Hootsuite pricing in 2026: $99 to $399 a seat, plus what the Professional plan adds

By Jan Suski. I go deep on every review, checking every number against its source and digging up details other coverage misses, a habit from six years of SEO and link building for tech companies. Bylines at Surfer, Brand24, and Senuto. How the scoring works.

Published 6 October 2026Prefer this source on Google

Hootsuite charges $99, $199 or $399 per user a month on annual billing, and every seat is billed separately. Those three rates sit on Hootsuite's plans page, checked on 6 October 2026, alongside a fourth tier, Enterprise, that's quoted after a demo.

The headline number misleads small teams in two ways. The cheapest plan caps a team at 10 social accounts, so the 11th profile moves every seat to the $199 Professional rate. And the plans page publishes no month-to-month price at all, even though Hootsuite sells one.

This report covers what each plan costs and gates, what the Professional plan adds for its $100 premium, what buyers pay once a sales rep is involved, and how the Hootsuite cost compares with four rival social media management platforms priced on the same team. It's written for a marketing lead or small business owner deciding which tier to buy, or if Hootsuite is worth buying at all.

How much does Hootsuite cost

One Standard seat costs $1,188 a year, one Professional seat $2,388 and one Advanced seat $4,788. Those are the annual-billing rates times 12. Hootsuite's footnote on the plans page reads: "Prices displayed in USD, based on annual billing, but do not include applicable taxes."

Hootsuite pricing is per user, which Hootsuite calls a seat. Its own FAQ says plans "are sold per user (or 'seat')," and every self-serve tier lists "1+" in the user seats row. A three-person team on Standard pays $297 a month, billed as $3,564 up front for the year. The same team on Professional pays $597 a month, or $7,164 a year.

Hootsuite's FAQ states the ladder in one line: "Paid plans start at $99 for a Standard plan, $199 for a Professional plan, and range up to $399 for an Advanced plan." A Hootsuite budget has to zero in on two dials: the tier and the headcount. Doubling the team doubles the bill. Moving up one tier roughly doubles it again. Our audit of software pricing errors found the same ladder live on 1 July 2026, so the rates have held for at least three months.

Hootsuite plans and pricing, tier by tier

Hootsuite sells four plans. Three have a published plan price and a 14-day trial; the fourth needs a sales call. All figures below come from the plans page, checked 6 October 2026.

Every price in this table is Hootsuite's annual-billing list price, read off hootsuite.com/plans on 6 October 2026. The table holds zero Vendr figures.

Standard plan: $99 per user

Standard covers up to 10 social accounts, unlimited scheduled posts, AI-generated captions and images, one unified inbox, and basic brand monitoring. It's the cheapest plan Hootsuite sells. Hootsuite's FAQ gives a worked example: five Facebook Pages and five Instagram profiles fill the cap exactly.

Hootsuite Analytics on Standard lets a user "analyze the performance of multiple accounts from one dashboard," in the FAQ's words. That's basic analytics, such as follower growth across connected profiles, plus competitive benchmarking against five rivals. Standard allows multiple users, each billed per seat, so small businesses with two people on one brand pay $198 a month.

The gates show up fast for small teams. Standard has no approval workflows, no custom reports, no 30-day Quick Search for social listening, and benchmarks five competitors. It suits a single social media manager running one brand, and the advanced features sit on higher tier plans. Small businesses posting one brand to Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn use three of the 10 slots.

Professional plan: $199 per user

The Hootsuite Professional plan is the tier Hootsuite tags "Most popular." It lifts the account cap to unlimited and adds automation, custom reports and 30-day Quick Search for social listening. The section after this one breaks down what the $100 premium buys and when it pays.

Advanced plan: $399 per user

Advanced is where team collaboration starts on the Hootsuite social media ladder, and approvals cost an arm and a leg at this tier. It adds post approval workflows, internal comments, suspending scheduled posts, message assignment, skill-based routing, inbox team productivity reporting, and report exports with your own logo. For a team of three, that's $14,364 a year at list.

Those team collaboration tools, content approval workflows among them, suit team structures with one reviewer and several writers. Internal comments keep team communication attached to the post, and assignment routes each inbound message to a named person.

