The 7 Best Social Media Management Tools in 2025 (+ Their Alternatives)
Save time, automate processes, get in-depth analytics, and more with these best-in-class social media tools for 2025.
On any given day, you are:
- Creating social media posts
- Repurposing existing content for socials
- Staying on top of trends across platforms
- Reviewing your analytics for social media reporting
- …And so much more.
Doing all of this manually can make you bone tired and burned out. Luckily, there are plenty of social media management tools to take some of the tasks off your to-do list. Here are the 7 best ones — and plenty of alternatives to each tool, if you need it.
Quick summary: The 7 best social media management tools (and various alternatives)
Tool name | Free plan/trial | Price | Best for | Top features | Alternative tools |
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Buffer | Free forever for up to 3 social media channels | $6/month/channel | Creators and small business owners |
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Hootsuite | No free plans. All plans have a 30-day free trial | $99/month for 10 social media channels | Mid-sized businesses practicing social listening |
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Tailwind | Free plan available for one account and five posts per month | $19.99/month for 400 posts on one account | Managing your Pinterest account |
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SocialPilot | No free plan. 14-day free trial for all paid plans | $30/month for one user and 10 social media accounts | Social media agencies |
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Zoho Social | No free plans. 15-day free trial for all paid plans | €15/month for one user and 10 social media channels | Zoho users |
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Sprout Social | No free plans. 30-day free trial for all paid plans | $249/seat/month for five social media profiles | All-in-one social and influencer marketing |
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Oktopost | Pricing isn’t publicly available | Pricing isn’t publicly available | B2B companies |
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1. Buffer
Best social media management tool for creators and small businesses
Free plan/trial available: Yes. Free forever for up to 3 channels. All paid plans also have a 14-day free trial.
Price: Paid plans begin at $6/month/channel.
Favorite features:
- Store ideas, curated content, and any notes on the go using the Ideas feature
- Start Page helps you ditch dry, boring, and generic link-in-bio tools and enables you to create a customizable landing page that’s authentically you
- You knew Buffer was gonna be on the top of this list, didn’t you? 😉 Yes, I’m biased because this is the Buffer blog, but I had been a customer of Buffer long before I was its writer.
The thing I love most about Buffer is its simplicity. On the surface, Buffer looks like a simple tool. Add your accounts and start social media scheduling. But Buffer can do so much more.
- You can store the social media post ideas that pop up in the shower or while walking the dog because the app is so smooth, accessible, and easy to use
- You can create beautiful, branded social media reports for stakeholders and get metrics tailored to you — no more questioning, “At what times do I get the most engagement? Which posts give me the most bang for my buck?”
- You can build your very own customized landing page in minutes. You’ll be surprised at how easy it is to create, seriously
Not just this: Buffer is a pioneer in the industry for embedding scheduling, analytics, etc., for new social media platforms. With new social channels entering the internet rapidly (looking at you, Threads & Bluesky), you’d want a social media management tool that’s in your corner, looking out for you.
Besides this, Buffer has all the basics checked: You can schedule posts easily, respond to comments, use its AI assistant to help speed up content creation, and collaborate with your team easily.
Buffer isn’t the best choice for you if you run a large enterprise company with a complex social media team. Its features are simple, straightforward, and powerful. But they are primarily geared toward creators and scrappy small businesses.
3 alternatives to Buffer
- Later is a good overall alternative to Buffer, but it’s available only for popular social media channels (LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, X, Pinterest, and YouTube). It also doesn’t have any free plan. The paid plans are costlier — they begin at $25/month for one user, but include one social media account for each platform.
- Loomly is also a good choice — especially if you’re a freelance social media manager. It has decent collaboration features and approval workflows — designed for someone managing multiple content calendars. But it’s not too complicated either (not a good fit for bigger social media agencies). It doesn’t have any free plans. The paid plans begin at $42/month for two users and 10 social media accounts.
