The Top 15 Twitter Clients You Can Still Use in 2025
Before Elon Musk bought Twitter and made significant changes to their app ecosystem, there used to be a plethora of Twitter clients, third-party apps devoted solely to allowing its users to consume tweets. Some of these clients or apps were Android or iOS only while there were also dedicated Twitter clients for Mac and Windows devices.
Unfortunately, that world came to an abrupt end in early 2023 when Twitter closed off access to a majority of these third-party Twitter apps.
While Twitter has made improvements in its user interface, if you are looking for options for how to use Twitter, you are still in luck. There are still alternative solutions you can use to monitor your timeline and notifications. Most of these come in the form of the same Twitter dashboards that companies have been using to manage their social media. These Twitter clients still exist because their main purpose is not just a Twitter app, and therefore the thought is that Twitter will not lose many advertising $$$ because you probably won’t be consuming too many tweets through them.
Let’s take a deeper look at what happened at Twitter and then dig deeper into the alternatives you can still use today.
What Happened to All of the Dedicated Twitter Clients?
Citing violations to Twitter rules (though some have suggested the rules were changed after rights were revoked), Twitter officially destroyed all compatibility with and access to Twitter alternatives to management and use. The precise reason for this is still largely unknown; some have posited that a customizable Twitter app run from a third party made algorithm patterns and ads more difficult to see.
The precise reasons for the revocation notwithstanding, third-party services have officially been removed from the lineup of Twitter offerings, including some of the third-party clients that were responsible for increasing innovation on Twitter. This includes third-party clients who were responsible for branding, apps for re-Tweeting (which were later purchased by Twitter), and more. The chronological timeline of Twitter’s development demonstrates the value of third-party clients in the history of Twitter, and the loss of them has been a significant blow to independent developers and active users, alike.
The removal of third-party apps from Twitter’s lineup means that access to features many people have come to rely on has been removed, as have many advanced features that are not available on the Twitter platform itself. What is left includes the basic and distinct features of Twitter itself, and the few recognized apps that have been developed by Twitter, or recognized as official Twitter apps.
Official Twitter Clients
Despite the changes that have been made to additional features available for Twitter in favor of more basic features, there remain several official Twitter clients including the following:
1. Twitter
Arguably, there’s nothing quite like the original.
When Twitter was a new platform, the only option for sending Tweets was to go onto Twitter.com and send your Tweet from a PC. If you may remember, Twitter was released more than a year before the first iPhone, so Web tweeting is the original method. Now, there are many other ways to send Tweets, yet directly through Twitter, or using an “official” Twitter app, is still the favorite and most powerful feature to deliver Tweets.
2. Tweetdeck
Originally developed independently, Tweetdeck is now part of Twitter itself. Back in the day, it is safe to say that it was the leading client outside of Twitter.com, before the emergence of HootSuite. Based on its history, you might call it a midway point between using just the Twitter app or website and going with a full service third-party social media manager with a seemingly endless list of features.
However, far from being a “little brother” to Twitter, this app is intended to offer enhanced features not available to those who only use Twitter. For instance, Tweetdeck allows you to schedule posts in advance. It also helps you “compress” the contents of your posts to fit the character limit. Part of this is through the use of miniature Web links and hashtag management to keep things lively and consistent across social networks.
Twitter-Dedicated Content Creation and Management Apps
Each of these content creation and management apps focus entirely on Twitter, rather than a broad spectrum of social platforms, but provide more functionality than a simple client platform typically offers.
3. Tweet Hunter
Tweet Hunter is an AI-based tool with several cool features, the most valuable of which is, perhaps, its ability to deliver generated content to keep up to date with your particular niche or area of interest. Its distinctive features include AI Tweet generation, inspiration in the form of regular updates on popular Tweets from your niche, and access to ghostwriters with whom to develop Tweets. A frequent Twitter user is likely to benefit from the use of Tweet Hunter, especially one who is looking to improve their following without dramatically increasing the amount of time they spend on the social network.
4. Hypefury
Hypefury’s name is apt; from the most lightweight Twitter client to the more invested, Hypefury can prove useful. Doubling as a source of inspiration, and an automated service, Hypefury helps you determine what you want to surround yourself with and derive inspiration from in order to write, then tracks your best-performing Tweets and automatically promotes your site, course, newsletter, and more, to drive more traffic to these spaces. The customization options are not vast, but what is done is done well, and provides a great deal of consistency for your timeline of Tweets. Hypefury functions as an automation platform and a customizable platform to develop your own brand.