Enterprise plan: custom pricing

Enterprise has no published plan price. Hootsuite lists it as "Contact for pricing" and routes buyers to a demo. It adds advanced security in the form of single sign-on and compliance integrations, 13 months of listening historical data, ROI reporting, what the plans page calls "advanced analytics," and a block of add-ons only enterprise customers can buy. Hootsuite's about page claims more than 6,000 enterprise customers.

Enterprise also bundles professional services: expert-led implementation and onboarding, solutions tailored to the account, and customized consulting and training. None of those appears on the three self-serve paid plans.

The Hootsuite Professional plan: what $199 a seat buys

Professional costs $100 more per seat each month than Standard, or $1,200 more per seat over a year. Hootsuite's FAQ says Standard covers "the core tools" while Professional "adds more automation, advanced reporting, and room to scale." The plans page comparison table turns that into named features.

Moving from Standard to the professional plan adds these, per the comparison table:

• Unlimited social accounts, up from 10
• Quick Search covering 30 days of social conversations, with five result sets compared side by side (Standard compares two)
• Trend forecasting up to 90 days ahead
• Customizable report templates, report notes, basic exporting and scheduling
• Competitive benchmarking against 20 competitors, up from five
• DM automations, automated message responses, AI-powered smart replies and tag automations
• Custom-branded vanity URLs, Bitly integration and automated link tracking
• Inbox data export and full contact profiles

The account count is the first difference Hootsuite's own FAQ lists, "compared with just 10 on Standard." Agencies with multiple brands hit it first, since account management across multiple brands multiplies profiles fast.

A team that adds an 11th profile, say a new regional Instagram account, has no Standard option left, and the professional plan price applies to every seat on the account. Hootsuite adds a caveat to the tier comparison: "Some features are only available with multiple user seats."

Professional still leaves approval workflows out. A team that needs a manager to sign off posts before they publish moves to Advanced at $399 per seat. That gap is the devil in the details for agencies, who usually need both unlimited accounts and approvals and so pay the top self-serve rate.

The name has history too. In February 2023, BetaKit reported that free users had to move to a Professional plan at $99 a month covering one user and 10 social accounts. That package now carries the Standard name at the same $99, while "Professional" names the $199 tier. Search results quoting a $99 Professional plan describe the 2023 ladder, so check the account count and the date of any figure before trusting it.

What each Hootsuite tier gates

All paid plans include unlimited scheduled posts, the social content calendar, bulk scheduling for loading multiple posts at once, link-in-bio (Hootbio), Canva and Adobe Express templates, and 100 AI credits a month from Hootsuite's Wisdom assistant. The gates sit elsewhere.

The approval workflows row sets the price of collaboration. Content approval workflows, internal comments and team assignments all start at Advanced, so a small team that wants a second pair of eyes on posts pays four times the Standard rate per seat.

Analytics depth is the second gate. Standard includes analytics and reporting, per Hootsuite's FAQ, while custom reports and templates start at Professional and paid-and-organic ROI reporting appears only on Enterprise. Listening alerts and 13 months of historical data, the tools for monitoring brand mentions over time, sit on Enterprise too, alongside advanced analytics for social attribution, the most detailed analytics Hootsuite sells.

Billing, seats and the free trial

Hootsuite offers monthly and annual billing on Standard, Professional and Advanced. Its FAQ says annual billing "provides a lower per-user monthly rate compared to month-to-month billing," yet the plans page renders only the annual figures. That's the gap our pricing-errors audit flagged when it tested AI answers about Hootsuite.

The 14-day Hootsuite trial needs no credit card. Hootsuite's FAQ states you "won't be charged automatically when it ends." Two limits apply during the trial, per the plans page footnote: "daily posting limits (10-20 posts per organization, depending on plan)," and bulk scheduling is switched off. The trial runs on the plan you pick, unified inbox included, so a team can hit the ground running with scheduled posts and test bulk scheduling only after paying.

That's a change from 2022. An archived June 2022 plans page offered a 30-day trial and warned that "regular billing begins and you'll be charged" when it ended.

Paid plans renew on their own. Section 22 of Hootsuite's self-serve terms, updated 29 July 2025, says plans "renew automatically at the end of the term." Section 24 adds that a customer who cancels or downgrades "must continue to pay for the rest of your plan term and you are not entitled to a refund." Taxes come on top of every plan price.

