The Best Social Media Management Software For 2023: Reviews & Pricing

Looking for software to help you manage your social media workflow? You’re in the right place.

Social media management tools come with everything brands, creators, and marketing agencies need to dominate on social.

They can help you to manage your content calendar, schedule posts, keep up with comments, and track your performance across all your social media profiles—all from one place.

But with so many different products out there to choose from, it can be tough to know which software is right for you.

To help you figure that out, we’ll be reviewing and comparing the very best SMM tools on the market in this post.

We’ll be looking at each tool’s key features, pros and cons, pricing, and more. By the time you’re done reading, you’ll have all the information you need to make an informed decision.

Ready? Let’s get started.

Note: We’re defining a “social media management tool” as any tool that helps you with social media comment management, content publishing, and reporting/analytics.

The best social media management tools – summary

---

#1 – Agorapulse

Agorapulse is our top pick for the overall best social media management tool on the market right now. It has everything we’re looking for, with a comprehensive feature set, easy-to-use interface, broad cross-platform compatibility, and more.

Agorapulse works with all the most popular social media networks: Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, GMB, and TikTok.

And it’s loaded with powerful features to help you grow your following and max out your engagement on all of the above

First off, there’s the unified social inbox. You can use it to manage all your incoming comments, messages, and reviews across your entire social media presence in one place.

Then, there’s the publishing toolkit, which has everything you need to plan content, collaborate with your team to create social media posts, and schedule them across all your social media channels. It’s super intuitive.

On top of that, there’s also its social listening feature. You can use it to track mentions of your brand, competitors, or keyword across social. So you can quickly uncover strategic insights and find out what social media users are saying about any topic.

And that’s not all. Agorapulse also comes with some of the best analytics and reporting tools we’ve seen. 

You can create beautiful, actionable reports that surface all the most important social metrics, and then share them with the brands you work with in seconds. 

Agorapulse will even keep track of what social media posts and conversations are driving leads, traffic, and sales for your business, so you can accurately measure the ROI of your social marketing efforts without any of the usual headaches and guesswork.

Key features

• Social inbox
• Post scheduling
• Publishing calendar
• Social media monitoring
• Analytics and reporting
• ROI tracking
• Chrome extension
• Mobile app

Pros

• Excellent support
• Best-in-class analytics and reporting
• All-in-one feature set
• Easy to use

Cons

• Doesn’t support less well-known social media platforms like Telegram or Mastodon
• Recent pricing changes make it more expensive for larger teams (you pay per user)

Pricing

Agorapulse offers a limited free plan for up to 10 scheduled posts per month.

Paid plans include unlimited scheduled posts and start from €49 per user/month.

You can also try premium features for free for 30 days.

Read our Agorapulse review.

---

#2 – Sendible

Sendible is another of our favorite social media platforms. It offers many of the same features as Agorapulse, but at a more affordable entry-level price point.

Sendible is another true all-in-one social media management software solution in that it offers pretty much everything you need right out of the box.

There’s a publishing tool that you can use to schedule a month’s worth of content in minutes and customize them for each social media platform.

There are also some powerful content creation/curation tools, like content suggestions, automated RSS feeds, Google Alerts, Canva integration, a content library, and a built-in image editor.

Plus, analytics, reporting, social media monitoring, comment management, etc. And most of those features are included in the entry-level Creator plan, which is around half the price of Agorapulse’s entry-level plan.

Oh, and one more thing: Sendible is a great choice for agencies. It’s one of the few SMM platforms that offer a white-label feature, so you can customize the software under your own brand, and let the clients you work with manage their accounts in their own client dashboards. 

You can also set up approval workflows and hierarchies with ease, enabling you to seamlessly collaborate with your team and the brands you work with.

Supported social media networks include Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Google My Business, and LinkedIn.

Key features

• Unified dashboard
• Scheduling tool
• Image editor
• Content library
• Collaboration tools
• Analytics
• Reports
• Social media monitoring
• White label

Pros

• Great for agencies
• Excellent content creation tools
• Good value for money
• White label feature

Cons

• Doesn’t support TikTok
• Not as easy to use as Agorapulse
• No free forever plan

Pricing

Plans start at $25 per month. There’s no free plan but you can get started with a 14-day free trial.

Read our Sendible review.

---

#3 – Pallyy

Pallyy is one of the most affordable social media management platforms on the market. It’s well-suited to Instagram and TikTok and stands out for its excellent publishing tools.

Pallyy offers a few different tools to help with different areas of your social media management workflow, but its scheduler is really the highlight.

You can use it to schedule posts across all your socials including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GMB, Pinterest, and TikTok.

