Sprout Social

Sprout Social runs publishing, a unified Smart Inbox, review management, analytics and keyword monitoring across the networks it holds partnerships with: Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Threads, TikTok, X and YouTube, plus Bluesky, Reddit, Snapchat, WhatsApp and Facebook Messenger in the integrations directory.

The AI side is named Trellis, described as Sprout Social's AI agent that queries social data in conversational language and returns answers inside Publishing, Reporting, Listening and the Smart Inbox. Trellis Studio is where a team builds reusable skills for it. Smaller AI features sit beside it: Enhance Post by AI Assist on Professional, Enhance Reply by AI Assist and Smart Inbox sentiment on Advanced. The vendor calls Trellis proactive, able to orchestrate complex, multi-step tasks without constant prompting, which is analysis and monitoring rather than posting on its own: public-facing actions can be held behind approval workflows that admins control.

The pricing page opens with "No credit card required. Annual billing." and the cards then show $79 (Essentials), $199 (Standard), $299 (Professional) and $399 (Advanced) per seat per month. Those are the annual-commitment rates. The month-to-month rates appear only in the FAQ: "Essentials: $99 per seat/month Standard: $249 per seat/month Professional: $399 per seat/month Advanced: $499 per seat/month". On Professional the two numbers happen to be $299 and $399, so a buyer reading the card alone understates the monthly cost by a third.

Enterprise is quoted as Custom. The discount is described in prose rather than a percentage, and annual billing is a single upfront payment for the whole term.

Trellis gives 100 credits per seat per month on every plan, with Trellis Plus at $35 per user/month monthly or $28 annually. Premium Analytics, Listening, Employee Advocacy and Professional Services are add-ons from Standard up, none with a published price. Influencer Marketing is a separate product needing no Sprout plan, also with no rate card.

Renewal price rises on annual plans are capped at 7% unless 60 days notice of different pricing is given.

Monthly in-app plans cancel from the billing page and run to the next pay date. Annual plans also cancel from the billing page but only before the next annual pay date, and annual plans billed monthly need notice at least thirty (30) days prior to the end of your current Subscription Term by email to a customer success manager. In every case the terms state that no refunds or credits are issued for prepaid and unused fees, and cancellation must be done by the current account owner.

Downgrading carries its own warning: it "may cause the loss of content, features, or capacity of your Account". After termination Sprout may remove account information, settings and content within thirty days, with no recovery afterwards. A team leaving should pull its data out first, which per the plan table means being on Advanced, where the API lives.

The Sprout API docs are public and specific: OAuth 2.0 with machine-to-machine or user-based clients, or account-scoped API tokens, rate limited to 60 requests per minute and 250,000 per month. Endpoints cover profile and post analytics, inbox messages, cases, listening topic metrics and messages, publishing post creation and media upload, plus a direct Tableau connector.

The docs are candid about the gaps: paid ad account data, listening data from X and listening message-level data from Reddit are not included. Access needs the API Permissions permission and acceptance of the Analytics API terms, with a separate X Content End User License Agreement before X data flows. The docs say only "the appropriate plan"; the pricing table resolves it, listing "The Sprout API and Helpdesk integrations" under Advanced.

No MCP server or connector for AI assistants is published. The API docs, the integrations directory and the AI pages do not mention MCP, and no such page appears in the sitemap index.

The integrations directory marks each connector with the plans it works on, which is more honest than most and worth reading before buying a tier. Slack, Canva, Dropbox, Adobe Experience Manager, Google Analytics and the review sources (Yelp, Trustpilot, Glassdoor, Google Play, Facebook reviews) are labeled All Plans. Shopify is Professional and Advanced. The help desk and CRM connectors are Advanced only: Zendesk, HubSpot Service Hub and Microsoft Dynamics 365 each carry an Advanced Plan label, and Salesforce lists Agentforce-assisted case handling.

Tableau and Salesforce Marketing Cloud Intelligence are marked Premium Solution, as is every Listening source, so business intelligence and listening depend on the paid add-ons.

The Trust Center names SOC 2 Type 2, ISO 27001, ISO 27701, CSA STAR Level 1 and PCI DSS attestations, publishes a downloadable customer DPA and points to a customer trust portal. The application security page adds SAML 2.0 SSO with just-in-time provisioning, TOTP or HOTP two-step verification, IP restrictions on the app and the API, audit trail logs covering more than fifty events, per-user permissions and a global publishing pause button.

Residency is the clear limit: infrastructure, application software and customer data all sit in US regions, primary in AWS us-east-1, secondary in us-west-2, with GCP us-central1 for backup. A European buyer with a residency requirement has no option here. On AI, the vendor states no-training agreements with its model partners and the ability to opt out of the OpenAI integration entirely, and names the OECD AI Principles and the NIST AI Risk Management Framework. What is not published is a configurable retention control: the privacy policy describes only Sprout's own legitimate-business-need standard.

Uptime is a target rather than a commitment. Engineering strives to maintain 99.9% uptime as a KPI, with public status pages per product, while the terms say interruptions do not justify terminating a subscription or earning a refund.

This suits a brand or agency team that wants publishing, social customer care, analytics and listening under one roof, with the AI used to shorten analysis rather than to replace a social manager. The terms provide for agencies, including assigning one client per group and charging clients for the use.

It fits poorly in three situations. A small team on a tight budget pays $99 per seat per month at the entry tier with five profiles and no brand keywords, which is expensive beside single-purpose schedulers. A team that needs programmatic access, a help desk connector or a data export path pays $499 per seat per month month-to-month for Advanced, because those three capabilities share that tier. And a buyer with a non-US data residency requirement is ruled out by the hosting footprint rather than by a feature gap.

Check one thing before signing: the plan cards and the FAQ publish different prices for the same plans, because the cards default to annual billing.