Hootsuite vs Metricool
An independent, review-free comparison compiled by the SaaSTracker editorial team. Both products are profiled in full, and neither can pay for placement here.
The short answer
Both sides assessedHootsuite compared with Metricool
Metricool does most of what a small business uses Hootsuite for, plus unified ads reporting and a link in bio, for roughly $25 a month across five brands. What it does not do is a real assignable inbox with routing, structured approvals below its Advanced tier, or listening in any serious sense. If your team is one or two people and your need is scheduling plus reporting, Metricool is the obvious pick and saves you over a thousand dollars a year. Hootsuite earns its price only when workflow and engagement volume are the problem.
Metricool compared with Hootsuite
Hootsuite costs $99 per user per month for 10 accounts, or $199 for unlimited, against Metricool at roughly $25 for five brands with unlimited profiles inside each. What Hootsuite adds is a real assignable inbox with routing, listening through Talkwalker, and enterprise administration. Unless engagement volume or compliance is your genuine constraint, Metricool does the small-business job for a fraction of the price and better ads reporting.
Choose Hootsuite if
Small agencies and multi-brand marketing teams where one or two people manage a large number of social accounts, and in-house teams that genuinely need listening, a real shared inbox, and approval workflows in the same tool as publishing rather than stitched together from three cheaper products.
Choose Metricool if
Freelancers, small agencies, and small in-house teams managing several brands across many networks who need dependable scheduling, genuinely good cross-network analytics including paid, and client-ready reports, without paying per seat for a suite they will not use.
Side by side
13 attributes| Attribute | Hootsuite | Metricool |
|---|---|---|
| Category | Social | Social |
| Starting price | $99 per user per month billed annually (Standard) (14 days trial) | €0 free for one brand, then from about €20 or $25 per month for five brands (Starter) (free plan available) |
| Pricing model | Per user per month subscription across four tiers, with social account limits only on the entry tier and listening, advocacy, and enterprise controls sold as add-ons or bundled into a quoted Enterprise plan. | Tiered subscription priced by the number of connected brands, with unlimited profiles inside each brand, a free plan for one brand, and team features, approvals, API, and Looker Studio gated to the Advanced tier. |
| Free plan | No | One brand, up to 20 scheduled posts per month, 5 competitor profiles, 30 days of analytics history, and the AI assistant. |
| Free trial | 14 days, no credit card required | Available on paid plans; the free tier also functions as an indefinite evaluation path |
| Best for | Small agencies and multi-brand marketing teams where one or two people manage a large number of social accounts, and in-house teams that genuinely need listening, a real shared inbox, and approval workflows in the same tool as publishing rather than stitched together from three cheaper products. | Freelancers, small agencies, and small in-house teams managing several brands across many networks who need dependable scheduling, genuinely good cross-network analytics including paid, and client-ready reports, without paying per seat for a suite they will not use. |
| Setup time | A few hours for a single brand, a week for an agency. Connecting accounts is fast, but building organizations, teams, permissions, and approval chains for multiple clients is a real configuration project rather than a checkbox. | Under an hour per brand. Connect the profiles, connect the ad accounts if you have them, and the analytics start populating immediately with whatever historical window each network API will backfill. |
| Learning curve | Moderate to steep. Hootsuite has more surface area than most buyers need and the interface has accumulated eighteen years of it. Expect a genuine training investment for anyone who has only used a native scheduler, and expect to leave several modules switched off. | Low. The interface is dense but logically organized, and the brand-based structure is easy to reason about once you understand that profiles inside a brand are free. Reports and autolists reward a couple of hours of deliberate setup. |
| Platforms | Web app, iOS, Android, Browser extension, App directory extensions | Web app, iOS, Android, Looker Studio connector, Smartlinks hosted pages |
| Compliance | SOC 2, GDPR, CCPA, Custom compliance configuration on Enterprise | GDPR, EU-based operations under a European corporate parent |
| Founded | 2008 | 2015 |
| Headquarters | Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada | Madrid, Spain |
| Ownership | Privately held, venture and growth-equity backed | Acquired by team.blue, a European digital services and hosting group, in July 2024 |
Strengths and limitations
Hootsuite
Strengths
- Unlimited social accounts from the $199 Professional tier makes it the cheapest option in the category for anyone managing dozens of profiles from one or two seats.
- The unified inbox descended from the Sparkcentral acquisition is a genuine helpdesk with assignment, tagging, saved replies, and routing, not the comment reader that cheaper tools ship.
- Breadth is real: publishing, engagement, analytics, listening, advocacy, and paid social under one login, which removes an integration problem that costs small teams more time than they admit.
- Approval workflows plus organization and team permissions handle the client-isolation and sign-off requirements that agencies actually get audited on.
Limitations
- A $99 per seat floor with no free plan makes Hootsuite the wrong first purchase for almost every solo founder and early-stage team in this category.
