My Take on Buffer vs Sprout Social

Last Updated on december 29, 2024 by Ewen Finser

If you are trying to figure out if Sprout Social or Buffer is right for your social media marketing strategy, you are right where you should be!

I’ve used both Buffer and Sprout Sociaal off and on for the last decade or so, starting with Buffer back in 2014. They’ve both changed a lot over the years, but are heavyweights in the social media landscape for good reason.

In this comparison, I’ll break down how I’ve used both of these platforms, where I think they both are BEST suited, and some specific use cases to help you decide.

First, I’ll highlight the primary differences to set the stage:

Main Differences Between Buffer and Sprout Social

• Sprout Social has deeper analytics, reporting and data intelligence features compared to Buffer.
• Buffer has a more customizable – and potentially more affordable – pricing plan where you can build a plan based on how many social accounts you need to connect (starting at $6/month for 1 account), whereas Sprout Social charges per use (not social channel) and starts at a fixed rate of $199/month per seat.
• Buffer offers a completely free version for a single user, whereas Sprout Social only offers free trials.
• Buffer has includes solo creators in their target demographic, whereas Sprout Social is more clearly oriented towards enterprise, agencies, startups, and growing small businesses.
• Sprout Social has a dedicated and more thorough bulk scheduling feature-set, compared to Buffer’s makeshift CSV workarounds (interestingly, there’s actually a third-party service called BulkBuffer that does this… very odd it’s not a core feature in Buffer).

What I Like About Buffer

These are some of my favorite aspects of Buffer right now:

• Pricing Flexibility: Buffer still retains their everyday appeal for marketers of all stripes. I like this. They also feature a fairly innovative model where each social account starts at $6/month. At first I didn’t like this, but after some reflection, it’s probably a good “usage based” pricing model for smaller businesses that really SHOULD be justifying each additional account beffore adding more.
• Functional Free Tier: Their free tier doesn’t offer too much, but it is fully functional for someone just getting started with social media. This is something that Sprout Social doesn’t really bother with (I get it), so if you are really trying out a strategy, Buffer can be a low-to-no-cost way to test things out in your market.
• Widely Adopted: Since Buffer has been around as one of the OG’s of the social media automation space, they are widely used and recognized. This can be helpful for attracting talent and getting a social strategy implemented quickly vs a lengthy onboarding process.
• Team Friendly: If you spring for just a bit more on their Team plan, you get UNLIMITED team seats, and the pricing increment is $12/month for each connected social account. This can be a good comp to other platforms, as many I’ve seen tend to segregate team tiers more with steeper pricing jumps.

What I Like About Sprout Social

On the other hand, here’s what I liked about Sprout Social:

• Outstanding Analytics Features: Sprout Social provides excellent analytics for all of your social media operations, conveniently nested in one useful dashboard. I particularly find their metrics for tracking engagement over time to be incredibly valuable in assessing the value of a campaign (and this helps explain why the platform “costs more” than some other social media automators).
• Business Intelligence Focus: Sprout Social has a veritable insights factory, between their social listen tools and and BI platform integrations (like Dynamics, Tableau, Salesforce, Hubspot, etc…).

• Automation & Bulk Scheduling: This is one of the clear gaps with Buffer that Sprout Social readily fills. Sprout allows for all types of bulk uploading and automation, whereas Buffer still doesn’t really have an answer for this (relying on third-party apps).
• Influencer Marketing Tools: Sprout Social has really leaned into the influencer marketing use case, something large or rapidly growing brands should definitely be measuring in a social context (particularly now, with all of the Google and AI search engine flux). They even acquired influencer platform Tagger to level up their game here.

Let’s Talk Pricing

Pricing is the one area where I see a huge divergence in approach between Buffer and Sprout Social.

As I discuss above, Buffer comes in with the clear value prop pricing:

DO pay attention to how this works in practice though, as the initial quotes are just for 1 channel.

In some of my businesses – for example – we have at least 4 channels (Reddit, Pinterest, Facebook, YouTube), and we definitely have a team running our plays. In this case, our pricing looks like:

Still, all in all this is not a hefty price tag for most operations with even a bit of maturity.

