s email and live chat support is only available during the hours of 9am – 10pm GMT. For international social media teams or companies with a global presence, this may be a concern as you likely will have employees working outside of those hours. What happens if they run into any problems outside of those hours? This is something that you should consider when making your decision on which social media tool to choose.

Agorapulse Customer Support

Agorapulse leads the category with a rating of 9.2 on G2. This isn’t too surprising, given that our support team at Agorapulse is available around the clock, and has some of the best response times in the industry. With the entry-level Standard plan, you can expect to hear back from us in 6 hours or less. And if you are on the enterprise-level Custom plan, you’ll hear back in just 30 minutes or less.

But no matter the plan you choose, you still will receive a timely response from our support team at Agorapulse. And having high-quality technical support available when you need it is something you really can’t put a price tag on.

Plans and Pricing

Of course, you may be interested in what the cost for each of these tools is going to be, so here’s a look at the plans and prices for each. (By the way, it is fairly common for these prices to change regularly, not just for our own tool, but for our competitors as well. Just so you know, the prices and available plans listed below have been last updated on March 22, 2024.)

Hootsuite Pricing

Hootsuite now offers just three different plans to choose from: Professional, Team, and Enterprise. (In 2023, they stopped offering their Free plan and their Business plan.)

Hootsuite’s Professional plan is $99/month, and the Team plan is $249/month – but that price is only if you pay annually.

In fact, the actual monthly price for each of the Hootsuite plans isn’t even listed anywhere on the pricing page. Turns out, if you want to pay monthly for Hootsuite, the prices are about 50% higher than what is publicly listed, but you won’t be able to see the real cost until you sign up for a “free trial” and enter your credit card information.

Here are the two prices for the Team plan:

That being said, Hootsuite does have an offer which allows you to receive a 20% discount – but that’s only if you skip your free trial completely, and are willing to pay upfront for a tool that you haven’t even tried yet.

There are also a couple of other things you need to be aware of with the Hootsuite Professional and Team plans. For starters, they are missing many of the key time-saving features that are needed for effective social media management, such as approval workflows, saved replies or a content library. These features are only available on the Hootsuite Enterprise plan.

Additionally, the Hootsuite plans are pretty limiting when it comes to the number of user accounts you can have. The Professional plan includes just one user, and the Team plan includes three users. If you need more users than that, you will be forced into upgrading to the Enterprise plan, which still only gives you a total of five users. Extra seats can be added, but for an extra cost of course.

Oh and if you want to upgrade from the Team plan (priced at $2,988 annually) moving to the Enterprise plan will cost you at least another $13,000 on top of that – and that’s really just the low end of the spectrum. Considering that many of the useful Hootsuite features are “add-ons”, you need to also be prepared to fork over even more cash, because the add-ons can start to add up pretty fast.

But regardless, even without any add-ons, you’re essentially looking at annual costs of $16,000 – $18,000 when you go with Hootsuite’s Enterprise plan.

Sendible Pricing

Sendible has five different plans available, all at different price points. They are:

• Creator: $29/month, billed monthly or $25/month billed annually
• Traction: $89/month, billed monthly or $76/month, billed annually
• White Label: $240/month billed monthly, or $204/month billed annually.
• White Label+: $750/month, billed monthly, or $638/month billed annually
• Custom: This plan does not have a price listed publicly on the website, as it is for large teams and agencies, and the pricing is tailored to each individual business.

Some things to consider with the Sendible pricing:

• The White Label package that is currently priced at $240/month is a discounted rate, the normal cost of this package is $399/month.
• Similar to Hootsuite, many features that you may need in a social media management tool aren’t available on Sendible’s lower pricing tiers. For example, content libraries, UTM parameters, and custom approval workflows are only offered on the White Label and White Label+ plans.

Let’s see how this compares to the plans and pricing of Agorapulse.

Agorapulse Pricing

Agorapulse offers five different tiers of pricing:

• Free, as in $0 a month
• Standard, $49 per user/month, billed annually, or $69 per user/month, billed monthly
• Professional, $79/ per user/month, billed annually or $99 per user/month, billed monthly
• Advanced $119 per user/month, billed annually or $149/per user/month, billed monthly
• Custom – price varies as the plan is tailored to your needs

 

You’ll notice that when compared to Sendible or Hootsuite, our plans give you access to more advanced features like content libraries, shared calendars, and saved replies without having to spend a fortune.

Not only that, but the plans at Agorapulse are a lot more flexible than those offered by Sendible and Hootsuite. With Agorapulse, you aren’t forced to upgrade to a higher tier plan, just because you need additional users or social profiles. You can simply add on extra users or social profiles to any of the plans. This allows you to purchase the plan with the features you need, and then scale it to fit your team.

Whereas with Hootsuite, you are forced into the Enterprise plan if you need more than 20 social accounts and three users. And with Sendible, you would need to move to the White Label plan if you need more than 24 social profiles or 4 users. And on Sendible’s White Label plan, you may wind up paying for a lot more users and accounts than you really need, as it includes 105 social profiles and 15 users.

Hootsuite vs Sendible vs Agorapulse: Which Will You Choose?

Ultimately, choosing the right social media management tool boils down to understanding your needs, team size, and desired features. We’ve laid out the facts, showcasing where each platform shines and where there might be room for improvement. And as seen in the G2 ratings, reviewers consistently rank Agorapulse ahead of Hootsuite and Sendible in nearly every category.

But whether Agorapulse is the right fit for you or if you lean towards Hootsuite or Sendible, we hope this comparison has provided you with valuable insights to make an informed decision.