Agorapulse vs. Sendible vs. Sprout Social

Agorapulse has been a huge benefit to us as a business and is the most comprehensive platform we've used, having previously been with Hootsuite and ContentCal. It is likely to be better for companies that are managing multiple social profiles and want to consolidate these into one manageable platform. Given the amount of features it provides, it might not be suitable for individuals. The reporting is a fantastic part of the platform, which includes brand awareness for certain profiles, the best time to post for engagement, and details that all help with strategising. The inbuilt link shortening and tracking is useful, we've set this up and need to explore its capabilities further. Overall, we would recommend Agorapulse and it's a great asset to our business.

Incentivized

I have a fairly straightforward use case for Sendible and it meets almost all of my needs. If you are a small company that needs a collaborative solution to social media content creation, and likely has a small team (or no team) to manage social media postings, I think Sendible is likely a great tool to schedule posts and largely automate social media marketing. A larger company or more involved marketing team could still use Sendible to schedule and collaborate on posts. However, there may be additional features they may want or need (like the ability to promote posts) that may not be available with Sendible.

Incentivized

Sprout Social is a great tool, but it comes with a high per-seat price. In my opinion, this tool is great for a well-established brand, but for any start-up or multi-person agency, the cost can add up quickly and make or break your decision to use it. The reason for the lower recommendation score is a recent and ongoing issue I am facing with getting out of our current agreement. In our experience, Sprout Social makes it impossible to do, and the way they get you to agree to a year-long contract is a little shady. No contract is renewed after a year; just a simple email asking if you want to make any changes. In my experience, if you are not fully aware of what you agreed to a year ago, they will get ya, and you will be in the position we are in now. After experiencing this, I see that it is common among Sprout Social users looking for a more cost-effective option. Big bummer considering the monthly price users are paying.

Incentivized

• Calendar sharing - great for internal and external approval
• Community management - it means we can keep on top of engagement for all of our clients in one place
• Report - it's really useful for us to be able to create such in depth reports that we can use internally but also share with clients so they can see the results of what we are doing

Incentivized

• Easy to schedule and post to all of your social media platforms.
• Customer support is very accommodating and always there to help. I have never had an issue with reaching someone whether it was for a quick question or to demo other features.
• They have an awesome affiliate program (example: I earned over $600 from one company clicking through an signing up from my affiliate link - yay!)
• Compared to other social media platforms, Sendible has been the most robust with features and ease of use.
• They are always making advances and upgrades to their service offerings to better meet the needs of their customers.

• Social Scheduling: Sprout Social makes it easier than any platform I've used to schedule posts with each, and to batch-schedule the same post to run on multiple dates. The scheduling platform is intuitive and easy to understand.
• Social Reporting: With just a few clicks of the button, you can easily export reports that are easy for both social media experts and complete novices to understand. I like how you can get a report within 60 seconds or so if needed.
• Customer Service/Help: Whenever I've had a question, both my Sprout Social rep and the Help Center have been extremely easy to contact and quick to reply. Problems are solved very fast and it's made easy to understand.

Incentivized

• Would love to have a draft feature. We often don't schedule things until the assets are ready, or use a placeholder image and swap them afterwards
• Editing posts intended for multiple channels is not as easy as scheduling them in the first place. I would love to edit and have the same menu I do as when I'm scheduling where I have my base text and then the adjusted text for each social media. It's rare that something I've planned to be a similar post across channels, needs editing, but only for one of those channels. e.g. Correcting mistakes or changing strategies.
• Currently, I export the analytics and put it in a Google Sheet where I have more control over the data, which I love. For me to use the Agora Reports system, I would need substantial features like comparing metrics in the same charts, using direct line charts instead of smoothed (smoothed charts look nice, but just obfuscate data), separating out paid growth, etc. It's probably too large an ask for what Agora is trying to provide, which is why the export tool is very useful.
• While I'm talking about it, a slight bug with the export tool is that when you export two things in quick succession, it just sends a duplicate of the first report via email. I'll export a CSV of Global data and then a CSV of Content, and if I do it too quickly, it doubles up the Global data and I don't get the Content until I resend.
• More specific filtering for listening. Sometimes someone has our brand in their name and we get ALL of their content. We have to add each user like this to the filter instead of being able to filter out usernames that contain it.

Incentivized

• Inbox. The inbox of incoming messages/posts is very clunky. Threads are separated into individual messages, making it difficult to follow conversations.
• Reporting. The included reporting features are limited and don't allow for enough customization to be worth using.
• Hashtags. When discussing the 10 most common mistakes (or whatever the title might be), we are unable to say "You won't believe #3" because the system reads this as a hashtag to link rather than just a number. It adds on editing time when approving posts.
• Default settings. As a Social Media Manager, it is annoying to have myself set as default when looking at the content calendar. I don't write the posts, just approved and schedule them, so manually entering in my writers' names in the filters could be made easier by making this an editable feature.
• Instagram. You cannot post multiple images in a single Instagram post from Sendible.
• Service Lists. They are supposed to be helpful in grouping your services (we do this by brand), however, these lists don't pull the information you put on individual services. So if I have a list with Facebook, Instagram, and Pinterest for Brand A, you can't just add the Brand A Service List filter onto the calendar and see all of those posts that are scheduled. They don't seem to have much purpose at all.