In contrast, Sprout Social doesn’t even bother to compete here. They are clearly going after larger teams, agencies, marketing departments, developed brands, and fast-growing startups:

Interestingly, Sprout does offer unlimited social profiles once you get on the Professional plan or higher. This can be great for agencies and large orgs with multiple networks, channels and campaigns running all at once.

Still, it’s clearly a hefty PER SEAT investment, whichever plan you go with.

Mijn mening: You’ll want to really have whoever sits in this seat be thoroughly invested in maximizing value, ideally someone with there hands in socials or influencer marketing day-to-day.

Let’s Talk Integrations

Another area I’m always looking at for viability is the integration environments. Particularly for something as “glue-like” as social media, I want to generally see a wide compatibility with third party platforms.

Fortunately, both Buffer and Sprout Social are well regarded and fairly comparable in the integration bucket.

Buffer, by virtue of being one of the earliest social automation platforms does have a variety of practical integrations with tools like Canva, Unsplash, ChatGPT, PicMonkey and more… but I was honestly surprised to see not as many platforms as I’d expect on their list.

Sprout Social has fewer solo creator type integrations but leans a bit more into common larger business and enterprise level sales and BI suites like Dynamics 365, Hubspot, Salesforce, and Tableau.

My bottom line here on integrations is that Sprout Social offers more robust and interesting deep integrations, whereas Buffer is more of the practical individual creator variety.

Some Alternatives to Consider

Of course Buffer and Sprout are not the only games in town. These are some competitors I’d consider in the same analysis, some with slightly different strong points:

• Socialbee: I like Socialbee for smaller agencies or portfolio brands that manage many profiles and accounts, but don’t quite have the budget or necessity for Sprout Social analytics and BI yet.
• Later: If Instagram is your main channel, I’d take a hard look at Later. They’ve since expanded to other platforms (and are now a true SMM suite), but Instagram is where they disrupted first and it’s still my go-to for these types of visual storytelling automation plays.
• Hootsuite: Similar in many ways to Sprout Social – lots of data analytics and intelligence tools – but a bit more affordable, approachable and generalized with their pricing tiers (starts at $99/month). Sort of a halfway point between Buffer and Sprout.
• Metricool: Many harder to find social integrations like for Twitch and Bluesky and with a great competitor analysis suite. Billed as the “swiss army knife” but more affordable than you’d expect.
• SocialPilot: I like their LinkedIn document publishing tools (many social platforms kind of skip LinkedIn). They also have a great add-on for soliciting customer reviews.
• Verzendbaar: A really nice, clean, and affordable SMM platform that’s scalable from the early days ($24/month) up to the enterprise level. More of a traditional scheduling and automation focus.

Who Should Use Buffer?

So – with all of this in mind – who do I think should lean Buffer here? Here are the two clear camps that make sense to me:

• Teams Figuring it out with Social: I think Buffer is ideal for companies and organizations that want to leverage social, but aren’t entirely sure how core it is to their strategy yet or what the specific ROI is. The incremental “per channel” pricing works well for a “figure it out as we go” strategy. If this sounds like you, stick with Buffer.
• Solo Creators and (very) SMBs: I also think Buffer is clearly more suitable for solo operators and smaller businesses that just can’t afford a higher-ticket social tool. They likely don’t have the time or operational capacity to analyze or leverage deep customer insights, either. If this sounds like you, Buffer is a good starting point.

And Who Should Upgrade to Sprout Social?

With Sprout Social, I see a huge advantage for more robust teams, organizations, and businesses. Specfically, if you fit one of these groups I’d go with Sprout Social:

• Agencies & client facing teams: IF you do anything on social media, having a suite like Sprout Social is just going to make you look good, deliver real value to clients and just make your life easier with it’s data-driven reports, insights, and exports.
• Enterprise social teams: If you work for an established brand or organization trying to show ROI from social media to your internal stakeholders, I’d also lean hard towards Sprout Social for similar reasons.
• Venture startups: If you have significant venture backing, you are likely on a timeline to get traction and Sprout Social is a good place to invest in the ramp. If this sounds like you, stick with Sprout Social.
• Influencer-centric brands: If you work with influencers in any significant way, I see a clear advantage for Sprout Social here. Particularly with their recent acquisition of Tagger. Sprout is now really an influencer marketing management platform as well.