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Planable is the best client-facing social media tool we’ve ever used and we’ve used a lot.
A social media scheduler is the greatest time-saver ever. This marketers' little helper ensures teams stay consistent and efficient and have enough time to do what they do best — develop new creative ways to engage with the audience. So say goodbye to scheduling...
Jan 17, 2025
When you’re picking the right digital tools for your marketing team or your business, there are so many to choose from that it might leave you scratching your head. After all, a proper marketing campaign plan involves a lot more than simply promoting your business with paid ads. You also have to think about how you’ll use social media, SEO, email marketing, content strategies, and more — plus a place to manage and track all these activities.
That’s why I compiled a list of the top digital marketing tools available. To spare you the research, I split this into multiple categories, each covering key areas of your marketing strategy.
Without a doubt, digital marketing tools differ in their feature set depending on the marketing channels they focus on — which makes the process of picking the right ones even trickier.
Still, there are a few must-haves all of these tools have in common, namely:
Digital marketing tools must integrate with your existing toolset and target channels. For SEO tools, for example, your platform should integrate with tools like Google Analytics and Google Docs to help manage SEO workflows from beginning to end.
Built-in collaboration features are mandatory across the board, especially in social media management and content planning. Look for tools that allow communication via comments and easy external collaborator onboarding, while approval workflows are also nice to have.
Whether you’ll focus on emails, socials, or blog posts, your digital marketing tool should ideally offer built-in analytics for that specific channel — it declutters your toolset and makes it easy to analyze and optimize your marketing efforts in one go.
Planable is a social media management tool for agencies and brands that handles direct scheduling across all major networks. The platform lets you schedule social media posts via a handy drag-and-drop calendar or plan out your entire marketing calendar, including blogs, newsletters, and any other written formats through its Universal Content feature.
Content calendar view in Planable
You can organize content through color-coded labels and loads of filtering options. You can sift through projects based on social networks, content types, authors, and campaigns. Plus, the platform includes numerous time-saving features, like the option to schedule recurring posts or publish content across multiple social media platforms simultaneously.
Scheduling a recurring post in Planable
Planable really stands out through its collaboration and approval tools. Team members can leave feedback via direct comments, annotations, and suggestions. Even working with clients or external collaborators is as convenient as it gets. Clients and other stakeholders can hop onto the platform via shareable links — no account setup is needed.
Collaboration via internal notes in Planable
The option to create separate workspaces dedicated to different brands, clients, or campaigns also keeps things neat and organized. You can mark comments or complete projects as internal — perfect for hiding work-in-progress content away from the client’s view until it’s ready.
Speaking of which, Planable’s review and approval tools ensure your end result is as polished as possible. The platform’s multi-level approval workflows let you set up multiple approval layers — content must pass through each distinct layer before receiving the final greenlight.
Multi-level approval workflow in Planable
I love the ability to lock content upon approval — handy to prevent any accidental post-approval tweaks or mishaps.
Key features
Drawbacks: Although Planable includes direct social media scheduling, you currently cannot publish blogs or other content formats from the platform.
Pricing: Planable starts at $33 per workspace per month (annual billing). There’s also a free plan that includes all the platform’s features (except X publishing) — you can schedule up to 50 total posts.
Buffer is an all-in-one social media management platform that stands out through its reports and AI-powered recommendations. The platform tracks your social content’s performance to suggest ideal posting time, frequency, and content type to maximize your social media presence.
You can also set up fully customized reports to track metrics across one or multiple social accounts. Buffer also compares organic content and boosted post-performance to help optimize your campaign spend, while its hashtag and audience demographic analytics tool offer the insights necessary to learn what makes different audiences tick.
Key features
Drawbacks: Buffer is rather lackluster in collaboration features — the platform lacks annotations and suggestions, while its approval feature is quite rudimentary.
Pricing: Paid plans start at $5 per month per channel (annual billing), with a limited free plan available.
Sendible is a solid option for small businesses seeking a social media marketing tool with great audience engagement features.
The platform lets you monitor and reply to comments and DMs across various channels like LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram, and YouTube — all within a unified inbox. You can also assign comments to specific team members to quickly address all critical feedback.
Key features
Drawbacks: The platform’s steep pricing gaps between packages can make scalability a challenge.
Pricing: Sendible starts at $25 per month (billed annually), with a 14-day free trial available.
Airtable is a powerful project management tool that stands out through its customization capabilities and data visualization tools. The platform’s Interface Designer turns spreadsheet-based data into workspaces tailor-made for your specific needs — all via a no-code interface.
For example, you can turn assignment spreadsheets into visual dashboards complete with buttons, visuals, progress bars, and more — ideal for giving external stakeholders high-level overviews of your campaign’s progress.
