Metricool vs Hootsuite for agencies: client count against team size

Anyone posting on behalf of other people ends up comparing these two, and it is a better comparison than it looks, because they solve the agency problem from opposite directions.

Metricool is "An analytics-led social media tool priced by how many brands you manage, with a free tier for one brand.". Its meter is your client list: From $20 / month billed yearly for up to five brands, From $53 / month billed yearly for up to fifteen.

Hootsuite is "A long-established social media management platform aimed at teams and larger organisations.". Its meter is your organisation: From $99 / month on Standard, From $199 / month on Professional, Up to $399 / month on Advanced.

Cost per client is the number to compute

For an agency, neither headline price means much on its own. Divide by clients.

Metricool Advanced at about $53 a month, fifteen clients: roughly $3.50 per client per month. That is close to a rounding error against any retainer.

Metricool Starter at about $20 a month, five clients: about $4 per client.

Hootsuite Standard at $99 a month, five clients: about $20 per client. At fifteen clients, if you stayed on Standard, about $6.60, though a fifteen-client operation will not sit on the entry tier in practice.

On the raw meter, the per-brand model is dramatically cheaper per client, and it stays cheaper as the client list grows. That is the honest headline, and if cost per client is your binding constraint the discussion can end there.

Where cost per client stops being the point

Three situations change the answer, and they are all about the agency rather than the clients.

When the agency has staff. Cheap per client is irrelevant if the tool cannot give your account manager, your designer and your junior different levels of access. An agency where everyone shares one login has an incident waiting.

When clients require sign-off. Most retainers include client approval before publishing. That needs to be a step in the tool, with a record of who approved what, or it lives in email and eventually something goes out that a client did not agree to. Platforms built for organisations tend to sell this explicitly.

When clients ask about your vendors. Larger clients increasingly ask what software touches their accounts and under what terms. An established platform with published security and contractual commitments is easier to answer that question with.

None of those are features this page can rank, because neither company's public pricing page states them in a verifiable way. But they are the axes where the price gap gets justified, and they are the questions to take into a trial.

The realistic reading by agency size

Solo freelancer, two to five clients. The per-brand meter is close to unbeatable, and Metricool's free tier means you can start on one client at no cost. Hootsuite's entry price is roughly a thousand dollars a year for a business that may be billing four figures a month total.

Two to five people, five to fifteen clients. Genuinely contested. The per-brand meter is far cheaper, but this is exactly the size where shared logins start causing problems and client approvals stop being informal. Price both, and cost the manual process you are running today in hours.

More than about ten staff. Governance is the binding constraint, not licence cost. Platforms priced for organisations exist for this, and per-brand pricing will not solve a permissions problem no matter how cheap it is.

The caveat on the numbers

Hootsuite's prices are worded on its own page as "from" and "up to" figures, so they are quoted that way here. Treat them as a floor. A multi-seat agency deployment is negotiated, and the published entry price is unlikely to be what you pay.

Metricool's brand caps are hard numbers, which makes budgeting easier: count your clients, pick the tier that holds them, add headroom for the next two.

Price it into the retainer

Agencies have an advantage over in-house teams here: software is a pass-through cost that can be built into pricing. Doing that arithmetic explicitly changes the decision.

Take a retainer of $1,500 a month per client.

Per-brand pricing at fifteen clients is about $53 a month total, roughly $3.50 per client. As a share of a $1,500 retainer that is around a quarter of one percent. It is invisible.

Tier pricing at the entry floor is $99 a month total. At fifteen clients that is $6.60 each, about 0.4 percent of the retainer. Also invisible.

Here is the point most agencies miss: at any reasonable client count, both are trivial against retainer revenue. The per-brand model is six times cheaper and both round to nothing. Choosing on licence cost is optimising the smallest line in your budget.

Where it stops being trivial is at the top. Tier pricing at Up to $399 / month is roughly $4,788 a year, and if that tier is what you need for approvals and permissions, it is about $27 per client per month at fifteen clients. Still under two percent of a retainer, and now large enough to think about.