5. Social Dog
Social Dog’s offerings focus primarily on post management and analytics. Although it does not have any additional features to recommend it over some of its peers, the features it does offer, it does well. Post management abilities include post scheduling and idea milling; advanced filters allow users to focus on keywords and use social listening to keep abreast of trends in your niche. Follower management tools is a favorite feature, as it allows marketing teams and individuals alike to evaluate trends in follower increases and decreases, to determine which posts are more likely to improve engagement, and which posts fall flat. The aforementioned features make Social Dog particularly useful for teams looking to gain insights and more closely tailor posts.
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6. Circleboom
Circleboom’s particular boatload of features focus more on management than content creation. For this reason, Circleboom is best for people seeking customization features that focus on audience insights and management, with a small helping of search features and the ability to delete already posted Tweets. This last function can be particularly helpful for the frequent Twitter user who might post first and think later, or produce a large number of Tweets and need to pare down–or even a user who might find themselves prone to forgetfulness or errors. Circleboom is a great 3rd party Twitter app for audience management, deleting Tweets, and its search features.
Social Media Dashboards with Twitter Functionality
Although many of the third party apps’ availability was removed, one of the most popular features of social media dashboards continues to be their ability to work with Twitter. Dashboards still available to use with Twitter include:
7. Social Pilot
Unlike many of the other offerings listed here, Social Pilot is a longstanding platform with a variety of enhanced options across numerous social media sites. While the entire platform is not dedicated to Twitter specifically, Social Pilot still has plenty to offer anyone looking to improve their Twitter experience. As a management tool, Social Pilot offers the ability to get a bird’s-eye view of your Twitter calendar, derive insight from analytics, and create engaging content to continually publish on your Twitter feed. Functioning as a customizable platform from which to manage multiple platforms, Social Pilot allows you to do virtually everything from a single, easy to use interface.
8. SocialBee
SocialBee is a client that mostly focuses on automated posting and evergreen content, although they have introduced a new Engage features pictured above that already allows you to manage mentions and comments from your Twitter feed, with post and message management. coming soon.
SocialBee really excels as a content management client for Twitter and all of your social media, allowing you to import and process bulk content from a number of methods and create, manage, and analyze queues of content to keep your Twitter followers engaged.
9. Agorapulse
As an Agorapulse user myself, I’m well aware of its overall value for social media scheduling as a whole. After all, there’s a lot more to managing social media than just logging into your accounts once in a while. Agorapulse allows users to see what other people are saying about their business, or their client’s business. However, it’s even more important to note that Agorapulse has scheduling options, allowing Tweets to be sent even when the account holder isn’t online.
10. Sprout Social
Built for teamwork, Sprout Social is one of those customer service-centered utilities. After all, you can set it up to manage multiple Twitter accounts and have several members of your marketing team. While you might be surprised Sprout Social wasn’t more popular in this study, I think it makes sense: Influencers are often solopreneurs, so they generally don’t have a large team. An assistant is what most of them tend to manage. Additionally, while influencers interact with their followers, there isn’t a customer service aspect with them like most other businesses. Which makes Sprout Social overkill for most of them.
Speaking of overkill, Sprout Social really does offer a complete software package for businesses which includes contact management, competitive insight, lead generation and more unique functionality that few Twitter clients on this page have.
11. Sendible
With a hefty focus on meeting your marketing efforts where they are now, and creating a developer platform from which to manage all of your social posts and relationships, Sendible is best used as a means of developing a consistent tone across platforms, along with analytics that can help you determine the correct time, spacing, and themes for your particular brand or business. Sendible is designed to be used as part of a team, rather than being used as a solo management platform, and can help users develop a posting timeline and aesthetic that works best for their brand across many different social media sites.
12. Hootsuite
Hootsuite is probably popular because the Twitter integration capabilities are first class, including the team reply feature. With this function, you can have a customer service group responding to Mentions from other users, facilitating both customer service and user engagement. Another great part of this tool is the ease with which users can upload media files to Twitter, including video. Influencers with a significant presence on other platforms can use Hootsuite to manage these, as well. However, when I last did this study, Hootsuite was at the top of the list, and Buffer has passed it. That means that Hootsuite’s share of Tweets has declined considerably, at least by social media marketing influencers. That being said, Hootsuite’s robust functionality is on par with any tool on this list – check out our post on Hootsuite features for more details.
13. Buffer
Buffer is a full-service social media management program, known for its smarter tool to schedule your tweets. Plan out all your tweets for a particular day, fill up your Buffer with your desired tweets, then Buffer schedules them for you. Have multiple Twitter accounts? You can manage all of them in one place, an option not available for the native Twitter client.
With Buffer, users can also design a post for each chosen social media platform using the same materials. This makes sharing a branded message in more than one place super easy.
