If you’re on the hunt for a social media management tool, chances are that Buffer and Hootsuite are some of the first names that pop up — with good reason.
These two options are among the best, and both come packed with features that will help you make your social media workflows more efficient and, ultimately, grow your audience.
So, which one is best? Interesting question — and it’s one without a straightforward answer. Perhaps a better question would be: Which social media management tool is right for you?
While both Buffer and Hootsuite offer similar core features — social media management, scheduling, and analytics — these tools were built with pretty different users in mind.
Generally speaking, Buffer serves small to medium businesses, solopreneurs, and creators. Hootsuite, on the other hand, is primarily focused on large social media marketing teams at bigger businesses.
Those key target users show up in a lot of ways in how various features within these social media management tools work (and how much they cost) — we’ll get into all that below — but that’s not to say that, if you’re on a large marketing team, Hootsuite is automatically the best option for you.
The most important things to consider when weighing Buffer vs. Hootsuite are the following:
- Buffer vs Hootsuite feature overview
- Plans and pricing
- Social media planning and scheduling
- Social media analytics
- Social media engagement
- Teamwork and collaboration
Let’s take a closer look at the two tools.
Buffer vs Hootsuite feature overview
Here’s a bird’s-eye view of all the features and the cost of both tools. I’ll go over most of these in greater depth in the rest of the article.
