12 Best Social Media Management Tools (2024 Comparison)

Best Social Media Management Tools

Are you looking for the best social media management tools to help you grow your online presence?

Perhaps you need a smarter way to manage multiple profiles and networks? Or maybe you need to improve team collaboration?

Whatever your situation, managing social media requires the right strategy and the right tools.

And while there are thousands of social media tools, not all of them can be classed as management tools. For instance, MeetEdgar can handle scheduling, but it doesn’t manage network engagement.

This post focuses on the best social media management tools that include these three key elements:

  • Engagement – A single dashboard where you can monitor all your social network messages and engage with your audience. This may be in the form of an inbox or social streams.
  • Publishing – A system of scheduling and recycling your content to each social network.
  • Reporting – A method of analyzing and reporting how your content performs on each network.

These tools offer other features as well, like content curation, but that’s outside the scope of this post so we’ll focus on core social media management functionality.

The best social media management software – comparison

TL;DR: 

  1. Sendible – Best social media management tool for most users. Broad feature set and affordable for individuals & teams alike.
  2. SocialBee – Best for those primarily focused on publishing & scheduling social media content.
  3. Pallyy – Best for content creators. Particularly those focused on Instagram and TikTok.
  4. Metricool – Best affordable option.

#1 – Sendible

Sendible is one of the best social media management platforms on the market. Given its balance of features, it’s a great option for most users. It’s an all-in-one white-label solution that comes with everything you need to manage your socials at scale.

Sendible Homepage

Engagement

Sendible’s Priority Inbox brings all your important messages and comments from multiple social media accounts in one centralized location. 

Messages are automatically sorted by sentiment (positive, negative, or neutral), making it easy for you to monitor your brand reputation. You can reply directly from your Priority Inbox and delegate conversations to different team members.

If you want, you can switch to the Social Feeds view to monitor individual social profiles. Social Feeds update in real time so you’ll know the second you get a new engagement.

Publishing

Sendible’s publishing tools make it easy to schedule posts to all your socials in advance. Posts can be scheduled individually, or grouped into campaigns and added to queues. 

If you want, you can choose to ‘recycle’ evergreen posts, which will automatically re-add them to the queue once they get published so that they get shared again at a later date.

I like that Sendible recommends Optimal Times to schedule each post. These recommendations are based on how your previous posts have performed on different days/times and can help you maximize engagements.

All your scheduled posts are displayed in Sendible’s interactive, drag-and-drop content calendar, so it’s easy to move things around if needed. And if you’re struggling to come up with new ideas for posts, you can use Sendible’s rich content curation features, including a powerful recommendation engine and RSS feeds.

Reporting

Sendible also comes with powerful social media reporting capabilities. You can generate in-depth reports for individual social media platforms like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and more in a couple of clicks using pre-built templates. 

Alternatively, build your own custom reports with the metrics that matter to you in the drag-and-drop report builder. There are over 200 modules to choose from, depending on what kind of analytics data you want to include. (i.e. audience growth, top content, engagements, etc.) 

When your reports are ready, you can share them via live links, export them as PDFs, or set up automatic email reports to send them directly to your clients at regular intervals.

Networks

With Sendible, you can manage your profiles on all the most popular social media platforms: Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Google My Business. It also lets you publish directly to WordPress.

Pricing

Sendible offers several plans starting from $25/month, and you can save 15% when you pay yearly. Higher-priced plan tiers include more users, social profiles, and features. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

Read our Sendible review.

#2 – SocialBee

SocialBee has the best publishing and scheduling features of any social media management tool we’ve tried. Its new AI assistant, ‘Social Media Copilot’, is a game-changer.

SocialBee Homepage

Engagement

SocialBee lets you set up customizable social streams, from which you can view, manage, and reply to all your incoming messages across social media. 

