4 CoSchedule Alternatives for Project Management

TL;DR:

• Content marketers have a lot to manage, and CoSchedule is a popular tool for content and social management.
• However, there are alternatives like Letterdrop, Notion, Asana, and Airtable that offer similar services.
• This blog post evaluates each tool's integrations, key features, and limitations.

You have a million and one channels to think about. The blog, the newsletter, individual social media pages... and you're overseeing company and personal accounts for distribution.

The nightmare doesn't stop there. You have to think about individual projects, remind people of deadlines, and track approvals for both your in-house team and freelancers. That's almost seven hours a week of additional work in total. Yikes.

‎‎Content calendars and project management tools are the saving grace for Content Marketers like you everywhere, which is probably how you ended up with CoSchedule.

CoSchedule's been a trusted content and social management tool for ten years, serving more than 200,000 marketers worldwide. It's clearly great, but maybe you're wondering what else is out there. It's starting to look a little dated.

Letterdrop, Notion, Asana, and Airtable are all popular project management tools that offer a similar service to CoSchedule. To help you determine which alternative may be a good fit for you, I'll evaluate each tool and give a rundown of their integrations, key features, and limitations.

I also use tables for a side-by-side comparison of:

• Content calendars
• Project boards
• Automation
• Distribution
• SEO tools
• Collaboration capabilities

Nobody wants a leaky project management strategy. That leads to missed deadlines... and an angry VP of Marketing.

An Overview of CoSchedule

CoSchedule combines multiple marketing tools into one workspace to help coordinate content, processes, and teams. The company strives to be the go-to marketing toolkit for marketers everywhere.

Integrations

CoSchedule allows you to directly post to or manage content on:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• LinkedIn
• Pinterest
• MailChimp
• Campaign Monitor
• HubSpot
• WordPress
• Constant Contact
• Active Campaign

Features

1. Marketing Calendar

The Marketing Calendar is a centralized tool with an easy drag-and-drop interface. You can view all ongoing projects and share them with your stakeholders. It's also easy to shift them around.

You can create and schedule social media posts. Its ReQueue feature allows you to automate a consistent social schedule and repost ongoing campaigns.

2. An Overview of the Marketing Suite

Here are all the tools in the Marketing Suite:

• Content Organizer: This tool offers SEO checks and keyword research for headlines. You can also manage intake forms and outlines and link to external documents.
• Asset Organizer: You can safely organize and share files with stakeholders.
• Calendar Organizer: Create, monitor, and share individual workspaces tied to a calendar.
• Work Organizer: This allows you to create, automate, and manage workflows and to-do lists.

Drawbacks

• Many users find the interface overwhelming to learn.
• SEO and keyword research is limited to headlines. That means having to research elsewhere.
• No performance analytics. You'll have to track pages and traffic somewhere else.

Time for the alternatives.

1. Letterdrop

Letterdrop is the modern content management tool, using GPT-4 and AI.

Letterdrop is an all-in-one content marketing tool that brings a real-time content calendar, project management, approvals, one-click publishing, socials, newsletters, blog posts, and analytics under one roof.

It also has an ecosystem of SEO tools.

Integrations

With Letterdrop, you can publish to and manage content from:

• Facebook
• Instagram
• Twitter
• LinkedIn
• Reddit
• Slack
• Webflow
• WordPress
• HubSpot
• Any CMS
• Medium
• Hashnode
• Dev.to

Features

1. CMS

Letterdrop has an integrated, headless CMS, which brings everything content related to one single database.

It can push content directly to Webflow, WordPress, Contentful, and literally any other custom site.

The editor was built for marketers and is like a more advanced Google docs.

2. Content Calendar

The Letterdrop calendar gives you a high-level overview of everything that's scheduled, from blog posts to socials across platforms.

As your content moves, your calendar updates. No more cross-checks necessary.

3. Project Board

Every project is represented by a card. Each card is tied to artifacts like drafts and content briefs. They show status history, the person responsible for the project, and even data around SEO difficulty and search volume.

It's easy to trace responsibility and keep track of approvals. Every contributor is limited to permissions according to their role and receives email and Slack alerts when it's their turn to take action.

You can leave comments and assign tasks — all in real-time.

4. SEO Tools

Letterdrop's smart SEO tooling was built by ex-Googlers and can help you answer search intent properly, help you cover information gaps in existing pages, and more to get ranking.

The SEO Optimizer Tool can run your content through 60 structural optimization rules, suggesting and even automating corrections.

You can also monitor your pages to check whether they need updates.

5. Distribution Automation

Letterdrop can take distribution off your hands. Here's how:

• You can schedule social posts in advance and use AI to create drafts as a jumping-off point.
• You can automate employee advocacy and reach thousands more prospects. Simply get your employees to connect their LinkedIn accounts to Letterdrop, and then you can automate likes and comments to company posts from those accounts. You can even ghostwrite for them.

