The Best Alternative to Hootsuite is Zoho Social

Coordinating and managing a social media marketing campaign while effectively handling all other aspects of your small or medium-sized business can be a challenging task. That is why so many companies use social media management software to streamline audience engagement and increase brand awareness. Fortunately, there are quite a few tools on the market that can do just that. But how do you choose the best one? In this article, we will compare two of the most popular platforms—Zoho Social and Hootsuite.

Zoho Social

Zoho Social is a comprehensive social media management platform for businesses and agencies. It helps schedule posts, monitor mentions, create custom dashboards, and much more.

Zoho Social includes a powerful set of features, such as a publishing calendar, bulk scheduler, and post recycling, to provide you with all the social media publishing tools your business needs.

Agencies can bring all their clients onto Zoho Social and manage their social media presence effectively. They can easily add new clients and assign team members to them with predefined roles.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite is a software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that connects a range of social media accounts to a centralized social media management console.

Using the Hootsuite social media dashboard, teams can collaboratively schedule updates across various social networks, integrate their existing marketing tools to optimize workflow, and track campaign results and industry trends for quick tactical adjustments.

Pros and Cons ofZoho Social

Zoho Social is designed to cover all aspects of a social media strategy. In fact, it offers several additional features that are slightly ahead of Hootsuite. Its strongest point is the social listening feature, which allows you to track mentions, reply to messages, and monitor user engagement in real time.

Pros of Zoho Social

Listening Dashboard: Create listening columns to organize your social listening efforts.

Various User Roles and Permissions: Zoho Social allows you to manage your team at a granular level by assigning specific roles with different access permissions.

Social Media Publishing Calendar: You can schedule future posts, filter relevant ones, and manage your content pipeline using the Publishing Calendar.

Social Media Ad Integration: Take advantage of social media integrations for your chosen platform—such as LinkedIn or Facebook—to consolidate your marketing initiatives.

Additional Integrations: Zoho Social also integrates with other cloud tools like TikTok, Canva, and other Zoho business applications, such as the Zoho CRM integration.

Unlimited Reports: Zoho Social features a dedicated "Reports" tab where you can view statistics for a specific social network or dive deep into analytics to learn more about your audience and how they interact with your content. But that's not all: you can also create custom reports that focus on the metrics most important to your business.

Cons of Zoho Social

Complex Pricing Structure: Subscribing to the right plan for agencies can be quite expensive, but trust us, it's worth it.

Pros and Cons of Hootsuite

Many brands and social media agencies use Hootsuite because it features functionalities tailored to specific business needs. However, since these features have been added gradually over time, their implementation is not the smoothest.

Pros of Hootsuite

Employee Advocacy Tools: You can use Hootsuite Amplify to optimize your agency or brand's employee advocacy campaigns.

Reliable Customer Support: Hootsuite is one of the very few social platforms that can be contacted by phone, in addition to other customer service channels.

Wide Range of Integrations: Hootsuite's popularity has attracted third-party developers to create integrations that expand the platform's functionality.

Cons of Hootsuite

Too Expensive for Small Businesses: Hootsuite's entry-level plan offers fewer features than other social media marketing tools, yet it still costs more.

No Team Access for Entry-Level Users: The standard plan is suitable for only a single user and a limited number of social accounts.

No Review Management: Despite its high prices, Hootsuite lacks a reputation management section.

Supported Social Networks

Social Channels	Hootsuit	Zoho Social
Facebook Page	+	+
Facebook Group	+	+
Twitter Profile	+	+
LinkedIn Company Page	+	+
LinkedIn Profile	+	+
Google My Business listing	_	+
Instagram Profile	+	+
YouTube Channel	+	+
Pinterest Profile	+	+
TikTok Business Profile	+	+

As you can see, these software solutions support virtually the same social media platforms. However, Zoho Social supports one more social network—Google My Business.

Pricing

Zoho Social features 5 different plans—3 for businesses and 2 for agencies. There is also a free version and a 15-day free trial.

Prices for Zoho Social start at $10 per month for the Standard plan or $30 per month for the Professional plan. The best-selling option is the Premium plan, which costs $40 per month. Moving up to Zoho's upper tiers, the Agency plan costs $230 per month, and the Agency Plus plan is $330 per month. All of these plans are billed annually, though they can be billed monthly if you are willing to pay a higher rate.

For small businesses, Zoho is a very solid investment. Even the lowest tier, Standard, offers plenty of features, while choosing the Professional or Premium plan provides more comprehensive analytics and flexible publishing capabilities.

Hootsuite offers 4 pricing tiers for varying numbers of users.

Many "advanced" features are unavailable in the Professional and Team plans. If you need features such as content approval workflows, campaign reports, or a content library, to name just a few, you must commit to upfront annual obligations on the Business or Enterprise plan.

Agencies may find it difficult to derive value from Hootsuite due to the tool's user/profile limitations and advanced features. Agencies and companies that need to manage more than 20 social media profiles or require more than 3 users on their account will soon find themselves doubling or tripling their costs to get the users, profiles, or features they need.

Conclusions

Overall, when comparing Zoho Social to Hootsuite, Zoho Social is easier to use, set up, and administer. It is also more cost-effective in terms of meeting business needs at a more reasonable price.

You can even start using core Zoho Social features without spending a penny by utilizing the free plan. The choice is yours!