Owl or Sparrow, what’s your choice?

In the last times, there are coming up lots of “multiple social networks clients” which main purpose is to cover a rising need: to manage together our different social networks accounts in a single app. But when you start to focus on the issue you realize that there are just two basic choices: Tweetdeck and Hootsuite. Both “muti-social network managers” are available in a desktop version and in a mobile app for different platforms. In this post, we’re going to shed some light on this quarrel focusing on both Android apps.

Multiple accounts

Both Android apps supports Twitter, Facebook, Foursquare. Tweetdeck also supports Google Buzz and Hootsuite integrates WordPress. Regarding that, both cover the most used social networks (we mainly use it for Facebook and Twitter) except LinkedIn. The question that raises is: when will they integrate LinkedIN? And specially, when will they integrate Google+??

Interface

This is always a matter of taste, but we think that Tweetdeck is which wins this round. Although both are set in customizable streams in which you can defined what to show (News Feeds, Retweets, Mentions…), Tweetdeck has a more friendly-user interface. The reasons: black background with light text, thinner columns that allows you to see more at a glance and finally, the colored scrollbar for those tweets/post you haven’t read yet. What’s more, Tweetdeck integrates Facebook’s News Feed and Twitter’s Home in the same column. Hootsuite doesn’t.

Main Features

Both Hootsuite and Tweetdeck lets you to post Facebook and Twitter at the same time, add new accounts, add/delete/set streams from the app, post, retweet, “like”, post location, and much more.Regarding searching friends or hashtags is way much easier in Hootsuite (Tweetdeck need to create a new stream for that purpose). However, no one of them has auto-complete, What’s more, Hootsuite lets you access the stats from the app, Tweetdeck doesn’t (even it includes stats in the desktop version). That’s an added value, but in a app version we don’t find it really useful. What’s more, Tweetdeck includes deck.ly, the feature that allows you to post tweets 140+ characters. We think it kills the essence of Twitter and it should be considered as a flaw. Hootsuite doesn’t go on this issues.

Resources

Hootsuite seems to be less data-hungry than Tweetdeck, probably due to its sober interface.

Widget

Surprisingly, Hootsuite for Android doesn’t have a screen widget. That’s a lack that should be solved as soon as possible. Tweetdeck overtake Hootsuite in this sense since it contains different size widgets (for posting and shortcut to columns). Actually, the posting widget lets you to take a picture and it integrates (and shorten) it automatically to publish it on Twitter or Facebook (can post on both at the same time).

Conclusion

From our point of view, Tweetdeck wins this take because of its simplicity, its user-friendly interface and its screen widgets. It’s our choice for Android. However, we think that Hootsuite overtakes Tweetdeck by far in the desktop version. First, because Tweetdeck is a software that needs to be installed and Hootsuite is a web app. What’s more regarding stats and professional tools to track is more sophisticated. Likewise, Hootsuite is way faster than Tweetdeck in the desktop version.

So, our choice is Tweetdeck in our Android, Hootsuite in our computer.  What’s yours?

Happy social network apps discovery!