Zoho Social and Hootsuite appear to have a lot in common on the surface. The distinctions between these two applications may appear trivial to the untrained eye. However, for a social media manager, the many tools available are critical to their job. So we provided both products to our Marketing Assistant, Himani, to evaluate them objectively and give us a definite opinion on which one is “better.”

These were her findings…

Typical Characteristics  

Let’s start with what these two platforms have in common before we get into the fun part. If you’re unfamiliar with marketing software, this is a fantastic way to get a sense of what some of these applications can do. 

• Both apps provide you the ability to… 
• In one spot, you can keep track of different social media feeds. 
• Make your postings ahead of time. 
• Get access to extensive reports and data from analytics. 
• Manage client assistance from a single location. 
• Collaborate on social media projects with your colleagues. 
• Have a function that says “Recommended post time” (more on that later) 
• Posts can be scheduled in bulk. 
• Make shortened URLs. 

Let’s look at where they vary now!

The Advantages of Zoho Social  

• You may reuse posts, making it simple to schedule evergreen material. 
• The Zshare plugin from Zoho allows me to concurrently study material and repurpose it for our own social media channels. This feature also makes re-sharing articles a breeze. This addon has really captured my heart, and I use it on a daily basis.
• There is a mobile application that is easy to use and has a lot of features. 
• It is less expensive than Hootsuite. 
• You have the option of putting posts in a queue.
• Instagram DMs and ALT text are supported. Through your connected Instagram Business account on Zoho Social, you can now find your perfect followers, improve your networking skills, and manage and send messages to your followers. To provide additional context and assist visually challenged people that visit your website for information, you can now add an alt text to every image you upload using Zoho Social. Not only can having appropriate alt text affixed to your image help you attract more visitors, but it also helps your image rank higher in search engine results pages (SERP). 
• Within the scheduling tool, you can utilize Canva to create articles.

The Disadvantages of Zoho Social 

However, there are several drawbacks to using Zoho Social. Here are the most significant ones I came across. 

• Unless you use the Zshare button, you can’t customize posts for multiple social networks as they’re being created. 
• The repeat scheduling is only available on a weekly or monthly basis, and it cannot be customized to run every 10 days or every two weeks. 
• It is difficult to tag people. You can’t tag personal accounts via Social, which means you can publish through it but have to manually tag accounts, which is inefficient. 
• Instagram has limited formatting options, but this is a typical problem for social media marketers using cloud-based management tools. 
• The information is only kept for 65 days.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite’s Advantages 

• Similar to Zoho Social’s ZShare button, Hootsuite’s ‘Hootlet’ extension is a plug-in that resides on your browser toolbar and allows you to easily share information you find online with your audience. 
• The ‘Recommended time to post’ tool was introduced in Hootsuite’s August update, and it offers a publication time based on your previous 30 days of posts. Similarly, Zoho has a SmartQ space, but it only gives ideas for Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Hootsuite also provides LinkedIn time slots, which is quite useful for our B2B business friends.
• Your Instagram feed may be planned. Businesses utilize Instagram as a digital mood board and showroom since it is a very aesthetically focused social channel. Remixing photographs to represent your brand’s message and mission is a function I haven’t seen on many other social media management tools, and it’s crucial for communicating your style. This feature is brand new as of August 2021, so it’ll be fascinating to watch whether other platforms adopt it and how far it develops. 
• Data is available for 13 months, which is far longer than Zoho Social’s 65 days.

Apart from the platform’s overall style and layout, there aren’t any special features that set it apart from Social. 

Hootsuite’s Drawbacks 

• On personal LinkedIn accounts, Hootsuite does not enable you to tag/upload videos. 
• The tales tool might be enhanced to ensure that numerous stories are uploaded in the correct order. 
• There’s no easy way to see how a post will look on different social networking networks. Without some trial and error, it’s difficult to know what to anticipate. 
• Hootsuite might implement location tagging, similar to what Instagram does in its app. 
• It may easily add up, particularly for larger marketing teams.

The Final Words

“I particularly like the dashboard look that Zoho Social provides. It’s clean, and the menus and tools are arranged with the user in mind, so I’m able to use Socials’ capabilities with ease. Furthermore, the daily Analytics reports created on each social media platform are critical for us to track our social media development and growth. Other marketers, I’ve discovered, like Zoho Social because of its price and (really undervalued) usability. To be honest, I’m not shocked — the platform’s simplicity of use is unparalleled…

Because I’m used to utilizing Zoho Social on a regular basis, Hootsuite took some getting used to. But, as with Social, I can understand why marketers would like using this tool as much as I do. Both are extremely similar and serve the same goal, so unless you want to get down to the nitty gritty, they are both excellent choices. Furthermore, because they are competitors, any creative feature enhancements are promptly adopted by both.

Hootsuite’s content management capabilities, such as scheduling, creating, duplicating, and monitoring content performance, are among my favorites. They are, in my opinion, a serious challenger to Zoho Social. However, Hootsuite’s recent decision to raise their fees by over 1000 percent surprised the majority of consumers, prompting many to switch to Social. Making social media a lot more accessible.”