7 Best Social Media Inbox Tools (2023 Top Picks)

Welcome to our roundup of the best social media inbox tools.

Social inboxes are the best way to manage your communications across social at scale and ensure you catch every social mention. They’re a much better solution than social streams, which only hinder productivity.

In this post, we’ll be reviewing and comparing our favorite social media management tools that have the best social inbox features.

Ready? Let’s get started!

The best social media inbox tools compared

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#1 – Agorapulse

Agorapulse is our top pick for the best social media inbox tool. It offers the most complete inbox overall with lots of powerful features and a great user interface.

Agorapulse’s unified inbox captures all your customer communications across Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, and other networks in one place.

That includes direct messages, organic post comments, paid ad comments, reviews, etc. Thanks to the social media monitoring feature, it’ll even ‘listen in’ on conversations across social that mention your brand and surface those brand mentions in your inbox so you can jump into important conversations faster.

Agorapulse’s Inbox Assistant feature helps you to stay on top of all those messages. It organizes your inbox by allowing you to automate common tasks. For example, you can use it to automatically bookmark, label, delete/hide, and assign comments and messages based on the keywords they include, saving you a ton of time.

Saved replies are another useful time-saving feature. Instead of having to type out the same generic replies over and over again to common messages, you can save them and send them in one click.

All team members on your plan can manage inbox activities with real-time collaboration tools. And alongside every message, you and your team will be able to see the sender’s name and profile so you know exactly who you’re responding to.

As great as Agorapulse’s inbox is, it’s only the start. The platform also comes with a bunch of other tools to help with other areas of your social media operations, including publishing tools, reporting tools, and social media ROI tracking.

Key features

• Unified inbox
• Ad comments
• Inbox Assistant (automation)
• Labels
• Saved replies
• Team collaboration
• ROI tracking
• Social media monitoring
• Publishing & scheduling
• Reporting

Pros

• All-in-one toolkit
• Rich automation capabilities
• Time-saving features
• Great UI
• Best social inbox overall
• Developed based on feedback from top social media marketers

Cons

• A little expensive (especially for large teams)
• On the Standard plan, the inbox is limited to 5,000 messages per month

Pricing

Plans start from $49/user/month. There’s also a limited free plan and a 30-day free trial available.

Read our Agorapulse review.

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#2 – Sendible 

Sendible is a close second place. It’s another all-in-one SMM toolkit with a similar feature set to Agorapulse, but it’s a little more affordable. And it’s a great choice for agencies thanks to its white-label tool and robust team collaboration features.

Once you’ve signed up for Sendible, you’ll be able to see an aggregated overview of all your most important social media engagements across platforms (Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn) in your Priority Inbox. 

It updates in real-time with comments, direct messages, and individual streams so you can keep your finger on the pulse. And your team can reply to those comments with ease from your dashboard.

On top of the inbox, Sendible also comes with an excellent publishing tool that you can use to plan and schedule content to all your social media accounts in advance. Plus, a powerful content curation and design toolkit, social media monitoring capabilities, analytics and reporting, and more.

All of that is available on the entry-level Creator plan, which is significantly cheaper than Agorapulse’s entry-level plan. 

And if you’re an agency, you can upgrade to a higher-tier plan to unlock agency-focused features like team collaboration, assignment and approval workflows, and user management. 

There’s even a white-label feature that lets you customize the Sendible platform with your branding and allow your clients to access the branded version in their own dashboards.

Key features

• Priority inbox 
• Engage and reply to comments
• Scheduling & posting
• Content curation
• Team collaboration
• Keyword searches
• Analytics and reporting
• White label tool

Pros

• Great for agencies
• More affordable than Agorapulse
• Rich feature set
• Excellent content curation and design tools

Cons

• Can only engage and reply to comments on Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn
• Doesn’t support TikTok
• No free plan

Pricing

Plans start from $25/month and you can get started with a free 14-day trial.

Read our Sendible review.

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#3 – Pallyy 

Pallyy has the best user interface of any inbox tool we’ve tried. It’s also one of the most affordable options out there, which makes it a great choice for creators and influencers who don’t need all the bells and whistles.

Pallyy’s UI is really nice to work with across the board, but particularly so in the case of its social inbox.

It’s a huge step up from their old IG comment management tool and has been designed with a similar UI to that of Gmail so it has a familiar feel to it. 

And it supports more platforms now. In addition to Instagram communications, you can now manage Facebook comments and mentions, Twitter DMs and mentions, LinkedIn Comments, and Google My Business reviews. It even includes TikTok comments as well, which is a big plus.

