Jun 02, 2020 ● 6 min read
- Buffer Vs. Hootsuite: Simplify Your Social Media Strategy Account
- Buffer Vs. Hootsuite: Simplify Your Social Media Strategy Content
- Buffer Vs. Hootsuite: Simplify Your Social Media Strategy Business
- Buffer Vs. Hootsuite: Simplify Your Social Media Strategy Marketing
Buffer vs Hootsuite vs MavSocial: 3 social media tools go head-to-head. Here are three social media management tools to consolidate your promotional strategy. It offers all the elements to. This blog started to be written January 11, 2015. Advertise your products and services here.
Even though both tools are great, they do differ in certain aspects, and in order to find out the right one for you, you need to understand what Hootsuite and Buffer actually do and compare their common features and pricing.
Table of Contents
- Common Features in Both Tools
Hootsuite vs Buffer: What They Do?
Both tools help you to schedule and automate posting to multiple feeds at once, measure the success of your content against important social media metrics, and coordinate publishing across your team.
Even though both tools are known as social media management tools, Buffer is more like a content publishing platform that allows you to schedule and publish content to social networks.
Image source: https://buffer.com/
Hootsuite, on the other hand, allows you to manage your social media channels like a true social media management tool. It also allows you to use it to give tasks to other users, so it’s great for a team platform.
Image source: https://hootsuite.com/platform/content-curation#
Buffer vs Hootsuite: Pricing
Both tools offer a free version that allows you to add up to 3 social media accounts and schedule a specific number of posts to each – 10 posts per social media account for Buffer, and 30 posts in total for Hootsuite.
Hootsuite | Buffer | ||||
Professional | Team | Business | Pro | Premium | Business |
$ 29/mo | $ 129/mo | $ 599/mo | $ 15/mo | $ 65/mo | $ 99/mo |
Buffer Vs. Hootsuite: Simplify Your Social Media Strategy Account
Hootsuite offers an Enterprise plan but you’ll have to contact them for pricing. This plan is more oriented for large-scale businesses, giving them a chance to manage and create larger teams across their company, monitor how they are engaging with followers, and get deep analytics data.
Common Features in Both Tools
Supported Social Networks
Buffer | Hootsuite |
|---|---|
Facebook Pages and Groups | Facebook Pages and Groups |
Twitter Profiles | Twitter Profiles |
Instagram Business Profiles | Instagram Business Profiles |
Google+ Profiles and Pages | Google+ Profiles and Pages |
LinkedIn Profiles and Pages | LinkedIn Profiles and Pages |
Pinterest Boards (Pro or Business Only) | Pinterest Channels (Professional only) |
WordPress Blogs | |
YouTube Channels | |
Flickr, Vimeo, Reddit, Tumblr,Vk and more. |
If you are looking only at the number of supported networks, Hootsuite is the winner. But, if you’re only on one or two social networks, you won’t need the long list of Hootsuite’s supported networks.
After all, the most important thing is to choose the tool that supports the social networks you are on right now and the ones you plan to move on to shortly.
Publishing, Scheduling, and Posting
Both tools allow posting and scheduling posts to your social accounts as well as tweaking your message for each social network to adjust it for the appropriate audience. With Buffer, however, you can’t respond to content, unlike Hootsuite which allows replying, retweeting or responding to any content.
There are, however, some differences in the process of scheduling content. Buffer allows you to use the Buffer Queue – a custom schedule that dictates the time your posts should go up.
You put a posting schedule in place, which can be customized per day, and Buffer will automatically send out the posts in the queue. The custom schedule is a great feature you can use and control if you don’t want to bother with scheduling your posts manually.
Hootsuite, on the other hand, offers AutoSchedule that controls when your posts will go live. In other words, the tool itself can choose the order and time your content will go live. This can be useful if you have plenty of posts and you don’t want to bother in what order they go up or when they go up, as long as all posts don’t go up at the same time.
Free users of both tools have certain scheduling limitations. Buffers lets you schedule 10 posts per social media account regardless if you use direct scheduling or the queue, while Hootsuite lets you schedule 30 posts across all social media accounts.
Analytics
The type of analytics both tools provide has a lot to do with their primary function. Being a social media management tool, Hootsuite provides analytics from your social networks, including analytics about the performance of your social networks, about the content you post, and your social traffic.
