Hootsuite Alternative: Try HeyOrca For Managing Multiple Clients

There are plenty of Hootsuite alternatives on the market. We’re often asked how HeyOrca compares to the social media management tools such as Sprout Social and Buffer.

HeyOrca was designed to bring together content drafting, collaboration, client approvals and scheduling in one place, with separate calendars for each client.

To better determine if HeyOrca is right for you, we’ve put together a detailed breakdown of how we differ from Hootsuite.

At a Glance:

Feature	HeyOrca	Hootsuite
Publishing	Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn (personal and business pages), Instagram* *HeyOrca notifies you to publish with an email or push notification, and content auto-copies to your clipboard (direct publishing coming soon!)	Twitter, Facebook, Google+, LinkedIn, WordPress, Instagram, YouTube
Social Media Approvals For Clients	Yes, for all plans	Enterprise or Business teams have internal social approvals, not optimised for external client use
Number of Users	Unlimited	1 – 10+, dependant on plan
Number of Registered Social Profiles	Unlimited	10 – 50+, dependant on plan
Social Media Listening	No	Yes
Analytics	Yes	Yes
Retain Drafts	All users and teams	Personal: Team plan and higher. Shared: Enterprise
Media Library	All users and teams	Enterprise users only
Drag and drop calendar	Yes	Yes
Separate calendar and social account groups for different clients	Yes	No
Mobile App	For Instagram publishing only. HeyOrca offers a mobile-friendly website.	Yes
Plans and Pricing	Flexible pricing: $299 – $499+ per month (1-15+ clients, unlimited social profiles, unlimited users).	$19.99 – $499+ per month. Features dependant on plan level.
Dedicated customer support	Assigned a customer experience representative	No

1. Supported Networks

HeyOrca

HeyOrca currently supports the ability to publish to the following social networks:

• Twitter
• Facebook pages
• LinkedIn company pages
• Instagram

All HeyOrca teams have the ability to add unlimited social pages and profiles for each client you have registered in the system.

Also, for drafting and approval processes only, HeyOrca allows you to mock up posts in what we call Demo Accounts for other networks including:

• YouTube
• Google+
• Tumblr
• Reddit
• SnapChat
• Pinterest

Having the ability to mock up posts for all the current popular networks allows you to keep planning and approval for social media in one place.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite currently supports the ability to publish to the following social networks:

• Twitter
• Facebook (profiles, pages and groups)
• Google+ (pages and profiles)
• LinkedIn company pages
• WordPress blogs
• Instagram profiles
• YouTube channels

The maximum number of social media profiles or pages you can add to your account differs depending on your plan, from 10-50+.

2. Social Media Drafting and Scheduling

HeyOrca

Drafting a post: HeyOrca allows you to draft, schedule and reschedule your posts in a few ways. You can create a draft in your content library to be scheduled for a future date, or create a post right on your daily timeline or monthly calendar view. You can also use our bulk planner to populate your calendar with placeholders for the same days and times every week.

When you start to draft a post, choose the appropriate social platform, and profile or page. Note that our platform does not allow you to publish a single message to multiple social media profiles at once.

Next, add your text. Shorten any links with our embedded Bit.ly and see how content will embed. You can then add or replace a video or image to go with your post via upload or choose from your media library. After you add an image, you get access to a comprehensive web image editor to allow you to clean up, crop, add filters or stickers.

When your clients go to approve the post, they will see it mocked up exactly as it will appear natively when published.

Scheduling: HeyOrca does not have an autoschedule option, but in the post planning window, you can schedule your post for any day or time. If you planned the post in our content library, you can schedule the post from there, and all teams can retain scheduled posts in the library for future use as evergreen content or as a template for future content.

Scheduled posts and unapproved drafts can then be viewed in a daily list view or monthly calendar view. If you want to easily change the date of a scheduled post, you can drag and drop the post to another day in calendar view.

Hootsuite

Drafting a Post: Hootsuite allows you to write drafts through the top bar on their website, or by clicking the small green icon on the lower right-hand side of their app.

In the drafting window, you can select one or multiple social networks for publishing. You then write copy, add and shorten any links using their owl.ly shortener, and add your own images. You don’t get a full preview of how the post will look in this view but will see how any linked content will look when embedded.

Scheduling: In the planning window, you can schedule a post for a specific day and time, or use Hootsuite’s autoschedule feature which will find the next most opportune time to schedule the post. Hootsuite uses an algorithm to determine when the best time to post would be, though that may not reflect the best time for your particular message.

You can see all scheduled and published posts in the Publisher view. You can filter by account and edit posts here. To reschedule a post, you can either manually set a new date and time, or drag and drop posts to a new day in the calendar view.

3. User Permissions and Content Approvals

HeyOrca

With HeyOrca, you can register as many users as you wish, regardless of your monthly plan. Users can either be designated Internal or External. Internal users are part of your agency or organization and can be assigned to multiple clients. External users only have access to their own client team. All users can also be assigned different levels of editing permissions; you can read about ones for Internal users here, or ones for External users here.