On top of the social inbox, Pallyy has an outstanding content calendar feature. You can use it to visually plan your feed and schedule content in bulk to Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and beyond.

And that’s not all. Pallyy also offers analytics for Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, and Instagram. Plus a bunch of other useful Instagram-exclusive tools like first comment scheduling, best time to post suggestions, and a bio link tool.

You can collaborate with your team members with features like a shared calendar, team activity feed, team tagging and assignments, notes and feedback, and more.

Key features

• Social media inbox
• Team collaboration features
• Automations
• Bulk actions
• Content calendar
• Scheduling
• Visual feed planner
• Analytics and reporting
• Explore tool
• IG bio link tool

Pros

• Very beginner-friendly
• Excellent UI
• The content calendar is really nice
• Supports TikTok

Cons

• Only basic automation capabilities
• Base price only includes 1 social set and 1 user account

Pricing

Pallyy offers a Free plan for up to 15 scheduled posts per month. Pallyy Premium costs $15/month for unlimited posting. Additional social sets and users are charged separately. A 14-day free trial is available.

You can try out Pallyy Premium free for 14 days.

Read our Pallyy review.

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#4 – NapoleonCat

NapoleonCat is the best social media inbox tool for customer service teams. It boasts powerful automation capabilities and tons of features to help you provide better customer support on social.

NapoleonCat’s unified social inbox compiles all your private messages, comments, and reviews from across social and Google, and puts them all in one easy-to-manage dashboard.

You can set up automations to tag and filter incoming messages and assign them to different departments and individual team members.

To help your team respond to your customers more quickly and efficiently, you can utilize NapoleonCat’s time-saving features like Saved Replies. 

The auto-moderation feature is another game-changer. It automates the moderation process for you by automatically detecting and filtering out or removing all the spam messages and offensive comments you get on social media. And it can even respond to repetitive queries for you to reduce your customer support agents’ workload. 

On top of the social inbox, NapoleonCat offers many more social management tools including post-scheduling, analytics, and reporting.

The pricing model is designed to be flexible and scalable enough for social media teams. You can customize your plan by selecting the number of profiles you want to manage, and the number of users you want to add to your account, and the price will adjust accordingly.

This is great as it allows you to tailor your plan so that you only pay for what you need, rather than for preset limits that you’ll never reach.

Key features

• Social media inbox management
• Automatic comment and message moderation
• Publishing/scheduling
• Analytics
• Reporting
• Team collaboration tools
• Automation

Pros

• Ideal for customer service teams
• You can customize your plan limits
• Auto-moderation is a nice feature
• Advanced and powerful feature set

Cons

• The user interface could be better
• Scheduling functionality isn’t as strong as other tools

Pricing

Plans start from $26/month when billed annually. You can try it out with a 2-week free trial.

Read our NapoleonCat review.

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#5 – Metricool

Metricool is an affordable and useful social management tool that is a great option if you want to save some money. 

The social inbox allows you to view and respond to all your messages in one place. 

You can search your inbox using keywords and filter messages to make it easier to find what you’re looking for. You can also use the team features to collaborate with colleagues when it comes to managing social media engagement. The inbox isn’t the most advanced on the market, but it does the job.

Metricool also has a bunch of other useful features that can make your SMM easier. There’s a planner tool for scheduling and publishing, a hashtag tracking tool, a smart links tool, and even an AI assistant. 

Metricool also includes a powerful analytics tool as well as reporting and competitor research functions. 

If funds are tight, then Metricool is definitely a good option as there’s a solid free plan that’s suitable for managing one small brand. 

Key features

• Social inbox 
• Planning and scheduling tools 
• Analytics 
• Competitor research 
• Hashtag tracker 
• Smart links 
• Reporting 

Pros

• Great free plan 
• Wide range of tools 
• In-depth analytics 

Cons

• Social inbox could be more advanced
• No social listening tool 

Pricing

Metricool has a free forever plan that includes up to 50 posts per month. Paid plans start from $15/month. 

Read our Metricool review.

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#6 – Crowdfire 

Crowdfire is another social media management tool with a great social inbox. It’s excellent value for money with affordable plans and a deep feature set.

Crowdfire doesn’t support as many networks as some other tools, but it does support the ‘big four’: Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. 

Once you sign up, you track and manage all your mentions and comments across social from your team inbox. Plus, send replies to all of your mentions with text, gifs, images, and even videos. The mobile app makes it easy to reply on the go.

