Hootsuite Reviews: 4.2/5 — Solid Choice

I wouldn't say I like anything about Hootsuite because I have a bad aftertaste, and I don't remember how it was. They took my hard-working money for nothing in return. Facebook has it for free not sure why we would have to pay for such lousy service

Their account levels are not transparent, and it's almost impossible to delete the account or downgrade based on the customer's point of view. From their point of view, they make money while you struggle to find where to delete the account. It took me 6 months and $450 to close my account and hours spent on customer service

To post on multiple platforms at the same time, it's not worth the money spent nor their customer service quality

They had a free plan for simple social media management

They're discontinuing the free version of the software.

Posting social media content on behalf of a client

The ease of scheduling posts is amazing. The analytics for reporting are incredible. You can create you own personalized reports.

I have had issues a couple times of accounts not connecting. But it's super simple to reconnect them. My biggest dislike is that the same business counts as 2 accounts if they have a Facebook and Instagram. I am unhappy with doubling the price starting next month. I understand pricing can go up, but double? That's ridiculous.

Solving the time management problem.

Has a lot of tools if you want to track various analytics and work with teams.

Massively increased prices recently, bloated with inessential features, strange glitches and wonkiness for the price paid.

It was meant to help me manage my social media presence efficiently, but I stopped using it when they jacked up the price without adding useful features.

The tool was average, nothing stood out compared to it's competitors. We are moving to BrandWatch due to issues with Hootsuite.

Terrible company to deal with when there is a problem on their side. We had a billing issue (fraudulent use of a credit card) and Hootsuite were unhelpful and refused to have a call with us to get the issue resolved. When chasing up, you get a different client representative emailing back everytime asking for the same information. Unprofessional and untrustworthy. We are moving to Brandwatch going forwards.

They are yet to solve the issue but with any lack of drive their side I doubt it will ever be solved.

Scheduling tool is great - easy to use. suggested times for posts is also useful.

We've been using Hootsuite for less than a year, while our 3x fitness studios recover from the pandemic in Australia. After considering a vast number of alternatives, we decided on Hootsuite, and really enjoyed it. Received an email last week informing us that our price will increase from $249 to $599 - 140% increase. Never seen anything like it, after having worked in software and professional services (my previous life) for over 20 years.

Time management and quality posting.

Listening was a great tool, Megan was awesome, it was a great tool for publishing to IG/FB, but not for reels and for TikTok because of all the API issues still.

Our onboarding was TERRIBLE. We had to reach out for help and the help we did get the person knew nothing about the platform or what anything meant so he kept saying hed have to get back to us. It made everythng take so long. Then, the data had tons of bugs and the numbers were always wrong.

None - I genuinely think that every other platform out there is better than Hootsuite. If you're looking for an expensive tool to use for content planning you can use this.

NOTHING. it is a load of RUBISH ! and a CON.

everything the system and people who answer the emails are all incompetent and treat customers like me like idiots .

Nothing they have taken an annual subscription and don't want to resolve an issue. Basically, they took the money and ran.

Connecting accounts and posting is relatively easy.

I believe that 90% of the time for SaaS, price increases should not impact legacy users. Hootsuite tripled the price I was paying. I had to find this out from my invoice. No permission was given. There was no advance warning. They just snuck it in there. When I requested that customer service offer a refund, they (first a robot, then a human) kept misunderstanding the issue. E.g. I could not start a simple conversation about a price increase. The chatbot would inanely respond with irrelevant articles and marketing snippets. The email I received later from the human customer service appeared not to have read the chat and also sent irrelevant content. In the end, Hootsuite was just supposed to be a convenience and is not core to my business. I did not want to spend any more time getting the run around nor did I like the idea that they do business in this way, so I cancelled it.

Hootsuite helps post on social media and is a time saving tool.

Being able to schedule all platforms in one spot.

I find it unacceptable that what Hootsuite calls support is an email conversation that takes at least 24+ hours before someone responds.....each time. So I send the request for help and it takes 24 hours or more to hear back. Then I answer their extremely basic level 1 support suggestion, that I already troubleshot myself, and it takes 24+ hours to hear back. Then I have a question about something they want me to do and it takes another 24 or more hours to hear back. That is the most ridiculous and ineffective excuse for what they call support. It shows your lack of value for their Professional level members. I guess unless you go in with big bucks, Hootsuite doesn't want to support you. At least that is my experience.

The problem I am solving is being able to schedule posts in one spot. But even that is not happening because Facebook is showing that it is posting (in Hootsuite) but when you look at my Facebook feed the posts are not always there. So it saves time in that LinkedIn and Twitter can be scheduled from one platform but no one seems to be able to help me get Facebook fixed. They seem to not care to help their Professional level members with anything more than a useless email conversation that takes days to carry out.

Nothing wowed me about Hootsuite. The only reason we used it was the good reviews and it seemed like that's what everyone else was using.