Payment runs on Visa, Mastercard, Discover, JCB and PayPal. Invoicing by check, wire or ACH is limited to the annual Enterprise plan.

Is there a Hootsuite free plan

Hootsuite has no free plan and no permanent free tier for social media teams. It shut the free plan on 31 March 2023, according to BetaKit's report from 28 February 2023. Hootsuite's statement, quoted by BetaKit, said the decision "was not made as a result of any changes being implemented at Twitter."

The old free plan was small. The June 2022 plans page described it as "2 social accounts | 5 scheduled messages | 1 user." Hootsuite replaced it with the 14-day trial on paid plans.

Buyers who need a free plan for a small social media strategy now look elsewhere. Buffer's free plan covers three channels, one user and 10 scheduled posts per channel, the closest free tier to what Hootsuite dropped. Of the paid plans Hootsuite sells, the cheapest is one Standard seat at $99 a month, billed annually.

How Hootsuite pricing changed since 2022

Hootsuite's tier names, prices and user bundles have all changed since June 2022. The largest change moved users out of the plan and onto a per-seat bill.

In June 2022 the archived page listed four tiers with users built in. Professional covered 1 user and 10 social accounts, the Team plan 3 users and 20 accounts, and the Business plan 5 users and 35 accounts, with Enterprise above them at 5 or more users and 50 or more accounts. Additional users were sold as an add-on.

By February 2023, BetaKit put Professional at $99 a month and the business tiers from $249 a month. The free plan closed five weeks later.

By 2026 Hootsuite had gone back to the drawing board on bundles: the ladder drops bundled users entirely. Standard, Professional and Advanced each start at one seat, and the account allowance no longer grows with the plan the way 10, 20 and 35 did in 2022. A three-person team that bought the Team plan in 2022 now buys three seats, and the Team plan name has left Hootsuite's ladder.

The user count Hootsuite advertises moved too. The 2022 plans page said Hootsuite was "trusted by 18+ million users in 175+ countries." The current about page cites "200K+ users" and "6K+ enterprise customers," with customers in 200 or more countries.

Add-ons and Enterprise-only modules

The plans page groups features into named modules: Perch for publishing, Nest for messaging and customer care, Lumen for social listening, Wisdom for AI, and Parliament for amplification and employee advocacy. Several sit behind the Enterprise plan as add-ons with no published price.

Seven add-ons are marked Enterprise-only on the comparison table: Parliament amplification and employee advocacy, advanced analytics for social attribution, an advanced inbox for social customer care, Lumen by Talkwalker, a Lumen MCP connector, brand review monitoring, and a Salesforce integration. None appears on Standard, Professional or Advanced.

Lumen by Talkwalker is the listening product Hootsuite bought. Hootsuite announced the Talkwalker deal on 8 April 2024, and full listening now ships inside Enterprise only. Our social listening pricing report covers what that category costs across vendors.

Integrations outside those modules run through the Hootsuite App Directory, which lists third party apps such as Bynder, monday.com, Cloudinary and Wrike, each marked free on the directory page.

For a buyer, the module list reads like a menu with the prices torn off. A team that wants employee advocacy or Salesforce data in Hootsuite is buying Enterprise, and the sales rep calls the shots on the number.

What buyers pay for Hootsuite in practice

Vendr's marketplace listing puts the median Hootsuite contract at $12,316 a year, based on 75 purchases. The tracked range runs from $5,600 to $30,000 a year, and Vendr says buyers saved 15% on average.

Set against list prices, the median lines up with mid-sized teams. $12,316 buys five Professional seats at $11,940, or two Advanced seats at $9,576 with change left over. The $30,000 top of the range covers six Advanced seats at list ($28,728), a reminder that the per-seat model scales with headcount.

$5,600 a year is more than four Standard seats at $4,752, so the smallest deals in Vendr's sample still cover several users. Single-seat buyers pay by card on the plans page and stay under the radar of procurement data.

What Hootsuite users say about the price

Review scores split by platform. Hootsuite holds 4.4 out of 5 from 3,803 reviews on Capterra and a 1.3 TrustScore from 556 reviews on Trustpilot, checked 6 October 2026. The one- and two-star Trustpilot reviews from 2026 quoted below center on billing and renewal.

