Sprout Social

Overview
ProductRatingMost Used ByProduct SummaryStarting Price
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
Sprout Social
Editions & Modules
Essentials
$79 per seat/per month annual / $99 per seat/per month monthly
Standard
$199 annual / $249 monthly
per user/per month
Professional
$299 annual / $399 monthly
per user/per month
Advanced
$399 annual / $499 monthly
per user/per month
Free Trial
Free
for 30 days
Offerings
Pricing Offerings
Sprout Social
Free Trial
Yes
Free/Freemium Version
No
Premium Consulting/Integration Services
No
Entry-level Setup FeeNo setup fee
Additional Details
More Pricing Information
Community Pulse
Sprout Social
Considered Both Products
Sprout Social
Chose Sprout Social
Sprout Social has more in depth reporting metrics and makes it easier to plan and keep track of your social media posts.
Chose Sprout Social
Sprout Social scheduling and analytics capabilities as well as the internal conversations and assignment features are what put it above the rest.
Chose Sprout Social
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 …
Chose Sprout Social
Doesnt compare at all and your information isnt really safe with google much less platforms that can be added and tracked
Chose Sprout Social
Sprout Social is overall an easier platform to use, understand, train on and be trained on than Meltwater. While I do think that Meltwater has listening tools at a higher level than Sprout Social, every other aspect of the platform is harder to use and not as intuitive or …
Chose Sprout Social
Sprout Social's Social Inbox and Listening Tools stood out, plus the sales and onboarding processes were well connected and helpful. They were flexible in the price point as a nonprofit and organization with unique needs in general. They also hit all the marks in what we needed …
Chose Sprout Social
Sprout Social is able to do all + more than the other platforms mentioned. And the user dashboard is easy on the eyes. Again, I'd like to add that Sprout Social puts an effort into their support team which makes it much more appealing to use the platform overall.
Chose Sprout Social
I think Sprout Social is much better. In my opinion, it is superior in its functions and user experience. I have also enjoyed the trainings and webinars a bit more here.
Chose Sprout Social
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.
Chose Sprout Social
Sprout Social has more features and is easier to use
Chose Sprout Social
The reason we decided to go with Sprout Social was mainly the 'approval' function. The second reason was the reporting tool (analytics), where we found a lot of great insights and health status of our organic socials.
Chose Sprout Social
Hootsuite is more budget-friendly. Sprout Social is pricier but it has more features. Sprout Social also has better analytics and reporting. Hootsuite is good at scheduling posts and is pretty basic. There are paid add-ons that you can add such as listening. Listening is …
Chose Sprout Social
The tool is better in terms of the value it’s providing and the cost is also good but the user interface has to be improved so it can be made usable in fully. A new member may find it very difficult to use from day 1 so it’s something to be looked
Chose Sprout Social
Reporting is a big deal for us since we manage different clients, Sprout social let us to adjust and filter for all of them and also to get the reporting in different formats
Chose Sprout Social
It's been awhile since I've used these, except for Agorapulse - I used them more recently. Agorapulse was not intuitive to use, their features were not as regularly updated/integrated with Meta, their reporting wasn't as detailed as Sprout, and there were a lot of bugs/issues …
Chose Sprout Social
They are pretty similar in many ways. However, I'm now most comfortable in Sprout Social, both from having used Sprout Social the longest and finding the UX of its basic tools most intuitive in comparison to other products.
Chose Sprout Social
We use Sprout Social right now because it's very user friendly and has the features that we as a communications team need for the most part. We have used or looked into other scheduling platforms in the past, and mostly because of the cost of Sprout Social we have considered …
Chose Sprout Social
I will admit that I have not used Hootsuite, however, I do think if you have more then 40 or so accounts they might be able to handle that more. I have used Later Social & Buffer and I find Sprout Social easier to use and less clunky UI. Later & Buffer do work, but I used both …
