Making the work
Growing an audience
Running the business
Both cover analytics. Here is what separates them on price, billing, what you can take with you, and coverage.
Scheduling and monitoring for ten accounts up
A visitor log with a lasting free tier
Hootsuite | Statcounter | |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price (they differ) | From $99 | From $18 |
| Pricing model (they differ) | Free trial, then paid | Free plan, paid tiers |
| Free tier (they differ) | No | Yes |
| Billing | Not stated | Monthly or annual |
| Free trial (they differ) | 14 days | 30 days |
| API | Yes |
Shaded rows are where the two answers disagree and both listings have answered. A row where one side has not stated a fact is left plain, because silence is not a difference.
Scheduling and monitoring for ten accounts up
Hootsuite schedules posts, answers messages from one inbox and monitors what is being said about a brand and its competitors, which is the combination that keeps it in agencies and marketing teams. The entry plan covers ten social accounts for one person; the tier above lifts that to unlimited and adds inbox automation. Analytics and approval workflows are what the upper plans are actually sold on. It is priced per user per month, so a second person on the account roughly doubles it.
Our note
The per-user pricing is what to model, because a second person roughly doubles the bill and that is where this stops competing with the cheaper schedulers. Choose it when monitoring and approvals are requirements rather than nice to have, and choose almost anything else when they are not.
Only on this side
A visitor log with a lasting free tier
Statcounter has been counting visitors since before analytics became a discipline, and it still does the thing that made it useful: a live feed of individual visits rather than only aggregates, which is how somebody works out what one specific referral actually did. The free plan keeps two weeks of history for a small site. Paying buys longer retention, more sessions and session replay. It is a visitor log rather than a product analytics suite, and anybody wanting funnels and cohorts is looking at the wrong tool.
Ratings are the average of reviews readers left. The facts are stated by each tool’s own listing and are not verified by CloutStack. How we make money.
| Not stated |
| Data export | Not stated | Not stated |
|---|
| Their cut | None | None |
|---|
| Runs on (they differ) | Web, iOS, Android | Web |
|---|
| Covers | Analytics, Social Media Management | Analytics |
|---|
| Works with | Nothing in particular | Nothing in particular |
|---|
| Founded | Not listed | Not listed |
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| Reader rating | No reviews yet | No reviews yet |
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| Live deals | None right now | None right now |
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Our note
Use this alongside a modern analytics tool rather than instead of one, because the visitor feed answers a question the others do not and it answers little else. Fourteen days of retention on the free plan is the limit that will push you to pay, sooner than the session count.