Being mainly a publishing and scheduling tool, Buffer provides analytics of the content published on the platform. This doesn’t include the content you post through another tool. This tool has an intuitive analytics dashboard that you can also see on the Buffer mobile app.
You get analytics for your content, such as your best and worst posts based on reach, engagement, and post type. All this data is presented in a simple and clean layout that you can export it for further analysis.
Hootsuite, on the other hand, provides a lot more analytics which can be confusing to some people. The usual analytics can be acquired through Hootsuite Core Analytics, whereas real-time analytics can be acquired through uberVu via Hootsuite. Free users can run only a specific number of reports, and a couple of more if they upgrade to the Pro version.
Team Management
Admins can use both tools to assign certain team members to specific social media accounts. Buffer is great for small teams, but Hootsuite offers more tools to scale for larger teams and businesses.
Overall, the team management of Buffer consists of sharing access to the tool with members of your team and manually selecting which social media account they will have access to.
Your team members may get full posting rights, or they may require approval before posts go live, so this is up to you. This is more than enough for small businesses, but not for large businesses with hundreds of social media accounts.
Hootsuite offers many tools for large businesses to categorize their employees into different categories, such as Organizations (groups of teams), Teams (groups of team members), our Team Members. This makes large-scale marketing operations accessible.
For instance, you can provide outside agency access to a particular set of social media accounts, whereas your internal team can manage the others.
Based on the team management feature, choose Buffer if you’re a small business, or Hootsuite if you’re a large organization.
User Interface
Thanks to the minimal user interface of Buffer, you can see the number of posts you have scheduled in the queue for each account, which posts you’ve scheduled, and edit any of them.
Image source: https://uxdesign.cc/
The Pro version and above allow you to see your posts on a calendar view, thus making it easy for you to plan out your posts for the entire week or month.
When it comes to Hootsuite’s dashboard, it’s more indirect. There are multiple tabs on the dashboard, each of them containing several columns for one or more social networks.
Although you can make a tab with your scheduled columns in one place, the tool doesn’t have a particular place where you can find all your scheduled posts. So, Hootsuite’s user interface is more customizable but less intuitive than Buffer’s.
What Tool Is Better for Your Business?
With its intuitive analytics dashboard and clean user experience, Buffer focuses on publishing and scheduling your content and easily manages a small team. The business plans of this tool are less expensive, so Buffer is the winner for small businesses or businesses that are just getting started.
Hootsuite, however, is the better choice for large companies with many different teams. It offers a lot more features than Buffer, such as tracking topic searches, monitoring your feeds, and getting information about the performance of your social posts in real-time. Hootsuite has more expensive business plans than Buffer, but they are worth it for those working in a large organization.
Hootsuite Vs. Buffer – which one should you pick?
If you have been researching tools to schedule your Instagram posts (or other platforms like Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, etc.), you may have inevitably come across Hootsuite and Buffer.
As two of the most popular social media scheduling tools, both Hootsuite and Buffer come packed with features to help you with your tasks. But which is the right tool for your business?
Let’s find out.
Oh, by the way…
If you are visiting this website for the first time and do not know who we are – Hopper HQ is a brilliant social media scheduling tool. Just like Hootsuite and Buffer, but BETTER ;-).
Try Hopper HQ right away. It’s FREE for 14 days!
Plan your social media posts.
Visually plan your posts. Drag and drop everywhere.
In this article, we are going to do a Buffer Vs. Hootsuite comparison across a handful of different parameters. As a direct competitor to both Buffer and Hootsuite, we are also going to tell you how Hopper HQ compares against these two tools on the same parameters.
Let’s get going.
Sign-up & Onboarding Process
Buffer Vs. Hootsuite: Simplify Your Social Media Strategy Content
Many users tend to disregard the sign-up process while reviewing various tools. After all, it is just a one-time thing, right?
But here’s the thing.
The onboarding process can be one of the most crucial parts of the user journey. It does not matter how powerful your product is – if this value is not communicated to the user, they are going to feel overwhelmed.
Hootsuite onboarding process
The Hootsuite homepage communicates what they offer, their free trial policy, and also a quick link to their pricing page.