Small businesses raise price relative to size. Tim K., a founder in human resources who has used Hootsuite for over two years, titled his July 2026 Hootsuite review on Capterra "Social management tool that works great" and rated it 4 out of 5, yet still wrote: "The cost is too high for a small business relative to other options."

Zaid E., an associate director of external relations at a nonprofit, left a one-star Hootsuite review on Capterra in February 2026 and called it "Overpriced for the value and experience it offers." He added that "Buffer offers the same value for half the cost."

Two reviewers describe charges that arrived out of the blue. A reviewer named Tony, in a March 2026 review, accused Hootsuite of "hiding ridiculous renewal terms in their contracts." Russell King said in a March 2026 review that years after closing his account, "still every year they charge my card £1200."

A reviewer in Austria described a double-billing problem in an April 2026 Trustpilot review:

"Over a period of three years, we ended up overpaying significantly because payments were made via bank transfer while Hootsuite simultaneously continued charging our MasterCard."

Lyanne Huysmans, Trustpilot, 9 April 2026.

Gary Oak, writing from Canada in February 2026, tied the price to support response times:

"They charge 3k/year Have zero live support (You're lucky if you get a reply once every 48h)"

Gary Oak, Trustpilot, 13 February 2026.

Two of those complaints concern charges after a renewal date, the ground Sections 22 and 24 of the terms cover, and both clauses settle renewal and refunds in Hootsuite's favor.

How to negotiate a lower Hootsuite cost

Count users before the trial ends. Every seat bills at the full tier rate and Hootsuite's terms refund none of them mid-term.

Four levers move the number. Nonprofits verified through TechSoup or Percent pay $39, $79 or $159 a seat, per Hootsuite's nonprofit page, a discount of up to 60%. Yearly billing beats monthly by Hootsuite's own statement. Trimming profiles to 10 keeps a team on Standard. And Vendr's 15% average saving suggests a sales-led deal has room.

Bring a competing quote. Sprout Social's median contract on Vendr sits at $16,188 against Hootsuite's $12,316, and Agorapulse publishes 10-profile seats at $79. Our Sprout Social pricing breakdown lists the rates a rep will expect you to cite.

Set a calendar reminder for the renewal date. Plans renew automatically under Section 22, and a cancellation after renewal still leaves the full term to pay.

Hootsuite against the alternatives

Hootsuite sits at the premium end of social media management software for small teams. Per-seat billing is par for the course here: Sprout Social, Agorapulse and Hootsuite all charge per user. The scenario below prices one team on each vendor's own pricing page: three users, 10 social accounts, annual billing, list price, checked 6 October 2026.

Each price is the vendor's own annual-billing list price, read off its pricing page on 6 October 2026. The table holds zero Vendr figures.

Sprout Social costs more here because its Essentials and Standard plans stop at five social profiles, which pushes a 10-account team to Professional at $299 a seat. Hootsuite fits the same team on Standard. Our Sprout Social review covers the product side of that trade.

Buffer's Team plan charges $10 per channel a month with "Unlimited team members," so headcount costs nothing and accounts set the price. Unlimited team members and approval workflows on one plan kill two birds with one stone for a small team; Hootsuite holds approvals back until the $399 Advanced plan.

Agorapulse caps its three paid plans at 10 social profiles each and reserves its Custom tier for unlimited profiles. That tier lets admins create custom roles and set complex approval workflows with multiple steps.

SocialPilot is the low-cost option. Its Essentials plan is $30 a month on monthly billing and Standard $50, covering 15 accounts and three users. Smaller schedulers price lower still: Autoposting.ai starts at $10 a month for three accounts, and Schedulala's Business plan is $27 a month for up to five accounts on each platform. Schedulala's Enterprise tier adds dedicated support for 100 or more accounts.

Those cheaper tools cover publishing and scheduled posts. Hootsuite's extra cost buys listening, inbox automation and benchmarking against 20 competitors for social media marketing teams that report on competitors. Hootsuite's higher tier plans also carry the advanced features a pure scheduler lacks. A buyer comparing listening depth across the top vendors can start with our social listening tools ranking.

