Sprout Social Analytics: Reports by Plan, Premium Analytics and Limits

What every Sprout Social plan reports on

Sprout Social's analytics live in one Reports area, and the core of it comes with every plan. Essentials, the entry tier, includes profile-level and post-level reporting: the Profile Performance Report, which rolls your connected profiles into one cross-network view, and the Post Performance Report, which ranks individual posts ^[1]. Beside those sit network reports for Instagram, Facebook, X, Bluesky, Threads, TikTok, LinkedIn, YouTube and Pinterest, each with the metrics that network exposes. A Google Analytics report counts sessions from your social links and breaks them down by source.

Since October 2024 you can also choose which metrics appear, and in what order, in six profile reports without any add-on: Facebook, Instagram, X, LinkedIn, TikTok and Pinterest. That alone makes the base reports more usable for a monthly deck. The limits show up quickly, though. Comparing two date ranges of different lengths, filtering posts by tag or searching post text all belong to the paid add-on. Bluesky data is post-level only. Groups with more than 5,000 connected profiles lose profile-level reporting altogether, a rule that only touches very large accounts. For a small team, Essentials answers one question well: what did our posts do?

Which plan unlocks which report

The deeper reports climb the plan ladder, and prices are per seat, so every report you unlock is paid for once per user. Professional costs $299 per seat a month billed annually or $399 billed monthly; Advanced costs $399 per seat a month billed annually or $499 billed monthly. Neither price includes Premium Analytics. Here is how the reports split across the four published plans:

• Essentials and Standard: profile, post and network reports. Standard adds the Smart Inbox and review management, and it can take the Premium Analytics add-on; Essentials cannot.
• Professional: competitor reports, the Tag Performance Report, paid reporting at campaign level, the Publishing Team Report, the Inbox Activity Report and custom report branding.
• Advanced: everything above plus the Inbox Team Report (Advanced only since March 1, 2024), the care reports built around cases, the Customer Feedback Report, recurring scheduled PDFs and the API.

Paid reports cover Facebook and Instagram, X, LinkedIn and TikTok, and a Cross-Network Paid Performance Report adds them up with CPM, CPE and web conversions. TikTok joined on June 11, 2026. Pinterest has no paid reporting. One wrinkle helps Standard buyers: adding Premium Analytics to Standard brings the paid reports that normally start at Professional. Team reports need the Enable Team Reports permission, and a departed agent stays visible as inactive for a year. Seats are the real cost driver: three Advanced seats billed annually come to $1,197 a month, by our arithmetic. Our Sprout Social pricing guide covers the contract rules.

Competitor analysis, network by network

Competitor reports start on Professional, and they cover Facebook, Instagram and X only. LinkedIn pages cannot be added because the LinkedIn API does not support competitor analysis. TikTok and Pinterest competitor reports do not exist either. The Competitor Performance Report compares audience growth, publishing behavior, top posts and engagement, and the Competitor Posts Report lists rivals' individual posts. Each network also has its own report; the X version allows 20 competitors per group, and the Instagram one shows each rival's top three hashtags. Adding profiles needs the Manage Competitor Profiles Reports permission.

Read the numbers with their rules in mind. Engagement here means public engagements only: reactions, comments and shares. Ads are excluded, but boosted posts count. Collection starts on the day you add a competitor, apart from some Facebook and Instagram top posts, and X competitors backfill only 30 days of posts. The data is then kept indefinitely. Facebook multi-image posts, albums and Reels never reach the report because of API limits.

Competitor reports run on UTC while the Facebook and Instagram owned reports use Pacific time, so a day's totals will not line up when you set your profile next to a rival's. Top Posts shows up to 12 posts, cut to five per profile in a PDF, and the posts CSV stops at 1,000 rows. Add rivals the day you sign, because last quarter cannot be rebuilt later.