On Instagram, you’re not limited to feed posts and can also schedule Carousels and Stories directly without relying on push notifications. The same goes for TikTok videos.

You also get a few other really neat Instagram-exclusive features, including a visual planner (so you can plan and preview your whole Instagram feed in advance), a bio link tool, best time to post suggestions, first comment scheduling, and more.

Aside from the scheduling side of things, you also get a bunch of other tools to help with different areas of your social media workflow. 

This includes detailed analytics/reporting, and one of the best unified social inboxes that we’ve tested. The UI/UX is incredible.

Finally, for those looking to curate content on Instagram, there’s an Explore tool that can help you to find engaging content and save it for re-posting; and in-depth analytics for both Instagram and LinkedIn.

Key features

• Post feedback (team collaboration)
• Content calendar
• Cross-platform scheduling
• Visual feed planner
• Bulk scheduling
• Social inbox
• Analytics and reporting
• Best time to post
• Reply on Instagram
• Explore
• Bio links

Pros

• Simple and straightforward pricing
• Very easy to use
• Great visual feed planner
• Powerful social inbox
• Ideal for visual content sharing
• Supports direct scheduling to TikTok

Cons

• Mostly focused on scheduling/publishing
• Additional social sets are charged separately

Pricing

Pallyy only offers two plans: Free and Premium.

The Free plan is limited to 15 scheduled posts/per month, while the Premium plan costs $15/per month and comes with unlimited scheduled posts. Additional social sets and users are charged separately. 

You can try out Pallyy Premium free for 14 days.

Read our Pallyy review.

---

#4 – NapoleonCat

NapoleonCat is one of the best social media management tools for customer service teams. It stands out for its best-in-class social inbox and powerful automation capabilities.

NapoleonCat comes with all the tools brands need to better support and engage with customers across social media.

Its social inbox is one of the best we’ve seen. It takes all your messages, Google reviews, and comments from across social and compiles them in one place.

From there, you can use tag messages to filter your incoming messages and automatically assign them to select team members or departments. Then, take advantage of NapoleonCat’s useful time-saving tools to streamline your customer communications.

For example, Saved replies allow your team to respond to customers faster. And the auto-moderation tool can automatically remove or hide spam/offensive comments, and even reply with autoresponder messages to repetitive queries. This helps to keep your inbox clutter-free and reduces your team’s workload.

And the inbox is just the beginning. NapoleonCat also comes with powerful publishing tools to help you schedule posts across platforms, as well as advanced analytics, automated reporting, and more.

Another thing we like about NapolenCat is its scalable and flexible pricing model. You can select the number of social media profiles you want to manage and the size of your social media team to receive a custom plan tailored to you, so you don’t end up paying for more than you need. 

Supported platforms include Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, GMB, YouTube, and Messenger.

Key features

• Social inbox
• Auto-moderation
• Automations
• Workflow tools
• Publishing
• Analytics
• Reporting

Pros

• Great for customer service teams
• Flexible pricing
• Good publishing tools
• Great automations

Cons

• UI could be better
• No free plan (only free trial)

Pricing

Plans start at $25.82/month when billed annually, depending on the required number of social media profiles/users.

A 2-week free trial is available.

Read our NapoleonCat review.

---

#5 – Metricool

Metricool is one of the most comprehensive social media management tools we’ve seen. And it doubles up as a paid ad tool too.

Not only does Mericool support more social media networks than most comparable tools (for example, it’s one of the only platforms that supports Twitch), but it’s also jam-packed with features covering all areas of social media marketing.

That includes a social media planner that you can use to schedule images, videos, stories, TikToks, text posts, etc. across all the social media channels you’re active on.

Plus, a competitive analysis tool, hashtag tracker, analytics, link in bio tool (SmartLinks), and social inbox.

Another way Metricool differs from most other SMM tools out there is that it doubles up as a paid ad management platform.

You can use it to plan, optimize, manage, and track both Facebook Ads and Google Ads campaigns.

Key features

• Planner
• Scheduler
• SmartLinks
• Inbox
• Analytics
• Reports
• Competitor research
• Looker Studio connector
• Hashtag tracker
• Ad
• Chrome extension

Pros

• Very broad feature set
• Paid ad tool
• Supports lots of social media software (including niche networks like Twitch)

Cons

• Limited scheduled posts on all plans (even on the Enterprise plan)

Pricing

Metricool offers a free plan for up to 50 posts/per month. Paid plans start from $12/month when billed annually.

Read our Metricool review.

---

#6 – Iconosquare

Iconosquare is a social media marketing platform that stands out for its rich analytics and reporting capabilities.

