Hootsuite Alternatives for 2026: Free and Paid Options for Twitter (X) Teams
- Choose by job, not by brand: publishing and scheduling (Buffer, SocialPilot, Metricool), a shared inbox with approvals (Agorapulse, Sprout Social), or monitoring X for a brand (a listening add-on or an X search API).
- Free options are thin: Buffer's free plan covers 3 channels and 10 scheduled posts per channel with X included; Metricool's free plan excludes X; Hootsuite, Sprout Social and SocialPilot offer trials, not free plans.
- Listening is the expensive part: Sprout Social and Agorapulse quote listening as an add-on with no public price; Hootsuite's Quick Search sits on Professional and up.
- Our one-day test: 393 posts matched six tool names on X in 24 hours; "hootsuite" alone had 327, newest 9 minutes old at collection, and only 9% were in English.
- The X-only bill: $1.77/month to capture every match at $0.15 per 1,000 posts returned vs $58.95/month at X's $0.005 per post read (about 33x), plus a $1.30/month polling floor at a 5-minute interval.
- Query tip from the data: one 24-hour
advanced_searchquery returned 100 posts; six 4-hour slices returned 300. Slice long windows and de-duplicate byid.
Hootsuite started on November 28, 2008 as a Twitter dashboard called BrightKit, and many teams still bought it for that reason: one screen to post to X and watch what people said back. Its self-serve plans now start at $99 per user/month with no free plan, which is why the question "what else is there" comes up at every renewal.
This page is for teams leaving Hootsuite, with extra weight on the ones who mostly used it for X. It is the reverse of our Sprout Social alternatives guide (which treats Hootsuite as one of the options), and it does not repeat the free X Pro and TweetDeck replacements we compare in the TweetDeck alternative guide. Every price below was read from the vendor's own pricing page this year, one row per tool.
What no other alternatives list measures is the X side. We monitored the brand names of all six tools on X for the same 24 hours and counted what a brand monitor would actually catch, how fresh it is, and what it would cost to collect without a suite.
$1.77 at $0.15 per 1,000 posts returned vs $58.95 at the official X API's $0.005 per post read, for 393 posts measured in 24 hours (collected in 2026); 79% of the 327 "hootsuite" matches were Italian.
Which Hootsuite job are you replacing?
Most teams pay for Hootsuite to do three different jobs, and no single alternative wins all three. Splitting them first keeps the decision honest, because the cost drivers are different for each job.
Job 1: publishing and scheduling. Queueing posts across X, LinkedIn, Instagram and the rest, a content calendar, and basic analytics. Many tools do this well, and this is where the low-cost and free options live.
Job 2: the shared inbox and approvals. Replies, mentions and DMs land in one queue that several people work, with approval steps before anything goes out. This is per-seat software, and the price scales with headcount.
Job 3: monitoring X for a brand, product or competitor. Seeing every post that names you, fast enough to respond. Suites sell this as listening, usually as a separately quoted add-on. Only this job needs a stream of X data, and it is the one job you can price per post returned instead of per seat.
If you only used Hootsuite for Job 1, any publisher in the table below will do. If Job 3 was the reason you bought it, read the study and the X-only section before signing another annual suite contract.
Hootsuite alternatives compared: price, free option, X support, listening
Each row is the entry paid price exactly as the vendor shows it, plus the free option, X (Twitter) support and how listening is sold. Prices were read from each vendor's pricing page; billing periods are as stated there.
Two notes on the table. SocialPilot served us prices in Indian rupees, so we print what we saw rather than convert it; check socialpilot.co/pricing from your own region. The TwitterAPI.io free credit is "up to $1 of free credits (at most 100,000 credits, no card, one per person or network, expiring after 31 days)" for new accounts that pass the automatic bot check; purchased credits never expire.
What the table does not show is the listening price, because none of the suites publish it. Hootsuite puts deeper listening (13 months of history, alerts, "advanced listening powered by Lumen") on Enterprise, which is contact-for-pricing.
Free Hootsuite alternatives: what free actually includes
Searches for free Hootsuite alternatives are common, and the honest answer is short: one mainstream publisher has a free plan that includes X, and none of the suites do.
