Buffer vs. Owler vs. Sprout Social

It helps me save hours by devoting only half an hour in a month's worth of posting, in addition to that it is quite simple to use. Buffer for scheduling social posts well in advance, but I have begun using it instead of posting natively on the social apps themselves because it makes it super easy to post the same messages to more than one platform.

This is a free service, so it should be compared to free and low cost alerting (e.g. Google Alerts) and PE/VC funding profile (e.g. Crunchbase) services. Owler is well suited for competitive intelligence professionals, named account reps, and marketing professionals tracking company news (web mined company mentions and press releases) and social media (blogs, Video, YouTube). The alerts are high precision and tag for three key events (M&A, Funding, Exec Changes). It is the alerting and social media tools which are the key strength of the service. The company claims two million profiles, but only has 60,000 with full address information. Content includes competitors, user polls, and funding / M&A data. Owler should be viewed as a free complement to other online company research tools, but it lacks the depth to replace subscription services. Missing content includes long business descriptions; financials and discrete sizing data; family tree linkage, and executive profiles (only the CEO is covered) While they offer list building functionality, it is quite thin and non-downloadable. As such, I would not recommend Owler for sales and marketing prospecting at this point. A unique feature is a set of company polls about the direction of the company and CEO performance. Unfortunately, the response rates are often too low to be statistically meaningful.

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

• I can plan and publish content on social channels.
• Buffer's interface is quite tidy and generates the necessary facilities to save us time in publishing consistent content.
• It has a special price; it is pretty affordable.
• It has the possibility of integrating with other tools to improve its functions.

Incentivized

• Owler enables the user to quickly find the data and information that he or she needs.
• I appreciate the customizable dashboard where you can set alerts and track companies you select.
• The latest news regarding the funding rounds of startup companies is especially helpful.
• The top competitors to companies provided by Owler often give me a great point of reference for my competitive analysis.

Incentivized

• 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

• Expensive Analytics: The upgrade you need to access your analytics is quite expensive, and I have come across other tools that provide the same or even more for a lesser priced plan.
• No Media Library: The one feature I have found on another social media planning tool that I wish Buffer had is a media library. This allows you to upload photos you aren't using right away to have them readily available when you do decide to use them. This is not a feature in Buffer.

Incentivized

• The information provided is useful but at times the variation with other websites and tools is substantial which makes it difficult to rely solely on owler
• Information only about bigger companies is available not for smaller and research on smaller ones are important as there are not many tools that do that
• There are few companies that appear as defunct or do not exist but in the actual market there is a lot going on with them and being in market intelligence industry owler needs to capture that
• It would be great if they provide revenue or growth of the in the past three years or so. As it would save our time and efforts to some extent
• They need to maintain the database in aperiodic manner with precise information

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

I am giving buffer this rating because of a couple issues that it has compared to other platforms. It does not always post to instagram and you will need to go in an manually post. Also, one of the biggest qualms that we have with buffer is the price it costs to have robust analytics

Incentivized

Not really an applicable question as this is a free service, but if they charged $100 / year (GageIn's price) I would still license the service.

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

We use Buffer for certain website content that should be shared on social networks, having this tool helps us to do it faster and easier since we can send the publications from the internet browser and the stack of scheduled messages. It is really fast and easy for all team members who share access to the account, so at the same time that we analyze the information that we can share, the message stack is prepared

Incentivized

I think it's well designed but always room for improvement. Maybe more customization in layout or information presented. Maybe even a layout that allows comparison and ranking of companies in a similar industry or vertical, or company size, and geography

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

Buffer is always on hand and very reliable, their software suite rarely has outages

Incentivized

I have yet to see the platform down or running slowly, but there have been multiple instances recently (Q2 2015) when the user links to a news story and Owler gives an Oops message. Users simply click on the story a second time and the story is displayed. This is a nuisance bug. I also have a sense that the system is not processing alerts as quickly as before, but I haven't tracked this closely, so I could be wrong about it.

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.

Buffer performs well on both desktop and mobile platforms. The one area as I have stated before is that it does not always want to automatically push to Instagram and the user will have to go do it manually. Buffer works very well pushing to other platforms. The instagram issue is the only reason buffer does not get a 10 on this section

Incentivized

The news precision, which is the most important feature for me, is very accurate. They have editors review the news to ensure it is properly tagged by company and event type.

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

1. It really helped to my business to grow online.
2. I was able to take actions mindfully as the analytics are damn good.
3. Also used for managing clients social media accounts and it proved to be a best resource.
4. Clients were really happy as they got high demand and growth on internet and the secret is Buffer.
5. The user interface is really easy to understand and manage. Support is 24/7 available to help.

Incentivized

Problems have been closed quickly and professionally.

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

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

We were very satisfied with the implementation of Buffer. We had no issues switching from the platform that we were using over to buffer. Our staff did not even miss a beat when it came to posting content. It was an easy transition and I feel that is something that buffer has really done well. They have an "out of the box" usability platform

Incentivized

Focus on setting up companies that have limited news coverage first. Public companies are well covered and it is easy to track them. Furthermore, the surfeit of news around public companies can crowd out smaller companies with less news. It is smaller companies where you are most likely to see a benefit in their tracking of news, blogs, press releases, and videos.

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.

I also used Combin which is easy and free to use. However, Combin only posts when the computer is active and connected to the internet. So, posting while you are not actively using your computer at that moment is not possible, therefore Buffer is much more efficient as you can even post while being on vacation without working.

Incentivized

I believe Lead411 and Owler go hand in hand, rather than one over the other. I believe Lead411's contact generation is far stronger based on the cost, but Owler allows you to broaden your horizon for prospecting whereas Lead411 is more of a user-driven search rather than an platform-driven search.

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

Buffer does what it say on tin as they say! you can always count on Buffer. Buffer can be scale to 25 social account with 2,000 scheduled post which is enough for most agencies or businesses

Incentivized

• It has saved money by allowing us to automate our social using one person
• It allows us to connect one channel at a time instead of wasting money on larger account management tools
• We are making money, because it has already delivered several clients

Incentivized

• The personalisation of emails has definitely helped us to earn a higher reply rate, with the knock-on that this will be helping with future deals.
• Keeps us very relevant in our conversations with contacts. They are often impressed by the research and knowledge we have on their company and how we have aligned ourselves to help. Again, small differences at the start of calls but this will be helping with the number of opportunities created.
• Reduces SDR prospecting time. Quick and easy to get updates allowing them to process a great number of accounts on a daily basis.

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