Social media
Buffer vs Hootsuite
Buffer for almost every small business: schedule posts, see what worked, move on. Hootsuite earns its price only when several people need approval workflows, social listening and inbox management across many accounts.
- No affiliate links
- Public pricing only
- Updated by hand
Scheduling is a solved problem and both do it. The gap is everything around it — monitoring streams, team permissions, approvals, unified inbox — and how much you pay for features you may never open.
Buffer's per-channel pricing is unusually honest: three channels costs a fraction of ten. Hootsuite's entry plan starts at a level most small teams find hard to justify.
Side by side
Buffer and Hootsuite in short.
Buffer
Simple social scheduling and analytics, priced per connected channel.
- Free
- Free plan covering up to three channels with basic scheduling.
- Paid from
- From roughly $6 per channel per month
Good at
- Genuinely cheap — you pay for what you connect
- Clean scheduling queue and an AI assistant for repurposing posts
- Free plan is enough for a solo founder
Weak at
- Light on monitoring and listening
- Approval workflows are basic
Hootsuite
Established social management suite with streams, listening, approvals and inbox.
- Free
- No free plan.
- Paid from
- From roughly $99/month
Good at
- Monitoring streams and social listening in one dashboard
- Approval workflows and permissions for larger teams
- Unified inbox across networks
Weak at
- Expensive relative to what small teams use
- Interface is dense and dated in places
The differences
Where they actually diverge.
Pick one
Which one fits you.
Choose Buffer if
- You post to a few channels and want it queued
- Budget is under $50 a month
- Nobody needs to approve anything
Choose Hootsuite if
- Several people publish and someone must sign off
- You need to monitor mentions and reply in one place
- You manage many client accounts
When neither is the answer
If one channel drives all your results, post natively. Native tools schedule for free and some networks still favour native posting behaviour in reach.
Questions
Common questions.
Do schedulers reduce reach?
There's no reliable public evidence that third-party posting is penalised on the major networks today, and both tools use official APIs. What does hurt reach is posting the same content everywhere without adapting it.
What about X and LinkedIn specifically?
X's API pricing has made third-party posting less reliable and more expensive for vendors. If X is your main channel, check current support before subscribing, or use a dedicated tool like Typefully.
Prices are list prices published by each vendor and change often — check the linked pricing pages before you buy. We take no affiliate commission and nobody pays to appear here.
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