You can choose the specific platform (e.g. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, etc.) and type of conversations (e.g. DMs, mentions, comments, replies, etc.) to show in each social stream. Plus, group multiple streams together into ‘Boards’ to keep things organized. And you can turn on notifications to let you know whenever you get a new engagement.

Publishing

You can publish posts to all your social media accounts from your SocialBee dashboard, or schedule them in advance. 

Category-based scheduling allows you to create and schedule multiple posts at once. And you can save even more time with the AI-powered Social Media Copilot, which plans your whole social strategy. 

It creates a social media posting schedule and categorized content plan, then crafts and schedules a month’s worth of social media posts for you in just a few minutes.

Reporting

With SocialBee, you can view analytics for all your social profiles in one place. View your audience demographic, measure follower growth over time, discover your best-performing posts, find out when your best time to post is, and gather all the other insights you need to inform your social strategy.

You can filter analytics data for different social platforms and date ranges, and export branded reports to showcase all that data and share it with your clients.

Networks

SocialBee supports a wide range of social media platforms: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Pinterest, TikTok, YouTube, Google Business, and Bluesky

Pricing

SocialBee offers several plans starting from $29/month, and you can save 16% with yearly billing. All plans include the same core features but higher tiers include extra social profiles and users, and a longer historical analytics data range. Get started with a 14-day free trial.

Read our SocialBee review.

#3 – Pallyy

Pallyy is the best social media management tool for content creators, especially if you’re focusing on Instagram or TikTok. It’s affordable and easy to use, and I love its visual scheduling interface.

Pallyy Homepage

Engagement

Pallyy offers a unified social inbox that pulls in comments, mentions, reviews, and DMs from networks like Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, TikTok, and Google My Business. 

You can reply to all messages from one place. Plus, assign conversations to team members, add labels to keep things organized, and use automations to boost your efficiency.

Publishing

Pallyy offers auto-publishing for all the leading social networks. You can create and schedule posts in advance through the interactive content calendar. 

Just drag the images or videos you want to use in the post from your media library onto any data in the calendar, then add a caption and set the time you want Pallyy to publish it. It’s that easy.

You can also create a queue within the calendar’s settings which makes scheduling content a lot easier.

If you’re scheduling posts to Instagram, you can also switch over to Feed View to preview how they’ll look on your feed when they’re live, which is pretty neat.

Reporting

Creating Reports with Pallyy is super easy too. You can choose the specific social media profiles and the timeframe you want to report on (e.g. last 30 days, last 90 days, etc.), as well as the charts and metrics you want to include. Then just grab a share link or download the report as a PDF.

Networks

Pallyy integrates with most social networks including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google Business, Pinterest, and TikTok. 

You can use Pallyy to publish content to all of the above. However, analytics are only available for LinkedIn and Instagram.

Pricing

Pallyy offers two plans: Free and Premium. The Free plan only lets you manage one social set and schedule up to 15 posts, and you don’t get access to all features.

Pallyy Premium costs $25/month and includes additional features and unlimited scheduled posts. It only includes one social set but you can add additional sets for an additional monthly fee.

Read our Pallyy review.

#4 – ContentStudio

ContentStudio is another all-in-one platform that gives you everything you need to create/curate, publish, and analyze social media content, and engage with your audience, in one dashboard.

But it has a few extra features you might not expect such as an influencer research database.

ContentStudio Homepage

Engagement

ContentStudio takes all your cross-channel communications and combines them into one unified inbox, so you can manage and reply to messages, Tweets, DMs, etc. on all your different social profiles without having to log into each platform separately. 

The inbox is loaded with powerful filters to help you sort through conversations, as well as useful collaboration tools like internal notes, assignments and bookmarking, etc. I also like how each conversation is attached to a ‘Client Bio’, so you can see detailed information about who you’re interacting with on social.

Publishing

You can publish and schedule social media posts on ContentStudio’s multi-channel, shareable content calendar.   Just select the date you want to publish, then write your caption and add media in the Post Composer. ContentStudio will recommend some best times to post for maximum engagement. 