Key features
Drawbacks: Users report that Airtable has a steep learning curve.
Pricing: There’s a free plan available. Paid packages start at $20 per user per month (annual billing).
Notion is a solid choice if you’re looking to keep all your internal documents in a centralized, easy-to-navigate space.
The platform’s Wikis let you set up complete internal repositories including multiple documents, like brand guidelines, employee onboarding files, mission statements, and so on. Most notably, you can publish documents as dedicated web pages, allowing easy access for remote employees.
Key features
Drawbacks: Notion is quite complex and might seem intimidating to new users.
Pricing: Notion starts at $10 per user per month (annual billing), with a free version available.
Miro is a whiteboard collaboration tool that lets you brainstorm and plan projects with team members via collaborative canvases. The platform includes built-in audio and video chat and polling and presentation tools.
You can also use the platform’s AI to turn sticky notes into fully-fledged product or content briefs, interactive prototypes, meeting summaries, and more.
Key features
Drawbacks: Miro limits the amount of times you can use its AI tools across all its pricing packages.
Pricing: You can use Miro completely for free, while paid plans start at $8 per user per month (annual billing).
Think of Planable AI as your handy social media assistant. You can use it to write quick social media captions from scratch complete with hashtags and emojis, or edit existing copy in a pinch.
Generating an Instagram caption with Planable AI
Planable AI also writes up social captions for your images and videos. Simply upload your visuals onto the platform and click Generate — you don’t even have to bother writing prompts.
Key features
Drawbacks: Planable AI is currently limited to social media posts — you cannot use it for other written content formats.
Pricing: The AI assistant is included in all of Planable’s pricing plans.
Copy.ai is an AI-powered toolset that generates fully automated sales and marketing workflows.
You can use the platform to perform tasks both simple and complex, from generating email copy or SEO-optimized blog posts to leveraging CRM data for personalized marketing campaigns.
Key features
Drawbacks: Copy.ai is rather complex — there’s a slight learning curve and implementing the platform into your tool stack may take a while.
Pricing: Paid plans start at $36 per month (annual billing). There’s also a free plan available.
Jasper is an AI writing tool that generates copy across numerous formats — be it emails, ad copy, blog posts, and so on. One of the platform’s standouts is the Remix feature. You can upload content into Jasper and automatically repurpose it for other channels.
For example, you could copy/paste a blog post’s page URL and have Jasper turn the content into an email newsletter to drive more traffic to your website.
Key features
Drawbacks: Jasper is quite finicky in terms of prompts — they have to be particularly specific to generate accurate outputs.
Pricing: Jasper starts at $39 per user per month (annual billing), with a 7-day free trial available.
Google Search Console helps spot any website performance issues that might affect your search engine rankings, from 404 error pages to slow loading speeds and more.
You can also let the platform run in the background and receive email notifications whenever Google spots any problems, along with suggestions to fix them.
Key features
Drawbacks: Users report the platform’s URL inspection is occasionally slow.
Pricing: Google Search Console is available for free.
Ahrefs is an all-in-one SEO tool with excellent competitive analytics capabilities. The platform’s Site Explorer reveals your competitors’ complete backlink profiles (page and domain ratings, external links, etc.), top-ranking keywords, and more.
Most notably, the platform reveals any broken backlinks pointing to your competitors — perfect to step up your broken link building strategy and fill in the gaps. And of course, you can use Site Explorer to analyze your own website.
Key features
Drawbacks: Ahrefs is not the most scalability-friendly option in this list — there are significant gaps in pricing between plans.
Pricing: You get free access to Site Explorer and auditing tools, while paid plans start at $29 per month (monthly billing).
Surfer is an all-in-one content optimization platform with excellent topic cluster development and keyword research tools. The platform’s Topic Explorer generates dozens of keyword clusters from your seed keyword.
You can easily select your target topics and jump straight into content creation and optimization via the platform’s Content Editor. Surfer’s Topical Maps also show you how well your website covers target topic clusters under a visual interactive format.
Key features
Drawbacks: The platform’s AI writing tools can take a while to generate content.
Pricing: Surfer starts at $79 per month (annual billing).
ActiveCampaign is an all-in-one digital marketing automation tool with advanced email marketing capabilities. The platform puts your marketing funnel on auto-pilot.
It sets up separate lead-nurturing campaigns based on traffic sources (socials, websites, or ads) and user behavior (cart abandonment, demo sign-ups, etc.). The platform drives leads further down the funnel via personalized messages using data from your contacts list.
Key features
Drawbacks: Users report that the platform’s email template builder is quite clunky.
Pricing: ActiveCampaign starts at $15 per month for 1000 contacts.
