10 Sprout Social Alternatives For Your Social Media Needs in 2024

Managing your social media accounts and interacting with your customers is an important part of maintaining your online presence. But planning and executing social media campaigns—and engaging with followers and potential customers—can take a lot of time and energy. To make the process easier, best-in-class businesses look to marketing platforms with artificial intelligence features to help them speed up their efforts.

What is Sprout Social?

Sprout Social is an AI-powered business intelligence platform and social media management solution. It is founded on the idea that building connections with the people who love and trust your brand will help with your brand’s growth through social listening and engagement.

Sprout Social has features to schedule and publish content, boosting engagement with target audiences. Additionally, businesses can access and respond to comments and view analytics on their social media content, helping them provide better customer service and hone in on what their audiences want to see.

Why Do People Use Sprout Social?

People use Sprout Social because of its comprehensive suite of tools for social media management. It has publishing and engagement functions as well as influencer marketing support and AI-powered business intelligence to help get more done.

Podium or Sprout Social

While Podium and Sprout Social both offer features that help businesses manage their social media interactions, there are a few key differences:

Sprout Social vs Podium: Main Features

Sprout Social has several important features to consider. All plans include:

• Smart inbox
• Conversation history
• Comment moderation
• Review management
• Paid Ads comment moderation
• Contact views
• Collision detection
• Message completion
• Brand keywords
• Custom inbox views
• Case management
• Mobile inbox push notifications

SpoutSocial also has its own proprietary AI and automation tool that has access to over 10 years of historical data sets. That, combined with OpenAI integration, helps you automate your manual tasks.

Sprout Social starts at $199 per seat each month with a 30-day free trial. The Professional plan is $299 per seat each month, and the Advanced plan is $399 per seat each month. For enterprises, Sprout Social requires you to contact them for more details.

Podium is another software-as-a-service platform that helps you manage interactions with leads and customers on social media, via texting, on your website, and more. Plus, Podium helps you build a strong online presence, collect payments, and manage personalized marketing campaigns. Like Sprout Social, Podium features AI capabilities. But with Podium’s AI Employee, businesses can do so much more. The AI Employee communicates with leads and customers like a real human, keeps leads warm with follow-up questions, schedules appointments, answers detailed product or service questions, and focuses on helping businesses close more deals/increase sales.

For only $399 per month, Podium’s Core plan includes:

• Consolidated lead conversion platform
• Review management with AI responses
• Basic automation, reporting, and customization options
• Unlimited 1:1 text messaging with leads and customers
• Website chat
• Text marketing
• AI suggested replies
• 200+ integrations with integration support
• 1-on-1 personalized onboarding support
• Dedicated customer success manager
• Chat, phone, and email support
• AI Employee add-on available with any Podium plan

Get additional features—surveys, text marketing with images and GIFs, advanced customer segmentation, additional AI capabilities, lower payment processing fees, and more—with Podium’s Pro plan for just $599 per month.

Podium’s Signature plan allows you to build a custom plan to meet the specific needs of your business.  Talk to sales to get a quote.

10 Best Sprout Social Alternatives in 2024

Sprout Social isn’t the only AI-powered platform out there. Many of its competitors offer similar features (and include additional capabilities).

Podium

Podium is a top competitor for Sprout Social. In its most basic plan, Podium offers AI features that can help your business respond to leads and customers. And with Podium’s AI Employee, businesses can use the tool to interact with leads and customers—just like a real human. Plus, Podium offers a robust list of features that help businesses engage across the entire customer journey—reputation management, website chat, payments, surveys, marketing campaigns, texting, bulk messages, and more. So, whether you need to respond to your Instagram DMs or want to interact with customers across all your social media platforms, your consolidated inbox is waiting for you (or your AI Employee) to effectively engage.

Podium starts at $399 for its Core plan.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite has a wide range of features that help businesses manage their social media channels. It can help with planning, creating, or scheduling posts. Some positives about this platform include managing multiple social networks on one dashboard and seeing analytics data quickly. However, it does come at a high cost once you look into a full business plan (starting at $739 a month).

Zoho Social

Zoho Social is a more user-friendly option than Sprout Social and has an evergreen option that allows you to repost evergreen content automatically each week or month. One interesting feature—the panic button—lets you pause everything if you have to swivel your social media strategy. The standard plan is affordable at $7 monthly per user, but agencies can expect to pay $170 or more each month for up to five users.

Agorapulse

Agorapulse is a top competitor of Sprout Social with similar features. However, users find the inbox platform to be complex, requiring a manual click-through for each conversation.

Agorapulse also has fewer reporting metrics than typical competitor solutions. The Standard plan starts at $49 per user per month, and the Advanced plan is $119 monthly.

Buffer

Buffer links with social media platforms to schedule, publish, and then analyze your social media content. It can also help you find content to post from within your industry.

Buffer is one of the few platforms on this list with a free plan available. It is a good option for individual content creators as well as small businesses. Users pay per channel for more tools and features. Plans start around $6 per channel.

Sendible

Sendible is a social media solution for businesses hoping for social listening features, social media scheduling, and the ability to track multiple social media accounts from one helpful dashboard. At a starting price of $25 a month, it’s much cheaper than Sprout Social. However, it is designed for teams, so if you’re a solo-preneur, it may not be right for you.

Later

Later is a social media scheduling tool that also helps users manage posts. The platform has highly visual content to help you stay organized, and it has features to plan, schedule, and publish videos, stories, and posts directly from your desktop.

The entry-level plan starts at $18 per month.

MeetEdgar

MeetEdgar was designed with small businesses and entrepreneurs in mind. It has features such as content scheduling and categorization, evergreen posting functions, and compatibility with Google Business. However, there is a learning curve that can make the system difficult to use for new users.

Depending on the plan, MeetEdgar runs $299 or $499 annually.

SocialBee

SocialBee is an AI-powered platform that helps businesses grow on social media. Key features include a visual content calendar, content creation integrations, content categorization, RSS fees, and powerful analytics tools.

SocialBee is relatively affordable with a starting price of $29 per month and a 14-day free trial.

Emplifi

Emplifi calls itself a social marketing cloud. The platform is designed to manage social media strategies, analyze data to identify trends, create social media strategies, and improve your campaigns’ performance.

Emplifi is good for businesses looking for a user-friendly design. It also has reporting features that make it beneficial for companies that like to see reports, data, and insight daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, or annually. However, it lacks customer service options, such as chat on the website or a phone number you can call, and you can’t re-queue posts. Bulk actions also take time to load, which can slow teams down.

Prices start at $200 annually.

Podium AI Employee

Handling your business’s social media channels and responding to customers on your own is time consuming. But Podium connects with your customers wherever they are and routing your messages to one easy-to-use inbox. And, even better, Podium’s AI Employee can help you respond quickly to questions and comments by managing conversations via text and Website Chat—so you stay connected with customers for improved conversions. Watch a demo to see how Podium can help your business thrive.