Here's a quick demo video of how distribution on Letterdrop works:

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6. AI Writing

Letterdrop's integrated AI assistant can help you:

• Draft social posts.
• Write complete introductions, sections, and conclusions in your blog posts.
• Write entire outlines based on top pages.
• Autocomplete sentences and paragraphs.

7. Idea Intake

Letterdrop can help you save hours on your ideation process. Here's how:

1. Letterdrop integrates with Gong.io to extract valuable marketing insights from sales calls, such as customer questions.

2. It simplifies the process of getting ideas from your team by integrating with Slack and email.

3. There is native competitor research.

4. It allows you to review and repost existing pieces that performed well in the past.

Drawbacks

• No tools for budget planning.

Letterdrop vs CoSchedule

2. Notion

Notion is an all-in-one online workspace designed for teams to organize data, switch between different views, share information, and automate workflows.

Features

1. Properties

Properties help you organize the pages in your database based on actionable criteria. For example, you can assign team members to projects specific to content type.

You can also use properties to add deadlines. These can correspond things such as outlines, drafts, and final reviews.

2. Customization

You can customize your content organization as much as you like. This includes writing and adding content on any page, text styling, adjusting page width, customizing backlinks, adding cover art, and more.

3. Comment and Share

You can @ mention teammates on-page and leave comment threads.

You can also share subpages as blogs with a simple "Share to the Web" option.

4. Templates

Notion offers plenty of templates to kickstart your workflow. We wrote an article on Notion's content calendar template if you're interested.

Drawbacks

• Notion is a general-purpose tool rather than a content management tool.
• You cannot distribute content from the platform.
• It has no native integrations or automations. That means clunky workarounds and a bunch of third-party tools.
• It isn't synced with content. That means manually keeping track of individual Google Docs and your content calendar.

Notion vs CoSchedule

3. Asana

Asana is a web and mobile work management platform that helps and incentivizes teams to organize, track, and manage their workflows.

Features

1. Task Scheduler

Asana allows you to schedule and prioritize tasks in any format that suits you. This includes Kanban boards, task lists, and Gantt charts.

You can see everyone's workload and the time spent on each task or project. The project manager receives an alert if someone might be overloaded with tasks.

2. Reporting Dashboard

The reporting dashboard includes project insights such as workloads, budget projections, and tasks completed over a specific time period.

3. Team Calendar

Your entire team can access a real-time calendar reflecting ongoing projects.

4. Workflow Automation

Asana lets you add basic automation rules to simplify your workflow.

For example, you can set triggers so that your Content Lead is automatically assigned to review a final draft.

5. Document Storage

Asana offers a task file attachment tool so that you and your team can save and access resources on-site.

6. Collaboration

You can comment on and share resources to every task.

Drawbacks

• There are no native integrations. This means clunky workarounds for simple problems.
• Deadlines aren't enforced and there's no time-tracking. This means another manual workaround and missed deadlines.
• It's a general-purpose tool rather than a content management tool.

Asana vs CoSchedule

4. Airtable

Airtable is an online database and collaboration tool that combines the features of a spreadsheet with the power of a database. It allows users to create, structure, track, and share information.

Features

1. Assign and Track Tasks

You can create a basic task management system yourself. You can add timelines, budgets, comments, and statuses for each post, and you can also associate content with campaigns.

There is also a built-in alert system, so you can tag people and assign tasks.

2. Content Overview

You can get an instant rundown of content projects and statuses on one screen and choose whichever view you want, like a traditional calendar view, a Kanban board, or a spreadsheet-like grid.

3. Templates

Airtable can help users cut down on time by offering hundreds of templates to work from, including ones for social media campaigns and content calendars. We have an article on using the Airtable content calendar template here.

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4. Document Storage

You can attach files and organize them within your Airtable database.

Drawbacks

• Airtable isn't synced to your content. This means updating calendars manually, and having to use third-party apps like Google Docs to write and edit content.
• You cannot distribute content from Airtable.
• There are no automation tools.
• There are no native integrations. This means clunky workarounds for simple problems.

Airtable vs Coschedule

Save Hours a Week with a Solid Content Management Tool

I believe software like Notion, Asana and Airtable are excellent all-purpose work management tools for small businesses and personal use. However, they may not be robust enough to handle larger teams and a more demanding content workflow.

A tool geared toward content management rather than general work management can save you 6.8 hours a week in manual operations. For this reason, I am more inclined to recommend more centralized tools like CoSchedule and Letterdrop.

And Letterdrop both modernizes and goes beyond CoSchedule's capabilities in terms of project management, automation, distribution, and SEO tooling.

You don't want to fall behind on content deadlines because of a flimsy work management tool. That won't exactly sit well with the VP of Marketing.

Hopefully, this list was able to help you weigh up some other CoSchedule options — and can help keep both you and your boss happy.