Sift vs Sprout Social
The agent-first
Sprout Social alternative.
Sift is built for social care and answering customers from day one, not for publishing with an inbox attached. Agents set up the workspace, route and draft on every conversation and fill your fields, with live SLAs, CSAT and QA underneath, and no add-ons to unlock the care AI.
Set us up for refund and outage conversations on X and Instagram. Pull the order number into a field and give me a weekly view.
Example: setup done by an agent
Built for care
from day one.
Sift is made for responding to customers on social. No long setup, no services for everything, and no paying to store your own data.
Live on day one
Connect a channel and agents start drafting within the hour. They build the labels, queues, fields and dashboards from a description of how you work.
No services for every change
Change routing, labels or fields by asking. No ticket to a Success Manager, no statement of work, no waiting on a services team.
Your data, no storage fees
Your full conversation history stays searchable and exportable. You never pay to keep or reach your own data.
What Sprout Social costs a care team beyond the license
- Care automation needs the Advanced plan at $399 per seat per month.
- A care team may need Trellis Plus, Premium Analytics, Listening and Guardian on top of seats.
- SLA goals appear in reports only, with the Premium Analytics add-on.
- Every new teammate is another seat.
Their AI reads.
Sift's agents act.
Most AI in social tools answers questions about your data. In Sift, agents do the work on every conversation, and your own AI tools can too.
Sprout Social AI today
- Trellis answers questions about your data. Drafting from conversation history needs the Trellis Plus add-on.
- MCP server in ChatGPT only, covering TikTok post data. No write actions.
- Automated Rules tag and route on keywords, sentiment and fixed labels.
- Enhance rewrites an agent's draft to be friendlier, shorter or longer.
Sift agents
- Agents read, tag and score every conversation on arrival.
- Agents fill your custom fields and close-out forms.
- Agents route on what they understood and draft from your knowledge base.
- Your AI tools act over MCP: about 800 operations, each permission-checked.
Agents do the work,
including the setup.
Our own team onboards customers by talking to Sift through MCP. Your team can work the same way: say what you want, review what the agent built, and apply it.
01 · In-app agent
An agent that does anything you can do in Sift.
SiftGPT searches conversations, compares trends, builds dashboards, sets up rules and prepares briefings. It works with your data and inside your permissions.
What drove refund complaints this week?
Payment delays doubled since Monday. 212 conversations · Saved to Refunds dashboard
Still no refund for my order and it has been 9 days. Order 48213.
02 · Fields and forms
Fields and forms fill themselves.
Agents label every conversation and customer, pull out details like order numbers, and complete close-out forms. Your team reviews instead of typing, and your reports stay complete.
03 · MCP server
Run Sift from Claude, ChatGPT or your own agent.
Sift's MCP server gives outside AI tools the same data and actions your team has: search, analytics, settings, dashboards and reply drafts. Admins choose who can connect and who can send.
Add a "Delivery damage" label, route it to Claims, and tell me how many we had last week.
Done. 64 conversations last week, 41 on Instagram. New ones now go to Claims.
https://mcp.getsift.ai/mcp 5 or more posts mention an outage within 10 minutes on X
Label them Outage, send them to the Incidents queue, alert #social-ops in Slack, and draft a holding reply
04 · Automations
Describe the automation. Agents build it.
Say what should happen when a conversation arrives. Agents write the conditions, routing, alerts and follow-up, and you approve the result before it runs.
Everything you run today
The old way still works.
Agents sit on top of a full care platform. Queues, assignment, SLAs, required fields, macros, approvals, CSAT and audit history all work the way your team runs them in Sprout Social, so nothing is lost when you switch.
Empathetic opening and a clear next step. Missed confirming the refund timeline in the first reply.
Queues and assignment
- Any saved search can be a queue
- Push, pull or AI assignment, set per queue
- Skills, capacity caps and tiebreaks
- Custom agent statuses with auto-away
SLAs and statuses
- First response and resolution targets
- Business hours, holidays and escalation
- Up to 5 custom statuses
- Required fields and forms before close
Quality and CSAT
- Native CSAT surveys
- Estimated CSAT on every conversation
- AI QA against your rubric on 100% of closed conversations
- Reply approvals per queue and per person
Agent tools
- Multi-step macros
- Saved replies with variables
- Translation in both directions
- Link and merge, one profile across channels
Admin and integrations
- Audit log of every settings change
- PII masking
- Signed webhooks
- Slack app for questions, alerts and briefings
What changes
day to day.
In rules-based tools, admins and support staff do this work by hand. In Sift, you ask for it.
Edit the taxonomy, update keyword rules, retrain the team.
Tell an agent. It adds the label and starts applying it.
Build a rule per channel and queue, then test it.
Ask for the routing. The agent writes the rule for you to approve.
Bulk-tag by hand or export to a spreadsheet.
Agents label every past conversation in the background.
Staff type the same answers on every ticket.
Agents fill the form from the conversation. People check it.
Pull exports, build charts, write the summary.
Schedule an agent to send the report every Monday.
File a request with whoever owns the dashboards.
Ask SiftGPT, or ask Claude or ChatGPT connected to Sift.
Sift and Sprout Social,
side by side.
