7 Sprout Social Alternatives for Agencies and Growing Teams

If your team keeps growing and most of the work is client content, the Sprout Social alternatives below will usually cost less, because they don't charge for every person who logs in. Sequence and Metricool price by brand, Sendible by workspace, SocialPilot and Vista Social by plan tier, and Agorapulse and Hootsuite per user like Sprout does. If you rely on social listening, Premium Analytics or a large customer care team, Sprout is still a strong choice, and switching could cost you more in lost capability than you save.

We make Sequence, so read this with that in mind. Prices are in USD before tax, taken from each vendor's own pricing and help pages, checked October 2026. For a feature-by-feature look at the two products, see Sequence vs Sprout Social.

Sprout charges per seat on every plan. Essentials is US$79 a seat a month billed annually (US$99 monthly), Standard US$199 (US$249), Professional US$299 (US$399) and Advanced US$399 (US$499), according to Sprout's pricing page. Essentials and Standard include five social profiles, so most agencies land on Professional for unlimited profiles.

That model makes sense when each seat is a full-time social manager. It gets expensive when the extra people are a video editor who only needs to read feedback, a designer who uploads final files, or an account manager who checks the calendar twice a week. Each of them still counts as a seat.

Internal approval workflows start on Professional. Approval by people outside your team is a separate feature: Sprout's External Approvers workflow needs the Advanced plan and allows a maximum of three external approvers, who approve from an email link without a seat (Sprout help centre). An agency with eight clients, each with its own sign-off person, runs past that limit quickly.

So the useful question when comparing alternatives is not "does it have approvals?" Most of them do. Ask which plan includes approval by clients, how many clients can approve, and whether each reviewer needs a paid login.

Sprout is the better fit when the work goes well beyond publishing client content. Stay, or at least get a renewal quote before you switch, if any of these describe you:

Key: ✅ included on the plan named. ◐ conditional or limited. ❌ not offered according to the vendor's pages. "Not confirmed" means the vendor's own pages didn't settle it.

Here's a setup that's common once an agency outgrows its first few clients: six staff (two social managers, an account manager, a designer, a video editor and the owner), eight clients with four social profiles each (32 profiles), and every client approves posts before they go out. Monthly billing in USD before tax, checked October 2026, with annual rates where the vendor publishes them.

The cheapest options are not like-for-like. Metricool and SocialPilot cost less than Sequence here, and both deserve a trial if publishing and reporting are most of the job. Sequence costs more than those two because the price includes media review with timecoded comments, a Plan document on every post and guest approval without logins. It costs a small fraction of Sprout's Advanced plan for the same team, mostly because adding the video editor costs nothing.

Sequence is an all-in-one social media management platform built around the work before publishing. Each post has a Plan for the brief and script, media review with comments pinned to a timecode and drawings on the frame, review stages for the plan, the media and the final post, and publishing to eight networks: Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube, TikTok, Threads, X and Pinterest.

The difference that matters for Sprout users is the client step. On Pro, a post or project share link can let anyone holding it comment, draw on media at a timecode and approve or request changes, with only a name, no account and no seat. There's no limit on how many clients do that. Pro also includes the inbox (DMs on Instagram, Facebook, X and TikTok, and comments across seven networks), scheduled email reports, and DM Flows for Instagram and Facebook.

Pricing: a Free plan for one brand, one user and one account. Pro starts at US$49 a month for one brand, graduated per brand, with unlimited members and five accounts per brand. See how agencies set it up on the agencies page. Yearly billing is 10 times the monthly price.

What you give up: social listening, competitor benchmarking and Bluesky publishing, all of which Sprout offers. Ads analytics covers Meta only.

Agorapulse is the closest like-for-like move for teams that chose Sprout for engagement. Its inbox covers comments, DMs and reviews on every plan, and white-label report exports are on all plans too (Agorapulse pricing). On Advanced, shared calendars let clients approve, comment or reject without an account (Agorapulse help).

It still prices per user: US$79 to US$149 a user a month billed annually across Standard, Professional and Advanced (US$99 to US$199 monthly). Each self-serve plan lists 10 profiles and Advanced lists five shared calendars, so an agency past five clients will likely be talking to sales about Custom. Its automated moderation can label, assign or hide messages, but it doesn't send comment-to-DM replies.

Hootsuite is worth considering if you're leaving Sprout over a specific gap rather than the price. Advanced costs US$399 a user a month billed annually and is the first plan with review and approval workflows. Professional is US$199 with unlimited accounts and custom reports (Hootsuite plans). Hootsuite doesn't publish its monthly-billing prices.

One difference worth knowing: Hootsuite includes Instagram comment-to-DM keyword automation on all plans (Hootsuite). We couldn't confirm from Hootsuite's own pages whether clients can approve without a seat, so ask before you assume the per-user maths changes. If you're a smaller team weighing Hootsuite itself, our Hootsuite alternatives for small agencies covers that decision.

Sendible prices by workspaces and profiles, with unlimited users on every plan (Sendible pricing). Plus (US$99 a month, 3 workspaces, 18 profiles) adds assignment and approvals through client dashboards. Premium (US$199, 7 workspaces, 42 profiles) adds custom branded reports, and Elite (US$299, 15 workspaces, 90 profiles) is where a growing agency usually ends up. A white-label app is a paid add-on on Elite and Enterprise; Sendible's FAQ quotes it from US$349 a month on Elite.

It's a good fit when the client count grows faster than the team and each client needs its own space. Sendible doesn't list DM automation.

Vista Social publishes to more networks than most tools here, including Reddit, Snapchat, Tumblr and Bluesky, and its inbox covers comments, DMs and reviews on all plans. DM automations, including Instagram comment-to-DM and story replies, are on every plan as well (Vista Social help). Approvals for outside teams and clients start on Advanced.

Pricing is by tier: Professional US$99 a month (15 profiles), Advanced US$199 (30 profiles) and Scale US$449 (70 profiles, white-label reports), per Vista Social pricing. The plan table lists 2, 3 and 4 users, while the FAQ quotes higher numbers for Professional and Advanced, so get the user count in writing. X is a US$29 monthly add-on.

SocialPilot's Premium plan (US$100 a month, US$85 annually) includes 20 accounts, six users, unlimited client seats, client approval workflows and white-label reports (SocialPilot pricing). Extra accounts are US$4 a month. Standard and above include an inbox for comments, DMs and story replies, plus Instagram comment-to-DM automation (SocialPilot update).

It's lighter on production. Video review with timecoded comments isn't documented, so creative feedback usually still happens in another tool before the post reaches SocialPilot.

Metricool prices in bands of brands rather than people. Advanced covers up to 15 brands for US$67 a month (US$53 annually) and adds team and client management, post approvals, report templates and a Looker Studio connector (Metricool pricing). Paid plans include Flows for Instagram comment-to-DM, offered at no extra cost for a limited time.

It's the cheapest way off Sprout when analytics is what the client pays for. LinkedIn needs a paid plan, X is an add-on and white label is on Custom only. Our Sequence vs Metricool comparison explains where the price difference shows up.

Sprout contracts are often annual, so start trials a month or two before renewal, not in the week it lapses. Then work through these steps:

For the wider category, our guide to the best all-in-one social media management software scores ten tools against the same checklist.

If the last one sounds like your agency, compare Sequence's per-brand pricing with your current Sprout invoice, then run one client's month through a 14-day Pro trial.

Sprout Social pricing and help centre; Agorapulse, Hootsuite, Sendible, Vista Social, SocialPilot and Metricool pricing and help pages, all linked above; Sequence pricing. Checked October 2026. Prices and plan limits change.