- Lastly, Metricool is also a great alternative to Buffer. It can do all the basics of social media management, from post-scheduling to customized landing pages. Metricool has a free plan allowing you to publish up to 50 monthly posts. Paid plans begin at $22/month to schedule unlimited monthly posts.
2. Hootsuite
Best social media management tool for mid-sized businesses practicing social listening
Free plan/trial available: No free plans. Paid plans have a free trial of 30 days.
Price: Pricing starts at $99/month for 10 social media channels.
Favorite features:
- An extensive and unbeatable social listening dashboard to help you monitor trending keywords, competitors, and brand mentions
- Granular control over the access you can provide to various team members. This feature is perfect for complex teams
- You can stack your social media reports against competitors & your industry in general to examine how you’re performing against these benchmarks
Hootsuite is not an unfamiliar tool in the social media management world. And for good reason: I love its social listening feature. Since acquiring Talkwalker, it has become all the more powerful. You can choose your location, a topic you want to analyze, and the platform will give an in-depth report about what people are saying on that topic for the past week.
That’s not all: Hootsuite also has an excellent team management feature. You can create multiple sub-teams and minutely decide what level of access to give to your team members. An A+ feature if you’re a freelance social media manager or run a social media marketing agency.
The AI assistant can also do a lot — there are options to use copywriting formulas to write posts, repurpose existing posts, etc. But on testing, I found most outputs need a ton of refining.
I also don’t enjoy how complex the home dashboard is. It’s a bit overwhelming, and while feature-rich, Hootsuite definitely isn’t easy to use.
3 alternatives to Hootsuite
- Keyhole is an excellent Hootsuite alternative, specifically for social media listening. Its fundamental social media management features (like scheduling, storing ideas, creating graphics, team collaboration) aren’t as strong as Hootsuite, but the social listening feature is a tad bit better. Better how? The dashboard is more user-friendly and the audience insights are deeper. For example, you can also analyze whether the overall sentiment on a topic is positive, negative, or neutral. It has no free plan and the pricing is a bit complicated: You have to buy each of its features (social listening, scheduling, analytics, historical insights) separately. Social listening costs $189/month in the cheapest plan.
- Social Insider is also a good choice for replacing Hootsuite for social media analytics. The only problem is Social Insider doesn’t help you schedule posts or collaborate with team members. It’s specifically a tool to dive deeper into your social media analytics.If you have your content calendar scheduling and collaborating sorted via other tools, I’d recommend Social Insider for getting excellent insight into your social media performance. There’s no free plan. Paid plans begin at $99/month for up to 20 social media accounts.
- Lastly, Mention is also a great tool that has the best of both worlds from Keyhole and Social Insider. Granted, its social listening features and analytics aren’t as good as Keyhole and Social Insider, but it’s decent enough. It also allows you to do all the basic social media management stuff like scheduling posts for X, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Facebook. Prices start at $41/month for up to 4 social media accounts. There’s no free plan.
3. Tailwind
Best social media management tool for managing your Pinterest account
Free plan/trial available: Free plan available for one account and five posts per month.
Price: Paid plans begin at $19.99/month for 400 posts per month on one account.
Favorite features:
- Schedule your pins at preset intervals
- A browser extension to create new pins from anywhere and save them to relevant boards
- SmartGuide monitors your Pinterest activity and alerts you on the recommended best practices to inform your Pinterest strategy
Sure, plenty of social media management software can help you schedule pins on Pinterest and manage your Pinterest account. But no one does it like Tailwind.
For starters, its sole focus is on Pinterest and it's an official Pinterest partner. So if you’re someone who’s looking to burrow down on this platform or grow your following on it exclusively, I’d say it's better to use a Tailwind because it’s dedicated to Pinterest.
The thing I find most amazing? You can transform your photos into fantastic Pin designs in one click. It’s like having your own, personalized Canva for Pinterest within your social media management tool.
Apart from this, you can schedule pins, add them to preset boards, and even spread them out at various intervals for maximum engagement. You know, the basics. On testing, Tailwind was quite easy to use! The browser extension was a bit wonky and slowed me down, but that just might be my browser (Brave).