To save time, you can also use ContentStudio’s automation features to automatically create and schedule social posts. For example, you can automatically publish trending articles from curated custom topics to your socials, automatically recycle your evergreen posts at pre-defined intervals, automatically share RSS feed content on your socials, and more.

Reporting

From ContentStudio’s social analytics dashboard, you can keep track of how your content is performing on each of your profiles. You’ll be able to see all the important metrics at a glance including engagement stats, audience growth, demographics data, etc. for both your profiles/pages and your competitors. 

Plus, compile your analytics data into digestible white-labeled reports and download them, or pre-schedule them to land directly in your email inbox or your client’s.

Networks

ContentStudio lets you publish posts and manage profiles on 9 social networks: Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, TikTok, Tumblr, YouTube, Pinterest, and Google Business.

Pricing

ContentStudio offers several plans starting from $25/month, and you can get 20% off when you pay yearly. Higher-priced plans let you manage more social accounts and workspaces, offer higher usage limits, and come with extra features and benefits. You can get started with a 14-day free trial.

#5 – Agorapulse

Agorapulse has some advanced features I haven’t seen in many other social media management tools, including social media ROI analysis and advocacy tools. It’s powerful and flexible and provides social media managers and marketing teams with a more streamlined workflow.

Agorapulse Homepage

Engagement

Agorapulse pulls all incoming engagements and messages from your connected socials into its built-in social media inbox and sorts them with labels, tags, and filters.

You can assign inbox items to specific users and allocate tasks to team members. And you can automate comment moderation and inbox clean-up tasks by creating ‘moderation rules’ (if/then automations). 

I also like the ‘Saved replies’ feature, which allows your team to use one-click responses to save time. And I particularly like the slick UI for the inbox.

Publishing

Agorapulse’s publishing tools allow you to plan, compose, and schedule posts to all your social profiles and pages.

You can either schedule posts individually or add them to publishing ‘queues’ to save time.

I really like Agorapulse’s publishing calendar too. It shows you every post you’ve scheduled or published, with status tags to show you what stage of the workflow they’re currently at (e.g. waiting for approval, rejected, published, drafted, etc.).

Reporting

Agorapulse’s reporting tool is arguably its biggest strength. It’s much more advanced than most of the other social media management tools on this list.

You can create and view detailed reports that show you key metrics and insights about your social media performance, content, audience, and more. Reports can even show you internal data, such as metrics about your team’s performance inside Agorapulse (e.g. how many messages each team member has responded to in the inbox).

And I particularly like Agorapulse’s ROI reports. They show you the impact your social media efforts have had on your bottom line by integrating with Google Analytics to determine how much traffic, conversions, and sales revenue each post/page/message has generated.

Networks

Agorapulse can be used to manage social profiles on all the main networks: Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, and Pinterest. You can also connect your Google Business Profile.

Pricing

Agorapulse has a free plan that lets you schedule up to 10 posts per month. Paid plans start from $69/month (per user), and you can save up to 30% on that if you pay annually. All plans include unlimited scheduled posts but higher-priced tiers include more features and benefits. Get started with a 30-day free trial.

Read our Agorapulse review.

#6 – Metricool

Metricool is one of the most affordable social media management platforms. Its free plan is great and its paid plans start at a fraction of the price of some other platforms.

Metricool Homepage

Engagement

Metricool gives you a single inbox from which you can manage all your social messages. It pulls in DMs, comments, and reviews from Facebook, Instagram, X, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn, and Google My Business. 

You and your team can reply to messages from the inbox, and take advantage of features like filters and saved responses to boost response time and improve productivity.

Publishing

You can create, schedule, and publish posts to your socials through Metricool’s Planner tool. It tells you the best time to publish each day for your specific audience, and it’s loaded with powerful time-saving features like batch scheduling, an AI caption generator, and autolists (content queues). 