I don't like the interface it is dated and not easy to use. It was also incredibly difficult to link multiple social accounts to hootsuite. The customer service is not helpful and it seems like no one knows what's going on.

Scheduling analytics

It looks like a good enough product, unifying messaging to many social media platforms. However, given my experiences, I have a hard time being positive about this product.

I started a free trial. I automatically got charged 585€ for a yearly subscription. I then talked to support, who told me they could refund the charge. After which they stopped responding. A little search turned up this is a very common occurrence: https://www.trustpilot.com/review/hootsuite.com I have blocked my card and contested the charge with my bank.

Unify managing social media accounts. I hardly tested the product though honestly, since I just created a trial account to see how the integration with other social media worked.

Hootsuite looks at which posts have been the most successful and lets you know the times of day and days of the week in which you're getting the most interaction so that you can use those time slots again.

Just a post-scheduler, no administrative control over the page

Hootsuite has made it slightly more manageable to schedule posts a week at a time for over a dozen pages.

that it worked well for the last 10 years

in a single month during the covid pandemic an increase of X7 my pro plan + CAD exchange of 25%.

it does exactly what many other platforms do, UI is not the most amazing

The tool is great if you're an enterprise company and have a ton of social you need to post and research on a daily basis. If you have a dedicated social manager and/or team that is embedded in social action 24/7, this could be useful. For smaller agencies, I'd advise against it.

Hootsuite renewed our contract without contacting us (for a year) and no communication was made to see if we were happy or would like to adjust at all. We've been trying to cancel our contract for months now and they are not flexible in the least. It's an expensive tool that you can find free alternatives for (or MUCH less expensive options), so I would highly recommend you look elsewhere before being locked into a year-long contract.

As mentioned above, you can find tools that do the majority of what Hootsuite does for much, much less. They do a great job at selling you on all of the useful features, but I've found that it's not much different than some of the most basic software.

I like that it will post directly to ALL social media platforms instead of using a reminder based system.

I hate how long it takes videos to upload, and the excessive menus are both unintuitive and ugly. The interface needs to be updated desperately.

It takes a ridiculous amount of time to plan and post content to each platform utilized by my clients, so it is nice to streamline that process. I have had phenomenal increases in engagement since switching from not having a management platform at all.

Ease of use and can host most of the social accounts

Keeps on missing our scheduled posts. I tried contacting support, couldn't help me as well. Kept repeating myself over and over yet kept giving me the wrong information.

Automating our social media posting. Did not benefit me at all.

Easy to use interface that anyone can pick up and start using with very limited skills needed.

The photo editor is very limited, so I tend to do all edits in Photoshop especially sizing down before uploading into Hootsuite. The reporting is very basic and not that insightful, so I tend to go directly to the platforms to pull helpful data in order to plan out our social content month after month. The platforms get disconnected from Hootsuite on a regular basis for no apparent reason - sometimes a few times a week. The integration with IG is very limited, so you are better off posting right within IG than trying to use Hootsuite for that channel at the moment. ' Not all of the messages or mentions get picked up by Hootsuite, which requires you once again to supplement the tool with using the native platforms themselves to properly monitor and respond to consumers so there is a constant uncertainty if we are seeing and responding to everything or accidentally and unknowingly ignoring some comments.

We were previously posting on individual platforms, so this reducing that need since you can post to all channels pretty quickly by simply duplicating and adjusting the copy from one platform to another.

This is an ok option for folks with no other automation tools. If your marketing automation platform bakes in social (like Hubspot), then just go with that.

If you're looking for an enterprise solution, run as fast as you can. The last 3 years we've paid for the platform it hasn't been used. The aggregate posting and analytics are not impressive by any means. It's the same type of features you get for free on so many other platforms. In the past, I've also experienced a decrease in overall impressions and engagement on social when posting through the Hootsuite platform. Allegedly, it's because the social sites will recognize that you're posting offsite. We've moved to posting directly in-network and organically engaging with influencers, etc.

Hootsuite locks people into contracts and will not let them out. My organization has literally spent years trying to get them to cancel - with ample notice. Upwards of a year notice, at times. And then following up more than 30 days before cancellation because we never hear back from customer service - and still they won't let us out of a contract. The churn rate must be high because we're never able to connect with the same person month after month, and when we are contacted by our customer support manager - they are not able to help us with anything. Only the most basic administrative tasks - ones that you can normally do right from a portal, like adding users - is what these reps have the power to do. Everything else must go to 'upper management' - who will never contact you back. Even though a formal ticketing process, we've been trying to get help that requires "upper management" and it's almost been a month now, and our CSM says that our ticket has been escalated, but he's the only person that will write us back, even though he has no authorization to help. It's absolutely maddening. I've never put a bad review out on G2 and I've used hundreds of marketing tools in my career. I've never seen anything quite like this.

