Hootsuite pricing, without the sales call.

Hootsuite publishes three prices and keeps a fourth behind a sales conversation. The table below is what appears on its plans page, per user, per month.

The important column is the last one. Hootsuite prices per user, which means the number you saw in an ad is the number for one person. Two people doubles it. Teams that budget from the headline figure and then add a second seat are the ones who describe the tool as expensive later.

No. Hootsuite ran a free tier for years and retired it, which is why so many pages still describe one. What exists now is a 30-day trial, and after that the account needs a paid plan.

This is the single most common reason people search for Hootsuite pricing in the first place: they used the free version at a previous job, came back, and found the door shut. If free is the requirement rather than cheap, Buffer, Metricool, and Publer all still run free tiers with real limits attached.

The tiers separate on seats, connected social accounts, and how much analytics and approval workflow you get. Standard is one person with a small number of connected accounts. Professional opens up more accounts and scheduling volume. Advanced adds the approval and permission controls that larger teams need, plus deeper reporting.

Two costs sit outside the tier price and catch people out. Additional social accounts beyond the tier limit are charged separately, and some add-ons, notably advanced analytics and social listening, are priced on their own rather than included.

This is arithmetic on the published per-user prices rather than a quote, and it is the number most people actually want when they search for what Hootsuite costs. Seats are the only variable here; connected accounts and add-ons sit on top.

The jump from one person to five is what turns a tool people describe as reasonable into one they describe as enterprise software.

Before switching tools, there are three levers on the invoice you already have, and the third one is the one almost no roundup mentions.

The first is annual billing, which Hootsuite discounts like everyone else in the category. The second is right-sizing seats: audit who has logged in during the last month, because review-only people are usually the majority of seats and the cheapest thing to remove. The third is the nonprofit programme.

It is worth it when publishing and inbox management are the job. Hootsuite connects to the platforms, queues posts, pulls comments and messages into one inbox, and reports on what happened. If your week is spent inside that loop, a scheduler is the right category of tool and Hootsuite is a mature one.

It stops being worth it when the actual bottleneck is upstream. Plenty of teams pay for a scheduler and still spend most of the week staring at an empty calendar, because the hard part was never the posting. If your queue is empty rather than disorganised, a cheaper scheduler will not fix that and neither will a more expensive one.

There are three, and they are genuinely different from each other. The first is a cheaper scheduler that does the same job for less, which is what most of the alternatives lists are about. The second is a free tier with real limits, which works until the account count grows. The third is splitting the job: something cheap to publish with, and something else to produce what gets published.

The third is the one people rarely price out, and it is often the cheapest of the three, because publishing is close to a commodity and the production is where the week actually goes.