Who Hootsuite pricing fits

Hootsuite fits a team of one to five people managing more than 10 accounts who want an all-in-one tool for publishing, inbox and listening. At that size, Professional runs $2,388 a year for one seat and $11,940 for five, the second figure close to Vendr's $12,316 median.

It fits poorly for individual users who only need scheduling, where a $99 seat buys features that sit unused, and for small businesses that need approvals, where the jump to Advanced costs $4,788 a seat. Agencies managing multiple client accounts with sign-off rules land on Advanced or Enterprise almost by default, and an agency whose enterprise clients require SSO has one tier to buy, since only Enterprise sells it.

Enterprise customers with SSO requirements, compliance integrations or employee advocacy programs have one option, the custom quote. For them the self-serve ladder is irrelevant and Vendr's $30,000 ceiling is the closer reference, next to quote-only suites such as Sprinklr, covered in our Sprinklr pricing report.

What to budget for year one

Budget the seats, the tier the account count forces, and tax, then fold the total into the social media marketing budget. A three-person team with 12 profiles on Professional pays $7,164 a year before tax. Add a fourth person and it's $9,552. Add approvals and the same four people on Advanced cost $19,152, or $4,788 per seat.

Plan for the renewal. Hootsuite's terms give no refund on cancellation, and the budget line runs a full 12 months from the purchase date on a yearly plan. A team still on the fence after 14 days of trial can buy monthly, accept the higher unpublished rate, and switch to annual once the seat count settles.

For a wider view of where social budgets go, our social media statistics report tracks platform usage and ad spend.

Frequently asked questions

How much does Hootsuite cost per month?

Standard costs $99, Professional $199 and Advanced $399 per user a month on annual billing. Enterprise is quoted. Monthly billing costs more per user, and the plans page doesn't publish that rate.

Is Hootsuite free or paid?

Paid. The free plan ended on 31 March 2023. Hootsuite offers a 14-day trial with no credit card and no automatic charge when it ends.

Is there a cheaper version of Hootsuite?

Standard at $99 per seat is the cheapest of the paid plans. Nonprofits verified through TechSoup or Percent pay $39 a seat for it. Outside Hootsuite, Buffer has a free plan and SocialPilot starts at $25.50 a month, billed yearly.

Is Hootsuite worth the money?

For teams that use its listening, automation and benchmarking, the Professional plan prices those features at $2,388 a seat a year. For scheduling alone, Buffer and SocialPilot cost a fraction of that.

Which is better, Sprout Social or Hootsuite?

On price for a 10-account team, Hootsuite: $3,564 a year for three users against $10,764 on Sprout Social, whose lower tiers cap at five profiles. Our Brandwatch and Sprout Social comparison covers Sprout's listening side.

What is better, Buffer or Hootsuite?

Buffer costs less and bills per channel with unlimited users on Team. Hootsuite adds social listening, inbox automation and deeper reporting at $99 to $399 a seat.

What does Hootsuite do?

It's a social media management tool that schedules and publishes posts across multiple platforms, runs a unified inbox for messages, reports on post performance and follower growth, and adds social listening on Professional and above.

Is Hootsuite a CRM system?

Hootsuite sells social media management with contact profiles built from social conversations on Professional and above. Enterprise buyers can add a Salesforce integration for CRM data.

Does Hootsuite still exist?

Yes. Hootsuite was founded in 2008, agreed to buy Talkwalker in April 2024, and lists four plans on its pricing page as of October 2026.

What are the downsides of using Hootsuite?

Per-seat billing that doubles with each tier, social media approvals locked to the $399 plan, no free plan, no refunds on cancellation, and a 1.3 TrustScore on Trustpilot driven by billing complaints.

Bottom line

In a nutshell, Hootsuite pricing comes down to two numbers: how many people need a login and how many social accounts they run. Under 11 accounts with no sign-off rules, Standard at $99 a seat does the job. Past 10 accounts, the Professional plan at $199 a seat is the floor.

The costs to watch sit in the terms. Approvals cost $399 a seat, plans renew on their own, and a cancellation refunds nothing. Buyers who negotiate through procurement land near a $12,316 median, and a nonprofit pays 60% less.

Teams that only need scheduled posts across a handful of profiles can pay a tenth of the Hootsuite figure elsewhere. Teams that use the listening, automation and 20-competitor benchmarking get all three from one $199 seat.