What I don’t like is the free version of Tailwind is basically non-existent for anyone taking Pinterest marketing seriously. There are only five free posts per month…which is nothing — especially since Pinterest often thrives on quantity.
3 alternatives to Tailwind (for other social media channels)
- Hypefury is the Tailwind of X. It has an inspiration panel to see other creators’ top tweets and has auto-comments to promote your newsletter, small business, or any other venture. There’s no better tool if you’re looking to grow on X. No free plan. Paid plans begin at $29/month. You can connect one X account and schedule posts for up to one month.
- Shield is the alternative to Tailwind if you’re big on LinkedIn. Its unique selling point is its in-depth LinkedIn analytics — you can identify key themes in your content and which topics get the most likes from your audience. There’s no free plan. Paid plans begin at $8/month for one LinkedIn account.
- I’d recommend using Manychat if you are selling on Instagram. It can’t do the scheduling, social media analytics, etc. but it can automate attracting leads via Instagram DMs and responding to customers quickly.
4. SocialPilot
Best social media management tool for social media agencies
Free plan/trial available: No free plans. Free trial for all paid plans available for 14 days.
Price: Prices start at $30/month for one user and 10 social media accounts.
Favorite features:
- Separate your dashboards for various clients and whitelabel them with customized colors, logos, etc., to give your customers a premium experience
- Simple approval process with easy, shareable, personalized links — requiring no sign-ups from your clients
- Auto-send various clients personalized and branded social media performance reports
SocialPilot screams agency, in my opinion. Its pricing plans itself have “Agency” and “Agency+” options. Take the approval process: you can share direct personalized links (no sign ups required) that compile everything your client needs to review on a single screen. The whole workflow is designed to be agency-friendly.
The dashboard is also user-friendly if you manage multiple clients. You can have different sub-dashboards for various clients to keep their management separated from the rest. Not just this: You can also whitelabel the platform to provide a customized experience to your clients.
And like Hootsuite, there’s also granular control over which team member can do what tasks — but SocialPilot is much more affordable and simpler to use.
I didn’t mention the basic features like scheduling, reporting features, and AI assistant, but SocialPilot aces all the fundamentals, too. Its standout features are just more geared toward agencies.
- Sendible is also designed for agencies like SocialPilot. It has similar features like personalized dashboards, automated reports, and custom permissions. I’d say the user experience of Sendible is a tad bit better, but SocialPilot’s approval workflow is superior to Sendible. Choose Sendible if you’re an agency that’s scaling fast. Its pricing plans are more accommodating toward bigger agencies. Similarly to SocialPilot, paid plans begin at $29/month for one user and six social media profiles. There’s no free plan.
- SocialBee also has separate plans for agencies. You can have separate workspaces for each client and collaborate seamlessly. There’s not a lot of granular control, though, so SocialBee is more suitable for agencies with a small team handling a lot of clients. No free plans. Paid plans begin at $179/month for up to 50 social media profiles and 10 workspaces.
- Pallyy is a good alternative to SocialPilot if you want something simple. There’s no branded dashboards, but you can have customized colors. There’s a feedback overview that’s very straightforward to use, but can get cluttered if you manage a ton of clients. Pricing is also simple: They have one plan that costs $18/month. Adding team members costs $29/month/user. You can create unlimited teams. There’s also a free forever plan where you can schedule up to 15 posts/month.
5. Zoho Social
Best social media management tool for Zoho users
Free plan/trial available: No free plan. All paid plans have a 15-day free trial.
Price: Pricing starts at €15/month for one user and 10 social media channels.
Favorite features:
- Integration to other Zoho products like CRM and Desk for smooth management
- Build your own customized social media listening dashboard to track brand mentions, stay on top of trends, and more
- Automate your social media posts to repeat at a certain cadence to repost your content without any intervention
Zoho is a well-known name in the tech industry. It offers CRM solutions, emailing services, payroll processing, customer service software, and a whole lot of other products that knowledge workers use. If you work in a company that already uses Zoho for various purposes, Zoho Social is a great social media management tool you should consider.
