The #1 Sprout Social Alternative for Agencies: HeyOrca!

There is no shortage of Sprout Social alternatives on the market and Sprout Social is one of the social media management tools HeyOrca is most often compared to. 

Below you will find a detailed comparison between Sprout Social and HeyOrca to see if HeyOrca is the right Sprout Social alternative for your marketing agency or brand 👇

Sprout Social VS. HeyOrca Overview

HeyOrca is a social media management platform that is designed to provide agencies and brands with a comprehensive solution at price point that is accessible to all businesses.

HeyOrca’s platform combines social media scheduling, collaboration, approvals, and reporting in one visual platform that allows you to switch between the multiple brands you manage.

Here are just a few of the main reasons customers have chosen HeyOrca as an alternative to Sprout Social:

• Ease of Use: Social media managers and the clients they manage find HeyOrca to be intuitive and easy-to-use.
• Affordability: Unlike other social media management tools, HeyOrca is priced by calendar. Each calendar includes unlimited users, social posts, media assets, and allows you to connect up to 10 social profiles.
• Visual Design: HeyOrca’s calendar gives you and your clients a comprehensive view into the content you have planned and allows you to visually create posts exactly as they would appear on social networks.
• Collaboration + Approvals: HeyOrca is designed to help you save time and build client trust. You can easily share content with your clients for feedback and approval by generating a link for the post(s) you’d like to share. Clients or managers can provide feedback or approve the post directly from within the platform – without ever having to log in or create an account.
• Updates + Releases: At HeyOrca, one of our primary guiding principles is to “obsess over our customers’ problems.” We are constantly surveying our customers to figure out new ways to help marketers take back their day and fight burnout!
• 5 min or Less Support Response Times: Our support team is loved dearly by our customers. Whether you’ve got a quick question about HeyOrca or are engaging in a free 1-on-1 training session, our team is here to provide you with world-class support.

Sprout Social VS. HeyOrca Social Media

Planning & Scheduling Features

Sprout Social Vs. HeyOrca
Collaboration Features

Sprout Social Vs. HeyOrca
Features for Agencies & Freelancers

Sprout Social Vs. HeyOrca
Social Media Reporting Features

Sprout Social Vs. HeyOrca Pricing

Supported Social Networks

HeyOrca

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

• Facebook pages
• Instagram
• Twitter
• LinkedIn company pages and personal profiles
• Pinterest

With HeyOrca, you can schedule posts to supported networks directly from the calendar view. The post editor displays content exactly as it would appear on social networks for both you and your clients to review.

Every HeyOrca calendar comes with unlimited users, social posts, media storage, and allows you to connect up to 10 social networks. 

HeyOrca also allows you to mock up posts (for drafting and approval purposes only) in Demo Accounts for other social networks, including:

• YouTube
• Google+
• Tumblr
• Reddit
• SnapChat

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

Sprout Social

Sprout Social currently supports the ability to publish to the following social networks:

• Twitter
• Facebook (profiles, pages and groups)
• Google+ (pages and profiles)
• LinkedIn (profiles and companies)
• Instagram profiles

The amount of social media profiles you can use in your account varies from plan to plan.

A Standard account allows you to connect 5 profiles, whereas a Professional or Advanced plan will allow for 10 social profiles.

One of the many reasons agency professionals and brands choose HeyOrca as an alternative to Sprout Social is pricing.

Sprout Social charges you $99+ per user.

Alternatively, HeyOrca is priced at $99 per social calendar you manage. Each calendar comes with unlimited users + 10 connected social media profiles. You can bundle calendars and select annual billing to save even more on your monthly costs!

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 directly from your daily timeline or monthly calendar view.

You can also use our bulk planner to populate your calendar with placeholders for recurring posts.

Once you’ve created a post, you can quickly replicate it to other social networks. Just click the copy button, select the social networks and hit apply! You can leave the posts as is, or customize them to each of your social networks.

When you start to draft a post, choose the appropriate social platform, and profile or page.

Next, add your text. Shorten any links with our embedded Bit.ly link shortener.

You can then add or replace a media to go with your post by uploading it directly to the post or selecting existing graphics from your media library. You can also use our Canva integration to upload, edit, and create graphics directly from HeyOrca.

After you add an image, you can use the built-in web image editor to modify your design.

HeyOrca’s media library will tag graphics that have been used in previous posts, to ensure you’re not accidentally duplicating content.

Scheduling: HeyOrca allows you to schedule posts in a few ways. You can create a new post directly from your calendar, schedule an evergreen post from your content library, or duplicate an existing post to work off of.

Conversely, you can save created posts to your content library to be used as evergreen content in the future.

Default Posting Times can be set for each of your social networks, saving you even more time when scheduling content in your calendar.

Scheduled posts and unapproved drafts can then be viewed in a daily list view or monthly calendar view.

HeyOrca’s calendar view makes it effortless to update your posts on the fly. Need to reschedule a post for another date? You can simply drag and drop the post to another day in calendar view or use the bulk editor move multiple posts at once!