Iconosquare offers all the usual features you’d expect from a social media management tool, including publishing tools, team collaboration features, inbox management (i.e. Conversations), social listening, and more.

But what makes it stand out is its analytics capabilities. It offers a deeper level of insight than you typically get elsewhere, with over 100 tracked metrics. 

You can use it to measure follower evolution, engagement rates, reach, and much more for lots of different platforms and content types. And you can surface all that data in actionable, eye-catching social media reports in minutes.

Just keep in mind that some of the more advanced analytics and reporting features, like tags/mention analytics, hashtag reports, and mentions tracking are exclusively for Instagram. And the social inbox is also only for Instagram.

Therefore, we’d mainly recommend Iconosquare to brands that are focusing heavily on Instagram.

Key features

• Publishing tools
• Team collaboration
• Conversations
• Social listening
• Analytics
• Reporting
• Mobile app

Pros

• Excellent analytics data
• Simple and easy to use
• Best time to post recommendations
• Powerful scheduler

Cons

• Mainly focused on Instagram
• Doesn’t support as wide a variety of social media networks as other tools
• A bit pricey

Pricing

Plans start from $49/month when billed annually. You can get started with a 14-day free trial.

Read our Iconosquare review.

---

#7 – Crowdfire

Crowdfire is a simple but powerful social media management platform that stands out for its excellent content curation features.

Creating social media content is easy with Crowdfire.

All you have to do is enter some topics that you want to post about, and Crowdfire will trawl the web to find top-performing, relevant articles and images, and then serve them up for you to use in the app.

If you see an article/image you think will resonate with your social media audience, you can share it in a couple of clicks.

This is a great way to fill out your social media publishing calendar without having to create original content from scratch every time.

You can also add custom RSS feeds, or connect Crowdfire to your blog, YouTube channel, or ecommerce store to schedule product updates, announce new blog posts/videos, etc. automatically.

Aside from the content curation tools, Crowdfire also comes with an easy-to-use social media scheduler. 

It has some advanced features like automatic best time to post recommendations, queue meter (which tells you whether or not you have enough content scheduled to look active), and more.

And on top of that, Crowdfire also comes with rich analytics and a social listening tool that will keep track of your brand mentions.

Key features

• Content curation
• RSS feeds
• Scheduling
• Analytics
• Mentions
• Chrome extension

Pros

• Very affordable
• Easy to use
• Great content curation features

Cons

• Limited supported social media networks (no TikTok or niche platforms)
• Low usage limits (capped at 100-800 scheduled posts per month depending on your plan)

Pricing

Crowdfire offers a free plan that lets you schedule up to 10 posts.

Paid plans start at $7.48 per month when billed annually.

---

#8 – Sprout Social

Sprout Social is one of the most powerful social media management tools out there. But it’s geared towards large businesses/enterprises, so it’s fairly expensive.

Sprout Social is 10x as expensive as some other platforms. But it also offers a range of best-in-class features that are well-suited to large businesses and agencies. So if you have the budget for it, it may be worth it.

It’s an all-in-one platform so you get a lot of tools out of the box. That includes a fantastic social inbox, social content calendar, review management tool, keyword  monitoring, sophisticated reporting, and more

It also acts as a social CRM (customer relationship management) platform and stores detailed information about your customers, like conversation history, contact information, internal notes, etc.

This comes in useful for your sales and customer service team, enabling them to respond to customers quickly and efficiently.

Another unique feature that we’ve only seen on Sprout Social is its Employee Advocacy tool. It enables you to amplify your social media reach by turning your business’s employees into brand advocates.

Key features

• Social inbox
• Review management
• Social media monitoring
• Analytics
• Reporting
• Content calendar
• Scheduling
• CRM
• Brand advocacy

Pros

• Excellent reporting and collaboration tools
• Built-in CRM
• Enterprise-focused feature set

Cons

• Very expensive
• Social media scheduling functionality is weak compared to other tools on this list.

Pricing

Plans start at $249 per month (+$199 per month for each additional user). You can get started with a free 30-day trial.

Read our Sprout Social review.

---

#9 – Hootsuite

Hootsuite is another very powerful social media management platform that’s geared more toward large businesses and teams. It has some very advanced features but again, it’s pretty expensive.

Hootsuite is one of the most popular social media marketing tools out there—and there are good reasons for that.

It has a really nice UI and some awesome features. 

You can use it to create social media posts with the help of a built-in content library and curation tools. Then, schedule unlimited social media posts on the built-in publishing calendar.

It also comes with campaign planning/management tools, social media monitoring, a unified inbox, ads tools, outstanding analytics, and more.

