Juggling content ideas, drowning in DMs, chasing viral moments, and praying your scheduled posts actually post?
Just another Tuesday in the life of a social media manager—but it doesn’t have to be “that” way always.
There are some great social media management tools out there—that can take a bit of load off you, automate boring bits, and give your sanity back!
However, not all tools are created equal. Some are great for small teams, others are built for agencies handling dozens of clients, and some shine in analytics while others focus on content creation.
The right one is like having a clone (only difference: it meets deadlines)!
In this blog, we’ll break down the best social media management tools based on your needs. Let’s dive in.
What is a social media management tool?
A social media management tool is software that helps social media managers, agencies, and business owners streamline their whole process from ideating social media content to publishing—and lets you interact and analyze in-depth even after publishing.
How do we test and evaluate these tools?
To pick the best social media management tools, we started by analyzing user reviews and then took into consideration expert ratings and genuine reviews from G2. Our top priorities were ease of use, time-saving features, and fair pricing. We also made sure the tools could scale as businesses grow.
We also checked for key features like automation, scheduling, analytics, and AI tools. Integrations were a must. If it helps you run social media better and faster, it made the cut.
10 Best Social Media Management Tools
Now that you know how we test and evaluate the tools, take a look at this list of best social media management tools in 2025.
1) Hootsuite
Hootsuite helps social media managers save hours of work and manage social media faster and smarter.
It's the market leader and the first one of its kind in the industry to automate social media tasks like scheduling posts, engaging with the audience, keeping online reputation in check, and more.
With Hootsuite, you get an extensive all-in-one dashboard that helps schedule posts, track engagement, and monitor brand mentions. Instead of juggling multiple accounts, you can switch between accounts in a single tab.
For social teams, Hootsuite is ideal as its collaboration features are top-notch. From assigning tasks to reviewing and working together on campaigns, you can do it all.
Key features
- Unified inbox for consolidating messages and comments
- Real-time alerts for new messages and interactions
- Quick reply tools with pre-set responses for faster engagement
- Smart routing engine with built-in language detection for automatic query assignment
- Collaboration tools for tagging and assigning conversations
- Integrated Canva templates and AI assistant for captions and hashtags
Limitations
- Users have noted that Hootsuite's pricing can be steep, especially when adding new team members.
- Some users have mentioned challenges in integrating Hootsuite with other marketing tools.
- There are reports of the platform experiencing sluggish performance, particularly when bulk scheduling.
What did you like the most?
I liked the ability to manage multiple social media accounts from a single dashboard, saving time and avoiding the hassle of switching between platforms. The custom reports with visual charts, exportable formats, and trend analysis make tracking performance easy and sharing insights with the team.
Pricing
Professional | Team | Enterprise |
---|---|---|
$99/month | $249/month | On-demand pricing |
Ratings
G2: 4.2
Capterra: 4.4
2) Buffer
Buffer is an all-in-one social media tool that helps you create content, collaborate with teams, publish seamlessly, engage with your audience, and analyze social media metrics.
Whether you’re a small business owner, a creator or an agency—Buffer’s social media tools cater to all.
Known for its clean interface and ease of use, it's super easy on Buffer to create content, visually organize ideas, and schedule using its auto-publishing feature.
There’s also an AI assistant to help you write captions, generate ideas, and repurpose old content smartly. The best part? Engaging with your audience becomes 10x faster as you can see all comments and DMs in one simple dashboard.
Key features
- AI-powered engine for identifying best posting times, formats, and frequencies.
- Scheduled post alerts with real-time notification triggers.
- Unlimited collaborator access with role-based permission settings.
- Dual-format content scheduler with both calendar and queue views.
Limitations
- Users have noted that Buffer’s analytics features are quite basic in its free and lower-tier plans.
- Buffer’s interface is not one of the fastest tools out there.
- Some reviewers have reported glitches in the scheduling feature.
What did you like the most?