Not much at all except it is free trial to find out how horrible the software works.

Old platform. When you publish a post it appears like it posted fine, even get a message on the screen saying it posted to my account BUT post is not published in my chosen accounts, it has been deleted and all my content I wrote for the post is gone and does not publish anywhere!!!! Everytime I try to add an account to Hootsuite to publish on it says it can’t link to Facebook and I get errors, my Facebook account is fine! This system is glitchy, unreliable, ugly and clunky platform and a huge waste of time!

None, Hootsuite just creates more problems for me.

The layout of the page itself was generally easy to navigate.

Hootsuite does not publicize all of their updates (including ones that will effect your posts), does not notify you when or why something fails, and is making it increasingly hard to use the program to effectively manage social accounts.

The biggest benefit was that you can schedule posts as FB accounts, pages, and groups.

Service was helpful to be able to enter posts in one place and have it post to multiple social platforms

They said their billing practice was to send and advance email telling me my trial was expiring and that they would be invoicing me. They never sent the advance email and billed me at 2 am for $370. I cancelled my account within 10 hours after they billed once I found the charge and contacted them immediately for a refund. I have sent followup emails twice about this charge and they say they've opened a ticket on it, but have never followed up with me. I have to wait 30 days at my bank before disputing a charge, so am in the holding period before I do that. Hootsuite has not made one single effort to act with any amount of integrity regarding this issue. I will also be filing a complaint with the Better Business Bureau for fraudulent billing practices.

Posting on multiple platforms at once. No benefits as price was significantly more than advertised and their support is nonexistent.

The only good thing that hootsuite provides is that it shortens links using the company branded bit.ly.

Everything. It fails to post sometimes, I always get error messages, I have been in contact with the support team for 2 months and nothing has been fixed, it is slow, it fails to tag and shorten links half the time, you can’t upload videos to twitter, the list goes on.

We use hootsuite to post on social media. But the scheduling is so unreliable and the posting so slow and glitchy that I’d rather just post natively on social media or use a different tool.

Having the dashboard to view multiple accounts at once.

I have always found it clunky and at times difficult to find what you're looking for within the app/site.

I didn't really solve any problems, now there are similar sites that can be used.. however none of them are that satisfying to use. Regardless, being able to schedule posts is always an extremel important too for a social media manager.

The free trial was nice to explore what they offer as a service.

No human contacts. I was only able to talk to someone on their sales team but any technical/billing difficulties are handled through chat. I was charged 3 times for an annual plan and couldn't get anyone on the phone to work with me to get my payments refunded. When I called to speak with someone they told me they couldn't help me and that these issues were handled via email which is what caused the problem in the first place.

It was nice at first to be able to schedule my posts and bring on team members to manage clients accounts.

NOTHING. Please take my advice and run away from this service

They are for fraud not against it. There was a faudulent charge on my account and they did absolutely nothing about it

I am not solving any problem with hootsuite. They charged me $228 and claimed it was a puppy shop that used my account. I informed them that it is a fraudulent charge and they downgraded the puppy shops account to the free one. After downgrading the account I would expect them to refund my money which they never did. Highly disappointed in them. I do not believe there was any puppy shop using my account because I was unable to find details of the puppy shop online. Hootsuite is Fraudulent, stay away!!!

The ability to post to multiple social networks at once.

The mobile app doesn't have full twitter functionality or notifications any longer, customer service is virtually nonexistent, features keep getting removed while the product price keeps going up.

Hootsuite used to be helpful for social media but now has become a virtually useless service to us.

Obviously scheduling social posts is nice, but there are many better options out there. Hootsuite is not very intuitive and overall I hated working on it.

We tried it and found it to be extremely clumsy and difficult to use. Certain features that can't be done due to social platform restraints COULD be handled better to make the manual posting easier for their customers. Other platforms offer much better solutions. Many of our photos loaded wrong, we constantly had errors, the interface is just LACKING big time. We used it for a month and decided we did not like it and tried to get a refund just to find out that when you pre-pay for the year you are stuck with it. No refunds allowed. Their customer support is awful and to let a dissatisfied customer leave angry is not a great way to do business. A waste of $350.

I haven't seen any benefits when compared to several other social scheduling platforms. Hootsuite was my least favorite that we tried.

We liked the idea of posting to multiple channels from one source, but Hootsuite was NOT the solution for us

Their dashboard is a mess. Their app is even worse They are not for agencies with multiple clients and the customer care is non existent.

We wanted to be able to cover multiple channels for multiple clients, ended up making the switch to Loomly and LOVE it.

Scheduling is easy. Easy to use for multiple account management

Reports are now hidden behind a paywall. It was functional for my staff to use with little knowledge. We are a nonprofit so don't have the funds to pay. Unless you pay, you are better off using another service or investing time to learn Facebook Insights.

Being able to schedule posts is very helpful.