Built for care, not bolted on. Every Sprout Social detail links to its source below the table.
| Sift | Sprout Social | |
|---|---|---|
| AI reads every message on arrival | ✓Summary, intent, priority, and 1 to 10 scores with reasons. | ◐Fixed labels: Customer Love, Support, High Risk. Advanced plan. |
| AI tags with your taxonomy | ✓Your own tag groups, plus themes that update nightly. | ✕Keyword rules apply tags. |
| AI fills custom fields | ✓Any field type, with confidence, reason and source. Close-out forms arrive prefilled. | ✕Fixed type and priority only. No custom fields. |
| Routing | ✓Queues route on any AI field, with skills, capacity caps and a recorded reason. | ◐Rules plus round robin. No AI or skills routing. Advanced plan. |
| Reply drafts | ✓Every channel, grounded in your synced help center, citing the articles used. | ◐Trellis drafts from conversation history with the Trellis Plus add-on. No knowledge base. |
| An AI agent that works conversations | ✓Goals tag, route, fill, draft and close within your policy. | ✕Trellis answers questions about your data. Its care agent is in early access. |
| Your AI over MCP | ✓Reads and acts: conversations, analytics, dashboards, automations, AI goals and settings, with user permissions. | ✕ChatGPT only. Reads TikTok post data. No write actions. |
| Live SLAs | ✓Policies with business hours and holidays, live timers and escalation on breach. | ◐Goal times in reports only, with the Premium Analytics add-on. No live timers or alerts. |
| Statuses and required fields | ✓Up to 5 custom statuses. Required fields and forms before close. | ✕Fixed statuses: Open, On Hold, Closed. |
| CSAT and QA | ✓Native CSAT surveys, estimated CSAT on every conversation, and AI QA on 100% of closed ones. | ◐CSAT surveys on X, Instagram and Facebook. Advanced plan. No AI QA. |
| Translation | ✓On by default. Agents read in their language, customers get replies in theirs. | ✕Manual, one message at a time. |
| Channels | ✓Social, messaging, Discord, Telegram, communities, app stores and reviews. | ◐Major networks and reviews. No Discord or Telegram. |
| Pricing | ✓Care AI included, no per-feature AI add-ons. Quoted on channels, volume and agents. | ◐$79 to $399 per seat per month billed annually. Trellis Plus is $28 to $35 more per seat. Listening and Premium Analytics are add-ons. |
✓ Documented and available◐ Partial, rules-based, gated or add-on✕ Not available or not documented
Sources: Sprout Social pricing · Trellis general availability · Sprout Social help center · Gartner Visionary announcement · Sift MCP documentation
Moving from Sprout Social
in two weeks.
Most of the move is setup, and agents do the setup. Your team spends its time reviewing.
- Hour 1
Connect and draft
Connect a channel, add your knowledge sources and brand voice. Agents start drafting replies for review.
- Day 1
Agents set up the workspace
Describe your current tags, queues and reports. Agents build the matching labels, routing rules, fields and dashboards.
- Week 1
Run side by side
Agents label and route live conversations. Your team reviews drafts and adjusts guidance in plain language.
- Week 2
Switch off Sprout Social
Turn on automatic sending where you trust it, schedule reports, and connect your own AI tools over MCP.
Bring your channels.
Social, messaging, community and app reviews in one inbox, so agents work from the whole conversation.
Explore integrationsYou decide what agents can do.
Admins choose who can use agents and who can send through them, per role and per person. Auto-send runs only where you turn it on.
Visit the Trust CenterPeople approve what matters.
Setup changes can wait for approval, and replies prepared from an outside AI tool always need a person to confirm.
Everything is recorded.
Every tool call is logged. Sift is ISO 27001 certified, SOC 2 compliant and GDPR compliant.
Where Sprout Social is strong
Questions to ask Sprout Social
- Can Trellis tag, route or fill a field on its own, or only answer questions?
- Where do live SLA timers, breach alerts and custom fields live?
- Which add-ons does a care team need on top of Advanced seats?
Sift fits if
Sprout Social may fit better if
Is Sift a replacement for Sprout Social?
For teams whose social inbox is mostly customer care, yes. If your main job is scheduling and publishing posts, Sprout Social is built for that and Sift is not.
How is Sift different from Trellis?
Trellis reads: it answers questions about your data, and drafts replies with the Trellis Plus add-on. Sift's agents act on every conversation. They tag, fill fields, route and draft on arrival, and they can set up the workspace for you.
Do we keep SLAs, CSAT and QA if we switch?
Yes. Queues, push and pull assignment, skills and capacity, SLA policies with escalation, required fields before close, macros, approvals, CSAT surveys and audit history all work the way your team runs them in Sprout Social today. Agents add to that work. They do not replace the controls.
Are there services or data storage fees?
No. Agents do the setup and handle changes, so there is no services contract for routine work, and your full conversation history stays yours with no fee to store or reach it.
How long does setup take?
Simple setups go live in about an hour: connect a channel, set the brand voice, start drafting. Multi-channel setups with custom labels and full autopilot usually take a week or two.
Who configures Sift?
Mostly agents. You describe what you want, and Sift's agents build the routing rules, labels, fields, automations and dashboards for you to approve. Our own team onboards customers this way, through Sift's MCP server.
What moves over from Sprout Social?
Your channels, saved replies, knowledge sources, and the way you tag, route and report. Describe your current setup, and agents build the matching labels, queues, rules, fields and dashboards in Sift.
Can agents send replies without a person?
Only where you allow it. Review is the default, and auto-send is set per goal for high-confidence replies. Replies prepared from an outside AI tool always need a person to confirm them in Sift.
Which channels does Sift cover?
X, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, YouTube, WhatsApp, Discord, Telegram, community forums, and App Store and Google Play reviews. Available actions vary by channel.
Is our data secure?
Sift is ISO 27001 certified, SOC 2 compliant and GDPR compliant. Your data is used for your agents only and is never shared across customers. Every agent and MCP tool call is logged.
How much does Sprout Social cost compared to Sift?
Sprout Social lists plans from $79 to $399 per seat per month billed annually, with Trellis Plus, Listening and Premium Analytics sold separately. Sift quotes on channels, volume and agents, with care AI included.
Put your social agents to work.
See how Sift’s agents can handle conversations, find what matters, and bring your team in when needed.