If you need X specifically and pay nothing, Buffer's free plan is the realistic pick for scheduling, and X's own tools cover reading. X Pro, the successor to TweetDeck, has been a paid X subscription feature since 2023 and moved to the Premium+ tier on March 26, 2026, according to X's help center and press coverage at the time; check help.x.com/en/using-x/x-premium for the current tier list. The TweetDeck alternative guide covers the free and paid deck-style readers in detail, so we do not repeat them here.
If the free need is monitoring, a query-based API is the closest thing to free at small volume: 100,000 credits cover about 6,600 posts at 15 credits per post returned, enough for weeks of a quiet brand query, but the sign-up credit expires after 31 days, so treat it as a trial.
Suites and publishers: Sprout Social, Agorapulse, Buffer, SocialPilot, Metricool
Sprout Social (sproutsocial.com). The closest like-for-like replacement: publishing, a smart inbox, reporting and approval flows. Seats run from $79 per seat/month on annual billing (Essentials) to $399 (Advanced), with a 30-day trial and no card. Listening and Premium Analytics are each an add-on to Standard and above, quoted on request. If you are weighing Sprout against Hootsuite from the other direction, our Sprout Social alternatives guide is the reverse question.
Agorapulse (agorapulse.com). A suite with a strong inbox and per-user pricing: Standard $79, Professional $119 and Advanced $149 per user/month billed annually ($99, $149 and $199 billed monthly). X counts toward the 10-profile limit, and Agorapulse lists separate X Lite and X Plus add-ons with no public price, so ask what your X usage will cost before you migrate.
Buffer (buffer.com). Publishing first, priced per channel instead of per user: Essentials $5/month per channel and Team $10/month per channel, or $60 and $120 a year billed annually. X is supported on every plan, including the free one. Its pricing page describes an inbox for comments and post analytics, not brand monitoring.
SocialPilot (socialpilot.co). A scheduler aimed at agencies, with 10 accounts and 1 user on Standard and 30 accounts and 3 users on Premium, both with a 14-day trial and no card. X appears in the Standard platform list.
Metricool (metricool.com). Priced per brand, with Starter from $20/month billed annually for 5 brands and Advanced from $53/month for 15 brands, VAT excluded. The catch for X teams: the free plan excludes X, and paid plans need a separate X add-on whose fee is not shown on the pricing page.
None of these five sells X brand monitoring as a published, priced feature. That is the gap the next two sections measure.
Study: how much X traffic does a brand-name monitor catch in a day?
We searched X for each tool's brand name over the same trailing 24 hours with /twitter/tweet/advanced_search (Latest), collected in 2026. Together the six names matched 393 posts. The volume is lopsided: Hootsuite's name drew 327, while Agorapulse drew none in the window.
Raw matches are not mentions you care about. 79% of the "hootsuite" posts were in Italian, 97% carried a link, and five accounts posted 53% of them. Only 29 were in English. A monitor that alerts on every raw match would page your team all day for link posts; filter on the lang field and a minimum author.followers before you alert.
Small brands are quiet. Sprout Social, Metricool, Buffer and SocialPilot each drew 8 to 22 posts in the day. For a brand of that size, a monitor's job is not volume but making sure the few posts that matter are not missed, which favors a frequent, cheap check over a heavy suite.
What it costs to collect. A month at these rates is about 11,790 posts across all six names. At $0.15 per 1,000 posts returned that is $1.77/month; at the official X API's pay-per-usage rate card ($0.005 per post read) it is $58.95/month. Polling also has a floor: a check that finds nothing still costs the 15-credit minimum ($0.00015), which is $1.30/month at a 5-minute interval or $6.48/month every 60 seconds for one combined query.
What the vendors' own X accounts show. A quieter signal for X-focused buyers: how much each vendor still invests in X itself. We read the most recent posts of each official account (up to 100; Buffer's timeline returned 20).
Every account posts less than once a day on average. Hootsuite's 6.1 million followers make its account the largest by far, yet its last 95 posts span about 509 days. Sprout Social's newest post was 141 days old at collection and Agorapulse's 72 days. None of this rates the products, but it does suggest where each vendor's attention is: if X is your main channel, ask each vendor about its X roadmap and X add-on pricing before you migrate.
One day of "hootsuite" on X: timing, freshness and a search pitfall
The Hootsuite name is the one with enough traffic to study its rhythm. Across the day the median gap between matching posts was 1.8 minutes, 90% of gaps were under 11 minutes, and the longest quiet stretch was 92 minutes. The busiest hour carried 43 posts. The newest match was 9 minutes old when we collected, so search results were close to live.