I’ll be honest: Zoho Social has nothing special. Like Buffer’s known for its ease and Hootsuite for its feature-richness, Zoho Social doesn’t have any snowflake feature to make it standout. But that isn’t to say it can’t get the job done. If you need something simple to schedule your posts, analyze their performance, and create the occasional report, Zoho can do the job just fine.
Zoho Social is especially great because it integrates with Zoho Desk (its customer service software). Some businesses just get a lot of queries from customers on social media. If you’re one of those, Zoho Social is great because you can integrate social media for customer service and social media for marketing seamlessly.
I’d recommend signing up for Zoho Social only if you’re already in the Zoho ecosystem and your social media marketing strategy is still developing. Once you’ve fleshed out a roadmap, you might move toward a more specialized social media management software that caters to your unique needs. Or if you have the budget, you can add a separate tool in addition to Zoho Social.
2 alternatives to Zoho Social
- HubSpot is the enterprise version of Zoho. It has a social media management software that can help you build campaigns, schedule social media posts, and link all your social media activity back to the HubSpot CRM. Like Zoho Social, HubSpot’s social media management tool isn’t the best in the market — but it’s an easy choice if you already use HubSpot products. There are many pricing plans, but the one that includes social media starts at $890/month for three users. You can connect up to 50 social media accounts and schedule 10,000 posts per month.
- For republishing top-performing content, you can also use MeetEdgar. Other than that, MeetEdgar also has basic social media management software features like scheduling posts, tracking performance, etc. It costs $29.99/month for up to five social accounts. There’s no free plan.
6. Sprout Social
Best social media management tool for using one tool for social media marketing and influencer marketing
Free plan/trial available: No free plan available. All paid plans have a 30 day free trial.
Price: Pricing starts at $249/seat/month for five social media profiles.
Favorite features:
- Aesthetic reports that make you swoon
- Influencer marketing software to help you run two strategies with one software
- Employee advocacy feature to help you curate a feed specifically for your employees
Sprout Social acquired Tagger Media in 2023. So, now, not only can it help you with social media management tasks like scheduling posts, tracking brand mentions, and monitoring analytics, it can also help you find influencers and collaborate with them. This is a major headache eliminated if you’re a social media manager responsible for running your social media marketing plan and your influencer marketing strategy.
That said, Sprout Social isn’t lackluster in the social media management department either. It has an AI assistant, like all popular social media management tools and its reports are beautiful. You can use various interactive charts and graphs to visualize information — and it’s just a treat to look at.
All that said, Sprout Social is definitely not for the creator or small business. It comes with a hefty price tag and the paid plans don’t include the cost of integrating the influencer marketing software. Welp.
If you’re a big company with the big bucks, Sprout Social might be worth your money. But if you’re a small business with a shoestring budget, choose two different tools for your social media and influencer marketing strategy to not burn a hole in your pocket.
2 alternatives to Sprout Social
- Meltwater is multiple software rolled into one. It has a media relations tool, social listening dashboard, social media management, influencer marketing software, and a whole lot more. If you prefer having one tool for multiple use cases, Meltwater is a fine choice. The pricing isn’t publicly available.
- Brandwatch is another software that has four tools: social media management software, influencer marketing, consumer intelligence, and media intelligence. It has an influencer database of 30 million creators and the CRM is quite easy to use. Brandwatch is also the official partner of Meta, X, TikTok, Reddit, Instagram, and Tumblr. Pricing for this tool is also not publicly available.
7. Oktopost
Best social media management tool for B2B companies
Free plan/trial available: Pricing not publicly available.
Price: Pricing not publicly available.
Favorite features:
- Premade dashboards by B2B social media experts to help you track important metrics
- Each post is assigned to a campaign for accurate social media reporting
- Tracks buyer journeys
Oktopost specializes in social media management for B2B companies. Every scheduled post is assigned to a campaign for better reporting and UTM parameters are added to every link you share on social media.