What Premium Analytics adds

Premium Analytics is Sprout's paid reporting layer on top of the plan reports. It is sold for Standard and up, not Essentials, and Sprout publishes no price for it; the pricing page sends you to a demo ^[1]. On an annual plan the add-on renews with the plan automatically (annual plans paid monthly and invoiced plans need 30 days' notice by email to cancel), and removing an add-on brings no refund. What you get falls into five groups ^[2]:

• My Reports, launched in March 2024: custom dashboards that combine widgets from different reports, with text annotations, tables and charts. CSV downloads follow the widget filters.
• Custom Metrics, launched January 29, 2026: formulas built from existing Sprout data with add, subtract, multiply and divide, up to 50 at account level and 50 at group level.
• Post Analysis Drilldowns, since November 18, 2025: click a point on a chart to see the posts behind it, then view or tag them.
• Paid vs Organic comparison for Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn, plus the paid reports for Standard customers.
• Shareable links, so stakeholders without a Sprout login can open a report: a snapshot, or refreshed daily with Dynamic Date Range on.

Smaller gains add up. You can filter Post Performance by tag, if your plan includes tagging (Professional and up), and search post text. Benchmarking puts your Facebook, Instagram and LinkedIn engagement rate against the 25th, 50th and 75th percentiles of Sprout users. You can compare ranges of different lengths, and Analyze by AI Assist writes a summary per widget. Two cautions. Editing a Custom Metric rewrites its historical values instantly, so lock definitions before quarterly reviews. And the older Custom Report Builder is on its way out: Sprout says it will be sunset and recommends moving to My Reports, so build nothing new there.

How far back your data goes

When you connect a profile, Sprout backfills history, but the depth depends on the network and the type of metric. Audience counts often start on the day you connect, while post metrics usually reach further back. Sprout's help pages do not always agree, so treat these as working figures from the per-network reporting overviews and the general data availability page, and ask support when one number decides a contract ^[3]:

Paid data has its own clock: X Ads and LinkedIn ads backfill 180 days and TikTok ads cover the last 90 days. For Facebook ads, one page says 720 days and another says 180 days automatically with two years on request. Delays matter too. TikTok metrics arrive about 24 hours late, YouTube video metrics can lag 72 hours, and follower counts for owned Facebook Pages up to 48 hours. Do not close a month's report on the first of the next month. Give it three days.

When the networks change the metrics

Your charts can shift without anyone on your team touching them, because Meta, Google and others keep redefining their metrics and Sprout reports what the APIs return. A metric with the same name can measure something different from one quarter to the next, and some history is overwritten rather than kept. Four changes since 2025 matter for any year-on-year comparison.

Instagram, 2025: impressions became views. Instagram Views appear in Sprout reports back to January 1, 2025, and an API request for Instagram impressions returns Views after that date. Reels show Instagram Views under the old Video Views label, and non-Reel videos and carousels no longer have Video Views at all.

Facebook, November 15, 2025. Meta removed viral and non-viral impressions at page and post level with no replacement, and Sprout lost them even for past periods. Sprout backfilled Facebook Views from January 1, 2025, overwriting the earlier Impressions values, and cross-network reports keep mapping Facebook Views to Impressions ^[4].

Facebook, June 15, 2026. Standard Facebook Reach was remapped to Total Unique Media Views, reach no longer splits paid from organic, and the new reach is backfilled only from January 1, 2026. Sprout warns that reach trends may shift. Views were unaffected.

YouTube, August 24, 2026. YouTube now counts a view whenever a video starts or replays. Sprout takes views straight from the YouTube API and does not recalculate history, so the series breaks on that date. Shorts already switched on March 31, 2025.

The lesson is simple. Export the CSV or PDF before every announced deprecation, as Sprout itself advised, and annotate the break in your monthly report. Sprout posts these changes in its monthly release notes and in dedicated help articles, so someone on the team should read them each month. A short note beside the chart saves a long meeting about a drop that never happened.

Exports, scheduled PDFs and branded reports

Most reports download as PDF or CSV. The Profile Performance CSV can carry up to 50 columns. On Professional and Advanced you can email a one-time PDF to up to 25 recipients, including people without a Sprout account. Recurring weekly or monthly PDF deliveries are Advanced only. With Premium Analytics, a scheduled My Reports delivery can be a snapshot or live; only the live setting picks up later widget date overrides. Analyze by AI Assist summaries appear in static exports but not in scheduled PDFs or dynamic shared links.