Chose Sprout Social
We use Asana to track tasks for all of our work, not just social media. I would love to see a Sprout Social and Asana integration.
Features
Sprout Social
Listening/monitoring
Comparison of Listening/monitoring features of Product A and Product B
Sprout Social
7.4
111 Ratings
3% below category average
Boolean keyword searches7.178 Ratings
Filtering out noise/spam7.193 Ratings
Sentiment analysis7.375 Ratings
Broad channel coverage8.187 Ratings
Publishing
Comparison of Publishing features of Product A and Product B
Sprout Social
8.3
139 Ratings
3% above category average
Content planning and scheduling9.2139 Ratings
Audience targeting7.4106 Ratings
Content optimization8.2122 Ratings
Workflow management8.4121 Ratings
Engagement
Comparison of Engagement features of Product A and Product B
Sprout Social
8.1
126 Ratings
0% above category average
Automated routing and prioritization7.881 Ratings
Customer interaction histories8.1111 Ratings
Bulk actions8.2110 Ratings
Marketing
Comparison of Marketing features of Product A and Product B
Sprout Social
7.2
93 Ratings
7% below category average
Lead generation7.167 Ratings
Content marketing8.289 Ratings
Paid media management6.23 Ratings
Campaigns and promotions7.24 Ratings
Channel coverage/integration
Comparison of Channel coverage/integration features of Product A and Product B
Sprout Social
8.5
138 Ratings
2% above category average
Twitter8.9122 Ratings
Facebook8.8137 Ratings
LinkedIn8.8125 Ratings
Google+7.846 Ratings
Instagram8.7127 Ratings
Pinterest8.346 Ratings
YouTube8.01 Ratings
Reporting/analytics
Comparison of Reporting/analytics features of Product A and Product B
Sprout Social
8.3
140 Ratings
7% above category average
Campaign success analytics8.7132 Ratings
Real-time tracking8.2128 Ratings
Competitor analysis8.1116 Ratings
Account management
Comparison of Account management features of Product A and Product B
Sprout Social
8.0
132 Ratings
1% above category average
Role-based user permissions & privileges8.5126 Ratings
Mobile access7.5119 Ratings
Best Alternatives
Sprout Social
Small Businesses
CoSchedule Marketing Suite
CoSchedule Marketing Suite
Score 10.0 out of 10
Medium-sized Companies
CoSchedule Marketing Suite
CoSchedule Marketing Suite
Score 10.0 out of 10
Enterprises
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Social Suite by Reputation.com
Score 9.4 out of 10
All AlternativesView all alternatives
User Ratings
Sprout Social
Likelihood to Recommend
8.4
(176 ratings)
Likelihood to Renew
9.5
(65 ratings)
Usability
8.6
(103 ratings)
Availability
7.7
(8 ratings)
Performance
8.0
(7 ratings)
Support Rating
4.6
(38 ratings)
Online Training
7.3
(3 ratings)
Implementation Rating
10.0
(11 ratings)
Ease of integration
7.8
(27 ratings)
Vendor post-sale
9.1
(1 ratings)
Vendor pre-sale
9.1
(1 ratings)
User Testimonials
Sprout Social
Likelihood to Recommend
Sprout Social
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.
Read full review
Pros
Sprout Social
  • 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.
Read full review
Cons
Sprout Social
  • 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.
Read full review
Likelihood to Renew
Sprout Social
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.
Read full review
Usability
Sprout Social
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.
Read full review
Reliability and Availability
Sprout Social
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.
Read full review
Performance
Sprout Social
It is quick to post, however you have to refresh the page every time you add a new scheduled item.
Read full review
Support Rating
Sprout Social
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.
Read full review
Online Training
Sprout Social
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
Read full review
Implementation Rating
Sprout Social
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.
Read full review
Alternatives Considered
Sprout Social
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.
Read full review
Return on Investment
Sprout Social
  • 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.
Read full review
ScreenShots

Sprout Social Screenshots

Screenshot of Sprout’s social media publishing tools, used to schedule and post messages to Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest and LinkedIn simultaneously from a single Compose window.