Hootsuite pricing in 2026 starts at $99 per user per month for Standard, $199 for Professional, and $399 for Advanced. Those three figures are USD, billed annually, and they sit in both the pricing FAQ and the page's JSON-LD. Enterprise has no public dollar. Month-to-month billing exists, according to that same FAQ, but the higher per-seat rate is not printed on the plans page. There is no free plan. A 14-day trial needs no card and does not auto-charge on the marketing FAQ. Hootsuite wins if the job is scheduling, inbox, approvals, and owned-account listening. Trends MCP is the cheaper path when the job is public multi-source trend boards plus MCP and REST, not a social suite.
How much is Hootsuite per user in 2026?
Paid self-serve seats print three annual rates: Standard $99 per user per month, Professional $199, Advanced $399. JSON-LD on the pricing page (accessed 21 Sep 2026) sets priceCurrency to USD, lowPrice to 99.00, highPrice to 399.00, and offerCount to 4. The fourth offer is Enterprise with a URL and no price field.
Multiply by seats. One Standard seat is $1,188 per year. Five Standard seats are $5,940 per year. Ten Professional seats are $23,880 per year. Ten Advanced seats are $47,880 per year. Hootsuite sells seats, not social accounts, so a one-person shop paying Standard still pays $99 per month on annual billing even if it only connects two profiles.
| Plan | Annual rate per seat | One-seat year | Five-seat year | Social accounts |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Standard | $99 / mo | $1,188 | $5,940 | 10 |
| Professional | $199 / mo | $2,388 | $11,940 | Unlimited |
| Advanced | $399 / mo | $4,788 | $23,940 | Unlimited |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | Custom | Unlimited |
The asterisk under the cards says prices exclude tax and rest on annual billing. Payment methods listed on the FAQ are Visa, Mastercard, Discover, JCB, and PayPal. Annual Enterprise invoices can also go out by check, wire, or ACH.
What Standard at $99 includes that Professional at $199 adds
Standard is the 10-account calendar: unlimited scheduled posts after the trial, one inbox, AI captions and images, a five-competitor benchmark, and Lumen search over the past seven days. The Standard plan page (accessed 21 Sep 2026) names the product stack as Perch for publishing, Nest for the inbox, Lumen for listening, and Wisdom for the in-app assistant. Networks listed on first login are Facebook, TikTok, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, YouTube, Threads, Bluesky, and Pinterest. Nest's inbox list on that page also names Google Business Profile and WhatsApp.
Professional removes the 10-account cap. It extends Lumen search to 30 days, lets a workspace compare up to five searches, raises competitor benchmarking to 20, adds custom and scheduled reports, and is the tier whose pricing card promises trend forecasts up to 90 days ahead. Inbox automation, smart replies, and DM automations sit here, not on Standard.
Advanced is the team-control SKU: approval workflows, message assignment, auto-routing, internal comments, post suspension, CSAT surveys, and report export/share. Competitor benchmarking stays at 20, the same ceiling Professional already sold. Enterprise then adds SSO, compliance add-ons, Parliament employee advocacy, and the listening/analytics extras that only that contract lists. The Advanced FAQ says organizations that need SSO, Parliament, or advanced social intelligence should look at Enterprise rather than stacking Advanced seats.
One schema quirk is worth reading before treating Lumen as an Enterprise-only add-on. The same pricing-page JSON-LD lists a software add-on named "Lumen by Talkwalker" described as Enterprise-tier social listening. The Standard and Advanced plan pages, fetched the same day, both say those SKUs include Lumen. The durable split is depth: seven-day search and five competitors on Standard, 30-day search and a 90-day forecast claim on Professional, then Enterprise-only extras on the Enterprise page (13 months of historical listening data is the figure that page prints for premium listening).
Why the public page hides month-to-month rates
The pricing FAQ states that Standard, Professional, and Advanced can bill monthly or annually, and that annual billing is the lower per-user monthly rate. The cards, the asterisk, and the JSON-LD UnitPriceSpecification all say billed annually. No month-to-month dollar appears on /pricing, /plans, the Standard/Professional/Advanced URLs, or llms.txt in this run.
Self-serve legal copy still assumes both cadences. The Self-Serve Terms (last modified 29 Jul 2025) say plans renew at the end of a monthly or annual term and auto-bill unless cancelled under section 24. Section 20 also says a free trial of a paid self-serve service may require a card, and that Hootsuite will charge automatically on the first day after the trial unless the account is cancelled or downgraded first. That is not the story on the 21 Sep 2026 marketing FAQ, which says no card is required and the trial does not auto-charge. Buyers who care about the charge behavior should read both pages, not only the card grid.
Enterprise is a different contract. The Enterprise FAQ (accessed 21 Sep 2026) describes a one-year term that auto-renews, written non-renewal notice at least 60 days before term end, and written notice at least 90 days before a fee increase. Those 60-day and 90-day clocks are Enterprise copy. They are not printed as self-serve SKU rules on the public pricing cards.
What the 14-day trial actually lets a team post
The trial is 14 days, no card on the marketing FAQ, no automatic conversion. Daily posting is capped at 10-20 posts per organization, "depending on plan." Bulk scheduling is off during the trial. Unlimited scheduled posts, the headline Standard feature, is therefore a paid-plan claim, not a trial claim.
There is still no permanent free tier on the 2026 cards. The self-serve terms continue to mention a charge-free service a customer can downgrade into after a trial. That leftover line does not restore a public $0 SKU on the plans page.