Key features

• Publishing
• Scheduling
• Analytics
• Engagement tools
• Collaboration tools
• Roles & permissions
• Approval workflows
• Content library

Pros

• Unlimited posts on all plans
• All-in-one feature set
• Advanced tools
• Great for serious businesses and professionals

Cons

• Very expensive
• Regularly increases prices on legacy users

Pricing

Plans start at $99/month. A 30-day free trial is available

---

#10 – TweetDeck

Last but not least, we have TweetDeck—a completely free social media management tool for Twitter users.

Unlike the other platforms we’ve looked at so far, TweetDeck isn’t a cross-platform management tool. It’s only available for Twitter.

But the good news is there are no monthly subscription costs; anyone can sign up for TweetDeck and start using it straight away.

Once you’ve signed up, you can connect multiple accounts and manage all of them from one place.

You can schedule Tweets in advance, discover recent trends and news, view and reply to comments in real-time, and more.

And what’s really cool is you can completely customize the interface to make it work for you.

The idea is that you select what you want to see on your dashboard, and add columns (i.e. ‘decks’) that show you that content. You can view multiple decks side-by-side on one page.

So, for example, you could add one column to show all your latest mentions, one that shows the results of a specific search query, and one that shows a list of your most recent likes, etc. Then every time you open the app, you’ll be able to see all of the above at a glance on one page.

We’d definitely recommend checking it out if you’re mainly focusing on Twitter. But if you’re also active on other social media platforms, you’ll probably want to use another one of the tools on this list alongside it.

Key features

• Multi-account management
• Tweet scheduling
• Analytics
• Content discovery
• Custom dashboard

Pros

• Unique, fun interface
• Completely free to use
• Cool features

Cons

• Twitter only

Pricing

You can use TweetDeck for free with no monthly subscription fees

---

Social media management tools FAQ

What are social media management tools?

Social media management tools are software products that make it easier to manage one or more social media profiles from one dashboard. 

They typically include multiple tools to help with different areas of social media marketing, like analytics, publishing/scheduling tools, automations, inbox management features, etc.

Why use a social media management tool?

If you’re serious about social media, or you manage multiple social media profiles, social media management tools are an essential time-saving tool. Here are some of the main reasons to use them:

• Manage multiple social media accounts. Social media management tools typically let you connect multiple social media profiles, so you can manage everything from one place without having to open a bunch of different apps and browser tabs
• Consistent publishing. Most social media management tools allow you to schedule posts ahead of time, which makes it easier to plan your content strategy and publish content consistently.
• Deeper insights. Most social media platforms only give you access to basic analytics natively. But social media management software typically offers much deeper insights to help you better analyze your campaign performance, brand awareness and sentiment, etc.
• Time-saving automation. Many tools come with automation capabilities that can help you to streamline your workflow. For example, some SMM tools can automatically detect and recycle your best-performing content or automatically route certain types of social media messages to specific team members.
• Content curation. SMM tools can also help reduce the time it takes to create social media posts. Some come with built-in image/template libraries to help you create content, and others offer curation tools to help you find relevant, engaging posts to reshare with your audience.

Who needs a social media management tool?

Pretty much anyone can benefit from social media management tools. But they’re especially useful for professional social media managers or agencies that manage brand social media accounts. 

We’d also recommend them for professional influencers that publish lots of social media content and need to accurately measure their performance.

How do I choose a social media management tool?

When you’re weighing up your options, the main things to consider are:

• The social media software you want to focus on (some tools may only support certain platforms)
• The features you need (e.g. social media scheduling, brand mention tracking, inbox management, etc)
• Your budget and the size of your team (some tools are better value than others if you have lots of users)

Choosing the best social media management tools

That concludes our roundup of the best social media management tools.

Each of the tools on this list has its strengths and weaknesses. If you’re still not sure which one is the best fit for your needs, here’s what we’d suggest:

• Agorapulse is the right choice for most users—you really can’t go wrong with it. It supports pretty much all the main social media platforms and has an all-in-one feature set with everything you could possibly need: publishing tools, analytics, social listening, inbox, etc.
• Sendible is a good alternative to Agorapulse if you want to keep your monthly costs down. It shares a lot of the same features but has a slightly lower entry-level price point (but it’s not as easy to use and lacks support for TikTok).
• Pallyy is the best choice for users who are focusing on Instagram or TikTok. It’s also super affordable, so it’s a good choice for content creators on a tighter budget.

We hope you found this helpful. Good luck!

Related comparisons:

• Social media calendar tools
• Social media inbox tools
• Social media scheduling tools
• Hoosuite alternatives & competitors

---

Disclosure: If you buy through links on our site, we may make a commission.