Introduction
Hootsuite vs Later. In today’s digital age, social media management tools have become a crucial component for businesses, marketers, and individuals looking to establish and maintain an online presence. Hootsuite and Later are two of the most popular social media management tools in the market.
Both platforms offer a range of features to help users manage their social media accounts, schedule posts, analyze their performance, and engage with their audience.
However, each platform has its unique strengths and weaknesses that may make it a better fit for certain users or businesses.
ln this post, we’ll compare these tools, key features pros & cons pricings and give recommendations on who should use them.
Let’s get started!
What is Later?
Later is a scheduling and publishing tool focused on Instagram (Meta Business Partner, Pinterest Business Partner, and TikTok Marketing Partner). It also offers features such as planning and scheduling content, obtaining analytics, tracking user-generated content, and dealing with hashtags.
Later was the first Instagram scheduler and was created specifically for this platform. It started as a basic tool for Instagram but has since become more comprehensive and compatible with other social media sites, like Planoly.
What is Hootsuite?
Hootsuite is a social media management tool that allows you to manage multiple social media accounts from one place. You can schedule posts, monitor analytics, collaborate with team members, and more.
Hootsuite is one of the best tools in the industry and supports the most used social networks like Instagram, Facebook, TikTok YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Pinterest.
Why would you use Later?
If you want to efficiently manage your Instagram content by scheduling and publishing posts in advance. Later also provides tools for organizing and analyzing your Instagram presence, such as tracking user-generated content, generating multiple links in your bio, and monitoring hashtag usage.
If you’re managing multiple social media accounts, Later can help you streamline your workflow by allowing you to plan and schedule content across different platforms from one dashboard.
Overall, Later is a helpful tool for anyone looking to save time and increase their social media engagement on Instagram and beyond.
Why would you use Hootsuite?
If you want to schedule posts in advance, Hootsuite is one of the best options. It’s a great tool for managing multiple social media accounts and its library of templates makes it easy to create original content.
Hootsuite allows you to measure the impact of your posts so that you can learn from them and improve your social media strategy over time.
Is an all-in-one social media management solution and is the most comprehensive tool in the industry.
Hootsuite vs Later: Key features
Here are the key features of Hootsuite
- Social Media Management: Hootsuite allows you to manage multiple social media accounts from a single dashboard, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, Pinterest, Youtube, and TikTok.
- Scheduling and Publishing: You can schedule and publish social media posts in advance, which saves time and ensures consistent posting.
- Analytics and Reporting: Provides analytics on your social media performance, including engagement rates, reach, and follower growth, allowing you to adjust your strategy to improve your results.
- Social Listening and Monitoring: Hootsuite offers social listening and monitoring tools, allowing you to track mentions of your brand on social media and respond to customer inquiries and feedback.
- Collaboration and Team Management: Hootsuite offers collaboration features, allowing multiple team members to access and work on the same account simultaneously. You can also assign tasks, create approvals, and set permissions for team members.
- Integration with Other Tools: Integrates with other 150+ Third-party apps, allowing you to streamline your social media management and analytics.
The key features of Later are
- Instagram scheduling and auto-publishing: Later’s Instagram scheduling tool allows you to plan and schedule your posts in advance, and it can even automatically publish your content for you at the scheduled time.
- Instagram analytics: Later provides detailed analytics on your Instagram account, including follower growth, engagement rates, and more. This can help you understand how your content is performing and make data-driven decisions about your social media strategy.
- User-generated content (UGC) management: Later makes it easy to track and manage UGC on Instagram. You can easily search for and repost user-generated content from within the Later platform, which can help you build engagement and relationships with your followers.
- Linkin.bio: Later’s Linkin.bio feature allows you to add multiple links to your Instagram bio, which can help you drive traffic to your website or other online properties.
- Hashtag analytics: Later’s hashtag analytics tool allows you to track the performance of specific hashtags on Instagram, which can help you optimize your use of hashtags and increase your reach.
- Multi-platform scheduling: In addition to Instagram, Later allows you to schedule content for other social media platforms, including Facebook TikTok LinkedIn Pinterest, and Twitter.
Hootsuite vs Later: Ease of use
Later is designed to be user-friendly and easy to use, even if you don’t have a lot of experience with social media management tools.
The user interface is clean and simple, making it easy to navigate and find the features you need. Also, have drag-and-drop scheduling and visual planning functionalities.
In addition, Later’s mobile app allows you to manage your Instagram account on the go, which can be especially helpful if you’re running a business or managing multiple accounts.
Hootsuite is designed to be an easy-to-use social media management tool. The dashboard is organized and user-friendly, making it easy to navigate and manage multiple social media accounts.
Users can schedule posts, track analytics, and engage with their audience from one central location.
Hootsuite also offers a mobile app, which is user-friendly and provides a streamlined experience for mobile posting and engagement.
Although Hootsuite may require more time and effort to learn compared to other social media management tools but remains a highly effective and user-friendly option for businesses of all sizes.