Aside from the social inbox, Crowdfire also enables you to schedule posts to your social profiles in an intuitive calendar interface. And it comes with some of the best content curation tools we’ve seen, so you’ll never be short of post ideas. 

That includes an article curation tool, image curation tool, RSS feed connections, and a Chrome extension so you can share articles that you come across as you browse the web.

Key features

• Mentions tracking
• Comment replying
• Mobile app
• Content calendar
• RSS feeds
• Image and article curation
• Chrome extension

Pros

• Super affordable
• Deep feature set
• Good social scheduler
• Excellent curation tools

Cons

• Doesn’t support many social networks (no TikTok, GMB, YouTube, etc.)
• No unlimited post-scheduling regardless of the plan you choose

Pricing

Crowdfire offers a free plan, and paid plans start at just $7.48/month. 

However, to track and reply to mentions, you’ll need to sign up for a Premium plan or above, which starts from $37.48/month.

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#7 – Sprout Social

Sprout Social is an enterprise-level social media inbox tool that has a pretty rich feature set. The Sprout Social smart inbox allows you to unify all your networks and profiles and monitor and respond to incoming messages in real-time. 

You can also make use of other engagement features like message spike alerts, review management, and even a bot builder. 

In terms of additional social media management features, Sprout Social also includes basic scheduling and publishing features, social media listening, analytics, and reporting.  

Sprout Social is much more suited to larger teams for two reasons. Firstly, it has a ton of useful features for collaboration such as message tagging, task assignment, and team reports. 

However, the most important reason is the price. Although it’s a powerful tool, it’s very expensive in comparison to other tools, making it a better choice for enterprise brands with a bigger budget to work with.

Given the price of Sprout Social, you might expect it to have the best social inbox, but it doesn’t. And its publishing functionality is weaker than other tools as well. It’s a very good tool in its own right and it does have some unique features that other platforms don’t have. 

Key features

• Smart Inbox
• Publishing and scheduling 
• Bot builder 
• Review management 
• Task assignment 
• Team reports
• Analytics 
• Social listening 

Pros

• Social listening is a good bonus tool 
• Team tools are useful 
• Powerful analytics 

Cons

• Not affordable for smaller businesses 
• Inbox and publishing functions could be better 

Pricing

Plans start from $249/month with a 30-day free trial available.

Read our Sprout Social review.

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Social media inbox tools FAQ

What is a social media inbox?

A social media inbox refers to the place where all your incoming and outgoing direct messages are stored on social.

Each social platform has its own native inbox from which you can read and respond to your messages.

Social inbox tools take that to the next level. They combine all your messages from across multiple different social platforms in one place and give you access to additional features to help you manage your communications more efficiently.

What is the best unified social media inbox?

We think Agorapulse is the overall best unified social media inbox on the market right now. It has an excellent UI and it’s packed with powerful tools, like a smart Inbox Assistant, rich organization features (e.g. labels, notes, etc.), saved replies, and more.

Sendible is a close second and the best unified social inbox for social media marketing agencies. 

What are social media tools?

Social media tools are software applications that help you to better manage your social media operations. 

Social inboxes are one type of social media tool, but there are plenty of other types, like publishing/scheduling tools, automation tools, social media analytics and reporting software, etc.

All-in-one social media management software solutions offer all of the above in one platform, but there are also dedicated tools for specific use cases.

What are the major social media platforms?

If we’re talking about popularity, then Facebook is still the top social media platform by active users. YouTube comes in second and WhatsApp ranks third.

That said, some people might argue that YouTube and WhatsApp are not ‘true’ social media networks. In that case, second and third place would go to Instagram and TikTok respectively.

Choosing the best social inbox tools for your needs

That concludes our comparison of the best social inbox tools.

All of the tools on this list have their pros and cons, and some are better for particular use cases than others. 

If you’re still not sure which one is the best fit for your needs, this is what we’d suggest:

• Choose Agorapulse if you’re on the fence. It’s the most complete social media inbox tool overall and will be the best choice for most users.
• Use Sendible if you’re a social media marketing agency. It has a solid agency-focused feature set with excellent team collaboration tools.
• Go with Pallyy if your priorities are ease of use and affordability. It has the nicest UI of any of the options on this list and is easy to work with.

Just getting started with social media? Check out our beginner’s guide on how to create a social media strategy. You can also learn more about the advantages and disadvantages of social media here.

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