14. CoSchedule
This application is also a full-service social media manager and marketing suite. One of the great things about this software is that it does a little bit of everything, saving time for the busy professional. For Twitter users, CoSchedule has valuable tools to not only schedule Tweets in advance, but actively monitor your account. They’ll collect Mentions and other brand-centered Twitter activity, and report back to you. Among marketing professionals, the analytics capabilities are excellent, as well. I think that one reason it isn’t more popular, though, is that CoSchedule is a “heavy duty” application. It’s geared more towards marketing agencies than personal users.
15. Social Oomph
Originally known as Tweet Later back in the day, Social Oomph was one of the first Twitter clients allowing you a cutting edge way of scheduling your tweets to post in the future. Since then they have focused on building a tool that offers productivity solutions for social media users.
I say this is a tech savvy choice because this is one of the few tools that works with tech companies and gaming community-favored apps such as Discord and Mastodon. Social Oomph is one of the first apps built with the Twitter API, so their technology is cutting-edge. However, it’s only for social media scheduling, and doesn’t offer any analytics tools. That’s probably why it isn’t as popular of an option for marketers.
I find that active tweeters often have very deep and passionate relationships with their social media apps, so now it’s your turn: What do you use for your Twitter client and recommend to the world? I’d love to hear from you in the comments.
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Yikes. I just noticed the date on this post is 2012. Well, a lot of these apps have gone to the birdcage in the sky. Sad!
Originally published in 2012, but often revised Terri to keep it up-to-date Terri!
Buffer is my favorite app, and I continue using Tweetdeck, although the newest version (Musk) is frustrating to use. It used to be possible to access all accounts in one swoop and now requires logging in and out of accounts.
It’s fun to read the comments here, Neal. I’d forgotten about apps like Manage Flitter, Seesmic, Tweetbot and others. There were many apps that were useful and even fun when Twitter’s API was accessible to all.
Hey Terri! Appreciate the comment! Yes, there have been so many wonderful apps in the past when the Twitter API and community was the most open and peaceful one. Remember Twestivals and Tweetups? Aaahh the good old days … ;-)
Tweetups and Twestifvals and social media conferences like Gnomedex were awesome. Threads felt like old Twitter in the beginning and I had hopes for a resurrection of “social” getting back into “social media.
I got excited reading this because I though a bunch of these apps were dead! Turned out, many are moribund.
A recent contender that has been blessed by Twitter is Fedica. It has a feature where you can see who has unfollowed you (I think like Manage Flitter). I don’t know how people can purge the people who follow then unfollow. Do you?
I use a tool called Social Dog (affiliate link), which I happened to find out about. It is actually a Japanese company, so perhaps because of a relationship with Twitter Japan, they are able to get access to the API there, but you can do many sophisticated things with it just like in the good old days of Manage Flitter and Tweepi. However, with the new Twitter restrictions, you cannot follow or unfollow within the app, only click on a link which takes you to Twitter to follow or unfollow. Hope the info helps!
I’ve tried almost all of these, using Hootsuite as the main Twitter management tool. Hootsuite is definitely my main tool, including iPhone and iPad apps.
Everybody has to use what they feel most comfortable with, and if HootSuite works for you, no need to change!
Amazing list.
Thanks, Neals for sharing.
I’m not a big fan of Twitter but I know that Hootsuite is an amazing tool.
I have used Buffer too and it worked perfectly for me.
Keep it up with the great work you are doing in helping small businesses across the globe.
Emenike
Thank you my friend! Keep tweeting!
Can’t believe Tweetbot is not in the top 20.
Perhaps Tweetbot made the Top 30, but the data speaks for itself!
No mention of TweetBot. Nice work.
They didn’t show up in the list!
Hi Neal, Just re-read this. I’m so excited MarketMeSuite made the list and would love to show you around our new “Inbox For Social” :)
Yes – looking forward to it Tammy!
Tweet me and we’ll set up a time! @tammykfennell:twitter
Will do!
My favourite are two, hootsuite and tweetdeck
As the chart shows, those really are the two big “gorillas” in the market right now.
I suggest you try other tools until you find the one that matches your needs!
Great post, we’ve been using “tweetdeck” for a while but have just started trialling “status people”, both have their advantages. It’s a shame that more solutions aren’t geared towards one man and his restaurant (ie, me!)
Great list, I use Winnow for iOS
Tweetbot is probably the best twitter app for iPhone I’ve used so far.
Thanks for sharing! I use Sprout Social on my iPhone…
I hardly believe that Tweetbot is not in the top 7
Nope – it wasn’t!
what about Seesmic??
Unfortunately Seesmic didn’t make it into the Top 20! Certainly Seesmic is one of the first platforms, and with their acquisition of Ping.fm, have promise. Time will tell to see if they can truly differentiate their product from the others.