Hootsuite vs Later: Customer Support
Hootsuite Academy provides resources on social media strategy, in-platform management, and reporting. Users can get support via social media, ticket submission, and 24/7 priority support for Business and Enterprise accounts.
Later offers a range of customer support options to help users get the most out of their platform. Users can contact the company via email, social media, and direct from the site with tutorials, webinars, and a help center (FAQ).
For customers in Advanced Plan, Later offers a dedicated customer success manager who can provide personalized support and guidance.
Hootsuite vs Later: Pros and Cons
When comparing Hootsuite and Later, it’s clear that both platforms have their unique strengths and weaknesses. Hootsuite offers a versatile platform with support for many social media platforms and robust analytics tools.
It’s an excellent choice for businesses with multiple team members who need to manage various social media accounts. However, Hootsuite can be complex and expensive, and it lacks visual content management features.
On the other hand, Later is designed specifically for Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok marketers, and offers a user-friendly interface with intuitive scheduling tools. Its focus on visual content planning and affordability makes it a great choice for small businesses and individuals.
However, Later’s platform support is limited, and its collaboration tools are not as robust as Hootsuite’s.
Let’s see the pros & cons in more detailed
Pros of Hootsuite:
- Multiple Social Media Management: Hootsuite supports multiple social media platforms, including Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and more. This makes it a great option for businesses with a strong presence on multiple social media sites.
- Post Scheduling: You can schedule posts in advance on Hootsuite, which can save time and ensure consistent posting.
- Analytics and Insights: Hootsuite provides detailed analytics and insights into your social media performance, including engagement rates, follower growth, and more.
- Team Collaboration: Hootsuite offers features that make it easy to collaborate with team members on social media management tasks.
- Integration with Third-Party Tools: Hootsuite integrates with 150+ third-party tools, making it easier to manage and share content.
Cons of Hootsuite:
- Dashboard Interface: Some users may find Hootsuite’s dashboard interface overwhelming or confusing.
- Many Features: Hootsuite has many features that you may not need, making it expensive. You may be better off finding cheaper options with only the tools you need.
- Price: Hootsuite’s pricing plans can be expensive, especially if you need access to more advanced features.
- No Free Plan: Hootsuite has only 30 days free trail at Professional and Team plans.
Pros of Later:
- Time-saving: Later’s scheduling and auto-publishing features can save you a significant amount of time, allowing you to plan and schedule your Instagram posts in advance.
- Multi-platform compatibility: Later allows you to schedule content for multiple social media platforms, including Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest TikTok, and Linkedin, all from one dashboard.
- Analytics: Later provides detailed analytics on your Instagram account, including follower growth, engagement rates, and more. This can help you understand how your content is performing and make data-driven decisions about your social media strategy.
- UGC management: Later makes it easy to track and manage user-generated content on Instagram, which can help you build engagement and relationships with your followers.
- Linkin.bio: Later’s Linkin.bio feature allows you to add multiple links to your Instagram bio, which can help you drive traffic to your website or other online properties.
Cons of Later:
- Limited free plan: Later’s free plan is quite limited, offering only basic scheduling features and analytics. To access more advanced features, you will need to upgrade to a paid plan.
- No real-time posting: Later does not offer real-time posting, which means that you can’t post directly to Instagram from the platform. Instead, you will need to use Later’s scheduling feature to plan and schedule your posts in advance.
- Some features are Instagram-specific: While Later does offer multi-platform scheduling, some of its features, such as UGC management and Linkin.bio, are specific to Instagram and TikTok.
- Cost: Later’s paid plans can be quite expensive, particularly for larger businesses or agencies that need to manage multiple accounts.
Hootsuite vs Later: Pricing & Plans
Later Pricing & Plans
Later offers 6 different plans to choose from according to your needs.
Free plan
- 1 Social Set, 1 user, 1 Access Group
- 10 posts per month per social platform
- A Linkin.bio page
- Instagram Analytics (3 months)
- Unlimited media storage
- Photo and video scheduling
- Saved Captions
- Visual Instagram Planner
Starter: $18/month
- 1 Social Set
- 1 user
- 30 posts per social profile
- Limited analytics (up to 3 months of data)
- Customizable Linkin.bio page
- Collab tools for creators
- Extra Social Sets and users are not available.
Growth: $40/month
- 3 Social Sets
- 3 users
- 150 posts per social profile
- Full analytics (up to 1 year of data)
- Customizable Linkin.bio page
- Collab tools for creators and brands
- Team and brand management tools
- Extra Social Sets ($15/month each) Extra users ($5/month each).
