Publer vs. Sprout Social

Where Publer is well suited: + Organisation of multiple social media accounts for when you have multiple brands + The integration of Google Maps makes it easy to organise multiple locations + Calendar with a nice overview makes it easy to see your social media planning for the following period of time Where it is less suited for: - Comparing competition and ideal posting time is quite a surplus in cost - No native Dutch version

Sprout is typically the first platform that comes to mind when I think of social media content scheduling/platform management/social media management. However, Sprout is very pricey, and I don’t think there’s an obvious standout element that helps differentiate it from other scheduling platforms. For organizations with only a few social media profiles, I’d be more likely to recommend lower-cost or free platforms as opposed to Sprout. I’d probably only recommend Sprout for organizations with dozens or hundreds of social media accounts

Incentivized

• A unified drag-and-drop calendar with genuine native previews allows us to bulk-upload images or videos, shuffle posts between dates and platforms, and see exactly how each platform (FB, IG, TikTok, Threads, etc.) will display before we hit “Schedule.”
• Role-based approvals that streamline teamwork: interns draft, managers approve, and the audit trail ensures that nothing inconsistent slips through.
• Quick-glance analytics built right into the calendar, surface engagement spikes, best-time suggestions and post-level stats without exporting to another tool, so we can tweak campaigns on the spot.

• 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

• Some IG features are currently missing, like syncing with trending sounds, but I think that's more of an API limitation than a fault with Publer
• The website interface can be a bit challenging to navigate. It isn't quite as intuitive as I'd like with where things are placed.
• Some of the terms are confusing, like "recycling" and "recurring." I wish they'd combine these two particular posting options into one.
• I'd also love to see better integration with my personalized AI, trained on my 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

I love the tool, is simple and useful

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

Publer is overall pretty easy to use. You can schedule posts very easily, and we have found that new users can pick this up very easily. It could have an improved dashboard and UI that shows the different sections more clearly, but it has still been easy to use overall.

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.

The pages do load very quick but in the the iPad form

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

Every time I have contacted Publer, I get answers right away

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.

In our opinion, Sendible is poorly designed and takes too many menus, clicks, opens and closes to perform a simple task. Their pricing structure changes suddenly with price increases and loss of seats. Socialbee was a contender but had restraints for a multi brand company that we did not want to workaround.

Incentivized

We started this agency using Later and switched to Iconosqaure because we needed more in-depth reporting. We switched from Iconosquare to Sprout Social because of the continuous scheduling bugs/issues we were having with our account and our terrible experience with their Customer Service team. We are planning to close our Sprout Social account and move to HeyOrca because of cost, ease of use, and the basic scheduling features Sprout Social doesn't offer.

Incentivized

I just used the web integration

I think this is well designed product. I really enjoy that I am able to learn it quick, integrate all the socials very easily

• I can on-charge the price of the subscription within my package, so I can charge it out for what I want, allowing me to make some profit
• Every one of my clients has loved using it, so they are more inclined to keep using our social media services
• Publer helps my business to look professional

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