Even for the busiest name in the set, 83.4% of one-minute checks would find nothing new. A 5-minute interval is the practical default: half the checks still come back empty, but nothing waits longer than five minutes to surface.
The pitfall. Our first pass was a single query covering all 24 hours. It returned 100 posts and reported has_next_page: false. Splitting the same day into six 4-hour slices returned 300, and the union of every pass, de-duplicated by id, was 327. For backfills, slice long windows with since_time and until_time and merge on id; for live monitoring, short polling windows avoid the problem by design.
The X-only path: replace the listening job with an API
If Job 3 was the reason you paid for Hootsuite, you can keep a cheap publisher (or Buffer's free plan) for Jobs 1 and 2 and move X monitoring to a search query you own. The build is three pieces.
1. One combined query. Put every brand, product and competitor name in one advanced_search query with OR, add -filter:replies if replies are noise for you, and window it with since_time and until_time (Unix seconds). One query keeps the polling floor at a single 15-credit minimum per check.
2. Filter before you alert. Keep posts whose lang matches your market and whose author.followers clears a threshold you choose. In our data that one rule turned 327 raw "hootsuite" matches into 29 English posts.
3. Deliver where the team already works. Post matches to Slack, email or a ticket queue. If you would rather not run a poller, register a filter rule with POST /oapi/tweet_filter/add_rule (a tag, a value of up to 255 characters, and interval_seconds from 0.05 to 86,400, default 60), activate it with update_rule, and receive matches on a webhook.
Cost, side by side. For all six names in our study, the data bill is $1.77/month at $0.15 per 1,000 posts returned versus $58.95/month on the official X API's pay-per-usage rate card at $0.005 per post read, about 33x apart per 1,000 posts. The X API's pay-per-usage plan is capped at 3 million post reads a month, with Enterprise above that. Reads on TwitterAPI.io need no X account.
Rate limits. Before the first payment the API allows 0.2 requests per second, which is plenty for a check every 5 minutes; paid accounts get 20 requests per second, 50 on Scale and 500 on Business. Monthly plans exist (Starter $29 up to Business $1,499) for teams that prefer a fixed bill; see the pricing page rather than per-request math.
What you give up. An API is not a suite. There is no content calendar, no approval flow and no sentiment dashboard unless you build one. The X-only path makes sense when X monitoring was the expensive part of the contract and someone on the team can run a small script.
import time
import requests
API_KEY = "your_twitterapi_io_key"
BASE = "https://api.twitterapi.io"
HEADERS = {"X-API-Key": API_KEY}
# One combined query replaces a suite's brand stream. Add your own brand and product names.
QUERY = '(hootsuite OR "sprout social" OR agorapulse OR socialpilot OR metricool) -filter:replies'
KEEP_LANGS = {"en"} # our study: 79% of raw "hootsuite" matches were Italian
WINDOW_SECONDS = 4 * 3600 # slice long windows; one 24 h query returned 100 of 327 posts
def search_window(since_ts, until_ts):
"""Fetch every post in [since_ts, until_ts), following next_cursor."""
q = f"{QUERY} since_time:{since_ts} until_time:{until_ts}"
cursor, out = "", []
while True:
r = requests.get(
f"{BASE}/twitter/tweet/advanced_search",
headers=HEADERS,
params={"query": q, "queryType": "Latest", "cursor": cursor},
timeout=30,
)
r.raise_for_status()
body = r.json()
out.extend(body.get("tweets") or [])
if not body.get("has_next_page") or not body.get("next_cursor"):
return out
cursor = body["next_cursor"]
def backfill(hours=24):
"""Pull the last N hours in 4-hour slices and de-duplicate by post id."""
now = int(time.time())
seen = {}
for start in range(now - hours * 3600, now, WINDOW_SECONDS):
for t in search_window(start, min(start + WINDOW_SECONDS, now)):
seen[t["id"]] = t
return list(seen.values())
def poll_forever(interval=300):
"""Every 5 minutes, ask only for posts newer than the last check."""
