Buffer vs. Hootsuite: Which Social Media Management Tool is Right For You?

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.

Plans and pricing

The cost of a tool is a dealbreaker for many, so let’s talk about the starkest difference between Buffer and Hootsuite right up front: the price.

This is particularly important when some of your essential features might only be available on specific plans or cost extra. 

Here’s a big-picture look at both Buffer and Hootsuite’s pricing: 

Buffer pricing

• Free plan (up to 3 social media accounts/channels) — $0
• Essentials plan — $6 per channel per month (or $5 per channel paid annually)
• Team plan — $12 per channel per month (or $10 per channel paid annually)
• Agency plan — $120 for 10 channels per month (or $100 per 10 channels paid annually)

See Buffer’s full pricing guide here →

Hootsuite pricing

• Professional plan — $99 per month, billed annually
• Team plan — $249 per month, billed annually
• Enterprise plan — Contact for pricing

See Hootsuite’s full pricing guide here →

Free trials

Both Buffer and Hootsuite offer free trials of their plans, so you can put pretty much all of the above to the test without paying a cent.  

Buffer free trial: 14 days on Essentials, Teams, and Agency Plan. (Remember, you can use up to three social media channels on Buffer’s forever-free plan.)

Hootsuite free trial: 30 days on their Professional and Teams plan, after which you’ll be charged $99 or $249 per month, respectively. 

Now we’ve talked cost, let’s get into the meat of what both these powerful tools can do. 

Social media scheduling and planning

Both Buffer and Hootsuite are comprehensive social media scheduling tool options and offer a social media content calendar and queue system that will help you easily plan and schedule your posts. 

Both tools allow users to connect multiple social media accounts and manage them from a single dashboard.

An important consideration here is what channels each tool works with. Here’s a quick breakdown of the various social media platforms supported by each tool:

When it comes to ease of use, Buffer’s system is intuitive and clean, and it’s really easy to get up and running fast with multiple social media accounts. 

Hootsuite’s social media management tools boast some handy additional features (like bulk scheduling and paid posts), but these additions mean the tool comes with a bit of a learning curve to make sure you get the most bang for your buck. 

Some factors I thought worth highlighting when it comes to social media scheduling itself on both tools, as these may be a deal breaker for some social media managers and creators:

• Both Buffer and Hootsuite have an AI assistant baked into the creator. Buffer's AI Assistant is available on all plans, including free, and there's no limit on how many ideas or posts you can create. Hootsuite's OwlyWriterAI is also available on all paid plans, but there is a limit to how much you can use it.
• Hootsuite doesn’t have the option to choose covers or thumbnails for Instagram Reels and TikToks.
• You cannot crosspost to Pinterest on Hootsuite. ‘Pins’ are treated as separate from ‘posts’ on other platforms, and the former will need to be created and scheduled separately. 
• Buffer does not allow users to create social media posts in bulk.
• Buffer does not have hashtag recommendations.

Here’s a comparison of the post composer window in both Buffer and Hootsuite for scheduling an Instagram Reel and TikTok. 

On the planning front, Buffer boasts the Create Space — an ideas hub where you can store any content ideas, text, and media to access when you’re ready to publish them.

Features like tags and a Kanban board view make it easy to organize this library, helping you turn it into a flexible space that works for you.

Hootsuite offers Content Library, a comparable feature focused explicitly on saving media files. This feature is only available on their higher-tier plans (from Teams, at $249 per month and upwards). Buffer’s Create is available on all plans, including Free. 

Social media engagement 

Both Buffer and Hootsuite offer a social media engagement dashboard that will help you stay on top of messages across multiple social media platforms.

There are some key differences. With Buffer’s engagement tools, you can keep track of comments on Facebook and Instagram. You can filter these comments based on important sentiments (‘negativity,’ ‘order,’ and ‘question’) so you always know how to prioritize your replies. 

Hootsuite handles things a little differently, with its social media Inbox helping you monitor Facebook Pages’ private messages, comments and replies, and visitor posts, as well as X/Twitter’s direct messages and LinkedIn Pages’ comments and replies.

Worth mentioning here is Hootsuite’s social listening tool. If you’re interested in tracking mentions of and sentiment towards your company or brand, Hootsuite has some powerful options. You’ll have access to ‘basic’ social listening features like those within the example below, but full access to the tool is only available on their price-on-request Enterprise plan. 

Social media analytics

Social media analytics tools can be a game-changer if you’re looking to build your following and scale your social media presence across platforms. 

Again, both Buffer and Hootsuite have you covered, though the different user focuses are definitely evident in the complexity of the social media analytics options. 

Buffer analytics are easy to understand and interpret: you’ll have access to post analytics for all the social media channels supported, allowing you to keep track of content performance at a glance.

In-depth analytics (available on the Essentials plan and above) are the next step up, though still easy to get to grips with. You’ll get comprehensive metrics for Facebook Pages, Instagram Business and Creator accounts, Twitter/X, and LinkedIn Pages. 

For each of the social media channels mentioned above, you’ll get an in-depth look at all these numbers and more, plus (and this is where the magic happens) recommendations based on these numbers. 

So, not only does Buffer surface all the most important numbers — it also interprets them and suggests specific actions that will help improve your performance. Under the ‘Answers’ tab, you’ll find:

• Your personal best time to post
• Your best type of content
• Your best posting frequency

An incredibly helpful feature worth mentioning is the link between tags and analytics. As part of your content planning and scheduling, you can choose custom tags for every single one of your posts.

For example, you might want to categorize your posts by content pillar (as I’ve done in the screenshot below) or specific product. This is super helpful for social media managers looking to prove the value of a specific campaign or series. 

In the analytics dashboard, you can then track the tag's performance across multiple social media platforms to measure how well your audience responds across platforms.

All of the metrics mentioned above can be turned into beautiful custom social media reports by simply clicking the ‘+’ button next to each section.

Where Buffer shines for creators and small businesses, Hootsuite can provide insights for larger teams. With the latter, you’ll be able to set specific goals to help surface the numbers that are most important for you, measure the performance of your paid vs. organic social media posts, and get benchmarks based on specific industries. 

Your metrics are largely displayed in a widget-like set-up, which you can customize according to the numbers you most want to focus on, which can then be converted to reports. 

Teamwork and collaboration

Hootsuite was designed with large teams in mind, so access and approvals is a complex, layered system that allows users to get really granular on who can see and access what. 

With different ‘organizations,’ teams, and channels, you can create an intricate system for a big team (or several). Organizations are the highest tier in the system, which will allow superusers to assign tasks to members or teams, route messages to specific teams, and control access to social accounts.

That said, large teams will have to pay extra to have anything more than five users per account, even on Hootsuite’s premium Enterprise plan.

On Buffer, things are more straightforward — you can add an unlimited number of users to the platform on both the Teams and Agency plans.  

You can choose to give users:

1. Full posting access: Their posts and ideas will be published when scheduled. 

Approval required:

Everything they create will need to be approved by someone with full posting access before it is published. 

You can also choose to give users access to only certain social media accounts.

As you’ll see from the screenshot below, the collaboration system is flexible enough to allow you to give users admin access, whether they have full posting access or not.

Which tool is right for you?

As I touched on above, it really depends! There’s no one-size-fits-all approach when it comes to the best social media management tool for your brand and business. If you’re looking for something not mentioned here or more options, definitely check out our round-up of Hootsuite alternatives. 

If you do decide on Buffer (yay!) and have any questions, please don’t hesitate to reach out via hello@buffer.com. We’re a global team, so there’s always someone online to help!