Incentivized

• I would like for Personal Instagram Accounts to be able to integrate with Sprout Social's Employee Advocacy platform. You are able to connect personally accounts to Sprout Social itself, which is great, but for employee re-sharing internal stories, this is not possible unless it is with a Business Instagram account.
• I would like for the left hand tool bar to be more user friendly. There are so many tools and settings that are available, and I would like for it to be simplified in a way that makes it less cluttered.
• An improvement can be made with the Sprout Social Mobile App. The user friendliness of the app does not allow as much autonomy as the regular webpage.

Incentivized

The decision has been made. It's time to get to work--no steps back. I feel confident this product is well suited to help me make progress. I want to get down business and utilize the functionality of this product to meet my marketing goals. I feel very comfortable with the choice I have made.

Incentivized

If I am given a larger budget to work with then I'd like a program that tracks and collects my PR hits, as well as sends me important info to respond to. I realy like the way New Brand Analytics tracks my Trip Advisor,etc ratings

Incentivized

Sprout Social is the best platform out there for social-media management, and now that I have all my clients using Sprout Social, it would be sort of silly for me to walk away format at this juncture. The only cloud on the horizon would be if Salesforce bought it (as has been rumored) and put it inside its walled garden.

Incentivized

Any time I onboard a new team member, they are very quick to adapt to Agora's user interface and therefore require a very quick onboarding process from me, which is a massive plus. While I think having an all-in-one platform would be ideal, there is something to be said about only having a few bells and whistle so that my team can focus on what is most important to us and our clients, content

Incentivized

Sendible is 100% web based so managing social media platforms can be done from anywhere with internet connectivity. During registration, Sendible takes its users on a tour of its main features. The sleek design was engineered by professionals who have great interest in social media marketing. There is ample support in case users get lost and there is no learning curve.

Incentivized

Sprout Social is straightforward to use - built for anyone regardless of tech experience to be able to navigate. It integrates pretty seamlessly to the native platforms and brings a lot of things together to make a seamlessly experience for seasoned social media managers.

Incentivized

Agorapulse occasionally has outages or shuts down. It never interferes with my use of the application or any of my posts

Incentivized

Uptime was OK, but given the fact that we are in Europe, there were some specific problems: They tended to take the system down for maintenance during the night in the US, which was during our workday. This was definitely problematic and hard to explain to our clients.

Agorapulse has generally had great performance. Occasionally I have issues with my videos being posted on Instagram. I still am not sure why. the format of the videos is the same as the videos that are going through.

Incentivized

It is quick to post, however you have to refresh the page every time you add a new scheduled item.

The support from Agorapulse is excellent. Any time we have made contact they have been quick to reply, and given added extra information to help. The initial sales experience was also good. Not pushy like a lot of other companies, more that they would like to help. And they certainly did for us at a difficult time which built a fantastic relationship with us from the very start. Communication is great too, with just the right amount of emails and updates. Overall we feel that they genuinely care about their clients and users.

Incentivized

Sendible has a great resource center which I have used multiple times throughout my year using the platform. There are plenty of troubleshooting articles and guides that make it easy to uncover the root of any small issues I may have.

Incentivized

The chat and online resources are great. The managers are too. They go through account reps pretty fast. Also, not a lot of onboarding once a product or service is sold. The ticket request system is terrible, they have too many people switching off roles, they take a long time to get back to you and don't plan on anything being fixed over a weekend - even if you have a problem. Their customer service via tickets is the worst.

Incentivized

I did not train in person

Incentivized

The staff walked me through the whole platform and asked me if I had any questions. They were very helpful in answering any questions I had.

Incentivized

Their training is good, but the promotion of it is even better. I don't need or have the time for training, but I was always happy to know it was there. They did a great job sending updates out and making me aware when there was a new feature that I may want training for. As for the training I never used it, so I can't comment on that

Be sure of the game play mechanics you need to achieve your objectives, it will help significantly in setting up the game and creating the assets

Make sure you do it all the way. Do not break it into phases. Pour yourself a coffee, start it in the morning and you'll be done before you finish that coffee.

Want to post the same content on different profiles? Don't duplicate your posts, you can just select what platform to post them onto! You can even change around the copy/hashtags/etc to optimize the posts for each platform.

Incentivized

While lacking in some features compared to those big alternatives, Sendible doesn't stop releasing new features every few months and doesn't cost nearly as much monthly as they do for the amount of profiles they allow to manage. Overall I'd say it's a solid competitor if they keep the updates coming and optimize the platform a little

Incentivized

Takes the best of all of these and puts them in one place. I am yet to find a feature that these have that are not on Sprout Social, while there are many missing features on these platforms that come with Sprout Social as standard.

Incentivized

I'm not sure I understand what is meant by scalability.

Incentivized

• It has saved our company a lot of time digging through all different social medias to be responsive to consumers
• It has helped us be more responsive to prospects, so better lead generation
• Agorapulse allows us to be in touch quicker with our prospects, meaning better lead to appointment generation as well.

Incentivized

• It helps my business, to manage my clients social media.
• However I was hoping to capture more people who want to use the tool as DIY which has not happened.
• I do not want to let it go but it is currently more of an expense then bringing in a return.

Incentivized

• One positive impact has been a huge time saver for our team. Where we once had multiple systems and delays from producing content to approval to publishing, now everything is seamless.
• Another positive impact is streamlining the onboarding process for new team members. Sprout Social is user-friendly and intuitive, making it easy to study even for someone completely new to social media.
• One negative impact has been the time it takes to wade through irrelevant social listening posts. The filtering is not effective enough to eliminate the noise.

Incentivized