You can edit the images you use in your posts directly from Metricool’s Planner, or through Canva thanks to the native integration.

Reporting

Metricool brings analytics from all the different social networks under one roof. It can track your reach, interactions, comments, followers, competitors… all the metrics you need to evaluate the results of your social media marketing efforts.

You can choose the data you want to include in your reports and customize the design to match your brand. And if you want to combine Metricool’s data with data from other sources, you can use the Data Studio Connector.

Networks

Metricool integrates with more social media networks than most, including Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, LinkedIn, and Google Business, as well as with your website/blog. 

It’s also one of the only social media management tools I’ve tried that lets you analyze your Twitch channel and competitors.

Pricing

Metricool has a free forever plan that lets you manage one social set, but it’s very limited. Several paid plans are available starting from $22/month or $18/month if you pay yearly. Higher-priced plans include more features and more generous usage caps.

Read our Metricool review.

#7 – Crowdfire

Crowdfire is a simple but powerful platform that comes with all the tools you need to manage all your socials. I particularly like its content discovery features.

Crowdfire Homepage

Engagement

With Crowdfire, you can monitor Instagram and Facebook for mentions, and pull them into your team inbox. Then, you can reply to your mentions with text, images, videos, and gifs. Unfortunately, though, the Mentions feature is only included in the Premium plan and above.

Publishing

Like other platforms, Crowdfire lets you publish/schedule posts to multiple platforms at once, and automatically tailor posts for each platform. But it also has some cool publishing features that I haven’t seen elsewhere. 

For example, I really like the ‘Queue Meter’, which tells you at a glance how many posts you still need to schedule for your timeline to look active over the next 7 days.

It also has one of the best content curation tools on the market. Just enter some topics that are relevant to your audience, and Crowdfire will crawl the web to find engaging articles and images and pull them into your feed, ready for you to share on social. 

Reporting

Crowdfire also comes with a Report Builder that you can use to create professional, branded reports with all your social KPIs. You can report on each social network independently, or combine multiple networks into one report. 

There are ready-to-use templates, or you can start from scratch and pick the data points that matter to you. Then, download your reports as PDF files or PPT presentations, or schedule weekly/monthly exports straight to your email.

Networks

Crowdfire supports 5 social networks: Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and Instagram. However, Pinterest isn’t included in the Free plan.

Pricing

Crowdfire offers a limited free plan that lets you manage up to 3 accounts on all supported networks except for Pinterest, but free users can only schedule 10 posts per account and can’t access all features.

Several paid plans are available starting from $9.99/month. The higher the price of the plan, the more accounts you can manage, and the more features you can access.

#8 – Vista Social

Vista Social is a powerful SMM platform built with brands and agencies in mind. It has all the essential tools—publishing, engagement, reporting—plus a link-in-bio page builder and lots of other useful features.

Engagement

Vista Social offers a lot of features to help you manage engagements. There’s a unified social inbox where you can like and reply to comments and comments from across social in one place. Plus tag messages, add internal notes, and assign tasks to specific team members.

On top of that, there’s also a built-in social listening tool and a review management tool that you can use to monitor and reply to customer reviews on platforms like Yelp and TripAdvisor.

Publishing

You can plan, schedule, and publish social media posts to all your profiles from Vista Social. The ChatGPT-powered AI writing tool can generate captions for you to save time, and you can save even more time with Publishing Queues (posting schedules).

If you’re working with a team, you can set up approval workflows so that posts have to be signed off before they’re published. Plus, collaborate and manage all your scheduled posts in a shared content calendar.

Reporting

Create customizable, fully automated reports to track your performance across multiple channels from Vista Social’s analytics dashboard. Pull in data from all your connected social media profiles and pages, and choose which specific metrics you want to show. 

You can also create competitor reports to benchmark your performance against industry rivals, and team performance reports to measure team productivity. All reports are fully white labeled, so you can add your own logo, colors, title, etc.

