Sendible Review 2024 – Is It a Wise Investment?

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Sendible’s Feature-Rich, but Is the Price Right?

When you’re talking about the best social media management tools, Sendible is one of the services people mention most. Sendible launched in 2009, and promotes itself as a good alternative to social media management tools like Hootsuite and Buffer.

Sendible supports all major social media networks, including Facebook pages and groups, Twitter, Instagram business profiles, Facebook ads, LinkedIn profiles and pages, Google My Business, YouTube, and Pinterest.

This means it has the potential to be an all-round social media dashboard for small businesses and brands. (Or you could simply use it with your favorite social media site as a tweet scheduler, Facebook scheduler, Instagram scheduler, Pinterest scheduler – well, you get the idea.)

Sendible takes a slightly different approach from Hootsuite and Buffer to working with social networks. Every interaction with a network is called a “service,” so if you post to Twitter and stream to Twitter that counts as two services.

The Starter plan gives a single user access to 12 services. You can have three users and 48 services with the Traction plan, seven users and 105 services with the Growth plan, and 12 users and 192 services with the Scale plan.  All plans offer a 30-day free trial (no credit card required), so you can test Sendible for a decent amount of time before making a long-term financial commitment.

While Sendible reviews rave about its brand-friendly features and excellent reporting, the question remains: Is it worth the hefty price tag? Our in-depth Sendible review will soon find out.  We’re going to test out the Traction plan, so read on to find out if Sendible is the right social media dashboard for you and meets the specific needs of your business.

We tested this tool as part of a larger project rating all of the top social media management tools.

A Robust All-in-One Social Media Dashboard

Sendible has a number of features that make it a powerhouse. These include a share button to help agency clients and team members share content quickly and easily, and a mobile app that gives on-the-go access to powerful monitoring, engagement, analytics, and more.

Social Inbox and Engagement

The Engage tab is at the core of Sendible. It’s like a super social media tracker, allowing you to monitor social media activity on all the channels you’ve added. In addition, you can click on individual streams via the Priority Inbox to the right of the page, to see what Sendible recommends you pay attention to.

Messages are sorted by date, so you can easily see what’s newest, or keep track of anything you’ve missed. You can respond to messages directly from within this interface. For example, clicking the reply button on a Twitter message pops up a compose window with the person you’re replying to automatically tagged. There’s also a handy preview button (eye icon) so you can check how your message will look.

You can also complete many of the actions you’d be able to do in the actual apps, such as liking, retweeting, sharing , commenting, and so on.  A pretty neat feature is the ability to see in-depth profile information for Twitter users, simply by clicking on the username.

For this feature, Sendible has also integrated with Majestic to provide trust scores and metrics. This is great for businesses needing more detail about about their fans.

Social Listening

Social media monitoring tools are crucial for any business, and Sendible’s got one baked right in. Use the Monitor tab to pay attention to what’s being said about your brand online.

One cool thing is that Sendible starts you off by automatically creating keyword monitors based on your website and interests (you provide this information during setup). You can also add your own, which is useful if you need to keep tabs on multiple websites or topics.

Or you can simply search for a site or brand you want to track, as I’ve done below. Recent searches appear in the Searches sub-menu of the Monitor tab.

Keyword monitors also include sentiment analysis, so you can assess how people feel about your business and can respond accordingly. If you want to turn around negative sentiment, this is a useful tool. You can filter content in this tab by source, as well as sentiment, to really dig down into what’s happening to your brand reputation.

Monitoring only works for Facebook and Twitter, which is kind of a shame, but still useful. You can also use this section of Sendible as a hashtag tracker, so you stay up to date with trending topics and issues of interest to your business. This enables you to jump on trends quickly to get more engagement with your social media content.

Publishing and Scheduling Posts

When you’re ready to create content, click the Compose button to get a pop-up window. Here, you can paste a link, or craft a social media message.  The compose window includes a number of handy tools, such as link shorteners, attachments (for adding more images, for example), and emoji.

You can also click the calendar to send or schedule an update, and save a draft or copy it to your content library so you can share it easily multiple times.

Once you’ve created your original message, select the networks you want to post to. Sendible automatically formats posts appropriately for each network. You also get access to additional options, such as the eye icon to show a preview, and buttons for sending or scheduling your post.

Other publishing features include being able to compose multiple posts at a time, bulk upload them via CSV, and create social media content campaigns with individual timings.

You can see all scheduled and posted content within Sendible’s calendar interface, which serves as a useful post planner. It’s easy to rearrange content with drag and drop, too. Unlike Buffer1, though, you’ll only see the content that you’ve posted via Sendible, so if you’re using more than one social media tool, this is a disadvantage.

Team Features

When using social media scheduling tools like Sendible, it’s important for teams to be able to work efficiently. Sendible appears to have got this right, with a tasks area where you can see tasks assigned to you, to others, and those that have been completed. It’s simple, but effective.

When you’re ready to expand your team, you can add new team members with just one click.  And when you’re posting any content, it’s pretty simple to send it for review before it goes live, as shown earlier.

Suggested Content

Sendible automatically creates a content library for you, but you can also add your own. This is an excellent place to create social media posts for evergreen content, so you can easily share it again without having to craft the post from scratch.

You can also see content recommendations based on what you’ve posted on Twitter, and there are topic groups curated by Sendible so you always have engaging content to share. This is a great way to solve the problem of figuring out what to post.

External Integrations

Sendible isn’t just about social media scheduling tools – it also supports several blogging platforms. These include WordPress.org and WordPress.com, Medium, Blogger, Tumblr, as well as lesser known platforms like Movable Type and MetaWeblog.