The analytics also look a tad bit different than your usual social media management software: Oktopost tracks the buyer journey to understand how your social media campaigns are impacting revenue. The B2B social media experts in Oktopost also recommend premade dashboards that you should be monitoring to analyze your social performance.
The only con I could find is you can’t get a feel for the product because there’s no free trial or publicly available pricing.
2 alternatives to Oktopost
- Content Studio is also quite B2B oriented. You can curate existing content from X, YouTube, and the web. There’s also an in-built RSS feed reader so you can control what you see on your social profiles’ news feed. You can even find influencers on X, YouTube, and Instagram. You can also schedule blogs on Medium, WordPress, Webflow, etc. along with social media management. There’s no free plan, though. Paid plans begin at $25/month for five social media accounts and one user.
- There’s nothing that makes Missinglettr specifically useful for B2B companies, but it has a ‘drip social media campaigns’ feature that’ll be quite useful for any B2B organization. You can connect your company blog, Medium, or YouTube channel and Missinglettr will automatically extract the most valuable quotes & images to post about it on social media. You can also curate content like on Content Studio. Pricing begins at $15/month for one user, three social media profiles, and one workspace. There are no free plans.
What should you look for in social media management tools
The problem with choosing social media management platforms is:
- The market is saturated with plenty of social media tools
- Most social media management software has pretty much the same core features. Finding their differentiators among all the features is time-consuming and can take some trial-and-error
In this scenario, choosing the right social media management software can become a difficult task. How do you know which is the right one for you? Here are five questions you should ask yourself while evaluating social media tools:
1. Does the social media management platform connect with all major social networks? Your social media efforts might be focused on one social media platform right now, but that’s bound to change as you grow. Your target audience is present in multiple social networks and you’ll likely expand into multiple social media channels as you scale. For starters, you can choose specialized social media management apps focusing on just one network, but eventually you might need a social media management platform that connects with all major social networks.
2. Does the social media management tool have strong reporting features? One of the core aspects of a well-made social media strategy is having comprehensive analytics. A social media presence in a silo is ineffective. You need detailed analytics to prove social media ROI. This is true for everyone — social media managers, agencies, freelancers. In all social media management tools, examine the analytics tools thoroughly. Does it calculate the social media metrics you need? Can you measure audience engagement accurately? Are all customer interactions accounted for? Are the reporting tools providing in-depth analytics for multiple platforms?
3. Does the social media management software have strong collaboration tools? If you’re a creator operating solo, you might not need collaboration features for your marketing efforts. But social media managers and agencies need strong team collaboration tools to work together. Nail down the specifics of what you need to work together seamlessly. Do you need granular level permission control? Or a smooth social media workflow to onboard clients? Almost all social media management tools have plans that allow for team collaboration where you can add multiple team members. But there are differences in a few features (like permission levels). Check for those.
4. Will the price of the social media management tool stay in budget as you scale? Maybe you choose the social media management software that the world’s biggest companies use. But what’s the point if it goes out of pocket as soon as you grow? Don’t just look at the current price of social media management tools. Calculate the cost when you want to connect multiple accounts. The best social media management tool will be able to scale with you — whether that’s in adding team members or adding multiple social media profiles.
5. Does the social media tool have specialized features you need? Despite the competition, most social media management tools have few features especially designed for their target audience. Buffer has a DIY landing page builder for its creators and Sprout Social has an influencer marketing tool, for instance. Many tools also help you generate ideas, choose from an extensive media library, or provide an easy to use visual content calendar. Articles like this one will help you understand the few features that make a social media management platform different from the rest.
After your initial analysis, you’ll be left with a handful of social media management tools that fit your budget and your needs. Luckily, most tools have long free trials that you can use to get a feel for the software before committing to a monthly or yearly subscription. Is testing all shortlisted social media software within free trials a bit tedious? Yes. But it’ll help you make the best long-term choice.
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