Networks

Vista Social supports the widest variety of networks of any social media management tool I’ve tried. You can post content and manage your profiles on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, YouTube, Google Business, TikTok, Reddit, Pinterest, and Snapchat. Plus, monitor reviews on other platforms like TripAdvisor, TrustPilot, and Yelp.

Pricing

Vista Social offers four plans starting from $39/month, and you can get 20% off with yearly billing. Higher-priced plans include more social profiles, more users, and more features.

Read our Vista Social review.

#9 – Iconosquare

Iconosquare has the best reporting capabilities of any social media management software I’ve tried. Plus, it has all the other stuff you need to manage your profiles including publishing, engagement, and team collaboration tools

Iconosquare Homepage

Engagement

With Iconosquare’s Conversations tool, you can view, manage, and reply to comments and direct messages that you receive on Facebook and Instagram. Plus, you can also track mentions on Instagram and pull them into the same feed.

Publishing

I love Iconosquare’s publishing workflow. You start by composing a post for one social media profile, and then use the crossposting feature to tailor and schedule it on other networks as needed. 

It also has all the other publishing features we like to see including ‘best time to post’ suggestions, a built-in media library, post approvals, first comment scheduling, a shared content calendar, and more.

Reporting

You can use Iconosquare’s social media analytics and reporting tools to track performance and gather insights to inform your social media strategy.

There are over 100+ tracked metrics that you can add to your custom analytics dashboard, which is more than you get with most other platforms. Examples include follower evolution, average engagement rate, tags/mention analytics, top posts, and top hashtags. 

Once you’ve built your dashboard, you can receive automatic reports via email at regular intervals.

Networks

Iconosquare supports Instagram, Facebook, X, LinkedIn, and TikTok. However, the engagement features are only available for Facebook and Instagram.

Pricing

Iconosquare gives you three plans to choose from: Single, Teams, and Custom. They all come with the same core features but different numbers of users, data retention periods, and levels of support.

You can customize each plan by choosing how many social profiles you want to manage. The more you add, the more you pay. Plans start from $49/month, and you can save up to 22% with yearly billing.

Read our Iconosquare review.

#10 – Sprout Social

Sprout Social is a good choice for larger businesses that want a better way to manage their socials. It’s very expensive, but it has some best-in-class features and is one of the only SMM platforms to come with a built-in CRM.

Sprout Social Homepage

Engagement

Sprout Social’s unified social media inbox is one of the most advanced on the market. It’s packed with powerful AI and automation features that make it easier to handle large volumes of social messages at scale.

For example, it automatically detects the sentiment of each message and categorizes them accordingly to help with your message prioritization. And the built-in AI Assist feature can write and rewrite replies for you, helping you to craft better messages and enhancing tone of voice.

It also comes with a bot builder for Facebook and Twitter so you can continue to engage with customers on social outside of business hours. Plus, spike alerts that let you know if you get a sudden increase in social media messages, and more.

Publishing

Sprout Social’s built-in social media scheduling tools are great too, especially for teams. You can create and publish posts to multiple platforms at once, and plan your whole strategy in the Campaign Planner.

If you want, you can set up publishing permissions for each user on your account so that team members can draft and submit messages and managers can approve them before publishing. And everyone can work together through the shared asset library and content calendar.

Another great feature: ‘Optimal Send Times’. It looks at your previous 16 weeks of audience data to tell you the best times to publish posts to get more views and engagements.

Reporting

Sprout Social’s analytics offer you deep insights into every area of social media. Track views, engagements, growth, competitors, and trends across networks, and visualize that data in interactive graphs and charts. 

You can report on both your organic and paid performance from the same place. And there are a bunch of pre-built templates for different types of reports including profile performance, post performance, competitor, platform-specific, and team and task reports

Sharing reports with your clients is easy with automated email delivery and CSV/PDF exports.

Networks

Sprout Social integrates with most of the leading social networks: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, TikTok, X, and YouTube.