It also has plenty of other external integrations to streamline your social media content management even more.  There are integrations for moderating Facebook comments, updating your Facebook cover photo, creating graphics with Canva, attaching images from Dropbox or Google Drive, monitoring the impact of social media on traffic with Google Analytics, and getting social media notifications in Slack. While Sendible doesn’t have as many integrations as Hootsuite1, it’s concentrated on the ones its core users are most likely to use.

Sendible’s Easy to Set Up and Use, With a Couple of Minor Issues

Getting Sendible set up doesn’t take long, and it’s got a couple of neat features. Even if you don’t get it right the first time, you can easily add and remove services via a handy menu button.

Hassle Free Setup

Signing up for Sendible was a hassle-free process that took less than a minute.  One of the things I appreciated most is that it told me right on the signup page when my free trial would end.

Once you’re in, you immediately get the option to add accounts, starting with the most common for business: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, and Google My Business.  Again, adding social media accounts is seamless – one of the quickest processes I’ve seen. Plus, Sendible keeps you updated with the number of accounts and services you have added and have left.

However, a few minor issues arose. When I added an account, it wasn’t always evident that the addition had taken place as I navigated through other sections of the dashboard. For instance, I observed the addition of both LinkedIn and Instagram profiles, but the associated content didn’t display upon inspection.

For Twitter and Facebook, though, it worked fine, and I was able to get straight into content creation.

Auto-Posting Content

One of Sendible’s best features is the ability to monitor RSS feeds or websites and automatically post that content on your social sites. To do this, go to Content, then Feeds, and select New Auto Post. Search by name or URL for a source to add. Then set options like update frequency, number of entries, and so on.

You can decide whether to add this content to your drafts or to your calendar as a scheduled post. This is an excellent way to keep your content calendar full. I used this feature to post to LinkedIn, though automated Facebook posting would also work well.  This is a huge time saver for busy social media managers.

You can also get an email alert when your message has been delivered, although, those with busy social media accounts may want to turn this off.

Grouping Social Accounts

If you’re an agency or social media manager who’s handling social media for multiple clients, Sendible’s account grouping facility is an excellent way to stay organized. You can add clients in the same way as you add new users to a team, and all clients get individual dashboards. Switch between them to add the social media accounts for each client, so you can manage them individually.

Auto-Generated Reports Give a Useful Snapshot of Social Media Metrics

Social media analytics are available via the Measure tab in your Sendible dashboard. This gives you an overview of what’s happening with your profiles. Whether you’re managing your own social media or are running multiple accounts as an agency, you’ll find this easy to use.

Analytics

The analytics dashboard has a clean, clear interface. It includes buttons for the main social media accounts for which Sendible collects data. Click on any button to go to the actual report, or to set up analytics for that platform. It’s easy to use and works pretty quickly.

If you want to learn about how to leverage Sendible’s analytics to improve your social media strategy, read more here.

Reporting

Sendible automatically creates reports for the platforms you add, and these provide a useful overview.

But you can also build custom reports, drawing on a number of insights and graphs. In fact, Sendible’s reporting is pretty awesome, as all reports feature the same beautiful user interface and reams of data on every aspect of your social media performance.

Apps and Integrations

Sendible just has one additional analytics integration: Google Analytics. This was a bit buggy at first, but a couple of days later, it provided a useful overview of website performance. This is a good way to bring all your social and web analytics under one roof, and will save time for busy marketers.

Sendible Has an Extensive Knowledge Base, but Can Be Slow to Respond

Sendible supports users via a detailed knowledge base, and also keeps you up to date with known issues in the dashboard. There’s phone support for customers in the US, UK, and Australia.

Other than that, you’ll have to open a support ticket. There’s a lot of detail to fill in, plus a recaptcha, which didn’t work that well. I had to attempt it four times before it let my query go through.

An interesting feature is that Sendible lets you decide how important your query is. I marked my query as “important,” rather than “urgent,” and a couple of days later I was still waiting for a response.

Sendible aims for a 48 hour response time, with customer service available 9am–7pm UTC Monday to Friday. This is inadequate, in my opinion, as many other social media tools offer quicker support options.

There did not appear to be live chat in my location,  but after a Google search I was able to access a support email address. I sent an email asking  how to schedule the same message at different times on different social media accounts and waited for a response.

Since I sent this email after close of business on a Friday, I thought a response around on Monday morning was pretty quick. The response was also helpful and detailed, including a video walkthrough of how to solve my query.

Overall, I thought Sendible’s customer support could be better. I never got a response to my support ticket, though email support worked well.

Support Questionnaire

Sendible Pricing Is High, but It’s Feature-Rich

Compared with tools like Buffer1 and Hootsuite1, which both offer free plans, Sendible looks costly. But the tool is incredibly feature-rich, so it could be worth it.

However, if you want more than basic reporting on social media metrics, you’ll have to upgrade to the Traction plan, which is similar in price to Hootsuite’s Team and Buffer’s Business plan. However, Sendible’s reporting is much better, and could make it more appealing, especially now that Buffer has moved its best analytics into a separate tool, Buffer Analyze.

Sendible accepts all major credit cards, and applies a 15% discount for annual purchases. Non-profits also get a 15% discount, or 25% for annual payments.

You can also buy additional services for any plan. The price for this is available on application.

Cancellations & Refunds

I grabbed a free trial of Sendible with no credit card details required. I cancelled it before the trial expired, so I didn’t need a refund. Cancellation was straightforward, with no need to get additional help. Read more about cancelling your Sendible account.