There is a bit of friction in actually completing the sign-up though.
Clicking on the ‘Start Your Free 30 Day Trial’ button takes you to a window where you are offered a chance to pick between their Team plan and the Professional plan. You will have to make a decision here before you are taken to the sign-up window.
That’s a lot of work to just get to the sign-up window.
The sign-up process is not complete. Yet. Once you have entered the options, you now have to choose between a monthly or annual plan, and enter your credit card details before you can start the free trial.
Phew!
Buffer Onboarding Process
Like Hootsuite, the Buffer homepage too has its communication laid out.
The trial period is shorter, but in our experience, you do not need more than a couple of days to decide if a tool is a good fit for your needs, or not.
Anything more than that is a bonus.
Again, just like Hootsuite, there is a lot of friction in completing your signup process.
If you thought deciding between the different plans was cumbersome with Hootsuite, Buffer takes it up one notch further. Here, you also have to pick between two completely different products – their ‘Publish’ and ‘Analyze’ products.
Both ‘Publish’ and ‘Analyze’ come with separate pricing plans.
Since we are discussing the scheduling functions of these tools, we are going to pick the ‘Publish’ option.
Now, you need to make a decision on which of the three paid plans you need to sign up for. Remember that at this point, you do not even know if Buffer is a good fit for your needs or not.
So I think all of this is mentally draining as a new user.
The good thing, however, is that you do not need to enter your credit card details just to try. But then, inputting an email and password is not going to complete the sign-up process.
You are then taken to another window where you enter details about your company, the number of people in your team, where you heard about Buffer, and so on. These are not optional questions. You need to answer them before moving to the next step.
The onboarding process from here is smooth. You connect your social media accounts and can start using the product.
Also Read:Planoly Vs. Later
The Hopper HQ Sign Up Process
Compared to Hootsuite and Buffer, Hopper HQ has a very clean and intuitive onboarding process.
First – there are no hoops to jump through. The signup window is perhaps the first thing you will notice when you load the HopperHQ website.
Above the signup box is a clear value communication on what the product offers.
Amazing, right? You key-in your name, email, and password, then enter the credit card details in the next, and voila – your free trial has begun.
It does not take more than one minute to get through the signup process.
Don’t believe me? Try it out yourself by clicking here.
Plan your social media posts.
Visually plan your posts. Drag and drop everywhere.
Pricing Plans Comparison
Hootsuite Pricing
Hootsuite offers 4 different pricing plans (apart from Enterprise custom solutions).
For individuals who want to use a social media management solution for their personal accounts, the free tier can be quite handy.
Here, you can connect three social media accounts and can cumulatively schedule 30 messages in a month. It’s nifty enough to give yourself an extended trial of the product.
Among the paid plans, the lowest price point is $29/month for the Professional plan. It gives you the ability to connect 10 accounts.
Beyond this, Hootsuite starts getting very expensive. If you need to connect more than 10 accounts, you will need to go for the ‘Team’ plan which is $129/month and those who need to connect more than 20 accounts will have to go for the ‘Business’ plan which is $599/month.
Quite clearly, both the Team and Business plans are geared towards agencies who do social media marketing for their living.
You won’t otherwise need to connect so many accounts or afford $599 for just social media management.
Buffer Pricing
As I mentioned earlier in this article, Buffer has two products – ‘Publish’ and ‘Analyze’. ‘Publish’ is their suite of social media scheduling tools while ‘Analyze’ is their analytics product.
Compared to Hootsuite, Buffer is relatively cheaper. Their free tier lets you schedule 10 posts in a month.
If you are a serious user though, you will need to sign up for one of their paid plans that start at $15/month for the Pro plan. This plan lets you connect to 8 channels and 100 scheduled posts in a month.
The Premium plan that is priced at $65/month lets you generously schedule as many as 2000 posts a month.
But here is the thing – you are still allowed to connect only 8 social channels. If you are an agency that handles social media accounts for more than a couple of clients, you are going to need their ‘Business’ account which is priced at $99/month and lets you connect 25 social accounts.
You are still limited by their 2000 posts per month limit.
Quick note — the pricing discussed here is just for the ‘Publish’ product. If you also want analytics features for your clients, you have to sign up for the ‘Analyze’ product which starts at $35/month for 8 social accounts.