Custom branding on PDF exports is a Professional and Advanced feature: you upload a logo per group in the Customize Branding section before exporting, which matters to agencies sending reports under a client's name. Shared links are a Premium Analytics feature, and only the Account Owner can switch link sharing on and choose invite-only or public links. A link is a static snapshot unless Dynamic Date Range is on, which refreshes it daily. You cannot edit a link's filters or dates afterward; you create a new one.

Watch for retirements. The Tag Performance Report was rebuilt on August 11, 2026 with Threads and Bluesky support, and scheduled deliveries and shared links from the legacy version expired on October 14, 2026. If a stakeholder stopped getting the tag report, that is why. Recreate the delivery from the new report, and check the recipients list while you are there. Deleting a My Reports dashboard works the same way: its scheduled deliveries and shared links stop at once.

Tableau, the API and Trellis

Teams that blend social data with sales or web data have two routes, and both sit at the top of the price list. The Sprout API is Advanced only, and the Tableau connector needs API access, a Tableau account and Premium Analytics. Only account owners can reach the API key. The connector is a one-way feed of profile, post and tag data. It leaves out message data, ad accounts, competitors, Listening, publishing data and owned demographics. Even inside the API, several metrics such as Net Sentiment Score and some X and Facebook video metrics need Premium Analytics. Our Sprout Social API guide has the request limits.

Trellis, Sprout's AI agent, reads reporting data alongside publishing, inbox and, if you pay for it, Listening data. Ask it in plain language and it can list your top five and lowest five posts by engagement rate, for example. The Performance and Engagement agent needs Professional or above and the OpenAI integration, which is on by default unless an Account Owner has turned it off. Every seat gets 100 Trellis credits a month on every plan, and only Trellis chat and skills use them. It is a quick way to draft the commentary for a report. Check every number it cites against the report itself.

Customers hosted in Sprout's EU data center lose some of this. Post Analysis Drilldowns are not available to them, and neither is the Bluesky integration, so Bluesky never reaches their reports. EEA privacy rules have also trimmed some metrics: Instagram Story replies from EEA users are no longer counted, which can lower engagement and engagement rate. If your account runs in the EU data center, ask which reporting features are excluded before you promise them to a client.

A monthly reporting routine that holds up

A routine beats a heroic month-end scramble. The aim is a report that compares like with like every month, lands on the same day, and explains its own breaks. This is a workable cadence built from the features above, with the plan each step needs, so a team on Essentials can run the first two steps and skip the rest:

1. Day 3 of the month: open the Profile Performance Report for last month, now that delayed TikTok, YouTube and Facebook data has landed. Compare with the previous month, not the previous week.
2. Same day: sort the Post Performance Report by engagement and note the top and bottom posts. On Professional, check the Tag Performance Report for campaign tags.
3. Competitors: pull the Competitor Performance Report for Facebook, Instagram and X, and keep in mind that it measures public engagement only.
4. Care metrics on Advanced: add the Inbox Team or Case Management numbers if service is part of your brief.
5. Annotate: record any network metric change that month, using My Reports text annotations if you have Premium Analytics.
6. Send: export a branded PDF on Professional, or let an Advanced scheduled delivery do it; on Premium Analytics, share a link instead, with Dynamic Date Range on so it refreshes daily.

Keep the same date range, time zone and metric set every month. Change only one thing at a time. Report time zones differ by report: Post Performance follows the time zone you select, the Tag Report and Publishing Team Report use UTC, and the cross-network paid report follows the ad account. Pick one convention and state it on the first page.

The bottom line

Sprout Social's analytics are broad and well documented, but the useful parts are spread across plans and one unpriced add-on. Essentials covers profile and post reporting; Professional adds competitors, tags, paid, the Publishing Team Report and branding; Advanced adds the Inbox Team Report, care reports, scheduled PDFs and the API; Premium Analytics adds custom dashboards, metrics and shareable links. Match the report list to your plan before you sign, add competitors on day one, and annotate every network metric change so your year-on-year charts stay honest.