The problem with the top 3 cross-platform clients, HootSuite, TweetDeck and SocialOomph, is that its still hard to manage your followers, even tho they make tweeting a breeze. In Tweetdeck and HootSuite you can’t even see your followers easily, so you need another tool.
I do like TweetDeck because Twitter made it their free native client for ‘power users’ and I think they will keep developing it until it is as good as the best competitors clients – it doesn’t have as many features right now, but it is nice to use (HootSuite I find terrible). How long can it be til they add a buffer function, which several other apps have? SocialOomph has all the bells and whistles, but to get all the features, its too pricey for me (~$40pcm).
My favourite client so far is Pluggio which you should definitely check out. I use the free version, again the full version is not cheap. But even the free version has been great for helping me find lots of targeted followers, and the interface is the most intuitive of the bunch by far. It allows scheduling, buffering, url shorteners, RSS feeds, and has its own bookmarklet for easy tweeting.
But again, I cant see my follower list properly, and other things, so I still have to go with something like ManageFlitter to do various bits. (Why isn’t that on here too? Incredibly useful.)
I will certainly check out Sprout Social, altho I don’t really feel the need yet to pay for a client as there are so many free services available out there.
For managing followers, you should definitely check out my app of choice, Tweepi! TweetSpinner is also another option.
Thanks for the continued support Neal! When I first saw the tweet above, I meant to mention to you (but it slipped my mind) – Sprout Social is the only tool on that list that doesn’t have a free version – thus not surprised by the volume breakdown – the top 3 have millions of free users. Pound for pound amongst professionals I think we’ve got something specials. Thanks again for including us!
Justyn Howard
CEO
Sprout Social, Inc.
@Justyn:twitter
Appreciate your taking the time to comment here, Justyn. That alone says a lot about your company. In social media tools, it truly is becoming the case of you get what you pay for, and I believe those that use social as part of their marketing infrastructure will begin to realize that $20, $50, or even $100 is a small price to pay to support their social media “engine.” Keep up the great work!
any experiences with Roost?
Nope.
MarketMeSuite is my fav for a number of reasons.. I have my top Social Media sites for clients all in one place. I can tweet to multiple accounts in one shot and can check followers, unfollow and set up various searches and so much more. There are still pieces to come on the new web app.
I wrote a blog article about MMS and did a short interview with their CEO Tammy Kahn Fennell..
Thanks Elaine for spreading the MMS love at TroolSocial!
Appreciate the extra info Elaine. I am still looking for what differentiates it from the others … guess I’ll have to take it for a test drive to find out!
So have you tried it out yet?
I have been tweeting back and forth with the founder of MarketMeSuite. While it looks like it has a lot of the functionality I am looking for, it doesn’t offer an iPhone app yet. I plan to take another look after that app is released ;-)
Thanks for including MarketMeSuite on the list. We just released our new web app “The Social Inbox” and I’d love to show you around.
~Tammy, CEO @MarketMeSuite:twitter
Thanks for commenting Tammy – and I’d love to take you up on your offer!
Hootsuite keeps me sane. Nice to see @Bufferapp also listed in the Top 20!
Yes! @BufferApp was a pleasant surprise! But I find @SproutSocial keeping me saner these days ;-)
I’ve tried almost all of these and at the moment, using Hootsuite as the main Twitter management tool. I spice it up from time to time with Marketmesuite and tweet here and there with some other tools, but at the moment Hootsuite is definitely my main tool, including iPhone and iPad apps.
Thanks Brankica! I’m very curious as to how you “spice it up” with Marketmesuite … care to comment? ;-)
Oh, I didn’t ignore Seesmic at all – they didn’t appear in the data! Yes, Seesmic is a good platform – but the data suggests that they may be losing out in popularity for various reasons.
When Twitter released new versions of TweetDeck for the desktop and iPhone, the company must have figured that the app needed to go on a features and capabilities diet. I’ve already switched to HootSuite for mobile; I’m hanging on to the last good “Air” version of TweetDeck until I can find a suitable replacement. Thanks, Neal, for this survey.
Yes, I do believe that TweetDeck has lost the leading market share that it used to have due to HootSuite adding the features that social media marketers want. As Twitter continues to integrate TweetDeck functionality, it will be interesting to see how TweetDeck can continue to maintain share.
You ignored seesmic, very good, complete and simple client
Interesting and informative, particularly as I am thinking of changing to HooySuite, the information was very timely.
THANKS
Thanks for the comment Glen! I would give SproutSocial a drive as well…
Sprout Social also has a very responsive support team. Any questions you have, they get back within a couple hours.
So far I’ve been happy with Sprout Social support as well!