Advanced: $80/month
- 6 Social Sets
- 6 users
- Unlimited posts
- Full analytics (up to 1 year of data)
- Customizable Linkin.bio page
- Collab tools for creators and brands
- Team and brand management tools
- Live chat support
- Extra Social Sets ($15/month each) Extra users ($5/month each)
Scale 15: $200/month
- 15 Social Sets
- 10 users
- Auto Publishing
- Unlimited Posts
- 1 Year Of Analytics
- Customized Linkin.bio Page
- Team & Brand Management Tools
- Live Chat Support
- Instagram Conversations
- Extra Social Sets ($15/month each) Extra users ($5/month each)
Scale 30: $400/month
- 30 Social Sets
- 20 users
- Auto Publishing
- Unlimited Posts
- 1 Year Of Analytics
- Customized Linkin.bio Page
- Team & Brand Management Tools
- Live Chat Support
- Instagram Conversations
- Extra Social Sets ($15/month each) Extra users ($5/month each)
A Social Set is a set of social profiles (1 Instagram, 1 Facebook, 1 Twitter, 1 Pinterest, 1 TikTok, and 1 Linkedin profile). Social Sets help you organize your social profiles based on brand or identity.
All paid plans include Auto Publishing, Instagram Best Time to Post, Visual Instagram Planner, Instagram Reels Auto Publishing, Hashtag Suggestions, Instagram Stories Scheduling, and Carousel Auto Publishing.
In addition, If you choose to pay annually you will have a 17% discount and the price configured on the Starter at $15/month, on Growth at $33,33/month, and on Professional at 66,67/month. All paid plans come with a 14-day free trial.
On Scale 15 and on Scale 30 you can’t pay annually.
Hootsuite Pricing & Plans
Hootsuite offers 4 different plans to choose from according to your needs.
Professional $99/month
- 1 User
- 10 Social accounts
- Unlimited posts
- Post Scheduling
- Access to messages in one inbox
Team $249/month
- 3 Users,
- 20 Social accounts
- Everything in Professional plus Roles & permissions
- Assign posts to team members
Business: $762/month
- 5 Users
- 35 Social accounts
- Everything in Team plus Assign posts to team members
- Approval workflows
- Inbound/outbound tagging
- Content & asset library
- Hootsuite customer support
Enterprise: Custom price
- Starts at 5 users
- Starts at 50 social accounts
- Everything in Business plus Assign posts to team members
- Social ads management
- Social ads analytics & reporting
- Employee advocacy
- Team productivity reporting
All these plans are based on annual billing. In the Professional and the Team plans you can test it for free for 30 days.
If you want to skip the trial period you have a 20% discount. In Hootsuite, you have only 30 days of free trial and you don’t have the choice of a free plan.
Hootsuite vs Later: Which one should I choose?
Hootsuite is a powerful social media management tool that allows users to manage multiple social media accounts from one dashboard. It offers features such as scheduling posts in advance, monitoring social media activity, and analyzing performance metrics.
Hootsuite also integrates with over 150 platforms, making it a versatile choice for businesses and marketers who use a variety of social media channels.
Later, on the other hand, is a visual content scheduling tool that specializes in Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok. It offers a range of features to help users manage their Instagram accounts, such as scheduling posts and stories, creating content calendars, and analyzing audience engagement.
Later also offers a media library where users can store and organize their visual content for easy access.
When choosing between Hootsuite vs Later, it ultimately depends on your specific needs and goals. If you manage multiple social media accounts and use a variety of platforms, Hootsuite may be the better option for you.
If your focus is primarily on Instagram, Pinterest, or TikTok, and you want a tool specifically designed for visual content, Later may be the better choice.
Overall, both Hootsuite and Later are excellent social media management tools that offer a range of features to help you manage your social media presence effectively. Consider your unique requirements and goals, and choose the tool that best fits your need
Conclusion
Hootsuite vs Later are two popular platforms that offer a range of features to help users manage their social media accounts, but they have different strengths and weaknesses.
Hootsuite is an excellent choice for businesses with multiple team members and diverse social media accounts. However, its pricing plans can be expensive, and its interface can be overwhelming for new users.
Later, on the other hand, is a user-friendly platform designed specifically for Instagram, Pinterest, and TikTok marketers. It offers an intuitive scheduling tool, visual content planning, and affordability, making it a great choice for small businesses and individuals. However, its platform support is limited, and its collaboration tools are not as robust as Hootsuite’s.
Ultimately, the choice between Hootsuite and Later depends on your specific needs and goals. If you require support for multiple social media platforms and robust analytics and collaboration tools, Hootsuite may be the better choice.
If you primarily focus on visual content and require a user-friendly platform with affordable pricing, Later may be the better option for you.
Regardless of which platform you choose, both Hootsuite and Later are excellent tools that can help you manage your social media presence effectively. Carefully consider your unique requirements and goals before making a decision, and you’ll be able to select the platform that’s best suited for your needs.
In the end, it’s up to you which one you decide to use and we hope to help you to clarify what suit to your needs with this Hootsuite vs Later comparison post.
Click here to get a detailed comparison of Hootsuite vs SocialBee.
Click here to get a detailed comparison of Later vs Planoly.
or here to see the Later vs Loomly post
or here to see the Later vs Buffer post.
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