Hopper HQ Pricing
Hopper HQ is designed to keep the needs of agencies in mind. There are no pricing tiers to choose from.
You are instead offered ‘bundles’ – each bundle lets you connect to one account each from Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.
You can get as many bundles as you wish. The pricing starts at $16/month (annually billed) for one bundle and there are discounts if you need several bundles.
For instance, if you are signed up for 10 bundles, then the annual pricing drops from $16/month/bundle to $14.5/month/bundle.
Another good thing is that there are no posting limits like you have with Buffer. No matter how many accounts you have connected your account to, you enjoy unlimited scheduling.
The reason why this pricing model makes more sense is that agencies no longer have to juggle their expenses across different clients. Someone with 5 clients can sign up for 5 bundles while a large agency with a hundred clients could sign up for 100 bundles.
Want to know how much Hopper HQ will cost you? Try our pricing calculator here.
Product Features
Both Hootsuite and Buffer come with all the standard features that one might be looking for in a social media scheduling application.
We are talking about features like publishing calendar, auto-scheduling, and bulk scheduling. Truth be told, this is what a majority of users are going to need in a scheduling app.
So what makes these tools different?
Starting with Hootsuite, this is built for collaboration. The Team plan lets you have 3 people in the account. With the $599/month Business account, you also have the option to have additional users for a fee.
Many other features like Campaign planning, reporting, and social listening are only available under the Business plan. Again, some of these are add-ons which means that you will be spending more than the monthly fee to access these features.
With Buffer, most of the basic features are available to all paid users. However, if you are looking for hashtag management, additional users, and Instagram Stories publishing, then these are only available to the higher tiers – they are not available to the Pro tier users.
Hopper HQ features you can’t miss
There are some things that Hopper HQ does really well – features that neither Hootsuite nor Buffer offer.
No Feature-gating
Buffer Vs. Hootsuite: Simplify Your Social Media Strategy Business
There is no feature-gating on Hopper HQ. That is, you are not going to be denied a feature just because you are not on a higher tier plan. All features are available to all users.
Kickass Image Editor
Hopper HQ has a fantastic image editor that lets you do all sorts of amazing things with your photos before you upload them on Instagram or other platforms.
You can add filters, add texts, crop your image, add overlays, edit the brightness and saturation levels – it’s a comprehensive image editing tool.
Neither of the two tools we discussed before has this feature. Now, you do not have to pay for another image editing application just so you can upload beautiful images to your Instagram account.
Curious how good this image editor is? Sign up for the free trial already!
You also have a comprehensive Instagram Analytics tool available to all Hopper HQ users. Unlike Buffer, you do not have to sign up for another product just to get analytics reports.
Explore the data behind your Instagram account.
Find the best time to post on Instagram
Track your follower growth overtime
Understand your post engagement
TRY INSTAGRAM ANALYTICS NOWPriority support to everyone
Buffer Vs. Hootsuite: Simplify Your Social Media Strategy Marketing
If you are not sold on Hopper HQ already, consider this – despite being the cheaper of the three tools, Hopper HQ offers the best customer support.
All users regardless of how big or small they are get instant live-chat support. Why is this cool? Because, if you are a Hootsuite customer, you get 24×7 priority support only if you are a $599/month business user.
All Hopper HQ users get priority live chat and email support.
Hootsuite Vs. Buffer – Which one would you choose?
The answer to this is that it depends. Hootsuite is the more expensive of the two. It also comes with a solid list of features that an enterprise business would need, and can afford.
Buffer is relatively cheaper. However, if you are an agency, you are going to feel limited with their 2000 posts per month limit. Also, you are going to need their analytics tool for client reporting purposes which makes it sort of more expensive than what you originally thought.
Hopper HQ has some amazing tools like image editor that marketers, especially Instagram marketers, are going to love. It also permits unlimited scheduling which takes away the perennial dilemma that agencies face – how many posts should I allocate for each of my clients?
Ultimately, it’s a question of your needs and choice. But before you make a decision, feel free to give Hopper HQ a try. You are going to be absolutely delighted.
Plan your social media posts.
Visually plan your posts. Drag and drop everywhere.