- Per-seat pricing scales badly with headcount: three people on Advanced is nearly $1,200 a month before add-ons, for work Metricool or SocialBee would cover for a tenth of that.
- Approval workflows are gated to the $399 Advanced tier, which is a genuinely awkward place to put the feature agencies need most.
- The composer and calendar carry the weight of many acquisitions and many years; reviewers consistently rate the interface below newer competitors, and the learning curve is real.
Metricool
Strengths
- Pricing by brand rather than by seat or channel is the single best-designed meter in this category for small businesses and agencies.
- Unified organic and paid reporting across Meta, Google, and TikTok Ads in one dashboard is genuinely rare and removes the most tedious recurring task in client reporting.
- Twelve supported surfaces including Bluesky, Threads, Twitch, and Google Business Profile, which is broader coverage than most tools charging five times as much.
- A real free plan for one brand, not a countdown trial, so you can evaluate properly and small operators can start at zero.
Limitations
- The inbox is a comment and message reader without assignment rules, routing, collision detection, or response-time reporting, which rules Metricool out for support-heavy brands.
- There is no query-based social listening at all, so brand monitoring beyond your own mentions and named competitors is not something the product does.
- Team management and approval workflows are Advanced-only, so a two-person team on Starter has no sign-off mechanism.
- Pricing is denominated in euros with a sliding brand count, which makes budgeting slightly fiddlier than a flat published USD tier.
Pricing compared
Hootsuite
Per user per month subscription across four tiers, with social account limits only on the entry tier and listening, advocacy, and enterprise controls sold as add-ons or bundled into a quoted Enterprise plan.
- Standard$99
- Professional$199
- Advanced$399
- EnterpriseCustom
Hootsuite is expensive per person and cheap per account, and whether it is good value depends entirely on which of those numbers is large in your business. At one seat and fifty client accounts, $199 a month is the best price in this category for that shape of work, and no cheaper tool bundles a real assignable inbox, approvals, and reporting alongside it. At four seats and six accounts, you are paying nearly $800 a month for scheduling that Metricool does for $45 and SocialBee for $99. The suite pitch also relies on listening and advocacy that are quoted separately, so the value you are shown in a demo and the value in your contract can diverge sharply. Buy it for account density, not for feature checkboxes.
Metricool
Tiered subscription priced by the number of connected brands, with unlimited profiles inside each brand, a free plan for one brand, and team features, approvals, API, and Looker Studio gated to the Advanced tier.
- Free€0
- StarterFrom €20 (about $25)
- AdvancedFrom €54 (about $67)
- CustomQuoted
Metricool is the best capability-per-dollar in this category and it is not close. Twelve networks with no per-channel meter, unlimited publishing, competitor tracking, unified organic and paid reporting, branded client exports, a link in bio, and an inbox for roughly $25 a month across five brands is a price structure the American competitors have simply not matched. Advanced at around $67 adds team roles, approvals, API access, and Looker Studio, features that cost $399 per seat at Hootsuite and $299 per seat at Sprout. What you give up is inbox depth, listening, and enterprise support, and those are real gaps rather than marketing distinctions. But for the overwhelming majority of small businesses and small agencies, Metricool covers the work and leaves several thousand dollars a year to spend on content instead of software.
Editorial verdict on each
Hootsuite
Hootsuite is priced for a business shape, not a feature list, and that shape is many accounts managed by few people. If you are an agency or a multi-brand team where one seat covers fifty profiles, Professional at $199 is the best per-account economics in this category and the inbox, permissions, and reporting are real. If you are a founder with four networks or a five-person team with a dozen accounts, the per-seat floor makes Hootsuite two to ten times more expensive than Metricool, SocialBee, or Buffer for work those tools do at least as pleasantly. The suite pitch also leans on Talkwalker listening and Amplify advocacy that are quoted separately, so insist on pricing the plan you would actually run rather than the demo you were shown. Established, dependable, and rarely the exciting answer.
Read the full Hootsuite profileMetricool
Best ValueMetricool is the default recommendation in this category for anyone whose business is smaller than a staffed social team. Pricing by brand rather than by seat or channel means a single business posting to ten networks pays the same as one posting to two, an agency with ten clients pays $45 a month, and the analytics you get for that money, including Meta, Google, and TikTok ad spend reported next to organic performance, are better than what most competitors sell at ten times the price. Approvals, team roles, API access, and Looker Studio arrive at around $67. The gaps are real and worth naming: no listening, an inbox that is a reader rather than a helpdesk, and a thin enterprise posture. If social is a customer support channel or a compliance surface, buy Sprout. For everyone else, start free, move to Starter, and spend the four thousand dollars a year you did not give to an incumbent on content.
Read the full Metricool profileHootsuite profile last reviewed 2026-08-22; Metricool last reviewed 2026-08-22. Pricing is compiled from public sources and can change without notice. See our methodology.