Mailchimp is perfect for those looking to easily handle their entire marketing funnel. Besides emails, the platform also manages retargeting ad campaigns, social media content scheduling, landing pages, or entire websites — complete with SEO tools, lead generation forms, and A/B testing tools.
As for email marketing, Mailchimp lets you create personalized campaigns and comes with a solid set of audience analytics tools.
Key features
Drawbacks: Although MailChimp offers a diverse toolset, the platform is rather shallow and lacks advanced features like Active Campaign’s variety in audience segmentation options.
Pricing: MailChimp starts at $20 per month for 500 contacts, with a one-month free trial available.
Drip is a simple automation solution specifically designed for e-commerce businesses. The platform offers the tools necessary to set up cart abandonment campaigns, product upsells, discount pop-ups, and more.
Drip also integrates natively with BigCommerce, Shopify, WooCommerce, and other online store platforms.
Key features
Drawbacks: Drip is rather limited compared to Mailchimp and ActiveCampaign, for instance — it lacks features like audience demographic analytics.
Pricing: Drip starts at $39 per month for 2500 contacts, with a 14-day free trial available.
Planable Analytics is an add-on to the core product. The analytics tool lets you zoom in on your social media performance through network-specific metrics and learn what makes your audience tick by highlighting your best-performing posts in terms of impressions and engagement.
Facebook analytics view in Planable
Planable Analytics stands out through its reports. You can generate custom cross-network or network-specific reports complete with interactive graphs and charts, and share them with your clients via email in just a few clicks.
These reports cover everything your clients need to know, from account follower growth to average engagement rates, total reach, profile visits, and more.
Key features
Drawbacks: Planable lacks social listening tools. Although you can see how many comments a particular post generates, the platform currently does not let you view the comments themselves.
Pricing: Planable Analytics costs an extra $9 per workspace per month (annual billing). The add-on is available across all of the platform’s core paid packages.
Google Analytics reveals everything you need to know about the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns. The platform monitors your top-performing traffic sources and gets into the details to see how website visitors navigate your site — what pages they visit, how much time they spend on them, and so on.
You can also get extra insights into your buyer’s journey through Google Manager and set up Events to track micro-conversions, like sign-ups or particular page visits, for example.
Key features
Drawbacks: Users report that Google Analytics has a rather steep learning curve.
Pricing: Google Analytics is completely free to use.
Hotjar is a digital marketing tool that tracks users’ browsing activity on your website to provide detailed insights into how to modify its layout for maximum conversions.
The platform’s Heatmaps let you visualize the number of clicks specific page buttons generate, how far users scroll down a specific page, and where exactly they move their cursors — ideal for A/B testing and conversion rate optimization.
Hotjar also records user interactions — you can replay them to get concrete evidence of your visitor’s browsing behavior and spot any potential user experience-related mishaps.
Key features
Drawbacks: The platform’s session recording tool has occasional bugs. Users report it may record sessions of users from areas you don’t target.
Pricing: Paid packages start at $40 per month (annual billing), with a limited free plan available.
Canva lets you create visuals for your social media posts, ad creatives, infographics, and even physical brochures.
It’s an all-in-one graphic design platform packed with features to easily create visuals. Canva includes a huge variety of purpose-built templates, while its AI-powered tools set lets you edit or create new visuals from scratch.
Key features
Drawbacks: The platform’s free plan is quite limited — it’s only available to one user and lacks customizable templates.
Pricing: Canva starts at $100 per year per user with a free plan available.
Figma is a collaborative design platform perfect for complex projects like website pages. The platform’s Multiplayer feature lets team members collaborate on the same design in real time, while its Developer Handoff tool ensures a smooth transition of projects between designers and developers.
Figma also includes handy prototyping tools perfect for building and testing fully interactive page mockups.
Key features
Drawbacks: Users report occasional performance issues — large files may cause crashes and general lag.
Pricing: You can get started completely for free, while paid packages start at $15 per user per month (billed annually).
It’s been a long list, I know, but having a diverse digital marketing tool stack doesn’t have to be as intimidating as it seems.
For example, with Planable you get a three-in-one solution. You can manage and optimize your social media marketing strategy via its social scheduling and analytics tools, while the platform’s AI assistant is perfect for writing social captions quickly.
Plus, the platform doubles as an excellent multi-channel content collaboration tool through its Universal Content features and top-notch collaboration and approval functionalities. And did I mention it also integrates with Canva? That’s one less thing to worry about.
Why not try it and see for yourself? Schedule your first 50 posts completely for free!
Digital marketing enthusiast, language nerd, and content writer. Horea loves writing about SaaS and anything that involves boosting online presence – from SEO to social media, web design, and more. His content is allergic to fluff and eats research for breakfast.
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