Pricing

Sprout Social offers several plans starting from $249 per month, save up to 25% with annual billing.

Higher-priced plan tiers include unlimited social profiles, premium features, and other benefits. You can get started with a 30-day free trial.

Read our Sprout Social review.

#11 – Hootsuite

Hootsuite is another one of the more expensive social media management tools out there, but you get a lot for your money. It gives you all the tools you need to manage your socials and grow your audience across all the leading networks.

Hootsuite Homepage

Engagement

Hootsuite lets you set up Streams to manage engagement. Streams are custom social feeds that show you specific types of content on different social profiles, like mentions, comments, posts, competitors, etc.

You can respond to engagements faster with features like saved replies, auto-responses, and custom chatbots.

Publishing

It’s easy to keep active on all your brand’s social profiles with Hootsuite’s auto-publishing tools. Social media managers can use the bulk scheduler to create and schedule hundreds of posts at once or add them individually. Hootsuite will tell you the best times to share social media posts as you schedule them.

The built-in AI writer OwlyWriter can generate captions, hashtags, and post ideas for you to save time. And you can get even more post ideas through Streams—Hootsuite’s content discovery tool. 

Once you’ve scheduled/published a post, you’ll be able to see it in the content calendar. From there, you can get a bird’s eye view of your whole campaign and add, rearrange, or suspend scheduled posts in a few clicks.

Reporting

Hootsuite’s built-in analytics allow you to view both organic and paid social media metrics in one dashboard, alongside web analytics. 

You’ll be able to keep track of how your posts are performing and the growth of your audience on each channel, as well as how your social campaigns are impacting web traffic and conversions. 

There are pre-built report templates, and you can also build your own from scratch. Reports can be exported as PDF, PPT, and CSV files.

Networks

With Hootsuite, you can manage multiple social media channels including Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, YouTube, and LinkedIn.

Pricing

Hootsuite offers several plans starting from $99/month. Higher-priced plans include more users and social accounts, as well as extra features. There’s no free plan but you can try it out with a 30-day free trial, or skip the trial to get 20% off.

#12 – HubSpot

HubSpot is an all-in-one marketing platform that includes some solid social media management functionality. This tool (well, suite of tools) allows users to manage multiple social media accounts from a centralized dashboard, and to streamline the process of creating, scheduling, and publishing content across most major social media platforms.

HubSpot Social Media Management

Engagement

With HubSpot Social, you can view, manage, and reply to direct messages and comments that you receive on LinkedIn, X (Twitter), Facebook and Instagram.

Plus, you can also track mentions on these platforms and pull them into the same feed for added efficiency.

Publishing

You can plan, manage, and publish social media posts to all your profiles from HubSpot’s Social Inbox.

And if you have a team you can coordinate with them when publishing on your brand’s social channels, plus have a shared content calendar so you can monitor in real time the pace of your social promotion and the results you’re getting.

Reporting

The tool gives you dozens of tracked metrics you can add to your analytics dashboard.

Example metrics include follower count and follower growth graphs, average engagement rate, popular tags, mentions, top hashtags, top posts, etc.

Networks

HubSpot supports all major social media platforms where your brand has a presence, including LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and X (Twitter).

Pricing

Pricing starts with $800mo as part of the Marketing Hub Professional tier.

Final thoughts

There’s a lot of overlap between the tools in this list when it comes to features, but that doesn’t mean you should just pick any of them.

Each of them has a unique interface and its own set of pros and cons. For example, some might be better suited to teams and brands, whereas others might cater more toward independent influencers and content creators.

It’s important to make sure your social media management tool is a good fit for you, and there’s no reason you can’t try a few different options out before you make your decision. 

Most of the tools in this list offer free versions or trials that you can use to take them for a spin.

If you’re interested in exploring other tools that can help you grow your social media presence, you might want to check out these social media automation platforms, as well as our roundups of social media calendar software and social media dashboard tools.


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