Later Social vs. Sprout Social vs. VistaCreate

The free version is more than enough for personal use. But if you have a small business or if you're trying to grow your brand, it's better to use one of the premium plans. It's worth it. Later is especially useful if you manage multiple accounts for multiple brands/companies because you'll be managing everything with just one tool

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

VistaCreate is well suited for creating engaging content for users of all age groups. There are beautiful, modern templates and a variety of shapes and animations to choose from. Most importantly, the cost is inexpensive, and you get that bang for your buck. An attractive feature is the ability to upload music, or choose from the library, to add to your content piece. It's quite clever, as this allows the reader to engage in more than one sense e.g., animated content versus static text. The reader hears music, and the content is animated and visually appealing. This allows keywords to be highlighted. The probability of communicating your message in this manner is increased.

Incentivized

• Later's easy upload feature (drag and drop) is incredibly helpful, especially for multiple images and videos.
• The drag and drop option for scheduling content is easy, and images and videos load rather quickly depending on size.
• Captions can be saved if there are posts or common phrases that repeated and shared out from the content.

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

• Certificate design
• Social media communications
• Conversion of designs into various file formats e.g. mp4, jpg, pdf
• PowerPoint designs

Incentivized

• I wish I could edit the look and feel of my pictures within Later a little easier. There are standard filters, but for brand sake, I need everything to be consistent.
• I wish there was a direct integration with things like Canva and Lightroom to make uploading and editing my images seamless.
• The biggest thing I wish Later did was allowing a better threshold for the free accounts. All of the helpful and useful features are for paid only (video posts, multi-image posts, analytics, etc). I can't justify the cost for just a few posts a month. I end up doing all of the video and multi-image posts manually, which lately has me questioning the benefit of Later's free version as a small business.

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

• Difficult to design content on mobile phone
• Mobile designs do not sync with desktop app

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

The desktop site is almost perfect, I love it. I love that I can drag and drop, I love that I can easily and quickly switch to analytics and switching profiles... love the ease of link in bio. so great!

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

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.

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

Later are not just a software tool, they also provide marketing advice, tips, and tutorials via their blog. I’ve only had to reach out to them for help a few times and have found them to respond much faster than other tools in their category. I receive weekly emails with updates, marketing tips and invites to online events. I look forward to their emails as I’ve learned a lot of things that I’ve been able to actually implement.

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

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

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 went with Later for the lower cost subscription. The Hootsuite copy features is missed, but Later has hashtag suggestions which is nice. I really need something to post across multiple platforms. I also needed the ability to schedule more than the 5 free scheduled posts offered by Hootsuite. Later has been working great for what I need it to do to support my small event promotion business.

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

In my view, VistaCreate is easier to navigate and design content. The templates are fun and appealing. The availability of Shutterstock photos is endless. The version history is saved so that work is not lost. There is a brand feature that automatically selects color themes to support branding. It is easy to export content to your desired file type.

Incentivized

• Increased social media involvement - Since utilizing Later and another social media scheduling tool, we have seen our growth rise as much as 12% in just a few months. This includes followers, likes, and engagement. This is huge for us since social media is a great way to generate new customers and increase brand awareness.
• Easier reporting - Analytics tools on most of the big three (Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter) are pretty limited. Later is a great way to take a look at our Analytics, and it makes it easy to understand the numbers.

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

• Improved communication with staff
• Improved brand presence on social media
• Ability to appeal to all age groups
• Improved staff morale

Incentivized