An internal user can either share the calendar with an external user for review or choose specific posts and generate a custom link which will highlight only the selected posts. External users can then make comments or approve those posts. HeyOrca retains an audit trail for every post so there is full transparency and accountability. Scheduled posts on HeyOrca will only go live if they are approved.

Hootsuite

Hootsuite’s approval workflow is designed for use by internal social media teams rather than for collaborating with outside stakeholders, as all approvers need to be registered in one of your organization’s seats. This gives all users at least limited access to your entire Hootsuite calendar and social networks. The ability to designate team members for approvals is limited to Business and Enterprise plans only.

Users can be assigned different roles with different levels of permissions. You can set up your workflow so that by default any new scheduled post requires approval from users who have been assigned an approval role. When a message requiring approval is scheduled, the assigned users will be notified by email. They can then comment on the post if needed, edit it directly, reject it or approve for publication. Hootsuite retains a record of all comments, edits, and approvals.

Posts can be exported as a spreadsheet to send manually for approvals or edits.

4. Social Account Management

HeyOrca

With a focus on agencies and approvals, HeyOrca allows you to group related social media profiles into client teams. Each team has its own scheduling, calendar, and libraries, so you’ll never accidentally program posts for the wrong client. This also limits your clients from seeing the rest of your dashboard and eliminates the need to send post copy via spreadsheets (but you can export them to a spreadsheet if you wish).

Each team has the ability to add unlimited social media profiles to manage, and it’s easy to add or remove them from the team settings. You can also filter by account when viewing your calendar.

Hootsuite

In Hootsuite, you can register a limited number of social media profiles based on your plan type. If you work with multiple clients, it is worth noting that Hootsuite does not allow you to group related social media profiles together. In your organization settings, it is easy to add and remove social media profiles.

When viewing your social calendar in publishing view, you can then filter by social profile so its easier to find what you are looking for.

5. Managing Social Assets

HeyOrca

Saving Drafts and Templates: In HeyOrca’s Content Library, you can save unlimited drafts and templates, no matter how much you pay per month. You can tag content and then use filters to easily find what you are looking for, both in your library and on your calendar.

Saving media assets: HeyOrca gives you access to a media library with unlimited storage. Keep your frequently used images, GIFs, and videos together in one place, and tag them so you can use filters to locate them easily.

Hootsuite

Saving Drafts and Templates: In terms of retaining drafts and templates for the future, your abilities depend on your pricing plan. Professional and Team plan members can save drafts privately, but can’t share them with their team. Only Enterprise teams have access to a shared content library where they can save social media posts for reuse.

Saving Media Assets: Hootsuite gives you unlimited storage to save your media assets, but similar to team drafts and templates your organization needs to be on an Enterprise plan to access this feature.

6. Pricing

Hootsuite

Hootsuite has four different pricing plans, each with different features and limitations of users and registered social accounts. Freelancers and very small agencies might be able to get by with a Professional or Team account, but any agency that requires a lot of collaboration would struggle without a Business or Enterprise plan:

Professional:
$19.99 a month
10 accounts and 1 user

Team:
$99.99 a month
20 accounts and 3 users

Business:
$499.99 a month
50 accounts and 5 – 10 users

Enterprise:
$Custom

HeyOrca

HeyOrcas pricing offers teams more social media scheduling and posting flexibility than most products. We dont charge agencies by users and social profiles. We offer a more fair and scalable pricing model based on how many clients your agency needs separate teams for.

Heres our breakdown:

1-4 Clients:

This package costs $299/month. You get an unlimited number of users, social profiles, social posts, assets under storage, client approvals, and product training (with a dedicated customer success representative. However, you dont get access to our text-message to media library function. Custom branding on your agencys HeyOrca internal and external interface is not available.

5-8 Clients:

This package costs $349/month. You get an unlimited number of users, social profiles, social posts, assets under storage, client approvals, and product training (with a dedicated customer success representative. You also get access to our text-message to media library function, and custom branding on your agencys HeyOrca internal and external interface.

9-15 Clients:

This package costs $499/month. You get all the same features as the package for 5-8 clients.

16+ Clients:

This package pricing is customized. You get all the same features as the package for 5-8 clients.

Easy Social Media Planning and Approvals In One Place

Hootsuite is a great way to manage multiple social accounts and perform social listening but is not optimized for agencies who manage multiple clients and need to get approvals.

HeyOrca allows you to group social media profiles into separate client teams so it’s easy to manage your scheduling, and sending posts for approval is a snap. Our plans suit any budget for marketing agencies, organizations, and freelancersbecause we offer the best pricing plan for marketers who work with multiple clients.

Give HeyOrca a try. Your clients will be glad you did!

We hope this post has helped you determine if HeyOrca is right for you. For more information, be sure to check out our Frequently Asked Questions, or reach out to us using the chat icon in the corner of your browser window.