For Instagram Posts, you can see how they will appear on your client’s Grid by using the Instagram Grid Preview feature. Here you can preview your scheduled posts and drag and drop them to achieve a stylish, on-brand Grid.

Sprout Social

Drafting a Post: To draft a post in Sprout, click the compose button on the navbar. This will bring up a drafting window where you choose your social network and then draft your post. You can shorten links with bit.ly, and if you want to see how a post will look when published, you can hit Sprout’s preview button to get a view. After you finish your draft, you can save your draft to review and publish at a later time, or use one of Sprout’s scheduling options.

Scheduling: Sprout offers a few ways to schedule content. You can choose a day and time to publish, or use Sprout’s auto-schedule option which can either schedule posts at intervals you choose, or automatically set a day and time based on their assessment of when your followers are most active with your account.

User Permissions and Content Approvals

HeyOrca

Unlike other social media management tools, HeyOrca allows you to connect an unlimited number of users to each of your calendars.

Users permissions can be customized to allow certain users the ability to edit, approve, or provide feedback on posts or make changes to the account.

Users can assign multiple approvers to a post and set-up automated reminders to ensure posts always meet their deadlines. 

Scheduled posts that require approvals will not publish until they are approved.

HeyOrca also retains an audit trail for every post giving you full transparency into the changes made on a post.

Sprout Social

With Sprout Social, you pay an additional fee for every user you add to your account.

If you require client approval functionality, you’ll need to register for their professional ($149 a month per user) or advanced ($249 a month per user) plans.

Like HeyOrca, you’ll be able to designate various user roles and set up content approvals.

For every social media profile you have registered, an administrator can set it up so that posts have to be approved before they can be published.

The account can also be set up so that more than one stakeholder needs to approve each post. Reviewers can then leave comments and tag specific team members if changes need to be made, or they can approve a post for publication.

Social Account Management

HeyOrca

While HeyOrca is used and loved by brands and business of all sorts, it focused on delivering collaboration and approval features for agencies and social media managers that require stakeholder approvals.

HeyOrca allows you group each of the brands you manage into unique calendars.

Each calendar will have its own connected social media accounts, calendar, libraries, users, and permissions. You can rest assured that you’ll never post content to the wrong calendar.

This also limits your clients from seeing the rest of your dashboard and eliminates the need to send post copy via spreadsheets.

You can easily flip between brands using the HeyOrca dashboard or by clicking on a brand’s icon on the sidebar.

Each calendar comes with unlimited users and up to 10 connected social media account to manage.

Sprout Social

The number of social media profiles you can register depends on your account level. Profiles can be grouped together by client to stay organized.

You can create a separate environment with a unique calendar and analytics for each client with a specific agency plan (custom pricing).

You can filter the calendar by profile or tags to easily find the posts you’re looking for.

Managing Social Assets

HeyOrca

Saving Drafts and Templates: All plans have access to HeyOrca’s Content Library to save unlimited drafts and templates. You can publish posts from here and retain them for future use. 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.

Sprout Social

Saving Drafts and Templates: Sprout allows you to save drafts to publish later or submit for review. However, once a draft is published it will not be retained.

Saving media assets: Sprout Social provides Enterprise users with a 1TB library to store media assets. All images and videos can be tagged and filter to be found easily.

Pricing

Sprout Social

Sprout has three basic pricing plans, and each plan cost only represents one user. They charge your agency more for each additional user registered to your account. This can make the costs prohibitive for SMBs. However, this pricing plan might appeal to a freelancer who would be the only user. Freelancers would have to invest more if they wanted a client approval feature in the tool.

Standard: $99 per user per month 5 social profiles

Professional: $149 per user per month 10 social profiles

Advanced: $249 per user per month 10 social profiles

HeyOrca

HeyOrca’s pricing offers more social media scheduling and posting flexibility than most Sprout Social Alternatives.

We don’t charge agencies and brands on a per-user basis – every calendar comes with unlimited users. Agencies and brands find that our pricing is a refreshing break from traditional pricing structures charged by other social media management calendars.

1-4 Clients: $99 per calendar per month | Includes unlimited users + up to 10 connected social profiles

Bundle & Save: $59 per calendar per month (40% off) when you sign-up for 5 or more calendars

Custom Bulk Pricing: Save even more when you sign-up for 10 or more calendars

Annual Pricing Discount:  Save an additional 15% on your subscriptions when you sign-up for annual billing

Social Media Planning and Content Approvals In One Place

Sprout Social was designed with Enterprise customers in mind. It has powerful listening features and analytics but is restrictive in the ability to collaborate with external stakeholders as you need to pay to register them. With a large team that means you could be paying a couple grand a month!

HeyOrca allows you to manage multiple brands in their own unique calendars – making it easier and more efficient to manage your post scheduling, collaboration, approvals and reporting.

Our plans suit any budget for agencies, organizations, and freelancers, and we don’t limit our features based on the amount you pay per month.

Give HeyOrca a try. You and your clients will be glad you did!

We hope this post has helped you determine if HeyOrca is the right Sprout Social alternative for you. For more information, be sure to book a quick 30-min demo or sign-up for a free 14-day trial (no credit card required)