Archive vs Sprout Social

The posts driving your brand right now aren't on your content calendar.

Sprout publishes what your team makes. Archive captures what creators and customers make about you — automatically, including Stories.

Seven things that change

Why enterprise teams switch to Archive

Automatic capture

Every tagged post collected without a screenshot

Story detection

Saved before the 24-hour clock runs out

Untagged mentions

Radar found 1.7M untagged mentions in a single month

Creator discovery

Find and rank the people already posting about you

Competitive intelligence

See which creators are posting for rival brands

Rights and whitelisting

Turn a good post into an ad without a DM thread

Five-minute setup

Connect your accounts and content starts arriving

Trusted by over 1K+ brands

What changes

Teams that stopped reporting on half the picture

Before Archive, Allbirds couldn’t keep up with their UGC and had no reporting tools to support their sprawling influencer program.

Sarah Grosz
Influencer Marketing Manager

Momofuku Goods gets significant social attention, but the team had no way to measure their program’s success until they got Archive.

Kyle Seebohm
VP, Omnichannel Growth Marketing

Grüns is great at gifting, but they had no automated process for turning that flood of UGC into polished ad content until they started using Archive.

Chad Janis
Founder

Thousands of creators, zero manual tracking. How Ketone-IQ scaled creator marketing on Archive.

Michael Brandt, Co-founder and CEO of Ketone-IQ
Michael Brandt
Co-founder and CEO
Ketone-IQ energy shot variety pack: peach, raspberry lemonade, and green apple

Before Archive, Immi was going to have to hire two full-time marketing employees just to keep up with the viral pace of their UGC.

Kevin Lee
Co-Founder

Feature by feature

Feature by feature: what each platform actually captures

Sprout is built to run your social channels. Archive is built to capture the content other people make about you. Here's where that difference shows up.

Category
What the platform is watching
Everyone else's accounts. Every post about your brand, collected as individual content you can search, rights-clear and reuse.
Your accounts — publishing, scheduling, the inbox, and analytics on what you posted. Listening covers mentions and sentiment across channels.
Content capture
Every tagged post across Instagram, TikTok and YouTube collected automatically, 24 hours a day.
No automated UGC capture. Saving a creator's post for later means someone doing it by hand.
Untagged mentions
Radar reads video, audio and on-screen text to find your brand in posts that never tagged you.
Not covered. A post that doesn't tag or mention you doesn't reach your account.
Instagram Stories
Stories detected and saved around the clock, including overnight and at weekends.
No Story capture before the 24-hour expiry.
Creator discovery
Discovery starts from people already posting about you and your competitors, ranked by how they actually perform for your brand.
Creator features arrived with the Tagger acquisition and sit on top of the publishing platform. Discovery works from creator databases.
Competitive intelligence
Competitor Insights names the creators posting for your competitors, so you can approach them.
Competitive reporting covers your channels against rival channels. It doesn't show you which creators rivals are working with.
What the reporting answers
What your creator program is worth — EMV, impressions and performance per creator and per post, including content you never commissioned.
How your published social is performing — reach, engagement, sentiment, response times.
*Where Sprout is genuinely stronger
Sprout is a mature social management platform and better than Archive at the job it was built for: publishing and scheduling across every channel, a unified engagement inbox, employee advocacy, cross-channel listening and sentiment, and a strong multi-brand agency model. Archive doesn't publish, schedule or manage your inbox, and isn't trying to. Most teams running both keep Sprout exactly where it is.

See what your community posted this week

Thirty minutes. We'll connect your accounts and show you the posts and Stories that never reached Sprout.

The common setup

Keep Sprout. Add the half it was never built for.

Sprout runs your channels. Archive runs everything happening around them. The two don't overlap much in practice, which is why teams rarely choose between them — the social team keeps publishing and engaging in Sprout, and the creator and UGC work moves to Archive where the content is actually being captured.

Questions teams ask before they move

  • Do we have to leave Sprout?

    Almost nobody does. Sprout handles publishing, scheduling and your engagement inbox. Archive handles creator content capture, discovery and ROI. Teams run both because they do genuinely different jobs.

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  • Sprout has influencer features now. What's different?

    Sprout acquired Tagger and added creator tooling to a publishing platform. Archive was built for creator content from the start, and the difference shows up in capture: automatic collection of tagged posts, detection of untagged ones, and Stories saved before they expire.

    Both, by design. Archie handles sourcing, outreach, negotiation, and reporting. You approve every creator and every piece of content before it goes live. Nothing ships without your sign-off.

  • How long does setup take?

    Under five minutes to connect your Instagram, TikTok and YouTube accounts. No code, no implementation project.

    Most teams fully hand sourcing over to Archie, others run Archive alongside an existing agency while they evaluate. Either way, Archive gives you the visibility layer neither an agency nor an in-house team can fully replace: everything happening in your channel, tagged or not.

  • Isn't Sprout's listening already covering this?

    Listening tells you what people are saying and how they feel about it. Archive gives you the individual posts as content — searchable, rights-clearable, and attributable to a creator you can work with. Different output from the same raw material.

    Instagram, Tiktok today, with X and Linkedin rolling out next.

  • Does this cover Stories?

    Yes, and it's usually the gap teams feel first. Stories are detected around the clock and saved before the 24-hour window closes.

    Yes. Archie screens every candidate for competitor conflicts, posting activity, and brand safety before anything reaches you, and every rejection comes with a reason you can override.

  • We're a small team. Is this a lot to run?

    The opposite, in most cases. Archive exists so two or three people can run a program that used to need more. One customer avoided hiring two full-time people specifically to keep up with their UGC.

    Yes. Archie screens every candidate for competitor conflicts, posting activity, and brand safety before anything reaches you, and every rejection comes with a reason you can override.

    • Every Story you miss disappears in 24 hours

    Book a 30-minute demo and we'll show you what Archive has already captured — including the posts you didn't know existed.