Really appreciated the automated and customizable post timing—it makes reaching the audience more effective. Besides, having preset publishing schedules for each account also keeps everything organized without constant manual input.
Pricing
Free | Essentials | Team |
---|---|---|
Free forever (up to 3 channels) | $5/month/channel ($60 billed yearly) | $10/month/channel ($120 billed yearly) |
Ratings
G2: 4.3
Capterra: 4.5
3) Sprout Social
Another competitor of Hootsuite, Sprout Social has earned its fame in the industry—and for the right reasons. Sprout understands that it takes more than just your marketing strategy to transform your socials and has come up with a robust platform that takes care of every aspect of your socials.
It offers an intuitive interface, deep analytics, AI-driven automation, and advanced collaboration tools to streamline social media marketing.
Unlike simpler social media management platforms like Buffer, Sprout Social provides robust reporting, social listening, and CRM features, which allow businesses to gain deeper insights.
The platform supports Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, Pinterest, YouTube, and TikTok with seamless multi-platform integration.
Key features
- Unified inbox for centralizing messages, mentions, and comments
- Multi-platform integration for monitoring and responding across multiple platforms
- Anomaly detection system for identifying sudden spikes in engagement
- AI-powered reply assistant for automated responses within the inbox
- Routing engine using chatbots to classify, prioritize, and assign conversations automatically
Limitations
- While Sprout Social captures mentions and hashtags, there’s a glitch with photo tags and other social media tags.
- Sprout Social's pricing can be relatively high, especially for small businesses.
- Users have reported experiencing occasional glitches, such as issues with social sentiment analysis and post-editing.
What did you like the most?
Loved how the dashboard pulls in all messages, comments, and mentions so nothing gets missed. It also made keeping up with reviews easy, so I could respond to feedback right away.
Pricing
Standard | Professional | Advanced | Enterprise |
---|---|---|---|
$199/seat/month | $299/seat/month | $399/seat/month | Custom |
Note: Free trial for 30 days available.
Ratings
G2: 4.4
Capterra: 4.4
4) Agorapulse
Agorapulse is a robust social media management platform designed to help businesses, agencies, and marketers drive impactful business outcomes.
From scheduling content to bringing it all in a centralized dashboard and even tracking your social media ROI—Agorapulse lets you do all these with your social media accounts and more.
Agorapulse is as good as the other tools we mentioned till now in the list. But what makes it stand out—is its ROI feature that lets you measure and tie your social media activities to real revenue-generating goals.
To take its revenue feature a step ahead, you also get a Link in Bio feature—using which you can create a customizable mini website, add links, and sell more online.
Key features
- Unified inbox for all mentions, messages, and comments management
- Tagging and real-time reporting for trend detection
- Saved replies with customizable templates for faster responses
- UTM tracking engine for automatic assessment of campaign links and performance attribution
- Bulk conversation management feature for reviewing and responding in bulk
Limitations
- Agorapulse's capabilities for managing and optimizing paid advertisements across social channels are somewhat limited.
- Users have expressed concerns over the lack of advanced data filtering capabilities.
- While generally user-friendly, certain aspects of the interface, such as the inbox layout, have been mentioned as areas that could benefit from optimization.
What did you like the most?
Getting set up was simple, and everything fit smoothly into my usual workflow. I really appreciated how responsive and helpful the support team was whenever I had a question.
Pricing
Standard | Professional | Advanced | Custom |
---|---|---|---|
$79 per user/month (Billed annually) |
$119 per user/month (Billed annually) |
$149 per user/month (Billed annually) |
On-demand |
Ratings
G2: 4.5
Capterra: 4.6
5) Statusbrew
Statusbrew has 1:1 feature parity with Hootsuite and Sprout Social—so whatever features you get on these two are almost at par with Statusbrew, but at a comparatively lower price.
With this, it becomes a no-brainer for social media managers to automate, engage, publish, and analyze your efforts. It also offers accurate analytics of your social media accounts and brand visibility and gives you the data you need to boost your social media performance.