last = int(time.time()) - interval
seen = set()
while True:
now = int(time.time())
for t in search_window(last, now):
if t["id"] in seen or t.get("lang") not in KEEP_LANGS:
continue
seen.add(t["id"])
a = t["author"]
print(f'{t["createdAt"]} @{a["userName"]} ({a["followers"]} followers) '
f'likes={t["likeCount"]} views={t.get("viewCount")} {t["url"]}')
last = now
time.sleep(interval)
if __name__ == "__main__":
day = backfill(24)
english = [t for t in day if t.get("lang") in KEEP_LANGS]
print(f"last 24 h: {len(day)} posts, {len(english)} in English")
poll_forever()
How to choose: a short decision guide
You schedule posts for a few channels and want to stop paying per user. Start on Buffer's free plan; move to Essentials at $5/month per channel when you outgrow 10 queued posts per channel.
You run an agency with many client accounts. Compare SocialPilot (10 to 30 accounts per plan) and Metricool (priced per brand), and confirm Metricool's X add-on fee first.
Several people answer replies and DMs, with approvals. Trial Agorapulse and Sprout Social side by side; both offer 30 days. Ask for the X add-on and listening quotes in writing.
X monitoring was the reason you bought Hootsuite. Keep a publisher for posting and run one combined X search query with a language and follower filter. In our test that captured every brand-name match for six tools for about $1.77/month in data plus the polling floor.
You need enterprise listening across many networks, with history and sentiment. That is a listening product decision, not a scheduler one; our build-vs-buy guide for X social listening walks through it.
How we collected this
Question. If a team leaves Hootsuite and keeps watching X for its brand, how much X traffic does a brand-name monitor catch in a day, how fresh is it, and what does it cost to collect without a suite?
Queries and accounts. Six brand-name searches (hootsuite; "sprout social" OR sproutsocial; buffer.com OR @buffer; agorapulse; socialpilot; metricool) over the same trailing 24-hour window, with /twitter/tweet/advanced_search and queryType Latest. For Hootsuite we merged one full-day query, one probe and six 4-hour slices, de-duplicated by post id. Separately, the profiles and latest posts of six official accounts via /twitter/user/info and /twitter/user/last_tweets.
Sample and cost. 393 matching posts in the window and 515 official-account posts, from 78 requests returning 1,128 posts in total (overlapping passes included), collected in 2026. At 15 credits per post returned that is about $0.17 of API credit.
What the sample cannot show. One day is one day: launches, outages or a viral post would change the counts. Buffer's query excludes the bare word "buffer", which is mostly unrelated, so it undercounts casual mentions. Search counts varied between overlapping passes, so treat every count as a lower bound. Nothing here measures how well each suite's own listening works.
Privacy. Aggregates only. Search results include private individuals, so their raw pages were not kept; the published sample has no post ids, URLs, text or handles. Only official brand accounts are named.
import time
import requests
API_KEY = "your_twitterapi_io_key"
BASE = "https://api.twitterapi.io"
HEADERS = {"X-API-Key": API_KEY}
# One combined query replaces a suite's brand stream. Add your own brand and product names.
QUERY = '(hootsuite OR "sprout social" OR agorapulse OR socialpilot OR metricool) -filter:replies'
KEEP_LANGS = {"en"} # our study: 79% of raw "hootsuite" matches were Italian
WINDOW_SECONDS = 4 * 3600 # slice long windows; one 24 h query returned 100 of 327 posts
def search_window(since_ts, until_ts):
"""Fetch every post in [since_ts, until_ts), following next_cursor."""
q = f"{QUERY} since_time:{since_ts} until_time:{until_ts}"
cursor, out = "", []
while True:
r = requests.get(
f"{BASE}/twitter/tweet/advanced_search",
headers=HEADERS,
params={"query": q, "queryType": "Latest", "cursor": cursor},
timeout=30,
)
r.raise_for_status()
body = r.json()
out.extend(body.get("tweets") or [])
if not body.get("has_next_page") or not body.get("next_cursor"):
return out
cursor = body["next_cursor"]
def backfill(hours=24):
"""Pull the last N hours in 4-hour slices and de-duplicate by post id."""
now = int(time.time())
seen = {}
for start in range(now - hours * 3600, now, WINDOW_SECONDS):
for t in search_window(start, min(start + WINDOW_SECONDS, now)):
seen[t["id"]] = t
return list(seen.values())
def poll_forever(interval=300):
"""Every 5 minutes, ask only for posts newer than the last check."""