Nonprofit seats at $39, $79, and $159
HootGiving reprints the same three self-serve plans at $39, $79, and $159 per user per month, marked USD and billed annually (accessed 21 Sep 2026). Against the public $99 / $199 / $399 list, each discounted seat is about 60% off, which matches the page headline "Save up to 60%." One nonprofit Standard seat is $468 per year. One nonprofit Advanced seat is $1,908 per year.
The discount is an application, not a checkout toggle. The public pricing FAQ only says a discounted rate exists for nonprofits on some plans and points at an apply flow, including TechSoup. Enterprise is absent from the HootGiving card row.
Four Hootsuite MCP hosts versus one Trends MCP URL
Hootsuite's MCP page (accessed 21 Sep 2026) publishes four remote server URLs, one per product:
- Perch (publish, drafts, calendar, owned-account analytics):
https://mcp.hootsuite.com/perch - Nest (inbox, assignments, saved replies):
https://mcp.hootsuite.com/nest - Lumen (mentions, sentiment, industry chatter):
https://mcp.hootsuite.com/lumen - Parliament (employee advocacy shares):
https://mcp.hootsuite.com/parliament
The MCP FAQ requires an active Hootsuite account and access to the matching product. ChatGPT and Claude get connector-style setup. Gemini and Microsoft Copilot are documented as needing an IT administrator. Sample Lumen prompts on that page still use a 7-day window even though Professional marketing sells 30-day search. The MCP page lists ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, and Gemini. It does not publish a Cursor mcp.json block.
Trends MCP is the other shape: public boards, no connected social profiles, one Bearer host for most clients, three read-only tools. docs.md last updated 21 Sep 2026 gives this Cursor snippet:
"trends-mcp": {
"url": "https://api.trendsmcp.ai/mcp",
"transport": "http",
"headers": { "Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" }
}
Paste that into ~/.cursor/mcp.json (Windows: %USERPROFILE%\.cursor\mcp.json). The install walkthrough lives on the MCP server for Cursor page. get_top_trends defaults to limit 25 (max 200). Free boards return the top 10 and pin offset at 0. The machine-readable source list on llms.txt and docs.md this run is 16 keyword sources plus 24 live feed names. HTML marketing still prints other totals on /pricing and /data-sources; those pages disagree with each other, so this post uses the markdown inventory.
Public monthly SKUs on pricing.md (21 Sep 2026) are Free $0 / 100 requests, Starter $19 / 1,000, Pro $49 / 5,000, Business $199 / 25,000. HTML yearly cards show Starter $16 per month ($192 billed annually), Pro $39 ($468), Business $159 ($1,910). Failed calls are free. HTML FAQ copy says one successful API or MCP call equals one request; docs.md meters MCP get_top_trends at 1 credit per 10 requested rows, max 10 credits per call, with REST still 1 request per call. Quote the meter that matches the transport in use.
A five-seat Hootsuite Standard year is $5,940 before tax. A Trends MCP Business year at the HTML yearly card is $1,910. That comparison only holds if the job is live public boards and keyword growth, not a content calendar. Hootsuite still wins scheduling, Nest, approvals, and owned-account Lumen. Cheaper schedulers exist for teams that do not need that stack; Metricool's published brand-count SKUs are one example, and the existing Sprout Social vs Hootsuite post covers the other heavy social suite.
FAQ
Does Hootsuite still have a free plan?
No public free plan appears on the 21 Sep 2026 cards. The entry path is a 14-day trial (10-20 daily posts, no bulk scheduling) or a paid seat at $99 / $199 / $399 per user per month on annual billing. Self-serve legal copy still mentions downgrading to a charge-free service after a trial. That sentence is not a $0 SKU on /pricing.
Is Hootsuite billed per social account or per user?
Per user, also called a seat. Standard caps connected social accounts at 10. Professional, Advanced, and Enterprise list unlimited accounts. Extra people who need the dashboard each add another seat at the same per-user rate. Nonprofit HootGiving seats follow the same per-user rule at $39 / $79 / $159.
Can a buyer see the month-to-month Hootsuite price before checkout?
Not on the public plans page this run. The FAQ confirms monthly billing exists and costs more per user than annual. JSON-LD and the card asterisk only encode the annual figures $99, $199, and $399. Treat any month-to-month dollar quoted by a third-party roundup as unverified unless it is on hootsuite.com.
Does Hootsuite MCP work without a Hootsuite login?
No. The MCP FAQ (accessed 21 Sep 2026) requires an active account and access to Perch, Nest, Lumen, or Parliament. The four hosts extend those products into ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, or Copilot. They do not expose Google Trends, TikTok hashtag boards, Amazon Best Sellers, or GitHub trending as public feeds.
When is Trends MCP the right buy instead of a Hootsuite seat?
When the buyer needs ranked public trend feeds and keyword growth inside Cursor, Claude, or REST, without connecting brand profiles. Start on Free at 100 requests per month, then Starter at $19 if the default limit 25 and one year of history matter. Keep Hootsuite when the work is publishing, inbox, approvals, or owned-account listening. The two tools overlap only on "what is moving," and they measure that job on different graphs.
Sources (accessed 21 Sep 2026 unless noted): Hootsuite pricing and JSON-LD; Standard, Professional, Advanced, Enterprise; HootGiving nonprofit rates; Hootsuite MCP; Self-Serve Terms (last modified 29 Jul 2025). Trends MCP figures from pricing.md, docs.md, and llms.txt dated 21 Sep 2026, plus the HTML /pricing yearly cards the same day.