Besides the basic social media features like scheduling, auto-publishing, and content planning—Statusbrew dominates the advanced analytics, automation, and reporting side of social media too.
From intuitive shareable calendars to auto-routing priority messages and comments and building customizable reports—you can do it all with this dashboard.
Key features
- Quick replies with smart filtering for faster responses
- Automated detection for managing trolls, spam, and negative comments
- Comment moderation feature to auto-hide incoming comments
- Custom report builder with widget-based configuration and scheduling options
- Social listening tools for tracking mentions, hashtags, and competitor activities
Limitations
- While the interface is intuitive, some advanced features require time to master, especially for beginners.
- Some users have reported slight delays in post-scheduling and analytics updates.
What did you like the most?
I found the custom reporting and detailed insights really helpful for tracking performance and fine-tuning our content strategy. Working as a team was seamless too, with features for assigning roles and approving content easily.
Pricing
Lite | Standard | Premium | Enterprise |
---|---|---|---|
$69/month (billed annually) |
$129/month (billed annually) |
$229/month (billed annually) |
On-demand pricing |
Ratings
G2: 4.8
Capterra: 4.8
6) SocialPilot
Though still not among the industry leaders yet, Socialpilot has all the needful when it comes to social media management platforms. Be it basic planning and the ability to schedule posts or detailed analytics and automation, Socialpilot has got it all.
It's one of the best social media management apps for startups and small businesses to start with, considering the pricing. Apart from a winning user-friendly interface, SocialPilot comes with an all-in-one content calendar to help social media managers plan, organize, and schedule posts.
If you often don't get time to plan content, you can rely on its AI Pilot to generate engaging content and bulk schedule 500+ social media posts at once. But only posting isn't enoug,h and you need to track how your social media posts are performing as well.
Key features
- Monthly content calendar for visualizing and editing all scheduled posts
- AI assistant for automated content and brief generation
- Bulk scheduling functionality for managing 500+ posts without manual efforts
- Custom UTM tagging for accurate traffic source tracking
- Automated PDF reporting for delivering date-specific performance reports to inboxes
Limitations
- Unlike premium tools like Sprout Social, SocialPilot does not provide deep sentiment analysis or keyword monitoring.
- Some posts may require manual approval due to platform API restrictions.
What did you like the most?
Scheduling up to 500 posts at once was a game changer for me. What stood out just as much was how easily I could manage multiple brands with built-in tools for assigning team roles.
Pricing
Essential | Standard | Premium | Ultimate |
---|---|---|---|
$30/month | $50/month | $100/month | $200/month |
Ratings
G2: 4.5
Capterra: 4.4
7) Later
Later is a social media management platform that is specifically used to monitor brand mentions, audience sentiments, and online conversations.
As compared to all the other social media management software that is quite oriented towards reporting, analytics, and listening, Later is centered particularly on influencer engagement, content creation, and brand development.
Originally developed as an Instagram scheduler, Later has basic analytics, AI-driven content creation, and a link-in-bio feature, allowing businesses to drive traffic and increase engagement.
Eventually, various advanced features, such as sentiment analysis, brand mentions, and comment trackin,g have been included to make sure brands and creators can leverage the benefits.
Key features
- Instagram grid planner with visual feed layout
- Custom link-in-bio page for directing traffic to websites, shops
- Hashtag-based discovery tool for identifying niche influencers across platforms
- Integrated analytics dashboard for accessing real-time insights
Limitations
- It lacks advanced functionalities such as in-depth reporting.
- Some users find the dashboard cluttered due to multiple functionalities.
- Users have reported issues with posting video files that do not meet specific size criteria.
What did you like the most?
The visual content calendar and media library made planning and organizing posts feel effortless. I really appreciated the intuitive post builder too—especially the AI caption writing and hashtag suggestions, which helped speed things up.
