Metricool vs Sprout Social (2026): Why One Costs 15x More Per Account
- Sprout Social bills per seat, and its Essentials and Standard tiers cap you at 5 social profiles per seat — so the real cost is $15.80 to $39.80 per account per month (sproutsocial.com/pricing, checke
- Metricool's Advanced tier covers up to 50 brands for €43–67/month, which works out to roughly €1 per brand — the same column, 15 to 40 times cheaper.
- The gap is not a rip-off. Sprout is a customer-service and brand-monitoring product with a publisher attached; Metricool is an analytics product with a publisher attached. Neither is primarily a publi
- One question decides it: does anyone on your team answer incoming DMs and reviews all day? If yes, Sprout's inbox is what you're buying. If no, you are paying for a helpdesk you will never open.
Open both pricing pages in two tabs and the first number you see is $79 and €16. That comparison is meaningless, and it is the one almost every "best tools" listicle makes. Sprout Social's $79 is per seat, per month, for 5 social profiles. Metricool's €16 is per month for 5 to 10 brands. The moment you divide by accounts, the two products stop looking like neighbours and start looking like they're in different industries.
Here is what that division actually produces, from both vendors' own pricing pages on 2026-09-02.
The one column nobody puts in the comparison table
| Plan | Price | Accounts included | Cost per account / month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sprout Essentials | $79 / seat (annual) | 5 profiles | $15.80 |
| Sprout Standard | $199 / seat (annual) | 5 profiles | $39.80 |
| Sprout Professional | $299 / seat (annual) | Unlimited | depends on volume |
| Metricool Starter | €16–20 / month | 5–10 brands | ≈ €2–4 |
| Metricool Advanced | €43–67 / month | up to 50 brands | ≈ €1 |
Read the Standard row twice. $39.80 per account per month is not a typo, and it is not the headline price — it is what you get when you take the number Sprout advertises and divide it by the number of accounts Sprout lets you attach to it. Standard costs 2.5x more than Essentials and includes exactly the same 5 profiles. Everything you pay for in that jump is inbox, monitoring and review management.
Sprout's real unit is the seat, and it stacks
Every Sprout number on that page ends in <code>/seat/month</code>. Add a second person who needs to log in and the whole bill doubles — you do not add a $20 user, you add another $199. This is the same trap Hootsuite sets, and it is why per-seat products look reasonable to a solo operator right up until the moment the business grows one person.
On a seat-priced tool, hiring your first assistant costs you a second subscription. Budget for that on the day you sign up, not the day you hire.
The 30-day free trial is genuinely generous (no credit card), and Professional and Advanced do open profiles up to unlimited. But by then you are at $299–399 per seat, and what you are buying at that altitude is sentiment analysis, message spike alerts, the Sprout API and helpdesk integrations. Those are real products. They are just not publishing.
What Metricool is actually selling you
Metricool is an analytics product first. Competitor tracking, reports you can hand to a client, a Looker Studio connector — that is the core, and publishing rides along. Its free tier is capped at 20 posts a month for 1 brand and, notably, excludes LinkedIn and X entirely.
That exclusion is worth pausing on, because it is a pattern we have now seen twice. Free tiers never drop the networks users care least about — they drop the networks whose API the vendor pays most for or gets audited hardest on. Metricool's free tier drops LinkedIn and X. Upload-post's free tier drops TikTok. If a free plan is missing a network, that tells you about the vendor's cost structure, not about the network's popularity.
If you already send Metricool reports to clients every month, none of this matters — stay. The reporting is the product and we do not build anything like it. That sentence is not modesty; it is the actual decision rule.
The question that settles it in ten seconds
Does someone on your team spend real hours every week answering incoming messages, comments and reviews?
- Yes, that's a job here → Sprout's consolidated inbox, review management and message tagging are what the price is for. $199/seat is defensible. Compare it against Sprout's own competitors in that category, not against schedulers.
- No, we mostly publish and check numbers → You are buying a helpdesk to send posts. Metricool at the same profile count is roughly an order of magnitude cheaper, and a pure publisher is cheaper still.
- We run many accounts of our own, not clients' accounts → Neither tool is shaped for you, and that is the case worth spelling out below.
Where both of them stop working: your own account matrix
Both Sprout and Metricool assume one brand speaking through several networks. Attach the same content to 5 accounts and you have done the thing they're built for. But a growing number of operators are running the opposite shape: many accounts that are supposed to look like different people, each with its own niche and voice, none of which should be posting identical copy.
Dashboard tools have no answer to this, because their whole design assumes you want one message replicated. The cost column goes wrong too — per-seat and per-brand pricing punishes account count specifically.
This is the gap NoobClaw was built into, and it is worth being precise about what "different" means. Instead of one composer fanning out, each account runs in its own local fingerprint browser profile with its own niche, persona and keywords, and generates its own content — so what goes out is genuinely different per account rather than the same post duplicated. You log into your own accounts on your own machine; no credentials are handed over. Whether that matters to you depends entirely on whether your accounts are supposed to be one voice or many.
FAQ
Is Sprout Social ever worth $199 per seat if I only publish?
Honestly, no. Standard and Essentials include the same 5 profiles; the entire difference is inbox, monitoring and review management. If you don't work tickets, you're paying $120/seat/month for panels you won't open. Essentials at $79 is the only Sprout tier that makes sense for a publish-first workflow, and even then you should check what a dedicated scheduler costs at your account count first.
Does Metricool replace Sprout's inbox?
No, and pretending otherwise is how people end up unhappy after switching. Metricool's strength is analytics, competitor tracking and client reporting. If your team lives in a unified inbox answering customers, Metricool will feel like a downgrade in exactly the place it matters. Match the tool to the work you actually do, not to the price you'd prefer to pay.
Which one is better for running 20+ accounts?
Neither, if those accounts are yours rather than clients'. Sprout's per-seat model and Metricool's per-brand model both scale by charging you for account count, and both assume a single brand voice pushed to many networks. For many-accounts-one-operator, look at tools designed around per-account isolation and per-account content generation instead. See our breakdown of schedulers for multiple accounts for the cost-per-account math across the whole category.
Prices in this article were read directly from sproutsocial.com/pricing and metricool.com/pricing on 2026-09-02. Both vendors change tiers frequently — verify before you buy. Related reading: Metricool vs Blotato, Metricool vs Later, and the cheapest scheduler by cost per account.