eClincher aims to be the most powerful, complete and intuitive social media management software. According to the vendor, the product is designed to help users, businesses, and agencies manage social media presence with one platform, and offers the following capabilities: advanced publishing publishing automation (queues, RSS feeds, recycle evergreen content) engagement with unified social inbox & live social feeds monitoring content…
$149
per month
Sprout Social
Score 8.5 out of 10
N/A
Sprout Social provides social media management, marketing, customer care, data and intelligence, and employee advocacy solutions for brands and agencies, including Ticketmaster, Chipotle, Grubhub, Subaru, and Zendesk. Sprout’s platform is used to simplify social publishing, engagement, reviews, analytics and listening for customers. Sprout also provides customer success and technical support, to deliver consistent value to all users. Any organization, regardless of size or industry, receives…
$249
per month per user
Pricing
eClincher
Sprout Social
Editions & Modules
Standard
$149
per month
Professional
$349
per month
Enterprise
Contact Vendor
Essentials
$79 per seat/per month annual / $99 per seat/per month monthly
There are loads of social scheduling tools out there. I was using Buffer but then found it was limited in terms of listening and reporting so I started to look at a more professional software. I tried Hootsuite but hated the interface, way too busy with the primary focus …
I used Sprout in a past life and while it does have some more features and might be a bit more aesthetically pleasing and a tad more intuitive, it doesn't have the queues feature eClincher has, and it is much more expensive. The only feature I miss from Sprout really is the …
In my quest to find the best Social Media Management software, I tried just about every service out there (scrolling through Capterra, TrustRadius, and G2 Crowd to find new programs). I was able to go for about 4 months on free trials alone and kept a log of the pros and cons, …
I selected Sprout because it was more comprehensive in everything we needed. We previously used Meltwater and it was fine for posting and analytics, but we weren't able to see everything we posted in the calendar view like we can with Sprout. Even if we posted in the native …
Best suited for a marketer that cares about reports, needs a social media management platform and doesn't want to pay more for a more aesthetically pleasing version of a platform with the same or less functionality, such as Hootsuite or Sprout Social. For a social media marketer that wants to automate some of their postings, the queues feature is great for this functionality. Not best suited for beginners to social media, as their platform is best utilized with someone familiar with the industry that knows what they are doing. Their chat support team is very good though, but this type of individual might find themselves spending a lot of time on the platform.
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.
eClincher supports nearly every social network and connects to a large number of sources (blogs, bit.ly, Google Analytics, Google My Business). This makes workflow tremendously easy.
Posting Groups. At higher levels of service, eClincher allows you to set-up individual brand accounts. My agency isn't at that level, so we utilize eClincher's posting groups to make 1-click groups that post to all of the profiles for each client. This allows us to quickly post a cohesive message across all channels.
Workflow management: eClincher adds plenty of additional tools to make your workflow fast. Connections to free stock photo services make it easy to add generic pictures to your content. Google Analytics and bit.ly can keep track of statistics and measure success. The Inbox allows you to handle all your clients' accounts from one screen (including comments, messages, reviews, and more). The Feeds and Influencers tabs allow you to understand your market and what's being said. Altogether, eClincher makes a 1-app solution for Social Media Management.
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.
It's not very visually appealing, but this is not a dealbreaker.
The reporting features could definitely use some work. I still get more value from the native SNS pages, but this is quickly changing. They removed the "export to CSV" functionality, but they plan to reintroduce it soon. As mentioned previously, they really respond to criticism well and update the tool constantly.
The inbox could use some work. I don't like being directed offsite to view certain comments deemed "requests for further info" when they could just easily display them there.
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.
Unless the price of eClincher moves to a point where it is too much to justify, I don't see any reason why we wouldn't continue to use eClincher for our agency. The value at this price-point is unbelievable and we'd be foolish to move to a pricier program purely for the sake of slicker graphics or UI. eClinchers pricing is fantastic, and is only matched by its functionality—it matches or beats any of the major Social Media Manager SaaS programs out there for a fraction of the cost. This tool is great for growing agencies, but would also be useful for any marketing department or large agency that wants to streamline their social media workflow.
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.
Its usability was good until they changed their plans and stopped their LTD program for its early adopters who helped raise the tool by giving it positive reviews. I don't think eClincher is ethical in any sense based on the recent actions.
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.
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.
[In my experience,] due to the fact that they did a bait and switch on their plans and blamed AppSumo for the lifetime program ending is simply wrong. [I believe that] it's unethical to get support and reviews from their early adopters then take the plan away later.
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.
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 patient. eClincher isn't perfect and has some software issues. These issues will be exacerbated if you get frustrated or have a slow connection. If something "breaks" or locks up, just refresh the page and re-do that step. It may take your team a couple weeks to get use to using the new system. Once they've gotten the hang of it, I'm sure they'll love the amount of time they save. I'd recommend taking your time with the set-up. Though there aren't a lot of steps to get everything squared away, you can break the process into small chunks to make sure you're managing your time. To just hook-up all the social accounts, it may only take an hour or so. But, if you want to set-up all the extra tools (such as user accounts, listening feeds, posting groups, schedules, etc.) it'll take longer. I think it took around a day to set-up completely, but your mileage my vary.
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.
There are loads of social scheduling tools out there. I was using Buffer but then found it was limited in terms of listening and reporting so I started to look at a more professional software. I tried Hootsuite but hated the interface, way too busy with the primary focus being on feeds rather than scheduling. Sprout Social I found clunky and hard to use. eClincher was recommended to me by a friend. I think the interface (desktop and mobile) is easy to use but what sets it apart is its support - the live chat is brilliant.
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.
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.