Pricing
Starter | Growth | Advanced | Agency | Enterprise |
---|---|---|---|---|
$16.67/month | $30/month | $53.33/month | $133.33/month | On-demand pricing |
Ratings
G2: 4.5
Capterra: 4.4
8) Sendible
Scalability has always been a major issue with social media apps—but Sendible ticks the box. No matter whether you're a freelancer, an agency or a big enterprise; Sendible has features and pricing plans that cater to all social media managers.
Starting with basic features like scheduling to advanced features like reporting and customization—you’ll get it all here.
One of Sendible's standout attributes is its ability to centralize various social media activities into a single, intuitive dashboard—and manage social media presence efficiently.
As content plays a major role in your social media presence, it becomes tough for smaller teams to ideate and produce so much content manually. Thanks to Sendible’s AI-assist feature, you can now generate content ideas, create copy, and maintain consistency.
Key features
- Custom tagging for automating repetitive brand-specific information
- Smart queue scheduler for automated publishing and repurposing content
- One-click analytics access for performance data across selected social media accounts
- Branded report generator with scheduling options for automated preset dates
- Real-time task notification system with assignee visibility for collaboration
Limitations
- Some users have reported issues with uploading and editing large images, leading to crashes and workflow interruptions.
- Only one user at a time can be logged into the main account, which can cause issues when multiple team members need to work simultaneously.
- Require re-login through Sendible every 60-90 days.
What did you like the most?
I found the dashboard incredibly intuitive, which made managing multiple social accounts much easier. The customizable reports were also a big help when it came to tracking performance and showing ROI.
Pricing
Creator | Traction | Scale | Advanced | Enterprise |
---|---|---|---|---|
$29/mo billed monthly |
$89/mo billed monthly |
$199/mo billed monthly |
$299/mo billed monthly |
$750/mo billed monthly |
Ratings
G2: 4.5
Capterra: 4.6
9) CoSchedule
If you thought the perfect social media calendar didn't exist—this social media management software, CoSchedule, will prove you wrong. It's the perfect social media marketing calendar that does it all and for everyone.
Whether you’re a solopreneur, an agency owner, or a marketing team, this tool can be an ideal choice. But, unlike many standalone social media management tools, CoSchedule’s biggest advantage is its marketing-first approach.
CoSchedule isn’t just for social media but also helps teams organize their entire marketing strategy—from blog content to email marketing, campaigns, and team coordination.
The best part? The whole calendar can be customized from scratch so that you can get complete visibility of all your projects, tasks, and campaigns.
Key features
- Content calendar view for displaying all scheduled posts by date
- Collaboration workspace for team communication, note sharing, and progress tracking
- Built-in strategy assistant for generating real-time content suggestions
- Drag-and-drop scheduler for quick and intuitive content plan adjustments
Limitations
- New users may experience a learning curve due to the platform's comprehensive features.
- Its analytics tools are less robust compared to some alternatives, providing fewer insights into content performance.
What did you like the most?
What impressed me most was how seamlessly project management tools were combined with marketing and editorial functions. I also appreciated having all marketing channels integrated into a single calendar view.
Pricing
Free Calendar | Social Calendar | Agency Calendar | Content Calendar | Marketing Suite |
---|---|---|---|---|
$0 | $19/user/month (billed annually) |
$59/user/month (billed annually) |
On-demand pricing | On-demand pricing |
Ratings
G2: 4.4
Capterra: 4.4
10) Keyhole
Keyhole is one of the best social media management platforms for tracking important social metrics, competitors, audiences, and trends. The basic metrics can only take you so far—but Keyhole lets you dive in-depth and see the broader picture.
By understanding these metrics of your social media accounts, you can see the best times to post on social media, understand what type of content resonates most, and analyze your competitors’ positions in depth.
While there are other great features in Keyhole—its social media analytics features are where it stands out the most.
With it, you can spot top-performing posts instantly and repurpose them easily. Even making detailed reports with these insights is easy as you can brand them, export them, and share them as PDFs.