last = int(time.time()) - interval
seen = set()
while True:
now = int(time.time())
for t in search_window(last, now):
if t["id"] in seen or t.get("lang") not in KEEP_LANGS:
continue
seen.add(t["id"])
a = t["author"]
print(f'{t["createdAt"]} @{a["userName"]} ({a["followers"]} followers) '
f'likes={t["likeCount"]} views={t.get("viewCount")} {t["url"]}')
last = now
time.sleep(interval)
if __name__ == "__main__":
day = backfill(24)
english = [t for t in day if t.get("lang") in KEEP_LANGS]
print(f"last 24 h: {len(day)} posts, {len(english)} in English")
poll_forever()
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Questions readers ask
Is there a free alternative to Hootsuite?
For scheduling with X included, Buffer's free plan covers up to 3 channels with 10 scheduled posts per channel for one user. Metricool also has a free plan but it excludes X. Hootsuite, Sprout Social and SocialPilot offer trials of 14 to 30 days rather than free plans.
Does Hootsuite still have a free plan?
Its plans page lists no free plan. Paid plans start at $99 per user/month for Standard, and every self-serve plan has a 14-day trial.
Which Hootsuite alternative is closest feature for feature?
Sprout Social and Agorapulse. Both combine publishing, a shared inbox, approvals and reporting, and both sell listening as an add-on quoted on request. Agorapulse lists Standard at $79 per user/month billed annually; Sprout Social lists Essentials at $79 per seat/month on annual billing.
Which alternatives support X (Twitter)?
Buffer (free and paid), Sprout Social, Hootsuite and SocialPilot list X directly. Agorapulse lists X Lite and X Plus add-ons with no public price, and Metricool requires an X add-on on paid plans and excludes X on its free plan.
How do I monitor my brand on X without a social media suite?
Run one combined search query for your brand names on a schedule (every 5 minutes is a practical default), filter by language and author followers, and send matches to Slack or email. In our test, every match for six tool names cost about $1.77/month in data at $0.15 per 1,000 posts, versus $58.95 at the official X API's $0.005 per post read.
How many posts mention Hootsuite on X each day?
In our 24-hour window, collected in 2026, 327 posts matched "hootsuite". 79% were in Italian, 97% carried a link, and five accounts posted 53% of them, so only 29 were English posts.
Is X Pro (TweetDeck) a free Hootsuite alternative?
No. X Pro is part of a paid X subscription and moved to the Premium+ tier on March 26, 2026, according to X's help center and press coverage at the time. Our TweetDeck alternative guide compares the deck-style readers.
Continue
- X API pricing: $0.005 per post read, pay-per-usage capped at 3M post reads a month
- TwitterAPI.io docs: advanced search, since_time / until_time, cursor pagination
- TwitterAPI.io docs: add a tweet filter rule (tag, value, interval_seconds)
- X Help Center: X Premium tiers and which includes X Pro
- Wikipedia: Hootsuite history (BrightKit Twitter dashboard, November 2008)
- X (Twitter) API overview: endpoints, pricing and limits
- Sprout Social alternatives, including Hootsuite as an option
- TweetDeck and X Pro alternatives, free and paid
- X social listening: build vs buy
- Twitter (X) monitoring tools compared
- Guide to monitoring Twitter (X) through an API
- TwitterAPI.io pricing: $0.15 per 1,000 posts returned
- 01Pipedream Pricing in 2026: Connect Plans, Credits and the Workflows Shutdown
- 02Cloudflare Pay per Crawl: How the HTTP 402 Handshake Works, and What It Means for Twitter (X) Data
- 03ScrapingBee Pricing in 2026: Plans, Credit Costs and Alternatives
- 04Firecrawl Pricing: Plans, Credit Costs and What an X (Twitter) URL Costs
- 05LunarCrush API: What It Returns, What It Costs, and When Raw Twitter (X) Data Is the Better Input
- 06Zapier Alternatives in 2026: Prices, Self-Hosting and Which Ones Still Connect to Twitter (X)
- 07Grok Bot Alternatives: Open-Source and Hosted Agents for Twitter (X)
- 08Lovable Alternatives in 2026: Bolt.new, v0, Base44, Replit, Emergent and Cursor Compared
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