Sprout Social (Nasdaq: SPT) announced that it has been honored in G2’s 2026 Best Software Awards for the tenth straight year. The company appears in six distinct categories, ranging from overall software products to niche mid‑market solutions, underscoring its continued relevance in a market where social‑media management tools are rapidly evolving.
G2’s awards: a peer‑driven barometer
G2’s annual awards are compiled from verified user reviews, with scores weighted by recency, relevance and reviewer credibility. In the 2026 cycle, the platform evaluated thousands of social‑media solutions, ranking them across dozens of verticals. Sprout Social’s placement in six categories—
- Best Software Products
- Global Software Companies
- Highest Customer Satisfaction Products
- Best Marketing and Digital Advertising Software Products
- Best Customer Service Software Products
- Best Software for Mid‑Market Businesses (Sprout Social Influencer Marketing)
—signals broad approval from both enterprise and mid‑market users.
A decade of consistency, a year of expansion
While the repeated recognition highlights steady performance, Sprout Social’s 2025 product roadmap introduced several first‑generation AI‑driven tools that differentiate this year’s offering from its predecessors. The company rolled out “Trellis,” an artificial‑intelligence agent designed to surface actionable insights from raw social data, and completed the acquisition of NewsWhip, a firm known for trend‑prediction analytics. Together, these moves aim to shift brands from merely reacting to social chatter toward anticipating market shifts before they fully manifest.
AI at the core of the platform
Trellis, the newly announced AI agent, functions as an analytical layer that ingests data from Sprout’s existing listening and publishing modules. By applying natural‑language processing and sentiment detection, it can generate concise summaries of emerging topics, flag potential crises, and recommend content strategies aligned with identified audience moods. The integration of NewsWhip’s predictive engine further enhances Trellis by feeding forward‑looking trend scores, helping marketers prioritize conversations that are likely to gain traction in the coming weeks.
“Social media is increasingly central to how organizations understand markets, customers, and culture, and the industry is moving toward AI‑driven approaches to make sense of that volume and complexity,” said Scott Morris, Chief Marketing Officer at Sprout Social. “Being recognized by G2 for a decade underscores our consistency, while our expanded presence across diverse categories reflects the growth of social as a vital business tool. This evolution allows organizations of all sizes to move from reactive engagement to predictive intelligence, using social to deeply understand their customers, the market and what’s next.”
Influencer marketing gets an AI makeover
Sprout Social’s Influencer Marketing platform also received a substantial upgrade. The revamped suite now incorporates AI‑assisted influencer discovery, automatically matching brands with creators whose audience demographics and engagement patterns align with campaign goals. A built‑in brand‑safety layer scans influencer content for compliance risks, a feature that addresses growing advertiser concerns over brand‑fit and reputation management.
Integration depth expands the data fabric
Beyond new AI modules, Sprout Social broadened its integration portfolio in 2025. Connections to emerging platforms such as Bluesky, as well as entrenched networks like LinkedIn, Meta, TikTok Listening, and Salesforce, enable users to pull signals from a wider array of sources into a single dashboard. This “data fabric” approach reduces the need for point‑to‑point data pipelines, allowing marketing, customer‑service and product teams to collaborate on a unified view of social sentiment.
Customer voices reinforce the narrative
The G2 awards are largely driven by user sentiment, and Sprout Social’s own customers supplied a chorus of praise that aligns with the company’s strategic messaging.
“Sprout helps us craft insightful takeaways about the pulse of our customers on social. We understand their pain points and what resonates with them.”
“Having a single, unified stream for all incoming DMs, mentions, and comments—complete with collision detection, real‑time activity updates, and AI‑powered sentiment analysis—means our team can provide prompt, personalized customer care across dozens of brands at an exceptional velocity.”
“Sprout Social’s reporting functions are really advanced and offer insights in a way that is helpful. The AI summaries help pick out some of the more gleaning pieces of information that are helpful for communicating to our team more broadly about what our successes and takeaways are.”
“Sprout makes it easy to grab numbers, compare against our competitors, and show the impact of our efforts.”
These testimonials highlight three recurring themes: the value of consolidated inboxes, the speed gains from AI‑driven sentiment scoring, and the ability to benchmark performance against peers—all of which are directly tied to the platform’s 2025 enhancements.
Why the awards matter for B2B marketers
For B2B technology buyers, the G2 accolade serves as a third‑party validation that can shortcut lengthy procurement cycles. In a landscape where social‑media spend is increasingly tied to lead generation and brand awareness, a platform that can both listen at scale and translate that listening into predictive insights offers a tangible ROI argument. Sprout Social’s AI features, especially Trellis, address a common pain point: the sheer volume of social data that exceeds manual analysis capabilities.
Moreover, the inclusion of Sprout Social in the “Best Software for Mid‑Market Businesses” category signals that its pricing and feature set have become accessible enough for companies that sit below the enterprise threshold but still require sophisticated analytics. This could accelerate adoption among fast‑growing tech firms that need to scale social operations without a proportional increase in headcount.
Competitive context: where Sprout stands
Sprout Social competes with a crowded field that includes Hootsuite, Buffer, Sprinklr, and newer AI‑centric entrants like Cortex and Socialbakers. While many rivals have introduced AI modules, Sprout’s approach of embedding AI directly into both listening and publishing workflows—rather than offering it as a bolt‑on—sets it apart. The acquisition of NewsWhip also provides a data‑source advantage; competitors must either build similar trend‑prediction models in‑house or partner with third‑party providers, which can introduce latency and integration complexity.
Nevertheless, the market remains fragmented. Sprinklr, for instance, continues to dominate large‑scale global brands with its extensive suite of customer‑experience tools, while Hootsuite leverages a massive user base and a freemium model to capture SMBs. Sprout Social’s focus on AI‑enhanced insights and a consolidated inbox may appeal to mid‑market firms seeking a balance between depth and usability.
Looking ahead: AI as a strategic differentiator
The broader ad‑tech ecosystem is witnessing a shift toward predictive analytics, where machine learning models forecast audience behavior, ad spend efficiency and content virality. Sprout Social’s 2025 roadmap aligns with this trend, positioning the company as a potential data‑source for programmatic ad platforms that wish to incorporate real‑time social signals into bidding algorithms.
If Sprout can continue to refine its AI accuracy—particularly in sentiment detection across multilingual conversations—it may become a de‑facto standard for marketers who need trustworthy, actionable social intelligence. The company’s next logical step could involve opening an API for third‑party developers, enabling custom AI models to consume Sprout’s data streams, thereby fostering an ecosystem of niche applications.
Conclusion
Sprout Social’s dual achievement—securing six G2 award categories while unveiling a suite of AI‑powered tools—underscores a pivotal moment for social‑media management platforms. The company’s emphasis on predictive insights, integrated influencer discovery, and broader network integrations addresses long‑standing gaps in the market. For B2B marketers, the recognition serves as an external endorsement that Sprout’s platform can deliver measurable value in a data‑driven advertising landscape.
As social channels continue to evolve and the volume of user‑generated content expands, platforms that can turn that noise into foresight will likely dictate the next wave of ad‑tech innovation. Sprout Social’s latest moves suggest it intends to be at the forefront of that transformation.
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