Key features
- Real-time keyword and hashtag tracking across platforms
- Audience activity analyzer for identifying optimal posting times
- Performance-based content sorter for repurposing high-performing posts
- Influencer comparison dashboard for evaluating metrics and tracking growth
Limitations
- Its advanced features might be overwhelming for small businesses or individual users who require only basic tracking and reporting.
- Its functionality is limited by the restriction of historical data access beyond two weeks.
What did you like the most?
Being able to build live dashboards and generate reports instantly saved a lot of time and made it easier to make informed decisions. The interface felt intuitive, so I could get started without much of a learning curve.
Pricing
Limited analytics | Starts from |
---|---|
$49/month/user | $189/month/3 users |
Ratings
G2: 4.3
Capterra: 5.0
How to choose the best social media management tool?
Choosing a social media tool isn’t easy—you just can’t grab the first one you see or just because it looks great. Instead, you need to find one that actually takes the load off you and helps you get work done much faster. Here are some of the things you need to consider:
1. Is it compatible with your social media platforms?
While choosing, you need to ensure that the social media management software you’re choosing can do everything out of one place. So, ensure you’re checking if it supports all the channels you use—Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, LinkedIn or more. Otherwise, you’ll still continue to juggle between different applications.
2. Can you schedule posts easily?
No matter how expert-level your social media strategy is, posting consistently remains constant. However, it’s quite draining when you have to schedule posts manually every day. An ideal social media management tool should help you schedule easily, recommend the best time to post and accommodate bulk scheduling.
3. Is it good for teamwork?
Most social media management tools should provide ideal team collaboration features. If you have a team, you need to look for features like approval workflows, shared calendars, and role-based access. With these features, you don’t need to depend on text-based conversations for collaborations.
4. Can you keep an eye on your online reputation?
A large part of social media is maintaining your online reputation and any social media tool that makes it easy to monitor brand mentions, and track industry trends and keywords is ideal.
5. Does it support AI capabilities?
Though it's not a deal-breaker when choosing a social media management tool—having AI-driven tools can accelerate your processes. You need to look for features like post ideation, caption generation, automated sentiment detection, and more.
The bottom line
No matter what your goal with social media is—whether it's scheduling posts, monitoring performance, or just making your life a bit less hectic- there's a tool out there to help you out. The real trick here is to find the one that aligns with your workflow. So, go ahead, try out the social media management tools we suggested, and make your choice.
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Frequently Asked Questions
Why do businesses need social media management tools?
Businesses need social media management tools to ease up their processes and automate manual tasks such as scheduling, monitoring, engagement, reporting, and analysis across various social media channels.
What is the best social media management tool for small businesses?
It depends on what type of tool you need and how much you’re willing to spend. If you’re looking for something user-friendly and budget-friendly, SocialPilot and Buffer can be very good choices. But if you want a tool packed with features, tools like Hootsuite and Agorapulse might be more up to your speed.
How can I choose the right tool based on my business needs?
Looking to pick the perfect tool for your business needs? Here are some key factors to think about when selecting a social media management tool:
- How many social accounts do you need to handle?
- What scheduling and automation features are essential for you?
- Do you need robust analytics and reporting capabilities?
- Are social listening and monitoring important for your strategy?
- What collaboration and team workflow tools do you require?
- What’s your budget, and what pricing plans fit your needs?
For businesses that focus on engagement and customer interactions, tools like Sprout Social and Agorapulse are fantastic options. On the other hand, if automation and content scheduling are your top priorities, you might find Buffer or Statusbrew to be more suitable choices.
Are social media management tools worth the investment?
Absolutely! They’re especially beneficial for businesses that depend on social media for marketing, branding, or connecting with customers. These tools can save you a ton of time, boost your efficiency, and offer valuable insights based on data to help you refine your social media strategies.
Do these tools allow collaboration with team members?
Absolutely! Most social media management tools are designed with team collaboration in mind. Platforms like Hootsuite, Sprout Social, Agorapulse, and Statusbrew let multiple users join forces. You can assign different roles, approve posts, and keep conversations organized, all within a smooth workflow.