Loomly vs Hootsuite (2026): The $199 Plan Is Cheaper Per Account Than the $65 One

Loomly's cheapest plan is $65 a month. Hootsuite's mid plan is $199. Every listicle you have ever read sorts those two numbers and stops there.

Run the division and the ranking flips. At 60 accounts, Hootsuite Professional costs $3.32 per account and Loomly Beyond costs $5.53. The plan that looks three times more expensive is the one that comes out cheaper — and it is not close.

The numbers, both pulled the same day

Prices below were taken from each vendor's own pricing page on 5 September 2026. Both change these without notice, so treat the structure as the durable part and re-check the figures on the day you buy.

Hootsuite's page states the model in one sentence: "Hootsuite plans are sold per user (or 'seat'), so you can add as many users as your organization needs." Loomly's page lists no add-on price at all — no way to buy one more account or one more seat. You move a whole tier or you stay.

Cost per account: the number that reverses the ranking

The crossover is not a rounding artefact. It is the whole design. Loomly charges you for accounts and rations people; Hootsuite charges you for people and stops counting accounts. Which one is cheap depends entirely on which of those two things you have a lot of.

The thing nobody prints: Loomly gives you no volume discount at all

Divide each Loomly tier by its own account count and something odd shows up:

• Starter: $65 ÷ 12 = $5.42 per account (yearly: $49 ÷ 12 = $4.08)
• Beyond: $332 ÷ 60 = $5.53 per account (yearly: $249 ÷ 60 = $4.15)

Per-account cost goes up at the bigger tier. Across every vendor we have priced this year, that is the first time we have seen it move in that direction — Later comes closest, with two adjacent tiers at an identical $3.13 per account, but even Later does not charge more.

So what does the 5.1× jump from Starter to Beyond actually buy? Not cheaper accounts. It buys the removal of the 3-seat cap. Loomly is a seat-based product wearing an account ladder as a costume, and the ladder is what most comparisons price.

Ask which side the scarcity is on, then look at your own team

Every scheduler makes one thing abundant and rations the other. Sort the market that way and the decision becomes almost mechanical:

Scarcity on people (Hootsuite, Sprout, SocialPilot, RecurPost, and — despite appearances — Loomly). The product assumes your content volume is roughly fixed and that headcount is the real cost. Built for agencies with a team servicing a handful of brands.

Scarcity on content or throughput (Planable caps posts per workspace, Later caps posts per profile, Buffer's "unlimited" carries a 5,000-posts-per-channel fair use line). The product assumes people are cheap to add and output is the cost.

Here is the counterintuitive part, and it is the reason the crossover exists: if you are one or two people running a lot of accounts, seat-based pricing is your friend, not your enemy. You pay once for yourself and the account column stops mattering. The listicles that rank Hootsuite as "expensive" are quietly assuming a five-person team.

Which one to pick, in four lines

1. A team of 3+ people on 10–12 accounts → Loomly Starter. Three seats included, and $5.42 per account is genuinely good at that size.
2. One or two people on 25+ accounts → Hootsuite Professional. Unlimited accounts on one seat is the single most matrix-friendly line item in this comparison.
3. A team of 5+ on 60 accounts → Loomly Beyond. Unlimited users is exactly what you are paying the 5.1× for, and Hootsuite would bill you five times $199.
4. Approval workflow is the actual requirement → Loomly. That is what it is built around, and it is why people tolerate the flat per-account pricing.

What neither of them does

Both are scheduling and approval layers. They assume the content already exists and their job is to route it, time it, and get it signed off. That is a real job and both do it well.

It is also not the job most people running a matrix are stuck on. If you have twenty accounts, the bottleneck is rarely "when does this go out" — it is that twenty accounts need twenty genuinely different pieces of content, and copying one post across all of them is the fastest way to make the whole set look like one operator. A scheduler will happily distribute identical content to every account you own; it has no opinion about that. Tools built for the matrix case work the other way round — NoobClaw, for instance, generates each account's content from that account's own niche and persona and runs interactions in a local fingerprint browser at human-like intervals, because the problem it is aimed at is sameness rather than timing. Different category, different bottleneck. We wrote up where that line sits in Social Media Scheduler for Multiple Accounts.

FAQ

Can I add just one more account to Loomly Starter?

No. As of 5 September 2026 the pricing page lists no add-on price for extra accounts or extra users. The thirteenth account costs you the jump from $65 to $332. This is worth planning around: across the vendors we have priced, most offer some per-unit top-up lane, and the ones that do not force a cliff exactly where growth happens.

Is Hootsuite Professional really unlimited accounts?

That is what the plans page says today: Professional and above list social accounts as Unlimited, with seats as "1+". The catch is not hidden in the account column, it is in the seat column — every additional person is another $199/month at that tier. So the plan is cheap in exactly one shape (few people, many accounts) and expensive in the opposite one.

Do the annual prices change the conclusion?

No, they widen it. Loomly's annual rate is $4.08–$4.15 per account, essentially flat across tiers. Hootsuite's headline figures are already the annual-billing rate. At 60 accounts on one seat, Hootsuite is still around $3.32 per account against Loomly's $4.15 — the reversal survives the discount, because it comes from the pricing model rather than the promotion.