Social media management tools

Social media management tools let a person or a team plan, approve and publish posts to several networks from one calendar, answer comments and messages from one inbox, and report on how accounts perform. Marketing teams, agencies managing client accounts, creators and small businesses use them. They differ in what they charge for (each user, each connected channel, a bundle of profiles), which networks they publish to, whether the inbox covers direct messages, and which plan carries approvals, listening or single sign-on.

We compare them on the same six indicators, read from each vendor's pricing, trust, legal, help center and developer pages:

• Pricing clarity: whether the plan you need has a published price, can be bought online and month to month, whether extra users or profiles have a price, and whether the pages leave prices out or contradict each other.
• Free plan and trial: a permanent free plan and how many profiles, users and posts it allows; otherwise the length of the trial and whether it needs a card.
• Price for 3 users and 10 profiles: the monthly cost for 3 users managing 10 social profiles on the cheapest plan that covers them, billed annually, with the arithmetic shown; 0 when the pages cannot price it.
• Networks and publishing: which of ten major networks you can publish to, and on which plan approval workflows and bulk scheduling sit.
• Engagement and reporting: an inbox for comments and direct messages, social listening, competitor analytics and custom or branded reports, and on which plan each one sits.
• Security and team controls: the vendor's own SOC 2 Type II and ISO 27001, two-factor sign-in, a published DPA, SAML single sign-on and user roles.

How posts perform and how quickly a team replies depend on the team and the networks, not the tool, so we do not score them. Each review says which pages it was written from and when. Where we have run a product hands-on, the evidence is on its page.