Sprout Social pricing, worked out per seat for a small team

Sprout Social pricing looks simple on the page: four self-serve plans, each priced per seat. For a founder budgeting a small marketing team, the per-seat part is what changes the math, and so do the add-ons that sit outside the listed price. This breakdown works through what one, three and five seats cost, what you do not get at each level, and what a budget looks like if the job you need is monitoring rather than publishing.

The list prices

Sprout Social publishes these prices per seat per month (checked October 2026):

Yearly billing is paid upfront for the whole term. There is a 30-day trial with no card, and no free plan.

What each tier leaves out

• Essentials is built around publishing: up to five profiles, send-time suggestions, profile and post reporting. No brand keywords, so no monitoring.
• Standard adds the shared inbox, keyword and location monitoring and review management.
• Professional adds unlimited profiles and competitor insights.
• Advanced adds sentiment in the inbox, Message Spike Alerts and the Sprout API.

Then there are add-ons, sold on Standard and up: Listening, Premium Analytics, Employee Advocacy and Professional Services. Sprout does not publish their prices on the pricing page. Trellis, Sprout's AI agent, comes with 100 credits per seat a month; Trellis Plus is $28 per user a month yearly or $35 monthly.

Worked examples, yearly billing, before add-ons

A three-person team on Standard, which is the lowest plan that can take the Listening add-on, starts at $7,164 a year before Listening is priced in. That is the number to hold in mind when someone says "we should get Sprout so we can track mentions".

Splitting the jobs

Most early-stage companies use a social suite for two separate jobs:

1. Publishing and replying on the company's own accounts.
2. Hearing what the market says: mentions, competitor moves, threads asking for a tool like yours.

Sprout bundles the first and sells the second as an add-on. Pricing them separately can cut the bill a lot.

For publishing, Sprout Essentials at $79 a seat covers five profiles. Buffer, priced per channel, starts at $5 a channel a month yearly with a free plan for three channels.

For hearing the market, AyeWatch is built only for that, and its plans are not per seat. You start with a Free Preview of three lifetime runs and no card, and paid plans start at $9 a month, with no contracts or cancellation fees.

What makes it the better fit for this job is how it works. You describe each monitor in plain English, such as "a competitor changes its pricing page" or "someone on Reddit asks for a tool like ours". AI reads new items by meaning rather than keyword matching, decides whether they match what you asked for, and sends a short summary with its sources. It watches internet topics, specific web pages and social sources such as X, Reddit, YouTube, LinkedIn, Instagram and TikTok. Alerts reach you in the app on web, iOS and Android, and paid plans add email, Slack, Discord and webhooks.

Three budgets compared

The second and third rows lose things the first one has: a shared inbox, approval flows and team reporting. They gain monitoring of the open web and specific competitor pages, which Sprout's pricing page does not list.

How to decide

If your team spends its day answering customers in social inboxes and leadership wants a monthly social report, the Sprout Standard seats are probably worth it, and AyeWatch does not replace that work. If what you mainly wanted was to hear about mentions and competitor moves, buy that job on its own. The Sprout Social alternatives comparison from AyeWatch lists a few more combinations.