So the real question is not cost per client. It is whether the expensive tier removes enough manual work to pay for itself, and for an agency that is measurable: how many hours a month do your people spend on approvals, reporting and access management?

The client-facing argument

There is a factor here that does not exist for in-house teams. Your clients sometimes care which tools you use.

Larger clients ask about vendors. Some have procurement or security processes that extend to their agencies. A platform with published security commitments and a contractual relationship is easier to name in that conversation than one chosen for its price.

Approval trails protect you, not just them. "The client approved this on the fourteenth" is a defensible statement when the tool recorded it, and an argument when it lived in a chat thread. If you have ever had a client dispute a post they signed off on, you already know what that is worth.

Reporting is part of the deliverable. For many retainers the monthly report is the visible product. A tool that produces something you would put your logo on saves you the deck-building hours, which are the least billable hours in the business.

None of these are features this page can rank from public pricing pages. All three are worth raising explicitly in a trial or a demo, because they are where an agency's decision actually gets made.

Growth planning: which one surprises you?

Per-brand pricing has hard caps and clean steps. Up to five, up to fifteen. You can see the next cliff coming from a long way off and plan the tier change into your budget. The failure mode is forgetting to remove churned clients, so the cap arrives earlier than expected.

Tier pricing steps on capability rather than count. You move up because you need approvals or a permission model, not because you signed a fifth client. That is harder to forecast but usually easier to justify, since you are buying it in response to a felt problem.

Both punish inattention. Quarterly, count your live clients and your live seats and remove what is dormant. Most agencies are paying for at least one client who left.

Common questions

Which is better for a small agency?

On price, the per-brand model, decisively: up to fifteen brands at From $53 / month billed yearly against a floor of From $99 / month. On governance, the question is whether you need per-person permissions and client approval steps, which neither public pricing page settles. Trial for the approval flow specifically.

How many clients can I manage on Metricool?

Its published tiers state up to five brands on Starter and up to fifteen on Advanced, with a Custom tier for more. One brand generally means one client, so the tier maps directly onto your client list.

Does Hootsuite have client approval workflows?

Its public plan page does not state this in a form that could be verified and dated, so this page does not claim it either way. It positions itself around "A long-established social media management platform aimed at teams and larger organisations.", which is the kind of buyer that typically needs approvals, but make it something you verify in a demo rather than assume.

Can I bill software back to clients?

Many agencies do, either as a line item or folded into the retainer. At the per-client costs above, folding it in is usually simpler than itemising a few dollars.

What happens when a client leaves?

Remove the brand or workspace promptly, and export any reporting you owe them first. On capped plans a forgotten workspace consumes a slot you are paying for, and on any plan it leaves a client's data connected longer than your agreement probably allows.

The numbers, side by side

Metricool

Plan	Price	Notes
Free	$0 / month	Manage 1 brand
Starter	From $20 / month billed yearly	Up to 5 brands; $25 / month billed monthly
Advanced	From $53 / month billed yearly	Up to 15 brands; $67 / month billed monthly
Custom	Contact them

Metricool's pricing and features checked on 9 September 2026, from their own site.

Hootsuite

Plan	Price	Notes
Standard	From $99 / month
Professional	From $199 / month
Advanced	Up to $399 / month

Hootsuite's pricing and features checked on 9 September 2026, from their own site.

A note on what this page will not do: it compares pricing, pricing models and each company's own positioning, all read off their public pages on the dates shown. It does not rank their features against each other. Both companies ship a great deal that their pricing pages do not enumerate, and inventing a feature gap for either would be worse than leaving the question open. Trial both; the models below are what decide it for most people anyway.

If neither is quite the shape of your problem

Both tools on this page manage content. Neither carries the business the content is for: the brand deal, the deliverables and their due dates, the contract, the invoice, or what any of it earned.

If that is the part costing you evenings, Vantr is built around it and publishes to 12 platforms alongside. It has a free tier, so you can see whether that is your missing piece before paying anything. If the money side already works for you, ignore this and pick from the two above.

Sources

• Metricool pricing
• Hootsuite pricing